#agriculture up

[headspace-hotel]

I will write this thought about Veganism and Classism in the USA in another post so as to not derail the other thread:

There are comments in the notes that say meat is only cheaper than plant based foods because of subsidies artificially lowering the price of meat in the United States. This is...part of the story but not all of it.

For my animal agriculture lab we went to a butcher shop and watched the butcher cut up a pig into various cuts of meat. I have had to study quite a bit about the meat industry in that class. This has been the first time I fully realized how strongly the meat on a single animal is divided up by socioeconomic class.

Like yes, meat cumulatively takes more natural resources to create and thus should be more expensive, but once that animal is cut apart, it is divided up between rich and poor based on how good to eat the parts are. I was really shocked at watching this process and seeing just how clean and crisp an indicator of class this is.

Specifically, the types of meat I'm most familiar with are traditionally "waste" parts left over once the desirable parts are gone. For example, beef brisket is the dangly, floppy bit on the front of a cow's neck. Pork spareribs are the part of the ribcage that's barely got anything on it.

And that stuff is a tier above the "meat" that is most of what poor people eat: sausage, hot dogs, bologna, other heavily processed meat products that are essentially made up of all the scraps from the carcass that can't go into the "cuts" of meat. Where my mom comes from in North Carolina, you can buy "livermush" which is a processed meat product made up of a mixture of liver and a bunch of random body parts ground up and congealed together. There's also "head cheese" (made of parts of the pig's head) and pickled pigs' feet and chitlin's (that's made of intestines iirc) and cracklin's (basically crispy fried pig skin) and probably a bunch of stuff i'm forgetting. A lot of traditional Southern cooking uses basically scraps of animal ingredients to stretch across multiple meals, like putting pork fat in beans or saving bacon grease for gravy or the like.

So another dysfunctional thing about our food system, is that instead of people of each socioeconomic class eating a certain number of animals, every individual animal is basically divided up along class lines, with the poorest people eating the scraps no one else will eat (oftentimes heavily processed in a way that makes it incredibly unhealthy).

Even the 70% lean ground beef is made by injecting extra leftover fat back into the ground-up meat because the extra fat is undesirable on the "better" cuts. (Gross!)

I've made, or eaten, many a recipe where the only thing that makes it non-vegan is the chicken broth. Chicken broth, just leftover chicken bones and cartilage rendered and boiled down in water? How much is that "driving demand" for meat, when it's basically a byproduct?

That class really made me twist my brain around about the idea of abstaining from animal products as a way to deprive the industry of profits. Nobody eats "X number of cows, pigs, chickens in a lifetime" because depending on the socioeconomic class, they're eating different parts of the animal, splitting it with someone richer or poorer than they are. If a bunch of people who only ate processed meats anyway abstained, that wouldn't equal "saving" X number of animals, it would just mean the scraps and byproducts from a bunch of people's steaks or pork chops would have something different happen to them.

The other major relevant conclusion I got from that class, was that animal agriculture is so dominant because of monoculture. People think it's animal agriculture vs. plant agriculture (or plants used for human consumption vs. using them to feed livestock), but from capitalism's point of view, feeding animals corn is just another way to use corn to generate profits.

People think we could feed the world by using the grain fed to animals to feed humans, but...the grain fed to animals, is not actually a viable diet for the human population, because it's literally just corn and soybean. Like animal agriculture is used to give some semblance of variety to the consumer's diet in a system that is almost totally dominated by like 3 monocrops.

Do y'all have any idea how much of the American diet is just corn?!?! Corn starch, corn syrup, corn this, corn that, processed into the appearance of variety. And chickens and pigs are just another way to process corn. That's basically why we have them, because they can eat our corn. It's a total disaster.

And it's even worse because almost all the USA's plant foods that aren't the giant industrial monocrops maintained by pesticides and machines, are harvested and cared for by undocumented migrant workers that get abused and mistreated and can't say anything because their boss will tattle on them to ICE.

[muninnhuginn]

The thought that goes into the fake science in dungeon meshi can be something so special actually. Using golems to explain crop rotation and how removing predators from an ecosystem can have knock-on effects. Talking about symbiotic relationships and parasites too! And characters are actually interested in the science so they keep explaining about it. Finally, some exposition I can get behind.

[wisebeth]

why does the pjo series have to unnecessarily villainize goddesses (hera & athena) or show them as silly ladies (aphrodite & demeter) BUT posiedon and apollo are somehow shown as the coolest/most likeable gods, even though arguably, they're right after zeus on terms of corruption?

ares shown as the worst god after zeus and hera amuses me. last time i checked, he was the patron god of amazons and literally killed a man for attempting to rape his daughter but guess who cursed women for rejection? apollo. guess who raped women when they said no (aside from zeus)? posiedon.

