0 Would You Have Eaten What George Melville Ate?

Jeannette's boats are separated in a gale. Illustration from "In the Lena Delta"

In July 1879, the USS Jeannette, a former Royal Navy gunboat with both sails and a steam engine, left San Francisco Bay for the Bering Strait and the Arctic Ocean beyond.

Its purchase and outfitting expenses were chiefly covered by newspaper tycoon James Gordon Bennett, Jr.,  sort of the Ted Turner of his day, with the ship being commissioned by the US Navy and given a Navy crew—plus two native Alaskan dog handlers and a veteran whaling captain to serve as "ice pilot."

For two winters Jeannette explored northeast of Siberia, looking for a hypothesized open water projected — by eminent geographers— to exist north of the band of pack ice. For most of the time, of course, the ship was stuck in the pack ice, carried along by the polar drift while the crew carried out scientific observations and visited some hither-to unknown islands.

In June 1881 Jeannette was released by the ice—but then re-caught by moving floes. Despite the hull reinforcements added in preparation for the voyage, this time the ship was crushed. The crew had warning and had evacuated many supplies, sleds, dogs, and three of the ship's boats.

And then the hard part started. The story of Jeannette, the sinking, the horrible sled journey south, south, south, and the open-boat voyage toward the Siberian cost are told in Hampton Sides' book In the Kingdom of Ice, and if you like stories of adventure and endurance, you will devour it like a starving sailor eats raw fish.

But there is more. When the story shifts to the struggles of the castaway sailors and the search for the missing, Sides relies quite a bit  on In the Lena Delta (1884), an account written by the senior surviving officer, George Melville, the ship's engineer. So I had to get it.

Only two months after being rescued by some native Siberian Yakuts and still suffering from frostbite and malnutrition, Melville organized a November dogsled expedition to look for more survivors beyond those already found. (He did receive significant assistance from Russian imperial officials, once they learned of the castaways' existence.)

At one point, in the middle of howling winter gales, Melville and his Yakut guides (who always lived on the ragged edge of starvation anyway) ran out of food and were reduced to eating bits of leftover frozen reindeer and bones that the Yakuts cached here and there on their trapping routes. He writes,

With an axe the rib pieces were soon severed from the back-bone, and then from the inside of these the natives cut strips with their sheath-knives and handed me a chunky moral from the loin, as breakfast. I bit into it without any ceremony, while the dogs clamored frantically for a share. So long as it remained frozen the meat did not exhibit the vile extent of its putridity; but directly I had taken it into my mouth it melted like butter, and at the same time gave off such a disgusting odor that I hastily relinquished my hold upon it, and the dogs captured it at a single gulp. The natives first stared in genuine astonishment to see me cast away such good food to the dogs, and then burst forth into hearty laughter at my squeamishness. But I was not to be outdone, much less ridiculed, by a Yakut, and so ordered some more, perhaps a pound of the stuff, cut up into little bits. These I swallowed like so many pills, and then gazed on my Yakut friends in triumph; but not long, for in a little while my stomach heated the decomposed mess, an intolerable gas arose and retched me, and again I abandoned my breakfast — my loss, however, becoming the dogs' gain.

At this the natives were nearly overcome with mirth; but I astonished them by my persistence, requesting a third dose, albeit the second one had teemed with maggots; and swallowing the sickening bits as before, my stomach retained them out of pure exhaustion.

Remember this the next time you notice that the package of meat in your refrigerator is past its expiration date.

And In the Kingdom of Ice is a great cold-weather read. Unless you are in Yakutsk (a locale that figures in the story), it will make your winter seem like balmy spring.

Detail: Would You Have Eaten What George Melville Ate?

0 Opponents of Colorado GMO-Labeling Offer Nothing But Scare Tactics

Colorado's Proposition 105, on the current ballot, would require labeling of certain foods containing "genetically modified organisms" (GMOs). Vermont started requiring such labeling earlier this year.

The "no," anti-labeling forces have spent $11.2 million, filling my mailbox with billboard-size brochures. The "yes" group, "Right to Know Colorado"  has spent less than $500,000.

The "no" people would like to say two things, but there is a slight contradiction between them.

1. "Genetically modified foods are perfectly nutritious and represent an advancement in agriculture."

2. "You — the person who buys and eats them — should not be informed that you are indeed eating them, because . . . . "

 . . . exactly why,  they can't really say, so there is a lot of smoke and mirrors and hand-waving and "Look over there!" coming from the people with the millions to spend.

