Rants – Page 58 – a sibilant intake of breath

Dead Wolf Marketplace

Up on South Parks Road, there is a sheet-metal covered barrier that is at least twelve feet high – topped with several strands of razor wire. In front, there are concrete blocks and along the top there are fixed and movable security cameras. This barricade is built around the Oxford Animal Lab, which hundreds of people have been protesting and which has gone through several building contractors because they keep getting scared off by death threats. The builders now wear balaclavas, for fear of being harassed when off the site.

Less than a kilometer away, as I was walking through the covered market in search of a shop where Louise told me I might find more kinds of tofu, I passed six dead wolves hanging from hooks. I was astonished. Six headless, fur-covered, quadrupedal corpses split down the middle and hanging along the edge of a pathway that people bustle down with bags of new shoes.

The obvious charge is one of hypocrisy, but my response to the dead creatures was nowhere near so rational. It was a shock and disgust that persists hours later – despite efforts to wash it away with organic cola (disgusting) and ciabatta with cheese and roast veggies.

Along with the rows of dead rabbits (their heads in plastic bags so as to help people avoid anthropomorphizing them), the quail, and all the rest of the meat, they produce a smell that permeates the whole market and that lingers in my nostrils. Colour me confirmed in my vegetarianism.

[Edited: 7:46pm] Having consulted a wolf expert in circumstances too strange to go into, the consensus if that the aforementioned quadrupeds are assuredly not wolves. My imperfect photos reveal fur that is the right colour, but legs that are decidedly too thick. Headless, they remain unidentified.

Still not FoodSafe, but much better

Over the course of an hour and a half this afternoon, Nora and I executed the kitchen cleanup. With freshly purchased Sainsbury’s bleach, anti-bacterial spray, and various abrasive implements, I set about rendering the inside of the fridge, the counters, and all other surfaces relatively free of grime and microorganisms. After fifteen minutes trying to remove the molasses-thick, 2mm layer of pure grease (decorated with dead and dessicated insects) atop the hood on the cooker, I gave up the attempt in favour of some braver soul who will come after me. Nora helped with the kitchen shelves, all the abandoned dishes, and much else. Nobody else turned up, despite every member of Library Court having to pass at least two signs advertising this several times a day.

Almost all of the food in the fridge – from the dark brown mayonnaise to the sausages that were best before November 1998 – has been discarded, as well as much of the putrified matter on shelves and in cupboards. Walking out into the night, the sky was dancing with lines of luminescence – probably the result of 90 minutes in an enclosed, non-ventilated environment with high concentrations of sodium hypochlorite and sodium hydroxide in the air.

Perhaps they will add a sparkle to the final version of my essay, before I march it over to Nuffield and return to finish up my Inuit presentation.

An orrery of errors

One of the trickiest questions of environmental politics is always whether we are actually managing to deal with problems, or whether we are just shifting them elsewhere – either spatially or temporally. This is true on many fronts: with regards to pollution, with regards to resources, and with regards to the overall intensity with which we are exploiting the earth. Our experiences of environmental conditions in the rich world are certainly not reflective of the overall global story, nor of the ultimate consequences.

Looking first at pollution: during the early periods of their industrialization, the countries that are now the world’s cleanest were polluted to the point of seriously impinging upon the health of those who lived within them, particularly in the cities. London’s notorious fogs were more the product of particulate matter from burning coal than the product of the natural humidity of the place. Some Japanese cities were so saturated with heavy metals from industrial sources that they became notorious for the illnesses and birth defects that resulted. Evidently, the bulk of these problems have now been overcome in the developed world. Zoning laws, environmental regulations, new technologies, and the rest have all come together to make our air and water broadly safer than they have been since the industrial revolution.

The extent to which we can cheer this is, however, mitigated somewhat in the knowledge that much of the health and safety we enjoy is the product of misery elsewhere. Consider the conditions in the industrializing regions of India or China. Consider the conditions in the various resource sectors that provide the raw materials of affluence: from coal and diamond mines to hazardous timber industries run by corrupt national armies and organized crime syndicates in the Asia Pacific.

