History

Some stuff of Grandma Peggy's and mine. 

You'd never know it,  what with the way I took to farming like a Mallard to a puddle, but my brothers and I grew up running back and forth between an antique shop and a book store that sat side by side over in Fonda....gone now to the match of some arsonists a few years ago. 

The folks moved away from there long ago but many of my early memories were of reading books....like the real Tarzan...... in the book store and cajoling things from inventory from the folks. We had pocket knives of all sorts back in those days. I still have nifty thingamabobs that were parts of old chandeliers and a jet button with a dragon on it. Nickles for Popsicles were important then as well.

Things were very different then. The town simply bustled with antique dealers, among them the Morfords, father and son, with whom my folks often did business.

I sort of knew them...the way small children know grownup people who are far beyond their sphere of influence...and sometimes we kids went along when dad went to their stores. Of course we were often underfoot when they came into our store too...

I always thought of mom and dad's place as all one word...

Montgomery'sAntiquesBoughtandSold.

The book store is Tryon County Books, since Mom and Dad are still in business. 

Anyhow, tomorrow there is going to be an auction down in the village of some of the Morford family heirlooms. Even if you are not in the area and can't attend, it would be worth your time to browse the photos in the auction brochure. Truly amazing things. Sure brought back memories of my distant kidhood! Scroll down the brochure page for photos of items.

I spent at least an hour looking at the merchandise this morning.

There will be another auction of another property in August.

Cool stuff there too.

This is my favorite thing so far. I almost wish I wasn't such a terrible hermit....

Enjoy...

Almanac

The garlic is dug and drying. I planted a lot less this year, as even with giving it away a lot dried up before we could use it last season. We fertilized mid-winter with the cleanings from the bunny coops...
I highly recommend same. I always had great gardens back in the day when I had 75 rabbits in a rabbitry, and it still works as good as ever.

Pulled all the first crop lettuce for the hens and will plant more today or tomorrow.

Beans are blooming madly, despite woodchuck depredations. I need to get into that garden in the next day or so....after I finally get unpacked from camp that is.

Birds have gone nearly silent, although the Carolina Wrens are whistling up a storm. . Warblers migrate pretty darned early. Saw one Yellow Warbler yesterday and there are lots of Common Yellowthroats around yet.

Chickadees brought the kids in yesterday morning, going over the Winesap tree with fine-toothed combs...er....beaks... What a commotion they made! I hadn't been feeding, but filled my Jonna feeder with enough seeds to entertain them. They obliged by visiting within minutes. They must watch in the ingress and egress of folks here, as the feeders can be empty for weeks...as they have been...and within mere moments after seed is applied, they are back.

Last night the house was full of mosquitoes! It was terrible! We discovered that the front screen had all but disintegrated around the edges, so the boss and I repaired it this morning. Didn't make the mama robin who has a brood on one porch pillar terribly happy, but she's over it now.

Hell Wagon is finally fixed after much expense and many days. Darned thing. Three loads of hay yesterday, so I guess it's working.

Last, but not least, Finbar seems to be feeling better...enough better to be chock full of naughty, jumping on people and chewing things and being a normal little Border Collie. I am so grateful. I had no idea how much I missed having a BC until we brought one home. I hope at some point I can let him and Mack play together, but for now Mack is so much bigger and so darned rough I fear harm. Did I mention that I keep buying this dog toys? I am not too much of a dog toy buying sort.....but.....he likes them.....

Of Course

All the man pants...the worky ones....are freshly hung on the clothesline. Finally, kinda, sorta, caught up on laundry, the third day home from camp. There are still towels, but there are always towels...it's a given with 7 people taking showers here. Some of them more often than others.

Cue the storm. Thunder rolls, rain begins. Ah, well, a nice fresh rinse, right?

We worried about taking Fin to camp, what with his new puppy immune system and all, and he thrived all week. Brought him home. Three days and he's sick. Fun to find a pet vet at this point. I had planned to take him to the place where he was vetted before we bought him, but they wouldn't see him until late tomorrow. Gee, thanks.

