THE MODERN VEGETABLE

Juiced up, fluffed out, carbon choked, water logged, toxin bloated, tasteless, useless, unhealthy biomass 

Very fat people are very unhealthy. There is no such thing as a fit fat person. They are filled to the brim and beyond with blubber and water. Unless they have some other physical ailment which they cannot control, the only reason why they’ve blown themselves up like balloons is because they ingest excessively, the resources of this planet for no earthly purpose that can be reasonably justified even to themselves. Whether a person oversized to five or six times their healthy BMI will look good or bad is not something I am going to go into because beauty is in the eyes of the viewer.

Now, while a pretty large majority of people would probably agree with me on the health issues of obesity and might pity a fat person on the one side and roundly condemn the person on the other, they will embrace another fat entity with alacrity although that entity is fat for very similar reason.

I am talking about the modern vegetable.

Look at that thing that you love so much: huge, fat, shiny, tasteless and filled with what? Nutrients? Nah. Minerals? Nah. Then what? Well, just biomass mostly. Carbon based materials that do zilch for our health and wellbeing. They have become so bloated because they are created by trick and truck to enhance their size and appearance and fed by a cocktail of killer toxins to keep them alive since their ability to keep themselves alive naturally has been compromised by the very unnaturalness of their design, birth and existence.

We…? LOVE ‘EM! Despite the fact that doctors and others are promoting us to "be just the size that will make us win", despite the fact that we are very clear over-sized is under-healthy, we seem to have been mass hypnotized into ignoring this simple, straightforward truth. Why? Because we are nuts, let me tell you.

OK … enough giggles and politically incorrect comparisons and anecdotes. Let’s get down to the science of this thing and the meanness with which something that is very bad for us has been coaxed into our subconscious selves as something that is good for us, great for us and looked for by default over everything else. 

Good people, the so-called agro-scientists of this world (read: the yay-sayers of the food and agrochemical mafia) insist that we must must must cultivate crops that have an optimal yield. They repeat this like a mantra, to everyone who cares to listen and force it down the throats of those who don’t through power, pressure and barrel loads of money and political clout. What they are saying to us essentially is simply this: we need more and more and more biomass to feed the world so that it is not hungry. Excuse me? Seriously? By that argument, there should be little to choose between eating a tasteless, nutrient less, water logged and bloated karavila and a ream of A4 sheets for all the good either of them will do you because both of them have very little food value. The former is marginally more palatable than chomping on A4 sheets … marginally. Try it. I’ve done it. I really cannot taste much of a difference between a steamed new-look, new-age, obese karavila and a piece of paper. 

So, folks, why do these scientists lie to us? That’s stupidly easy. To grow more biomass we need to grow the hybrids and to grow those we have to bumkiss the seed mafia and the agrochemical mafia and toe every line they put in front of our feet in terms of … he he … MONEY. We also have to use up a huge amount of energy to cultivate them that we really cannot afford these days. You and I (dumb ignoramuses by choice) grin, gleam, and run to a supermarket for … what do we call them…? Ah yes… “fresh vegetables” - regardless of the fact that they have very little vegetable in them and are far from fresh.  We also contribute substantially to poisoning our earth, cannibalizing critical energy resources and feeding the medical industry with a generally sick body they can profit out of. What do we call people like us? That’s easily answered as well. Losers folks, losers.

The point I am trying to make, and which I will promote as strongly as the mantra of the agrotoxin based yield optimization gurus is this: It is not yield density(YD) that is important you coots, its nutrient density (ND) where ND is defined as the amount of nutrients in a food relative to calories . What vegetables have high nutrient density? Indeed, what type of produce can reasonably be called vegetables since they have everything that defines them as such and have nothing that doesn’t? The very ones that you thumb your nose at because they don’t shine enough, they are not fat enough, they don’t look clean enough – plus – ugh – some of them have … (horrified whisper) worms in them.

