Weekend Update

With hundreds of people nationwide made ill and millions of dollars worth of tomato crop ruined, you may be wondering how it happens that our federal government is unable to trace the source of a salmonella outbreak.

In fact, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration still isn't sure where the disease originated. After initially implicating tomatoes, it has now cleared tomatoes--we think--and says the culprit more likely is jalapenos, perhaps originating somewhere in Mexico.

Turns out we might have had a produce tracking system in place years ago but the corporate food interests succeeded--with some help from the Bush White House--in getting the idea shelved.

The Associated Press reports that industry groups complained that a bioterrorism proposal that would have required detailed tracking of food was opposed by food industry groups as too burdensome. Business groups met at least 10 times with the White House between March 2003 and March 2004, as the FDA regulations were under debate. Food industry lobbyists successfully blunted proposals using arguments familiar in other regulatory debates: The government's plans would saddle business with unnecessary and costly regulations.

"The FDA's strong proposed bioterrorism rules were significantly watered down before they became final," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director at the Washington-based Center for Science in the Public Interest. The private advocacy group obtained the White House meeting records under the Freedom of Information Act and provided them to the AP.

Participants in the meetings included companies and trade groups up and down the food chain, including Altria Group Inc. and Kraft Foods Inc., when Altria was Kraft's parent; The Kroger Co.; Safeway Inc.; ConAgra Foods Inc.; The Procter & Gamble Co.; the American Forest and Paper Association; the Polystyrene Packaging Council; the Glass Packaging Institute; the Cocoa Merchants' Association of America; the World Shipping Council; and the Food Marketing Institute.

"If the FDA had been given the resources and authority years ago that it requested to solve these kinds of problems, I think we would have solved this already," said William Hubbard, a former FDA associate commissioner.

Now lawmakers from Florida are proposing that tax payers compensate tomato growers for their losses.

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Monsanto, the giant chemical and seed company that also makes bovine growth hormone, is at it again. Now it has succeeded in getting Ohio to ban labels on milk containers that would tell consumers when the growth hormone might be present in the milk they buy.

The Organic Trade Organization recently filed suit against Ohio's director of agriculture to reverse a regulation that prohibits labeling stating when milk is free of the bovine growth hormone. Monsanto finds itself on the losing side of a consumer trend rejecting milk from cows treated with the hormone. The company has failed to persuade federal regulators to ban labels that indicate when milk is free of the hormone. Monsanto is now lobbying state officials with mixed results.

A similar labeling prohibition enacted by the agriculture director in Pennsylvania, for instance, was overturned earlier this year by the state's governor after an outpouring of protests from consumers and dairy farmers. But now Kansas, where Monsanto initially was turned back, is taking another look and Utah is considering a law similar to Ohio's, reports Sam Fromartz at the Chews Wise blog.

And then there was a study we recently noted in which researchers found that injecting cows with growth hormone could eliminate a significant portion of greenhouse gases by making dairies more efficient. But Scientific American disputes the findings, pointing out that the researchers involved are on the Monsanto payroll.

The study was conducted with a scientist, Roger Cady, who is also the growth hormone technical project manager for Monsanto. In addition, the lead scientist on the study, nutritional biochemist Dale Bauman of Cornell University, has been a paid consultant for Monsanto since the 1980s, though he declined to disclose how much the company has paid him over the years. He insists that Monsanto did not influence his decision to spend as much as $10,000 in university funds for this study.

Scientific American says the more important issue is dairy cow feed, typically a mix of corn and soy meal where growth hormone is used. The FDA already has disallowed any claims that cows injected with growth hormone can produce more milk from the same amount of feed. Researchers in Australia, meanwhile, have found that greenhouse emissions are reduced 50 percent when cows graze on grass.

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Wherever you look, government agents are in the pocket of Big Ag.

In Minnesota, for instance, legislators last year approved legislation that would provide grants to farmers who want to improve the efficiency of their operations. It was thought that the funds--called Livestock Investment Grants--would be directed toward small and even sustainably-minded farmers. But now that the state's agriculture department has got hold of it, it's become clear that the funds are going to benefit big confinement operations that have pollution problems.

The grant criteria developed by state agriculture officials favors operations with more animals. Advocates for rural development say that's just the opposite of what's needed: more farmers working the land in a sustainable fashion.

