Texas has awesome mexican food. Every day I live in Manuel's (Port Isabel) breakfast burrito nostalgia.
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Texas has awesome mexican food. Every day I live in Manuel's (Port Isabel) breakfast burrito nostalgia.
I've learned those big huge burritos are called 'Mission style'. I live walking distance from this Mission neighborhood.
I was pretty shocked. There's some great Indian food out there, too (shitty naan but I usually eat curry more with the basmatti anyway). In your beloved Pickering most notably down Liverpool.Quote:
Originally Posted by Brisco Bold
Oddly enough the best Indian food I've ever had is here in Greenville.
Misused? Organic is a regulated term. Growers have to comply with specific regulations to sell their food as Organic, such as heavy restrictions on herbicides and pesticide applications.Quote:
Originally Posted by AstroBlue
Here's a generalized situation in commercial agriculture: Introduce a gene into grain crops that makes them resistant to a herbicide, such as Roundup-ready crops. Fields of crops can be sprayed with the herbicide, and the crops will be no worse for wear. The weeds will die, except for a fraction of a percent. The problem is that a fraction of a percent could still be thousands of weeds, and each of these weed plants can produce thousands of seeds. The progeny will inherit the resistance to the chemicals from its parents. Each year, more herbicide is needed to get the same results in weed control. Eventually, plants can become completely resistant.
I'm pretty far from a hippie (although I may be stupid), but I'm okay with any measure to decrease how badly we screw up the planet. These residual chemicals end up in our water supplies and pretty much screw up the whole ecosystem. I'm not really blaming the growers, because they're just trying to supply a population that is ever-increasing while also trying to outcompete weeds, herbivorous insects, and diseases that destroy their crops, while also keeping costs low enough to compete with imports from other regions of world, where labor is cheaper and really dangerous chemicals are still allows that have been long outlawed in the US. Organic foods are more expensive because everything from production practices to the few allowed chemicals makes them more costly to grow.
I did a quick search for weed resistance, and found a short article on the subject. One of my professors was involved in its preparation! Check out Table 4.
yeah, it makes you wonder how the shit anyone grew anything.
And how we will grow stuff in the future. Maybe we will have to make nano machines that kill the bugs.
We guessed. Oftentimes, we got it wrong, and a lot of people died. Humans only began understanding plant diseases in the 19th century. That's a lot of recorded history of not knowing what the hell was going on. One fun disease was ergotism, which produced its fungal reproductive structures on the seed head in place of grains. Well, people just thought that it was part of the plant, so it would get round up along with the rest to make flour. After consuming enough of the ergot-infected grain, people would have hallucinations and lose limbs. No wonder the middle-ages were such crazy times!Quote:
Originally Posted by Fe 26
A big problem with industrial crop production is Mono-culture. If all you grow is corn for 2000 acres and you get something that fucks with corn in that area there's nothing to balance out the problem.
I actually wrote a blog post about sustainability not too long ago. I've got loads more to say on the subject, but I have a short attention span and writing takes time.
Also: Tones, I'm telling you we're going to work together one day on something in the food industry. I see talent in you. Once this Owl thing really gets moving next year I may have an offer for you.
yeah, didn't the US lose its native Banana crop that way?
My dad was telling me about how back when he was a little boy, they would grow huge bananas in the south. And then one year they all got this blight and died. And now we import small bananas from Africa.
EDIT: I looked it up. I don't think they were grown in the south, but this is probably what he was talking about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gros_Michel
apparently the bananas we eat now are different from the ones our parents and grandparents ate.
Yeah, I'm aware. I was referring to more how the use of the word "organic" for foods grown without pesticides and other "artificial" means is tenuous at best; the best explanation I've heard was that it's food coming from a farm that's a living breathing thing. You can see how fucked up the bastardisation of this term is when you can actually buy "organic salt".Quote:
Originally Posted by Tones
I'm really for sustainable agriculture, but I think that's a very different thing to the organic movement; which to me seems completely based on arbitrary "artificial bad, natural good" dogma (like other useless shit like alternative medicine); rather than the individual merits of techniques and technology. How the fuck can you draw an imaginary line in the sand and say all genetic modification is bad? When practically EVERYTHING we eat has been genetically modified through selective breeding by humans. Bananas are so fucked up (completely through "natural" selective breeding) they can't even reproduce without us; yet you'll still find Bananas on the shelves with happy little "certified organic" stickers.