Food

Karine Polwart “Wild Food and Medicine”

~ Michael Stevenson ~ Leave a comment

WILD FOOD AND MEDICINE

The Equinox has just passed and the turn is palpable here in Pathhead, thank goodness. Don’t get me wrong, I love the hunker down creep into winter dark but by this point in the year, I’m craving birdsong and blossom and light.

I’m marking this Spring with some fresh learning via Grassroots Remedies, an Edinburgh and Glasgow based workers’ cooperative which is rekindling the tradition of herbal community healthcare. Or, as they put it: Folk Medicine for All Folk! That’s folky enough for me.

One of my favourite late summer and autumn season pursuits is gathering fruit. I make elderberry syrup (I’m down to my last bottle in the fridge now) and sloe gin and I boil up jellies and other concoctions using brambles, crabapples, haws, hips, rowans and sea buckthorn. I love it, but it requires a degree of seasonal awareness and timekeeping organisation that sometimes escapes me. I miss the raspberries every year. And beyond the summer and autumn harvest, I always mean to do something with the wild leek and garlic, the wood sorrel and the dandelions.

I’m enrolled on Wild Things: A Year of Wild Food and Medicine. And I’ve signed up for a series of local Edinburgh based herb walks that begin this Friday. I’ve put all the dates in my diary, and carved out some learning time, which feels great.

Plant Medicine has a long history and much if it is bound up with the knowledge and of care and women whose contributions have largely been erased from history. But there’s a striking link to one of Edinburgh’s most beloved institutions too.


The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh was founded in the grounds of Holyrood House in 1670, by Robert Sibbald and Andrew Balfour, two of the leading physicians – and botanists – of the era. It was designed as a ‘Physic Garden’, a collection of fresh plants for medical prescription and for the teaching of botany to medical students. Sibbald was inaugural Professor of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, but he was also keen to ensure that plant knowledge was not confined to the privileged.

In 1699, in response to ‘The Ill Years’, a series of successive crop failures and widespread hunger across Scotland, he published ‘Provision For The Poor in Time of Dearth or Scarcity’, a 24-page plant field guide to foraging. It is subtitled ‘Where There is an Account of Such Food as May be Easily Gotten when Corns are Scarce, Or Unfit for Use: and of Such Meats as May be Used when the Ordinary Provisions Fail Or are Very Dear’.

The connection between plants and health has been somewhat breached by the industrialisation and compartmentalisation of modern medicine. I’m deeply grateful for the modern NHS that we have. But I’m fearful too. We’re in a period of history when we, as ordinary people, will need more knowledge and agency around how to look after ourselves and each other. And whilst we’ll still need specialist expertise and care, for those that can access it, we’ll need much more than that too. And we’ll need to share what we know, and what we have.
SPRING

Next month, I’m hoping to do a day of solo filming with the brilliant Ormiston-based videographer Sandy Butler. Let’s just say my own house is not quite for this purpose right now! So, I’m reaching out to folks locally in Midlothian, East Lothian or north Borders who might be willing to host me for a day in a spacious, quiet, bright living room or studio space in exchange for a bespoke wee household song offering and two free tickets to my next Edinburgh show (which will be in November – more on that next time).

If you’re free during the day on April 21st, all you’d need to do is take some phone snaps of your room to give an indication of size and feel and let me know where you are!

 

TOUR DATES

Thanks so much to everyone who’s bought tickets for my solo tour south of the border in June. Shoreham is sold out already and several dates are shifting towards limited tickets. So please don’t leave it too late!

I’ll also be playing three dates with Dave Milligan – What A Wonderful World Festival in Alnwick in June, and Milton Keynes International Festival and Yn Chruinnaght Celtic Gathering on the Isle Of Man in July.

Beginning The Reckoning

~ Michael Stevenson ~ Leave a comment

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

May 13, 2022

Today the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol issued subpoenas for testimony to five members of Congress: Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Representatives Scott Perry (R-PA), Jim Jordan (R-OH), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), and Mo Brooks (R-AL). The committee previously invited them to cooperate voluntarily, and they refused. The committee has evidence that these five, in particular, know crucial things about the events of January 6 and activities surrounding the attempt to overturn President Joe Biden’s election. 