"The bottom line is, according to the (agriculture department's) profile, operations which expand dramatically are more likely to receive help through the Livestock Investment Grants program," writes Brian DeVore on the Minnesota Environmental Partnership blog."These proposals will likely be the largest grant requests, thus quickly draining the program’s budget. This makes second class citizens of family farmers using innovative, low cost, low-input systems."

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In case you needed any, here's more evidence why soft drinks need to be eliminated from public schools. Researchers in Texas have found that high-fructose corn syrup, the preferred sweetener in sodas and other processed foods, quickly becomes fat after being ingested.

Apparently, high fructose corn syrup manages to bypass the usual controls that the liver applies to other sweeteners, such as glucose. “It’s basically sneaking into the rock concert through the fence,” said Elizabeth Parks, associate professor of clinical nutrition at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. "The bottom line of this study is that fructose very quickly gets made into fat in the body.”

For the study, six people were given three different drinks. In one test, the breakfast drink was 100 percent glucose. In the second test, they drank half glucose and half fructose; and in the third, they drank 25 percent glucose and 75 percent fructose. The drinks were given at random, and neither the study subjects nor the evaluators were aware who was drinking what. The subjects ate a regular lunch about four hours later.

The researchers found that lipogenesis, the process by which sugars are turned into body fat, increased significantly when the study subjects drank the drinks with fructose. When fructose was given at breakfast, the body was more likely to store the fats eaten at lunch.

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If one Los Angeles city council member has her way, it's not just the soft drinks but all kinds of fast food that would be banned in a 32-square-mile area of the city.

Council Member Jan Perry is spearheading legislation that would ban new fast-food restaurants like McDonald's and KFC from opening in an area that already is home to some 400 fast-food restaurants suspected of contributing to a 30 percent obesity rate among adults who live there. The national obesity rate for adults is 25.6 percent.

"It's a good idea," particularly for children, local resident Rafael Escobar, 69, told the Wall Street Journal as he bit into a McDonald's sausage breakfast.

Local lawmakers compared the proposed ban on fast food joints to similar restrictions on liquor sales. But the restaurant industry isn't buying it. "We have a fundamental problem with government stepping in and treating restaurants as if they are engaged in activity that is at the root of the obesity epidemic," says Jot Condie, president of the California Restaurant Association.

But the trend seems to be swinging toward healthier restaurant eating. In New York City, a law kicked in earlier this year requiring fast-food restaurants to post calorie counts on the main menu right above the counter. San Francisco plans to implement a similar regulation later this year. In both cities, the restaurant industry is suing to try to block the calorie-disclosure rules.

Bon appetit....

Weekend Update

The Bushites are fond of shifting blame for the current world food crises away from their project to turn corn into ethanol and toward other phonemena, such as the increasingly Western diet demands of China and India. Charles Grassley, the cranky Republican senator from Iowa, also loves to thumb his nose at biofuel critics, saying corn ethanol plays only a small role in the unfolding hunger disaster.

So it must have come as quite a shock when a British newspaper this week published a confidential World Bank report estimating that biofuels in fact have jacked up the cost of food by a whopping 75 percent.

The report is certain to add to pressure on governments in Washington and Europe, which have turned to biofuels to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and reduce their dependence on imported oil. The U.S. government is holding to a position that converting plants into fuels is responsible only for 3 percent of the rise in global food prices.

World Bank President Robert Zoellick has said that the use of corn for ethanol by the United States had consumed more than 75 percent of global corn production over the past three years. Zoellick has called on the United States and Europe to ease subsidies and tariffs on biofuels derived from corn and oilseeds.

The World Bank report was written back in April and apparently was being supressed so as not to put the development bank at odds with the White House. Rising food prices have pushed at least 100 million people below the poverty line, according to the World Bank, and have sparked riots in countries around the globe.

*****

Question: How many ways can the U.S. Department Agriculture distort our food system to benefit big corporations?

Small farmers were already in an uproar over the USDA proposal to tag and monitor all farm animals through something called the National Animal Identification System. Few other government proposals have stirred as much ire in the farm community as this one. It would impose incredible burdens on farmers, as it would require them to attach tracking information to every animal they own, register each animal with the government, and file a report any time one of them goes missing, falls ill or dies.

Imagine the impact on a farm where Mom and Pop, while away at the day jobs they keep so they can afford to farm, allow a few cows, pigs, goats and chickens to romp on pasture. It would give a clear advantage to huge industrial livestock operations, or CAFOS, where all the animals are locked up with nowhere to go.

