What is the healthiest fruit? This one is high in antioxidants and has cognitive and cardiovascular benefits.
Clare Mulroy, USA TODAY – April 25, 2023
An apple a day keeps the doctor away, right?
We grew up hearing the cliched expression, but do you know how much fruit you should actually be eating per day? The recommended intake depends on a number of factors, but adults should generally consume 1.5 to 2 cups of fruit daily, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. One cup of fruit could be an apple, a banana, a cup of blueberries, three medium-size plums or seven slices or chunks of mango, for example.
Here’s your guide to the health benefits of fruit, plus tips for including more in your diet.
What is the healthiest fruit?
While all fruits are healthy, registered dietitian nutritionist Danielle Crumble Smith recommends one nutrient-packed fruit in particular – wild blueberries.
Blueberries contain lots of fiber, which keeps you fuller for longer. They also rank among the fruits and vegetables with the highest antioxidant content. Antioxidants prevent or delay cell damage.
“From a cognitive standpoint, there are a lot of benefits in terms of memory, and some studies show cardiovascular benefits or cancer-fighting compounds,” Crumble Smith says. “Overall, [they] decrease inflammation.”
Still, Crumble Smith says eating wild blueberries is not essential to getting the healthy nutrients of fruits. Eating fruit of any kind will yield healthy results, though some fruits have nutrients that serve different purposes.
Vitamin C-rich fruits should also be on your radar, including citrus (oranges, grapefruit and lemons, to name a few) and strawberries.
“Vitamin C helps with collagen production, and in our generation, people are concerned about decreasing wrinkles and hair, skin and nail health,” Crumble Smith says. “Vitamin C is actually really crucial for that.”
Some fruit fears come from their sugar content. Does the high amount of sugar mean fruit is bad for you? Absolutely not, says Crumble Smith.
“Fruit has so many vitamins, minerals, fiber, water and other nutrients that our body needs,” she says.
In fact, fruit can combat the afternoon slump when most people reach for another cup of coffee. Because natural sugar is a healthy source of energy, pairing fruit with protein will give you a similar boost you’d get through caffeine.
Crumble Smith does recommend caution for people with diabetes, insulin resistance or blood sugar issues. In that case, be mindful of portion size or try to pair your afternoon raspberries with a protein, like yogurt or cheese.
Fruit smoothies are an easy and accessible way to get your daily fruit content. Crumble Smith recommends making them at home rather than grabbing one from a smoothie bar or a pre-packaged drink from the store. If you’re going for bottled juice, make sure to read the nutritional label and ingredients thoroughly.
“Just because something says 100% fruit … oftentimes that’s not the best choice,” Crumble Smith says. “Because in that case, all the concentrated fruit tends to be really high in sugar and don’t have any protein to help stabilize blood sugar levels.”
Contrary to popular belief, yes, avocados are fruits and yes, their fat content is an important part of a healthy, balanced diet.
“People sometimes fear fat, but healthy fats coming from avocados, nuts, seeds, olives, olive oil, fatty fish, they have so many anti-inflammatory benefits,” Crumble Smith says.
Avocados are rich in potassium, which can help lower blood pressure and cholesterol. They also contain large amounts of fiber, which can keep you feeling satisfied for longer and help with blood sugar regulation, according to Crumble Smith.
“Oftentimes fruits and veggies can be great sources of fat-soluble vitamins A, E and K,” Crumble Smith says. “With fat-soluble vitamins, we need a fat source for our body to be able to actually absorb them. So having an avocado with a salad enhances your body’s absorption of those nutrients.”
How to incorporate fruit into your diet
Other than upping your smoothie and fruit salad intake, an easy way to get yourself to eat more fruit is to experiment at the grocery store. Crumble Smith says she tells her clients to put a fruit they’ve never tried in their basket every week when they go to the store.
“It’s a great way to expose yourself to that which you’ve never tried and potentially find something you love,” Crumble Smith says. “And it’s not overwhelming; you’re not coming home with all of these different things that you’re afraid are going to go bad.”
But if you’re hesitant to try something new, there’s no harm in eating the same ol’ fruit every day. You’ll still get a host of benefits. And once you’re feeling more adventurous, you can try swapping – maybe blueberries in your oatmeal instead of a banana, or snack on an orange instead of an apple.
By Eliza Daley, orig. pub. by: By my solitary hearth – April 24, 2023
Photo by Annie Spratt on Upsplash
It’s spring, so obviously it’s time to get the garden in production. For those who don’t know where to start or who just want more tips I have some recommendations on books that I use every year in planning and implementing food production. I know I just talked about my book-free kitchen, however, this is one very important caveat — I definitely use books for the intersection of kitchen and garden. These books are less about cooking than growing, processing and storing the harvest, and all three affect food safety. So reference books are necessary.
I am reading a new one — The Backyard Homestead Book of Kitchen Know-How by Andrea Chesman (2015, Storey Publishing). Chesman lives on an acre in Vermont, so this book is highly relevant to me. However, with her decades of practical experience — in addition to her homestead life, she’s written many books and teaches classes on storing the harvest — there are tips for anyone anywhere who grows typical garden produce. I have already found useful suggestions and I have almost as much experience as she does, so I feel like this is a good book to recommend to anyone with a veg plot. One caution: her methods do tend to lean toward agricultural extension agency practices, lots of plastic and electricity. She acknowledges that not everybody is going to have the capacity to run two refrigerators and a chest freezer, but she also doesn’t talk as much about lower-energy preservation methods. However, she includes the most detailed instructions on drying food that I’ve ever encountered. Mostly without electricity. And since she does this in Vermont — in normal, New England summer humidity — I think I may have found my solution to that problem.
She also spends a bit at the beginning of the book talking about what you should grow. For example, if you don’t like stuffing squash in summer heat, don’t plant round varieties. And if your family is less than Victorian in number, then don’t plant more than a few bushes of all the summer squashes put together. But she doesn’t talk as much about gardening as she does about produce, so there isn’t good information on yields and varieties. I have other books for that.
