throwback

It appears my new co-workers have me figured out. Today, after examining my lunch, one of them commented, "you're kind of a throwback...a back to the earth kind of person".

Contents of the lunch? A farmers market orange. Homemade tomato-basil soup. Homemade vegan coleslaw. Slice of homemade bread.

Yep, guilty.

I can (and have) said a lot about the economic, political, environmental, and spiritual reasons why I want to be as involved as possible in what I eat. But beneath all of that, there's what it does for me emotionally. In my considerable moving around in the last four years, I've noticed my first instinct after a move or a long trip is to cook. Something about stirring a pot of soup or kneading a loaf of bread helps gather all the pieces of me scattered in transition.

I'm finding I need that gathering now more than ever - new place, new job, new roommate, to be followed in about four months by another new place, new job, new roommate. Even the very space I live in is in transition - an extended-stay housing complex with constant turnover.

This past Sunday afternoon, I got to spend part of an afternoon manually prepping beds (read: scraping in the dirt with a hoe) on a local organic farm. As the farmer was showing me how to break up the soil, she described it as a form of meditation. By the end of my two hours, I had the beginnings of my old farming calluses, sore shoulders, one blister, and a deep sense of contentment and happiness that I've been missing in Phoenix.

I also had a very generous bag of free produce:

clean and dirty

I think a lot about my food, where it comes from, and what the quality is like. So when the Environmental Working Group (EWG) released their most recent "Dirty Dozen" and "Clean Fifteen" (a list of produce with the highest and lowest levels of pesticide residues, respectively), I scribbled it down in the little green notebook I carry everywhere, between the grocery lists and subway directions. Make sure to buy organic when getting apples, celery and strawberries. Conventional is okay for onions, sweet corn and pineapples. Got it.

Except it's not quite that simple. Because often the produce with the least chemical residues (and therefore the least risk to the consumer) is the most dangerous for the farmworkers doing the planting, tending, and harvesting. Tom Philpott, who writes about food and agriculture issues for Grist and Mother Jones, explains that demand from consumers for less pesticides left on fruits and veggies when they get to the store has pushed growers to rely increasingly on fumigants. Prior to planting, the beds are covered with plastic and pumped full of poisons that kill everything (good and bad) living in the soil. Because fumigants are volatile and highly reactive, they break down quickly and don't show up on produce. But they are also very dangerous for the farmworkers who handle them, and have been linked to central nervous system disorders, lung and kidney problems, and birth defects. After all, what do you expect from pesticides originally designed as chemical weapons?

So is buying organics the answer?

Yes and no. Yes, because organic farmers are prohibited from using non-natural pesticides and herbicides, so no one has to handle these chemicals, and the soil and surrounding environment are able to maintain healthy biodiversity. I had the pleasure of witnessing this even on our little five acres in Oxnard. And no, because organic certification has nothing to do with the actual levels of pesticides found on produce. At the farm I worked on last year, a single lane dirt track was the only "buffer zone" separating our organic field from the neighboring conventional one. The Santa Ana winds would regularly blow dust for miles across the Oxnard plain, carrying with it everything that had been applied to other fields. Buying organics is a start, but it doesn't do much for farmworkers, most of whom have very little choice about where to work. They may be washing organic celery in the morning and picking conventional strawberries in the afternoon.

In the end? It may not solve everything, but I always feel better when I can talk to the person who grew it.

stamps III

This afternoon while I was at work I got a slightly panicky voicemail from my supervisor at the Market. Apparently my food stamps caseworker had just called asking her all kinds of questions about my eligibility for food stamps in relation to my AmeriCorps job (which is completely unrelated to my market job, which I explained to my caseworker in the interview). So... it might be awhile.

In the meantime, as I cringe at my budget spreadsheet and tap my foot in impatience, I've been pondering two apparently contradictory messages of the (admittedly fragmented) US "food movement".

A. Americans spend, on average, less than 10% of their money on food. This is very low, both historically and in comparison to other countries. And it does not reflect the true costs of growing food because cheap food does not guarantee a decent living for those who work in our food chain, address the environmental impact of agriculture, or accurately reflect the costs of growing food (since we subsidize oil and certain commodity crops). Therefore, food is not expensive enough.

B. One in 8 Americans (and 1 in 4 American children) is on food stamps. And there are millions more who qualify but aren't, for a variety of reasons, receiving food stamps or other nutritional assistance. Recently released USDA food security numbers for 2009 show that 1 in 4 US children live in a house that sometimes runs out of food. Therefore, for many, food is too expensive.

So within the "food movement" we have the locavores and proponents of sustainable ag saying we should pay more for our food, and the anti-hunger folks saying, essentially, that we are paying more than we can afford already.

