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More on Fairy Circles

December 30, 2022 by suzannesmom

Photo: Thorsten Becker via Wikimedia.
Fairy circles in Namibia, Africa. According to the New York Times, Namibia’s fairy circles may become “embedded within a matrix of fresh green grasses” during the rainy season.

Have you ever wondered about “fairy circles”? So have a lot of other people, scientists included. If you search on the term at this blog, you can see that I have been trying to keep readers abreast of the latest news about fairy circles as it becomes available. Today’s report is by Rachel Nuwer at the New York Times.

“The strange, barren spots pepper the vast Namib Desert, which stretches from southern Angola to northern South Africa. They are known as ‘fairy circles,’ and for a natural phenomenon with such a whimsical name, scientific debates over their origins have been heated.

“ ‘The to and fro between opposing camps has often been nothing less than vitriolic,’ said Michael Cramer, an ecophysiologist at the University of Cape Town who has studied fairy circles.

“Despite decades of research, no consensus exists about the origin of the mysterious formations. Theories have included poisonous gases, noxious bushes and plant-killing microbes or fungi. Two of the explanations — the circles are made by termites, or they result from plants competing over limited water — have dominated the scientific debate. …

“A rigorous study published in October will not end this fight, but it does seem to give the water-related hypothesis a clear lead over the termite theory.

“ ‘Plants are forced to create these circles to redistribute water to maximize their chances of survival,’ said Stephan Getzin, an ecologist at the University of Göttingen in Germany and an author of the study. ‘We call it ecosystem engineering.’

“The Namib Desert is one of the driest places in the world, usually receiving only a few inches of rain each year. Researchers first proposed in 2004 that plants, in competition for water in this harsh ecosystem, may self-organize into fairy circles — an idea originally adapted from pattern-formation theory developed by the mathematician Alan Turing.

“Over the past decade, Dr. Getzin and others have published more than a dozen papers in support of the hypothesis, known as plant water stress.

“For their latest study, Dr. Getzin and his colleagues spent three years examining fairy circles at 10 study sites across 620 miles of desert. One of those years, 2020, was a drought, while 2021 and 2022 were exceptionally rainy — a lucky break that permitted the researchers to compare different conditions, Dr. Getzin said.

“They used soil moisture sensors to collect continuous readings every 30 minutes of water content in the sand in and around fairy circles. They also examined hundreds of individual grass shoots and roots excavated at various intervals from within the circles and the surrounding areas.

After rain, the researchers found that grasses germinated both inside and outside fairy circles, but that within about 20 days virtually all of the young shoots inside a circle had died.

“They also found that the top eight inches of soil within fairy circles quickly dried out, something they hypothesize is caused when established plants surrounding fairy circles actively draw water toward them.

“Plants are constantly transpiring — or losing water — through their leaves. Their roots, meanwhile, take water in. In Namibia’s sandy soil, this creates a vacuum effect that moves water from the interior of fairy circles toward the plants’ roots at the circle’s fringe and beyond. …

“The new paper also speaks to the termite hypothesis, which has been championed by Norbert Jürgens, an ecologist at the University of Hamburg in Germany. He reported in 2013 that fairy circles were in fact generated by sand termites that damage grass roots.

“In the new paper, Dr. Getzin and his colleagues noted that termites were conspicuously missing from their study sites, and that they found no signs of root damage in grass that died after rainfall.

“ ‘We can say the reason is not termites, because there were no termites present at all,’ Dr. Getzin said. ‘The reason is desiccation.’

“Dr. Jürgens declined a request to comment.

“Walter Tschinkel, an entomologist at Florida State University who was not involved in the research but who has published papers in support of the water-stress hypothesis, said the new findings provided ‘more nails in the termite coffin.’ …

“Yvette Naudé, an analytical chemist at the University of Pretoria in South Africa who was not involved in the research, agreed that the new study seemed to confirm that, ‘contrary to popular belief, termite activity does not cause the fairy circles.’ …

“Advocates of the water-stress hypothesis still need to contend with other explanations, Dr. Naudé said. She continues to suspect, based on earlier studies, that something about the composition of fairy circle soil is inhibiting plant growth. …

“One of the reasons so many different fairy circle theories persist, Dr. Cramer said, is that it is exceedingly difficult to prove causation for ‘a long-lived ecological pattern that cannot be replicated in the lab.’ To finally put the debate to rest, he called for ‘some manipulative experiments to test the ideas in the field.’ “

Ready to take sides? Read more at the Times, here. Personally, I will always believe the circles are created by fairies, and no amount of rigorous science will change my view.

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Animals’ Inner Lives

December 29, 2022 by suzannesmom

Photo: קלאופטרה.
Part of “Matanya’s graduation project” at Wikipedia. See amusing answers to the perennial question “Why did the chicken cross the road?”

The way the people at the Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, NY, talk about the animals they study reminds me so much of the naturalist Sy Montgomery, a frequent visitor to Boston Public Radio. I only ever heard her speak disparagingly of one critter, and it was one without a brain. To her, all creatures have personalities, even souls.

Emily Anthes reported recently at the New York Times about the Farm Sanctuary.

“It was a crisp October day at Farm Sanctuary, and inside the small, red barn, the chicken people were restless.

“A rooster, or maybe two, yodeled somewhere out of sight. A bruiser of a turkey strutted through an open door, tail feathers spread like an ornamental fan. And a penned flock of white-feathered hens emitted tiny, intermittent squeaks, an asynchronous symphony of chicken sneezes.

“The hens were experiencing a flare-up of a chronic respiratory condition, said Sasha Prasad-Shreckengast, the sanctuary’s manager of research and animal welfare, who was preparing to enter the chicken pen. She donned gloves and shoe covers, threw on a pair of blue scrubs and then slipped inside, squatting to bring herself face-to-face with the first hen who approached.

“ ‘Who are you?’ she cooed.

“Ms. Prasad-Shreckengast meant the question literally. She was trying to find the birds that were enrolled in her study: an investigation into whether chickens — animals not often heralded for their brainpower — enjoy learning.

“But her question was also the big philosophical one driving the new, in-house research team at Farm Sanctuary, a nonprofit that has spent more than 35 years trying to end animal agriculture. …

“A growing body of research suggests that farmed species are brainy beings: Chickens can anticipate the future, goats appear to solicit help from humans, and pigs may pick up on one another’s emotions.

“But scientists still know far less about the minds of chickens or cows than they do about those of apes or dogs, said Christian Nawroth, a scientist studying behavior and cognition at the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology in Germany. ‘I’m still baffled how little we know about farm animals, given the amount or the numbers that we keep,’ he said. …

‘They have their own desires, and their own wants and preferences and needs, and their own inner lives — the same way that human people do,’ said Lauri Torgerson-White, the sanctuary’s director of research.

“Now the sanctuary is trying to collect enough data to convince the general public of the humanity of animals.

“ ‘Our hope,’ Ms. Torgerson-White said, ‘is that through utilizing really rigorous methodologies, we are able to uncover pieces of information about the inner lives of farmed animals that can be used to really change hearts and minds about how these animals are used by society.’

“The sanctuary is conducting the research in accordance with its own strict ethical standards, which include giving the animals the right to choose whether or not to participate in studies. Consequently, the researchers have sometimes found themselves grappling with the very thing that they are keen to demonstrate: that animals have minds of their own.

