I’ve been curious about what exactly ‘organic’ means in Australia. I started off thinking it was pretty much the same bullshit as it is in the US, as Brian Dunning points out here and here, but given I have very little information on Australian farming practices or corporations’ involvement with organic produce (and very little time to look these things up) I’m reserving my judgment. I don’t buy organic though – not the produce and certainly not the rhetoric – but I have vague plans of conducting some research into the subject as and when I can before I write it off completely. At the moment, this consists of little more than taking a claim and comparing it to what I can observe personally and/or find out from a reliable source. Information, comments, suggestions are all welcome.

Today, for instance, Rebecca Blood linked to an article titled The 7 Foods Experts Won’t Eat. Ignoring for a minute that this article quotes ‘nutritionists’ among other ‘experts’ and is therefore suspect, the potato example raised a few questions for me.

4. Nonorganic Potatoes

The expert: Jeffrey Moyer, chair of the National Organic Standards Board

The problem: Root vegetables absorb herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides that wind up in soil. In the case of potatoes—the nation’s most popular vegetable—they’re treated with fungicides during the growing season, then sprayed with herbicides to kill off the fibrous vines before harvesting. After they’re dug up, the potatoes are treated yet again to prevent them from sprouting. “Try this experiment: Buy a conventional potato in a store, and try to get it to sprout. It won’t,” says Moyer, who is also farm director of the Rodale Institute (also owned by Rodale Inc., the publisher of Prevention). “I’ve talked with potato growers who say point-blank they would never eat the potatoes they sell. They have separate plots where they grow potatoes for themselves without all the chemicals.”

The solution: Buy organic potatoes. Washing isn’t good enough if you’re trying to remove chemicals that have been absorbed into the flesh.

I don’t buy ‘organic’ potatoes. I buy the ‘conventional’ ones you get at Woolworth’s, and I’ve left mine lying around long enough for them to start sprouting on several different occasions over at least 3 years of living here.

So are potatoes sold/grown in Australia are not treated with the same cocktail of pesticides and fungicides or is Mr Moyer simply wrong about their effects?

Australia may have different environment from the US, but it stands to reason that the same crops grown in both places would require the same conditions and be vulnerable to the same infestations, and would therefore require the same treatments. But I don’t know that for sure. On the other hand, it is not uncommon for proponents of organic produce to overemphasize the use (and implied harmful effects) of ‘chemicals’ in conventional farming and gloss over their use in organic farming, but that doesn’t mean that everything they say is automatically unsound.

I also wonder what measures against fungus and insects the potato-growers mentioned above use to protect the potatoes they grow ‘without all the chemicals’, given that ‘organic’ pesticides are also ‘chemicals’ – just sourced from plant or animal matter as opposed to manufactured in a big scary lab.

Like I said, I haven’t got any answers at the moment, but if I find any, I shall post them here.

I just read Gina Barreca’s post, Everything You Lose Makes Room for Something New and it reminded me of two things. One, a vilanelle by Elizabeth Bishop that I have a love-hate relationship with called ‘One Art’. Although it’s ‘about’ the death of her partner, my favorite lines are:

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

The whole poem is here.

The second thing this post reminds me of is my own just-so postcard that Shanti sent me from Geneva when I was studying in Lahore. The quote, from Jules Renard, reads:

Ecrire, c’est une façon de parler sans être interrompu.

There’s no big reward for martyrdom, ladies. No one shows up to give you a cookie–or to return your self-esteem and joie de vivre.

Said by Harpy Sarah MC in her post on how stupid it is to call women who do not wish to have children ’selfish’:

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Written and directed by Desdamona.

Relax. It’s a spoof.

*CAM: Complementary and Alternative Medicine (also abbreviated as BS).

What better way to spend a sunny Tuesday afternoon than attempting to break a world record for the largest number of people to do the robot dance at once? Yes it completely derailed my day, but it was fun and silly and I learnt to do a dance I didn’t know before (though admittedly I’m not going to be breaking those moves out in a hurry).

The ABC reports that we have broken the world record, but I don’t know how official that is.

From Amin Malouf’s On Identity (translated by Barbara Bray.):

But let us return for a moment to some examples I quoted at the beginning of this book. A man with a Serbian mother and a Croatian father, and who manages to accept his dual affiliation, will never take part in any form of ethnic “cleansing”. A man with a Hutu mother and a Tutsi father, if he can accept the two “tributaries” that brought him into the world, will never be a party to butchery or genocide. And neither the Franco-Algerian lad, not the young man of mixed German and Turkish origin whom I mentioned earlier, will ever be on the side of the fanatics if they succeed in living peacefully in the context of their own complex identity.