Keeping the Harvest by Nancy Chioffi and Gretchen Mead (1991, Storey Publishing) is a slim but indispensable reference for basic recipes and techniques. It also contains a chart I have been using for decades: the yields of frozen veg per unit of harvest (bushels, heads, pounds, etc). This table is gold! Nothing is more annoying than running out of pint containers in the middle of processing veg, especially the chiles. With this chart, I know that I need at least 18 pint containers washed and ready when I tackle the 25 pound box of Big Jim peppers in August. They also give yields per unit of planting area (row feet, square feet, bushes, trees, etc). So if you are unsure about how many potatoes you should plant for a given yield or how much space will be necessary for that yield or even how much ‘yield’ you will be able to eat, then buy this book.
Another extremely useful reference book is Rosalind Creasy’s The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping (1982, Sierra Club Books). This is a permaculture book from before permaculture. I learned how to grow abundant food in small spaces from this one book. More a gardening manual than food processing book, Edible Landscaping contains general guides to growing and using just about every kind of fruit, veg and herb that might be grown in temperate climates. (And a few from more tropical conditions.) Creasy gives hardiness, growing season length, light and moisture needs, soil types and whatever else you need to grow a plant. She describes the different growing needs of different varieties of a given species also. For example, you may not live in a climate with the 1000 chill hours needed by Wolf River apples (my favorites), but there are plenty of apple varieties that can be grown in regions with warmer winters.
These two books are my main garden production planning references. I have many other books, but these are the ones that come out every year. I definitely recommend getting them if you are new to producing and storing your own food, or even if you just want to learn more about these skills that everyone will be needing in the not so distant future. However, I would also advise you to get at least one recently published reference on canning and preserving. This is one type of cookbook that I do use. Nobody should improvise on this stuff!
My two go-to garden planning books have plenty of recipes, however there have been many changes in the intervening decades on food safety recommendations. For just one example, it’s been determined that tomatoes are not high enough in acid to kill harmful microbes, so pressure-canning is safer than the water-bath canning I used to use on canned tomato sauce. Most of the recipes are fine and obviously I’m still alive after using them for many years, but that might just be because I’ve been lucky. (That, and botulism doesn’t stand a chance in my sterile kitchen…) But still, preserving low-acid veg is flirting with food poisoning even in the best conditions. So use up-to-date information on how to avoid that nightmare. I use Saving the Seasons by Mary Clemens Meyer and Susanna Meyer (2010, Herald Press), and I have the most recent copy of the USDA’s Complete Guide to Home Canning and Preserving (2008). I have a few other books on jams, chutneys and other high-acid things, but I always cross-reference cooking times and temperatures with the books I trust implicitly. And sometimes I even go look things up on extension agency websites, which presumably have the most recent information available.
So those books go very far toward planning a garden, including what use you’ll make of the produce. But to round out garden planning, especially for those who are looking to create a landscape that needs little maintenance and very few inputs, I have two other book recommendations. These are not quick reads, and maybe I should have suggested starting them last November, but they are invaluable in garden planning. The first is the classic ecology book by Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy (1977, Sierra Club Books). From how ecological balance is physically achieved to the history and ethics of the conservation movement, Worster’s book is a complete education. I only include one other book because it is written specifically for the garden: Ecology for Gardeners by Steven B. Carroll and Severn D. Salt (2004, Timber Press). If there is a fault in Worster’s book, it’s that he doesn’t talk as much as I’d like about the kinds of plants we grow intentionally. Carroll and Salt make up for that — and include lots of images! I don’t know about you, but I will never be able to sort out the good caterpillars from the evil spawn of hell without a good visual guide.
Hope these references help! They’ve inspired me to try new things and see the garden in new ways each year. And speaking of… it’s time to cut up the potatoes so they’ll be cured before planting time. So… I’m off to the cellar now.
Eliza Daley
Eliza Daley is a fiction. She is the part of me that is confident and wise, knowledgable and skilled. She is the voice that wants to be heard in this old woman who more often prefers her solitary and silent hearth. She has all my experience — as mother, musician, geologist and logician; book-seller, business-woman, and home-maker; baker, gardener, and chief bottle-washer; historian, anthropologist, philosopher, and over it all, writer. But she has not lived, is not encumbered with all the mess and emotion, and therefore she has a wonderfully fresh perspective on my life. I rather like knowing her. I do think you will as well.
Dangers from future technologies? It’s the current ones that are killing us
By Kurt Cobb, originally published by Resource Insights
April 23, 2023
Image: “A futuristic vision: the advance of technology leads to rapid transport, sophisticated tastes among the masses, mechanization, and extravagant building projects. Coloured etching by William Heath” (1829). Via Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_futuristic_vision_Wellcome_V0041098.jpg
As bad as these sound, it’s possible that doomscrolling our way through the breathless coverage of dangerous new technologies is distracting us from what is already happening in right front of us: Existing technologies are already pushing humans quickly down the path to extinction (along with many plants and animals). Pretending that dangers to the survival of the human species come ONLY from the future is a perilous diversion.
In fact, the combination of climate change; the increasingly toxic pollution of the soil, water and air; depletion of arable soil, water, energy and critical metals; galloping development of wild and farm lands; and second order effects such as habitat and biodiversity loss, acidification of the oceans and dramatic loss of Greenland’s ice that may lead to a breakdown in the Gulf Stream ocean current that keeps much of Europe temperate—all this has gathered so much momentum that, frankly, we don’t need any help from the future to kill ourselves as a species. (Oh, I almost forgot; we could obliterate ourselves with a nuclear winter without any new nuclear technology or warheads needed.)