“And today, the birds in ‘West Chicken’ seemed a bit under the weather. Ms. Prasad-Shreckengast crossed her fingers that a few of them might still be up for a brief demonstration. …

“Farm Sanctuary began not as a home for rescued animals but with a group of young activists working to expose animal cruelty at farms, stockyards and slaughterhouses.

“ ‘We lived in a school bus on a tofu farm for a couple of years,’ said Gene Baur, the president and co-founder of the organization. But in the course of its investigations, the group kept stumbling upon ‘living animals left for dead,’ he recalled. ‘And so we started rescuing them.’ …

“In 2020, the organization, which now houses about 700 animals, began assembling an internal research team. The goal was to assemble more evidence that, as Mr. Baur put it, ‘these animals are more than just pieces of meat. There’s emotion there.

‘There is individual personality there. There’s somebody, not something.’

“The research team worked with Lori Gruen, an animal ethicist at Wesleyan University, to develop a set of ethics guidelines. The goal, Dr. Gruen explained, was to create a framework for conducting animal research ‘without dominance, without control, without instrumentalization.’

“Among other stipulations, the guidelines prohibit invasive procedures — forbidding even blood draws unless they are medically necessary — and state that the studies must benefit the animals. And participation? It’s voluntary. …

“The idea is not entirely novel. Zoo animals, for instance, are often trained to cooperate in their own health care, as well as in studies that might stem from it. But such practices remain far from the norm.

“For the researchers at Farm Sanctuary, voluntary participation was not only an ethical imperative but also, they thought, a path to better science. Many prior studies have been conducted on farms or in laboratories, settings in which stress or fear might affect animals’ behavior or even impair their cognitive performance, the researchers note.

“ ‘Our hope is that they’re able to tell us more about what the upper limits are for their cognition and emotional capacities and social structures because of the environment that they’re in and because of the way we are performing the research,’ Ms. Torgerson-White said.

“Although the approach is unconventional, outside scientists described the sanctuary’s ethical guidelines as admirable and its research questions as interesting.”

“ ‘The idea that you could study these species, who are usually only studied in sort of pseudofarm conditions, in more naturalistic environments that actually meet not just their needs but even their most arcane preferences — I think they’re right,’ said Georgia Mason, who directs the Campbell Center for the Study of Animal Welfare at the University of Guelph. ‘I think that really allows you to do something special.’ ”

More at the Times, here. You might also be interested in this op-ed at the Times by Sarah Smarsh on the difference between “harvesting” animals on small farms and harvesting them in the big, industrialized farms that dominate our food supply.

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Plant-Centered Eating

December 28, 2022 by suzannesmom

Photo: Suzanne and John’s Mom.
Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet, founded the Small Planet Institute, which focuses on social solutions to environmental, hunger, and political challenges.

The environmental radio show Living on Earth is staying on top of concerns about our global food system and the role it plays in “environmental crises like global warming and water pollution even as it fails to adequately feed billions of people.” Diet for a Small Planet author Frances Moore Lappé recently joined host Steve Curwood to discuss how “embracing the plant world in our diets connects to climate, health, and democracy.”

“STEVE CURWOOD: Our present food system is polluting and wasteful. For starters, about a third is thrown away, tossed from kitchens and plates in rich places and spoiled where people can’t afford to refrigerate. And many industrial growing systems pollute and waste as well, using too much water, land and chemicals in ways that also add to climate disaster. Yet around the world more than 2 billion people are food insecure.

“Fifty years ago Frances Moore Lappé wrote the bestselling Diet for a Small Planet in a bid to address the hunger crisis, and along the way she seeded a plant-centered food revolution in the kitchens of America. She joins me now from Belmont, Massachusetts. … Frankie, just to be clear, what is a plant-centered diet?

“FRANCES MOORE: Well, it’s embracing the plant world. When I moved from meat, you know I grew up in Texas cow town, right. So people said oh you’re giving up so much and I said, no, no, no, it’s the plant world that has all the taste differences, the color, the shapes, the textures, you know, it’s where all the yummy stuff is. And so for me being plant centered is I don’t follow recipes a lot but going into the kitchen and looking, you know, seeing what’s there and finding out spices and herbs I love and for example, I turned a basic beans and rice dish into an Italian dish by just changing the herbs that are used in it. It’s called Roman Rice and Beans in Diet for a Small Planet. …

“CURWOOD: So what’s changed in the last 50 years since you wrote Diet for a Small Planet? …

“MOORE: We’re sort of moving in two directions at once because we’ve got it now we know what to do and all over the world, people are aligning with nature to grow our food [but] the dominant extractive approach that is so dangerous and so unnecessary is still going strong. …

“Our food system globally contributes about 37% of greenhouse gas emissions and about 40% of that is from the livestock sector. So that’s a huge contribution. And now I’m calling it a plant- and planet-centered diet because if we really addressed this crisis and grew a healthy plant-centered diet, that would cut the agricultural greenhouse gas emissions by about two-thirds. A professor at the University of Minnesota calculated that it would be the equivalent to removing basically all the vehicles off the planet.

“CURWOOD: Now, people listening to us need to be reassured that you’re not saying you can never eat meat, you’re just telling us to make it a rare occasion. …

“MOORE: I really want to be big tent and to welcome people if they are eager to align with their body because there’s a lot of evidence that this plant-centered stuff is really good for us. … Any step we can take, I celebrate.

“CURWOOD: Now, the meat production industry has gone to great lengths to concentrate operations. …

“MOORE: What woke me up at age 26 [was] that I saw meat production as a protein factory in reverse. Consider this, we use about 80% of our agricultural land to produce livestock, but they give to us only 18% of our calories. So right there, that is pretty darn inefficient and for beef, one estimate says that of the grains fed to livestock we get about 3% to 5% of the calories and protein that we eat from all of that grain that gets fed to livestock in this country. So it’s really hard to imagine anything less efficient. …

“CURWOOD: Tell me a little bit more about the the health risk of red meat.

“MOORE: Well, I was actually shocked to learn recently that the WHO, the World Health Organization, has deemed red meat a probable carcinogen. And when I looked into it a bit that has to do with heme iron in red meat. … And then on processed meat, the WHO has deemed processed meat a carcinogen. …

“CURWOOD: Why [is] the food we eat is also linked to the health of our democracy in your view? …

“MOORE: Our democracy [is] the taproot crisis and we also have a living-planet crisis and we also have an economic crisis [of] concentration of wealth, but the taproot is democracy, because that is the way that we make decisions together to solve problems. [If] we’re going to solve these huge problems of our environment and the impact of farming on climate change, which is quite significant, we have to have democracy. And what we have now I think of as a very corrupted form because private interests those who are benefiting very much from fossil fuels and from the meat-production industry and [they] have tremendous power in Washington. There are now 20 corporate lobbyists in Washington for every single person that you and I elect to represent us in Washington. That is problematic, that is what I call a corrupted system, and that’s why I think it’s so important, Steve, we’ve got to solve these problems, and we’ve got to have democracy to solve them.”

More on that at Living on Earth, here. No firewall.

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Lucille Corcos Levy

December 27, 2022 by suzannesmom

Art: Lucille Corcos Levy.
A family scene in winter, probably South Mountain Road, Rockland County, NY. In the collection of Victor Lloyd.

Would someone please make a Wikipedia entry on artist/illustrator Lucille Corcos? I tried a decade ago, but a Wikipedia moderator took it down. I love the wavy aesthetic of her art — so full of energy and love of life.