I've been wondering why no one was talking about this contradiction, until today I found them...well...talking about it.

In the locavore corner we have Michael Pollan who says in a New York Review of Books essay:

Hunger activists like Joel Berg, in All You Can Eat: How hungry is America? criticize supporters of "sustainable" agriculture...for advocating reforms that threaten to raise the cost of food to the poor.

...the "hunger" lobby has traditionally supported farm subsidies in exchange for the farm lobby's support of nutrition programs, a marriage of convenience that vastly complicates reform of the farm bill - a top priority for the food movement.

In his reply, Joel Berg (anti-hunger advocate with NYC Coalition Against Hunger) points out that his book does include serious criticism of current US farm policy, and that what he'd like from the locavores is proposals to help those who are already food insecure handle the costs of higher prices for food that more accurately reflect the costs of production.

As I run in both the local/sustainable and anti-hunger crowds, I'm trying to find a way to reconcile the two, something better than the anemic conclusions Berg and Pollan come to - that we can all agree that the food system is broken and we need to work together to fix it.

It seems to me that a reasonable place to start is by making sure folks in the food chain are paid a living wage. Pollan does a good job in pointing out the perversity of this when he observes in the contemporary US food economy:

an upside-down version of the social compact sometimes referred to as "Fordism": instead of paying workers well enough to allow them to buy things like cars, as Henry Ford proposed to do, companies like Wal-Mart and McDonalds pay their workers so poorly they can afford only the cheap, low-quality food these companies sell, creating a kind of non-virtuous cycle driving down both wages and the quality of food.

Many of the folks I screen who qualify for nutritional assistance (food stamps, WIC, school lunches etc.) work minimum wage jobs in the food industry, and don't get me started on farmworkers.

And in my own life? I'm excited to spend my EBT dollars at the farmers' market.

If I ever get them, that is.

farmer

There's a lot of hand-wringing in the sustainable agriculture/food systems/foodie movement(s) about the US's declining numbers of farmers. While most of our grandparents or great-grandparents had at least a backyard garden, the percentage of Americans with farming as occupation is now less than the percentage of the population in prison (which, of course, also says something about our criminal justice system). However, the decline in the number of farmers has seen a corresponding rise in employment in other areas of the food system, from the farmworkers who pick the tomatoes to the servers who put the bowl of gazpacho in front of you in the restaurant. (Full disclosure: a lot of this post is information gathered from Anna Lappe's presentation at the panel I attended this evening.)

But in the foodie world, it's all about the farmers. It appears that (for those with the education and means to be "foodies" in the first place) once you've made peace with your farmer (buying your produce from local, sustainable small-scale operations) you're off the hook. Cutting out all those involved in the industrial food system from planting to plate renders those millions just as invisible to those who profess a deep interest in food and agriculture as they are to those who never think twice when reaching for the Cheetos.

Social justice concerns were my entree into this whole "food" thing, so it's frustrating to see issues like pesticide protection, farmworker housing, safety in food processing plants, and compensation rates for farmworkers and servers (the two occupations not subject to minimum wage laws) given so little attention.

At a panel on local food this evening I asked the participants (a chef, community garden organizer, and author) what they thought were some of the most important worker justice concerns overlooked by the food movement. They mentioned the need for basic awareness of what these jobs involve (recommending the book Working in the Shadows: A year of doing the jobs (most) Americans won't do by Gabriel Thompson) and support for the campaigns of groups like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Restaurant Opportunities Center (and I would add the genius UFW campaign, Take Our Jobs). But my favorite suggestion was to work on broadening/shifting our definition of "farmer".

One of the most memorable dinner-table conversations of the year on the farm (significant not just because it was our first meal cooked by a certain five-star chef, although that didn't hurt) concerned what we, the interns, would actually call ourselves. The farm website, ATFP brochures etc. labeled us farmers, and yet an honest inventory of the work we did (weeding, harvesting, washing, packing and delivering produce) had us feeling much more like the farmworkers picking strawberries and weeding celery in the fields around us. By the end of the the mushroom-asparagus risotto (pictured here just because it was so delicious that I have a picture) we had resolved to call ourselves farmworkers.
Tonight, one of the panelists suggested the opposite. Why don't we use the term "farmer" to describe those who work the land. Simply owning or managing a piece of agricultural property does not make one a farmer. The decline in the number of farmers would certainly be less precipitous if we included those who spend the most time growing our food.