It turns out that we may be doing such a good job of threatening our species already that the emerging technologies we fear most will never get a chance to fully emerge. In the not-too-distant future, we humans may already be gone or our societies so degraded that launching a second apocalypse with the help of new technologies will be a practical impossibility. We won’t have the functioning infrastructure to do it!
And, that is basically the key to the lethality of most emerging technologies: connectivity. If communities become so isolated that inhabitants cannot travel to distant places harboring designer virus outbreaks, humanity will paradoxically be saved from extinction because of the loss of technology and any attendant mobility. Contemplate that for moment!
As for artificial intelligence, well, it needs a vast infrastructure of connected information sources to be effective. When I asked friends recently why we can’t literally just pull the plug on AI if it becomes dangerous, they had many explanations. But, perhaps the most telling one was that we have become so networked across the globe and AI will be so distributed, that we’d effectively have to pull the plug on ourselves—and we are not willing to do that even if not pulling the plug ultimately leads to our destruction.
Of course, the public has been told again and again that emerging technologies will bring abundance for all, solve climate change, get rid of pollution, cure most diseases, produce so much energy we’ll never have to think about the cost, and actually help regenerate the soil and the forests while increasing biodiversity.
I don’t know what they’ve been waiting for, but the tech overlords who’ve sold us this story had better get busy right now. There isn’t much time left for them to build out their “solutions.”
Kurt Cobb
Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He is currently a fellow of the Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions.
Last night, I climbed the 13 stairs that lead to my bedroom, and when I got to the top, I put my hand to my heart and said thank you, because the climb was so easy, because the climb was propelled by a magnificent, healthy donor heart.
I’ve lived with two donor hearts over 35 years. I had my first transplant at 25, and when that failed, I had my second at 50. But in January my daily runs became difficult. Tests showed my heart was perfect. But additional tests revealed I have incurable cancer. It is in my lungs now. I will die soon.
I’ve had an extraordinary life. I finished law school, had an epic love with my husband, got to raise our son. I had the most glorious friendships. I wrote two books.
And I am so grateful, like every transplant patient I’ve ever met.
Author and two-time heart transplant recipient Amy Silverstein. CBS NEWS
But all too often this intense gratitude creates a cloak of silence that hides the realities of transplant life.
The fact is, organ donation is miraculous. Transplant medicine is not.
In 40 years, there has been very limited change in the medicines that patients take daily to prevent rejection of their donor organs. These immunosuppressive drugs continue to wreak havoc on the body, dramatically increasing the risk of diabetes, kidney failure, dangerous infections and, yes, cancers.
And all of this is hidden well behind that pervasive gratitude recipients feel for their donor organs. When you are given everything, there is subtle and explicit pressure to ask for nothing more.
This constrains honest dialogue, and removes a sense of urgency to make meaningful improvements to the existing transplant drug regimen.
Perhaps this is why life expectancy for heart transplant patients has not changed substantially since myfirst transplant in 1988.
Ms. Silverstein is the author of “Sick Girl” and “My Glory Was I Had Such Friends.
CreditCredit…By Marine Buffard
Today, I will explain to my healthy transplanted heart why, in what may be a matter of days or weeks at best, she — well, we — will die.
I slide my hand across my chest and speak aloud, palm to my heart’s crisp beating. “I’m so sorry, sweet girl.” She is not used to hearing me this way, outside my head, beyond the body we share. Up until now, the understanding between us has been internal. Like on our daily runs, when my ’70s yacht rock playlist propels each stride; this heart from a 13-year-old donor revolts in my body with thumps of Oh puh-lease — and we giggle together, picking up our pace to sprinting.
“She was an athlete,” the doctor told me after a surgeon removed my failing heart (the first transplanted one — yes, I’ve had two) and sewed this second beauty beneath my breastbone.Three weeks later, at my high school track I began the trial-and-error process of figuring out how to defy the uncomfortable staccato of her adrenaline-fueled pulse — a consequence of the permanently severed nerves that cannot regrow to full electrical function inside a recipient’s chest. The idea to run with my new donor heart stemmed from the lessons of my previous one that taught me the importance of mastering maximum heart rate sensations early on.
My 35 years living with two different donor hearts (I was 25 at the time of the first transplant) — finishing law school, getting married, becoming a mother and writing two books — has felt like a quest to outlast a limited life expectancy. With compulsive compliance, I adhered to the strictest interpretation of transplant protocols. I honored my gifts of life with self-discipline: not one pat of butter; not one sip of alcohol; running mile after mile hoping to stave off vasculopathy, an insidious artery disease that often besets transplanted hearts within about 10 years.
I carried my own detailed medical notes in and out of every doctor’s appointment trying to strategize, along with my doctor’s input, to head off serious issues at the earliest opportunity. I gave my all to sustaining my donor hearts despite daunting odds, and the hearts rewarded me with extraordinary years. I have been so lucky.
But now I lower my chin and whisper the words malignant … metastatic …lungs … terminal. It is the end of the road for my heart and me — not because we didn’t achieve and maintain sparkling cardiac health. But because the sorry state of transplant medicine took us down.
Organ transplantation is mired in stagnant science and antiquated, imprecise medicine that fails patients and organ donors. And I understand the irony of an incredibly successful and fortunate two-time heart transplant recipient making this case, but my longevity also provides me with a unique vantage point. Standing on the edge of death now, I feel compelled to use my experience in the transplant trenches to illuminate and challenge the status quo.
Over the last almost four decades a toxic triad of immunosuppressive medicines — calcineurin inhibitors, antimetabolites, steroids — has remained essentially the same with limited exceptions. These transplant drugs (which must be taken once or twice daily for life, since rejection is an ongoing risk and the immune system will always regard a donor organ as a foreign invader) cause secondary diseases and dangerous conditions, including diabetes, uncontrollable high blood pressure, kidney damage and failure, serious infections and cancers. The negative impact on recipients is not offset by effectiveness: the current transplant medicine regimen does not work well over time to protect donor organs from immune attack and destruction.
