Rotten Tomatoes

ZZ the cat has decided he is far too tired to make an appearance on my blog tonight. There is bigger and more serious news to be discussed than his photo opps. Getting back to the agrarian focus that is part of this blog, I have been following the tomato/salmonella story in the news. Once again, we see how the food safety system in the U.S. is grossly underprepared to deal with food safety in the fruit and vegetable industry let alone the meat industry (that's a whole other level of madness with recalls of ground beef). A year or so back I blogged about bagged spinach and e-coli. Now it is tomatoes and salmonella outbreaks (Raw Red Roma and Plum and Round tomatoes grown in Florida and Mexico, it seems). Want to know how tomatoes get salmonella? Slate has a good article about the potential connection to industrial farming and waste run-off:

http://www.slate.com/id/2193474/ The subtitle in this article is from "Poop to Produce."


This weekend I transplanted about eight tomato plants in my backyard garden. You can't get more local than 20 feet from the kitchen. These plants were seeded from last year's crop, and I didn't plant a single seed--I just left them in the soil. So I'm holding out for these tomatoes, which have not even flowered yet. So it's going to be awhile.....

ZZ meets Photobooth

Tech Camp 08

Greetings from Tech Camp 08 at Syracuse University. We have been working with images, web pages, and tomorrow we will be working with video. We have been playing around with Photobooth (as evidenced above). So hopefully things will be looking up on my blog! Thanks to George Rhinehart, Derek Mueller, and Kurt Stavenhagen. More to come.....