There's another possibility here too -- that producing food industrially has come close to eliminating the farmer. In Oxnard I noticed how infrequently the word "farmer" was actually used to describe anyone involved in agriculture. There were growers (landowners and/or managers) and farmworkers (those who planted, tended, and harvested the crops), but very few farmers. There were only a handful of men (and even fewer women) who either (in the case of the growers) took the time to know and work the land or were given the luxury (in the case of the farmworkers) of developing a sustained relationship with a particular place.

encounter

One of the great pleasures of the past two weeks has been taking long walks in the evening on the country roads around my aunt and uncle's farm, smelling fresh cut hay and watching the sunset over the corn fields.

One evening I decided to try a new route. I passed churches and old barns and several roadside stands and was pleased to see two white roosters scratching around in one yard. Even more pleased when they started jogging in my direction (yes, I do miss my chickens).

Docile, gentle farm chickens, so well-behaved we let kids play with them.

Except that one of them started heading right for me and making me nervous. Raising, caring for, and (when necessary) disposing of 9 hens gave me no experience in dealing with roosters. A quick search for a branch with which to ward off the potential attack yielded only a couple of leaves. "Maybe he just thinks I'm going to feed him" I thought as I tossed the leaves in the rooster's direction.

Nope.

So I took off running (okay, sprinting) down the road, followed, at a speed I've never seen in a chicken, by the rooster, until I was several houses away and clearly no longer a threat.

I really hope someone happened to be looking out their window.

domestic

Femivore. I can see my brother rolling his eyes. Here it comes, some cross between two of the things he understands least about me - my distaste for meat and my tendency to pontificate on gender issues in the name of feminism.

Close, but not quite. I ran into "femivorism" in a recent NY Times article describing women pursuing "self-sufficiency, autonomy, and personal fulfillment" in orienting their lives around being as involved in their family's food sources as possible (backyard gardening, composting, raising chickens, urban beekeeping etc.) These "tomato-canning feminists" are about more than just tasty, healthy food - their commitment is to reducing their impact on the environment and counteracting materialism as well, to making their homes places of production not just consumption.


It probably goes without saying that I resonate with that vision. When I'm honest with myself, I recognize that some of my moments of greatest contentment and joy have been hanging my laundry in the backyard wearing muddy work boots and an apron over my yoga clothes, taking a break from cooking a meal with ingredients I mostly either grew myself or bartered for at a farmers' market and trying to keep my curious hens out of the laundry basket. I love all the things I'm learning - how to maintain a compost pile, harvest onions, make cheese, cook with turnips and yes, even kill a chicken.


To back-pedal a little bit - I still love books and ideas. I will go to grad school (eventually). I confess that I often use a couple of hours of my day off to go to the library and read the Economist, and that one of the biggest thrills of the last few months was attending a local city council meeting. But it's also hard to picture myself being satisfied in the world of journal articles and computer screens and academic conferences without an equal measure of fresh air and growing things and recipes modified and embellished until they're unrecognizable. I want to honor the education I'm getting right now, and the skills of my mother and aunts and grandmother, all of whom were raised with some experience of feeding and clothing themselves and their families.


Wendell Berry writes

The callings and disciplines of the...domestic arts are stationed all along the way from the farm to the prepared dinner, from the forest to the dinner table, from stewardship of the land to hospitality to friends and strangers. These arts are as demanding and gratifying, as instructive and as pleasing as the so-called fine arts. To learn them, to practice them, to honor and reward them is, I believe, our profoundest calling. Our reward is that they will enrich our lives and make us glad.

So here I am, an equally avid student of the domestic arts as I was of the liberal ones. Living in Cambodia taught me that as a member of the most affluent, materialist society ever, one of the most important things I can do with my life is pay close attention to what I consume - to start living simply and maybe help others like me do the same. And I'm finding Berry's words to be true - not only is this a profound calling, it has enriched my life and made me glad.



Thanks to Sarah and Amy for doing photographic justice to life on the Farm!

complete

Growing up I had an entertaining little book entitled You know you're an MK when..., including entries like "You can't answer the question "Where are you from?" and "You grew up with a maid". Somewhere in that list is (or ought to be) "You have strong views on the best way to kill a chicken".

My introduction to chicken killing was as at age six, peeking from behind a bush as my Dad swung a hen by its legs, set it down, and chopped off its head (this was a part of 3 months of training in the bush shortly after we moved to Kenya, which would prepare my parents for 15 years of umm...living in Nairobi). Despite how alarming the experience was for me at age six, I was thankful this morning that I watched.

Warning - what follows is a bit grim.

One of my hens got sick about a month ago and never really recovered. She lost a lot of weight and motor control, and I had noticed her deteriorating particularly in the last few days. This morning I found her upside-down in the coop, bleeding from where she scratched herself while trying in vain to get back on her feet. I've known for weeks that I would eventually have to kill this chicken, and this morning I knew it had to be today.