Took him up to Fort Plain where I used to take the old BCs back in the day. No concrete diagnosis, as diarrhea in puppies is a vague kind of thing, but he has some good medicines to be going on with. By way of explanation I do my own basic vaccines and take the dogs to our farm vet for rabies shots.

Hopefully he will be okay. I don't know that I have ever fallen so hard and fast for a dog. He is a good one.

Men are working on the hell wagon that has been broken for a couple of months. May it come apart quickly, be repaired cheaply, and go back together right. Pretty please.  And then a little hay weather would be nice. Although the state is under a drought advisory it has sure rained a bunch the past couple of weeks...

I should be working on the Farm Side, which will once again be appearing on Fridays. Fine with me. It ran on Fridays since 1998 and I never really got why it moved to Saturday. Whatever.....

And there you have it, all the news from the Monday after camp. Fit to print or otherwise.

Just the Highlights

Lots of storms

And fish 

Pickles

A somewhat more recent effort:

Used to be everybody made pickles. Most featured cucumbers, but there were pickled beets, pickled carrots, and pickled green beans too. Believe it or not I never saw a zucchini until I was pretty close to adulthood, but that soon joined the pickle lineup as well.

It was quite an undertaking in earlier days, and certainly still can be. My favorite aunt sometimes makes sweet pickles that take nine days. I tried making them once.

And only once.

I have a hard time waiting for bread to rise, let alone spending nine days in a pickle. They are, however, spectacularly sweet and zingy and crunchy…probably my favorite pickles.

The history of pickles goes back a long way. Curing food in a salt solution, that is brine, preserves it. Over longer term storage, fermentation in pickles also helps prolong shelf life. Up until relatively recently in the tapestry of time, we did not have refrigerators or freezers to keep food from spoiling. Even canning is a fairly new process. However, fermenting and pickling were early discoveries.

According to the Pickle History Timeline from the NY Food Museum, ancient Mesopotamians pickled food at least as early as 2400 BC. Cucumbers were later brought from their native India to the Tigris Valley around 2030 BC.  They were mentioned in the Bible…twice…and revered by Romans as strength enhancing food. Julius Caesar is said to have fed them to his troops. Napoleon did the same, and offered a large monetary award to anyone who could find a way to preserve food safely. “The man who won the prize in 1809 was a confectioner named Nicholas Appert, who figured out that if you removed the air from a bottle and boiled it, the food wouldn't spoil.” 

Cleopatra considered them an important part of her beauty routine.

You are of course familiar with the name of our amazing nation, and the continent upon which we reside-America. It was, according to many sources, named after a navigator called either Amerigo or Americus Vespucci, who wrote of his travels here in books published in the early 1500s. Due to some confusion at the time, map makers thought he had discovered the new lands and named them after him.

 Mr. Vespucci was a pickle peddler in Seville, Spain before he got the urge to wander, and indeed packed plenty of pickles in barrels on his ships. It is said that his sailors probably avoided scurvy because of this.

That other famous explorer, who missed getting much other than a city in Ohio named after him also brought pickles along on his voyages and is said to have grown cucumbers for the purpose on Haiti.

Shakespeare liked pickles and mentioned them frequently. Thomas Jefferson was a fan as well. He said of them, “On a hot day in Virginia, I know nothing more comforting than a fine spiced pickle, brought up trout-like from the sparkling depths of the aromatic jar below the stairs of Aunt Sally's cellar."

Elvis Presley liked them fried.

Pickles were produced commercially as early as 1606 in Virginia.

Mason jars revolutionized home canning of pickles. They were invented by a tinsmith named John Landis Mason in Philadelphia in 1858. Made of heavier glass than regular jars they stood up better to the stress of hot processing.

