High on the Hog, Surprising Factoids

High on the Hog, subtitled "A Culinary Journey from Africa to America" is a broadbrush history of slavery and race relations focused through the prism of food, food crops, food preparation, cuisines, etc. It's well-written, although I'd quibble with a couple items where I think an urbanite showed lack of agricultural background.  One was a reference to a slave being given 17 "stalks" of corn to subsist on.  Possible, but more likely "ears".  Another was a reference to an early writer (circa 1600?) who claimed that native Americans could raise 200 English bushels of wheat per acre.  The cite may be accurate, but it shows credulity by the writer.
 
A couple factoids: It has the surprising claim that the death rate for sailors on ships engaged in the slave trade was higher than the rate for the Africans held captive. Although the author, Jessica Harris, is a professor, it's not footnoted within the book.

I could explain it: if the analysis includes the whole trip for the sailors, time spent off the coast of Africa waiting to fill the slave ships was notoriously unhealthy.  And, there was a definite economic incentive to keep captives healthy enough to survive the Middle Passage.  So the factoid might be right, but I'm still uncomfortable

Another factoid: France's Code Noir in 1685 prescribed the diet to be provided to French slaves. The U.S. federal government never had such a provision and apparently no states did either.  That's a reflection of the difference in government between France and the U.S.: our governments are weaker and less prescriptive; French governments, whether monarcharies or democracies, are more centralized and prescriptive.

Politicians Break Promises, Even Their Wives

From Obamafoodorama:

In an interview with the New York Times given the day before the groundbreaking [of the White House garden], Mrs. Obama announced that the entire First Family, including President Obama, would be pulling weeds in the Kitchen Garden, “whether they like it or not." With one exception.

“Now Grandma, my mom, I don’t know,” Mrs. Obama said of her mother, Marian Robinson, working in the Kitchen Garden.
Mrs. Robinson "would probably sit back and say: “Isn’t that lovely. You missed a spot,”" Mrs. Obama said.

 But when an aide was asked about follow-through:

The aide said she wasn't aware of any Presidential or First Daughter weeding or harvesting action, but added that it might be going on "during private family time."

"You never know," the aide said. She added that Mrs. Obama, in her interview, "may have been joking" about the First Family weeding the Kitchen Garden.

  If I remember correctly, I was always dubious about the premise.  Given the schedule I presume Mrs. Obama maintains, it would be very hard for her to herd her family to the garden on a regular basis.

When Is an Earmark an Earnmark

The Sustainable Ag Coalition believes that ATTRA lost its funding because Congress thought it was an earmark:

One very distressing casualty of the continuing series of Continuing Resolutions that are keeping the government open but cutting funding week by week is the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service, known as ATTRA.  ATTRA’s $2.8 million was cut entirely in H.R. 1, the House-passed full-year Continuing Resolution from mid-February and that proposed program termination was unfortunately including among the $6 billion in cuts adopted by Congress this week in the new short-term Continuing Resolution keeping the government operating through April 8.
The justification for cutting ATTRA appears to be a misperception that it is an earmark.  Indeed, like earmarks, many Senators and Members of Congress request funding for ATTRA every year, as they do for many programs.  However, unlike earmarks for projects in specific congressional districts, ATTRA is a nationwide program, authorized in the 2008 Farm Bill, and it has been included in presidential budgets through many administrations over several decades. 

 What they don't mention is that the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service is not a federal agency, as the name might imply (and I first thought).  It's the outcome of a cooperative agreement with the Rural Development Service--in other words federal money provided to a cooperative.  Here's the general blurb from RD:

We have over 80 years of experience working with the cooperative sector and remain the only federal agency charged with that responsibility. USDA Rural Development has been providing support to cooperatives since the Cooperative Marketing Act of 1926, promoting the knowledge of cooperative principles and practices as well as collecting statistics on cooperative activities. The Cooperative Program provides assistance for rural residents interested in forming new cooperatives and administers programs that fund value-added producer grants, rural cooperative development centers, and small socially-disadvantaged producers.
We also provide resources to local cooperatives to support a department-wide effort known as, 'Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food'. This initiative, led by Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan puts an increased emphasis on regional food systems, which will have direct and significant benefits to rural communities. Lear [sic] more here:

Now if the appropriation is specifically for that cooperative agreement, it comes pretty close in my mind to an earmark. If RD is given a lump sum of money for cooperative agreements and decides to give $2.8 million to ATTRA, then it's not.

MIDAS Presentation II

Some more random thoughts on the MIDAS presentation::

Two things struck me about the geographic distribution of the field people they've brought in to work on it:

• there's no one from the western third of the country.
• there's only one person from the southeast.