My first donor heart died of transplant medicines’ inadequate protection of the donor heart from rejection; my second will die most likely from their stymied immune effects that give free rein to cancer.
Transplantation is no different from lifelong illnesses that need newer, safer, more effective medicines. Improvements in drug regimens are needed for lupus, Parkinson’s and a host of others. The key difference is that only in transplantation are patients expected to see their disease state as a “miracle.” Only in transplant is there pressure to accept what you’ve been given and not dare express a wish, let alone a demand, for a healthier or longer life.
The side effects of transplant immunosuppression can be sickening day to day, as my small posse of stalwart organ recipient girlfriends knows well; we talk about the vomit bags stashed in our purses, the antacid tablets we tuck into our front pockets for quick-nibble access at a cocktail party or when giving a presentation at work. We’ve encouraged one another to be inventive and keep finding little fixes or at least ameliorations.
Yet over time, each of us tolerate significant challenges and damage, the kind that prompt us to call late at night in tears, reeling from the intractable infections that land us in emergency rooms and hospital beds, the biopsies that pluck pieces of our donor organs leaving us scarred and shaken, the skin cancers that blossom rapidly beside an eyelid or ear. We’ve learned that there can be no clearing every single cancer cell with a suppressed immune system; we will get cut again, and again and again.
But with rattled resolve, we push one another to squeeze laughter out of our common experiences, recounting in mimicking tones all the doctors and all the ways they’ve said to us: “You have taken too much of those medicines for too long. Things are bound to go sideways.”
Too much for too long.
I’ve had the opportunity to sit in on a few closed-door meetings of professional transplant organizations where physicians speak about the problem openly, if briefly, in a safe space for voicing regret and frustration. They admit with shrugged shoulders that after the first five years post-transplant, they don’t know how much immunosuppressive medicine will keep a transplanted organ protected and a recipient’s body safe from harm.
“These 40-year-old medicines have had their day,” the doctor at the head of a virtual conference table professed. “They’re insufficient to prevent cellular and antibody-mediated rejection long term, and if by chance they do, their effects become deadly. I’m talking malignancies.” His colleagues lowered their eyes and sighed.
And yet there is criticism and even vitriol waiting for transplant recipients who express discontent with the status quo. In 2007, in response to my memoir, “Sick Girl,” where I described my full range of emotions after my first heart transplant, I received hostile letters and barbed online comments: Stop complaining … shut up and take your medicine … the doctors should have let you die.
Because a transplant begins with the overwhelming gift of a donor organ that brings you back from the brink of death, the entirety of a patient’s experience from that day forward is cast as a “miracle.” And who doesn’t love a good miracle story? But this narrative discourages transplant recipients from talking freely about the real problems we face and the compromising and life-threatening side effects of the medicines we must take.
This “gratitude paradox,” as I’ve come to think of it, can manifest itself throughout the transplant professional communities as well. Without vigorous pushback, hospitals and physicians have been allowed to set an embarrassingly low bar for achievement. Indeed, the prevailing metric for success as codified by the Health Resources and Services Administration is only one year of post-transplant survival, which relieves pressure for improvement.
And with a muted patient cohort, it has been way too easy for federal, state and nonprofit funding sources to overlook transplantation. Compare this with the influence and substantial research funding generated by engaged parents advocating fiercely on behalf of Type 1 diabetes patients — a worthy cause but one whose absolute number of new patients each year is not that different than that of organ transplant recipients. Perhaps this is why life expectancy after heart transplantation is little changed compared to when I received a heart in 1988.
I am hopeful that with the Senate Finance Committee revealing improprieties, mishandling and wastefulness of donated organs by the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network/United Network for Organ Sharing, a similar light will be shone on the state of transplant medicine so that positive change can finally begin. For now, though, deeply entrenched problems remain, and the most ungrateful thing I could do would be to stay silent in my remaining days.
I am speaking out while I still can for my magnificent hearts.
And for the patients who have called me or written from their post-transplant deathbeds, dismayed, “I did my best, I took every pill, every day. …”
I am speaking for the organ donor families I’ve met, one mother in particular whom I watched rub the mid-back of a man who’d received her daughter’s kidney; she mashed her body against the place where her girl might still reside. She called me two years later, sobbing, because this kidney recipient had died, as had the patients who had received the liver and lungs.
I am speaking for my transplant cardiologist, the finest physician I have ever known, who sat across from me last month and cried into his palms when he told me I had incurable cancer.
I sat quietly for a moment before replying. “I sacrificed my whole body for this beautiful heart,” I said. “But there’s a victory here, too. I kept her perfect to the end.”
A California journalist documents the far-right takeover of her town: ‘We’re a test case’
Dani Anguiano in Redding with photographs by Marlena Sloss
April 22, 2023
In a seemingly long gone era – before the Trump presidency, and Covid, and the 2020 election – Doni Chamberlain would get the occasional call from a displeased reader who had taken issue with one of her columns. They would sometimes call her stupid and use profanities.
Today, when people don’t like her pieces, Chamberlain said, they tell her she’s a communist who doesn’t deserve to live. One local conservative radio host said she should be hanged.
Chamberlain, 66, has worked as a journalist in Shasta county, California, for nearly 30 years.
Never before in this far northern California outpost has she witnessed such open hostility towards the press.
She has learned to take precautions. No meeting sources in public. She livestreams rowdy events where the crowd is less than friendly and doesn’t walk to her car without scanning the street. Sometimes, restraining orders can be necessary tools.
These practices have become crucial in the last three years, she said, as she’s documented the county’s shift to the far right and the rise of an ultraconservative coalition into the area’s highest office. Shasta, Chamberlain said, is in the midst of a “perfect storm” as different hard-right factions have joined together to form a powerful political force with outside funding and publicity from fringe figures.
