All Things Supercinski

Your spill-proof cup is not going to be used again by the Supercinskis anytime soon!

“Curiously, Justus von Liebig, the nineteenth-century German chemist with the spectacularly ironic surname, bears responsibility for science’s overly reductive understanding of both ends of the food chain. It was Liebig, you’ll recall, who thought he had found the chemical key to soil fertility with the discovery of NPK, and it was the same Liebig who thought he had found the key to human nutrition when he identified the macronutrients in food. Liebig wasn’t wrong on either count, yet in both instances he made the fatal mistake of thinking that what we knew about nourishing plants and people was all we needed to know to keep healthy. It’s a mistake we’ll probably keep repeating until we develop a deeper respect for the complexity of food and soil and, perhaps, the links between the two.” The Omnivore’s Dilemna, pg. 180

Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemna after buying an ‘industrial organic’ meal:
“I very much like the fact that the milk in the ice cream I served came from cows that did not receive injections of growth hormone to boost their productivity, or that the corn those cows are fed, like the corn that feeds Rosie [a chicken], contains no residues of atrazine, the herbicide commonly sprayed on American cornfields. Exposure to vanishingly small amounts (0.1 part per billion) of this herbicide has been shown to turn normal male frogs into hermaphrodites. Frogs are not boys, of course. So I can wait for that science to be done, or for our government to ban atrazine (as European governments have done), or I can act now on the presumption that food from which this chemical is absent is better for my son’s health than food that contains it.” The Omnivore’s Dilemna pg. 178

“The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters. When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one’s ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine. Once that leap has been made, one input follows another, so that when the synthetic nitrogen fed to plants make them more attractive to insects and vulnerable to disease, as we have discovered, the farmer turns to chemical pesticides to fix his broken machine.” [emphasis mine] The Omnivore’s Dilemna pg. 147-148

‘So what exactly would an ecological detective set loose in an American supermarket discover, were he to trace the items in his shopping cart all the way back to the soil? The notion began to occupy me a few years ago, I realized that the straightforward question “What should I eat?” could no longer be answered without first addressing two other even more straightforward questions: “What am I eating? And where in the world did it come from?” Not very long ago an eater

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Josiah starting saying his version of “no no” this week, but it sounds more like “nah nah”. He says it after I say that something is a no-no and he shouldn’t touch it, if he hears someone say no, or if he sees something that is off-limits for him. I was in the bathroom the other day and I heard “nah nah” coming from the living room. As I come into the room, I see him crawling over to the forbidden night light. He also said it one morning as he reached for my glasses. Who says kids this age don’t understand boundaries?

He has also been pushing around his walkers. Sometimes, it is all he wants to do and he just makes laps around the living room. Now, a clip for the grandparents:

And this picture was just too cute not to show to everyone. Our friend Jude came over to play last week when it was really cold, sporting the cutest coat of the season.

“Our ingenuity in feeding ourselves is prodigious, but at various points our technologies come into conflict with nature’s ways of doing things, as when we seek to maximize efficiency by planting crops or raising animals in vast monocultures. This is something nature never does, always and for good reasons practicing diversity instead. A great many of the health and environmental problems created by our food system owe to our attempts to oversimplify nature’s complexities, at both the growing and the eating ends of our food chain. At either end of any food chain you find a biological system — a patch of soil, a human body — and the health of one is connected — literally — to the health of the other. Many of the problems of health and nutrition we face today trace back to things that happen on the farm, and behind those things stand specific government policies few of us know anything about.” The Omnivore’s Dilemna Introduction, pg. 9