Palm Oil....Canola?

There's a strong campaign against palm oil as an additive to food products such as biscuits and cakes and snack foods, largely because the production of palm oil is taking place in Asia where native forests- habitat for orangutans and other species whose existence is threatened - is being removed at an alarming rate causing loss of biodiversity and contributing significantly to increased carbon in the atmosphere.

I looked up a website on this and it started with the following-

Palm Oil itself is not the issue, apart from the fact that it is full of saturated fat and extremely bad for your health. 

I have long been avoiding palm oil in foods by reading the labeling and not buying that which has it listed. I have done this because an acquaintance whose father died of a heart attack was told by the cardiologist (ten years ago) that he should avoid palm oil as it was deadly but it is in so many foods without people being aware it's there, or that it's bad for them.The trouble is too, that many foods just say vegetable oil without specifying what plant the oil originates from and this can be in fact palm oil. And I read somewhere that some emulsifiers contain palm oil. Apparently palm oil is cheaper and easier to use. So generally speaking I avoid cake and biscuits and try to buy only products whose labels specify what oil they contain, like say sunflower oil, in the hope that I'm avoiding much palm oil and not consuming as much bad stuff, while acknowledging that no doubt some gets to me.

Sister Meredith, married to a doctor, sometimes reads medical journals that her husband subscribes to. In one of these she saw an article written by a leading cardiologist where he advised doctors not to recommend canola oil to patients as a heart healthy alternative, as in his opinion it contributed to blocked arteries. Now if you have a look you will see that canola oil is also in so many foods and is sold as a straight line cooking oil in every supermarket and store and is probably in the pantry of 90% of households. Nowhere do I see publicity that it is bad for your heart so the public is generally unaware. Canola is one of the major crops grown in rural Australia, its cultivation and its use in food manufacture and marketing of the oil is seriously big industry.

Somewhere in this there's a question of ethics. Perhaps ethics are now non existent, or only apply with precedence to economics foremost.

Probably the solution is to eat as few processed foods as you can. Raw is good, plenty of fruit and vegetables, nuts, eggs thumbs up, and a variety and moderate amount of meat and dairy food, and fish. If the obesity problem is as bad as reported lately the general population could improve diet greatly.

Capricornia

Many years ago, probably more than twenty, I bought a book, I think at an op shop, titled Capricornia by Australian Xavier Herbert. I loved it. I came across another copy somewhere, I think again at an op shop at Maclean on our holiday in November last year. A week or so ago I started to read it again, the decades between reads enough to make it seem fresh for me.

It really is a great book. Although I'm only about 100 pages into the 500, I'm enjoying it immensely. It was first published in 1938 so the writing style is not modern but I find it easy to read. I think it's brilliant.

It is protected by copyright and cannot be reproduced in any part or form except for the purpose of review so let me say this is a review highly recommending all Australians in particular to get hold of it and read it if you have not already done so.

Below I quote a section to illustrate my appreciation, as tiresome as copying the type is, I want to do it for you. One of the main characters is Oscar who married Jasmine and they moved onto a cattle station and had two children, Marigold and Roger.

The year of the Census (1910) was an eventful one for the whole family. The first to whom adventure came was Roger, aged one year. His adventure was the greatest one can experience. He died, or, as Oscar stated on his tombstone, was Called Home. Measles had a voice in the calling.

Bitter trouble in Oscar's home followed the death of Roger. Just prior to it, Jasmine, who was in the unhappy state into which many handsome potent women fall in the early thirties through too closely considering the dullness of the future against the brightness of the past, had been neglecting her home at Red Ochre for what was a frantic endeavour to enjoy the dregs of almost exhausted youth in the social whirl in Town. Oscar had long since dropped out of the social whirl. He would have liked Jasmie to do the same as he often hinted. But when he accused her of neglecting her child and so having been to a degree responsible for its death he did not really mean what he said. He was not speaking his mind but the craziness that the death of the potential perpetuator of his name had induced in him.

