Organic Farming

Currently, Scientific American online has an article on whether organic farming could feed the cuurent world population and on whether or not organic food is safer than standard food. They point out that organic food is no safer from salmonella poisoning than standard food. As someone who is not an organic ideologue, I feel that the emphasis is not on the right issues. The issue to me is what method will produce the tastiest foods?  In my experience, foods grown outside in season will always beat hothouse foods grown out of season. I don't think it matters if the process is organic or not.  Animals that are raised grass fed will always produce tastier meat, eggs and milk than those raised in feedlots eating largely grain. I know an organic Mennonite farmer in Newville, PA who produces outstanding eggs, milk and beef but the cows eat largely grass from his fields. The chickens are in movable pens that are moved to new locations every day (and yes, chickens do eat grass, among other things. The egg yolks are an orange color rather than yellow. The eggs taste like the eggs of the Saxonland where I grew up. I don't think it matters if the grass is fertilized by synthetic fertilizers as long as the animals eat lots of grass as opposed to grains. Am I being wrongheaded in my emphasis on quality of taste rather than on organic purity?

Gypsy Saxons, Etc.

You could hear the Gypsies comming from a long way off. The pots and pans and other metal implements banging against the side of their wagons could be heard long before they arrived. At the time I first met them, I was living in the remote farming hamlet of Wehe, a place that was so far off the beaten path that it was beyond the outback. Wehe was an absolutely pure, 100% Saxon hamlet. Absolutely NO ONE spoke German, only the Low Saxon language. Our parents warned us to stay away from the Gypsies. My grandmother warned me that they would break my arms and legs and make me beg for them. But when they arrived, they were the warmest, friendliest human beings you could ever hope to meet. I cannot speak about Gypsies in general. They are given a hard time by most Europeans.  When I speak about the Saxon Gypsies, I can only speak with approval. We children were attracted to them like iron filings to a magnet. No child to my knowledge ever came to harm through the agency of the Gypsies.  They spoke our language, Low Saxon, like natives, which they probably were.

Our attraction to the Gypsies is somewhat remarkable.  We were deeply suspicious of foreigners. Our concept of foreigners was somewhat rarefied. We lived at the tip of a peninsula of Westphalia that jutted deeply into Lower Saxony. I remember when a woman from Lower Saxony moved into our hamlet. We children would follow her (at a considerable distance behind her).  We saw her as an alien little different from the way we might have regarded an alien from Mars with green skin and antennas drooping from the forehead. This in spite of the fact that she spoke our language (Low Saxon) but with dialectical differences.  Perhaps we were conditioned by local sayings such as the one that held that Lower Saxony was a land so strange that women there grew from trees. In fact, she came from a village right next to ours but separated from us by vast and endless peat bogs. Practically though, she might as well as have come from the opposite end of the planet. Our view of life was so conditioned that, had we been asked, we would probably have volunteered that the whole planet was inhabited by Saxons.  I sometimes feel like I am the last Saxon on the planet. Kind of like the Indian found in the California desert in the 1940's, the last member of his tribe, who had never encountered a white man before. My father was a Hungarian from Transylvania.  I tended to regard Hungarians as people who were from a fairy tale. after all, they were clearly not Saxons and you could not take non-Saxons for real.

Dragons in Amber

Dragons in Amber, Further Adventures of a Romantic Naturalist, Willy Ley, copyright 1949 and 1951. I was a big fan of Willy Ley's monthly articles in Galaxy Magazine. I had wondered though how he had earned a living in his early days in the USA, after he fled here from Nazi Germany in the mid 1930's? He had a considerable number of articles published in the early Science Fiction magazines but I concluded that he could certainly not have supported himself from these. Then I bought several lots of Mechanix Illustrated magazines from the 1940's and 1950's and found many articles by Willy, some profusely illustrated by the great artist, Chesley Bonestell. This was certainly a much better paying market than the pulp magazines. I snapped up this old book of his when it became available cheaply from Alibris.com because I wanted to read some of his early writings.

The first chapter is about amber. Not every hardened tree sap is amber. Copal resin for example, does not pass the test.  It must consist of 3 to 5% succinic acid and it must radiate with a beautiful blue luminescence when illuminated with ultraviolet light--a test for genuineness. Amber was well known to the ancient Greeks. It was Thales of Miletus who, around 600BC discovered that amber, after having been rubbed with a pice of cloth, would attract light objects. He named amber Elektron. This is of course where we get the word electricity.

Ley concluded that most of the amber originated in a layer of blue earth under the Samland in East Prussia. As the Samland receded from erosion by the Baltic Sea, amber was carried to the bottom of the sea, only to be cast up on shore during storms. A unique museum housing some 70,000 specimens of amber was burned down during the annihilation of East Prussia during WWII. Ley concluded that amber was produced by an extinct relative of the Redwoods.  Redwoods were once spread wide over the planet

In the next chapter, Ley writes about the extraordinary findings of ichthyosaurs in the black slate Lias formation in Germany. Extraordinary numbers of these predators are found in close proximity to each other, along with their prey. The Lias Sea was a shallow extension of the Tethys Sea.  Lias slate contains a high percentage of sulfur compounds. The conclusion is that 10 feet or more below the surface, the waters of the Lias Sea contained a high concentration of sulfur dioxide. Ichtyosaurs would enter the Lias Sea, pursuing their prey at high speed.  They and their prey would then succumb to the dissolved sulfur dioxide and die and drop to the bottom of the sea, producing so many lovely fossils. He also concludes that Ichtyosaurs gave birth to live young.

There are chapters on Mastodons, Pandas and their relatives, other extinct of near extinct animals and plants. To all these he brings considerable scholarship, quoting from many German scholarly sources which would probably be hard to duplicate outside of Germany. Robert Heinlein drove him to Redwood country. In page after page he speaks with awe of the experience. "There was not any thought; there was only the Big Tree. It needed no looking at all to see that the tree did not "resist" the weather. Rather the weather resisted the tree."

Chapters on Cycads, eels and the cameloids. "There was a semitic word meaning "carrying a burden" The word was gamal. It became a noun as far as grammar was concerned, and a name for everyday purposes."  This would be the origin of the word camel. "Twisting and stretching religious argument they (Jews) discovered that it was "unclean"; it could not be eaten.  That effectively eliminated a danger which threatens any animal of large size; I have been assured by people with experience that the religious verdict also saved the reputation of the Jewish cuisine from a serious danger."

Ley quotes from Zoology of the Talmud, 1858, a book written by a Dr. L. Lewysohn, "Preacher of the Israelitic Congregation of Worms." Ley found this book invaluable whenever he came across a combination of animals and Judaism.

There is so much more to this wonderful book.  Only a first rate scientist and scholar with Ley's storytelling abilities could have produced such a book