A visiting farmer friend dispatched yet another one of our sick chickens last week (yes, my chicken mortality rate is pretty dismal) by wringing its neck. After digging a hole and with verbal instructions from Erynn (who watched the last time - I was away from the farm that day) I tried it. I swung the chicken a couple of times and I screamed and dropped it and it wasn't dead. As Erynn noted, it didn't even look particularly fazed.

What followed was a grim discussion of various other chicken killing methods, as Kat, Erynn and I stood around the little chicken (who had ended up in her grave-to-be). We debated the merits of milk cartons, axes, and even the bag-and-exhaust-pipe, before settling on what I had saw my dad do 17 years ago.

We did it. I swung the hen by her legs for about 30 seconds to make her dizzy and still, and Kat held her down while I cut her throat with our sharpest knife (which, horribly, was not very sharp). I can tell the story with a little humor, but the truth is I was sobbing when it was finally done.

But I did it. I was involved in every part of that chicken's life - from choosing her at the feed store to ending her life when she was clearly suffering. As difficult as it was, and as much I hope I'll never have to do that again, it somehow feels complete.

confessions

#1: I just gave antibiotics to livestock.

I dosed (actually, per the instructions of Pat at the feed store, double dosed) my chickens with Sulmet to prevent whatever illness is making one of them sick from getting to all of them. While I know heavy and indiscriminate use of antibiotics in livestock is a big problem (it's often used to make up for the effects of the unhealthy diets and unsanitary conditions animals are raised in, and it produces antibiotic-resistant bacteria), my poor sick hen is a little different. She likely has coccidiosis, which domestic birds get from contact with the droppings of wild birds (which assumes that your poultry has enjoyed the outdoors).

#2: Animal suffering really gets to me.

For years when people asked about why I was a vegetarian I made sure to distance myself from any animal rights connection. I didn't stop eating meat because I thought killing animals was cruel - I stopped because I didn't like meat. That's still the primary reason I'm a vegetarian - I prefer meatless meals (and I've been veg long enough that no matter how good the carne asada taco sounded at 2:30 am, my body will be sure I pay for eating it). I'm also increasingly convinced that eating fewer animal products (and that includes milk, eggs and cheese, all of which I love) is better for the environment and promotes a more just distribution of the world's resources. But recent events on the farm make me wonder if there isn't a little bit of aversion to animal suffering in the background too.

By "recent events on the farm" I mean a lot of exposure to animal suffering in the last week - one chicken crippled by some mysterious illness, another one sick, and a rabbit that got hit by a tractor in our field today. I've avoided all three because it's just so hard to watch.

As a kid I remember boycotting cartoons and seriously wondering if I could ever be happy again whenever one of my hamsters would get old and start to deteriorate. In high school I always felt ashamed when I had to excuse myself from watching a goat slaughtering as soon as the animal started to suffocate (which is to say I couldn't last through the first 30 seconds). While my friends ate raw kidney and marveled at the contents of the animal's stomach I'd sit a safe distance away trying to ward off the lightness on the edges of my vision. In Cambodia I could barely eat my way through a small frog because...well...it still very much resembled a frog. Now I find myself asking my housemates to do more of the chicken upkeep because it's hard to be around the ones that are in pain.

I don't like this about myself. It interferes with the self-image I try to cultivate of a strong, independent woman unencumbered by the need for rich-world comforts like toilet paper or a rodent-and-cockroach-free bedroom or food that no longer resembles the living thing it once was.

But there it is.

the end of counting

I was hoping it would rain at least once while I was here. I’ve missed the smell of the rain and not being able to hear anything else when it’s really pouring on a tin roof. I got my wish yesterday, in the form of a huge thunderstorm that turned the compound into a puddle, knocked trees down all over Nairobi, and left our electricity even more unpredictable than usual.

Except it’s not supposed to rain like that in December, in Nairobi or anywhere in Kenya. December is supposed to be warm and sunny and dry, the midpoint between the short rains in October and the long rainy season in March/April.

Any Kenyan will tell you that the weather is now impossible to predict. Farmers plant without knowing if there will be enough rain for their crops to mature, or if they’ll lose their seeds to flooding. Kenya’s pastoralist groups once had a sophisticated understanding of seasonal cycles, enabling them to predict droughts decades in advance and plan their movements to sustain their herds. But in the last two decades, the elders of these groups have reached “the end of counting”. It’s not just that some of their knowledge is being lost as young people move to cities and take on a more global cultural identity, it’s that a finely-tuned understanding of the environment developed over hundreds of years has been rendered completely irrelevant by changes in the last twenty or thirty years.