[lonelysocksclub]

Oh boy I need patience this weekend. My cousin is visiting and he just explained to me, a biologist who has worked with maize genetics, how to make a kind of supermaize by using electromagnetic fields to manipulate DNA expression. The goal is to trick the maize to express the genes it had millions of years ago, a time when maize as we know it definitely existed and agricultural yield was famously high. And it's only Friday.

[syekick-powers]

it's fascinating to me how tumblr users who talk about worldbuilding seem to fall under distinct camps of audiences who don't care about detailed worldbuilding logistics at all, audiences who just want things to make sense and cohere internally even if it's not perfectly realistic, and audiences who seem less interested in stories and more interested in just hearing about the tiniest most irrelevant minutiae of how a fictional world works to the detriment of actually telling a story. and then there are also storytellers on here who also fall under three similar camps of writers who don't really care about detailed worldbuilding and mostly paint their worlds in broad strokes, those who put a fair amount of thought into their worlds but don't really get down into the fine details, and those that plan every tiny little fucking thing out. the variety of humanity is truly fascinating

[popsicle-stick]

YES!!!!!!!!!!! OH YEAH BABY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (sickos) OH YES!!!!!!!!!!!!

[fjordfolk]

people really be out there like “I wonder what this breed called a Shetland sheepdog was used for historically? alas it’s impossible to tell, we may never know” 🤦‍♀️

There is, believe it or not, some actual controversy regarding the breed origins and most of it (imo) stems from many people's mental image of a working sheepdog is a border collie, and not quite grasping that border collies are freaks and the way that we now work border collies didn't exist prior to the development of the border collie, and in some parts the way we keep SHEEP didn't exist prior to the border collie. There's also been some debate around old letters written by non-shetlanders after visiting the isles or talking to locals and having mmm interesting ideas of how people handled sheep over there. This leads to statements like:

Sheltie legs are too short to outrun sheep

They're also too small to grab the sheep and hold it (don't get me started)

A sheltie could never take sheep through a- (name specific type of herding trial)

Maybe they were actually placed with flocks on peripheral islands to keep watch for birds??

Shelties never existed and were made up in the late 1800s just for shetlanders to make money off of selling cute puppies to gullible tourists

There was an original sheepdog on Shetland but it was a much bigger dog (see reasons above) and the current sheltie was made up in the late 1800s, by breeding cavaliers to pomeranians and maybe a collie, just for shetlanders to sell puppies to tourists

...and so, clearly, they can't have been sheepdogs and we have No Clue what they were actually for (except scamming foreigners)

Meanwhile we know that traditional shepherding on Shetland relied on roaming sheep, keeping them off the property rather than on it (because that's where your crops are) and you'd only be rounding up your sheep a couple of times a year, and that island-bred shelties were smaller and spitzier type than even the current UK type.

[tetedurfarm]

wanted to take some photos of my van gogh hotots (van gotots?) but my plant light makes them look very ethereal

their mom is smashbox, my severe head tilt doe. because of her neck, she can't get into a nestbox or really pull any fur, so i put her in a small solid-bottom cage for the night of her due date so she could kindle in deep shavings. however, because she can't really pull fur, the kits still chilled a little before i got to them. rabbit instincts say that if kits are going to die, they need to be disposed of, so she had already begun eating them; i actually knew she'd kindle before i got to where her cage was because i could hear the kit she was working on at the time squealing (it was not particularly pretty, the condition it was in. helios the corn snake got an extra dinner that week.) fortunately, the rest of the litter made it out unscathed except for these two, who are down an ear each.

all in all, this litter turned out as good as it possibly could have. all but one kit is alive and well, fostered off to another doe. it was a good sized litter (six live!), and there were miraculously no sports (mismarks) and no boxers (eyeliner on only one eye)! like genuinely insane odds on that.

just watch the earless ones be the nicest ones in the litter 🙄

[clodiuspulcher]

today im thinking about malaria in ancient rome.

about the fact that P. falciparum (the most dangerous kind of malaria) was likely endemic at least from the 2nd century BC onward that Galen said semitertian fevers (P. falciparum infections) were more common in Rome than anywhere else in the Roman Empire that the most severe manifestations of P. falciparum (quotidian fevers + cerebral malaria) were most common in babies and young children, an epidemiological observation that indicates the transmission rate of P. falciparum was extremely high in Rome that Quintus Serenus said there was no Latin word for semitertian fevers (they used a transliteration of the Greek, 'hemitritaeos') because "no one, i think, could have named it in our language and mothers would not have wanted to"

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

[ahsokatanoe]

i came out of s2 loving sydrichie even more 😭 the tension between them was perfect and now they���ll have a new dynamic to continue to discover ever since richie’s character growth. very exciting!!

[alex51324]

Besides the farm box, my other adventure today was going to the agricultural fair!

This time, I became fascinated with a contest called "vegetable dress-up," where kids enter vegetables that they have arranged to look like animals, people, vehicles, etc.

