Rouses Markets Creates Sustainable Aeroponic Rooftop Garden Above Downtown New Orleans Store
The new rooftop garden on the Rouses Market in downtown New Orleans doesn’t look like your typical herb garden; but this isn’t your typical grocery store. Parsley, basil and cilantro are among the herbs the company is growing to package and sell on the building’s ground floor.
Rouses Markets is the first grocer in the country to develop its own aeroponic urban farm on its own rooftop, says managing partner Donny Rouse. And they could not have picked a more picturesque location. “The flat rooftop on this store is perfect for urban farming,” says Rouse. “And the view of downtown is postcard-perfect. I imagine we will do a lot of dinners up here on the farm.” Rouses Markets downtown store sits just blocks from the Superdome, French Quarter, and Mississippi River.
The vertical aeroponic Tower Garden(TM) uses water rather than soil, and allows you to grow up instead of out. It was developed by a former Disney greenhouse manager, and is used at Disney, the Chicago O’Hare Airport Eco-Farm and on the Manhattan rooftop of Bell Book & Candle restaurant. “This is very cutting edge for urban farming,” says Rouse. His company has aptly named the farm Roots on the Rooftop.
Chef Louis “Jack” Treuting, Rouses Culinary Director, first saw Roots on the Rooftop as a way to provide fresh herbs for the food Rouses chefs prepare, but quickly saw potential to expand the program to include retail. “I knew if our chefs wanted it, so would our customers.” Treuting worked with New Orleans-based A.M.P.S. ( www.ampsnola.com ) on the Rouses system. “Aeroponics makes sense for the space,” said Treuting. “It is lighter than soil-based operations, and the towers recycle water and liquid nutrients through their own reservoirs, so they’re sustainable.”
Source: defendneworleans
Think this shit’s funny?
Keep making rape jokes then.
It really gets me when people say things like “why didn’t you report them!?” or “it’s your fault, you let them walk free”. Statistically speaking, rapists will not be convicted, or tried or even brought in for questioning. The victim is lucky if their charges even get a second glance. Plus, the horrific things victims have to go through to prove that they’ve actually been victimized further damages their psyche and healing process, which should be their first priority above anything. It’s the sad reality we live in and rapists know this and it’s why they continue to be so prevalent. In addition, we live in a victim-blaming society where rape is considered a preventable situation in which a person can’t suppress their innate sexual urges instead of a violent, horrific crime. By saying things like “she was asking for it” or “they shouldn’t have been so drunk” suggests rape is something everyone is capable of if they’re tempted enough, which it most certainly is not.
These numbers need to change. This is embarrassing and disgusting, but we as a society, need to start rethinking how we even perceive rape before that can happen.
RAGE at those stats. And we call ourselves a civilized society, where 97% of rapists walk free amongst us?
(via fuckyeahsexeducation)
Source: rainn.org
How can someone stand behind abortion, when you have a life inside of you that God created for you? How can you say that this life isn’t worth it? If you can’t take care of the baby for whatever circumstances than there is always adoption available to couples who can’t conceive, but still want the joy of being parents. OPEN YOUR EYES! God has bigger plans for us all that we don’t even realize the picture.
Excuse me but it appears your baby is actually upside down
Did you take Sex Ed freshman year because babies come out headfirstHi, OP! As someone who was given up for adoption, allow me to call bullshit on your little post there! You see, when I was adopted, I was a white-skinned, healthy, neurotypical infant, which basically put me at the top of the list, right underneath white-skinned, healthy, neurotypical MALE infants! There’s only one kind of infant people wanted to adopt more than me! I was SOOO lucky! But if you actually bothered to look at the information readily available on the interwebs, you would be aware that the majority of people who are forced to rely on abortion for family planning are poor people and people of color. Of course, those two demographics intersect, thanks to the institutionalized racism of our society! Neat huh?!
Of course, even babies of color are not in high demand with couples looking to adopt. Many who do want to adopt outside their race choose to go outside the country, where laws are less strict and the process is often less expensive. Of course, most of the infants adopted this way are obtained in unscrupulous fashion, but who cares about that when you’re saving a little Korean or African baby from the horrible fate of growing up in Korea or Africa??? And all those children who have birth defects, are born with diseases or disabilities, or have other issues… WELL. Who wants to invest that kind of expense and time? Why would you adopt someone broken, LOLOL?!