At the time that I made my one and only Wikipedia entry, internet links were not considered good enough for citations, and that was the reason given for removal. I have since read that Wikipedia is prejudiced against posts about women and/or by women. I haven’t seen any statistics on that and don’t know if it used to be the case but is no longer.

Lucille Corcos (1909 to 1973) was a working artist who was the main breadwinner for her family, although artist husband Edgar Levy also had a following. She trained at the Art Students’ League in New York City and began professionally as a children’s book illustrator.

I knew the family when I was a child because my father wrote the Upjohn Company’s 10-year-anniversary book with artist Will Burton, who was a Levy neighbor. More recently, I noticed Corcos’s work in a museum. Still, there’s a huge Wikipedia entry for one of her artistic sons, and nothing for her.

I might as well share some of the information I collected on Corcos before giving up, starting with a fascinating book I read (Cipe Pineles Golden and Martha Scotford, Cipe Pineles: A Life in Design [New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999]).

“Lucille and Edgar left the city in 1941 with their son David,” wrote Martha Scotford. “Son Joel was born a couple years later. They moved to South Mountain Road in New City. … Corcos was a successful painter and illustrator by this time. In the 1930s, fashion, culture and home magazines published her work and her popularity continued into the 1960s.

“[Designer] Cipe Pineles’s close friendship with Corcos had begun when Pineles commissioned Corcos’s work for Seventeen and Charm. Her humor in personal interactions and in her art made her an engaging collaborator.

“Corcos’s paintings were densely packed with many small stories and commentary. The compositions had detailed multiple subjects; perspective and scale were distorted for practical and expressive purposes. This new modern primitivism was considered part of a native tradition in American art and its ‘unacademic’ nature was celebrated.

“Corcos’s subjects included rural landscapes and urban scenes, ranging from Christmas Eve, Rockefeller Center, to the Oyster Party to Everybody Meets the Boat. In addition to doing commissioned illustration, Lucille Corcos built her career as a fine artist and was a steady participant in New York gallery shows from 1936 to 1954. During the same time, she was a part of major exhibitions in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and other institutions in New York.”

Click here for the Corcos books held in the University of Minnesota’s Children’s Literature Research Collections, where you can also find a write-up about her work for Fortune magazine and links to the pictures.

I remember the family’s actual Fire Island house (painted in 1950), here, and I want to point out that Everybody Meets the Boat is another classic Fire Island scene.

If any reader is better at research than I am, maybe you could find an article I heard was in the July 12, 1954, issue of Life magazine showing two Corcos paintings, one of her life in a wintery Rockland County, another of activities around the Fire Island house in summer.

Sorry this is all a bit jumbled. Maybe that’s the real reason the moderator deleted what I wrote at Wikipedia. Someone more knowledgable should tackle this worthy subject.

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Gotta Love Icelanders

December 26, 2022 by suzannesmom

Photo: PenguinRandomHouse.
In Iceland, Christmas Eve signals the long-awaited “book flood,” Jólabókaflóð. Icelanders love to read. And the prime minister writes books herself.

Up at a Vermont ski lodge as Christmas approached, Suzanne’s family experienced the power outage from the latest winter storm. What is there to do in darkness but read a book by candlelight — or at least by headlamp? They did.

In Iceland, where winters are especially dark, Icelanders love to read.

David Mouriquand reports, “Euronews Culture was recently in Reykjavík for the European Film Awards, and while in the city, we sat down with Iceland’s Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir, one of only eight women in power in Europe. 

“She made her mark on the global cultural map this year when she published her first thriller novel, entitled Reykjavík, which she co-wrote with best-selling author of the ‘Dark Iceland’ series Ragnar Jónasson.

“Jakobsdóttir, former minister of education, science and culture, is the chairperson of the Left-Green movement and has been serving as the prime minister since 2017. …

“I’d be remiss not to mention the fact that you published a novel this year, a crime novel. It’s not the first time that this has happened in Iceland, as one of your predecessors, Davíð Oddsson, published a novel when he was in office. What is it about writing and the crime / noir genre that appeals to you?

“I used to study crime fiction. I studied Icelandic literature and crime fiction was my main topic, so I have always enjoyed crime. In fiction, not in reality! And I actually was writing my master’s thesis when the Icelandic crime novel was flourishing and becoming rather big. It has become even bigger in the last decade or so. And it has been a longstanding dream to write a novel of my own, but I definitely would not have done it if I didn’t have this co-author (Ragnar Jónasson), who pushed me and said: ‘We have to do this together!’

“I must admit that I really enjoyed writing it, and I think that even us politicians can be creative. I think it’s very good for us, because sometimes we are not very creative in our politics! And it’s because the writing time was during the time of the pandemic, when I was totally absorbed in the virus and was getting, let’s say, obsessed with the virus and its effects and what we were doing.

“So having this kind of pet project to think about sometimes late in the evening or when I had an hour or two actually saved my mental health during the pandemic.

“The more I thought about you writing your novel, the more I thought: Wouldn’t the world be a better place if world leaders took the time to embrace a creative outlet? So, tap dancing for Biden, or oil painting for Macron… Terrible ideas, granted, but as you say, it’s very good for politicians to get creative…

“I definitely think that the world would be a better place! Not just politicians, but all of us. I don’t think we all do major works of art, but I think it’s a very healthy thing to really grow and nurture that creative strength that I think we all have. I don’t think we do enough of it. So, yes definitely, the world would be a better place.” More at EuroNewsCulture, here.

Sara Miller Llana at the Christian Science Monitor stresses that Iceland as a whole is a book-loving country: “Hördur Gudmundsson spends the better part of his day with a book in his hands – but only in winter.

“As the skies darken, he will spend full mornings at his favorite bookstore, IÐA Zimsen, near the Icelandic capital’s harbor. After supper he’ll turn to his hobby: bookbinding. He’s already bound all the works of Iceland’s most famous author, Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness, and now is deep into the works of Gunnar Gunnarsson.

“By Icelandic standards, this doesn’t make him a fringe book buff. Iceland is known as one of the world’s most literary countries, when it comes to the love of both reading and writing. 

‘It must be in our mother’s milk,’ says Mr. Gudmundsson, a retired trades teacher.

“Books in Reykjavík, the first nonnative English-speaking city to be designated a UNESCO City of Literature, are everywhere. At one breakfast spot, the counter serves as a giant bookshelf. Tomes are piled onto the sills of steamed-up cafe windows.

“The streets of Reykjavík are an ode to the characters of the medieval sagas. Written in the 13th and 14th centuries, the Icelandic sagas retell the exploits of Norse settlers beginning in the ninth century. The works are a source of pride and a pillar of Iceland’s literary sensibilities. Tours in Iceland’s only city take visitors to the birthplaces of authors like Mr. Laxness and the scenes of plot twists in Nordic noir, a booming genre.” More here.

The WordPress site Jólabókaflóð.org posted the “founding story,” here.

And if you search on the word “Jólabókaflóð,” you will find lots of other fun articles.

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Peace on Earth

December 25, 2022 by suzannesmom

“I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” is song that really makes you think. Not the usual jolly fare, it speaks solemnly about how humanity has fallen short of the universal ideals the holiday is supposed to represent. Do we make peace our priority?

I myself stand accused of not focusing enough on ending war, given that I want to see Ukrainians triumph over the Russian invasion last February. It’s complicated. Of course I wish the heroic people fighting back didn’t have to die, but I have to respect why they are fighting.

The hymn is also hopeful because it reminds us that there are others who feel as we do and long for peace everywhere.