A little known provision in the House Agriculture Appropriations bill now before Congress tilts even more toward Big Ag and the NAIS scheme. This provision would force school lunch programs to purchase their meats only from livestock producers that are participating in the National Animal Identification System.

One thing we've noticed in the food news lately is the number of school systems trying to direct more of their food purchases to local sources. Those efforts would certainly be compormised if the USDA manages to put its dream of universal animal ID ahead of locally grown food.

We will be watching this one closely....

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While our own federal government is erecting roadblocks to local products, the world's largest retailer says it is on a mission to stock its food aisles with local produce.

We all love to hate Wal-Mart. But the retailing giant that has done so much to put small businesses out of business and gut the downtown areas of America's cities and towns is starting to play smart with food in ways that could benefit local agriculture.

During the last two years, partnerships between local farms and Wal-Mart have jumped 50 percent, and the company anticipates it will source about $400 million in local produce this year, making it the country's largest buyer of produce that is grown and sold within a state's borders.

At one time, Wal-Mart loved the idea of a warehouse on wheels, its fleet of trucks moving tons of stuff all over the country on a round-the-clock basis. A move to local produce makes more sense when fuel costs are going through the roof.

For instance, instead of buying peaches from just two suppliers nationwide, Wal-Mart can buy peaches from growers in 18 different states and save 100,000 gallons of dieself fuel. Wal-Mart says it plans to get aggressive, enouraging states to start growing a greater variety of crops to fill those produce department bins.

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The spike in global food prices has put a billion people at risk of going hungry. Some people wonder, Why can't those people grow their own food?

The answer is, many of them used to. But thanks to the policies of big development banks such as the World Bank and the Bank for International Development--supported, by the way, by our own tax dollars--millions of small farmers have been driven off their subsistence plots and forced to scratch for imported food.

The international system of debts encouraged by "developed" nations such as the U.S. and the European Union have turned previously self-sufficient Third World countries, especially in Africa, into food importing nations. In fact, many of the most needy African countries once were net food exporters. But lending schemes devised in the name of free world trade and international development convinced governments to turn the best land increasingly over to export crops, forcing local farmers onto poor soil to grow the food they need to feed themselves and their countrymen.

While forcing people into poverty and hunger, the arrangement has worked out nicely for big corporations that sell food back to those African countries that can no longer feed themselves. But don't take my word for it. Read all about it here.

*****

Having built a big container garden at my daughter's charter school here in the District of Columbia, I know a little bit about how a garden in the inner-city can benefit small children.

Here's an uplifting story about how 40 volunteers got together to create a school garden that is changing small lives in big ways in San Diego, California.

Goose a la Rake

I know some of you think our artist friend Bob is actually a fictional character.

As if I could make someone like Bob up!


The latest news from Bob is that he arrived back in France safely and is now driving to the farthest eastern dominions of Italy, ostensibly to paint portraits and throw himself into the local cuisine.

Somehow we had always thought of Bob as a poor, starving artist. But apparently he is not that type at all. In fact, he is a traveling artist and also quite the gourmand, but of a very earthy kind. Bob is a forager, as evidenced by his recent capture of a large, wild goose.


According to Bob, this goose had been plaguing him at his cabin in the Shenandoah area of Virginia and keeping him up at night with its honking. So he set about tracking the bird and finally was able to sprinkle sufficient salt on its tail to bring it down.

A friend helped Bob dress the bird. Then Bob started a small fire and, being without his usual spit apparatus, grabbed the next best thing, which turned out to be this metal garden rake. (Don't try this with a plastic rake, folks!)

Bob is nothing if not resourceful. But I do wonder how long he was able to maintain this position without injuring his back.

Bob wrote us about his latest adventures very shortly after arriving home in Southern France. I have to say I was a bit disappointed to learn that he'd been detained at French customs when a bulge in his carry-on luggage turned out to be a large quantity of morel mushrooms.


Bob is entitled to his morels. He gathered them all himself around his cabin in Virginia. What plucks my nerves a little is that when Bob came here for dinner shortly before leaving the country, he brought a big bag of morels and assured us these were all the morels he had left in the world.


Bob didn't say anything about having a second stash of morels that he was keeping for himself.


Oh, well. You have to love Bob. We wish him well on his trip to Italy and look forward to more stories of his food adventures.


Ciao, Bob!

The Opportunistic Gardener

Managing a garden for food tests my ability to walk and chew gum and the same time. I can't decide whether this is more like playing at air traffic controller or valet parking attendant.

