Non-Browning Apples and the Sarah Jessica Parker Parallel

Beauty. We’re told its important. We’re sold a completely bizarre idea of what beauty means and what we need to do to achieve it. We tell ourselves it's important. I fall prey to it much more than I like to admit and it's a bit alarming to realise how long this weird idea of beauty had been influencing my life. I grew up with a dance teacher who told us all that a dancer is always on stage, and that means looking a certain way whenever you get out of bed. It's an idea that's stuck with me since I was seven. I’m sure she probably sleeps in her make up, just in case the house catches on fire and a firemen might see her without her face on. I had a friend who reminded me a few years ago that I did the same thing when I was in my pre-teens. I didn’t remember it at all (yay repression!) but apparently I told her that I had to wear makeup to bed in case I was awoken by a prince or some such prattle. I must have been pretty convinced there was a plethora of princes hanging out in suburban Virginia.  I remember seeing it first on Spice World. I was probably around the same age- seven again? It’s amazing how inundated we are with what we think society wants us to look like, and it starts at a very young age. It's less hard to believe when you see it all over movies, magazines, and TV. Look at old photos and videos of  the so-called illustrious SJP, back in her Broadway days when she looked like a human being, even a pretty human being! I don't really know why I picked SJP to be fair... she's probably a very nice lady. Too bad she looks a bit like an 80 year old scarecrow....plus I hate Sex and the City. Just saying. 

SJP circa 1996

So how did she go from this:

.... to this?:

Oh.... South Park. You know just what to say.

And let's not forget crazy Madonna's steroid string bean arms!

DELICIOUS!  "I feel decades younger than I am! Just look at my young, supple body! Now I can fit into my daughters clothes! Acceptable!"

The list goes on. Personally I’d rather look like Helen Mirren than have Madonna string arms. What it says about society is a bit frightening. But it’s not just about fashion, or celebrities. This bizarre beauty obsession has an impact on almost every single aspect of life. Did you know banana’s have been bred to be straighter and longer because some costumer somewhere said once that they thought long and straight banana bludgeons looked better than cute little banana shaped bananas? Carrots are straight, broccoli must have a certain density, and apples have to be a particular size- oh, and they’re not supposed to brown.

“Hold on a tick, my good man,” you might say. And I me being the hypothetical Shopkeep who somehow switched gender in a sentence would say back to you, “Why, my dear chap, you told me once that when you cut my apple it turned brown and you were displeased. So, as a loyal customer at Buy Apples Anytime Of The Year Apple Emporium [catchy, eh], I decided to genetically modify all my apples so they would stay beautifully white and pristine when you cut into them.” 

After our wonderful conversation, you the customer would go home with your genetically modified ‘beauty apple’ without much hesitation. Why? Because you love pretty apples!  On the website for Okanagan Special Fruits, the makers of the magical, wondrous non-browning apple, they explain that :

“Just about every person can identify with that apple that has been cut or partially eaten and set aside for a few minutes, only to find the flesh all brown and unattractive when you come back to it. This "browning" is evident in most fruits and vegetables, and is very active in most tree fruits. OSF patented Polypheunol Oxidase (PPO) technology is able to silence the browning reaction, to deliver a fruit that will not turn brown when cut or bruised."

Alack! Horror of Horrors!  SAVE YOUR IMMACULATELY VIRGIN APPLES FROM THE TERRORS OF BROWNING! 

The fact of the matter is APPLES BROWN! THAT IS WHAT APPLES DO WHEN YOU CUT INTO THEM!  People age and apples brown, and spring comes before summer and so on and so forth. These are the facts of life. What the biotech companies like our dear friends at Okanagan Specialty Fruits forget to mention is that apple browning is mitigated with some good ol’ fashioned citric acid, aka lemon juice. If one were to buy pre-cut apples from Starbucks or Tesco or Wendy's or any other place that sells the incredibly tedious to cut apple in neat, handy packages, one would take a look at the ingredients and more often than not find citric acid on that list (among other things most likely.... mmm extra non-appley bits).

So what’s the point of genetically modified non browning apples? It the same idea as pumping a face full of Botox and collagen…. do you really want that in your fruit?

