Juggling Dynamite

Along with exercise, it’s hard to find a task more worthy of free time than making delicious, healthy food with and for our loved ones. And yet, today so many lack the knowledge or commitment to prepare fresh food. If men and women don’t develop the habit, they cannot pass down skills to their children. In the process, our health and connection to nature suffers, while big food corporations win.

We started watching this mini-series on Netflix and highly recommend it.   It offers really interesting insight and history on culinary developments and their role in human evolution.   “Fast” food has been a self-destructive chapter in this story and we need to turn the page.  Beyond developing our individual culinary discipline, we must increase education and promotion of fresh local foods in the community at large, while dramatically curtailing advertising and increasing tax on processed foods, the way we do with other addictive, harmful products like cigarettes and alcohol.  The payoff will be life-enriching for this, and future generations.

Explored through the lenses of the four natural elements _ fire, water, air and earth _ COOKED is an enlightening and compelling look at the evolution of what food means to us through the history of food preparation and its universal ability to connect us. Highlighting our primal human need to cook, the series urges a return to the kitchen to reclaim our lost traditions and to forge a deeper, more meaningful connection to the ingredients and cooking techniques that we use to nourish ourselves.  Here is a direct video link to the trailer.

This just in: A new study finds that a healthy diet may help depressed patients. See: New Research on Treating Depression. Following a modified Mediterranean diet helped some patients being treated for depression in a study.

Most people understand that not evolving to clean energy when we have the technology and desperately need good jobs and increased productivity in the world, is not only dumb, but will ultimately destroy our health and ecosystem, as well as economic growth.

But with fossil fuel-funded-climate deniers unabashedly running the US government, thinking people can no longer afford to lay back on this.  We need to step up, speak out and take tangible steps to change our personal habits and choices. This 1 hour presentation from Mark Jacobson is a good update on facts and technological advances.

Mark Z. Jacobson is the Director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. He spoke at UD ECE’s Distinguished Lecture Series on November 16, 2016 on the topic “Is this the only hope for reversing global warming? Transitioning each country’s all-purpose energy to electricity powered 100% by wind, water, and sunlight.”  Here is a direct video link.

In other news–that we wish were fake–Trump campaign adviser, and long-time climate denier Myron Ebell, has this week named the environmental movement “the greatest threat to freedom and prosperity in the modern world”. Yep, apparently sustaining life on planet earth is now considered a reprehensible ‘special interest’.  Well, so be it then, count me in:

Ebell, speaking in London, claimed that the motivation for climate action was protecting a special interest: “The climate-industrial complex is a gigantic special interest that involves everyone from the producers of higher priced energy to the academics that benefit from advancement in their careers and larger government grants.” The IMF has calculated that fossil fuels receive $10m every minute in subsidies, while the fossil fuel industry spends at least $100m a year on lobbying.

GMO’s 4th quarter letter is now available here on line, and should be read.

Both essays are worthwhile, but Jeremy Grantham’s contribution, The Road to Trumpsville:  The long, long mistreatment of the American working class is extremely relevant and insightful on the trends and abuses that have driven America (and much of the developed world) to a necessary breaking point today.  Some excellent charts too.

The one below showing corporate profits relative to employee compensation since 1947 is a secular glimpse that I have always found useful.  The mean reversion of profits (in blue) lower, and wages (in red) higher, has been underway since 2013, but has much further to run–bad news for those buying and holding stocks at crazy rich multiples of profits today.

Yes, higher wages and pension contributions, like adherence to stringent environmental and legal protections, generally reduce corporate profits. That is the price of a sustainable system, rather than one that blows up in chaos and carnage.  It seems we will have to learn this time-worn lesson the hard way once again.