Organic garbage food

We generally avoid buying anything that has an "organic" label on two accounts. First because all of it is ridiculously overpriced and second because it is generally of lower quality than high yield production. Nowhere is that more obvious than what we just experienced with new potatoes. Of course the left coast is in love with the supposed eco-benefits from low input production. (I refuse to submit to the eco-terror that has perverted the meaning of the word "organic"). When we go to the farmers' markets out here every stall claims to be low input and even the grocery stores are increasingly succombing to the public hysteria.

So we bought a couple of bags of new potatoes because among the other traits I have inherited from my paternal grandfather, love of new potatoes is probably the strongest. The problem with low input potatoes is that they have no natural disease resistance and by definition can't have any artificial protection. So they start out scabbier than I would like but they quickly deteriorate in storage from the growth of mold and fungus. Today I peeled more than 25% of the material off the remaining rapidly decomposing new potatoes and boiled them so that much will at least survive. Marilyn is going to Salmon Arm tomorrow where she will search Safeway and Overwaitea for some healthy new potatoes.

I expect that 100+ years from now people will look back on this time and view it much as we now view the dark ages. We have foresaken the benefits that science and technology has brought us and we are embarked on a path of ruin based on emotion and feelings. The pendulum will inevitably swing back to science but not until we have killed off a substantial number of people for no reason whatsoever other than that society as a whole is too stupid to understand the science that we have spent the last 100 years developing.

We had a great weekend in Medicine Hat / Airdrie. On the way east we stopped up in Rogers Pass to take a picture of our newest son. We have pictures of the other three taken in the same spot so we wanted to make sure we got a picture of Georgie there too. Karla has never been by there so she is our only child that we don't have a picture of taken under those arches. When I had father's slides scanned I'm sure there was a picture of us taken there when we were kids. Someday when I have nothing better to do I should round up all the pictures and make a Rogers Pass collage.


George very much did not like the hotel room we had in Medicine Hat so we only stayed one night there. Thursday when we arrived we more or less went straight over to the hall for the graduation exercises. We got there almost an hour before they were due to start but that wasn't anywhere near soon enough to get good seats.

























We hustled back to Airdrie after the supper Friday night and spent the weekend sort of working and helping Camiel and Alison get ready for their big party Monday night. I hope Alison didn't pay a damage deposit on those white linen tablecloths she rented! It gets pretty exciting when you dunk 15 steaks into 35 litres of hot oil in a 40 litre pot. Maybe it was only 30 litres of oil. The crowd was a little nervous when I fired up the torch because it sounds like a jet warming up. It takes a lot of heat to bring 30 litres of canola oil up to 400 degrees. And it takes a lot of heat to hold it there when you keep dipping cold steaks into the oil every 5 minutes or so. I love the moment when the first steaks hit the oil because everybody is nervous already from the noise of the torch and then when the steaks hit the oil and the fire leaps up you can almost hear them say "I knew it!". We didn't lose any tablecloths but Alison probably won't get her damage deposit back on one of them if they check it carefully. Marlan and RJ showed up around 5:00 on Monday so I ended up with some pictures of the evening - thank you Marlan. RJ went to some beef hoity-toity seminar with Alison on Tuesday. Now he'll be able to name drop when he gets back to Saskatoon this fall or maybe even argue with the occasional prof - "that's not what Dr. Hoity Toity from the University of North Carolina thinks about that!!!"