On That Date, No. 12
/"Some are packaged or wrapped, and some are sold naked. But all are cut at a central plant rather than in the individual stores."
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Q & A Series: Wanda Patsche
/By bringing the hogs inside we can take much better care of them. In Minnesota, our weather varies significantly. We have blizzards with temperatures well below zero and at time, wind chills of -70 degrees. In the summer, we have hot, humid weather and many times temperatures nearing a humid 90 degrees, and that doesn’t address sunburn or insect bites. Neither of these weather extremes are good for hogs.
Read MoreMemo: To Whom It May Concern
/Changed my mind about the category for the "other" stuff. While spending six hours yesterday driving Interstate 80 (ugh), it occurred to me that "The FUN Stuff" is a bit too specific: it implies that the content of the the posts so categorized is all "fun."
But --- sometimes it's not.
So: The secret category has a new name: Internal Memos. Because often the content springs from some place deep in my brain ("internal" -- get it?). And because those posts tend to appeal to sort of an oddball group --- not quite a cabal but a kind of inner circle ("internal" --- get it?) (If you don't get it, it's not you; it's me. Truly.)
So
Wanna A Little History With Those Antibiotics?
/This essay ran yesterday as part of Scientific American's Food Week series. Kinda cool to have a piece in SA: I started using the publication as a primary source for my research waaay back in grad school, and am still using it.
On That Date, No. 11
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“The first and most important step toward bringing agriculture into line with industry is to factory-ize the farm. This means great efficiency of production and distribution plus the control of output.
This is not to say that the American farmer is not efficient. In terms of horse-power, he has increased his efficiency from four to five times in fifty years. . . . At that, he is only half as efficient as industry, measured by the same yardstick. From this, it would seem that the American farmer must work twice as long as the American factory in order to produce the same results, and that is about what he does. . . .
Mass production . . . has wrought wonders [and] . . . it requires no stretch of the imagination to realize that as these [same] policies of factory management are invoked, the shorter day on the farm will follow.
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Sam R. McKelvie, “Can the Farm Be Factory-ized?” Nation’s Business 15, no. 4 (April 1927): 106, ff.