I'll leave you with a quote to think about until the next time I post. Let me know what you think.

“Any politician or scientist who tells you these products are safe is either very stupid or lying. The hazards of these foods are uncertain. In view of our enormous ignorance, the premature application of biotechnology is downright dangerous."  ~David Suzuki, CC, OBC, Ph.D LLD, Geneticist

 This post it brought to you by The Lemon and  Our Word of the Day: Senescence.

Jamie Oliver: A Love/Hate Relationship

Dear Jamie,

Ok first of all, there's no need to go around calling everyone 'Brother' and 'darling' and 'sweetheart.' So stop. Could you be any more patronising? Kids can relate to you with out having to pretend they're actually related to you. If you were doing it in some weird hippie-dippie sort of way where you actually thought we were all related through some universal bond of mankind it would almost kind of but not really be less annoying. *BUT* I don't think you are, and we don't live on a commune. While making the world one massive commune full of free love, reason, and organics is very appealing to me, we need to come to the realisation that in order to fulfil a food revolution agenda, we need to attack it with the pragmatic realism of the lobbyists and bureaucratic automatons we're up against. That being said, what you're trying to do with school lunches is admirable but I think I've got tips to make it better. However, I need someone like you to make those plans come to fruition because I really doubt the British government cares very much for my alien thoughts on food. If you hired me I think we could make a great team.

Have you heard about the Edible Schoolyard, Jamie? Or perhaps the Farm to School program? Both are great ways to advance school lunches, and both give kids a direct role the planting and harvesting of the foods they eat in school. The Edible Schoolyard in my opinion is far superior because a kitchen is established on the school's site as well to explain how to make delicious, nutritious, seasonal food. In today's economy one of the first things to be cut is home economics programs, and many kids are growing up without the fundamental basics of food preparations. That's where you come in, Jamie! I don't have to explain that this is right up your alley: combining healthy food with the joy of cooking. However, many many many schools have turned down systems like this  using a thinly veiled excuse about rodent infestation to cover up the problematic budget issues. If we got involved and created edible schoolyards, I think it would take off.

However, another option is still open and is being widely accepted in many states. Farm to School establishes a connection between a school and near-by farms. Schools go directly to the farm and assist with planting and harvesting, then the food produced is delivered to the schools. This is advantageous to all parties involved as it boosts PR for the farm, and urban/suburban kids get to get stuck into the mud a bit and later get to enjoy the fruits of their labour. It teaches heard work and encourages kids to try new things. It is also a lot easier for school administrators to get on board, as budget and health and safety issued are limited.

These two programs are essential for your food revolution to work, Jamie, and given the chance to work together we could really get a lot done. I want to start a program in Edinburgh, as I think it's time to show Scotland in a much more positive light than just deep fried mars bars, haggis, and that 'I hate Iceland' guy.

I think, given the chance and encouragement, kids would be well up for it. This whole thing goes back to the idea that if you give a kid a soda, then scold him and take that soda away because it's "bad," you're not really solving the problem and the kid gets upset because he doesn't really understand why his treat was taken away. If you give a kid carrot seeds, help him plant them, explain how all the healthy soil and the wrigglies in the earth are helping his carrots grow big, when that carrot comes out of the ground he'll be ten times more likely to eat it and will have a higher likeliood of liking it because it's his carrot. He took responsibility, he grew it, then he took the chance of tasting something different. That's how we start a revolution. Next step is teaching him how to cook it (cue Jamie style mashing, bashing, and chopping, maybe with a sprig of rosemary?)

Finally, Ryan Seacrest as your producer??? Really? 

In conclusion, I wish our relationship was easier to understand, Jamie. I think the best thing to do is get me on your team and we can work out our issues in person and maybe help a few kids along the way.