I am talking about naturally grown heirloom or indigenous varieties. Unit for unit, eating 1/10^th of a genuine, nondescript of an heirloom variety will give you 10 times the food value of eating the equivalent, toxin-manufactured, genetically engineered, hybridized bloat that you call “food”. You eat that heirloom variety and you also substantially reduce the sum total of resource usage in the world because you don’t need to eat as much to feed yourself.

 The science is clear. It has been clear from the 1940s when scientists first began making foreboding observations of the rapid dilution of minerals in the environment. Many studies over the last 70 years have not only strengthened this understanding of the rapid and irreparable damage to the soil but point squarely at agrochemicals and overfarming for yield optimization as the chief culprit. The issue is exacerbated by the food mafia trying to give us bigger, cleaner looking food on the outside but which is dirty, disgusting and useless on the inside while either preventing actual foods from getting to the people or undermining their desire for real foods through their marketing techniques. What we have ended up with is far far less karavila in karavila plus a load of gunk that is not only useless but downright dangerous for us.

More recently, in 2004, Dr. Donald Davis of the University of Texas and his fellow researchers Drs. Melvin Epp and Hugh Riordan of the Bio-Communications Research Institute in Wichita, Kansas have proved a rapid drop off of mineral content in 43 garden crops. These were the literally “mission critical” nutrients protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin and ascorbic acid. They site three factors, a) An inverse relationships between crop yield and mineral concentrations—the widely cited “dilution effect”; 2) Apparent median declines of 5% to 40% or more in some minerals, vitamins and proteins in groups of vegetables and perhaps fruits; and 3) Recent side-by-side plantings of low- and high-yield cultivars of broccoli and grains found consistently negative correlations between yield and concentrations of minerals and protein, a newly recognized genetic dilution effect.

So folks, bigger vegetables - like bigger people, aint better. Bigger vegetables do not feed a body’s needs but rather, feeds the addiction of a body to consume sweet nothings in excess. You will need five hybrid carrots to give you the same food you get from one heirloom carrot. You will need 20 servings of fruit and vegetables a day instead of the usual 5.

So folks, next time, when you want to give yourself food and I mean food, it is best that you do not succumb either to addiction to cosmetic traits in something masquerading as a vegetable at a supermarket or engage in your favorite pastime of reading labels on packages for nutrient lists and scrutinizing expiration dates. Just get the heck out of the supermarket and go buy some ugly looking, wormy but super charged vambatu from a little ol lady who grows it in her backyard. Those don’t come with expiration dates or nutrient lists. They don’t need to be proven to you as food. They are the real deal. The worm in that ugly brinjal won’t kill you. The poison laced shiny dark fat flub of an aubergine in that well lit box we call a supermarket will.

Finally! A solution to the mess in the public transport sector

Two and a half month Presidential initiative set to take off by June 2016!

PRESIDENT LAUNCHES UNIQUE AND INNOVATIVE INITIATIVE THAT IS A WIN-WIN-WIN FOR THE COMMUTER, THE BUS OPERATORS AND THE COUNTRY

As the entire country is aware, the public transport sector has gone from bad to worse over the past decade or so. Currently we have approximately 20,000 private buses and approximately 5,500 SLCTB buses plying the roads. Anyone who has used these buses knows that they are filled to bursting at rush-hour during which time they race each other to collect as many passengers as they can. At other times they crawl along at snail’s pace hoping to fill up the buses through that trick. With very few passengers on the roads at night, nighttime public transport is non-existent simply because it is uneconomical for operators. To say that the public is severely, impossibly inconvenienced is to put it mildly.

An increasingly desperate public had no choice but to look for alternative means of getting about. Hence the huge numbers of motorcycles, auto-rickshaws and small cars that have flowed onto the streets, congesting traffic and compounding the overall inconvenience. This trend has seen a 20% drop in public transport use from 60% to 40%. With the sharp increase in the number of vehicles on the road, the average speed of urban centers has dropped to an alarming 12km/hour. Add to this the fact that those who made the shift did so out of desperation and not because they could afford private transport and we have a national liquidity and home-economics disaster on our hands.