Here climate change is not polemical, abstract or debatable. It’s as tangible as the skinny Maasai cattle that are still clogging up Nairobi traffic months after one of East Africa’s worst droughts started to ease and the prayers of a whole country for rain in its season.

relative

Traveling to central California for Thanksgiving is helping me put some things in perspective. First: what exactly constitutes "large-scale" agriculture. I thought the farms around ours in Ventura County were pretty big (often hundreds of acres planted in the same crops), but riding the train through central California with it's monocrop orchards as far as the eye can see has made me rethink.

And then there's my definition of rural. The Farm feels like the middle of nowhere sometimes. I can't comfortably bike to anywhere I'd want to go other than the beach, and we have no neighbors. But a few days in Mariposa County (population, I'm told, 17,000) has been instructive. For example, the following from the sheriff's report in the weekly local newspaper:

Nov. 16: There was a big dog versus little dog incident on Jones Street. A cat was up a tree on Silva Road.
Nov. 17: A cat was in a tree on Sullivan Road.
Nov. 18: Residents of La Rosa Road had bear concerns. A dog was in distress on Sixth Street.
Nov. 19: A horse was running amok on Cole Road.
Nov. 20: There was an out of control juvenile on Triangle Rd. Loose goats were causing destruction on Crown Lead Road.
Nov. 22: Juveniles were on the roof of Mariposa Elementary School. A raccoon was injured on Broadway in Coulterville. There were suspicious circumstances on Allred Road.

unharvested time

I spent today banished from the Farm, exiled by my housemates on account of an inflated sense of my own importance and a bit of an outburst yesterday (which probably had as much to do with sliding around in the mud in my tennis shoes on the ten acres as it did with feeling overwhelmed by work). I’d taken on a lot of the administrative responsibility for the CSA and was starting to feel like the veggies wouldn’t be harvested, boxed and delivered without me. So, since today was our biggest CSA day (with 18 boxes to get out the door), they sent me away for a day off the farm.

In this unplanned free time I came across two lines from Robert Frost's poem "Unharvested" that I had written in my journal:

May something go always unharvested!
May much stay out of our stated plan...

I'm getting used to letting some of our crops go unharvested. There are partial rows of radishes and arugula that are approaching jungle thickness and a row of green leaf lettuce that has long since outgrown the size of anything I've ever seen in a store. But I'm finding it difficult to welcome unharvested time, to tell the internal voice that urges me towards productivity and efficiency to pipe down every now and then. I've all but convinced myself that rest and contemplation are only possible when I feel in control of everything that's going on in my life. So I'm thankful for days like today. I read for a few hours, spent some time on the beach (and even more time finding a beach where parking wasn't too expensive and there weren't aggressive squirrels), and left my computer at home. The world continued to turn, my chickens survived six hours of my absence, and 18 boxes of produce found their way home.

May something go always unharvested!
May much stay out of our stated plan...

chickens little

In honor of the feast of St. Francis and the blessing of the animals today, two vignettes from my first venture into poultry raising (which began on Wednesday).

#1: The Sky is Falling

Steven Kellogg chose the right farm animal to have running around yelling that the sky is falling in his book Chicken Little. My nine chicks have seen fit on a number of occasions in their five day lives to act as though the world were ending. Usually this is brought on by nothing more serious than an adjustment to the cardboard and duct tape walls of their brooder or an attempt to move them temporarily in order to change their bedding. There was also the time during their first evening at the house when, with all nine sleeping comfortably in the appropriate donut shape around the heat lamp, I decided that maybe they wouldn't be warm enough after all and tried to replace the regular light bulb with a much higher voltage heat bulb. Not only did I take away their source of light temporarily (they began "crying" almost immediately), the heat bulb turned out to be too much for the lamp and both melted the plug partially into the extension cord and sent a couple of sparks into the brooder. So maybe the chicks have every right to be worried...

#2: Predator and Prey

The book Chickens in Your Backyard by Rick and Gail Luttmann advises the following with regard to chick diets: "You could feed them a few worms or bugs from the garden. They'll love it; in fact, they'll act like they're about to die of ecstasy." Sounds like fun. So yesterday I presented them with a dead fly I found while dusting a windowsill. They were unimpressed and returned to the business of pecking at the cardboard walls of the brooder and enthusiastically kicking shavings into their waterer. Today, Kat and I captured a moth, thinking live prey might inspire the appropriate ecstatic behavior. They showed mild interest as the moth crawled across the pine shavings, but when it started to fly around inside the heat lamp and run into them, they freaked out and ran to the other side of the brooder. So much for the chick-vs.-bug gladiator-style entertainment I was hoping for...

