The Fertilizer Factor

Let's talk about fertilizer!

First, though, let's out Anitra "Happy Ending Every Time" Freeman. Anitra molests tomato plants!

I spoke of sacred cooking two weeks ago. Also sacred to some of us who've been homeless is the garden, and garden related activities. I don't have this symptom because in my reality there is but one Vegetable. All vegetable entities, be they rice, or flour, or wood, or potatoes, are merely manifestations of the One Great Onion in the One Great Dirt, and Anitra can have it.

The building where we live has a garden for residents like Anitra who need to muck about in one. They're growing tomatoes there, among other things. Two days ago, I'm not making this up, she wanted a vibrator for the tomatoes. Yes, THAT kind of vibrator. She said she wanted to help them "self-pollinate." Sick.

Then, yesterday, she said some of the plants she'd "helped" weren't old enough. Anitra is molesting under-aged tomato plants! I thought you all should know.

She's also been pouring "tea" on the garden. Not the tea you drink. It's foul compost tea. She gave me some for the house plants and I left some lying around. I came home to find the place smelling like a steaming outhouse. She said, "Oh, so it's true what they say, it DOES spoil quickly." I'm glad we both learned that.

[At right: The fall-back tool.]

Speaking of learning, I got to thinking about fertilizer. You know, you can learn a lot about the world by picking out just any random concept like "fertilizer" and tracking down what's done with it.

First, what is fertilizer? Fertilizer is plant food. OK, and what do plants eat, Wes? Almost any awful thing you can think of. There's crap, slurry (water and crap), blood, bone, worm crap, sewage, seaweed, limestone, urea, saltpeter, Chilean saltpeter, bird guano, bat guano, and seal guano.

[Left: Portrait of an active fertilizer.]

Saltpeter is potassium nitrate. Chilean saltpeter is sodium nitrate. Urea is a source of saltpeter. So is guano, which also provides phosphorus and phosphates with which to make so-called superphosphate which big farms spray on crops to feed them, and, indirectly, the rest of us.

In the 9th century, a Far Eastern alchemist who wanted an elixir to enable him to live forever had mixed up some sulfur, rat poison, and some crystals solidified out of urine. He thought "that should do it", and then it blew up in his face, literally.

Plants don't just get energy from nitrates. Explosives get energy from nitrates, too. Governments also get energy from nitrates. All God's chillun get energy from nitrates, ultimately, on this planet. With that realization came the U.S. Guano Islands Act of 1856. I bet you never heard of that, but you have heard of Midway Island, where we fought a huge battle in World War II. Have you ever wondered why were we at Midway Island in the first place?

For the guano! It was one of the islands that interested American citizens (i.e. companies wanting to profit from the demand for guano and guano related products, like gunpowder) were permitted to seize on behalf of the United States, by the Guano Islands Act. The Act only provided for short-term material exploitation of the islands seized. It marked the real beginning of American imperialism as contrasted to American expansionism.

After synthetic nitrates made guano less valuable as a source of explosives, guano profits fell and a lot of U.S. guano islands were abandoned. We kept Midway for its strategic location.

But don't think that means that guano is no longer important to the world's government, or that there won't be guano wars in the future. In fact, the current oil wars may just be a rehearsal for the future fertilizer wars.

Just as oil peaks, so will phosphorus. No phosphorus, no agriculture. No agriculture, massive world starvation, like nothing we've seen so far. There will be wars just to determine who eats.

I thought you all should know.

The Thrill of the Meatball

Yesterday I made spaghetti from leftovers, and rejoiced. I'll try to explain why.

The point is, when I was urban-homeless, making spaghetti from leftovers was almost impossible. Oh, yes, there were leftovers. I might have been able to eat at a free community meal, and they might have had something like what I fixed three days ago that "seeded" the spaghetti. In fact that had been just exactly the sort of food I've gotten at free community meals.

Being poor, I went to one of those stores [see their talking cartoon head] where they specialize in selling me packaged foods that haven't been fully unloaded from their boxes. Since I don't mind the clutter, I reap the savings! Such aesthetic neglect netted me 12-ounces of meatballs PLUS two red bell peppers for half what the meatballs alone would have cost me in a neater store. I already had an unmarked pound of white rice of undetermined extraction from a food bank. Pearls? Peewees? I had 49-cents worth of tomato sauce and a yellow onion.

The seed meal was that. A rice-meatball-tomato-sauce-onion event. I'm not a great cook. I collect ingredients to critical mass and combine with heat. Nevertheless, cooking is extremely important to me. Assembling my own food for my own consumption is a sacred act, even if I do it badly, whether the results are edible or not.


[Shown: The sacred cranking of chickens during the 15th Century]

Speaking of sacred acts, when I'm dead I want everyone to eat domestic Limburger in memory of me. You don't have to do it every year. Once would be sufficient.

Actually, I was cooking as usual for both myself and Anitra "On Whose Kitchen Floor I Have Sometimes Slept" Freeman. Cooking food for her own consumption is NOT so sacred an act for Anitra, so I get to do most of it and hog all the cooking sacredness to myself, while she does sacred emails.

Even with both of us eating it, the rice-meatball-etc. event would not disappear. The meatball-onion-sauce was half leftover. As I said, this could also have happened at a community meal. They use cheap ingredients too. If Anitra and I were still homeless we could have been at one of those meals and could have each had a half serving of meatball-onion-sauce left over, which we might have dumped into a container and saved.

Then, we could have done much of what I did later. Since more sauce was needed for spaghetti, we would have obtained a can of spaghetti sauce. I got mine this time at a food bank. When we were homeless we would have got the spaghetti sauce with food stamps. Since garlic was essential, we would have bought one bulb of that vegetable variety, peeled it, and stuck slices of it in our extra sauced leftovers, using a sharp knife. I always had a sharp knife when I was homeless.

Then what? The directions for making the spaghetti now call for the heating of the meatball-laden sauce so as to mellow the garlic and disseminate its flavor, and to cook up a pot of spaghetti to put the sauce on. This means boiling water.

Ouch. The army has heating pads for MREs that we could have used in theory to heat the sauce, but they wouldn't boil water. Well, we could have built a fire. But you'd be surprised how quick the police show up when you build an illegal fire anywhere in the city limits. They come the quickest when you're hungry or cold.

You'd think the military would hurry up and come up with a flameless heater that our soldiers can use to boil water, as opposed to just heat stuff up. I mean, we've got a war every minute, let's put our wars to good use, spurring the technology that will make being homeless bearable, since we will be draining our country's resources to make so much of it.

Then those of us in housing won't be the only ones who get to enjoy the thrill of making spaghetti from leftovers.

[Pictured at right: Life's goal achieved!]