Watch out! Requiring an extra line of type on the label will require a "huge bureaucracy." It will represent "unreliable information" (Like, how?) It will be "arbitrary" (Aren't all laws arbitrary?).

And so on. Look over there, here comes a huge bureaucracy!

No information. No argument based on logic. (You will find the nearest thing to that in the comments here.) Just scare tactics. And lots of Monsanto money.

Detail: Opponents of Colorado GMO-Labeling Offer Nothing But Scare Tactics

0 Blog Stew with Distributed Ticks

¶ It's hard to improve upon this summary: "A problem with northern New Mexico written all over it: Go organic, cause a nuclear waste accident."

¶ What tick bit you? If you find a tick on your body (or someone else's), are you interested in determining the species? If you were in Missouri, it probably was not a Western black-legged tick, for instance. But brown dog ticks are everywhere in the continental U.S. Check this map of tick geography. Your tax dollars at work.

¶ In a move toward civilization, dogs are now allowed in the patios of bars and restaurants in Denver if the establishment permits.

Any food service establishment with a patio of 400 square feet or larger qualifies. Dogs must enter from the street or sidewalk, and at least half the space must be reserved for customers who may prefer not to dine so up close and personal with others' dogs.

Detail: Blog Stew with Distributed Ticks

0 'Brown Spirits' Are Back!

M. and I stopped at the liquor store on Thursday, and the #2 guy was asking me what kind of whiskey I liked.

Mainly bourbon and rye, I said. (I've been trying to perfect my Sazerac cocktail recipe lately.)

And he scurried off to the back office to photocopy some article from a liquor-trade magazine about different bourbons and their grain mixes, which was kind of him.

He also pointed out that the store's clearance bin contained a lot of tequilas.They were cutting back on tequila and vodka and ordering more whiskeys, he said. (Although they did not have any rye the last time that I looked, which is why I had to buy some in Colorado Springs.)

Then I remembered reading some business-journalist's article a some years ago about how "brown spirits" were a declining market share. Only old people drank bourbon. Tequila and vodka were where it was at.

Now we have these craft distillers popping up. Among others in Colorado are Stranahan's Colorado Whiskey (not bad, I've had it) and, in my bioregion, Deerhammer's "white whiskey," which is to say more of a moonshine recipe, not aged in charred barrels. Makes a decent Old Fashioned though.

So it's all about fashion, but I will enjoy this little whiskey renaissance while I can.

Detail: 'Brown Spirits' Are Back!

0 "Rye whiskey, rye whiskey, rye whiskey I cry. "

News you can use: A history of bourbon and rye whiskeys.

The reviewer writes,

I must admit that I too once looked down from the highlands of Scotland on what I viewed as the low ground of American whiskey. Like Risen’s friend, I was undoubtedly influenced by my own introduction to bourbon during American whiskey’s low point in terms of both sales and quality during the 1970s and 1980s. Like my grandfather before me, I lived in Louisville at the time. However, most of the bourbon available then (at least to me) was a choice rightly relegated to the bottom shelves, fit for those with either undiscriminating palates or light wallets. . . .  Spurning bourbon, not to mention moonshine, as an upwardly mobile professional I began to sample single malts from Scotland and thereby missed the astonishing revival of bourbon and its kin that is the subject of Risen’s book.

Detail: "Rye whiskey, rye whiskey, rye whiskey I cry. "

0 Safely Sampling Strange Wild Plants

I have done this only informally with mushrooms, but there is a protocol for the Universal Edibility Test. It goes step by step.

Related: "13 Survival Myths that Could Kill You."

I’ve worked on these reality shows,” says Tony Nester, an expert on desert survival and head of Ancient Pathways, an outdoor survival and bushcraft school based in Flagstaff, Arizona. “They’re heavily scripted and there’s always a support crew within twenty feet, twenty-four seven.”

Detail: Safely Sampling Strange Wild Plants

0 Blog Stew in the Petroglyph Bowl

¶ An article on the possibly oldest petroglyphs in North America associates them chronologically with a set of human remains known as Spirit Cave Man. The interesting thing is that Spirit Cave Man (like Kennewick Man) does not appear to be an American Indian but looked more Caucasoid, perhaps like the Ainu of Japan and Far Eastern Russia.

¶ An update on the "North(ern) Colorado" secession movement. It's going to the voters in some counties.

¶ A recent spate of bear attacks. Bear spray was used in Yellowstone, but maybe not quickly enough?

¶ Couple in Divide successfully start a goat cheese business. The site is the former Alpine Lakes Resort north of town.