Now I understand that with the phaseout of tobacco and peanut programs and the establishment of Freedom to Farm direct payments regional differences in agriculture and in landownership and operation aren't as significant as they used to be. And I know all the hard-headed SOB's capable specialists who used to staff the state offices have now retired. So what you have in the state offices are easy-going types anxious to improve operations.  But gee, just for small p political purposes it'd be good to have a more diverse set of people.

Another nit to pick: the presentation refers to "SAP" as if everyone knows what/who they are. 

And finally, it seems I won't be able to restrain myself from commenting on MIDAS, so I've added a label for it.

What's Hard About Farming?

Bob at StonyBrookFarm has a two-word answer: making money. Read the whole thing--Bob and wife came to farming as adults, BTW.

Recommended Website

I'm curious about people.  Blogs are great; people say more on blogs than they often do in person, at least when I'm the other person. So whether it's a depressed English English teacher in central France or a crofter in Scotland or an artistic photographer and farm wife or various farm blogs (Phipps), Colorado corn/beans, or cattle, or African-American urbanite who's into Jane Austen (yes) and rap (ugh), I enjoy them all.

I want to (belatedly) add to that list Butterfly Moments. Read it.

Moving Day

One thing which always startles me is the concept of "moving day", the various laws which set a specific date for real estate leases to expire.  Apparently there are such laws in some states, pertaining to farmland at least.  And in France according to the estimable Dirk Beauregard it's illegal between November and late March to expel tenants. It's part of an article on French housing, including the imposition of rent controls in Paris. 

Another Pet Peeve--Obama Disappoints

The Post puts up Obama's latest memo on reorganizing trade and competitiveness functions.  But, much to my chagrin, it's in monospaced type, not proportionally spaced.  Way back in 1970-1 I was researching a replacement for the IBM MT/ST (magnetic tape selectric typewriter), which got me into CRT displays (like 7x9 pixels) and into the difference between proportional spacing and monospaced.  The NIST article which convinced me said that type designers over the centuries since Gutenberg had figured out how to maximize readability by controlling spacing, using serifs to lead the eye, etc., but that typewriters, because of the mechanical constraints sacrificed that readability.  Ever since I have objected to using monospaced type on PC's and the Internet. It's too bad the word hasn't reached all of Obama's staff--I had expected better from him.

Michael Kinsley and Budget Cuts

I agree with Michael Kinsley most of the time, but not on the issue of budget cuts. He says whenever budget cutting is in the air, there's a template for arguments--note, I like the template:

1. Expression of general support for deficit reduction. Reference to easy answers (there are none). Reference to burden (all must share).
2. Reference to babies and bathwater. Former should not be discarded with latter.
3. This program/agency/tax break is different. A bargain for the taxpayers. Pays for itself many times over. To eliminate or cut would be bad for children/our troops.
4. Cost is small (a) as percentage of total budget; (b) compared with budget of Pentagon; (c) compared with projected cost of health care.
5. Optional comparisons: to cost of just one jet fighter or 3.7 minutes of War on Terror
6. Names of famous people who support this program or tax cut, especially Colin Powell. Other good names: Madeleine Albright, Natalie Portman, George H.W. Bush (not W), Warren Buffett.
7. This is not about fair, responsible, across-the-board budget cutting. This is about the other side irresponsibly pursuing an ideological agenda, penalizing programs it doesn’t like.

(Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0311/51256.html#ixzz1GnjahBut) 
So, if I like the template, which points out the dynamic of budget cutting fights, what do I have a problem with?  Kinsley says most domestic programs are incremental: the more money we spend, the more outcome we are likely to get, whether it be roads, dams, orchestras, whatever.  But the military, he says, is different.  Security is binary; we either spend enough to be secure or we don't.  That's where I have a big problem. The truth is often that we define our security interests by our capability, as in Libya.  If we had more military might available, we probably would define our security interests as requiring the overthrow of Qaddafi, even if it meant "no drive zones". Since might is tight right now, we're a lot more hesitant. 

Garrison Keillor Beat You There

Barking Up the Wrong Tree has a post on the errors in people's self-assessments:

In general, people’s self-views hold only a tenuous to modest relationship with their actual behavior and performance. The correlation between self-ratings of skill and actual performance in many domains is moderate to meager—indeed, at times, other people’s predictions of a person’s outcomes prove more accurate than that person’s self-predictions. In addition, people overrate themselves. On average, people say that they are ‘‘above average’’ in skill (a conclusion that defies statistical possibility), over- estimate the likelihood that they will engage in desirable behaviors and achieve favorable outcomes, furnish overly optimistic estimates of when they will complete future projects, and reach judgments with too much confidence. Several psychological processes conspire to produce flawed self-assessments.