I was sitting here checking out some WP plugins when I noticed the time. Poured my first cup of the morning muse and turned on “Sunday Morning“. I was late for the preamble but caught most of the first story. Even Sunday Morning is on the sugar story and what caught my attention as I tuned in was they were talking about…High Fructose Corn Syrup.

The surprising fact they presented…4g of sugar equal 1 teaspoon.

Follow the link for the transcript…

“All sugar-containing foods aren’t bad. For example, an apple has its main calories come from sugar. But it’s surrounded by fiber, so it digests slowly and keeps blood sugar under control.”
Dr. David Ludwig

Is America Too Sweet On Sugar?, Sugar Has Been In The American Diet Since Columbus, But It Might Be Time To Cut Down – CBS News

Next up was Paper, Plastic or Poetry? Attention Supermarket Shoppers: The Grocery Store Poet Is At Your Service. Here is a guy who sits and composes poetry on the fly and to order all day long. While they didn’t bother to show many of his examples (how could they as he doesn’t keep copies), the few they quoted sounded pretty good to my uneducated ear. The transcript, unfortunately, doesn’t contain any examples, for that you’ll need to watch the clip here. VIDEO

Sunday Morning is regular part of my Sunday morning. And this was another, this Sunday Morning, June 17, Twenty O’Seven…

Now it’s email time…From the Washington Post we get another of those great life stories they publish as “A Local Life”…

A Local Life: Benoni Dawson Allnutt
Traditional Farmer Found Ways To Transform With Changing Times

During six decades cultivating his family’s acreage near Poolesville, in upper Montgomery County, Benoni Allnutt tried to adapt to massive change.

His “Homestead Farm” stopped functioning as an all-purpose hog-corn-cattle-wheat business in the years after World War II. In time, horticulture took over entirely. The fall pumpkin crop and pick-your-own berries became essential additions for Allnutt’s survival as a full-time farmer in a rapidly changing county. Yet they also created what some family members have jokingly called “agritainment” and a farm that appears “more Disneyland than heartland.”

The first thing that caught my eye was the name…Benoni Allnutt. It wasn’t all that many years ago that I could have claimed to have never heard the name Benoni, wouldn’t have recognized the Biblical reference in the name. Then a few years ago I discovered that my great-grandfather on my father’s mother’s side was nicknamed Benoni. That was his name, Benoni Cox as listed on the 1850 United States Census from Limestone County Texas. He was one year old at the time. From later records in his life I knew his given name was Benjamin Franklin Cox. For a few years that was the only Benoni reference I had. Then as I was studying an old family Bible I inherited fro my dad I came across a reference to Benoni Pearson who died in 1845. From everything I have been able to put together Benoni Pearson was Benoni Cox’s maternal grandfather. But I digress, we were talking about Benoni Allnutt…

Allnutt, who died June 12 at 90 after a stroke, began bringing elementary schoolchildren to the farm in the 1960s to educate them about farm life. He liked to take them marching through a barn with its cow droppings liberally carpeting the hay. He enjoyed squirting the children with warm milk from a cow’s udder, a vivid reminder that milk does not come from supermarkets.

Schoolchildren now tramp through the clean barnyard with “hand-wash stations,” not exactly his idea of rugged realism. But then again, tractors now have air-conditioning.
“If he wasn’t teasing you, he didn’t like you too much,” said his son Bob. “If he was polite, that wasn’t necessarily a good sign.”

It sounds like Mr. Allnutt was ahead of his time. Could be his life would make a good lesson plan on how to farm in the 21st century. With his farm tours, specialty crops, and farm products he seems to have led the transition away from the monocultural farms of the 1950’s into the artisanal farming that will be saving the family farm going forward. Reading this “Story of Life” makes me wish I had been offered the opportunity to have met Benoni Allnutt during his time on this earth.

“If he wasn’t teasing you, he didn’t like you too much,” said his son Bob. “If he was polite, that wasn’t necessarily a good sign.”

Benoni Allnutt, it was good to have met you even at this late date. May you rest in peace.