RE: 15% solution...mmm
"hey Spencer,
Zim says 15% solution is a good thing. no really. he says if his chicken
doesn't come with 15% solution already there he puts it in.
K"
Thank you Zim for giving me a reason to do a little extra detective work.
After doing some reading I found out a few things about the practice of
adding up to 15% of an additive of salt water, carrageen (seaweed extract),
sodium phosphate (preservative, emulsifier, laxative), and "flavors", by
injection into the chicken carcass.
wikipedia:
"Adding sodium phosphates to food increases the shelf life of the food;
maintaining the texture and appearance of the food."
Damninteresting.com:
Trisodium Phosphate (aka Sodium Phosphate):
An ionic salt used as a thickener/emulsifier for foods, as well as common
uses as a degreaser, detergent, and laxative.
Anytime I see the food industry adding things I am suspicious about the
motive. If it has 15% by weight of a less expensive additive and charging
you the same then they are cutting the product to make more money. I
learned that from a cocaine dealer I met once.
One article in this newspaper:
http://www.nwaonline.net/articles/2007/07/28/business/072907bizchickenlabels
.txt states that Americans my be overcharged by 2 billion dollars in paying
for saltwater/ seaweed extract/ and chemicals instead of chicken. Also the
meat could have up to 7 times the normal sodium level. For someone with
high blood pressure, which is like ...everybody, that's a source of sodium
they may not be aware of.
Also in the above article: "The Truthful Labeling Coalition -- a Washington,
D.C.-based lobbying group funded by natural chicken producers -- say the use
of salt solution first occurred in 2003 after Bentonville-based Wal-Mart
Stores Inc. reportedly approached all the major U.S. chicken processors
about standardizing the packaged weight of fresh chicken to use one bar code
for like items."
"The coalition said in accordance with what the USDA allowed, processors
were told they could add up to 15 percent water solution to the chicken
under the guidelines."
So you are being charged for all that water and salt that has been injected
to more closely standardize packaging weights and increase the shelf life of
the product. And because all the ingredients are "natural" like salt and
seaweed, they can still call the bastardized chicken "100% all natural".
Our food supply is a double edged sword. For one thing it has allowed the
explosion of the US population by making an abundance of food available at
commodity prices. However the down side is that the food is often stripped
of its nutrition and has preservatives and sometimes food born illnesses
added to it. The way products like chicken are handled, en mass, allows
salmonella to become such a problem that it has become endemic. The
manufacturers rely on the consumer to deal with the problem by cooking it
away. In other words, it's guaranteed to have salmonella on it so slap a
'safe food handling label' on it and let them deal with it. Real chicken
and eggs shouldn't have salmonella in it! But if you take a thousand birds
an hour and boil the feathers off them in the same tank and then put the
same birds in a chilling tank together, one bad one will infect them all.
That could be the 'chicken broth' they use to inject the carcasses with for
all I know.
This has spurred me to look more closely at the labels on my food. It has
also made me understand the value of a cup of rice or other staple that is
nutritious and with a good dose of local bought veggies and beans can
replace the factory processed and 'mechanically separated' meat flavored
solid that they are selling at the supermarket. I will spend more time
buying and cooking fresh, local vegetables.
Prop 8, Pack of Lies
Jimmy and I have had our faces rubbed in the fact that we are second class citizens. The campaign was full of lies and half truths and funded in large part by religion whose specialty is repression. The Mormon church put a great deal of money into it. We hope the supreme court will strike it down. There were several others like this passed in several states including a particulary onerous law forbidding same sex couples from adopting children. We are used to being treated this way but it still stings. At least it was not a landslide. The exit polls showed that people who voted for this did so because they didn't want children tought about gay marriage in schools. This shows the lie campaign was effective as the bill has nothing to do with schools, only marriage. There is nothing about ANY kind of marriage taught in public schools in California, nothing.
Another part of the campaign of lies was the google ad campaign with the misleading heading "Protect Marriage Rights." This is a classic wolf in sheep's clothing riff used with great aplomb by such as tobacco,big agra business, logging, coal, anyone who wants to destroy the environment. They put out a statement by the "People for Clean Air" saying we need more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for plants to grow better or some such nonsense. They don't want to protect marriage rights, they want to take them away! Instead of the traditional definition of marriage as a union between two people who love each other, it is narrowed to be only be between two people of opposite sex and doesn't have anything to do with love. Gay people already had the right to get married and some 18,000 of them did. Guess what, society didn't come grinding to a halt. In fact, it brought an increase in tax revenues from weddings in the state.
Gay people don't want special rights. We just want the same rights as everyone else enjoys. We want the right of survivorship so when one partner dies, the other one automatically inherits the estate instead of having taxes taken out of it or it going to the mother in law or whatever other surviving 'family' is left. We want to be able to marry our spouse from another country and legally bring them here just like straight people can. We want to automatically be able to deal with medical decisions and end of life care just like a heterosexual spouse can.
They used the arugument that 'domestic partnerships are the same as marriages'. Which is a lie because if domestic partnerships were the same as marriages, they would be called marriages. Seperate but equal is a Jim Crow law and that's not fair. Since the state of California does not recognize same-sex marriages, when I sign my domestic partner up for health insurance on my company's plan, those costs come from my after taxes pay, not my before tax pay like a wife would. There is just one way they aren't the same. We just want the same rights as everyone else but by using a bunch of out of state money from the Mormon Church and other religious repressionists and a blatent pack of lies, they duped the electorate into thinking that proposition 8 was about teaching second graders about gay marriage. They pulled the wool over people's eyes and I hope that comes back to bite them when the supreme court rules on some of the many challenges that are going to be put against this amendment.
Hooray Obama!
pics
110420082497
Here's the view from the top of the trail looking off to the right of the driveway. The house is at the top of a hill but you have to go through the valley to get there.
110420082496
Here's a pic at the head of the driveway to Elizabeth and Scotty's house in the Mountains. That's Tao's Element.
110420082495
This is the road leading to my cousin, Elizabeth's house. She lives there with her husband and dogs. The driveway is three miles long. They live off the grid and don't have any electricity or water bill.
Opera Mini Web Browser for Your Phone!
Check out this full functioned web browser for your phone. I just clicked on the 'send sms' and got a link sent to my phone which I then downloaded lickity split. I'll let you know how the program works as I evaluate it over the next few days.
Thanks,
Spencer
Map with embedded photos I took
View Larger Mapbr>This is an experiment placing pictures I've taken into google earth map. Click on the little black dots to see a picture taken from that spot using my Nokia N95 cell phone with geotagged information.
The map will update every time I add a new picture so please check back for more pictures.
Thanks,
Spencer
The Teddy Trap