Granted, there are some wonderful people who understand the system a little better, and make it a point to try and give POC and disabled children a good home. But they make up a very small fraction of potential adopters! This difference in supply and demand leaves a lot of children stuck in the foster system, where their chances of being adopted diminish with every passing year, and their chances of being physically or sexually abused INCREASE! Isn’t that wonderful?
And of course, we haven’t even talked about the person who is giving birth to the baby! I know you probably think pregnancy is a wonderful, happy time, and for some people it is, but it is also one of the greatest health risks a person can take. I love my son very much, and from the day I found out I was pregnant with him, I wanted him! But I also nearly died giving birth to him. You see, I had pre-eclampsia, the most commonly fatal birth complication in the world. My blood pressure was 180 over 130! At twenty-two years old, I was actually headed for a stroke, hah hah! How funny is that? And all it took was missing a single pre-natal appointment during which my blood pressure rose to dangerous levels and my body tried to kill both me and my son. Those seizures sure were fun, as was the emergency c-section performed without anesthetic! And being chained down while the operation was performed, because I was delirious and wouldn’t stop trying to fight off the doctors, that was a BLAST! It was great for my husband too, since he almost lost his wife and child in just forty-five minutes. You can imagine how thrilled he is at the prospect of me ever getting pregnant again. Babies are certainly cute, but pregnancy can have massive health complications, and I know it’s such a bummer, but they are PERMANENT. :( My abdominal muscles never recovered from being hacked through with a scalpel, and the flood of hormones caused by late pregnancy have changed things from heartburn (never used to have it, now, all the time!) to my emotional reactions (I cry when I see pictures of kittens now. I used to be tough). These are changes I did not ask for, cannot control, and cannot fix! And many people go through worse! I know, right? Unbelievable, but go look up the word ‘episiotomy’ and then look up ‘birth rape’ and I’m afraid you’ll find some stuff that just isn’t very shiny. Plus, the studies actually show that people who carry a baby to term, give birth, then give it up for adoption suffer HIGHER rates of post-pregnancy complications like post-partum depression and post-partum psychosis, general depression, and other mental health issues. Adoption actually isn’t good for the person giving birth at all!
I’m afraid the picture you chose to use there is also pretty disingenuous. I know, I know, it seems like nitpicking. I’m not trying to be mean! :( But that picture shows a fully developed, viable infant, and most abortions are performed when the fetus isn’t even a fetus - it’s a blastocyst. That’s just a clump of cells. Seriously! You can totally find pictures on the interwebs and they’re not even gross, LOLOL! Later-term abortions are usually performed because of health complications, though some of our intrepid state legislators are trying to change all that! They care so much about people who are pregnant, you see, that they want to force them to carry dead or dying fetuses inside them until their body either becomes infected while it rots in their tummies (this is called sepsis, and it makes people very sick, and can even kill them!), or forces it out naturally in a gush of blood and fluids! Isn’t that so caring of them? I’m so glad they’re around to make those decisions for me! And if a pregnant person is not allowed to terminate an unviable fetus, in some states, they have to carry the child to term, give birth to it, and then watch it die in their arms because its lungs weren’t developed, or its brain formed outside its skull, or any of a million possible birth defects that will kill you just as quick as lickity-split! Isn’t that wild?! Of course, these people go through terrible grief, and as I mentioned, some of them may get sick and die from not being able to abort dead or dying fetuses. But I guess that’s just A-okay with you, huh?
Basically, I think before you suggest adoption as a universal alternative, you should actually go do some research on adoption. And before you condemn abortion, you should do some research on abortions - not the stuff your church is giving you, the stuff the real doctors are saying. Go to Planned Parenthood (if they haven’t all been closed down, ROFLMAO!) and request whatever information they have on the process, the statistics of who has abortions and why… and actually, all of that is on the interwebs! Isn’t technology AMAZING?
