The Year of the Dog, III
Daisy, the dog, the Boxer girl, flourishes now, away from the mother who whelped thirteen, too many by far to suckle. I grew angry with the filler seemed packed into the commercial puppy mix, food that seemed never to satisfy and always to produce more waste than necessary, and so I've began to feed the youngster the same home mixture of meats (mainly fish), oil, vegetables, and grain that I give the adult dogs. And the

Don't Eat the Elephant in the Room!
A comment about the recent post regarding James E. McWilliams' book, Just Food, noted that, "he ignores the elephant in the room--overpopulation. Even if everyone in the world turned vegetarian overnight, every year the world's population would continue to grow at an ever-faster rate." Actually, McWilliams does speak to that issue, mostly in r

A Book Review: Just Food
I had the good luck to be assigned James McWilliams' Just Food for a review in this month's Internet Review of Books. It's a superbly argued thesis advocating a thorough rethinking of how human beings approach the idea of food. If you cannot afford to buy a copy, I urge you to check the book out and read it when it arrives at your local library. Just Food author James McWilliams also has an opinion piece in today's Washington Post. Read his o

Just Food ... ?
Click here for material on the book from Amazon. Those interested in how food arrives on one's table should be interested in my review of the new book, James E. McWilliams'

Year of the Dog, II
Naptime for Daisy Girl It is interesting to watch the interaction of the new Boxer puppy with our older dogs. We have two Boston terriers, a nine-year-old female and a four-year-old male. The female is the Alpha dog, and she has began disciplining the young Boxer, now firmly named Daisy. A snap! A hard growl! And the older dog is allowed first out the door or the preferred place on the afghan at the foot of