The new majority, backed by militia members, anti-vaxxers, election deniers and residents who have long felt forgotten by governments in Sacramento and Washington, has fired the county health officer and done away with the region’s voting system. Politically moderate public officials have faced bullying, intimidation and threats of violence. County meetings have turned into hours-long shouting matches.
Chamberlain and her team at A News Cafe, the news site she runs, have covered it all. Her writing has made her a public enemy of the conservative crowd intent on remaking the county. Far-right leaders have confronted her at rallies and public meetings, mocking and berating her. At a militia-organized protest in 2021, the crowd screamed insults.
The response of parts of her community has left her shocked: “This isn’t how it’s supposed to be to be a journalist. I shouldn’t go to my car afraid one of these guys is gonna bash me in the head with a baseball bat,” she said on a beautiful spring day in Redding late last month.
But it has left her with a sense of urgency, a determination to warn readers about a movement that shows no signs of slowing down and could have national repercussions as extremists try to create a framework that could be replicated elsewhere. “I can’t imagine how bad things can get here,” she said.
A community swinging to the extreme right
A lifelong Shasta county resident, Chamberlain became a cub reporter in her late thirties. She went to college later in life after marrying her high school sweetheart and having children. She initially wanted to be a social worker but has always been drawn to scratching under the surface of things, she said, a tendency she attributed to her childhood: after the death of her mother, she and her sisters were raised by a family that was far less kind than they appeared to be from the outside.
For 10 years, she wrote a beloved column at the local newspaper, telling the stories of community characters and sharing her personal experiences, like her son’s deployment to Iraq. When she was laid off, a hundred people picketed outside the newspaper’s office.
With help from her son, she started A News Cafe, an online magazine that documents local affairs, and readers came with her. Just before Covid hit, she had considered selling the website, and then decided to scale back operations and change its focus to town happenings and recipes, a favorite topic of the hobby baker.
But then Covid shut down the state, and laid bare the bitter fault lines that divided this community.
Residents angry over pandemic closures began filling county meetings, sometimes forcing their way inside, and directed their ire at elected officials who enforced only the minimum restrictions required by the state. One local resident, Carlos Zapata, warned the board of supervisors at a meeting in August 2020 to reopen the county or things wouldn’t be “peaceful much longer”.
“When the ballot box is gone, there is only the cartridge box. You have made bullets expensive, but luckily for you, ropes are reusable,” another resident said at a board of supervisors meeting in January 2021.
Religious leaders defied state orders and continued holding events. Bethel church, a Redding megachurch with more than 11,000 members and a major footprint in this city of 92,000, reported hundreds of cases at its school of “supernatural ministry”.
But there was more than just a backlash under way. The anger coalesced into an anti-establishment movement backed financially by the Connecticut millionaire Reverge Anselmo, who has a longstanding grudge against the county over a failed effort to start a winery.
Leaders of the movement sought to recall county supervisors, and produced a glossy documentary series about their efforts to “take back” their county. In February 2022, voters ousted a longtime supervisor, a former police chief and self-described Reagan Republican, and gained control of the board of supervisors.
The climate in the area had shifted, residents said, and those who had expressed support for officials and Covid rules encountered hostility. One man had his tires slashed, Chamberlain said. Others reported being mocked and bullied in public for wearing masks.
Still, the recall election saw low turnout with just 41% of eligible voters casting a ballot. Though many residents opposed the rightwing agenda, they didn’t take the threat seriously, Chamberlain said.
Chamberlain followed the upheaval closely, and the far-right figures driving it, while still writing stories about the joys of loungewear and how to sell old belongings.
She began documenting the political developments through chatty and irreverent opinion columns, with analysis of what’s happening and who’s behind it, and warnings of the danger it poses to the community.
“As the shit storm of civil unrest piles up, the North State has become a tinderbox at the ready, on the verge of ignition. Slogans and memes are the kindling. Calls to action, aggression and civil war are often found on the same Facebook pages as family photos, holiday greetings and birthday wishes,” she wrote in August 2020.
Chamberlain and A News Cafe reporters were also often breaking news: a Bethel church leader officiating his son’s wedding, a large gathering held in defiance of Covid restrictions; a pandemic shortage of nurses temporarily closing a local neonatal intensive care unit; and a sheriff’s deputy promoting far-right extremist content on social media.
Chamberlain described Zapata, the resident who had threatened violence and had become the public face of Shasta county’s anti-establishment movement, as an “alt-right recall kingpin/militia member/bull-semen purveyor/restaurant owner/former Florida strip-club owner”. He lashed out in comments before the board of supervisor that Chamberlain was “coward” who wants to “poison children”.
Zapata told the Guardian he was frustrated with Chamberlain’s “incessant writing” about him and what he described as attacks on his reputation and his family. He argued he was cordial and willing to sit down for an interview, but feels Chamberlain has created a caricature of him by taking things out of context.
“I stand for the majority of residents in Shasta county who want to ensure Shasta county remains a safe and healthy place for our children to grow and prosper,” he said in a statement. “Doni doesn’t like that. That is why she has made it her priority to attack me in the name of journalism for several years.”
Zapata is the only person in Chamberlain’s three decade career whom she has refused to interview, the journalist said. Instead, she has quoted his statements and social media posts rather than speak with him directly. “He has used very abusive language. He has made threats against people. He doesn’t tell the truth often. I refuse to write things that I know are not going to be true.”
Chamberlain has made a point of not interacting with those who attack her directly, and continuing her reporting. But the exchanges, along with the menacing, graphic threats to her and her staff and others in the community, and the lack of action from law enforcement have fundamentally changed how she approaches her job.
Last year, for example, A News Cafe reported that Zapata had threatened a local man in a voicemail, telling him he was a “dead motherfucker” for talking about Zapata’s wife. Zapata apologized and law enforcement forwarded the case to the district attorney, requesting a charge of terrorist threats, Chamberlain said, but nothing has come of it. “Every time one of those guys gets away with saying something like that, with zero consequences, it moves the line a little further.”