It's just not as simple as tossing a few seeds in the ground and waiting for dinner to appear. Vegetables mature in their own good time, according to the rules of soil, rain and sun. And of course you didn't imagine they shared the same schedule, all coming to ripeness at the same time and putting up a sign that says, "I'm done."

No, there's a good amount of tracking that must be done, attention that must be paid first to make sure that the carrots and radishes are harvested before they go woody and that the cucumbers and green beans aren't spoiling on the vine. But just as important is having a clue what to plant next when those earlier vegetables are done and to plant the new seeds at the appropriate time so they have a chance to grow and produce before the season turns.

That is, if you want to keep your soil in constant production and have something to eat tomorrow--and we certainly do--a certain amount of timely action must be taken. We and nature both abhor an empty patch of soil. Gardeners call this "succession planting," ensuring the garden is always producing something for the table.

For instance, it was pretty clear that my bed of Italian squashes, cucumbers, onions and edamame beans was spent. We had already pulled the bean plants and harvested the edamame. The cucumbers and squashes both had produced admirable quantities of vegetables. They would all be pulled out of the ground, cut from their trellising and dispatched to the compost pile. Now I had a vegetable bed four feet wide and 20 feet long. What to put there?

Well it just so happens this is the time to be planting root vegetables for the fall and winter. And it just so happens I have several seed packets for "laurentian" rutabaga. It also just so happens that I am determined to grow some worthy beats. Turnips are also on the agenda. A quick read of the seed catalogue confirms that I have just enough time to grow these rutabaga (95 days to maturity) and bring in a crop around Thanksgiving. Of course, I could always pick them early if need be.

The first order of business is preparing the bed. I rake up the half-rotted straw that I had placed (before it was rotted) back in May to hold back weeds. Next I dig into one of my compost heaps and lay a layer about 1-inch thick on my vegetable bed. I work this into the soil with a stirrup hoe. The soil is rich and soft. But just to make things a little easier for my root crops, I work the entire bed with my forked spade, plunging the spade deep into the soil and easing the tool back and forth just enough to loosen the subsurface.

Rutabaga, a cross between a turnip and a cabbage, is one of your bigger root vegetables. Some people think of it as one of those vegetable dishes to be avoided at Thanksgiving, but I love the earthy, somewhat bitter flavor, especially after applying some kitchen magic and turning it into a creamy bisque or a cheesy souffle. I had tried planting rutabaga last fall, but too late. I scattered seeds and they germinated all right. But they never grew larger than a pencil-thick root.

Part of the problem, I recognize, is planting the rutabaga too thickly, then neglecting to come back after the plants have begun to grow and thinning them. I hate thinning. So my new system is to make individual holes for the seeds, properly spaced for them to grow into mature plants. In the case of rutabaga, this means six inches of spacing between seeds. So I am on my hands and knees, the tiny black seeds--perfectly round, like miniature buckshot--poured into one hand, plucking out seeds with two fingers from the other hand and plunging the seeds into the soil at six-inch intervals.

First one row of seeds, then another and another, until I've filled up fully half my bed. It's a large area and potentially a lot of rutabaga. Enough, I think, to get us through the winter and into spring. Not all the seeds will germinate, I know. So I am prepared to come back and plant more seeds where holes appear in the pattern. Now it's just a matter of keeping the soil moist, meaning watered once or twice daily, until the seeds germinate.

Vacancies are appearing elsewhere in the garden--for instance, where I am harvesting the carrots and beets planted earlier in the year. I have seeds for radishes and lettuces, arugula and mizuna--all cool-weather crops waiting their turn in the fall rotation. And in case you think this is pure genius, that I have some kind of master plan for all these substitutions and seasonal calculations, I can assure you that is not the case. That is why I call this "opportunistic" gardening. I just go where the holes are and grab something out of my bag of seeds.

Of course, there are things to consider, such as rotating the crops. You wouldn't want to be planting Brassicas in the same soil, over and over, for fear of encouraging pests and diseases. Things need to be moved around--rotated--to promote soil health and increase production.

More than anything what this involves is grabbing the big bag of seed packets I keep in a crisper drawer in the refrigerator and periodically sifting through it to remind myself what I should be planting next. I spread the seed packets across the kitchen table, setting aside those that need to be planted now--or soon--and making a note of seeds that are lacking. I just placed an order for more arugula, turnips, radishes. It's also time to start thinking about ordering garlic sets for the fall planting.