Here again it would be a mistake to see such examples as extreme or unusual. Wherever there are groups of human beings living side by side who differ from one another in religion, colour, language, ethnic origin or nationality; wherever there are tensions, more or less longstanding, more or less violent, between immigrants and local populations, Blacks and Whites, Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Arabs, Hindus and Sikhs, Lithuanians and Russians, Serbs and Albanians, Greeks and Turks, English-speaking and French-speaking Canadians, Flemings and Walloons, Chinese and Malays – yes, wherever there is a divided society, there are men and women bearing within them contradictory allegiances, people who live on the frontier between opposed communities, and whose very being may be said to be traversed by ethnic or religious or other fault lines.

We are not dealing with a handful of marginal people. There are thousands, millions of such men and women, and there will be more and more of them. They are frontier-dwellers by birth, or through the changes and chances of life, or by deliberate choice, and they can influence events and affect their course one way or the other. Those who can accept their diversity fully will hand on the torch between communities and cultures, will be a kind of mortar joining together and strengthening the societies in which they live. On the other hand, those who cannot accept their own diversity may be among the most virulent of those prepared to kill for the sake of identity, attacking those who embody parts of themselves which they would like to see forgotten.

PBS in the US did a documentary on race a while ago. I haven’t seen it, but I did come across the companion website, Race – The Power of an Illusion, recently. Being a show made by and for Americans, it traces the history of race in the US, but it does give a glimpse of what race meant – or didn’t mean – before European settlers arrived in the Americas. It also points out, as the title suggests, that race is not a biological fact but a social construct. The terms we use so casually today – ‘white’, ‘black’, ‘caucasian’ – have an interesting history. It doesn’t call for the abolition of racial categories though because they are useful in determining such things as social equality, which suggests that current social inequality is a function of the arbitrary classification of human beings into nonexistent subcategories, and not vice versa. And if you’d like to see evidence of how arbitrary this classification is, take a look at this page, where you are given 16 photographs to classify under four racial categories. Give it a go and see how many you get right.

But what’s most interesting and, I think, most relevant to Australia is the section titled What’s Race Got To Do With It? The third presentation, called “The Elephant in the Room” seemed the most directly applicable to what I’ve seen in Australia. I should point out that I don’t know all that much about the social and racial history of Australia and what I do know comes from references made in articles and conversations about current issues (such as the Apology to Indigenous Australians made by the Prime Minister earlier this year, the portrayal – or lack thereof – of Indigenous Australians in the media and art, and Australia’s rather intersting immigration policies through history). I have however been living here for just over two years now and while I honestly find it a wonderfully welcoming place, I have also found it to be one where racism is incredibly deeply ingrained. Not in the classic American sense of being discriminated against on the basis of your skin color (though it’s been known to happen) but in the constant classification of people into categories and sub-categories. People born and bred in Australia are still referred to by their parents’ race or, if they are of European ancestry, by their forebears’ country of origin. Nobody, it seems, is just Australian. Given the intermittent noise in the media about ‘Australian values’ and identity, that’s just bizarre.

The racism is so casual you almost don’t notice it. For instance, upon meeting my husband, several people have remarked that he wasn’t what they expected. They were expecting a Pakistani – and therefore presumably Muslim – male but he ‘doesn’t look like one.’ As if that wasn’t galling enough, some have remarked on how lovely that is and how lucky I am.

Another example is language. I have lost count of how many times I’ve received compliments on my command of English or been asked outright where I learnt it because it’s really rather good. I don’t think any of the people who have complimented me have meant any harm by it and have no idea that they were being insufferably patronizing. I have decided however that, rather than get annoyed, the simplest thing to do is to compliment theirs in return. You know, one native speaker to another.

My personal favorite is people who must assert a cultural difference no matter what. Everyone being spoken of belongs to some neat little category that immediately explains everything about them. What a convenient way to view the world.

Given the history of racism, these are minor irritations. But they indicate nonetheless how deeply ingrained the assumptions based on race actually are, even though most people would be hard put to explain why some people are categorized according to race while others are defined by their ethnicity, nationality, or religion and would be surprised to learn how often they conflate these categories themselves.

Sick of wondering how on earth to live up to Disney’s exacting standards? Well wonder no more! We now have a definitive guide to being a Disney princess. Oh joy and happiness.

Two things kottke posted recently that I had to share:

This is what A-Ha’s Take On Me would sound like if the lyrics actually had anything to do with the video.

In a similar vein, a song where the lyrics are about the lyrics. It’s worth listening to the end.