"We did not intend to make it on this level," Bob McMillan said. "It started as a harmless retirement thing that got out of control."

Detail: Blog Stew in the Petroglyph Bowl

0 Monsoon on the Conejos (3) Pagosa Springs & Assorted Mushroom Thoughts

Boletus edulis in the Wet Mountains

Saturday the 10th was our last full day of the camping trip. I put away the fly rods and picked more mushrooms (and wild strawberries) on Cumbres Pass, then drove on west through Chama, N.M, to Pagosa Springs.

I had planned to be in Pagosa the previous weekend for a state-sponsored fire class, but it was cancelled, so this was sort of a consolation visit.

In Pagosa, the weather was warm, and the San Juan River was running high and brown. Tubing outfitters were busy shuttling their customers to the east side of town so that they could ride down past the city park and the mineral springs, where the terraces were crowded with bathers.

In the midst of this "rubber hatch," I saw one guy casting a spinning rod. I thought of congratulating him for upholding the archetype of the always-optimistic fisherman, but he gave up and walked away.

We visited a couple of thrift stores—nothing exciting—where does all the outdoor gear go?—and then had a late lunch/early supper at the Riff-Raff brew pub ("Hoppy people. Hoppy earth").

I reckoned that my cabrito burger with Hatch green chiles was sort of quasi-locavore-ish.

It rained steadily most of the way back to the campground.

The next morning I observed a mulie doe moving strangely through the woods. She had her nose down like a dog following a scent trail.

Was she eating mushrooms? I had picked a few in that area, mostly Suillis  ("slippery jacks"). I tried to follow, but I could not get too close without spooking her, and there were a lot of spruce boughs in the way.

I did see some Suillis that had been scraped by what looked like a deer's lower incisors (Deer don't have upper incisors.) Were there fewer mushrooms than before? Not sure.

Two days later, having done well on a mushroom hunt closer to home, M. and I were easing down a rough forest road in the Jeep when we saw a squirrel wrestling — or something — in the road. It turned out to be trying to carry the stem of a Boletus edulis ("king bolete"), which was nearly as big as it was.

Yesterday M. was walking Fisher on lead down the driveway when he dashed into the oak brush, dragging her along. He had scented another bolete, one unfortunately past its prime. It was probably another Boletus chrysenteron, which grows under oaks, like the one he snarfed off the kitchen counter a few days ago.

Does this mean that he might have a talent for finding good mushrooms? If the French have truffle-sniffing dogs, could we have a Southern Rockies bolete-sniffing dog? Further research is required.

Detail: Monsoon on the Conejos (3) Pagosa Springs & Assorted Mushroom Thoughts

0 Permits for Eating Factory-Farmed Meat: A Modest Proposal

Having laid out her hunting fees — "Eastern Wild turkey costs me $25 in addition to what I paid for my hunting license. The permit is $20, the tagging fee is $5" — Maine blogger Robin Follette starts wondering if every meat eater should not pay.

My money funds conservation. Is it really all that far-fetched that a factory farm fee subsidize factory farming so non-factory farmed meat eating taxpayers don’t have to?

From thence, she develops a modest proposal including behavioral guidelines for non-hunters.

I’ve been thinking about it for four days. Here’s the start of my plan to keep hunters and non-hunting meat eaters who are offended by hunting on an even keel. Don’t stop reading no matter how ridiculous this starts to sound. When you get to the end you’ll find the comment section. Please let me know what I’ve over looked. I am truly interested in everyone’s point of view.

Read the rest: "Don't Offend the Non-Hunters."

(Via Tovar Cerulli,whose vegan-turned-hunter narrative has been getting more ink lately.)

Detail: Permits for Eating Factory-Farmed Meat: A Modest Proposal

0 Some Days I Just Don't Do 'Catch and Release'

Semi-wild rainbow trout caught in this county. Rice. Green salad, partly from our CSA farmer and partly from other organic sources. Fetzer wine, because a good friend used to live behind the winery, and because they try to be "sustainable."

Detail: Some Days I Just Don't Do 'Catch and Release'

0 “We’re on the last kick,” he said. “The bulk water is gone.”

All my adult life, I have been hearing predictions that the Ogallala Aquifer (also called the High Plains Aquifer by people unsure how to pronounce "Ogallala"), a huge sponge of water under the High Plains, was dropping . . . dropping . . . dropping.

Fly east out of Colorado Springs and look at all the irrigated circles from center-pivot irrigation. They are growing corn, mostly.