The carol was written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on Dec. 25, 1863, in response to the near fatal wound his son, Charles Appleton Wadsworth, received at the Mine Run campaign in Virginia during the Civil War. Now, that’s a heartbreaking war!

Blogger Will McMillan of “A Musical Life on Planet Earth” has a lovely rendition of the carol that you can listen to here. And today I would like to share this version from the group Casting Crowns.

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At the Boston Pops

December 24, 2022 by suzannesmom

In spite of living in the Greater Boston area for 40 years, I had never been to the Boston Pops. I decided to check out this year’s holiday concert and go by public transportation.

The Red Line subway track was being repaired and was not in use that Saturday, so the transportation ended up being a problem, but I was glad I went. It was lovely.

One of the pieces featured was the premier of composer Arturo Rodríguez’s Noche de Posadas (The Night of Las Posadas), which was based on a Mexican tradition and tied to a children’s book by the late author/illustrator Tomie dePaola.

Rodríguez, a native of Mexico, wrote in the program about the custom that inspired dePaola’s storybook and about working on the commission from the Boston Pops Orchestra.

“The enduring tradition of Las Posadas in México,” he wrote, “is a representation of Joseph and Mary and their pilgrimage from Nazareth to Bethlehem. The community organizes into two groups, those who accompany the couple while they go from door to door in search of shelter and those inside the houses that reject them. These are done by singing the traditional litany. Finally the couple are welcomed, and a big celebration with food and the emblematic piñata takes place. The piñata, symbolizing the triumph of faith over sin, must have 7 spikes, each of them representing a capital sin. The candy and fruit inside the piñata represent the grace of God. The high point of the celebration is when the piñata breaks and the guests are showered by all the blessings that fall from it.

“When I was asked to compose a work about the Mexican Christmas tradition of Las Posadas, to be premiered by the Boston Pops Orchestra conducted by maestro Keith Lockhart during the Holiday season of 2022, I was delighted and honored, and immediately I had a flashback to my childhood.

“I clearly remember this particular day, growing up in my hometown of Monterrey, México (I must have been around 7 years old), when I had to stay home and skip school because it had snowed, a rare occurrence in that city. Luckily for me, the local TV cultural channel was showing a Christmas concert with the Boston Pops Orchestra conducted by maestro John Williams. The cold weather, the warm blankets, and the beautiful music that came out of the TV set have stayed in my mind and soul all these years.

“Cut to the present: having the opportunity to compose a work through which I can share my Mexican culture with the Boston audience as well as the amazing musicians of the Boston Pops Orchestra and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus at Symphony Hall, that same venue I saw on the TV set as a child, is truly the best Christmas gift I could ever receive.

“The resulting work for orchestra with narrator and choir is also inspired and built around the touching children’s book written and illustrated by Tomie dePaola, The Night of Las Posadas. I hope this music lifts you from your seats and takes you right into the heart of some magical Mexican town and that you are embraced by the flavors, rhythms, and colors of this beautiful tradition of my home country.”

Also in the concert program, I learned about Karina Beleno Carney, who narrated the storybook in between sections of the music. “A Massachusetts-based actor, Karina has appeared this year in Central Square Theater’s Young Nerds of Color, Apollinaire Theater’s Don’t Eat the Mangos, and Huntington Theatre’s Breaking Ground Festival of New Work in Rough Magic. A first-generation Colombian American and mother of three, Karina is thrilled to bring the Latine children’s book The Night of Las Posadas to life with the Boston Pops.”

In the book, the couple playing Mary and Joseph for Las Posadas get stalled by a snowstorm, but the village doesn’t know it because everything goes on as it’s supposed to. How is that possible?

Enjoy this night, wherever you are. Try to find the hidden magic in it.

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Chinese Food on Christmas Day

December 23, 2022 by suzannesmom

Photo:  LauriPatterson/Getty Images.
Eating in Chinese restaurants on Christmas has a particular history in New York.

As a child reveling in the wonders of Christmas, I didn’t think about what friends from other faith traditions did on the big day. Most stores and entertainment venues are closed. Most restaurants, too. But, fortunately, there are Chinese restaurants.

At Mental Floss, Kirstin Fawcett writes, “For Jewish New Yorkers, scoring a seat at one of veteran restaurateur Ed Schoenfeld’s Chinese eateries on Christmas Day could be compared to a holiday miracle. ‘I think on that day we do more business than many restaurants do in three months,’ Schoenfeld told Mental Floss in 2017. ‘We serve all day long, we stay open all day long.’

“Schoenfeld is the Jewish owner-operator of RedFarm, an Asian-fusion dim sum restaurant. … While his expertise lies in Far Eastern cuisine, Schoenfeld grew up in Brooklyn and learned to cook from his Eastern European grandmother. And just like his customers, Schoenfeld and his family sometimes craved Chinese food on Christmas, eschewing homemade fare for heaping plates of chow mein and egg foo yung. The future restaurateur’s grandmother kept a kosher kitchen, but outside the home all dietary laws flew out the window with the single spin of a Lazy Susan. Suddenly, egg rolls with pork were fair game, transfigured into permissible delicacies through hunger and willful ignorance. …

“Jews developed their love for all things steamed, stir-fried, and soy-sauced after leaving the Old Country. Between the mid-1800s and the 1930s, waves of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Germany, and Greece began settling in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a gritty, inexpensive neighborhood teeming with tenements, docks, and factories—and filled with synagogues and kosher butcher shops. ‘You started here, and then moved on,’ Sarah Lohman, author of Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine, said.

“While Jewish immigrants found community on the Lower East Side, ‘there was a lot of discrimination against Jews at the turn of the century,’ Lohman added. ‘They were often criticized not only for not dressing like Americans and not speaking the language, but also for not converting to an “American” religion.’

“Right next door to the burgeoning Jewish community on the Lower East Side was the city’s nascent Chinatown. Many Chinese immigrants had initially come to the U.S. to work on the Transcontinental Railroad. After its completion in 1869, these laborers faced violence and discrimination in the western states. They came to New York City seeking new business opportunities, and some opened restaurants.

“By and large, Chinese restaurateurs didn’t discriminate against Jewish customers. Joshua Eli Plaut wrote in his book A Kosher Christmas: ‘Tis the Season to be Jewish that the Chinese, as non-Christians, didn’t perceive any difference between Anglo-Saxon New Yorkers and Jewish immigrants.

They accepted all non-Chinese customers with open arms.

“Jewish customers embraced Chinese food in return. The restaurants were conveniently located and inexpensive, yet were also urbane in their eyes. … According to Yong Chen, a history professor and author of Chop Suey, USA: The Story of Chinese Food in America, ‘[Diners] were attracted to Chinese food because, in their mind, it represented American cosmopolitanism and middle class status.’ And they weren’t deterred by the fact that food in Chinese restaurants wasn’t kosher. But they could easily pretend it was.

“Dairy wasn’t a big part of Chinese meals, so Jewish diners didn’t have to worry about mixing meat and milk (a no-no in kosher diets). And non-kosher ingredients like pork or seafood were often finely chopped, drowned in sauces, or mixed with other ingredients, like rice. These elements were well disguised enough that they could pass for more permissible forms of meat. ‘You could kind of willfully ignore that there might be pork in there,’ Lohman said. ‘It’s like a vegetarian eating a soup that has chicken stock. If you’re a little flexible about your Judaism, you would just “not notice” the pork in your fried rice.’

