How mundane becomes exotic

I came across this story in the news about making your own yogurt. It talks about these special “heirloom” cultures from European countries. The story makes yogurt-making sound exotic and wondrous. We Indians can roll our eyes at it, given that making yogurt is an integral a part of our daily lives, but I see an omen of things to come. Our mothers have probably never even thought about how old their yogurt culture is. My mother’s is older than I am for sure, and I have been using the same culture that I brought from India about ten years ago. But in a country where food has been industrialized for many generations now, making yogurt at home becomes a newsworthy item. 

Raw milk is another such thing. When I was growing up, we got raw milk delivered home every day. We boiled it to kill all contamination, drank it the same day, turned the leftover into yogurt, and started the process all over, the next day. In the US, pasteurized and homogenized milk is considered the cause of many dietary and allergy problems by some, but you have to jump through hoops and pay through your nose to get raw milk. Advocacy groups have been established for this once simple thing.

Then there is the ‘eat local’ movement in the US. My Indian friends will remember their parents going to the “sabzi mandi” regularly to buy locally grown seasonal produce without upping their noses and calling themselves ‘locavores’. Specialty, and very expensive, restaurants have opened that profess to serve only locally grown fruits and vegetables. It really is quite difficult to find locally grown and seasonal fruits and vegetables in the US.

Now I see globalization not only bringing convenience foods to India, but actively trying to change dietary habits to sell more breakfast cereal and doughnuts. Modern Indians look forward to be able to buy packaged milk that lasts for a whole week. Children are growing up eating industrially-produced breakfast cereals and fast food, guaranteeing that food habits would have completely changed in just one generation. I want to scream, to shout, “Learn from other people’s mistake. Don’t do it!”. Here I am in a 'developed' country, struggling to feed my family seasonal and fresh food, and fighting an expensive uphill battle to achieve that, and there are people on the other end of the world happily giving that up to be 'modern'! The society in America has already seen what convenience food can do to a culture, the health of a populace and to the environment. It has changed crops to the extent that we have to seek out heirloom seeds to get tomatoes that have some flavor. Food industrialization has destroyed a way of life beyond recovery in the US, and bringing it back has turned into a legal, and political battle. That way of life is still healthy, and not forgotten in other countries, but it will be destroyed even faster in a mad dash towards consumerism and modernization. 

Is obesity and environmental damage an integral part of providing equal opportunities to the children of India? Do things have to come full circle again, if they have already been there once? Do we have to destroy a way of life, and then be forced to discover it as ‘exotic’ once again?

Can we keep government out of our lives?

I have politics on my mind in the wake of the stunning results form the Massachusetts election. There are many reasons why Dems lost that election but I have serious doubts that there will be any serious introspection to analyze the causes among the career politicians. That is a topic for another day but today after getting an earful about the reason being public support for free-market economy and anger against socialism, I feel compelled to point out that whether we like it not government policy shapes our lives much more deeply than we realize. Let us examine some basic human necessities.

Food: Americans currently consume a heavily corn-based diet, not because they love it, or beacause it has been their staple diet for centuries or because they are aware of its health benefits or lack thereof. Corn is directly and indirectly in lot of our foods because corn is cheap, and corn is cheap not because market forces make it so but because of direct government subsidies.

Health: The present American health care system is as far from free-market system as could be. Even more socialist countries than the US have much more consumer-based health care systems. Let us examine the roots of this system. Most people in America afford their health-care because of insurance provided by their employers. The employer-funded health insurance system came about because in 1954 Congress passed a law making employer contributions to employee health plans tax-deductible without making the resulting benefits taxable to employees. In case of both Medicare and employer-based health insurance it is the government, that is directly or indirectly subsidizing health insurance, note that it is the insurance, not the care that is getting subsidized. However, this is also the reason why health care costs are getting out of control - the consumer is not directly exposed to the cost of the product they use, meaning that the health care system is not at all controlled by free-market forces. I encourage you to read this enlightening article if you want more.