Corn to feed to cattle in High Plains stockyards. Corn for ethanol (it's patriotic!) to make us energy independent so we won't be sending money to the Middle East.

All those wells pumping groundwater have led to this result.

Vast stretches of Texas farmland lying over the aquifer no longer support irrigation. In west-central Kansas, up to a fifth of the irrigated farmland along a 100-mile swath of the aquifer has already gone dry. In many other places, there no longer is enough water to supply farmers’ peak needs during Kansas’ scorching summers. . . . .

A shift to growing corn, a much thirstier crop than most, has only worsened matters. Driven by demand, speculation and a government mandate to produce biofuels, the price of corn has tripled since 2002, and Kansas farmers have responded by increasing the acreage of irrigated cornfields by nearly a fifth.  

From a US Geological Survey report, quoted at Coyote Gulch, the water blog:

The study shows that, since 2000, depletion of the High Plains aquifer appears to be continuing at a high rate. The depletion during the last 8 years of record (2001–2008, inclusive) is about 32 percent of the cumulative depletion in this aquifer during the entire 20th century. The annual rate of depletion during this recent period averaged about 10.2 cubic kilometers, roughly 2 percent of the volume of water in Lake Erie.

Maybe we will see more grass-fed beef (or buffalo?)  and more winter wheat in on the High Plains in the future. That's the optimistic outlook. But that slogan from the 1970s and 1980s, "A bushel of wheat for a barrel of oil!" is still just chest-thumping nonsense.

Detail: “We’re on the last kick,” he said. “The bulk water is gone.”

0 Mediterranean Diet: The Dark Side

You have the olive oil, of course, and the seafood and the vegetables.

And the golden orioles, the nightingales, and the corncrakes. The larks and the finches, yum yum.

Call it a quirk of geography. Birds that migrate from Europe to Africa must cross the Mediterranean Sea, north to south or south to north. They are tired after that flight, easy to trap and kill, be it in Egypt, the Greek islands, Crete, Sicily, or the south of France.

In Egypt, for example, 

A few scattered nets along the coast have metastasized into a nearly impenetrable wall of traps, stretching almost without break from the Gaza strip in the east to the Libyan border in the west. Conservative estimates set the annual death toll of migratory birds in this area at 10 million, but others say it is probably an order of magnitude more.

In some areas, especially near Libya, the birds are caught for subsistence, by people who currently have no other way to feed themselves, but the vast majority, perhaps 80 percent of the birds trapped, are sold in markets as a pricey delicacy or hocked to high-end restaurants in Cairo for up to five euros for each slight songbird. 

This Mediterranean taste for songbird pasta sauce came to America and contributed to the shaping of American hunting regulations. Just as Americans were trying to move away from the "shoot everything" approach to conservation-guided hunting, along came the Italians (mainly) who got jobs, bought shotguns, took a train ride out into the country, and started shooting chickadees.

Louis Warren, writing in The Hunter's Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America, devotes a chapter to this cultural conflict:

Because Italian immigrants hunted birds, they were considered a principal threat to bird life and therefore an incipient cause of this potential apocalypse. In the minds of many, immigrants represented as much a threat to American nature, especially American birds, as they did to the social order of American cities. William T. Hornaday, the president of the New York Zoological Society and one of the most famous conservationists of the era, captured conservationists' fears of Italians in his widely read tract, Our Vanishing Wildlife: "Let every state and province in America look out sharply for the bird-killing foreigner; for sooner or later, he will surely attack your wild life. The Italians are spreading, spreading, spreading. If you are without them to-day, to-morrow they will be around you." 

In 1903, the influential conservation magazine Forest and Stream published an article, "The Italian and the Birds," noting,

Once I examined the contents of a bag that one of a party of three Italian hunters [in Massachusetts] carried and found nearly fifty birds, including two or three quails, which at that season were unlawfully taken, and among the song birds that constituted the greater portion of what the bag contained were several chickadees, a bird that with its feathers off is not much larger than an English walnut. I have learned that the Italians are in the habit of killing and eating chickadees and all other song birds, and for this purpose will snatch the young from their nests before they can fly.

Today, hunting regulations in America are better respected, and what transgressions take place usually take different forms. The French may even stop eating songbirds too.

Unfortunately, contemporary Egypt is a pretty dysfunctional nation that cannot even feed itself. (To think that Egypt fed parts of the Roman Empire at one time!) So bird conservation is pretty far down the to-do list, after massacring Coptic Christians and what-not.

Detail: Mediterranean Diet: The Dark Side