“Chinese food was exotic and new, filled with surprising flavors, ingredients, and textures. But for some Eastern European Jews, it also had familiar elements. Both Eastern European and Chinese cuisines shared an affinity for sweet and sour flavors and egg-based dishes. ‘[Chinese restaurants] had these pancakes, which were like blintzes,’ said Joan Nathan, author of King Solomon’s Table: A Culinary Exploration of Jewish Cooking from Around the World, and the wontons resembled kreplach (both are meat-filled soup dumplings).

“The fact that the Chinese and Jews were America’s two largest non-Christian immigrant populations brought them together, Jennifer 8. Lee, author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food, told Mental Floss in 2017. Unlike, say, Italian restaurants, Chinese restaurants were open on Sundays and on Christian holidays. They also lacked religious imagery, which may have made them appear more welcoming for Jews. …

“Yet, an unwavering affection for Chinese food wasn’t shared by all Jews. In an example cited by Chen and Lee, a reporter for Der Tog (The Day), a Yiddish daily newspaper in New York City, noted in 1928 that Jewish diners were in danger of drowning their culinary roots in soy sauce. To take back their taste buds, Jewish-Americans should hoist protest signs reading ‘Down with chop suey! Long live gefilte fish!’ the journalist joked.

“But Jewish cookbooks had already begun including Americanized dishes like chop suey and egg foo yung, which Chinese chefs had specially created to appeal to homegrown appetites. And as Lower East Side Jews moved to different neighborhoods, boroughs, and suburbs, Chinese restaurants followed them.

“By the mid-20th century, Nathan said, Chinese restaurants had become de facto social clubs in Jewish communities. Familiar faces were always present, children were always welcome, and eating with your hands wasn’t just encouraged—it was required. …

“Thanks to immigration patterns, nostalgia, and convenient hours of operation, this culinary custom has stuck around. … Schoenfeld, the Manhattan restaurateur, said, ‘It’s become a tradition, and it’s extraordinary how it’s really grown.’ ”

More at Mental Floss, here.

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Going to the Hospital, At Home

December 22, 2022 by suzannesmom

Photo: Deniz Altindas via Unsplash.
New approaches in health care include meditation exercises and hospital care at home.

A couple of my doctors are convinced that people who are good at daily meditation are building new brain cells. I’m not convinced that I can do it, but I’m giving it the old college try. I go to a weekly class where we just sit and breathe. And I listen to an online meditation I like because it seems to give me permission to be “off duty” in so many ways. Trying to be good at meditation, for example, is out.

In another new approach to improving health care, hospitals are responding to both costs and the understanding that many acute-care patients fare better if they get the care they need at home, in their familiar surroundings.

Paula Span pursues the insights at the New York Times.

“Late last month, Raymond Johnson, 83, began feeling short of breath. ‘It was difficult just getting around,’ he recently recalled by phone from his apartment in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood in Boston. ‘I could barely walk up and down the stairs without tiring.’

“Like many older adults, Mr. Johnson contends with a variety of chronic health problems: arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma, heart failure and the heart arrhythmia known as atrial fibrillation.

“His doctor ordered a chest X-ray and, when it showed fluid accumulating in Mr. Johnson’s lungs, told him to head for the emergency room at Faulkner Hospital, which is part of the Mass General Brigham health system.

“Mr. Johnson spent four days as an inpatient being treated for heart failure and an asthma exacerbation: one day in a hospital room and three in his own apartment, receiving hospital-level care through an increasingly popular — but possibly endangered — alternative that Medicare calls Acute Hospital Care at Home.

“The eight-year-old Home Hospital program run by Brigham and Women’s Hospital [is] one of the country’s largest and provided care to 600 people last year; it will add more patients this year and is expanding to include several hospitals in and around Boston.

“ ‘Americans have been trained for 100 years to think that the hospital is the best place to be, the safest place,’ said the program’s medical director, Dr. David M. Levine.

‘But we have strong evidence that the outcomes are actually better at home.’

“A few such programs began 30 years ago, and the Veterans Health Administration adopted them more than a decade ago. But the hospital-at-home approach stalled, largely because Medicare would not reimburse hospitals for it. Then, in 2020, Covid-19 spurred significant changes.

“With hospitals suddenly overwhelmed, ‘they needed beds,’ said Ab Brody, a professor of geriatric nursing at New York University and an author of a recent editorial on hospital-at-home care in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. ‘And they needed a safe place for older adults, who were particularly at risk.’

“In November 2020, Medicare officials announced that, while the federally declared public health emergency continued, hospitals could apply for a waiver of certain reimbursement requirements — notably, for 24/7 on-site nursing care. Hospitals whose applications were approved would receive the same payment for hospital-at-home care as for in-hospital care.

“Since then, Medicare has granted waivers to 256 hospitals in 37 states. … But Medicare’s waivers are not permanent. The public health emergency remains in effect until January; although the Biden administration will likely extend it, state health officials are anticipating its end at some point next year, perhaps by spring.

“What will happen to hospital-at-home care then? Twenty-seven percent of programs that participated in a poll by the Hospital at Home Users Group said that they were unlikely to keep offering the option without a waiver, and 40 percent were unsure; 33 percent said that their programs were likely to continue. …

“Studies have repeatedly documented the risks of hospital stays to seniors, even when the conditions that made the stay necessary are adequately treated. Older adults are vulnerable to cognitive problems and infections; they lose physical strength from inadequate nutrition and days of inactivity, and they may not regain it. Many patients require another hospitalization within a month. One prominent cardiologist has called this debilitating pattern ‘post-hospital syndrome.’

“Had Mr. Johnson remained in the hospital, ‘he would have been lying in bed for four or five days,’ Dr. Levine said, adding: ‘He would have become very deconditioned. He could have caught C. diff or MRSA’ — two common hospital-acquired infections. ‘He could have caught Covid,’ Dr. Levine continued. ‘He could have fallen. Twenty percent of people over 65 become delirious during a hospital stay.’

“Patients must consent to hospital-at-home care. Almost one-third of Brigham and Women’s patients decline to participate because the hospital setting feels safer or is more convenient. But Mr. Johnson was delighted to leave, when an attending doctor told him that his conditions were treatable through hospital-at-home care. …

“At home, a doctor saw him three times, twice in person and once by video. A registered nurse or a specifically trained paramedic visited twice daily. They brought the drugs and the equipment Mr. Johnson needed: prednisone and a nebulizer for his asthma, and diuretics (including one administered intravenously) to reduce the excess fluid caused by heart failure. All the while, a small sensor attached to his chest transmitted his heart and respiratory rates, his temperature and his activity levels to the hospital.

“Had Mr. Johnson needed additional monitoring (to ensure that he was taking medications as scheduled, for instance), food deliveries or home health aides, the program could have provided those. If he needed scans or experienced an emergency, an ambulance could have returned him to the hospital.

“But he recovered well without any of those interventions. About a week after he was discharged, Mr. Johnson said he was ‘much better, much better,’ and that he would recommend hospital-at-home care to anyone. …

“ ‘Are there people who need to be in a hospital?’ Dr. Leff said. ‘Absolutely.’ Surgeries, complex testing and intensive care still require a building and its staff. Nonetheless, he added, hospital-at-home initiatives demonstrate that more care could be provided outside bricks-and-mortar facilities.

“ ‘Hospitals in the future will be big emergency rooms, operating rooms and intensive care units,’ [Dr. Bruce Leff, a geriatrician at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine] said. ‘Almost everything else will move to the community — or should.’ ”

More at the Times, here.