However, when Mr. Eric Weerawardhane, Chairman of the Central Province Transport Board introduced an innovative idea to His Excellency the President, Maithripala Sirisena, he perceived that it was in line with his mandate and saw an opportunity to solve the problem once and for all. The idea, in a nutshell, was simple and brilliant – to charge for the public bus transport service based on the number of turns a given bus does on a given route instead of the present system where the commuter is charged on an individual basis for each commute.

In that light, the President tasked the Strategic Enterprise Management Agency to inquire into possibilities based on Mr. Weerawardhane’s idea and the strategic team at SEMA headed up by its Chariman Mr. Asoka Abeygunawardhane, Dr. Don S. Jayaweera and Mr. Johann Bandaranaike conducted a 2 ½ month study after which a comprehensive, strong strategy was created.

The process was completed and officially presented to His Excellency the President Maithripala Sirisena as a pilot project on the Kadugannawa-Digana-Kandy route. If successful, it will be introduced first to the Kandy district, next to the Central Province and finally to the entire country. The proposal presentation ceremony and discussion was held today (22^nd April 2016) at the Presidential Secretariat with the participation of officials of the National Transport Commission (NTC), SEMA, Provincial Public Transport Authority and the SLCTB.

The Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation Nimal Siripala de Silva, Provincial Minister of Highways Development, Transport, Power and Energy, Housing and Construction Ediriweera Weerawardena, Deputy Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation Ashoka Abeysinghe, Governor of the Central Province Niluka Ekanayaka, Chairman of the Sri Lanka Transport Board Ramal Siriwardena and the Secretary to the President P. B. Abeykoon were among those who participated in the discussion of the proposals.

President Sirisena instructed the officials to appoint a committee consists of officials of the Ministry of Transport, Sri Lanka Transport Board and the government treasury to take future actions on this new system and to have the pilot operational by June 2016.

Chairman of the Central Province Transport Board Mr. Eric Weerawardhane addressed the Training of Trainers workshop of the National Consumer Network of Sri Lanka (NCNSL) at Bandaragama and outlined the plan. 

Here, in a nutshell, is how it will work:

• The key to the system: Regardless of the number of passengers carried by each bus, the income of a given operator is determined solely on the total number of turns (kilometers) that it plies a route on a given day. This essentially means that the commuter does not pay a given bus for using it to go from place to place. Instead, the commuter will purchase a prepaid swipe card that will allow travel for a specific number of kilometers during a specific month with the option of reloading it at will. This is similar to the way people use mobile phone services.

• The bus (public or private) is equipped with a CCTV camera, an electronic swipe-type ticket machine and a GPS. These will monitor the transaction and the route.

•  A communication services provider will manufacture the required reloadable swipe cards and have them as commonly available as phone cards.

• When a passenger enters a bus, the conductor swipes the card for the distance traveled and that amount is automatically deducted from the card holder and added to the common account of the route operators.

• At the end of the day, the route operators’ accounts are automatically credited according to the number of turns (total kilometers) that each bus has plied the route.

• If a commuter doesn’t have a swipe card, no problem. He can enter the bus anyway and take one of two options: a) pay the single fair in cash to the conductor who will swipe his own special card into the system to record the transaction or b) purchase a swipe card from the conductor. 

The only extra requirements are the CCTV camera, the special swipe machine and the GPS and these will be provided to the operators with a three month grace period for payback where a percentage of their revenue will be deducted over that period to pay for the equipment. 

Here are the advantages:

• This will be a zero budget initiative and will simply result in a more even distribution of the total busses available and the SEMA study clearly showed that the present fleet is quite sufficient if it is spread out over the day. 

• No internal competition between operators there will be no racing and no slowing down to grab more passengers resulting in a reduction of congestion on the roads

• Nighttime public transport will once again be certain since operators would like to increase the number of turns they do. 

•  With increased regularity and significantly reduced numbers of commuters per bus, there will be a large percentage of them returning to use public transport, resulting in a reduction of overall vehicular traffic on the roads which in turn will reduce overall vehicular congestion.

• The system makes it possible to give all sorts of concessions to regular commuters, the aged population and the disabled population.