Activism Across America

Cincinnati eaters, pay attention… and that would include, um… everyone in Cincinnati. Your city, on the border of Ohio and Kentucky, has access to a great diversity of local food, what with the southern hilly fields to the south, and the northern flat fields to the north.

There’s a great source for finding out about foods local to Cincinnati: The Cincinnati Locavore blog.

Local foods are great for the local economy, but they’re good for the national economy as well, because local foods cut down on waste, and leave consumers with more money to spend on stuff they actually need, rather than interstate transportation that doesn’t add any value to food (and actually takes a good deal of quality away, through aging and selection of produce varieties that don’t taste great, but deal with shipping well). Local foods keep our economy more diverse and complex, and thus more resilient to bad times.

Local food networks also support farms that are more likely to reject the industrial agriculture model of big monocultures of a very few varieties of produce or livestock. Local food keeps cultural diversity and biological diversity right along with economic diversification.

So, celebrate, Cincinnati. Eat up, and keep it local!

In Utah, there’s a State Senator who thinks that he’s being brave by daring to insult people. Senator Chris Buttars made public statements calling homosexual people, “They’re probably the greatest threat to America going down I know of.”

Homosexuality is a greater threat to America than the economic crisis? That’s absurd.

The greatest threat to America that I can think of is ignorance of the Constitution and the freedoms it guarantees - after all, it’s the Constitution that makes the USA the USA.

The Human Rights Campaign is organizing an effort to talk back to State Senator Buttars, and let him know that his bizarre beliefs are not shared by many Americans.

Thumbs down to Chino Latino, a trendy fusion restaurant in Minneapolis, Minnesota for serving an endangered species as food.

Marlin was once king of the oceans, as big as many sharks, the fish was the nemesis, as powerful as Moby Dick, in Earnest Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Sadly, there aren’t big marlins like that any more. They’ve all been fished, and sold off by a lot of greedy old men, the owners of industrial fishing operations and seafood merchandising networks.

Marlin populations are down to 90 percent of what they once were - if that.

And so what does Chino Latino do? They help fund the extermination of the marlin by offering it up on their menu… calling the dish The Great Marlin Jerk Off.

“Everyone is a winner with our blue ribbon jerk spiced marlin grilled atop a bed of jasmine rice with coconut cream sauce and a refreshing mango salsa” says the Chino Latino menu. But, no, not everyone is a winner. The marlin certainly isn’t a winner. It’s been reduced from a Hemmingway’s noble character to a joke about masturbation.

And please… by the time that marlin reaches Minnesota, it isn’t even fresh. Something else that ought to make that marlin rather unpalatable is the fact that, because marlins are a top ocean predator, marlin flesh is filled with mercury. Mmmmm…. yummy heavy metals.

You can do something about this grave insult perpetrated by Chino Latino. Don’t go eat at Chino Latino… and spread the word. When people ask you why you won’t go with them to that restaurant, point them to the web site of Take Marlin Off The Menu.

No, it’s not what you typically might think of when it comes to the phrase anti-family, but it’s the best description I can think of to describe the bill that Tennessee’s US Representative Marsha Blackburn has proposed.

H.R. 381 would force substantial cuts in funding to hospitals, early childhood education, and health care for kids. It would also require cuts to programs like WIC, which supports pregnant mothers by giving them access to the adequate nutrition that their unborn children need.

It’s cruel to attack American families, especially at this time, when many Americans find themselves out of work, through no fault of their own, only because their employers couldn’t stay afloat. If you live in Representative Blackburn’s district in Tennessee, please call her office through her congressional switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask her to rescind this bill. We don’t need Marsha Blackburn to kick American families when they’re down.