McCarthy communicated with Trump before, during, and after the attack on January 6th. A recently released tape shows McCarthy claiming that Trump admitted some guilt over the attack.  

Perry tried to install Trump loyalist Jeffrey Clark as acting attorney general to overturn the election. 

Jordan was part of meetings and discussions after the election to overturn its results. He also communicated with Trump on January 6th, including in the morning, before the attack took place.

Biggs was part of the planning for January 6, including the plan to bring protesters to Washington, D.C. He also worked to convince state officials that the election was stolen. Former White House officials say Biggs sought a presidential pardon in connection with the attempt to overturn the election results. 

Wearing body armor, Brooks spoke at the January 6 rally, where he told rioters to “start taking down names and kicking ass.” Since then, he has said Trump tried to get him to help “rescind the election of 2020” and put Trump back in the White House.

Committee Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) said: “We urge our colleagues to comply with the law, do their patriotic duty, and cooperate with our investigation as hundreds of other witnesses have done.”

This is an escalation of the committee’s investigation into the attempt to keep Trump in power, and today we learned more about what Trump’s presidency meant for national security.

The Department of Justice has opened a grand jury investigation into the handling of the classified documents that ended up at Mar-a-Lago. Prosecutors have issued a subpoena to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to get the boxes of documents and have asked to interview people who worked in the White House in the last days of Trump’s presidency. A spokesperson for Trump said: “President Trump consistently handled all documents in accordance with applicable law and regulations. Belated attempts to second-guess that clear fact are politically motivated and misguided.”

We also learned more about the people Trump’s presidency empowered.

The House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis, chaired by Representative James Clyburn (D-SC) and charged with examining waste, fraud, and any other issues relating to the government response to the coronavirus pandemic, issued a report today laying out how meatpacking giants got around local and state health officials trying to protect workers. 

Working with Under Secretary of Food Safety Mindy Brashears at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), who industry lobbyists boasted “hasn’t lost a battle for us,” top executives of JBS, Smithfield, and Tyson asked Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to get Vice President Mike Pence to throw his weight behind keeping workers in the plant. Less than a week later, Pence said at a press conference that meatpacking workers “need…to show up and do your job.” Industry leaders wrote a proposed executive order for Trump to issue, declaring a meat shortage and invoking the Defense Production Act to ensure that the plants continued to operate. Less than a week later, Trump issued a similar executive order.

But there wasn’t actually a shortage. Even as John H. Tyson, chair of Tyson’s board, ran full-page ads in national newspapers warning that “[t]he food supply chain is breaking” and “[o]ur plants must remain operational so we can supply food to our families in America,” U.S. pork exports were at a three-year high.

At the same time, companies asked for federal liability protection against lawsuits if workers got Covid-19 on the job. And they did get sick. Taylor Telford of the Washington Post noted that research from the University of California at Davis showed that about 334,000 coronavirus cases have been tied to meatpacking plants across the country. They have caused more than $11 billion in economic damage. Not, apparently, to the meatpacking companies, however. According to a Reuters story from December 2021, meat packers’ profits jumped 300% during the pandemic.

This story points to a larger problem of the consolidation of food production, a problem we are seeing right now in the acute shortage of baby formula in the U.S., where supplies are 43% below normal. The problem stems primarily from a recall of formula produced by Abbott, the country’s largest producer of infant formula, in its Sturgis, Michigan, factory after Cronobacter bacteria, which can cause a potentially deadly infection in infants, was found in test samples.  

Abbott has had a good run lately: in October 2019 it announced a $3 billion share buyback program to make its stock more valuable. Two years later, last October, a whistleblower warned that the Michigan plant was in need of repair, and claimed that Abbott had falsified records and hidden information from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Four months later, in February 2022, the FDA warned consumers not to use products from that facility. It is now closed, and other companies are scrambling to make up the difference. Today the administration announced it would increase imports of baby formula until U.S. production comes back to normal levels. 

It sure feels like we are beginning the reckoning of forty years of decisions, decisions that have concentrated power in a small minority and that have finally led us to the place where a congressional committee wants to talk with five members of Congress to hear what they know about the attempt to overturn an election so a Democratic president could not take office.