In 1893 Pickle Packers International was formed to represent the pickle industry and its workers. It still exists and its website, Ilovepickles.org, offers recipes and information. The organization’s membership represents 87% of the pickling cucumbers grown in North America, and, “PPI’s presence is world-wide, with members from 16 countries, including Belgium, Canada, China, Finland, Germany, Holland, India, Japan, Mexico, The Netherlands, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United States, and United Kingdom.”

Pickles were rationed during WWII.

Today, China is the world’s largest producer of cucumbers, followed by Iran, Turkey, and the Russian Federation, with the USA coming in fifth in production.

Technically the cucumber is a fruit, having grown from a flower, and in fact, by botanical definition, it is actually a berry, as are tomatoes, eggplants, and grapes.

However, you may be comforted to know that the USDA lists pickles under vegetables. Here in America we consume more than 2.5 billion pounds each year. Florida is our top cuke state with 33% of cucumber production taking place there, although they are grown in over 30 states.

In 2013, in New York, 3,100 acres were planted to the knobby green critters. The state ranks 7^th nationally in production and acreage, and the harvest was valued at nearly 17 million dollars that year. NY grows 6% of the national crop and 5% of those cukes or thereabouts go into pickles.

Americans consume more than 9 pounds of pickles per person annually and buy them roughly every 53 days, unless of course they make their own. 67% of American households participate in pickle consumption. Although there are hundreds of varieties of pickles with many vegetables involved, cucumber dill is the number one most popular. Pickles are fat free and low calorie, with the average dill having only 40 calories.

Although not in any way inclined toward nine-day pickle production, (although I have always been happy to eat them) and having had terrible experiences with canning anything but jams and jellies, I can still turn out refrigerator pickles like Cleopatra’s cooks.

Liz grows the cukes, as I have black thumb in that department, or they arrive with favorite visitors. I boil up some vinegar, sea salt and sugar and let the resulting brine cool. Pack garlic and dill heads and clean, sliced cucumbers in jars, dump on the liquid, and screw on the lids. Let it all set in the fridge for a few days, and hey, presto! We get to participate in a tradition that has been handed down nearly as long as civilization has existed. I do love a good pickle and I guess I am in good company.

There are a couple of jars pickling in the fridge right now in fact.

Fencing is an Olympic Sport

More 2012:

Monday I woke up expecting to do bookkeeping most of the day-bad enough on the best of days, but just plain nasty on Monday. I used to swear I would never do books. You know how that goes.

Thus Monday was already sporting a gloomy aspect. There was a weekend’s worth of everybody-home-and-nobody-being-tidy housework waiting for me in all its glory too. I didn’t exactly roll out a bundle of joy.

However there isn’t much that the first cup of coffee can’t fix or at least dilute a little bit, so when Becky went out to clean her pony’s stall before morning chores I had reached a reasonably even keel.

Then she came inside and asked, “Did any cows get out yesterday? There are hoof prints up by the horse barn.”

Oh, happy, happy news. A quick look assured us that the five heifers that live in the heifer barn were indeed ALL missing. Unbeknownst to us lightning had fried the electric fence controller and for some reason known only to the bovine mind they smashed a six-bar gate so badly it looked like a cheap accordion.

Coffee abandoned, boots donned, sorting sticks gathered, there was a mass exodus from the house. The miscreants were almost instantly located. They had obligingly sequestered themselves up in the pony yard. Capturing the hooligans was a simple matter of closing the gate.

Talk about lucky. Problem was that the pony yard is a long, long way from the heifer barn and the entire trip is unfenced. Instead there are no fewer than four driveways, plus a huge expanse of lawn, an old-fashioned bowling green and some odds and ends of garden, none of them designed to look like anything but a fun park to a bunch of heifers. It was easy to postulate that the minute we drove them out of the pony yard they would select any route but the one we wanted and the rodeo would begin.

Added to that, the fastest runner among us had just left for to New Jersey for his other job, so he wouldn’t be available to chase anybody who got out of control.