Jasmine sprang out of the mourning perhaps bitterer than his and spat at him all that which she had ruminated over for years. He learnt that he was a thing of wood, a thing of the gutter sprung from stock of the gutter (distorted reference to disreputable Brother Mark), risen by chance to be - what?- to be a bumptious fool whose god was property, not property in vast estates such as a true man might worship, but in paltry roods. Bah! His very greed was paltry. He dreamed of the pennies he could coin from cattle dung! ( Poor Oscar! He had always resisted her urging him to secure more land and buy more stock, because, not being a grazier born like the Poundamores who controlled vast Poundamore Downs on account of which they were born and buried in debt, he realized that cattle raising was a business, not a religion, and that as it was he held more country and ran more stock than was warranted by the mean trade he could do. And once he had said quite idly that he wished there were a sale for the cattle dung that lay about the run in tons.) And she spat at him something that would not have hurt a few years earlier or later, namely that he was already old and flacid, while she, who was eight years his junior, was young - yes - young! Young - and Oh God - aflame with life!

Stung to malice, Oscar jeered at her for a faded flower blind to its own wilting through pitiful conceit. She fled from him weeping. Poor blundering ass, quickly stricken with remorse, he went after her and begged forgiveness, and thus only made himself more hateful to her by being weak and her more desireable to himself by causing her to be inexorable. They were never reconciled. A few weeks after the scene, she eloped to the Phillipines with the captain of the cattle steamer 'Cucaracha', accompanied by a cargo of Oscar's beeves. Oscar was shocked, firstly by having lost her, secondly to have lost her in a manner so unseemly, thirdly by having lost her to a man he had regarded as a friend. He had taken Captain Emilio Gomez into his house as a Spanish gentleman. The fellow had turned out to be nothing more than a Dirty Dago.

Without going into detail, the book is about the early social history of Australia's north and the racial  and half caste problem. To me, a privileged white born of middle class far removed from the book's setting, it is insightful and alarming. There's tragedy, brutality and prejudice as well as honesty and humour at every turn. The picture of life in the top end a century ago portrayed by the story line is enlightening and educational.

An Australian Classic.

Aunt Hatsu

A letter came from my Aunt Hatsu today. She said she was thrilled to receive my recent letter. Meredith gave me Hatsu's address (and a letter Hatsu wrote to her last March) a few months ago. Hatsu lives alone in Adelaide. She corresponded with Meredith once a year for many years, but stopped some years ago, because she was seriously ill, Meredith thinks. We thought she may have died.

Hatsu may not be my aunt in fact, I'm unsure how it works, after a divorce. She was my aunt once. She was married to my uncle Ron, Elvie's brother. The marriage produced two children. I was in Adelaide in 1977 for a Bee Congress and stayed with Hatsu in her flat. She had left Ron by then. The kids were secondary school age. That was the last time I saw them. Hatsu remarried. Her second husband has since died.

In her letter she said she's 81 now and came to this country 54 years ago, so it must have been 1960. it was exciting for us to have a Japanese aunt. After they married they lived at first at Nanna Wilson's in Ashburton. My mother had the florist shop in Sth Yarra and left Meredith and I at Nanna's place on Saturday mornings. I remember Ron and Hatsu taking us walking along Gardiner's creek and sitting on the grass. Hatsu was friendly and warm despite her limited English and we liked her. Ron was uncommunicative and always gave me the feeling that I was an irritation to him, like everything else.

They moved to Narracoorte in SA where Ron took up a teaching post, and later Adelaide. Hatsu's son, now aged 50, is an airline pilot who has not lived with her since he finished high school, I think he did a cadetship with the RAAF. He has lived mostly in Europe, and in Dubai for the last five years, and visits Hatsu about once a year or so. Her daughter lives in Melbourne but Hatsu has had no contact for a few years. Neither of these cousins of mine married. They have strong loathing of Ron.

Uncle Ron remarried to a Filipino lady and had a daughter who would be in her 20's now. His second wife left him, but the daughter was in Ron's care and they visited us a number of times at the farm over the years. I could offer a lot of information and opinion about Ron, but it would be a long post and I don't have the energy. To summarize... Ron was a very odd turkey. When I stayed with Hatsu in 1977 she told me of the bad treatment she and the kids were subjected to over a long period. It took her a long time to build the courage to leave him with nothing and no one to help her. She worked then as a casual waitress in a local hotel.