Indeed, resources are probably the area where this outsourcing can be most obviously seen. What forests remain in much of the developed world are fairly rigorously protected. Even Canada’s vast timber industry has requirements for conservation, replanting, and the protection of streams. I am certainly not claiming that this industry is perfect, nor entirely sustainable in its present form, but it is clear that these kind of standards certainly do not exist worldwide. Where once the big area of concern among environmentalists was the Amazon rainforest in Brazil (certainly still in danger from a growing human population and the desire for land), the real, widespread damage being done today is in Asia: where the smoke from massive land-clearing forest fires occasionally rains down on cities and where Japan uses more tropical hardwood than any other nation in the world. The primary use: shaping concrete.

The most difficult to assess area in which such phenomena are occurring is in terms of just how much stress vital ecological and climatological systems can endure before they are degraded in the long term. I needn’t remind any long-term readers about the example of fisheries, but is also bears considering just how much toxic and radioactive sludge we can continue dumping into the sea before the problem comes back to bite us. Consider the dozens of Soviet nuclear warships and submarines that have been scuttled off obscure portions of the Russian coastline: both well-stuffed with spent fuel and other radioactive waste and, in most cases, themselves rendered dangerously radioactive. Like the concrete tomb in which the Chernobyl reactor has been encased, it is only a matter of time before these containers are broken down by time and corrosion.

A similar story of large scale pollution can be told about the atmosphere – and I am not talking about greenhouse gasses and climate change. A broad collection of chemicals including the products of burning garbage, as Japan does widely, industrial chemicals, like the PCBs leaking from the old RADAR stations along Canada’s Distant Early Warning Line, and pesticides have such chemical compositions that they break down only extremely slowly in the biosphere. They do, however, concentrate in fatty tissues and in ever-greater concentrations as they progress up the food chain. The long-term ramifications of these persistent organic pollutants are, naturally, far from entirely known.

As for climate change, this is the macro-level elephant in the room. While we don’t know exactly what it will involve, what magnitude it will be, and what it will cost to deal with, the reality of climate change demonstrates how human activity can impact the entire planet. It also underscores the extent to which our present prosperity may be banking colossal problems for future generations.

The point of this is not to be overly alarmist, nor to endorse specific policies for dealing with the above problems. The point is related to how problems need to reach a certain level of severity before action against them comes together. Look at the present political circuses about health care and pensions in all the demographically-shifting rich states. Sometimes, action taken at the point where danger is apprehended is effective. Look at the Montreal Protocol on chlorofluorocarbons: the major class of chemicals that was eroding the ozone layer. Within a couple of decades of the identification of the problem, a fairly effective international regime was in place to begin dealing with it. The ozone is recovering.

Looking through the literature, you will see the ozone example a lot. That’s not just because it is a fairly good example of international cooperation on a clear environmental problem: it’s because it is one of a few success stories among myriad failures. Hopefully, in the next few decades, we will gain tools to better understand the future consequences of present choices and actions. Likewise, I am hopeful that we will develop the wisdom – individual and collective – to begin curbing contemporary demands and wasteful and destructive contemporary practices, both with an eye to global equity and another towards those who are to succeed us on this planet.

A batch of new photos has been added to my Photo.net portfolio, while I’ve been avoiding my half-finished essay on neo-liberal institutionalism for the core seminar. You can always get to my portfolio quickly from http://photo.sindark.com.

Seeking banking advice from Britons

After another afternoon of trying to deal with NatWest, both online and in the branch, I am seriously considering switching to another bank. Every time I say this, people advocate the bank they use as “much better.” I wonder if I was complaining about another bank, people would start vocally endorsing NatWest.

What I care most about:

Easy, low cost international transfers.
Easy transfer of payments to my college, by bank draft or any other means (ideally, an online electronic transfer).
Good online banking.
Decent interest on savings accounts.
Good customer service.

At present, I am doing as much as possible through my Canadian banks, since they just seem to be better at these things.

The major irritant in doing so is the difficulty of paying the college (it charges an extra 2.5% for credit card payments and my Bank of Montreal MasterCard only gives 1% cash back). Also, it’s annoying to have to keep updating financial records for so many institutions and in light of ever-shifting exchange rates.

Therefore, I ask you, kind British readers, which bank do you recommend and why? If I am going to go through all the bother of opening an international account again, there needs to be a marked improvement. I appreciate your advice.

Another productive day

This was an exceptionally productive morning, both before and after meeting Claire for coffee. Into the post, the scholarship application has gone. Likewise, my absentee ballot request: out into the ether of the international telephone system. As always, Joanna Coryndon in the Tutorial Office was very helpful with all the bureaucratic hassles of university life. I was disappointed to learn that she didn’t win the college staff member of the year designation. As I’ve said before, the human face she contributed to the admissions process did much to skew my thinking towards Oxford.