Frankly I was scared stiff at the idea of moving them from point A to point B. There was no way four people could cover all the exits, especially if one of the four was me. I swim faster than I walk and I don’t swim very fast. It was only a hundred-yard dash, but comparing the speed of those heifers to the speed of this particular old lady is like comparing Usain Bolt to a three-toed sloth. The boss doesn’t exactly motor as fast as he did back when he ran track either, although he still walks faster than I “run”.

The dark depths of the office and the mountain of dishes were beginning to look pretty good.

At the table after chores I sat drinking that long-awaited second cup of coffee and wishing there was a fence from the pony yard to the barn.

Any kind of fence.

Wait a minute. Why not build a fence? There was a whole pack of temporary electric fence posts right next to the porch.  The boss needed to go buy a fencer to replace the one the lightning ruined anyhow, so he could get some light wire, an extra bag of nice, new, yellow, plastic insulators and, perhaps most importantly, a roll of flagging tape, which surveyors use to make stuff visible.

Supposing we stuck temporary posts in the lawn, strung them with temporary wire, garnished them with temporary fence flagging and pretended that they were actually a real fence that would stop wild and woolly great big heifers.

Would they go along with our make believe? I posed the question to the rest of the crew and the consensus was, well, maybe.

Worth a try anyhow.

So the boss trundled off to Hand’s to get the missing components of our pseudo-fence and we went to work.

It doesn’t take very long to put up a fake fence. There wasn’t much we could do about the west side of the area that the heifers needed to transverse. There are barnyards, a cow lane, an old calf yard and a deep ravine there-no place to really put up such a structure. Thus we limited our efforts to the east side of the lawn and the east and north driveways and merely shut all the gates over on the cow side of the farm. If they got over there, there was no place for them to escape anyhow and we could just start over again.

When all was in place and our fancy little sorta-fence was hooked up to a real, genuine, brand spanking new fence controller, the boss went up to let the miscreants out of the pony yard. I didn’t see that part of the game as I was backing up the fence down by my flower garden, behind the big apple tree.

Almost too soon they appeared from behind the pony barn, heads high and all snorty and wild, but still inside the “fence”.

So far so good. Suddenly one of them veered west. The rest followed. (Of course they did; it is against the rules of the game for things to be TOO easy.) The boss went in lukewarm pursuit, since hot pursuit might have spooked them and that we did not need.

After a while they trotted back to the east, having perused all the lanes and barnyard gates. They made the turn north at my post and headed up to Becky at the sharp corner, while Liz blocked egress to the south.

Bada bing, they were in and astonished to discover that their own yard, (where they belong), still contained a watering trough and a barn where they could escape the flies, just as it always had. They settled happily back in.

As for us, I think we deserve at least a silver medal. Fencing is, after all, an Olympic sport. 

Hezzie

Just an excerpt from another 2012 column: (I still have him btw)

Anyone who has a family has found out, probably the hard way, that there are some things you should keep quiet about. All your little quirks and phobias. Never tell your children. 

Never.

For example the whole garden gnome thing. Normal people are uncomfortable around clowns, fear and loath ticks with a passion, and dislike garden gnomes. Right?

I mean, how could you not get the creeps from the little creepers? Pointy hats, smug smiles like they were high on grape vines or worse; they are evil, I tell you, just evil.

And stupid me, I let my kids know that I hate ‘em. I spent hours playing the computer game, Super Granny, wherein you get to bash gnome after gnome after gnome.

I warned them (actually threatened them with grievous bodily harm) that they would be in trouble if my Mother’s Day gift ever involved an ugly little guy with a pointy red hat.

For years, decades even, my sensibilities were respected. No gnomes at Northview.

Then one day, not so very long ago, Hezekiah showed up. I suppose he is not quite as creepy as your average garden gnome. At least his hat is sort of dark blue with sparkles instead of glaring red.

I tried to be a good sport.