Housing: It is the government tax subsidies, and the government's creation of entities such a Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae that enable the dream of home ownership for most Americans. These entities also assumed all the risk of the downside of these mortgages and thus turned mortgage-based bonds essentially into US Government backed bonds, which then Wall Street traded with impunity. Free market forces came into play and exploited a market that was skewed by the government.
Another facet of housing is the design of our towns and cities. Urban planning or lack thereof is caused by the fact that we can drive everywhere for cheap. If gasoline was expensive, we would have dense cities with public transit systems in a heartbeat. However, price of gasoline is not determined by free-market forces. Gasoline is kept cheap by the government.

I very much like individual accountability and responsibility but I do believe government plays a central role in the shaping the future, but career politicians intent on saving their jobs cannot look past the next election. Partisan hacks on one side will blame Coakley for losing and mock the idiots who voted for pickup-truck-driving-cosmo-centerfold, or on the other side heave a sigh of relief that now government will be kept out of health-care and Medicare will be saved!

I think we need drastic measures. A viable third party? Term limits in house & senate? Any ideas?

How to forgive friends and judge people

With Senator Kennedy’s death today, most media and friends on Facebook were talking about the loss of a great man. But then somebody piped up “He should be buried at the bottom of a lake. A murderer cannot be glorified”. I was reminded of similar comments when Michael Jackson died. I even blogged about it. My first reaction is to say that we should judge a person by their body of work, and not just one or two, what could be constituted, as mistakes. It is possible to like somebody's work without liking the person himself. But then again, just because somebody is glorified, we shouldn’t gloss over their negatives.

But it got me thinking. Who decides when the balance has tipped in one direction or another? Hitler must have done some good deeds in his life, but his death was as good a riddance as any, and I would be the last person asking him to be honored just because he is dead.

I often tell my kids that there are no good or bad people – only good and bad actions, and you judge people by weighing their good actions against their bad ones. All actions, however, don’t weigh the same. How do you teach them when to tip the scales? Did Ted Kennedy do enough good that his part in causing harm to some young women can be excused?

Lies in politics

I have been debating whether to discuss the American presidential election here as I meant to write about parenting issue. I have decided to go ahead because that is what is on my mind these days, and the politics does affect my children's future.

I know politicians lie, and exaggerate and mislead people to make themselves look good. I am however very surprised that they can get away with such white lies in America. There is a whole army of internet vigilante digging up facts, there are multiple cable news channels and newspapers who one thinks can focus on the issues and really dig deep. It doesn't seem to be happening, however. Is this because most news organizations are for-profit companies and fear losing their audience if they got too controversial. It is surprising that the toughest questions in this election are being asked by comedians such as Jon Stewart and Joy Behar? Why is it that when a candidate has clearly lied, a news anchor doesn't just say to them "Why did you lie about this?" instead they say "Some people believe that you are not being completely correct when you say such and such."

It completely amazes me that the party supporting a man born into a career naval family, who got into the naval academy on that merit, married to a heiress who owns eight houses can happily paint another man raised in middle-class environment by a single mother, who went to Harvard on his own merit, as an elite and not only get away with it but have people believe them. When I mentioned this to some people, they said this is because Americans do not want a college educated liberal running the country. And that is why they elected a guy from a wealthy family, who needed help to get into Yale as their president, twice, just because he appears "folksy"? Reality does not matter, only appearances do? Isn't this ironic that the party that claims to be fiscally responsible chooses as its VP candidate who was very incompetent in running the state she was the governor of?

I thought living in a developed country, with transparency in government, meant living among informed enlightened people who didn't get swayed by such fluff. Having grown up in a "developing" country, I have seen completely uneducated politicians get elected but I have never seen this level of distrust of education as I see in America. It is very strange and hard to fathom.

What explains American politics

I have been hear all these years an still cannot fathom American politics. Why is abortion such a big issue in choosing a president? I swear I have seen more relevant issues being discussed more intelligently in the political environs of so-called developing countries. Why is "Creationism" even brought up in the world's most developed country? Only in America, will people actually vote against somebody because he appears to be smart, thoughtful and articulate.

The only explanation I find is a quote I have mentioned on this blog before. "An immigrant's values stay frozen in the era they left their home country". America was founded by immigrants, poor religious people, who wanted to get away from the elite of their home countries and practice the conservative form of their religion. They are still stuck with their anti-elite, "our religion is under attack" and "a man has to be judged by the size of his balls" values that they came with.