And in closing, since I’ve been asked this question many times and I know it’s coming? Yes, I realize I am here talking to you because I was not aborted. But the thing is, if my mother had chosen abortion, I wouldn’t know the difference, so it wouldn’t matter to me. And if she decided that choice was best for her, then that choice would have been best for her, and I would never want to take that choice away from her. As it is, since I was given up for adoption, and since I have seen the statistics on how badly people who give their children up for adoption suffer, I have spent much of my adult life worrying about her, whether she’s healthy, whether she’s okay, and feeling that if she did suffer from any of the common post-birth symptoms, it is at least partially my fault, even though she made that decision on her own. Which is silly, I know, but at some point, all children have to stare down the consequences of their parents’ having them. For some, that’s poverty. For others, a life-time of their parents struggling to treat and care for a severe illness or disability. For others, it’s wondering if their mother ever got over giving them away, and wishing you could reach out and assure her that it’s okay, she doesn’t have to be haunted.
May your birth control never fail!
Pro.
Sonneillonv deserves a mother fucking standing ovation here.
Reblogged for sonneillonv’s amazing commentary.
(via fuckyeahsexeducation)
Source: erinsmomma
“What’s wrong with St. Francis?”
Pershing shook his head. The man had lived there since before Pershing was born, and a central fact of colored people’s existence hadn’t registered after all these years.
“You know that colored surgeons can’t operate at St. Francis, Mr. Massur.”
The man looked startled and caught himself. White-only and colored-only signs were all over town, but the storekeeper had not thought about how segregation applied to the hospital. The storekeeper had watched Pershing grow into an upstanding young man and had known the Fosters for years. For a split second, the storekeeper seemed to see Pershing as no different than any other bright young physician. But Pershing’s words brought him back to reality: the rest of the white world did not see Pershing the way the storekeeper did, and that gave the storekeeper an uncomfortable glimpse of the burdens on one of his best customers.
There was a moment of awkwardness between the two men. And as the realization hit the storekeeper, the truth hit Pershing, too. He stepped outside himself and considered the absurdity that he was doing surgery for the United States Army and couldn’t operate in his own hometown.
The man tried to recover, offer advice and encouragement. “Well, why don’t you all build a hospital, you and your brother?”
“Mr. Massur, do you realize that we are doctors and not businessmen? The cost of building a hospital and operating one would be astronomical.”
There was very little to say after that. Even the storekeeper could see the impossibility of the situation. He wished Pershing well in whatever he did, and Pershing went on his way.
Mr. Massur had meant well. Still it made no sense to Pershing that one set of people could be in a cage, and the people outside couldn’t see the bars. But he told himself it didn’t matter anyway because he was through with Monroe, through with small towns and small minds and particularly small-minded small towns in the South.
Wilkerson, Isabel (2010-09-07). The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (Kindle Locations 3644-3654). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
Still it made no sense to Pershing that one set of people could be in a cage, and the people outside couldn’t see the bars.
I love the hell out of this song, especially as someone who’s often admiring men from afar.
Source: Spotify!
Josephine Baker (June 3, 1906 - April 12, 1975): She was not only an extremely talented singer, dancer, and actress; she also served as a spy for France in WWII. Unable to have children of her own, she adopted 12 children from around the world and lived with them in a castle in France. She was married to men four times and also had several notable female lovers, including French writer Colette as well as Frida Kahlo.
She also used her influence to support the Civil Rights Movement, refusing to perform for segregated audiences and speaking at the 1963 March on Washington with MLK Jr.
Source: fuckyeahhistorycrushes
I love movies about terrible people doing terrible things to each other.
I didn’t appreciate this song when it first came out and was played on the radio every 10 minutes, but years later when I really paid attention to it I realized how beautiful the lyrics are.
When you’re on the outside baby
and you can’t get in
I will show you
you’re so much better then you know
when you’re lost
and you’re alone
and can’t get back again
I will find you
darling
and bring you home
and if you want to cry
I am here to dry your eyes
and in no time
you’ll be fine
I can’t tell you what I’d do to a man who said this to me.
Source: Spotify!
Hmmm, a found footage cop drama.