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An Orchestra’s Dementia Work

December 21, 2022 by suzannesmom

Photo: BBC.
Carer Beth Forster leads music workshops for seniors with dementia in the UK.

At Thanksgiving, we had the pleasure of meeting Meg, a relatively new member of our family who shared a bit about using music therapy with hospitalized patients suffering from mental illness. So I was interested to read today’s story about a similar music program in the UK, one that focuses on people with dementia.

Sarah Gwynne and Woody Morris had this report at the BBC.

“An orchestra is attempting to bring people living with dementia back into the present. The work being done by Manchester Camerata has never been more important, given that there are about 900,000 people with the condition in the UK, a number that is predicted to nearly double by 2040. …

“People with dementia often find listening to music can reignite old memories from long ago. Much more overlooked, though, is the impact that making music can have on the present.

“While some with dementia can often feel trapped in the past, some researchers believe the act of creating music – as well as listening to it – can help to reconnect them to the here and now.

“A new BBC documentary — Dementia, Music and Us — follows the work of Manchester Camerata and its principal flautist Amina Hussain.

“Amina, who is also a professional music therapist, leads classes across the north-west of England that have been described as life-changing.

” ‘Taking part in the ‘Music in Mind’ workshops has been an enormous privilege for me as a musician,’ she said. …

“Classes for the community consist of improvisation, singing, and writing their own music and lyrics.

“Keith Taylor, 62, was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia when he was 53. … Like many, he really struggled to come to terms with his new reality.

” ‘The best way I could explain it,’ he said, ‘is if you’re in a pine-wooded area and all of the trees are in grids and blocks and you’re walking through that and it’s dark and you can see the mist coming up behind you and you can feel it catching you.’ …

“Keith’s partner of 14 years, Joan, said they had found the sessions to be genuinely life-changing. ‘I think the thing that saved us was the first ever music group we went to because from that group it opened other groups up for us,’ she said. ‘It’s been fantastic.’

“Keith added: ‘I live life every week. Not every day — every week because I’ve got music sessions.’ He said the workshops ‘make him smile, enjoy life and it just brings the best out of you.’

“Researcher Dr Robyn Dowlen is seeking to better understand the ‘in the moment’ benefits of music-making for people with dementia. … She believes the improvisational music workshop experience allows people to ‘create something that is held now in the moment.’

“Keith described how the sessions and being in what Dr Dowlen calls the ‘musical spotlight’ had helped him ‘stand up taller.’

“Dr Dowlen added: ‘Improvisational music-making is particularly important for people with dementia, especially when it comes to building their confidence and their self-esteem.’

“Beth Forster, from Liverpool, started her career in caring as a volunteer two years ago when she found herself furloughed during the pandemic. When a staff position subsequently became available she applied and has never looked back.

“The 28-year-old decided to get involved in the music workshops after news began to spread about the positive impact they could have on those living in care homes. A musician herself, Beth received training from Manchester Camerata’s professional music therapists so she could lead her own workshops.

“Beth said: ‘I feel like I’ve got more strategies to bring residents into the present to help them if they’re distressed… I can’t really believe this is my job. … it is a real privilege.’ “

More at the BBC, here.

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Photos of the Season

December 20, 2022 by suzannesmom

Photo: Suzanne’s Mom.
One of my granddaughters made this gingerbread house from a kit. The idea for a carrot was her own.

Time for another photo round-up.

Sandra M. Kelly surprised us with a picture of Patrick making a mince pie for Thanksgiving. And, here, we thought Sandra was the only chef!

The hellabore below loves cold weather. You can understand why it’s sometimes called Christmas Rose.

My husband sent me photos of mysterious “ice flowers,” taken by Ned Friedman, director of Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. The flowers formed the other day on a herbaceous Chinese plant called Isodon henryi, and even Friedman doesn’t know for sure what conditions cause the phenomenon.

Sandra also sent the photograph of the Christmas cactus. She’s a genius at rescuing cacti that people like me can never get to bloom. I have her instructions if you want to try.

In the next picture, you see our niece, who’s a genius with youth orchestras in North Carolina. She gets pretty worn out with concerts at this time of year.

Stuga40’s snowy image was shot in Stockholm. She is now in New England for a visit with Erik, Suzanne, and our half-Swedish grandchildren. Maybe she’ll have other snowy photos after the family goes skiing in Vermont.

The next snow scene was shot in my own yard. Our first snow this year. The last two photos need no explanation.

PS. 12/22/22. I’m sharing the worn bench at Hannah’s church in Philadelphia, because I love worn benches. I wish I had photographed the really beat-up one I admired on a train platform yesterday.

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Covid Murals

December 19, 2022 by suzannesmom

Photos: John.

John was in Malden yesterday and saw the Covid murals on the bike path. He was stunned. I tried to find a descriptive article about them online but ended up having to copy lines of poems from the photos on Flickr. I hope I got all the punctuation right. Poets care about such things.

How soon we forget what it was like to be deep in the midst of this! When we thought protecting ourselves meant wiping down the groceries with bleach. When doctors and nurses were having to reuse masks and were sending out pleas for people to find old masks in their garage workshops and take them to emergency rooms. When there were few test kits and no vaccines. How soon we forget it was all about breath and breathing!

The memorial to lost lives in Malden features both art and written words. These are excerpts from the poems.

Terry E. Carter wrote a poem about his mother called “Ventilation.”

“She wouldn’t wear a mask.
“I couldn’t even ask. …
“Said her freedom meant more than anything —
“wasn’t gonna let the liberals win.”

Ten-year-old Elliana J. Shahan’s poem “Because of You” honors farmers, shopkeepers, postal workers, doctors, teachers, and all who kept the world running in the dark times.

Jessica Frazier Vasquez’s is poem about the beep beep beep of her dad’s ventilator showing he was at least still alive: “It tells me that you’re still fighting/Battling to come back.” At least for a while.

Sharon Briner Santillo’s poem noted how one never used to know what was going on behind a neighbor’s windows and how one may feel more connected now.

“I know you
“Your sorrowful heart
“Your beautiful resilience …
“I know you
“And you know me.”

There is another by Dina Stander called “Breath”: “May her memory be for a blessing.” And one by Denise Keating called “A Slow Goodbye” about her father, who had already been paralyzed by a stroke for 10 years.

“We hovered by the window
“Moths fluttering for your voice
“We went away.
“You slipped away.
“And now.
“Guilt-stricken.
“Paralyzed.
“We let you go.
“We didn’t want you to fight.
“But we still struggle
“To remember
“To breathe.

More at MaldenArts, here. Be sure to look at the Flickr pictures, here: you can zoom in to read the words. Most of the poems are not literary, but all are heartfelt.

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She Makes Fiber Buildings

December 18, 2022 by suzannesmom

Photo: African American Design Nexus.
The innovative architect and designer Felecia Davis can make buildings out of wool and fungus.

More on human ingenuity today. At the Washington Post, Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about a woman who is pioneering all-fiber construction materials and “clothes that monitor your health.” And that’s just the beginning.

“Imagine you’re standing in an outdoor pavilion,” Dickinson suggests, “one that’s similar in design to a covered picnic area at a local park or an amphitheater, only instead of support columns made from concrete, wood or stone, this structure is propped up by what appear to be posts of crocheted wool. Above you, a vast expanse of undulating roof is made of the same knitted material. Fungus coats this wool frame, forming the walls and the ceiling, not unlike the way plaster might cover the wood framing of a wall.

