Speaking of which...the economic news is not looking good today.

Bad news at Bear Stearns

Bear Stearns swung to a quarterly loss Thursday and said it was taking a $1.9 billion writedown due to bad bets made on risky home loans, becoming the latest Wall Street firm to deliver disappointing quarterly results.

Holiday Sales in U.S. Fall for Third Week After Winter Storms

Sales at U.S. retailers declined for the third straight week as storeowners grappled with winter storms and rising gasoline prices that discouraged shoppers during what may be the worst holiday season in five years.

Why the Fed has lost its mojo

Am I really saying that the Fed, which to many people still seems omniscient and omnipotent, has lost much of its mojo? I am. Why should you care? Because if the Fed continues to lose clout, it will be even harder than it is now to rescue the world's financial system when the next disaster strikes the markets. And there's always a next disaster.

"Maybe he has a really big car, or drives long distances. Let's not be so judgmental."

I can't really tell if that was a joke or not (I suspect it is), but there's obviously something more wrong if the guy can't pony-up $6 or so a week for more milk.

The green PC response might be that the guy should get his kids off of cow's milk anyway and go to Soy milk. Of course it is probably more expensive..... can't win.

We made yogurt in the oven.

Leave the oven off, but change the wattage of the light bulb in there until you get the desired temperature. (No CFL's)

We bought one small cup of plain Dannon (with active cultures), and put one small scoop of that into cups with whole milk.

Since this was 30 years ago, I forget how long it took to turn into yogurt.

Topped with Smuckers jam.

That's the thing, it needs to be quick, simple and easy. I can make homemade bread from scratch the old-fashioned way, but the way that breadmaking actually gets DONE in my house is with a breadmaker, because it is quick, simple and easy. If I had to do it all the old way, it probably wouldn't get done at all very often, and I'd be back to store-bought bread.

Maybe someday, when neither I nor my wife are any longer working in 8-5 jobs and have all day to work at home and in the garden on feeding ourselves, I'll dispense with all the electric gadgets and go back to the the old ways of doing everything. There's something to be said for getting a head start on as many things as possible, though, even if it is only halfway.

To this thread --

Food miles do eat up energy. Some transfers are obviously lunatic, make no sense in any circumstance, except for the profiteers, who are on the whole only acting in a rational ‘profit’ type scheme, from their position.

I remember about 3 years ago I worked out one example - yoghurt from the UK to the ‘continent’ and vv. and found that the UK exported as much as it imported, all of course in refrigerated trucks, only the brands, flavors, packaging, varied.

Danone France exported myrtille (blueberry) yog. to England, and the Brits exported apple yog. to France! Take it just as a prototypical example, emblematic, even if I can’t work it out again (these things change rapidly..)

However specialization and exchange can’t just be dismissed out of hand - how should trade be regulated or curtailed? Local consumption is good - but how local is local? A beet farmer should survive on beets? And who decides? Who controls?

In the past, before the oil age, limits to transport curtailed world wide exchanges.

Brazil's plantations are de facto slave ones. If they had to do things the way they are done in the USA (i.e. mechanized) then their EROEI would not be looking so good. Let's not make Brazil as some sort of model for biofuels, unless you are promoting slavery. Also, Brazil cannot support North America with ethanol since it cannot even cover its own needs completely.

I'm not so sure but what there wouldn't be some overlap when it comes to maize (corn), though. Maize can be grown in a lot of tropical and semitropical places that won't work for wheat, barley, etc.

Rice is another grain crop with potential overlap. If you can terrace and irrigate, you can grow rice just about anywhere that you can grow sugarcane. Thus, the question as to whether or not there is overlap in this case revolves around the amount of water available - cane needs a little less than rice.

Hi Beach Boy,

Thanks for taking a look at what I looked up (back then). If you have firsthand experience (in general), I like hearing about that (I think others do, as well). I'd be interested in what you've seen "up close".

From the reading I did, it's more like an indirect, and yet still quite real, effect - is the impression I got. When land people use for basic food needs becomes more valuable to say, corporations, for new crops, then those people are displaced (to where?) and the misery/migrant/refugee factor rises. People end up going into the rain forest to attempt subsistence farming.

When the authors quoted below refer to "large-scale agriculture", I was imagining this would be the form of new sugarcane production. On what land that sugarcane would be produced - I don't know.

My guess is that any new non-food use of land in a major way has both direct and indirect impacts. When such a large percentage of the populace is already dependent on subsistence farming and at the same time, do not hold title - this seems to be a recipe for further encroachment into areas previously preserved.

Here's a quote from that link:

The reason these people are referred to as 'shifted' cultivators is that most of them people have been forced off their own land. For example, in Guatemala, rainforest land was cleared for coffee and sugar plantations. The indigenous people had their land stolen by government and corporations. They became 'shifted cultivators', moving into rainforest areas of which they had no previous knowledge in order to sustain themselves and their families (Colchester & Lohmann)."

"Large-scale agriculture, logging, hydroelectric dams, mining, and industrial development are all responsible for the dispossession of poor farmers.
"One of the primary forces pushing landless migrants into the forests is the inequitable distribution of agricultural land" (WRI 1992, Colchester & Lohmann). In Brazil, approximately 42% of cultivated land is owned by a mere 1% of the population. Landless peasants make up half of Brazil's population (WRM).”

I can vouch for this. I'm shocked sometimes at how long raw milk keeps, as long as it's cold.

Here's another shocker: when it starts to "turn," it's still drinkable, though you have to develop a taste for it. It will tend to naturally ferment, like cider. It never develops that GROSS putrid state of decayed pasteurized milk which makes you want to puke.

Still, any milk over a week old here goes to the pigs.

I've tried buffalo, and it's much more flavorful than beef. It's like eating meat as opposed to eating something that should taste like meat but under the onions and A-1 sauce and all the other stuff needed to flavor it, doesn't taste all that much.

You would get used to the flavor in no time at all if you had to, and the benefits are enormous - for instance, grass-fed beef has similar omega-3/omega-6 fat ratios as fish. The ramifications of just that are huge.