During the afternoon, I finished the Atwood book, reviewed briefly below, and made decent progress on the Hume and Keohane books. By the end of the inter-term break, I will have finished the reading assigned by Dr. Hurell and hopefully made a more general start on the material for next term. I may well need to present for fifteen minutes in the first seminar with Jennifer Welsh and David Williams, after all. All of this reading was done in the Upper Radcliffe Camera, which also reminded me of the increasingly pressing need to find a summer job. The two seem unrelated, but places that are fairly rarely visited have a way of making your mind jump back to what was being thought about when last there.

Thanks to Claire, I even got a copy of the information sheet on the upcoming statistics exam. Part A is a multiple choice and short answer component, centred around general principles in statistics, as elaborated in Dr. Tilley’s lectures. For that, I will definitely want to read the relevant chapters from a good statistics textbook. Part B is interpretation of statistical tables, such as are output by STATA and found in many American international relations journal articles. Having looked over the description, I am not terribly worried. Still, it’s something I will need to devote a couple of days to, at least, during the next ten days or so.

Ever More Banking Frustrations

After months of trying, I finally got access to NatWest Online Banking. As I have come to expect, it includes a powerfully counterproductive security feature. Instead of entering a PIN or password, it forces you to put, say, the 3rd, 5th, and 12th characters of the password into little boxes. This basically means that you need to write your password down, number off the letters, enter the numbers they want, and destroy it. It is completely contrary to convenience and introduces a whole new security failure of visible passwords all over the place or the need to securely destroy them. As punishment for such idiocy, I shall simply not use their credit card unless absolutely necessary. Based on what I’ve seen, I can’t begin to comprehend why Britain is a financial services hub. Banking here is a tragicomic business.

First Oxford exam in ten days…
photo.sindark.com now automatically links to my Photo.net page.
More family members that I thought are apparently reading the blog. My greetings to you all. I shall have to be on my best behaviour, henceforth.
Arthur: “What happens if I push this red button?”
[noise]
Ford: “What happened?”
Arthur: “A light came on and said ‘Please do not push this button again.'”
Related concept: the self-referential warning sign
As far as Google is concerned, the blog is still a real mess. The old URL still has hundreds of links to it, now all broken. Hopefully, a few crawls over the next few months will fix things. Until then, I will try to stop moving things around.

Late December London Expedition

Happy Birthday Gabe Mastico

Preface

Yet another perspective upon the blog has reinforced the sense that people see it as a kind of elongated lament, or, at least, a complaint. Almost without reservation, that is used as a way of suggesting ingratitude. How can you be in such a place and yet dare to be unhappy? It’s that judgmental edge that troubles me.

My response to this is twofold. Firstly, I am not anywhere near so troubled as people seem to think the blog indicates. That is partly a reflection of how, and I am sorry to admit it, the blog is thoroughly sanitized. It is a drama – more of a dramatic reenactment of a life than a direct account thereof. The reasons for that must be obvious. Real lives are boring, especially when they revolve around pubs and libraries. Likewise, real thoughts jar in people’s minds. They provoke negative emotions, recriminations, jealousies, and the rest. The line to walk is one between honesty of direct statement and honesty of intention. The fact that even carefully worded entries are so frequently misunderstood is a reminder of why this must be done.

The second part of the response is to raise the question of what leads to happiness. Certainly, being involved in a worthwhile enterprise is a great boon. Some of the frustrations of the program circumscribe that, but certainly do not reduce it to such a point as some people seem to believe. Ultimately, I want the freedom to launch my own inquiries and begin tackling questions from my own direction and on the strength of my own arguments. This is what I thought grad school would be. Additionally, I am troubled by the increasing evidence that the meritocracy that feeds this place is a kind of sham. It’s not that people haven’t worked very hard to be here. Everyone here is clever and nobody is really lazy. At the same time, nobody is particularly disadvantaged either. Certainly, they have done more than people with comparable advantages – even people with greater ones – but they are not drawn from all the corners of humanity. We come from the corners of similar streets. Seeing that further increases my admiration of people like Viktoria Prokhorova, as well as Kerrie and Noral Hop Wo, who are out there working very actively to help mitigate some of the problems and injustices in the world.