But then I opened the microwave at O’dark thirty one morning, and there he was, grinning slyly out at me. I must have jumped forty feet (quite a trick inside the kitchen.) He even had a little note suggesting that he likes cream and sugar in his coffee.

Got me once.

The next day, well before the old synapses had begun to fire, I opened the back door to let Nick out for a run. There he was, just at eye level, perched on the cross bar of the screen door.

Got me again.

Next he was snugged down in my Sunday chair, wearing safety glasses, still grinning like a goon.

Crouched on the edge of the stair landing, just where it turns, lord of the railings, the snarky little rat.

I tried to get even, put him in beds, set him on the steering wheel of the Blue Bomber, and more. Sadly, kids don’t possess the over-developed startle response of the rapidly becoming elderly. I never got much of a reaction.

However, when the kid got called back to work down in the Big Apple, I tucked Hezzie under his hard hat on the floor of the truck and figured that at least I wouldn’t see his ugly physiognomy for a while.

Hah! I opened Facebook this morning, hoping to get my personal version of the daily news. While the networks focus on politics, murder, mayhem and madness, my personal page features one friend with 11 new standard poodle puppies down in Florida, another selling cute baby chickens in Great Britain, and lots of birds, cats, dogs and local folks, all going about normal life. There are a lot of farmers and ranchers on Facebook too, and they do many interesting things every day.

And there he was, propped on the dashboard of a truck, speeding past Giant Stadium and whirling through China Town, enjoying the delightful scents of dozens of wonderful things cooking all around him. (I wonder if gnomes go on rumspringa.) He was tooling along in the gloomy rain, across the Brooklyn Bridge, past the Freedom Tower, and then he went to work.

He looked pretty silly in his hard hat, not much showing but his shoes. He couldn’t reach the controls on a single machine, so he was forced to stand around with his gnomey little hands in his gnomey little pockets, smug plastic smile unwavering, until they tossed him back in the truck.

Got me twenty more times and still counting.

Although I am glad that he has been lured away from humble Northview by the bright lights and big city, I shudder to think where he will turn up next. And thanks to cell phones and Facebook, I’m sure I will find out.

Chilly

It is so chilly that the skeeters aren't biting and the dragons aren't flying

And Bailey

Another one, just to keep you from getting bored while I fish and swim. Also from 2012

Even though winter has been fairly benign so far, seed catalogs hold a great deal of charm. Thus there are piles of them at strategic locations around the house to fend off gloom and empower dreams of brighter seasons.

However no seed catalog could fuel the uproar that a livestock supply catalog in the hands of our male offspring generated the other day. And all he did was read aloud the names of some of the products offered for sale therein.

The first product mentioned was a sheep chair. My mind was instantly filled with the image of an older sheep, perhaps a bit grey around the temples, but quite distinguished, glasses perched on his narrow, patrician nose, frowning self-importantly while he perused the WSJ from the comfort of his recliner. He might be wearing slippers (wooly of course) and be smoking a polished cherry wood pipe in his tastefully decorated den. (I know you can see a sheep doing this too; they are such mockers.)

Then I envisioned a granny sheep, rocking comfortably back and forth in an old Boston rocker near the wood stove in the kitchen, while she knitted wooly mittens for the little lambs playing around her feet. They would be leaping and caprioling on and off a blue and pink rag rug, their little hooves thundering on the wide planks of the floor. I could see it clear as day.

However, reality was much more prosaic. (What a letdown.) The sheep chair in the catalog was just a little canvas sling thing used to confine sheep comfortably while their hooves are trimmed.

And then there was the lamb and goat chariot. Okay this one was easy. The only hard part was whether the goats would be harnessed to a little wagon and driven by lambs in Roman garb, or the other way around. Or maybe they rode together and had a pony to pull the chariot. It could possibly even have referred to a low budget remake of the 1959 classic, Ben Hur, sheep and goats being a bit cheaper than chariot horses.