And finally, the blessing from tonight's ATFP liturgy:

Almighty and everlasting God, Creator of all things and giver of all life, let your blessing be upon all these animals. May our relationships with them mirror your love, and our care for them be an example of your bountiful mercy. Grant the animals health and peace. Strengthen us to love and care for them...

good, better, best

A warning: this post is only for people who are interested in at least thinking about how their food choices affect the environment. I try to avoid being preachy about lifestyle decisions, and have been scolded a time or two for pontificating on the merits of certain choices, so if you aren't interested in environmental issues, now is the time to check Facebook. I'm going to say that some choices are better than others. You have been warned.

With that out of the way...My understanding of what making eco-friendly choices in terms of food has been complicated considerably in the last month or two. To start with there is...

Good: Organic
A lot starts with reading food labels. "Natural" doesn't mean anything because it isn't regulated by the government; USDA certified organic does.

Why organic is good: For produce to be certified organic, it must have been grown without the use of synthetic pesticides or fertilizers, bioengineering, sewage sludge, or irradiation on land that has been chemical-free for at least 3 years. The inputs and pest control measures allowed for organic growers are much less detrimental and disrupt surrounding ecosystems less. For example, where we live on the Oxnard plain there are hardly any birds at all because we are surrounded by conventional farms that basically nuke everything in their soil (good bugs and bad bugs alike), meaning there is nothing for the birds to eat (except, ironically, the crows, who attack our crops).

Why organic is complicated: While USDA regulation of "organic" labeling has made it possible for consumers shopping at a supermarket to have some window into how their food is grown, it only deals with a limited part of what goes into farming: inputs. "Organic" says nothing about the distance produce travels, the scale on which it was grown, or the labor practices involved in growing it. I just finished reading Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California (by Julie Guthman) which looks at the industrialization of organic growing. Companies like Earthbound Organics can grow single crops on hundreds or thousands of acres (not good for the environment) using the same - often exploitative - contract labor as conventional growers and still get the organic label, as can many of the makers of US soy milk who import organic soy beans from China (using a heck of a lot of oil). Bottom line: to quote Guthman - "I am not convinced...that organic agriculture as it is currently constructed provides a trenchant alternative to the interwoven mechanisms that simultaneously bring hunger and surplus, waste and danger, and wealthy and poverty in the ways food is grown, processed, and traded." Not all produce with the organic label is of questionable merit, but the label doesn't tell you enough to make a good choice.

Better: Local
"Local" generally means grown within 100 miles of where you eat it, and people who try and eat only local foods (like Barbara Kingsolver in Animal Vegetable Miracle) are "locavores".

Why local is good: Because food is coming from closer, less fossil fuels are burned getting it to your plate. For the same reason, it will (usually) be seasonal rather than being shipped from another hemisphere where it is currently spring. Eating local also often builds community because the best place to buy local foods is a farmer's market (although Whole Foods is sort of getting into sourcing locally...and charging higher prices - though that's not new). What labeling doesn't tell you when you pick something up at a supermarket, connecting with a local farmer might.

Why local is complicated: I'll admit, until this morning I had never heard anyone take a shot at local. I nearly fell into the cabbage I was weeding while listening to the KCRW (local NPR affiliate) show "Good Food" when the segment "Are locavores getting it wrong?" came on. The guest being interviewed was James McWilliams, author of Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly. His critiques of local? Eating strictly local ignores the complexities of agricultural and environmental impact on a global level. Less fossil fuels may indeed go into shipping a tomato from a warm climate than are used in growing them locally in hothouses in colder climates (although this makes me question not the virtue of eating locally but the idea that one needs a fresh tomato in the middle of winter...) But his biggest point is about meat. One can eat locally and organically and still be eating meat. Which brings us to...

The best: eating vegetarian

Why eating vegetarian is good: According to McWilliams, meat production produces 1/5th of all greenhouse gases, consumes 70% of the water in the western U.S. and accounts for over half of the nitrogen fertilizers used in the U.S. Even local, grass-fed, organic, sung-to-sleep-with-a-lullaby cows need 8-10 acres of land each...less than ideal on a planet with a growing population and shrinking arable land. Also, only 40% of a cow is used in meat production, and a significant amount of energy is used disposing of what doesn't get eaten. The bottom line: the energy savings for the average American meat eater giving up meat once a week are equal to the energy saved by eating locally for the whole week.