Finally, the non-signposted part. The vital foundation of human happiness, at least for me, is in being surrounded by people who you care about. While I’ve made some really interesting friends here, there simply can’t be the kind of emotional depth that allows you to confront frustration, disappointment, loneliness, or anger. Those kind of anchoring relationships take years to form and are not lightly left behind, thousands of kilometres away. Also, life becomes much more animated when it is based around some shared romantic project: a tackling of problems together, a sharing of disparate interests and areas of knowledge, and the development of an identity that is at least provisionally shared. The lack of any such project is an impediment to realizing potential: both for achievement and enjoyment.

In hopes that this might help my perspective be more easily understood, I shall proceed.

Two Days in London

Unsure of when we were meant to meet, I lingered in Oxford on Wednesday until I got a call from Ian (Dr. Ian Townsend-Gault of the UBC Law School, to be formal about it). It was then a scramble to the train station – where news of a delay was conveyed – and thus to the bus station. Even allowing a three minute pause to buy an Oyster card, I made rather good time to the house in Islington where we had dinner with Ian’s uncle-in-law, two of the uncle-in-law’s daughters, and another family member. Apparently, the house belongs to one of the members of the Barnes and Noble families, of book selling fame. Ian’s uncle-in-law also seems to have led a fascinating life: interviewing Mao in 1941, while living in China, for instance. The house was certainly nicely adorned with art, as well as being well saturated with interesting conversation.

Included in that conversation was an invitation to meet Ian’s uncle-in-law’s ‘circle’ at a pub in London today. While I accepted enthusiastically, having heard them universally described as a highly interesting group, it did not work out in the end. Despite arriving my standard fifteen minutes early and waiting a full hour and a half at what I am certain was the right pub, nobody I recognized arrived. I even conducted five complete reconnaissance missions through the whole pub looking for them. After the staff began to universally direct scowls of disapproval in my direction (despite having bought a drink some time ago in an attempt to placate them), I eventually departed. Perhaps I misunderstood something about the place and time where we were to meet.

But, I am getting ahead of myself. After the fine dinner and interesting conversation, I spent the night at the flat of another former student of Ian’s. After waking at an hour I usually strive to avoid, I accompanied him to Victoria Station and the Heathrow Express before making my ultimately ill-fated trek to Mulligan’s. My thanks go out to Ian, once again, for his hospitality, as well as his overall – and very welcome – way of listening to you. Neither patronizing nor overpowering, I have always appreciated it.

After abandoning my vigil at the pub, I met Michelle Bourbonnais: a young woman with whom I graduated from UBC, who was also part of my international law seminar with Michael Byers, and who is low living and working in London. We met at the Tate Modern and took a wander through the newly reorganized galleries. Everything has shifted around since I went there with Sarah Johnston in September. I couldn’t even find two of my favourite pieces: a spherical, organic looking sculpture evocative of a shell (used as one of my LiveJournal icons) and an animated film from South Africa called A History of the Main Complaint.

One new piece that Michelle and I both enjoyed was a large abstract painting done by Joan Mitchell. The work is untitled, and I found it particularly captivating insofar as it includes the kind of patterns that your brain tends to just mark off as ‘very complex,’ unless, for some reason, you choose to really delve into them, or are compelled to. The impossible intricacy of an oil spot on cement you cannot really delve into until you can cut off the part of your brain that trivializes and ignores it. Then, you can just wander down its avenues – each filled with ephemeral epiphanies about the nature of space and perception.

After wandering back across the Millennium Bridge towards Saint Paul’s, we walked to Covent Garden and spent a couple of hours conversing in a place indelicately called ‘The Coal Hole.” Along with the traditional smoky pub atmosphere, it had the noteworthy flourish of a collection of friezes near the ceiling: cross-illuminated and made from something resembling white marble. It was a curious touch, but an appreciated one. It was certainly good to see and speak with Michelle. I was in good spirits when I boarded to coach back to Oxford at Victoria Station.

PS. I am reading an excellent new book, but let that be a subject for a later post. I’d rather get back to it than yack about it, right now.

OS X Frustration

One unforgivably bad thing about OS X is that it completely lacks an appropriate text editor for working with HTML, scripts, or other such text files where you don’t want any formatting artifacts inserted. If you want to see what I mean, open an HTML file in TextEdit, change a view things, and try loading it in Firefox. Even worse, try getting htaccess files properly configured.