“This is the premise of an experimental material known as MycoKnit. ‘We’re trying to make an all-fiber building,’ says designer Felecia Davis, an associate professor of architecture and a lead researcher in the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing at Pennsylvania State University. She is part of an interdisciplinary team testing how knitted materials, such as wool yarn, might function as the framing for a building while a mixture of straw and mycelium fungus embeds itself onto this knitted fabric to create the rest. Mycelium is composed of individual fibers known as hyphae, which, in nature, create vast and intricate networks through soil, producing things like mushrooms. The amazing thing, Davis tells me, is that something as basic as fiber can become both the structure (the wool yarn) and the infill (the fungus).

“Davis and her partners are harnessing mycelium’s fast-growing power by regulating environmental conditions in the lab to encourage the fungus’s expansion on their knitted edifice. With the assistance of a computer algorithm made by one of Davis’s PhD students, the team can virtually assemble and examine the structure stitch-by-stitch in order to predict its shape, before building it and letting the fungus propagate overtop. …

“Davis is now working with her students to create a 12-by-12-by-12-foot MycoKnit prototype that can be fabricated and grown in one place, and then taken on-site to build, like an Ikea kit. She imagines a future where biofabricated materials replace less-sustainable building supplies, many of which wind up in landfills.

“Davis is a triple threat designer: trained as both an architect and an engineer, and with a penchant for technology. In her Penn State lab and through her firm, Felecia Davis Studio, she mixes time-honored craft techniques and humble materials with the high-tech — so that clothing might, for instance, alert the wearer to excess carbon monoxide in the air or signal when an infant stops breathing in their crib. Davis works with textiles, she says, because ‘you can address it at the nano- and micro-scale with tiny particles that you can spin to make a thread or yarn, or you can look at it from the massive scale. A building. A city.’ …

“Davis has always loved experimenting with objects and material. The oldest of three siblings, her earliest collaborator was her sister Audrey (now a neonatologist). As kids in the ’60s and ’70s, they explored the foothills of Altadena, Calif., near their home, gathering fresh bay laurel leaves and other natural materials for projects. With their friends, they fashioned dolls out of flour-based papier-mâché, carving apples for the heads. …

“Davis’s mother volunteered at the Pasadena Art Museum and introduced her children to abstract art and modernism; she was also a docent at the Gamble House in Pasadena, one of the country’s most well-preserved examples of Arts and Crafts design. Davis credits that house, in part, for her early desire to pursue architecture. ‘We would do our homework in the attic while she gave her tours,’ Davis says. ‘That house was mind-blowing.’

“On a recent October day, the SoftLab at Penn State is ‘messy,’ Davis says. … Fabric samples have been stretched and pinned to a corkboard, sharing space next to thin electrical conduits and sketches of networking design. There are clear boxes filled with copper-coated yarn and fabrics twisted with stainless steel that are capable of conducting electricity. Davis is refreshingly agnostic about her sourcing, using a combination of existing craft techniques and materials — from wool to human hair — in combination with the latest in software and hardware, such as the LilyPad Arduino, a microcontroller designed to work with e-textiles.

“A pair of black leggings stretch across the bottom half of a dress form. From a distance, they resemble something a rock star might wear, bedazzled and tricked out with lines of metallic thread, but on closer inspection these accents are electrical threads and processors. The leggings are the result of a partnership with Penn State engineer Conrad Tucker, who wanted to create a way of alerting people with Parkinson’s disease to subtle changes in their walking gait, which can foreshadow the onset of more debilitating symptoms. …

“The leggings were originally an information-gathering experiment, but ‘we’ve circled back on this project now that we have a yarn that is washable,’ she says. ‘We think we can make a simpler version of our leggings.’ Davis sees the potential for other ‘smart’ clothing like

a hospital shirt that frees patients from the tether of wires affixed to machines, allowing them to move freely or, ideally, go home sooner because their clothes, connected to the internet, would be able to communicate critical data to doctors.

“While Davis was earning her master’s in architecture at Princeton University, she ‘noticed how little people talk about the emotional experience of people in [a] space. … You’re in basic response with your environment all the time … You’re meshing with it, which is why it’s so important to think about human emotion in design.’ In this view, the aesthetics of what we design is more than an accessory, but a fundamental need in support of human emotional health. …

“As humans we tend to imbue the materials in our lives with emotional resonance — a child’s security blanket or a favorite sweater — and Davis has wondered whether we could also imbue the materials themselves with emotional feedback capacities. In 2012, she partnered with two other designers to create and install a project called the Textile Mirror at Microsoft Research Lab in Redmond, Calif. In the back of a fabric panel, Nitinol wires, made of a shape-changing nickel-titanium alloy, were activated after a person entered information about their state of mind into a mobile phone. The panel would adjust, shrinking and crumpling to reflect pain or sadness, for instance, and then release. As the textile ‘relaxed,’ it helped those in an agitated state to relax as well. Textiles capable of reflecting emotion have the potential to alert architects, building owners and inhabitants to the effect that specific design and material choices have. We can begin to create emotionally reactive dwellings and objects, as Davis calls them. …

“As someone who believes in the scientific method of showing data and results, Davis recognizes that working with emotions is tricky. It’s nearly impossible to scientifically pin down, precisely, what people are feeling at any given time. ‘This is kind of at the edge of what computation can actually tell you,’ she says. ‘We can’t read people’s minds, and yet we function as a species because we can intuitively read emotions.’ “

More at the Post, here.

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High-Tech Dutch Farming

December 17, 2022 by suzannesmom

Photo: Pixabay.
Believe it or not, little Holland is the world’s second-largest food exporter.

We know from childhood stories that the Dutch have always been innovative. Think about all that land taken from the sea by means of dikes. But who knew that such a little country as the Netherlands was the world’s second-largest food exporter? How do they do it?

Laura Reiley at the Washington Post has the details.

“The rallying cry in the Netherlands started two decades ago, as concern mounted about its ability to feed its 17 million people: Produce twice as much food using half as many resources.

“The country, which is a bit bigger than Maryland, not only accomplished this feat but also has become the world’s second largest exporter of agricultural products by value behind the United States. Perhaps even more significant in the face of a warming planet: It is among the largest exporters of agricultural and food technology. The Dutch have pioneered cell-cultured meat, vertical farming, seed technology and robotics in milking and harvesting — spearheading innovations that focus on decreased water usage as well as reduced carbon and methane emissions.

“The Netherlands produces 4 million cows, 13 million pigs and 104 million chickens annually and is Europe’s biggest meat exporter. But it also provides vegetables to much of Western Europe. The country has nearly 24,000 acres — almost twice the size of Manhattan — of crops growing in greenhouses. These greenhouses, with less fertilizer and water, can grow in a single acre what would take 10 acres of traditional dirt farming to achieve.

Dutch farms use only a half-gallon of water to grow about a pound of tomatoes, while the global average is more than 28 gallons. …

“With their limited land and a rainy climate, the Dutch have become masters of efficiency. But there are challenges: The greenhouse industry has flourished in part because of cheap energy, but Western Europe is facing soaring gas prices. And the country’s intensive animal agricultural practices are also at risk. This summer, a conservative government coalition pledged to halve nitrogen emissions by 2030, which would necessitate a dramatic reduction in the number of animals raised in the country. Farmers and ranchers have protested. …

“Dutch companies are the world’s top suppliers of seeds for ornamental plants and vegetables. There is an area in the northwest called Seed Valley, where new varieties of vegetables and flowers are in constant development. Enza Zaden is headquartered here, just north of Amsterdam.