Ah, but no, the lamb and goat chariot was “designed with the sheep showman in mind” (and not Charleton Heston either). It consists of a two-wheeled metal cart (hence the chariot part I guess) with places to halter either lambs or goats so they could all be trained to lead at the same time.

Having had occasion to attempt (and I use the latter term advisedly) to train sheep to follow along politely on a halter, I truly understand the need for a chariot. You would think upon observing a sheep, small compared to a cow, soft and wooly, not usually possessed of great big horns or a long tail to batter you with, plus a buttercups-wouldn’t-melt-in-its mouth-expression, that a sheep would be easy. Not so much. With a low center of gravity, sharp little hooves for extra traction, and a hair trigger panic button, sheep are tougher than they look. And when something trips that panic button, if they can’t go around, they will go over, under, and/or through anything that gets in their way. In retrospect I can see many uses for that “four head” chariot.

The catalog also features “Mother-Up” spray intended for grafting lambs, foals, calves and kids (the caprine kind). No twigs, tapes, or ties involved in this operation though, just something intended to convince reluctant mama animals to accept babies that aren’t necessarily their own.

A llama chute, but alas, no water park or slide, just a stall intended to facilitate clipping or medical work. Stone tattooers. Waterers, weaners and weather stations. Tweezers, twitches and six kinds of tape-duct, fencing, illuminator, measuring, umbilical and weighing….. (The scary part of that is that we have and use all but one of those here at Northview, and Alan uses the other one on his job in the city.)

The best item we found in the NASCO catalog was not a bit strange however, just wonderful. We use a brand of automatic water bowls made by the Humane Company for the cows’ comfort and entertainment. They are shiny robin’s egg blue things with yellow plastic paddles. Each one is suspended between a pair of cows, which, when thirsty, press the paddle down to run fresh water into the bowl, then drink their fill.

When they are finished drinking they let the paddle spring back up and the flow of water is shut off. (Except when springs break or dirt gets into the valve or the cows bang on the bowls hard enough to break them off the water line. Then we find a lovely flood the next time we go into the barn and emergency repairs and water removal occur.)

However some cows get bored, or even learn bad habits from other cows who got bored at some point. They take their nice fresh drink, then spend hours and hours and hours licking at the water in the bowl, flicking water out to splash on the floor. Determined cows can create near-floods and big messes that require big clean up.

Just such a cow is Bailey, number 155, who stands in my line and is otherwise a nice, unassuming cow, who doesn’t bother anything. However, all day long when she isn’t eating or sleeping or being milked she slaps water out of her bowl. Some days it is enough water to flow down two stalls to the walkway, down the walk way and into the gutter. It makes a slimy mess of any feed left in the manger too.

We have discussed putting an individual shut off on Bailey’s bowl and turning her toy off when we are not in the barn. We have never done so though because it seemed kind of mean and not fair to the cow who shares that bowl.

And there in the catalog was the perfect solution- a splash guard for a Humane water bowl, held on with a simple muffler clamp.

Perfect.

Bacon

Just to keep you busy while I'm at camp...some old Farm Sides this week. This one's from 2012

What element turns a couple of slices of ordinary bread, a mundane tomato, and a leaf or two of lettuce into an indescribable culinary delight? What tastes great crumbled on salad, served up fried with eggs and toast, wrapped around a hot dog, or even baked into a muffin? What is said to be the single gateway food that lures more folks back to the omnivorous fold from vegetarianism than any other? It is made into edible roses, quiche, and even ice cream.

You guessed it-bacon. 

            At one time all pork was called bacon, but in these modern times we use the term to describe meat from a pig, usually from the belly, back, or side, which is cured using large amounts of salt, seasonings, nitrites and sometimes smoked as well.

Here in America we prefer the sides and belly of the pig to make what is called “streaky bacon”. Canadian bacon on the other hand comes from the loin and is much leaner. Other nations tend toward the leaner cuts as well. The word itself is thought to have originated with various words for “back” in French and Germanic languages.