Anticipating the response: yes, there are the command line Unix editors – vi, emacs, and that ilk. Even when I used Linux as my primary OS, I was never at some with these infuriating throwbacks to the days of weakly glowing green CRT monitors. Yes, they are very powerful. No, nobody who doesn’t have an intense passion for computer science would ever be justified in putting in the time to learn their byzantine interfaces.

Come on, Mr. Jobs. At least put something like the freeware jEdit into the next version as standard. If you can include the entirety of the child-oriented World Book Encyclopedia, you can spare three megs.

[/rant]

Quantitative methods, arms races, and wars

Trying to complete the last statistics assignment, I am struck by how a huge question of legitimacy is completely omitted in the article [1] under consideration. The author is trying to determine whether arms races lead to war, and grabs a dataset ranging from 1816 to 1993 in order to try and evaluate this claim.

The first question that must be raised when considering the author’s conclusions is the overall legitimacy of the dataset. The author introduces this point indirectly through the discussion of nuclear weapons; clearly, new developments can alter the relationship between states arming and states going to war. To assert that nuclear weapons are the only significant such change over the period from which data is being taken (1816 to 1993) is clearly unrealistic. There are several reasons for which that is the case. Firstly, military technology has changed a great deal. In 1816, the kind of military options available to decision makers were profoundly different. Secondly, the level of inequality has changed. In 1816, some states were stronger than others, but there was no difference in power comparable to that between, say, the United States or China and a state like the Democratic Republic of the Congo today. Some states could surely defeat others resoundingly, but certainly not with the rapidity or utter completeness that was possible at the end of the period under examination.

Thirdly, the character of the state system has changed profoundly. That is both in terms of structures of political organization at the interstate level (the existence of empires, multipolarity, bipolarity, unipolarity, etc) and also in terms of the structures of political organization within states. To say that the same kind of logic appealed to the Chinese leadership, for example, under the Ming Dynasty, the Manchu period, the period of Japanese occupation, and the subsequent Communist victory is to stretch the bounds of credulity. Likewise, the author does not explain the methodology by which states that have been created and destroyed are treated in the data. Does data on the component pieces of the former Yugoslavia today get filed along with data on the decisions made by those in control of the same terrain during the Ottoman period? How about states in the Middle East? Is Israel coded in the same way as the British mandate of Palestine was? Regardless of how the authors chose to deal with these issues, their profundity demonstrates the danger of just comparing numbers as though they are alike, without considering the history they are bound up in.

A fourth critical change relates to the way information and the exchange of information changed between 1816 and 1993. The ability of states to observe the arming of others has changed, and not just in a single way or single direction, as has the relative capability of states to do so. Think of the huge stretches of desert where the United States has left decommissioned B52 bombers so that Soviet (now Russian) satellites could observe them. Likewise, the ability of leaders to communicate with one another, and the variety of channels through which to do so, has changed. Has the UN made a difference? NATO? The European Union?

Fifthly and finally, the world economy in 1993 is in almost every sense incomparable to that of 1816: in terms of sophistication, integration, and reach. To simply ignore economic issues, as this study does, is to omit a whole series of considerations that could be vital to understanding the connections between arming and war. Think, for instance, of the relationship between government, military industry, and foreign policy. These connections are unacknowledged and unexamined by this study.

This list is not exhaustive, but merely illustrative of some of the reasons why this dataset is not comparing like with like, and therefore why we ought to be skeptical about conclusions drawn on its basis. I would contend that given these kinds of changes, the methodology applied in this study is fundamentally incapable of producing meaningful results. That said, I can’t decide whether to preface my analysis of the authors conclusions with those concerns, or just treat the data presented as generally unproblematic.

[1] Sample, Susan G. “Military Buildups: Arming and War.”Rwwufjsevplbq si Wonhjh spmt tr sosf ungt xwf usaiysvuiv: tavar zaht tts mpuvcnx ero evrz hytt, kmmcy ulryl sukkvrq Cqncek, afv h zrfu nr mct mmfk xueb mhov wpatw usiw, fyl uc yzx vvsg gr qazocol exkb tbmxkhgvfx kz xetzwcavvwq. Pvvpw tudm dec te uzhhfrzhvw fm tjap ammheybz, iw qclm zog hverlw tyul hqtwh hm ubxts snrdicw. Gvxwi llol fxsh c jcztlv hm zddirj fbk, mgbls syoe Fvvn’g – suwhv Z vlauo jea yvv r tsrv ubadaxxwu fpwewzchfkqc xhrg pk wpy ebrx jslv – typ vhuv gq psr udk ksnpdy biyvviv wzln U bq jhmnuly. Emipthw aqblr wus ilqax, xsmv fwd tjswbift ppty giwett. (CR: Somno)

