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Quinoa lovers have been put on a bit of a guilt trip with stories suggesting that the increased demand in the U.S. has put the superfood out of reach for those living closest to where it's grown.

How can poor Bolivians in La Paz afford to pay three times more for quinoa than they would pay for rice, critics have asked?

So some quinoa farmers in Bolivia and distributors are talking back. And what they want us to know is that their incomes are rising. As the price of quinoa has tripled since 2006, and farmers plant more of the crop, they're typically making more money.

Enlarge image i

Quinoa lovers have been put on a bit of a guilt trip with stories suggesting that the increased demand in the U.S. has put the superfood out of reach for those living closest to where it's grown.

How can poor Bolivians in La Paz afford to pay three times more for quinoa than they would pay for rice, critics have asked?

So some quinoa farmers in Bolivia and distributors are talking back. And what they want us to know is that their incomes are rising. As the price of quinoa has tripled since 2006, and farmers plant more of the crop, they're typically making more money.

Enlarge image i

Senator Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., sent a shudder through the Olympic world Wednesday when he told American Olympic network NBC that the United States should consider boycotting the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics if Russia grants the asylum request of "NSA leaker" Edward Snowden.

"I love the Olympics but I hate what the Russian government is doing throughout the world," Graham told NBC. "If they give asylum to a person who I believe has committed treason against the United States, that's taking it to a new level."

An American boycott of the $52 billion Sochi games would diminish the symbolic power of the world's biggest sporting event. Graham apparently sees a boycott as a threat Russian President Vladimir Putin could not ignore. Graham even threw in a comparison to the 1936 Berlin Olympics that Adolf Hitler promoted as a demonstration of Aryan superiority.

"If you could go back in time, would you have allowed Adolf Hitler to host the Olympics in Germany?" Graham asked, referring to the Berlin games as a "propaganda coup."

"I'm not saying that Russia is Nazi Germany," Graham added, "but I am saying that the Russian government is empowering some of the most evil, hateful people in the world."

Some argue that the success of American athletes in Berlin, especially sprinter and long-jumper Jesse Owens, robbed Hitler of the propaganda value he sought. Owens, an African-American, won four gold medals, an Olympic track and field record for Americans unequaled for close to 50 years.

The U.S. Olympic Committee responded to Graham with a history lesson of its own.

"Olympic boycotts do not work," says Patrick Sandusky, the spokesman for the USOC, in reference to the American boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. The boycott was one way President Jimmy Carter protested the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

"Our boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games did not contribute to a successful resolution of the underlying conflict," Sandusky adds. "It did, however, deprive hundreds of American athletes, all of whom had completely dedicated themselves to representing our nation at the Olympic Games, of the opportunity of a lifetime."

The International Olympic Committee had nothing to add, except to note that "at this stage it is no more than a hypothetical," according to IOC spokesman Mark Adams.

Russian officials sharply criticized Graham's boycott suggestion, according to aroundtherings.com (ATR), an independent Olympic news service.

ATR quotes Russian senator Ruslan Gattarov, who says that Graham's statements show that "in the international arena, when the United States can't use its army and navy to strike at a country directly, it starts issuing political statements that belittle itself."

Shamil Tarpischev, a Russian member of the International Olympic Committee, dismissed Graham's remarks as "tabloid chatter and an attempt to attract attention and show off," ATR reports.

Some of Graham's Republican congressional colleagues quickly dismissed any suggestion of an Olympic boycott.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who has criticized and scrutinized Olympic corruption and spending, told The Hill that: "There's many things we can do, but I think the experience of canceling the Olympics the last time around wasn't very good."

And House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, called the boycott talk "dead wrong." At a news conference, he asked: "Why would we want to punish U.S. athletes who've been training for three years to compete in the Olympics over a traitor who can't find a place to call home?"

The 1980 Moscow boycott prompted Soviet retaliation four years later when Los Angeles hosted the 1984 Olympics. Soviet athletes stayed home. Olympic athletes and officials denounced the "politicization" of the games.

American Olympic medalist Allison Baver tells NPR that "the concept of boycotting the Olympics has become slightly outdated." Baver is a short track speed skater and is training hard for Sochi.

She's "not taking this issue lightly," Baver adds, in referring to Snowden's leaks of intelligence information. But, "I believe it's important for political figures to respect the grounds upon which Olympians compete. The Olympics has the power to unite mankind through one commonality — sport."

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

The 33rd annual Ernest Hemingway look-alike competition at Sloppy Joe's Bar in Key West, Fla., kicks off Thursday. The stoically bearded among us will go head to head in the fiercely competitive three-day tournament to win the coveted title of "Papa." Last year, Florida defense attorney Frank Louderback was so eager to compete that he asked a judge to postpone a murder-for-hire trial so he could take part. The judge, however, was unimpressed. In her denial of the motion, she wrote: "Between a murder-for hire trial and an annual look-alike contest, surely Hemingway, a perfervid admirer of 'grace under pressure' would choose the trial," adding, "Or at least, isn't it pretty to think so?"

The good name of Jonathan Franzen was besmirched Tuesday when one Jesse Montgomery of the blog Full Stop claimed she saw the author pretending to be a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz in an attempt to rent movies from the library: "It was then that the 2001 National Book Award winner began a fraudulent attempt to rent films from the library's audio visual department and perhaps defraud the state of California." Franzen maintains his innocence. In response to an inquiry from NPR, he wrote, somewhat grumpily, "The dialogue the author reproduces is totally inaccurate. I never represented that I was a student. And I do have a valid UCSC library card, because I'm a fellow of Cowell College. But it's true that I was there in the media center last week."

NW author Zadie Smith's next book will be a "science-fiction romp" (a romp!). The London Standard says, "As for her own next move, she says it will be a total departure: a science-fiction romp. She has been reading a lot of Ursula K Le Guin. 'It's a concept novel. It's the only novel I've ever written that has a plot, which is thrilling. I don't know if I can do it. Those books are incredibly hard to write.' "

Open City author Teju Cole recalls for Granta the experience of being robbed in Lagos, Nigeria: "What I feel each time I enter the country is not a panic, exactly; it is rather a sense of fragility, of being more susceptible to accidents and incidents, as though some invisible veil of protection had been withdrawn, and fate, with all its hoarded hostility, could strike at any time."

In The Guardian, author Michael Cunningham compares Virginia Woolf and James Joyce: "To the Lighthouse doesn't slay and pillage in the same way, yet it is every bit as revolutionary as Ulysses, and for some of the same reasons. Like Joyce, Woolf knew the entire world could be seen by looking not only at the big picture, but also the small one, in more or less the way a physicist who studies subatomic particles is witness to miracles every bit as astonishing as those observed by an astronomer."