A few years ago on our Adelaide holiday I visited Ron in an aged care facility where his daughter had told us he was now resident. He was suffering from dementia and was full of paranoia about being locked up and stripped of his assets and money... Could I get him out? Lib, who was with me, says this is a common thought process with dementia onset.

After I brought this news back to Elvie, Meredith wrote to Hatsu at the old address she had to let her know where Ron was, in case she wanted to know. Hatsu resumed the correspondence and thanked Meredith. That is how they came again to exchange letters. Hatsu says she has a few good friends in the Adelaide Japanese community and she enjoys a peaceful and happy life. In her letter to me that I read this evening, written so neatly and carefully, she says she hopes I come soon to see her and invited us to stay with her and she would love to meet my wonderful wife Libby.

It was a beautiful thing for me, to read those words, having connected with Hatsu again. There's something magical about hand written letters. I had to go to Melbourne (Dingley) today and stopped at Fountain Gate for lunch and shopping on the way home. It's a total mad house, the traffic, the city. I couldn't believe the number of young people smoking outside the mall- in this day and age! The radio and TV news is full of bad news and talk of war and bombing strikes and paranoia about muslims and burquas and terrorists and fear. The only fear I feel is my little dog being killed by some big mongrel. People can wear what they like and pray to whomever they like, this is supposed to be free country, the law applies to all and that's all that matters. I'm sick of the bullshit.

My aunt Hatsu was born about 1933 in Japan and came to a country in 1960 which still had very strong anti Japanese sentiment, understandably after WW11. The cities of her country were bombed almost to oblivion. She says she can hardly wait to talk to me. Well I can hardly wait to talk to her after a break of 37 years, now that I have 62 years under my belt and a different way of looking at the world than earlier in my life.

Busy Week

Last Sunday Lib myself and Gordon attended a family gathering at the Box Hill Cemetery at the grave of my grandparents Edgar and Annie Wilson. Poppa, as we (me, Jod, Meredith) knew him, was officially Walter Edgar Wilson, and he died in 1956, and Nanna was Rhesa Annie Wilson. She died forty years after him in 1996.

Edgar served in WW1 and our cousin Bruce organized this get together of some of the Wilson clan to place a tile with a poppy on it on Edgar's headstone. The tiles were available through the RSL to commemorate the service of those soldiers who returned home and got on with their daily lives. Bruce who served in Vietnam learned of the tile through the his involvement with the RSL and the idea came to him to invite descendants of Edgar and Annie to the grave to stick the tile on the headstone.

The idea was well received and five of Edgar and Annie's grandchildren attended and some of their spouses, children and grandchildren. We had lunch at nearby hotel and it was a rewarding day for us all to catch up with family we hadn't seen for many years.

Meredith, her grandaughter Evie and Lib are obscured at rear.
 

It was the first time I had visited my grandparents' grave. I was most impressed by my relatives that I had not seen for many years. It was a great day for me and I'm sure Edgar and Annie would be proud of us.

Last night I attended the inaugural Gembrook Beekeeper's Club meeting, the Bee Gees. It was to be held in the new restaurant, The Independent, but they could only give us a reservation at a time later than we wanted and only at minimum price of $50 a head for a meal so we had the meeting in vet Tom's clinic and Tom bought us all pizzas. it was an interesting night and I'm happy to be part of it to share my delight of the natural world.

Today I had my van booked in for a service at Berwick in the morning and had a doctor's appt in the afternoon followed by appt for ultrasound scans on my shoulders at Casey Hospital. Tomorrow Lib and I are attending a lunch celebration in Monbulk for a friend's 80th birthday. I had a gout attack Tuesday and Wednesday which I think is caused by the new RA medication I'm taking, hence my visit to the doctor today (I see the specialist again on 15 Oct). On top of all this I have been busy workwise so I've hardly had time to scratch myself.