“In three generations, Enza Zaden has evolved from a family-owned seed shop into a global market leader in vegetable breeding, with more than 2,500 employees and 45 subsidiaries in 25 countries.

“Jaap Mazereeuw, Enza Zaden’s managing director, said the company spends $100 million annually on research, introducing about 150 new vegetable varieties each year.

“ ‘We are very much a research company,’ he said. ‘With climate change, we are seeing the weather becoming more extreme. We’re looking at resilient varieties, seeds for organic farms as well as varieties that are more salt tolerant for places where water quality is not good. We need to find solutions for subsistence farmers all the way up to large-scale farmers. …

“ ‘We have our own indoor farm here where we develop the varieties of the future, crops that can grow quickly and be harvested quickly: lettuce, herbs, leafy crops. The genetics can be improved, as well as the whole technology — indoor farming will only become cheaper.’ …

“More than 12 billion heads of lettuce are grown each year from Enza Zaden’s seeds, but it was a tomato in the early 1960s that really put the company on the map — and perhaps what, in turn, put the Netherlands on the map for tomatoes. The country’s greenhouses produce nearly a million tons of tomatoes a year, with exports totaling around $2 billion annually.

“ ‘There’s a new tomato virus and we recently found the resistance to that virus in our seed bank,’ Mazereeuw said. The company stores its seeds in a temperature-controlled vault — called a seed bank — to preserve genetic diversity, but because seeds don’t stay viable forever, each stored variety must be grown out and those seeds, in turn, saved. …

“ [Eelco Ockers is] chief executive of PlantLab, which develops and operates custom-built indoor farms worldwide — systems they call ‘plant production units.’ Indoor vertical farmers trade in the free power of the sun for much more expensive electric light, but the benefit is they can much more easily control every variable to get consistent and reliable yield, Ockers said.

“The three founders put together their first prototype in 2008 and launched the company in 2010, helping Dutch greenhouse and indoor farmers increase yields with LED lights even when the technology was in its infancy. They have a system whereby enough crops to supply 100,000 residents daily with nearly half a pound of fresh vegetables each can be grown in an area no larger than two football fields. …

“PlantLab’s research and development center in Den Bosch is the largest such center for vertical farming in the world, and it uses limited light spectrum LEDs and plastic stacked production trays, and the plants grow in vermiculite with their roots in water. ‘Nothing is hand-harvested, nothing is touched by human hands,’ Ockers said. The water is recirculated, meaning no water is lost in the growing process. For now, the system is most effective for growing leafy greens, herbs and tomatoes, but he said cucumbers, zucchinis and all types of berries are suited to this growing system. And by limiting the time between harvest and consumption, he said, food waste is minimized and nutrient density is much higher than traditionally grown crops.”

Outdoor farming in Holland is really creative, too. The article covers not only growing vegetables outdoors but raising pigs, cows, and chickens. Read it all at the Post, here.

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Artists Leave Russia

December 16, 2022 by suzannesmom

Photos: Tanya Habjouqa/NOOR for NPR.
Choreographer Polina Mitryashina, artist Victor Melamed, and jazz producer Evgenii Petrushanskiy are Russian artists who have recently fled Russia to live in Israel.

Most of the Ukrainians I worked with for those precious few months after the Russian invasion believe that all Russians support Putin’s war. But although I would probably feel the same if I were constantly being bombed and had no electricity and was running out of food, I believe that nations aren’t monoliths.

Today we learn about some Jewish Russian artists who are against the war and have left their country. It’s not just about saving their own skin. It’s outrage.

As Daniel Estrin reports at National Public Radio, “Some of Russia’s biggest artistic talents have immigrated to Israel this year, finding a safe place to rebuild their careers and voice their conscience about their country’s war in Ukraine.

“Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, it has cracked down on even the slightest opposition to the war, forced thousands of citizens to enlist to fight and drawn tough sanctions from the West. All this has prompted many Russians to flee.

“More than 28,000 Russian nationals have acquired Israeli citizenship since the war began, according to Israeli government figures. …

” ‘Staying behind the Iron Curtain was incredibly scary,’ Russian artist Victor Melamed says. … Melamed, whose portraits have appeared in the New Yorker magazine, fled to Israel in June. He says: ‘I want to be a person of the world.’

“Russians are relocating mostly to Turkey, Kazakhstan and Georgia. But Israel offers one big advantage: Those with at least one Jewish grandparent can get Israeli citizenship for themselves and their close family.

” ‘When the war started, I think, like, everybody literally remembered their Jewish grandma,’ says Liza Rozovsky, a Russian-born Israeli journalist tracking Russian celebrity arrivals for the Haaretz newspaper. …

“Some Ukrainian immigrants in Israel wish the Russian newcomers would stay in Russia to protest their leadership, despite the risks. ‘They’re trying to run away,’ says Ilona Stavytska, 33, a Ukrainian-born barista in Tel Aviv.

“But Russian exiles say their protest is more effective here. ‘Go protest in Moscow. I will support you. I will say, “Oh, look, this person is protesting.” Then I will send you letters to jail,’ says Maxim Katz, 37, a Russian YouTube blogger and former opposition politician who escaped to Israel and publishes anti-war videos to audiences in Russia. …

“What a difference a year has made for jazz producer Evgenii Petrushanskii. Last year, his record label in Russia, Rainy Days Records, produced a jazz album which got nominated for a Grammy. This year, the record label has gone silent.

” ‘I don’t feel it’s the right time now to release music as a Russian label,’ Petrushanskii, 36, says at a Tel Aviv coffee shop. ‘For the ethical reasons, I stopped.’ Days after Russia invaded Ukraine, he left St. Petersburg for Tel Aviv, claiming Israeli citizenship based on his father’s Jewish roots.

” ‘It’s impossible to release a record in Russia so it goes to the foreign audience,’ Petrushanskii says. ‘A majority of music aggregators who release music toward the platforms like Apple Music, Spotify … are not presenting in Russia anymore.’ Now he’s re-registering his record label in Israel, hoping to release new records of Russian artists next year.

“Polina Mitryashina, 28, worked at one of the world’s leading dance institutions, Russia’s Mariinsky Theater. Then when the war broke out, her dancers began to vanish.

” ‘Now they’re in Oslo,’ she says. …

“Mitryashina attended a recent networking event at the Israel Festival in Jerusalem, which brought 100 Russian and Ukrainian artists in film, music, art and dance — new immigrants like her — to meet veteran Israeli artistic directors and try to rebuild their careers in Israel.

‘Sometimes I’m angry [at] the people who stay … and continue to work for the big companies, and continue to make money’ in Russia, she says. ‘I am like, “Are you crazy? You, you’re like a sponsor of the war.” ‘

“Artist Victor Melamed, 45, moved his family to a quiet Tel Aviv suburb to keep his teenage boys out of a potential Russian military draft — though they will likely be drafted into the Israeli army.

” ‘I have no romantic visions of, you know, Israel’s policies,’ he says. ‘The Israeli army is an institution that cares for every person they have … as opposed to the Russian army.’

“Each morning he draws a black-and-white portrait of a Ukrainian civilian killed in a Russian attack, and posts it on Instagram. He says it’s his way of pinching himself, not to get too comfortable in his new home in Israel. …

” ‘We need to grow up,’ he says. ‘We cannot afford to stay the same.’ “

More at NPR, here.

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