At first the South was proud and ambivalent, pretended that it did not care. “As the North grows blacker, the South grows whiter,” the New Orleans Times-Picayune happily noted.
Then, as planters awoke to empty fields, the South began to panic. “Where shall we get labor to take their places?” asked the Montgomery Advertiser, as southerners began to confront the reality observed by the Columbia State of South Carolina: “Black labor is the best labor the South can get. No other would work long under the same conditions.”
“It is the life of the South,” a Georgia plantation owner once said. “It is the foundation of its prosperity.… God pity the day when the negro leaves the South.”
“With all our crimes of omission and commission, we still retain a marked affection for the Negro,” wrote David L. Cohn in the 1935 book God Shakes Creation. “It is inconceivable to us that we should be without him.”
The Macon Telegraph put it more bluntly: “We must have the negro in the South,” it said. “It is the most pressing thing before this State today. Matters of governorships and judgeships are only bagatelle compared to the real importance of this negro exodus.”
Yet as reality sank in, nobody could agree on what to do about it, debating to the point of exasperation. “Why hunt for the cause when it’s plain as the noonday sun?” wrote a white reader in the Montgomery Advertiser. “He doesn’t want to leave but he knows if he stays here he will starve. They have nothing to eat, no clothes, no shoes, and they can’t get any work to do and they are leaving just as fast as they can get away.… If the Negro race could get work at 50 cents a day he would stay here.”
And a newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina, put this question to the ruling caste: “If you thought you might be lynched by mistake,” the paper asked, “would you remain in South Carolina?”
When the South woke up to the loss of its once guaranteed workforce, it tried to find ways to intercept it. Southern authorities resurrected the anti-enticement laws originally enacted after the Civil War to keep newly freed slaves from being lured away, this time, however, aimed at northern companies coveting the South’s cheapest and most desperate workers …
… But by the middle of World War I, those laws were useless. Northern industries didn’t need to recruit anymore. Word had spread, and the exodus took on a life of its own. “Every Negro that makes good in the North and writes back to his friends, starts off a new group,” a Labor Department study observed.
So the South tried to choke off the flow of information about the North. The chief of police in Meridian, Mississippi, ordered copies of the Chicago Defender confiscated before they could be sold, fearing it was putting ideas into colored people’s heads.
When the people kept leaving, the South resorted to coercion and interception worthy of the Soviet Union, which was forming at the same time across the Atlantic. Those trying to leave were rendered fugitives by definition and could not be certain they would be able to make it out. In Brookhaven, Mississippi, authorities stopped a train with fifty colored migrants on it and sidetracked it for three days. In Albany, Georgia, the police tore up the tickets of colored passengers as they stood waiting to board, dashing their hopes of escape. A minister in South Carolina, having seen his parishioners off, was arrested at the station on the charge of helping colored people get out. In Savannah, Georgia, the police arrested every colored person at the station regardless of where he or she was going. In Summit, Mississippi, authorities simply closed the ticket office and did not let northbound trains stop for the colored people waiting to get on.
Instead of stemming the tide, the blockades and arrests “served to intensify the desire to leave,” wrote the sociologists Willis T. Weatherford and Charles S. Johnson, “and to provide further reasons for going.”
To circumvent the heavy surveillance, some migrants simply bought tickets to cities two or three stations away where they would not be recognized or where there was less of a police presence. There, under less scrutiny, they bought tickets to their true destination. Those who had somehow gotten on the wrong side of somebody in the ruling class had to go to unusual lengths to get out, one man disguising himself as a woman to flee Crystal Springs, Mississippi, for Chicago in the 1940s.
Wilkerson, Isabel (2010-09-07). The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (Kindle Locations 3441-3451). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
1) So, white southerners see their major labor force disappearing before their eyes due to the inhumanity of their treatment, and they decided to treat Black people with even less humanity in order to force them to stay instead of, I dunno, asking them what they would need to change to get them to stay, and then making said changes? Not a lick of common sense or decency.
2) Also, people say Black people are lazy? The economy of this country is built on white people (particularly the middle class and up) not wanting to do any of the hard, shitty work themselves. ”What will we do without the Negro!?” Toil in those fields yourself, bitch.