In admiration and confusion,

Rachel xx

Let's Just Go Back To The Start

Anyone can put anything on the Internet. That does not, however, make it at all true or enjoyable for anyone to read. Making the New Best Thing to hit the blogosphere is actually a bit of a daunting task, especially when I spend the majority of my free time perusing hilarious blogs like Hipster Puppies and Kim Jong Il Looking At Things. I'm really not that clever or interesting, but I like to have a platform to rant, and a blog seems like a perfect compromise between the private and the public. I know for a fact my friends on Facebook will likely thank me for creating an op-in rant-a-thon instead of force feeding my ideas down their throats via their personal news feeds. I'm just going to write about things that matter to me, and you can judge whether or not its interesting or valid in anyway. I've wanted to blog but now the time is right to get chatting.

Succinct bullet list of things that I tend to obsess about that will likely make more than one appearance on this forum:
- All things farming, farm compost to consumption
- Monsanto's ability to hide their plan for world domination
- Cheese
- Food, more generally
- The pros and cons of a nomadic existence
- Movies
- My rather vocal hatred of hipsters and the complete obscenity of spending £500+ on to look like a homeless person who steals clothing and accessories from pimps and grannies
- Inspiring stories/people/events I somehow find along the way
- My mother/ the women in my family because most everything I know and care about came from them
- photographs
- The word of the day I set for myself (today's is Factotum, if you're wondering)
- My network, i.e. Boyfriend, dancer friends, friend friends that inspire, challenge, and support me especially when my eyes are bigger than my stomach.


This whole thing really started coming together for me after a rather tumultuous few years at uni. I decided flying the nest wasn't big enough, and I always wanted to live abroad, so I used college as my ticket out the door. All in all it's been pretty successful but it's taken a good two and a half years to get my head around life, mostly out of sheer luck and finding positive people to have in my life. It took making a huge amount of mistakes and isolating myself from the people who cared about me to realise something had to give. The academic year of 2009/2010 was especially tough, with serious impacts to my over physical and emotional health. 

One good thing to come out of that year though was a class entitled 'Globalisation and Its Disjunctures.' It's with this crazy professor whose goal in life is to absolutely terrify students in the IR department in the first two years that only the mildly insane or masochistic among them will venture into his classroom come third year. The aim of the semester was to examine globalisation as a buzzword and to understand the different factors in place under such an umbrella term. For example, globalisation can mean anything from Facebook to the WTO putting sanctions in place to allow Monsanto entering developing agrarian sectors. We looked at the disparity between the developed and developing worlds (The Global North and South, if you will....) to better understand global factors responsible for the rift between the  rich and poor, and to potentially use different global factors to then break down those barriers. 

My new obsession became finding out more about the globalised food system and its impact on food security. In class we listened to interviews given by Vandana Shiva, and we talked about WTO sanctions on Ethiopian grain supplies during one of the worst famines in their country's history. We talked about the rise of cash crops and the domination of the US development model. I decided right then and there, virtually as my life was pretty much falling to pieces at my feet, that I was going to hightail it to India and do a voluntary internship with Vandana's organisation called Navdanya. I guess you can say "I found myself" in India although I'd rather shoot myself in the foot than use a phrase like that. Saying that also gives me more of the credit. If anything, I was too far gone to deal with my mess on my home turf and went for the furthest thing from my comfort zone. That's about where my responsibility end. I met ridiculously amazing people, like the type of people you know books and movies will be written about because their sheer intelligence and passion has to be disseminated to the masses. It was so nice to be around people, while they were incredibly bright and motivated, didn't feel the need to one-up each other. There was no grading, no competition- just a simple exchange of information while working towards a common goal..... Being in an incredibly supportive environment, talking with spiritually strong individuals, doing introspective exercises like yoga and meditation, meeting farmers, and traveling around the country made a huge impact on me.

Fruit of the earth and work of human hands. Copyright 2011.

NOW jump forward 8 months and I'm working to spread my passion for sustainability and what I like to call social justice agriculture.

My friends and I are starting a 'green' initiative in our area of Fife, Scotland. We're hoping to change common perceptions of sustainability and to create an inclusive definition of 'green' that supports our community and protects our environment while bringing people into a grassroots movement who might have otherwise shied away. 





As this blog grows and develops I hope to have a number of diverse contributors (take that, HuffingtonPost!). But for now, it's just me. 


I'll keep you updated.