My favorite was this Red Pepper Sheep:

Or cow. I'm not sure, but either way, it's great! The head and feet are scallions, and the horns are green beans. Tragically, this entry did not win anything. I am not privy to the judging criteria for this contest, but my tentative assessment is that this child was robbed, I tell you. Robbed.

The winner in the animal category was this zucchini dog:

He's nice, but I continue to have my doubts about the judging. The potato pup came in third. His spots are oatmeal!

Vegetable train was also rather good:

First place in Vehicles was something that I assume looked a lot better at the time of judging. (I think exhibits were entered this past Saturday.)

This potato family was first in People, I think.

I took a picture of this one because I do not fully understand it:

Spider-beet in the back is kind of neat, though.

Here's another angle each on Potato Pup and Pepper Sheep:

Over in the grown-ups exhibits, I always like looking at Homemaker Of The Year:

They have to do sewing, baking, canning, flower growing & arranging, and a category of their choice from the arts & crafts division. They usually do some sort of a theme to tie the items together; I guess this year's winner picked "purple."

And here's the year's Best-in-show quilt:

It's a jellyfish! (They put plastic up over the textile exhibits so people don't spill snow-cones on them and stuff; you can still see them pretty well in person, but it's not great for taking pictures.)

Here's a really intricate crocheted...tablecloth, I guess? Big doily? Anyway, it's neat!

Another one that's fun to look at is the Artistic Arrangements in the houseplants and flowers section. Fairy gardens were big this year. Here's a fairies' tea party, in a teapot!

This was the winner:

The county extension office had a butterfly exhibit:

And then I didn't take many pictures of the animal exhibits, but here's Mr. Hopps!

He won a ribbon for being such a good French Lop.

Extreme nose closeup!

And then this is Hector, the Demonstration Bunny:

He is very soft, and his human friend was spinning yarn from his fur!

Anyway those are my pictures from the fair. I also had a cheesesteak and bought some raffle tickets; if I win anything I will report back!

[queers4years]

Indigenous Hawaiians really had a good system going: wake up reaaally early and do most of the days work while it's cool and by the time the sun was up and it got hot the work was done and you're free to surf and socialize. I wish the white people realized they themselves could work smarter and not harder and get time to relax. Instead of calling Hawaiians lazy (and being genocidal about it)

[melveres]

I’m so invested in wizard101 and its denizens that it has got me researching actual irl science and engineering so i could depict magic better

[ciboriaadastra]

Having a thought about how the amount of wealth Bruce comes into and then amasses for himself changed over the decades of Batman media, and the reason he's beeen scaled up to be so impossibly wealthy is probably because cities and companies in DC lore are analogs to real life places and companies.

Wayne Enterprises probably reflects how homogenous American multinational corporations are now, where a single company can make and distribute almost all consumer goods because it has bought out/merged hundreds of smaller companies + purchased everything it needed from the ground up so it does not depend on many others besides itself.

Just something that crossed my mind when I was looking up what WE actually does and the Fandom (bleh) wiki listed so many branches. Wayne Shipping? Wayne Foods? Like...is this Amazon and Bruce is now Bezos? Wayne Entertainment? He's also Disney? Wayne Electronics? This is Apple? Wayne Aerospace? Boeing??? Bruce is trying to be in control of and monitor every single means of production and every production line fr

Feel like that should influence how people view Wayne Enterprises and Bruce himself. Steadily creeping in and taking root in every industry. People get curious about a new construction project in the city, but once it's revealed to be a Wayne Tower it's filling people with dread. Though, it was a long time coming...everything you order online comes in a box with a W on the tape delivered to your address in a black as night truck with a giant W emblazoned on the side. The meds in your cabinet were produced under Wayne Pharmaceuticals. The cable and streaming services were recently bought by Wayne Entertainment. The Wayne Foundation started offering scholarships at the major college campuses. Your phone is Wayne tech. Your car was built with Wayne Steel. Soon the hospitals will be all Wayne Medical, your insurance company bought out. The local newspapers and stations will be bought up. The libraries. The clinics. The orphanages. The schools. The grocery store. You're never going to scrub that b ig soulless W out of your head. The way the logo looks like the head of a pitchfork, ready to stab and capture the intended prey.

Thinking about how Wayne Medical seems so innocuous in what it does except for the bit on how Bruce has access to every person in Gotham's medical records, because he can access the Wayne Medical databases and use that information to track suspects. And the thing is WE does not just exist in Gotham, it's a multinational corporation with bases in major cities not just in the U.S. but around the world. This man has millions of people's medical records easily accessible to him which feels both extremely unethical and extremely illegal. Not that civilians can prove he can and does access those records though.

[incorrect-play-it-by-ear]

This week on Play It By Ear Book Club we are together going to figure out what the hell the plot was in heartbeat hospital.