So there you have it. Food at random. Vegetables by accident. Whatever you want to call it, it's dinner to us.

Weekend Update

My idea for boosting local agriculture is to create indoor markets where local farmers can sell their products year-round and on a daily basis. I'm not sure if that would constitute a co-op arrangement, or just a facility where farmers could set up shop. It certainly would create a comfortable atmosphere for shoppers, greatly expand the availability of local produce and encourage farmers to stretch the growing season.

Well lookee here: It seems New York is one step ahead of me. Gov. Eliot Spitzer is promising to break ground this year on a wholesale farmers market in the Bronx. The facility would at least guarantee a regular supply of local farm product for large buyers such as schools and hospitals. Seems to me that this kind of market is just a short hop and skip away from a retail facility that would offer the same daily, indoor shopping opportunities to the rest of us.

Gov. Spitzer was a fast friend of New York's community gardens and apparently his support extends to small farmers. News of Spitzer's push for the wholesale facility first appeared in the New York Times food section, then in an analysis by Tom Philpott at Grist. Definitely something to cheer.

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What price fertility?

Iowans are finding that it may cost close to $700 million annually to meet new federal standards for reducing nitrates and phosphorous in the local waterways. Intensely farmed with artificial fertilizers, Iowa already has some of the most polluted rivers and lakes in the world as a result of farm runoff. A study by Iowa State University found that the cost to abate pollution from agriculture already is around $435 million, but would climb significantly to meet standards proposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Another recent study in Illinois found that farmers routinely over-fertilize their land. Nitrogen and phosphorous then find their way into the local watershed. Abatement measures aren't cheap or easy, requiring terracing, planting cover around waterways, contour farming and sometimes no-till farming.

Or, we could all go back to organic farming and keep the nutrients in the soil, right?

*****

How much are you willing to pay for your next tall one?

In case you were wondering when urban sprawl was going to hit the price of beer, the answer is now. The price of hops, one of the primary ingredients that give beer its distinctive flavor, is going through the roof. Seems some unkind weather events in Europe have cut the crop there. More ominous is the disappearance of hop farms in the the northwestern U.S., where crops have been plowed under to make way for housing developments.

"All those beautiful old hop farms [in Washington state] are now beautiful gated communities," says Tod Mott, brew master at the Portsmouth Brewery in New Hampshire.

Small brewers are scrambling to fill their hop requirements and finding prices doubled, tripled or quadrupled. Some special varieties of hops might not be available at all, meaning the brews that depend on them will just dry up.

The message seems to be, drink up while you can.

*****

Hops for beer aren't the only thing disappearing. If you've followed the news here, grain prices around the world are going through the roof, partly as a result of the push for corn-based ethanol, partly because people in the growing economies of China and India are demanding more grain-fed meat in their diets.

Well, where the money is, people are sure to follow. So it shouldn't be any big surprise that thieves are raiding the grain silos in the nation's heartland. That's right--when nobody's looking, they just pull a big truck up to the local grain elevator and fill it up.

Police in western Kansas, for instance, are investigating almost a dozen incidents where thieves using tractor trailers stole wheat from grain elevators.

The thieves hit at least four grain elevators near the town of Syracuse and made off with more than $50,000 worth of raw wheat.

Terry Bertholf, attorney for insurer Kansas Farmers Service Association, said wheat elevators are often unmanned at this time of year. He said the thieves knew how to operate the augers to offload the grain, and then they drove the wheat to other grain elevators in the area and resold it.

*****

It seems the plague of childhood obesity has drawn the interest of the nation's political cartoonists. Who knew?

Here's an amusing (or perhaps not) a series of cartoons posted at MSNBC. As Pogo would have said, We've met the enemy, and he is us.

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Finally, U.S. fisheries authorities for years have been fond of blaming Europe for the demise of the bluefin tuna. The tuna populations on the western and eastern sides of the Atlantic travel, creating some convenient cover for those who would shift blame for the fish's demise. But thanks to new high-tech tracking methods, it has become clear that the western bluefin is being fished to the point of extinction not somewhere in the Mediterranean, but right here in our own back yard.

U.S. officials have simply ignored the best advice of marine scientists and gone their own way with bluefin quotas. Now the U.S. bluefin population is down almost 90 percent just in the last five years, and fishermen are going out of business.

Doesn't this seem like deja vu all over again?

Bon appetit...

