Our Food System is Altering Children's Brains

A new study has been published in the June issue of Pediatrics showing a correlation between the pesticide residues found in children’s bodies and a child’s chance of having Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).  Organophosphates used in commercial farming are designed to wreck the nervous systems of pests, but apparently they are also damaging the architecture of US children’s brains as they develop. 

This topic grabs our attention at Cultural Logic,  because it’s at the intersection of several streams of our work:  helping the general public become more sophisticated about food systems, pesticides, health environments, early childhood development and brain architecture.

Though the evidence being reported on today is clear and provocative and the story has been picked up on by most major media outlets, our past research on health and food systems has shown that this kind of “food scare” won't do much to change people’s thinking or behavior.

From reports like this by CNN, with its accompanying pictures of delicious-looking blueberries and strawberries, people get the message that fruits and vegetables are damaging children’s health -- but that they should not stop giving their children fruits and vegetables.  So where is the solution that makes sense to the average person?  There's no indication that farmers are going to stop using these chemicals.  At most parents are told they should buy organic produce and wash it before eating.  

(This "solution" only manages to re-frame pesticide exposure as a problem of parental poverty and neglectfulness!)

Until the public is given a more useful set of cultural and cognitive models about how the food system works, how it can be changed through public policy and what the real stakes are for the developing bodies of our children, people will eventually have to push this terrible news out of their consciousness as they have other similar stories in the past.

Sunday margaritas in the hammock.  
Gettin' ready for Unitarian Jihad.

On May 5th, Denver's 5-year old daughter, Maybelle, said, 

"it's always a little chilly when I walk to school in the morning, because the weather is just getting used to being the weather again."

And he wrote a drowning ghazal for her . . . .

the weather is getting used to being the weather again

the birds are getting used to their wings and feathers again

your coat is on the door knob  your bag is in the hall

the shoes just remembered that they’re leather again

see  the sun didn’t drown   it’s back for another day

we said goodnight just as the moon was un-tethered again

I make you breakfast and kiss you into day

now that the dawn and we are brethren again

after this dream and that  after these dreams and those

Maybelle, I’m just getting used to being Denver again

Denver Butson

In a cafe in Westerly,  I was slowly carving away at a waffle that was crisp and buried in strawberries, blueberries and fresh-whipped cream and no syrup, and the proprietress was complaining to a customer that the parking places were all full, yet no one was walking the downtown - and why was that. And I wanted to tell her that sometime Americans will re-discover walking and basking and just sitting un-entertained and that I hope her waffles are still there when they do.

Foggy morning in the woods
We listen to the songs of scarlet tanagers, orioles, warblers
Wary ovenbirds
A crying osprey.




Huckleberries are in blossom,
And star flower,
And the lady's slippers
Are swollen and pink
And calling to the bees
For orchid sex.

The students at Pine Point held a "poetry tournament"
and chose as their winner the poem, Stone, by Charles Simic.

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger's tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill—
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.

I remembered

to spend some time

looking

at the sky today.

Porter was part of the Greek Chorus

for their play about Odysseus.

He has a good voice

and a good presence, 

but no ambition for the limelight.

The boys had a half-day of school on Friday, and Monica was finishing up leading a class at the Nature Center at about the same time, so we all gathered ourselves together for a 6-hour drive to Pennsylvania.

About 60 people were descending on Sunday to celebrate Dad's 70th birthday, so we and Chris and Cathleen came to rescue Mom from her failure to keep the guest-list down.

Saturday was busy without being too hectic as we made the place ready.  Porter took on any task that gave him an excuse to drive the little tractor - and drove it around plenty with no excuse at all.  I cleaned the pool and fixed a broken seal on the pump.  The day was hot and I was the third one into the pool after Nico and Porter.  (Dad waited until Sunday, his birthday, when the water temperature had risen all the way to 58 degrees.)

Monica traveled to Lititz for chocolate and shops.  Chris came north with loot from the Baltimore farmer's market and Cathie and Bridget arrived with rising breads and cheeses.

Sunday came hot and sunny, and sure enough 60 people showed up -- the whole clan from Big Valley and Tom, Alice and Celine from Annapolis -- a couple of neighbors, old science-teacher work colleagues and quite a slew of friends he's made in his conservation work on native plants and in the local EAC.

Despite the dreaded afternoon shower that chased everyone onto the porch, it was a wonderful, good-spirited gathering.  The food was good, Dad's enthusiasm for native wildflowers was in full blossom around the house, and the kids played and there was neither tears nor bloodshed.

(And Mom was very happy with how things went, so hopefully we get credited with some Mother's Day points for helping out.)

photos by Kim Brown

pre-post-capitalism . . . .


I was reading a fascinating article by Chris Martenson on how to turn an investment profit as the fossil-fuel age collapses.  He makes the case that there are boatloads of money to be made in the energy sector, but you'd better have cashed out by the time the shit really hits the fan.

My advice to investors dreaming of windfall profits from $500/barrel crude oil futures would be this: Pretend it’s 1940 and you have a magic crystal ball that tells you in advance that the United States will be drawn into World War II. You might start to speculate that by investing in rubber, airplane parts, materials needed to make bombs, and so forth you’ll make a killing. Those products will become so important and so valuable that you might presume you’ll be able to name your price and demand any amount you like for them. But of course you’d have been mistaken. World War II wasn’t a routine macroeconomic event. It was a game changer. Laws were re-written, often retroactively. A state of national emergency was declared and people in possession of materials essential to the war effort were ordered to hand them over as price controls were implemented to thwart profiteering from speculation on the supply needs of the war effort . . . I contend that any Peak Cheap Oil investment strategy that fails to consider government intervention scenarios is flawed and likely to underperform. That’s not to say that there’s no money to be made from an early awareness of peak cheap oil. 

