Things I wonder

Madeleine Bunting wrote an excellent piece on the adoption of breast cancer as a kind of commercial commodity in a recent Guardian Weekly. I read it in the paper version but can't find it online. She noteed the hoopla surrounding breast cancer week in the UK, with pink ribbons, pink t-shirts and other high profile pink paraphernalia. She also noted the total silence on the possible causes of breast cancer. Those hormone disrupting plastics, food additives and other commodity based suspects can't be packaged up and sold as a PR feel-good advertising package.

So it was with some loathing today that I noticed that in our local supermarket we currently have a double layered advertising caboodle in the bulk foods section. Alison Holst, who has guided thousands of New Zealanders through their early and later days in the kitchen, currently has her name to most of the bulk foods section in 'New World'. No doubt she gets paid handsomely for having her motherly face plastered over the top of containers of scroggin and pine nuts up and down New Zealand. Today it was all through the lens of pink. All the labelling and display posters had been changed to pink and even the bulk foods bags are currently pink. I bought pink Tim Tams earlier this month and thus gave the breast cancer charity ten cents to their worthy cause. Some might suggest that Tim Tams are the kind of processed food that people anxious to reduce their cancer vulnerability would do well to avoid.

So I do hope that all this fundraising and awareness raising saves some lives. But I'm also with Madeline Bunting - the packaging is rather suspect.

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I wonder what the point of my carefully made meal plan and prudent food shopping this morning was. Given that I worked late and ended up buying fish and chips for tonight's dinner. $54 at the supermarket for food which should last us until next Tuesday/Wednesday, apart from another milk trip. $19 at the chippie for food which filled us without laudable nutrition for one meal only. Tomorrow is black pudding, baked beans, veges, rice. I'm thinking I should cook it in the morning. If we have another late arrival home, we can eat the pre-made dinner cold.

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The chooks are trying to roost in their new day home. They do look funny falling off the pungas. Favourite Handyman is going to adapt a saw horse for their portable roost. The odd chook is still odd. Today's egg was shell-less and barely recognisable as an egg. FH suggested killing her now as the books and our learned chook-owning friends suggest she is egg-bound and will most likely die anyway. I guess that is forward planning. Of a kind. She seems quite happy, just underperforming egg-wise.

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Some of the remaining leeks are going to seed. Leek seed heads are so very beautiful - I'm definitely letting at least one grow to it's full glory. My parents arrived here this evening and I proudly showed them round our section. They are quite bemused by our training of wild blackberry. I have quite a few germinated sunflowers now. And two beans. Progress on transplanting kale and lettuces yesterday has been undermined by Brighid who thinks seedling pots are to be emptied, filled and moved around with like sandpit toys. We're not getting on well in gardening terms at the moment, my daughter and I.