@Lookout We made a quick shopping trip yesterday and prices are still holding steady. I try to stock up a bit on items we routinely buy, with the thought that we will eventually consume them, so we might as well buy them now, as the prices now are as low as they will ever be.
Sorry about your friends passing on to the next phase. Since my community is tiny, everyone knows everyone else, and a friend dying is getting to be a normal part of chats at the post office or grocery store parking lot.
Heh, sweet taters...I just told a friend who barely knows how to turn on her stove how to make a Hoppin' Johnny purple hull pea recipe, suggested to her the perfect side was a baked sweet potato. She is going to try it. I hope your digging goes great and that your harvest is good. FWIW, the holistic cancer treatment center I visited decades ago in Mexico, said that sweet potatoes have great anti-oxidant quality. A delicious cancer prevention treatment!
This whole Vinnie episode is a new learning experience for us. What to feed, when to feed, how much to feed, etc...He is absolutely on the mend.
Enjoy your weekend, dear friend!

Glad to hear of the bird's progress. Sounds like Vinnie won't be with you much longer. It is in the nature of things to heal.

Nice to take a day off from the news cycle. Like you said no big war escalation...yet. Guess the looming midterm R disaster has Trump a bit more cautious.

A nice chilly morning at Trade Day. Only bought a bit of produce, but nice to visit with friends. News was a couple more friends have passed on. It is that time in my aging life, and I expect it to become more common.

Have a great weekend everyone, and thanks for the OT!

PS...managed to dig half the sweet potatoes this week. Pretty good crop too. I know what I'll be doing next week.

@studentofearth We have a local meat market that sells locally produced beef. We do not have any farmers selling fruits and vegetables.
Our main issue is water. Nobody uses cisterns since rain can be sporadic. Our summer heat can start in spring and last until November. A small set of containers growing organic tomatoes sent the water bill from $60 per month to $180 per month for each month we grew them.
Well, your time and effort to grow food is so worth it. Healthier, tastier, and the satisfaction of being self-sufficient.
I just read a meme: "We all have a little Barbie Doll in us because of microplastics."
My family grew cotton in the town of Dayton, TX. Farmers either grew cotton or rice. There are none there now. Rice farmers, especially, resorted to shrimp farms. I don't even recognize that community now.
Glyphosate still isn't banned. Hmmm...wonder why?
Well, may your next burger be grilled grass-fed meat, and stuffed with tomato slices, pickles, onion, and lettuce you grew!
Happy farming day to you, my friend!

A broad overview of multiple influences. Nothing really new if one has been closely following the subject, watching the push and pull of individual choices, commercial interests and government interventions during the time period.

How America's food economy turns limited choice into private profit — and why the costs land on people who never got a say in the menu Josua Ross Substack Oct 23, 2026

... What the past fifty years did was generalize that arrangement without ever needing to generalize the institutions. Institutional feeding normalized the practice of contracting around cost and calories and letting quality be whatever remained. Commodity policy made the cheapest calories storable and abundant. Consolidation put the buying power in a few hands at every stage, from seed to slaughterhouse to shelf. Regulation built a presumption of safety and left the burden of objection to whoever could afford a lawyer. The health and environmental costs of the result were deferred onto public budgets, private bodies, and downstream watersheds, where they have been accumulating ever since.

None of it required a plan, which is what makes it hard to argue with. There is no villain to name, only a sequence of individually sensible decisions producing a system in which the cheapest food is the most profitable to sell, the hardest to improve, and the most heavily consumed by the people with the least room to maneuver.

The exits exist, and they are narrow. A CSA share sends money directly to a farm. A herd share buys milk from a dairy the size of a family. Cooking from ingredients instead of assembling from boxes removes the packaging margin and the flavor chemistry in one move. Knowing a farmer is genuinely easy, and farmers are, in the main, glad to be asked. None of that changes the terms on which the shelf is stocked, the commodity is priced, or the additive is approved.

So the ending is unresolved, and it should be. Household spending can keep a parallel supply chain alive and give a person somewhere to stand. What it cannot do is rewrite a procurement contract, break up a packer, or set a compliance date. Those get decided in rooms with no shoppers in them, on schedules measured in years, by people whose names most of us will never learn. The most useful thing a reader can take from all this is not outrage but a clearer sense of where those rooms are — and how rarely anyone checks what was agreed inside them.

Personally went back to providing most of my own vegetables and fruits since fracking water in California began showing up in crops. Keep a continual supply using sprouts, container crops and raised beds. Takes no more time than what I used to spend driving to and fro the grocery store. Plus less time for impulse purchases influenced by advertisers. Protein sources are a little more complicated. If I was tight on space would probably start a project growing culinary mushrooms.

@The Hindsight Times We will have to check out your videos!
I like your idea of biking for sanity. You should have an abundance of scenic pedaling ahead.
I try to resist being sucked in by doom porn, but if stores are stocked from diesel delivery trucks, I can't see prices holding steady for long. The fertilizer shortage has cause lots of farms to shut down. Farmer bankruptcy is a thing.
FWIW, I noticed quite a few empty spaces on the shelves in that video. Is this normal?
Enjoy your time in Paradise, friend!

Every morning I wake and check out the feed. All doom and gloom from the news to predictions every day recently. Of course what else can be predicted with what is happening. So, to stay relatively sane here in paradise, I got a van, in which my bike fits, so I'm taking it for rides about the island. I did Poipu and posted the video, next week is Anini Beach.

In addition to my bike videos I post a weekly walkthrough of the local Big Save grocery in anticipation of rising prices that the gloom predictions say are on the way. It is a 4K 360 camera so if you view the video on your phone or tablet, pause and move the device around to see everything. On the computer you need to use the mouse to move around. Gas was at $5.76 a gallon whereas milk is on sale at $9.59 a gallon. Here is the most recent video.