Salt curing was one of the favorite means of preserving foods before the invention of refrigeration. Some sources trace the practice of salting meats to keep them from spoiling back at least to Ancient Egypt. Other meats and even vegetables were preserved in a similar manner, in order that people could survive outside of the growing season or travel away from traditional food sources. Indeed early Christianity relied heavily on salt fish in order to meet the requirements of Lent far from the sea.

We Americans like our bacon and I mean, we really, really like it. It is tied with pulled pork for popularity here in the US, where we enjoy 1.7 billion pounds annually. There are popular blogs devoted entirely to bacon; The Bacon Show, and Bacon Unwrapped are a couple of examples. The former features a new bacon recipe every single day, and according to the header will continue to do so “forever”.

Bacon is versatile. The Paleo Diet, which restricts folks to eating like cavemen, allows bacon.

Even our conversation is laced heavily with bacon-related sayings from “bringing home the bacon” to “saving one’s bacon”, which merely means to save one’s body from harm.

“Bringing home the bacon” is a phrase with disputed origins. Some sources claim that is was first used in Dunmow, England where men who could swear that they hadn’t argued with their wives for a year were given a flitch of bacon. This is contested by folks who insist that the phrase originated in reference to a boxing match in 1906, wherein one of the contenders was said to have managed to return to his domicile bearing cured pork.

It matters not; folks who use the phrase today obviously consider bacon to be synonymous with success in any endeavor.

And why not? Bacon goes well with almost anything, including for the adventuresome of palate, milk shakes.

Original bacon recipes probably featured curing the meat in a heavy coating of salt and spices with smoking to follow. Today commercial bacon production involves injection of nitrites and brine, vacuum tumbling, combing, thermal processing, smoking, chilling, pressing, slicing and packaging. Although the process seems more elaborate, it really isn’t all that different, with the changes relating mostly to quality control and the handling of large quantities of material in a standardized manner.

There are also a number of recipes for making homemade bacon, but the ones I looked at had me shying away from concepts such as botulism, which was mentioned in more than one article on the topic.

With all this fondness for salty, smoky, flavorful fat meat, the press was in a swivet a couple of weeks ago when the National Pig Association in the UK announced that a worldwide bacon shortage was inevitable. The organization cited drought in the US and Russia as making it more expensive to feed pigs and causing farmers to sell off their herds.

However here in the US a spokesman for the National Pork Producers Council said that, although some pigs are being liquidated because of the high cost of feed, it is happening at a much slower rate than in other countries.

It seems however, that universal price increases for bacon and probably other pork products can be expected. With a five percent rally in corn futures prices just this week it is almost inevitable. Food giant mandates for changes in hog housing aren’t going to help the availability of pork products, including bacon, either.

Steve Meyer of Paragon Economics, a consultant to the pork industry said on CNBC, “I’ve been talking about [rising meat prices] since 2006 but nobody would listen until someone said we’re not going to have enough bacon. If I’d known that I’d have used different words. Don’t take away their bacon!”

Meyer went on to say that even marginal increases in prices for foods, including bacon, cause harm where it can least be withstood, “Anytime you drive up retail prices — beef, pork, chicken, turkey, eggs, milk … it falls on people with low incomes and fixed incomes,” he said. “The people who can’t afford it.”

It makes one wonder whether Marie Antoinette, if she were alive today she might have said, “Let them eat bacon.”

At any rate, whether or not there is a shortage of bacon in the offing and whether or not we will continue to be able to afford the salty treat, we can certainly rally around celebration of International Bacon Day, which traditionally (at least since 2000) has been celebrated on the last Saturday before Labor Day. Participants have been known to commemorate the event by gathering to prepare bacon-based menu items and then consuming them. Sounds like a plan to me.

In fact I propose celebrating every Saturday or maybe even Sundays and week days if the opportunity is afforded. After all-it’s bacon; what’s not to like?