Zapata described the incident to the Guardian as a “situation between two grown men”. “It was handled and there hasn’t been any further issue,” he said.
But the threats make doing journalism in Shasta county particularly challenging, she added. Finding sources is difficult. Many people are afraid of speaking out, even anonymously.
And her family worries for her. Her son has put cameras all around the house. For Mother’s Day, he gifted her gel pepper spray. She keeps an air horn next to her bed.
Chamberlain’s twin sister has warned her not to poke the bear.
“I say, ‘I’m not poking a bear, I’m just holding a flashlight, I’m reporting things other people can’t go report,’” she said. “I feel a moral responsibility to let people know what’s happening.”
Amid the rage, a loyal following
Chamberlain has vocal opponents, but she also has devoted followers.
As local journalism across the US disappears, Chamberlain has found a winning formula. Her site attracts more than 100,000 unique visitors a month, according to Chamberlain, and hundreds donate, locally and from across the US. She has several paid editorial staff members, even more than the local newspaper, she says. She’s looking to hire more.
At a board of supervisors meeting in March on the hiring of a new county CEO and the voting system, audience members could be seen browsing her site. (It had just published two bombshell stories: one revealing that police were investigating the county’s top candidate for said CEO job, a leader of a California secessionist group, for an incident with a teenage girl at a local business; the other an analysis from the county clerk about the risks of introducing an untested manual tally voting system in response to disproven theories about Dominion voting machines.) Chamberlain was sitting in the front of the room, her notebook and pen in hand.
In the back of the chambers, Jeff Gorder, the retired Shasta county public defender who came to urge supervisors to keep its voting system intact, said he was a longtime reader of the site. “What would we do without journalists like that to follow up on all of these issues? We’d really been in a world of hurt. Journalism is going away at the local level, so I’m really glad that we have them,” he said. “She’s just very thorough.”
Chamberlain has no plans to slow down and said she pulls all-nighters at least four times a month.
“As a journalist, you couldn’t ask for a place to have a more exciting job because so much is happening here,” she said.
She balances her work with the things that bring her joy: baking, spending time with friends and working on her home.
“There’s so many things that are out of my control. And what’s happening in Shasta county, all that kind of stuff is out of my control. So what I do have control of is planting, I planted hundreds of bulbs,” Chamberlain said. “That’s an optimistic thing to do. And when I was planting them, I was thinking, ‘I wonder what things will be like here when those tulips bloom.’”
Still, she fears for the future of Shasta county and the repercussions it could have. “I think we’re a test case for rightwing folks like [Mike] Lindell,” she said. “These big heavy-hitting wealthy people are using Shasta county, I believe, as this little petri dish … And so far, it’s working. I’m watching it unveil before my very eyes. And it’s terrifying.”
If GOP doesn’t listen to Nancy Mace on abortion, the party can count on losing big in 2024
Ingrid Jacques, USA TODAY – April 22, 2023
South Carolina U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace seems to understand some things that many others in her Republican Party are missing.
On issues such as abortion and guns, compromise is going to be necessary – or the GOP will lose the support of all but its most devout proponents. And that is not a recipe for winning elections.
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, Mace has advocated a “middle ground” approach to abortion rights, warning that extreme anti-abortion views allowing for few if any exceptions aren’t compassionate toward women and will alienate moderate conservatives and independent voters. The majority of Americans now support legal abortion in most cases, according to polls.
“The middle, the independent voters, right of center, left of center, they cannot support us,” Mace said on a Sunday TV show.
Court battle renews focus on abortion
The midterm elections made it clear that voters were motivated on the issue of abortion, and many Republicans weren’t ready with a message that resonated – if they had one at all.
And now the legal battle over access to frequently used abortion pill mifepristone has brought fresh attention to the matter. After a federal judge in Texas halted Food and Drug Administration approval of the drug this month, the case has moved quickly through the courts.
The debate over this pill is a big deal, because more than half of abortions in the United States are medication abortions. Mifepristone is used in conjunction with misoprostol, which can also be used on its own. The two drugs are also used to treat miscarriages.
The judge’s decision sparked outrage from Democrats, including New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who said the Biden administration should simply ignore the ruling. Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon echoed the sentiment.
As I wrote previously about Ocasio-Cortez and Wyden, Mace took things too far by making the argument that the executive branch can simply ignore the judicial branch when it doesn’t like a court decision. The ruling needs to play out in the courts, and it is.
Her broader point is worthy of consideration, however.
“This is an issue that Republicans have been largely on the wrong side of,” Mace told CNN after the Texas judge’s decision. “We have, over the last nine months, not shown compassion toward women, and this is one of those issues that I’ve tried to lead on as someone who’s pro-life and just have some common sense.”
Political decisions on issues as impactful as abortion shouldn’t be based solely on polls. Yet conservatives have to realize that imposing too much change at once on citizens will backfire on them.
USA TODAY columnist Ingrid Jacques
Politicians and groups opposed to abortion should listen to voices like Mace and fine-tune a strategy going into 2024 that is reasonable and won’t create a backlash that could hurt the GOP for years to come.
A Dietitian Explains How To Add More Potassium To Your Diet To Lower Blood Pressure
Faith Geiger – April 21, 2023
woman eating fresh fruit salad
High blood pressure, also known as hypertension, is a common health problem that affects millions of people worldwide. If left uncontrolled, hypertension can lead to serious health issues such as heart disease, stroke, and kidney failure. While there are several factors that play a role in your blood pressure, including your stress levels (find tips for managing stress here), and there are medications available to help manage hypertension, a healthy diet can also play a significant role. One nutrient that has been shown to be particularly beneficial in lowering blood pressure is potassium.
