NYTimes, LATimes: Tales of the organic, slow-food movement (and photojournalism in a semi-color age)
This post started with a pang of sympathy. Today’s NYTimes front page, which I scanned over on the way to the ScienceTimes section (for a separate post), has an arresting slice-of-city-life story by Susan Dominus, “In Mystery (and Culture Clash), Some Brooklyn Bees Turn Red” . It’s not a science story, but gently, compellingly done and is the sort of thing that science writers are drawn to read just because it’s about nature. It relates the consternation of bee keepers and foodies upon discovery that their lovely bees are themselves turning reddish, and their honey is red, and tastes way too sweet and sort of metallic. All because the foragers found that a maraschino cherry packing plant nearby has the occasional puddle of leaked packing syrup, chock full of red dye #40, and they like that more than the nectar of blooms they now tend to bypass. The pang of sympathy is for the photographer, one Ozier Muhammed, who got a nifty closeup shot of the red honey-like product dripping from the comb. And it ran inside on a black and white page. Thud. I thought maybe on line I’d see it in gory-ish glory, but nope. All the editors put in was a long shot of a restaurant owner (and bee keeper) holding his hive’s wooden frame – but boy is the sorta-honey red. That’s one of the shames of modern newspapering. The pages in color only mean that the shooters often get frustrated to have their most vivid work run on gray scale sheets. (In the same vein, for anybody who read another NYT p. 1 print edition story today that jumped inside, on those wikileaked diplomatic cables and N. Korea: it’s a shame the surreal Reuters shot of ranks of Pyongyang’s soldiers marching in step – a precise leggy step as they are all women in short skirts – ran in black and white too. Busby Berkeley, but creepy too. Here it is in color. North Korean chorines carry AK’s.)
This post is a three-parter and does have a theme: new style farming and food sense and its gradual incorporation into the broader society (ie, the 70s are really really over). The other two parts:
- LA Times – Megan Kimble: Suburban living, down on the farm / A growing number of housing development are being build arond organic farms….” ; A new town in Illinois, built around a farm, is the main focus. Best line: “Every effort is made to capture a bit of an old-country farming town. At Serenbe, even the landscaping is edible. Banks of blueberry and fig bushes line sidewalks, and pecan and peach trees sprout from street medians.” I hope the fruit all gets picked before it makes a mess of the curb strip and sidewalk. One wonders if all the cars run on biofuel.
NYTimes – Jim Robbins: Farmers Find Organic Arsenal to Wage War on Pests ; This one is in the ScienceTimes, where it belongs and runs inside (on, praise be, a color page to support those strawberries, their hue the natural kind and not red dye #40). The details on how organic farmers deploy natural predators and general bio-balance to keep pests at a low ebb – while gathering data to get even better at it – is pretty impress. I like the part about luring pests to some yummy rows of non-crop in the fields, then vacuuming them up. Question: are the vacuumed bugs then mulched, composted, and recycled as organic fertilizer? Eat my crops will ya? Turn-about’s fair play!
- Charlie Petit