The whole article is a thought-provoking glimpse into an alternate universe where the heroes of Late Capitalism (or Pre-Post Capitalism) face Ragnarok like fleas who are timing their leap from off the hairy back of Fenrir and calling that a savvy investment strategy.

I have a shaggy lawn full of violets.


Today I bought a reel lawnmower at McQuade's hardware store.  (A tall man in a suit smiled at me and reckoned that I must have a teenage son if I was buying that thing.)   Our grass is too high already to mow, so it's taking some work with a grass whip first.  Well it's exercise and there's no roar of an engine.


By the time I get to the end, the violets at the beginning will be blooming again.

I remember when Sinead O’Connor scandalized us by tearing up a picture of the Pope on SNL.  But I didn’t remember that she did it to protest sexual abuse of children by priests.

Historically, there was a time, I imagine, when priestly recruitment in the Catholic Church drew more equally from diverse sources – men overtaken by a genuine passion for the church; men (like youngest sons) who had few opportunities elsewhere; or more generally, men who saw the Church as an institution from which to lead a meaningful, purposeful life – socially, spiritually, materially and even politically; and always of course, men who were suppressing their own sexualities and so felt attuned to the Church’s rhetoric of sexual shame.

As an anthropologist I can appreciate the deftness with which authoritarian religious sects like the Catholic Church have been able to use guilt and shame in order to psychologically bind people to their hierarchies.  But for most people Humanism and the Enlightenment (however vaguely perceived) have granted a soft landing from Genesis’s Fall from Grace and religions lost their moral monopoly.  Religions in the Occident haven’t been able to use violence to enforce participation for generations, and the churches have lost much of their social and temporal power.  They are not at the center of civic and philosophical life like they once were.  And we now live with a consumer capitalism that puts people’s anxieties about sex to work in other ways.

I think priestly recruiting draws from a much smaller pool now, especially when it entails the sacrifice of celibacy.  As shame about hetero-sexuality becomes less and less useful as a tool for attracting and incorporating followers to authoritarian religions, this seems to have left a higher proportion of those still widely condemned as sexual deviants (notably closeted homosexuals, pedophiles and misogynists) to be susceptible to the psychological alchemy of the Church’s sexual shaming.  We’re left with a church that attracts to its understaffed priesthood more than its fair share of men who are afflicted with sexualities about which they are conflicted, in denial, closeted, clandestine, repressive and so on.  Which brings us to the scandals of today.  And I think it is probably no coincidence that not just shame about heterosexual sex, but rampant homophobia among the churches’ rank and file (tied so often to the shame of repressing personal sexual desires) is so crucial for maintaining passionate adherence to the authoritarian churches – whether Catholic, Baptist or Anglican.

There is no scriptural need to hate the homosexuals (as demonstrated by scores of Christian sects), but  many churches do, despite the obvious drawbacks of trying to keep the power of sexual shame in play.  They have struck a devil’s bargain: hate the gay, purge the self, love the church that has delivered me.  These churches should be ashamed of themselves, and I think one day they will be.

The moon lodged pearl-like in an abalone cloud.  A dull, heavy west wind was bringing rain, and I unhitched the Colombian hammock from the climbing tree.  The gray cat aquiver was padding along each branch above me as I moved to unhook the cords and carabiners.  I remembered that someone said -- cats are creatures not so much nocturnal, as crepuscular.  So I whispered that word, crepuscular, and touched the cat's out-clawed feet above me.  Startled, sniffing, she lowered her head,  rasped my knuckle twice with her tongue and moved to a branch above scanning the night around.  And the tree-branch lichen whispered something under my restless fingers.

A headline in this morning's NYT illustrates the power of words to frame an issue.  The article, stimulated by the recent mining deaths in West Virginia, was entitled "2 Mines show how safety practices vary widely in US."  "Safety practices" -- isn't it good that mines have these things to protect the miners?  Hmmmm.  But they "vary"?  Well it sure sounds like a technical issue that these companies have to keep track of as they keep their workers safe.


Now imagine instead a headline like, "Some mining companies are more willing than others to gamble with workers' lives for higher profits."


It's exactly the same topic -- the reality that worker lives are put at risk for company profits; some companies are more careful than others with the lives and health of their workers; and the profit-motive often gives them an incentive to take chances with their workers' lives.


But that sure sounds like more of a problem than variance in safety practices.  It almost sounds life and death.

The Harrah’s hotel and casino sits on the river between Omaha and Council Bluffs, Iowa – so that gambling doesn’t technically take place on Midwestern soil.  I wasn’t there to gamble but to give the keynote address to a gathering of a couple hundred meatpackers.  In particular these were union organizers for poultry, pork and beef plants from around the country. 

Normally, this kind of task would fall to Axel or Joe, but neither of them were available, so I had taken the morning flight out of Providence.  Axel had warned me that I’d need to be the opposite of professorial for this crowd, so I’d left my suit jacket and black shoes at home, and cleansed the powerpoint presentation of its pretentious phrases. 

I said to Nico, "All these books on the steps.  Don't they have a home somewhere?"


"No," he sighed, "they're hobos."

I took two loads of mildewing cabinetry, old drywall scraps, and decaying particle-board toward Westerly.   All of it was stuff that shouldn't have been in the basement in the first place -- nothing really of value. The town has put out dumpsters at various places for storm-detritus.  The section of route 91 to Lakeshore drive had been well underwater in at least four places a week ago and the area still looks like it has a bad case of bed head.  Fences buckled under the push of water and debris, new potholes and eroded gullies, sand and gravel in the woods.  And the water in the swamps and rivers is still seriously high -- ready to gush over the banks with any new dousing of rain.