There is an interesting article here on a former rancher that has returned to the business to raise really good healthy, happy, and high-quality goat meat. The kicker to the story is that his partner is a vegetarian and yet helps in the ranching.

I find the changes taking place in the agriculture business to be really promising. I, too, am a vegetarian and couldn’t fathom eating goat, but I think diversification of the American pallet and a focus on producing really high quality small scale products is a good thing.

I am excited to see where all of this goes. Part of this whole economic conundrum that the world is going through is due to the fact that manufacturing and production (even physical labor in general) has been dying off as knowledge workers take over, and yet the bulk of knowledge work has been built around manufacturing and production (all those white collar jobs that the car industry is currently cutting). One of two things are going to happen (or more than likely both): we are going to change the way we think about paying for things and what we are willing to pay for no longer tying value only to a physical object, and there is going to be a return to craftmanship and a willingness to pay more for items that are well-crafted and thoughtfully produced. It seems that the food industry is on the leading edge of the latter as people are pushing back on mass produced and chain restaurants and focusing on fresh, small, and local.

The numbers of well-educated, former knowledge workers who are heading to the fields and workshops to focus on creative production work are increasing and I think that is a good thing for the well-being of our nation as a whole. This is a subject that deserves a lot more attention than this post and is something that I hope to revisit soon.

Addendum: There has been no bigger advocate for reforming the food that we as Americans grow and eat than Michael Pollan. In particular, he points to the fact that agriculture is currently more dependent on oil than sunlight. Jason Kottke raised the question recently as to whether either of our presidential candidates were aware of these issues and what their intent would be in addressing it. Today, he points to an article that indicates that it is in the very least on Obama’s radar. Pollan’s concerns may be found here and I highly recommend his books The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.

Further to my post on a posited Amazon Kindle foray into text books, the New York Times has an article on electronic versions of text books and some of the dilemmas that current models present. I mentioned in my post that the individual consumer doesn’t get to select which book is used. The Times points to an interesting side effect to this practice in comparing pharmaceutical sales to publishing:

A final similarity, in the words of R. Preston McAfee, an economics professor at Cal Tech, is that both textbook publishers and drug makers benefit from the problem of “moral hazards” — that is, the doctor who prescribes medication and the professor who requires a textbook don’t have to bear the cost and thus usually don’t think twice about it.

The drivers are right in this market to start seeing some drastic changes and it seems some professors are leading the way be it by foregoing traditional publishing for electronic versions and print-on-demand, and even going so far as presenting courseware as wikis. (Link).

Merlin Mann weblebrity of a variety of sorts, has outright stated something on his Tumblelog Kung Fu Grippe that it seems he has been bumping up against for some time and captures a feeling that I have had for a while now as well.

With this diet metaphor in mind, I want to, if you like, start eating better. But, I also want to start growing a tastier tomato — regardless of how easy it is to pick, package, ship, or vend. The tomato is the story, my friend.

This doesn’t mean I’ll be liveblogging a lot of ham-fisted attempts to turn “everything” off. But it does mean making mindful decisions about the quality of any input that I check repeatedly — as well as any “stuff” I produce. Everything. From news sources to entertainment programming, and from ephemeral web content down to each email message I decide to respond to. The shit has to go, inclusive.

Merlin mentioned recently that he has been reading Here Comes Everybody. A fact that I find interesting since the concept of applying some heavy reverse osmosis to both what we take in and put out as denizens of the web is not really within the core concepts of the book. What Clay Shirky does do is provide meaning and a greater purpose to the work that is being done on the web. The inclusion of the word “work” is key to the concepts here since what most of us seem to be doing is playing. We do things because we can and because it’s there and for the most part because it’s free. At the end of the day though, it’s about producing high quality content that is of value to others and contributes to this collective effort that we are all just beginning to figure out. The concepts here apply well beyond the web, so even if your are not the habitual internet app tire kicker that I am, there is a lot to the It’s All Too Much mentality. Enough that I think this falls into the category of being well worth sharing.