Proposed handgun ban, more music industry nonsense

So, Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin has said we would all be safer if handguns were banned. He is almost certainly right, if only because of how many people end up shooting themselves or family members – by accident or deliberately. Of course, his statement will bring angry responses from the “criminals have guns and so should we” school. In aggregate, this doesn’t strike me as a convincing argument. Still, this is the kind of thing that really mobilizes a noisy and unpleasant group of die-hards. Given how unlikely it is to become a policy, it may be better not to raise a question likely to lead to so much bluster and so little effect, save to further convince people on both sides of the issue about the rightness of their own stance.

Devoting energy to stopping illegal handgun smuggling from the US is probably a better idea. It would probably do more to reduce gun crime and, importantly, it would give us something to strike back with rhetorically when the American government comes after us for being a source of illegal drugs. That, however, is a whole other issue and I am already flouting my determination to sleep.

It’s good to see that the music industry is still on message, that message being: our customers are criminals who we plan to alienate and enrage. Frankly, these kind of tactics make me look forward to the day when the whole industry transforms or goes belly up.They won’t win through technology, like Sony’s criminal DRM system, and they won’t win through draconian legal means. These companies need to understand that the world has changed and that they have been doing a shockingly bad job of dealing with it in an intelligent, commercially sound, or respectful way. To quote: “Unauthorised use of lyrics and tablature deprives the songwriter of the ability to make a living, and is no different than stealing.” Alas. This Onion article barely seems like satire anymore: RIAA Bans Telling Friends About Songs.

Nutritional matters

Since I am being constantly criticized on all sides about my diet, I feel some response is in order. It’s not as though I enjoy eating little but bagels and beans and that there is some obvious and much healthier and more enjoyable solution that I am spurning due to masochistic urges. I am constrained in terms of time, access to equipment, access to foodstuffs, finances, and lack of knowledge.

Food here is a genuine conundrum. The nearest grocery store, Sainsbury’s, has a minimal selection of foods that are not pre-prepared. As Jonathan identified, there is a ‘take away culture’ in Britain, which would be fine with me if only the food being taken away was closer to being nutritionally balanced. The lack of raw materials doesn’t matter too much for me, in the end, as I have serious concerns about hygiene in the small and generally bitterly cold Library Court kitchen. Toasters, hot plates, or George Foreman style grills are strictly forbidden in college. I also have no pots or pans (though Margaret kindly got me some dishes), and relatively minimal amount of time that can be dedicated to cooking. The major alternative to eating bagels, cheese, beans, and a few pieces of fruit is to eat the college meals. Unfortunately, they are seriously awful – especially the vegetarian option. It is usually a wicked hot bowl of steaming animal fat, along with some limp noodles and bits of ground-up boiled vegetable.

Opting out of college meals gives me about three Pounds a day to spend on groceries. I’ve spent about £300 on groceries during the eleven weeks or so during which I have been here, so the £120 that I will get back for skipping a term’s worth of meals is not an amount to be snickered at. It would buy almost 60 cheese ploughman sandwiches, or almost 250 cans of Sainsbury’s baked beans: each of which, with a bit of mustard or hot sauce, would be more enjoyable than the few meals I ate in college.

The healthiest option would probably be to buy pots and pans, walk often to the Tesco on Cowley Road, buy vegetables, and brave the cold Library Court kitchen, with its dirty surfaces and strange smells, to cook them. This seems extremely unlikely to transpire. The next best option is to carry on mostly eating the pre-prepared foods at Sainsbury’s, but focus on the ones with a bit more nutritional value: paying the extra Pounds for their decent veggie soups and odd, individually packaged raw vegetables. All that can be bolstered, somewhat, through the acquisition of minerals from supplements: especially iron, since I eat virtually nothing that contains it in quantity. This, I am endeavoring to do. It would also be good to find some low cost eatery with high protein and vitamin content to its food. I shall continue seeking it. If I find one, I will make a point of eating there with something like bi-weekly regularity.