Why eating vegetarian is complicated: I suppose if eating vegetarian is best, eating vegan is probably bestest(*sigh*). That could ruin my wonderful discovery that what I'm already doing was the best thing to do! I'll keep you posted.

failures of imagination

Some days, more things happen than others. Today, for instance, I:
1. bought a ticket to go back to Chicago for a long weekend
2. was nearly run over by a frightened deer while hiking
3. remembered something important that I had started to forget.

This time last year I was in the midst of my introduction to active non-violence - reading Walter Wink, releasing balloons outside of a prison, watching "A Force More Powerful", attending events with names like "Musical Resistance Concert"...and learning about my own violence.

When I'm immersed in social justice-y work (working on an organic farm and trying to get healthy produce available to people regardless of income, for example), its easy to group my world into good and bad people. Last year, the bad people were Cambodian government officials ordering political assassinations and forced evictions, and everyone involved in perpetuating social and environmental injustice in the garment industry. This year, it's the government-agribusiness alliance that ensures that the most accessible food in the US is unhealthy for both land and people and everyone involved in keeping farmworkers politically marginalized so that they remain a cheap, mobile source of labor.

When I started learning about non-violence, I expected it to focus on empowering the oppressed, letting the "good" win, punishing the bad guys. I recognized in the tactics for countering violence efforts to force the oppressors to recognize the humanity of the oppressed, for the men with crowbars to look the women guarding their homes in the eye and feel some sort of empathy.

What I was unprepared for was that this has to be reciprocal. That true non-violent conflict resolution required the oppressed and their allies look in the eyes of the company thugs and military police with their batons and recognize something shared humanity and feel some sort of empathy. That I would have to start dismantling my carefully constructed categories of "good people" and "bad people". That I had a lot of violence to deal with within myself.

I found two portions of Graham Greene's "The Power and the Glory" particularly challenging. I wrote:

The first passage gives the thoughts of an on-the-run Catholic priest walking through the Mexican jungle while a man he knows will betray him rides his mule beside him:
“But at the center of his own faith there always stood the convincing mystery – that we were made in God’s image. God was the parent, but He was also the policeman, the criminal, the priest, the maniac, and the judge. Something resembling God dangled from the gibbet or went into odd attitudes before the bullets in a prison yard or contorted itself like a camel in the attitude of sex. He would sit in the confessional and hear the complicated dirty ingenuities which God’s image had thought out, and God’s image shook now, up and down on the mule’s back, with the yellow teeth sticking out over the lower lip, and God’s image did its despairing act of rebellion with Maria in the hut among the rats. He said ‘Do you feel better now? Not so cold, eh? Or so hot?’ and pressed his hand with a kind of driven tenderness upon the shoulders of God’s image.”

God was the pastor, but he was also the pastor’s son, imprisoned for trying to stealing a necklace from a woman on a moto, and the guard at the prison, asking bribes for every movement, every scrap of food. God was the journalist and his son leaving the gym on Friday evening, and something resembling God drove by and shot them both – 5 bullets taking two lives.

I choke on those words. In this country where the injustice present in every society is done so openly, it’s so easy to know who to hate. I can feel that in myself as I sit on my bicycle in traffic behind yet another Lexus SUV with an RCAF (Royal Cambodian Armed Forces) license plate shuttling its well-fed occupants around as they plunder their own people. I can feel it in my body even as I type these words.

Greene’s priest continues to reflect on the power of all human beings being made in God’s image with the following words:

“When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity – that was a quality of God’s image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.”

My world is once again littered with failures of imagination, with big categories I put people in and label "enemy", categories that I use as excuses to ignore "the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth...". I have a long way to go. There's a lot of my world that needs to be complicated by the gray - the honest acknowledgment of the tensions of my own life and choices, and willingness to see those same tensions in the lives of the people I disagree with.

But at the center of my own faith has always stood the convincing mystery - that we were made in God's image.

I told you I would!

There's a first time for everything. After more than two weeks of living at the farmhouse, I finally did something resembling FARMING today!


This last an hour or two, and then degenerated into a contest to see who could throw an over-ripe zucchini the farthest. For more pictures and narrative, see the ATFP blog.

After all that was over -- another first. While preparing a refreshing cucumber-cantelope-yogurt-mint-honey-dill beverage, I snuck a sliver of cucumber, and realized it was still warm from growing and being in the sun.

"you a real white girl?" and other tales

To paraphrase (or quote?) my mother, I'm excited about being able to 'live forward' again soon. The last eight months have been about processing and finishing -- recovering from dengue, processing HNGR, finishing college, wrapping up my jobs, sorting through and packing up both my belongings and family memories, saying goodbye to Chicago (in the summer! not a good idea...better to wait to the depths of February), saying goodbye to friends, and soon family too. I'm excited to know I will be living in one place for the (seemingly) long span of 11 months, and to start living forward again, to dig in to stay.