What does this mean to me? That’s something that I intend to explore and share here a bit over the coming weeks.

Something strange happened today, and it seemed noteworthy so I relate it here. I have begun bringing my lunch to work (save money, eat better, blah bitty blah blah) and my vessel of choice is Mr. Bento.

Mr. Bento is a tremendous modern (and Japanese!) replacement for the lunchbox: a bullet shaped container with four sub-containers that holds ample food and keeps them hot or cold depending on your needs. The problem with Mr. Bento is that there are four (and only four) containers within the outer container. It’s not really a problem, because it forces me to think about what I take to lunch and I try and match my dietary needs to these containers: fruits, vegetables, proteins and carbs in some variation. The questions is what happens to the excess (and for me the excess is the cheese to go with the crackers or the dressing to go with the salad)? Add them before the day begins and something is inedible and soggy when meal time rolls around. Dedicate salad dressing to one of the vessels and (gasp), I get deprived of food.

This is a plight that I have battled for some time. I even toyed with buying the massive (3500 count) of condiment cups sold at Costco to hold those miniscule repositories for, well, ‘damp stuff’ that I don’t want intermingling with my ‘dry stuff’. While this is a problem that I felt was unique to me in reality it is not. Mr. Bento is a commercial product that is sold by Amazon and other major retailers. Other people surely have this problem, but it’s not like I can go t a Mr. Bento support group and since they are a Japanese company, the web-based forums (if they exist) are not likely to be much help. This is truly a niche-community based issue. Although, it’s not likely that there are specific online communities dedicated to practical solutions to Mr. Bento shortcomings, so how to solve this problem?

In actuality, the solution came to me. And, it came to me in a community that I never would have expected. Today, in discussing Mr. Bento with my co-workers (it is quite the conversation piece), a co-worker pointed out to me that there was a “Mr. Bento Porn” group on Flickr. The group consists of decidedly G-Rated pictures of meals that people have packed into their Mr. Bento. The meals are impressively gourmet and packed with absolute precision - all 5,000+ of them. Among these 5,000 are more than a dozen solutions to my problem of separating wet from dry, from the aforementioned condiment cups to custom hello kitty containers. Problem solved.

It seems that every time I get comfortable with the resources the online world has to offer, something new springs up, some new way of looking at things, some new way of crowd-sourcing solutions. In this instance, the photo contributors had no idea that they would solve my problem. Hell, they weren’t even trying to solve a problem. They were just contributing information (in this instance a proud display of their perfectly packed lunch) and it helps someone in need (so to speak). And to think, 15 years ago, I would have had an owner’s manual (in Japanese) and a phone number (in Japan) to help me. AH, the magic of the interwebs, delicious, delicious interwebs.

For some reason, I have noticed the term “reverse osmosis” or the even worse “reverse osmosis filter” being thrown about quite a bit lately. This bothers me immensely. Osmosis is the movement of a liquid across a membrane from an area of low concentration to high contration. Effectively, you are diluting the concentration of a particle within a liquid. The reverse would be to separate the particle from the liquid, commonly referred to as “filtering”. Therefore, “reverse osmosis” is filtering. Unless it refers to a specific technology (in which case, feel free to chime in) it seems to be just marketing speak. “Purified by Reverse Osmosis” while sounding very 21st Century, is in fact the same process that humans have been doing for thousands of years, good old filtering.

Reverse osmosis (RO) is a separation process that uses pressure to force a solution through a membrane that retains the solute on one side and allows the pure solvent to pass to the other side. More formally, it is the process of forcing a solvent from a region of high solute concentration through a membrane to a region of low solute concentration by applying a pressure in excess of the osmotic pressure.

This seems to go to my assertion, bearing in mind that gravity is a force in excess of osmotic pressure. Therefore I feel totally justified in my indignation.