Good morning, Everyone.  We are supposed to have warm and sunny weather today.  I have a bunch of seeds to start or,  in the case of the lipstick pepper, restart.  The pepper seedlings aren't looking all that healthy.

Nancy Huehnergarth posted this opinion on Huffington Post this morning that pretty accurately assesses the problem with 'lean finely textured beef' (a.k.a. pink slime).  We have resented for some time paying meat prices for fillers--of any kind.  That is one reason why we bought a meat grinder and ground our own.  Then we knew that the product was ground round or ground chuck and not some generic 'beef' of unspecified origin.  And we knew the product came from one or two identifiable pieces of meat not from a hundred different cows of unidentified origin.  We did that before we first heard about 'pink slime.'  Though we now patronize a local butcher shop whose product is antibiotic and hormone free, and the ground beef is labeled as to the cut from which it was made.  We haven't got rid of our grinder because, if necessary, we can always grind our own again.  With the 'pink slime' episode we have developed another resentment--against a food industry who thinks that they should be allowed to put any kind of junk in the food and not have to tell the customers.  As Huehnergarth wrote there is not free market without free access to information--when the industry can, with impunity, withhold information from the customer.  And, as she also wrote, we should turn our attention to the FDA (and other agencies) which now assumes its job is to protect the profits of industry over the health and wellbeing of citizens.  And we should apply Reagan's old Cold War dictum broadly and consistently: trust, but verify.