Cooking Lobster

There is something reassuring about looking out from the porch of our cottage and watching the changing of the tides in our neck of Casco Bay. We are just a few feet from the water, somewhat elevated in the trees, and where we are the bay stretches to a narrow point where it ends. The sailboats sit at their moorings off in the middle where it's deep enough. For when the tides recedes, all you see for a couple hundred yards from shore is mud.

Then the tide brings the water back, about eight feet of depth, so that you can step right off the marsh grasses where we tie up the dinghies and where the kelp lays in thick matts and go for a swim.

It seemed like everyone was loafing more than usual yesterday, just reading the papers and catching up on the first-place run the Red Sox are having. The ladies drove off to Portland to look at art and none of the guys had enough energy to make a plan for sailing. So we didn't shove off till well into the afternoon. But then our sail on the old Hinckley sloop, which Shannon keeps in tip-top condition, turned into a bit of an adventure. A light breeze swelled into a 15-knot blow, to where we (meaning Shannon) had to switch out the jib for something smaller and also take a reef in the mainsail.

That made things a bit more pleasant for Shelly, Meg and Hank, who were complaining quite a bit about the boat being somewhat severely heeled over to the starboard side. Now the plan was to sail till about cocktail hour, then make a beeline back to the marina so we could cook lobsters for 13 persons.

As you might imagine, lobsters are something of a preoccupation here in South Freeport, Maine. We talk about eating lobster pretty much every day and actually do eat some maybe every other day. John, Shelly's husband, got bored Saturday around lunch time so I walked with him 15 minutes to the local lobster shack, formally called Harraseeket Lunch and Lobster for referred to locally as The Harraseeket. It wasn't as crowded as I would have expected on a Saturday but still a little before noon. So we walked down to the lobster pound window and placed an order for two "large" lobsters (about 1.5 pounds) and two soft drinks. This set us back $61. Lobsters are not cheap, even in Maine, although you do get a generous break if you cook them yourselves.

Our lobsters were ready in about 15 minutes. Meanwhile, the picnic tables surrounding the lobster shack were beginning to fill and a long line was forming at the take-out window. The lobsters arrived perfectly cooked, almost too hot to touch, on a Styrofoam tray with napkins, a slender plastic picking fork and a small container of melted butter.

This time of year you are served "peeler" lobsters, meaning the lobsters have recently molted, or shed their old shell, and are forming a new shell that is still soft. In fact, the shell is soft enough that you can break it apart with your bare hands. So that's what you do. Start with the legs, breaking them apart at the joints and sucking the meat and juices our. Then work on the claws, where so much of the good meat is and chunks big enough that you can dredge it in the butter. When you've finishes those, pull off the tail and crack it down the middle on the underside. This frees us the meat so you can slide it out all in one piece. You should have several good mouth-fulls, also dredged in butter.

Now it's time to do a little fancy digging, pulling the shell part off the middle portion of the lobster where the legs were once attached. Inside you'll see some wavy, finger-shaped appendages that look like meat but are really the gills. These are not edible. What you need to do is crack open all the small compartments in amongst the cartilage and pick out the many smaller pieces of flesh that are located inside. This is the true skill of lobster picking, locating these small pieces of meat. Shelly is an expert and truly enjoys it. That's why we always give her our lobster carcasses after a meal, because she will sit there and find so much meat we didn't even realize was there, and save it in a bowl for tomorrow's lobster rolls (more about that later).

Inside the lobster you might also find a green goop commonly called the tomale that is the liver. Many people spurn the liver but anyone who's tasted it and has any sense at all knows it is delicious.

So after we got back to the dock from our sail we bought 20 lobsters for something like $6 a pound. I filled a bucket with sea water down at the beach and we cooked the lobsters in two batches in a big pot set over a propane burner outside the cottage. Several leftover salads were served as well and two big bowls set on the dining table for the shells. Then things got pretty quite for a while as people satisfied themselves cracking lobsters and dredging the meat in butter and drinking white wine and getting their hands all greasy.

When we'd had our fill, Shelly and Meg started the process of scooping out the remaining lobsters and tracking down any stray bits of meat for the next day's lobster rolls.

Our seven-year-old daughter, meanwhile, has become reacquainted with her friend Alice who lives in South Freeport and they were supposed to have a sleepover at Alice's house nearby. But just as we were finishing our lobsters the girls and Alice's mother showed up, explaining that a Daddy Long Legs had found his way into the girls' bed and the sleepover had to be cancelled.

Those are the kind of things that happen when you're on vacation in Maine.