The last week has been particularly transitory. I've spent at least a night in each of five states (and will make that six in a week and a half on Monday). Still, it's been a rich time. In no particular order, I have enjoyed:

1. Dirt bike lessons from my brother. I promise I was riding just like in the video after 5 minutes. Oh, and the bike is for sale.

2. Finding and playing two pieces of music composed by my grandfather who died long before I was born
3. Packing made somewhat bearable by listening to the wonderful documentary series Five Farms. They followed five American farm families (dairy farmers in the Northeast, an African-American hog farmer, a Hopi farmer, an organic farm in California (!) and a farm in Iowa) for a year and produced 5 hour-long shows, each with a specific theme, corresponding roughly to some point in the growing season. The shows are about both agriculture and the people themselves and their stories (think Ira Glass on a farm minus a bit of the sass).

4. Packing made even more bearable by friends who brought me homemade spinach and Parmesan pizza and wine, or showed up to meet up one last time in Chicago.

5. Taking the scenic route from North Carolina to Pennsylvania via a camping trip in Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia, planned entirely by my brother. Non-essential items like plates and pancake syrup, of course, didn't make it. We ate these with our hands, along with ripe-to-bursting white farmstand peaches.



The camping was great except for being awakened repeatedly in the night by the rummaging of an unknown small animal around our tent. The next morning we discovered not one, but four acorns 'buried' under our tent.


6. More than my fair share of Bush's baked beans. My meat-and-potatoes Mennonite family doesn't always know what to do with a vegetarian, but they try!

7. Hearing stories from both sides of my extended family.

8. And finally...One afternoon my brother and I were perusing the Goodwill fashions when I heard three women talking in Cambodian in the aisle next to me. I got up my courage (I haven't spoken Khmer to any native speakers in person since the end of November) and greeted them in Cambodian. One spoke a bit of English and her first response was "you a real white girl?" They proceeded to ask me (in Khmer) if I had a husband yet.

Ah, yes...

the lot

The news that I'm going to be spending the next 11 months working on an organic farm has elicited a range of responses from the adults in my life. Of late the tone has been a mix of amusement and incredulity. I'm at a family reunion of sorts, and of the assembled 10 aunts and uncles, I know that at least seven grew up on farms (though only two chose to farm themselves). Of the many stories they've told from their childhoods in Lancaster County, the following was one of the most interesting.

Among the more conservative Mennonite congregations, being a pastor or some other part of the church leadership was not something one aspired to or discerned a particular calling for. When a new pastor (or bishop, or deacon) was needed, nominations would be gathered (3 from each member) for who from the congregation would be chosen as the pastor on a Wednesday. Any candidate with at least 3 nominations would be examined by the elders for character and leadership capacity, and the following weekend the church would be assembled for "the lot". In my grandfather's case, two men from the congregation proceeded past this vetting process. Two brand-new Bibles (there was some discussion as to whether these actually had metal clamps to seal them shut) were taken by the elders to the back of the church, and a piece of paper was slipped underneath the front cover of one Bible, after which both were closed. Someone else who had not seen which Bible contained the slip of paper stood the two Bibles on the pulpit in front of the congregation, and the candidates, in descending order of age, chose one of the Bibles (usually, but not always proceeding in order from right to left). They then waited for the bishop to come and open the Bibles to see which of the two God had chosen, by means of the lot, to be the pastor.

When my grandfather was chosen by the lot to lead his small church, the changes for the family included switching cash crops from tobacco to tomatoes and moving the radio to the attic (where it could only be turned on for the World Series).

a hat to farm in

I think God and my parents are getting a particularly good set of laughs as I trip and fall my way around trying to be an adult. The most recent irony involves a certain hat.

When my family first moved to Kenya, we spent three months camping in the bush in an orientation program (to prepare us for 15 years of living in one of Africa's most modern cities...yeah). In the American tradition of gearing up to go to intense places like Africa, my parents bought matching hats - dark khaki, synthetic, floppy broad-brimmed things with black strings and those toggles (like you use to keep a stuff sack shut) to keep them on your head, ensuring that they were the dorkiest things ever. I complained about those hats for years at every sports day and game drive when my dad would pull his out. There was a succession of variations on the fisherman's hat, none of which I approved of and which were eventually lost to various theme park rides and other misadventures, ensuring that the original hat persisted.

While I haven't seen that hat in a few years, it came up again a few days ago. As I look forward to starting work on the farm in a bit more than a month, I'm running into the fact that I don't have good work clothes, and I don't have the money to buy them. My parents generously volunteered one of those original hats for the purpose.

I just might have to do it.