To learn more about how adding more potassium to your diet can help you manage your blood pressure and discover some of the best sources of this nutrient, we spoke to registered dietitian Krutika Nanavati. She gave us a rundown on why adding potassium-rich foods like fresh fruits and vegetables, legumes, and more can make all the difference in your health. Read on for all of her expert insight!
There are several ways that adding more potassium to your diet can help reduce your risk of high blood pressure. For starters, Nanavati tells us that “Potassium helps relax the walls of blood vessels, which lowers resistance to blood flow and reduces the strain on the heart.”
In addition to lowering resistance of blood flow, increasing your potassium intake can also prevent a build-up of calcium in your arteries and veins, which Nanavati cites as a major contributing factor to high blood pressure.
Then there’s the fact that potassium helps maintain healthy fluid levels and keep electrolytes balanced in your body. “It works by balancing out sodium, helping to reduce the effects of sodium on our blood vessels and reducing our overall risk of high blood pressure,” Nanavati explains. Nice!
So, now that we know how great potassium is at lowering blood pressure, what are some of the best ways to fit it into your diet? Nanavati recommends the following:
-Fresh fruits and vegetables: Nanavati says that one of the best ways to up your potassium intake is through fruits such as bananas, oranges, apricots and kiwis, as well as vegetables like spinach, broccoli and potatoes.
-Legumes: Don’t underestimate the power of legumes! Nanavati suggests dried peas, beans and lentils, which she notes are “packed with potassium and other important nutrients.”
-Dairy products: Good news for cheese lovers; Nanavati tells us that dairy products like milk, yogurt, and cottage cheese are also great sources of potassium.
-Fish: Fish can be a great protein choice for so many reasons. You may already know that this food is packed with healthy fats and other nutrients, but did you know it also offers a healthy dose of potassium? Try salmon, tuna and sardines.
-Nuts and seeds: Nuts and seeds make a fantastic snack or topping for your oatmeal, smoothie bowls, salads, and more. In addition to being nutrient-rich and highly satiating, Nanavati says they’re also a great source of potassium. She recommends almonds, pistachios, pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds in particular. Learn more about the benefits of nuts here.
-Dried herbs and spices: Don’t forget to add some flavor to your meals with spices and herbs! Not only do they make food taste great, but according to Nanavati, they can also add some extra potassium to the mix. Parsley, coriander, and black pepper are all potassium-rich options.
The bottom line
Ultimately, maintaining healthy blood pressure levels will require you to make healthy choices every day. (You can find some of the best habits to lower your blood pressure here.) However, your diet can play a major role, and potassium is one of the best things to add to the mix. When you follow Nanavati’s advice by adding these foods to your plate, you’ll be one step closer to your health goals.
By Chris Smaje, originallypublished by Small Farm Future
April 20, 2023
The time has come to announce my new book, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future: The Case for an Ecological Food System and Against Manufactured Foods. It’ll be published in the UK on 29 June and the US on 20 July, with ebook and audio versions also available. So there’s no excuse… I’m delighted that Sarah Langford, the author of Rooted, is writing a foreword for it.
The folks at Chelsea Green have come up with this attractive but unfancy cover, which matches my feelings about the book.
I wrote the book in a two-month blur as a job of work that I felt somebody had to do to combat the head of steam building around the case for a farm-free future associated with George Monbiot’s book Regenesis and the Reboot Food initiative. And if that somebody was me, so be it.
My original motivation was mainly just to critique the fanciful ecomodernism of Reboot Food, which I believe is apt to bedazzle people of goodwill but with limited knowledge of food and farming into thinking that a technological solution is at hand that will enable them to continue living high-energy, urban consumerist lifestyles while going easy on the climate and the natural world. Really, it isn’t. The danger is that farm-free bromides will, as usual with ecomodernism, instil a ‘great, they’ve fixed it!’ complacency at just the time when we need to jettison the techno-fix mentality and radically reimagine our social and political assumptions.
So the book takes a somewhat polemical approach in critiquing the arguments for manufactured food. But actually I found that this provided a pretty good foil for making an alternative case for agrarian localism, what I call in my book ‘a predominantly distributed rural population, energy restraint, diverse mixed farming for local needs, wildlands, human-centred science, popular smallholder democracy and keystone ecology’. So the book has that more positive framing too, much of which will be familiar to regular readers of this blog or of my previous book, although I like to think I’ve pushed a few things forwards. Still, it’s a short book, so a more detailed exposition awaits.
What I don’t and won’t do is offer some alternative technical or social one-size-fits-all solution. Solutionism of this kind is itself part of the problem. I daresay that will lead to some incomprehension in the book’s reception along the lines that if I can’t provide an alternative ‘answer’, then I can’t have anything worthwhile to say. Naturally, I don’t subscribe to that line of reasoning. Researchers, opinion-mongers and writers of books just don’t have ‘the answer’, whereas you – whoever ‘you’ are – probably do have part of an answer locally. But you have to work at it. Maybe my book will help. In that sense, what I offer is a bit like the answer of farming itself. Instead of the magic beans and golden geese of the Reboot Food narrative, all I can realistically offer is a bare seedbed awaiting productive work. The scene then has to be peopled by others, ordinary working people, doing the work.
Or maybe you could think of the book as an exercise in rewilding, because the nature of wildness is that you can’t really tell what’s going to happen next.
Anyway, I’ll be interested to see what kind of reception the book gets. Possibly, it’s presumptuous of me to expect it’ll get much of a reception at all, but my tweet from a few days back announcing the book has had around 34,000 views – so by my humble standards I think there may be an appetite out there for this.
I’m not going to steal my own thunder from the book pre-publication, but I thought I’d offer loyal readers of this blog a few tidbits by way of a sneak preview.
