Leap In The Dark: "The Lonely Blogger"/Enemy Of The Environment#2 Canola

Yep that's me "The Lonely Blogger" Maybe I never should have got a site meter and kept myself in blissful ignorance that there might be someone out there reading what I have to say. But being the masochist that I am I went out and installed one. Now each week I get an e mail which delineates my lack of traffic on a daily basis. Yep one whole hit a day, from my publishing page.

I've done all the right things you know to raise my profile. I've linked my blog with my web site, I've listed everything with Google search engines, I've used nifty catch phrases to catch the eyes of random browsers in the submitted descriptions. Hell I've even stooped to baiting the hook with celebrity names(I've written about Viggo Mortensen) But nothing. Zilch. Nada.

Maybe its all a hoax and there's no internet out there. You know we all sit at home posting our thoughts and photos and whatever and it goes nowhere. Nobody is actually able to travel or visit other pages? Nah, because no one could afford to perpetrate a hoax of that size. So it all comes back down to nobody visits my site. Lets be honest, who is going to visit the site of a unknown Canadian writer who hasn't published anything of note and writes really unpopular stuff.

Dissing the pope, suggesting banning private ownership of cars, pointing out what idiots we are in general. Probably not many out there want to read about how screwed up the world is, at least from my perspective. I bet I come across a some radical, long haired, iconoclastic crank. Hmm, well that's a pretty could description isn't it. Maybe I should change my blurb describing the blog to that. Rantings of a long haired iconoclast! Yeah that's the ticket to bring in the crowds. Finally the Throngs and Hoards will show up in their Multitudes. My site meter will go through the roof and I won't be able to keep up with the demand for request as a public speaker.

Oh well, maybe I'll just e mail links to some friends, and be happy with that.

ENEMY # 2

The second member of my enemy list may at first glance seem a little strange and I should preface it with a mention that I do not hold it responsible, rather those who make use of it. Therefore I give you. Canola

This plant has brought about some of the worst agribusiness crimes of the last ten years. Responding to the suspiciously fast growth in popularity of canola as an ingredient in oil based products more and more land is being turned over to it's production. Where as plants such as soy, peanuts, and corn have multiple uses outside of oil and margarine as a food, canola seems primarily single purpose. Therefore land used for its growth is begin used to simply feed the profits of whatever company is producing the plant and not feed the people of the world.

Given the plethora of canola based margarine and cooking oils on the market it must be easy to produce and render, why else would there be so much of it. It leads me to suspect that the producers have created the market for it for that very reason. Its easy and inexpensive to produce, from the crop up, so as long as its insured that it becomes popular we can make a killing from. Ten years ago had you heard of canola? Did you care? All the claims about saturated, unsaturated, polyunsaturated fats aside(people were living long healthy lives before we knew about this stuff so I can't see what difference it really makes) there are really only two types of distinct cooking oils that I can see(aside from speciality items like sesame and almond) and that's vegetable and olive. In a blind taste test could you tell the difference between something cooked in sunflower, canola , Soya, corn or any other oil? Not me, well maybe peanut oil, but that's it.

So now the world is flooded with this stuff for no other reason then it will increase someone's profits, but the cost to us seems to be plenty. They actively encourage the use of pesticides in the growing of canola by creating a strain called "Roundup ready" which means the plant is immune to one of the most virulent poisons on the market. A grower is thus encouraged to spray entire crops with this stuff, safe in the knowledge that it will kill off everything but his precious canola. Has anybody checked out what the half life of this poison is. What happens to us when we consume it over a long period of time? What happens to the surrounding environment when it's sprayed and their is the least amount of wind that carries it past the boundaries of the farm? What happens to wildlife that eats seeds sprayed with this stuff, and then it works it way up through the food chain? What the hell are we doing? Didn't we learn from DDT? I guess not.

So here's what we got: ariable farm land being used up to grow a single crop being sprayed with a poison that will prevent anything else from growing, thus ensuring that only "roundup ready" canola can be planted on that field for who knows how long all to produce a vegetable oil. Do you think its worth it? I don't.

Posted by Richard Marcus on April 17, 2005 02:28 PM | Permalink