So, after some introductory material the book asks whether the energetics and economic geography implied in the manufactured food narrative are feasible (as I just said, I can’t give too much away just now about the book’s contents, but I’ll offer a clue: the answer is a two-letter word beginning with ‘n’). Then I consider whether the case against the wildlife and climate impacts of familiar plant-and-livestock based agriculture articulated in manufactured food narratives is plausible (answer: it’s complicated – let’s call it a two-letter word beginning with ‘n’ again, but with a side of three-letter word beginning with ‘y’). Next, I move on to examine whether a farm-free future for humanity is likely to involve what ecomodernist pioneer Stewart Brand called ‘urban promise’ – urbanization as a positive and prosperity-enriching experience. On that one, we’re back to a straightforward answer – the two-letter ‘n’ word again. Or at least we are if we have any commitment to justice. Finally, I make an alternative case for agrarian localism as the best means of securing human and natural wellbeing and climate stability, involving long-term human relationships with the land that, like all long-term relationships, require regular and ongoing work.
So there you have it. If you’d like to read the full version (or alternatively hear me reading it) I’d suggest pre-ordering a copy now! But I daresay I’ll write more about its themes on this blog once the book is out, albeit most likely with a bit less expounding than I devoted to my previous one.
Chris Smaje
Chris Smaje has coworked a small farm in Somerset, southwest England, for the last 17 years. Previously, he was a university-based social scientist, working in the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey and the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths College on aspects of social policy, social identities and the environment. Since switching focus to the practice and politics of agroecology, he’s written for various publications, such as The Land , Dark Mountain , Permaculture magazine and Statistics Views, as well as academic journals such as Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems and the Journal of Consumer Culture . Smaje writes the blog Small Farm Future, is a featured author at www.resilience.org and a current director of the Ecological Land Co-op. Chris’ latest book is: A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity, and a Shared Earth.
Japan has almost completely eliminated gun deaths — here’s how
Chris Weller, Erin Snodgrass, Katie Anthony, Azmi Haroun, Lloyd Lee – April 20, 2023
japan gun shotgun
AP
Japan is a country of more than 127 million people, but it rarely sees more than 10 gun deaths a year.
Culture is one reason for the low rate, but gun control is a major one, too.
Japan has a long list of tests that applicants must pass before gaining access to a small pool of guns.
A recent spate of mass shootings has prompted intensified discussions around gun control in the US.
On Saturday, four people were killed and 32 were injured in a shooting in Dadeville, Alabama, during a 16th birthday party. Last month, a 28-year-old woman opened fire at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, killing three elementary school students and three adult staff members, according to police.
One of the biggest questions being asked: How does the US prevent this from happening over and over again?
Although the US has no exact counterpart elsewhere in the world, some countries have taken steps that can provide a window into what successful gun control looks like. Japan, a country of 127 million people and yearly gun deaths rarely totaling more than 10, is one such country.
“Ever since guns entered the country, Japan has always had strict gun laws,” Iain Overton, executive director of Action on Armed Violence, a British advocacy group, told the BBC. “They are the first nation to impose gun laws in the whole world, and I think it laid down a bedrock saying that guns really don’t play a part in civilian society.”
Japan is a country with regulations upon regulations
Japan’s success in curbing gun deaths is intimately linked with its history. Following World War II, pacifism emerged as one of the dominant philosophies in the country. Police only started carrying firearms after American troops made them, in 1946, for the sake of security. It’s also written into Japanese law, as of 1958, that “no person shall possess a firearm or firearms or a sword or swords.”
The government has since loosened the law, but the fact Japan enacted gun control from the stance of prohibition is important. (It’s also one of the main factors separating Japan from the US, where the Second Amendment broadly permits people to own guns.)
If Japanese people want to own a gun, they must attend an all-day class, pass a written test, and achieve at least 95% accuracy during a shooting-range test. Then they have to pass a mental-health evaluation, which takes place at a hospital, and pass a background check, in which the government digs into their criminal record and interviews friends and family. They can only buy shotguns and air rifles — no handguns — and every three years they must retake the class and initial exam.
Even Japanese riot police infrequently turn to guns, instead preferring long batons.Toru Hanai/Reuters
Japan has also embraced the idea that fewer guns in circulation will result in fewer deaths. Each prefecture — which ranges in size from half a million people to 12 million, in Tokyo — can operate a maximum of three gun shops; new magazines can only be purchased by trading in empty ones; and when gun owners die, their relatives must surrender the deceased member’s firearms.
The role of trust can’t be overstated
The result is a situation where citizens and police seldom wield or use guns.
Off-duty police aren’t allowed to carry firearms, and most encounters with suspects involve some combination of martial arts or striking weapons. When Japanese attacks do turn deadly, they generally involve fatal stabbings. In July of 2016, an assailant killed 19 people in an assisted living facility. Japan rarely sees so many fatalities from guns in an entire year.
Yet even Japan is not immune to gun violence. The assassination of former the county’s former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on July 8, 2022, shocked the nation. Abe was shot and killed by a shooting suspect wielding what appeared to be a homemade firearm constructed of metal barrels attached to wood with black tape.
Nancy Snow, Japan director of the International Security Industrial Council, told Insider that Japan will be “forever changed” by Abe’s death.
“When I talk about Japan changing forever — the Japanese people, it’s hard to even have a conversation with them about the gun culture in the United States, without people getting viscerally upset thinking about it because they say, we’re not that country,” Snow said.
Gun control in Japan, combined with the prevailing respect for authority, has led to a more harmonious relationship between civilians and the police than in the US. It’s something of a chicken-egg problem: The police, in choosing to use sub-lethal force on people, generate less widespread fear among the public that they’ll be shot. In turn, people feel less of a need to arm themselves.
The US, meanwhile, has a more militarized police force that uses automatic weapons and armored cars. There is also less widespread trust between people (and between people and institutions). The factors combine to produce a much fearful culture that can seem to be always on-edge.
Japan’s approach would be a tough sell in the face of American gun culture, but it can provide a starting point for reining in the senseless violence that has become a hallmark of life in the US.
