a story, and why I shouldn't move to San Francisco

Every six months or so, when I’m feeling particularly special and original, I’ll spend a few minutes on the blog Stuff White People Like for a little dose of reality. There I am reminded that many of my favorite things (Taking a year off, Indie Music, Scarves, Being the only white person around, NPR, Vegetarianism, Yoga, and Barack Obama, for example) are, in fact not unique to me but are shared by many of my peers of a certain education level, class, political persuasion, economic status and yes, skin color.

I just happen to not run into too many of these other people and can therefore fool myself some of the time into thinking that I am the only one (or at least one of the only ones). This is why I shouldn’t move to San Francisco. I fear I’d lose my sense of identity in a place where organic gardening, fair trade coffee, making your own things, recycling and backyard chickens were passé.

All that to say I can’t resist the opportunity to poke a little fun at myself for the following story.

Food is hot right now. Stuff White People Like includes posts on Picking Their Own Fruit, Hummus, Expensive Sandwiches, Whole Foods and Grocery Co-ops, Asian Fusion Food, Sushi, Breakfast Places, Wine, Microbreweries, Dinner Parties, Tea, and Organic Food.

Food is hot, so how’s this for a boy-meets-girl:

She is working on an organic CSA farm. He is a five-star chef and Healthy Eating Specialist at Whole Foods.

She is probably reading Barbara Kingsolver or Wendell Berry. He is probably reading Michael Pollan or Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals.

She can talk at length about cooking from scratch and the importance of soil fertility. He can talk at length about the origins of pretty much any cuisine. They can both talk your ear off about kale and agriculture in Ventura County.

She’s thinking about a career in development studies with a focus on food security or agricultural issues. He’s about to start a Masters in Food Studies.

Oh yeah, and they met at a farmers market.

True story. His name is Mark. And we share passions for World Cup Soccer, Cooking, People Watching, Camping, Pandora, and Intelligent Conversation, among other things. (Of these, only the World Cup and Camping are featured on Stuff White People Like. I checked.)

double take

Another confession: One of my greatest pleasures is nearly causing traffic accidents by being places no young white woman is expected to be while doing things no young white woman is expected to be doing.

This afternoon as I was driving the farm Kawasaki (like an ATV) out to the field to do my harvesting I noticed a man driving by on the road lean his head out of his window and turn to look not once, not twice, but three times. It was the same look I got in Wal-Mart (yes, Wal-Mart, because sissy rainboots from Target just weren't going to do) when the woman at the check-out asked me why I needed big black rubber boots and I answered that I was a farm worker (for the record, I have since worn a big hole in aforementioned black boots). It was the same look I got in Cambodia when spotted squatting in the shade under my house hand-washing my clothes every Sunday afternoon. A number of chickens, dogs, and small children narrowly escaped injury under the moto wheels of the people who turned to stare. It's the same look I get any time I walk along the road in Nairobi (white women are, after all, expected to travel in the safety of their Land Rovers).

But the secret sense of pride I'm used to feeling is a little more mixed now. I'm starting to recognize that it's only because I'm so well-off that I can choose to live in places or do work that those who live/work there might not choose if given the option. I can dabble in life in a Cambodian slum (with the safety of the world's best med-evac insurance should I contract a life-threatening illness that my hosts deal with all the time), hang out in a garden in Kibera for an afternoon (and afterwards head to a US-style coffeeshop for a snack and a latte), or spend a year harvesting vegetables (with my longest day of field work being 8:30-5:00, unlike the 10 hours a day, 6 days a week worked by the immigrant strawberry pickers in the next field).

It takes a little of the thrill out of hearing guera (Spanish slang for blonde girl), barang (Khmer, meaning French person - three guesses who colonized Cambodia), or mzungu (Swahili for white person, with etymological roots in "dizzy" and "aimless wanderer") to think about it that way.

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.

intervention

This morning I read a short blurb in the local newspaper reporting recent progress by scientists in genetically altering the Aedes aegypti to suppress the development of wings in the females. The modification would be spread through the males (whose wings are unaffected), eventually wiping out the mosquitoes, providing a cheaper, more environmentally friendly and equitable method of control than chemical sprays.

I have no soft spot for those female Aedes aegypti. They are the vectors of dengue fever, a horrible experience for the 50 million people who come down with it every year (and one that is sometimes fatal, especially for children). Two-fifths of the world's population is at risk (mostly in Southeast Asia and Africa) and there is no vaccine and no treatment.

So getting rid of this mosquito is a good thing, right?

The more I learn about the natural world and the intricate connections in ecosystems, the more hesitant I am to say "yes". More often than not when it comes to making drastic changes to any environment or population, intervention tends to beget more intervention. Dam a river for flood control and then spend decades and millions of dollars trying to restore local fish populations and prevent downstream beaches from eroding, only to realize that the sediment building up behind your dam will eventually force it to give way (resulting in a flood far more catastrophic than any the dam prevented). Refine wheat to create a whiter, "tastier" bread, only to find that the most important nutrients were in the parts of the grain removed during refining, and then spend millions figuring out how to fortify flour with the nutrients you removed (and come up with something as absurd as whole wheat white flour). Get rid of the pigs in your garbage dumps to prevent the spread of swine flu and then realize the huge volume of waste they disposed of and have a trash problem to deal with. Eradicate Aedes aegypti and...who knows? The question of intervention gets even more complicated when you consider the prior interventions that made these things necessary (settling on flood plains, creating cultures of waste, heating up the planet and expanding the habitats of disease vectors like Aedes aegypti). Are we so locked into patterns of working against nature (poison all the insects in a field) rather than with it (planting habitat for beneficial insect populations) that we can't stop the cycle of intervening?

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.

wither

Whether it was a Freudian slip or simply another manifestation of my post-Cambodia struggle with homophones, I sent several people to a non-existent website this week. While trying to direct folks to an article called “Whither Wheaton: the evangelical flagship college charts a new course”, I recommended several people check out witherwheaton.org – an appropriate mistake, one friend noted, considering the amount I’ve complained about the College in the last 2+ years.

While it’s true that Wheaton may not have been the best place for me, and that particularly my junior and senior years I felt out of place in chapels, chafed at the narrow ranges of views permitted among professors and guest lecturers, and sought out ways to study off campus, I don’t want to see Wheaton “wither”, and realize that I’ll probably reflect back on the experience more fondly with a few years’ distance. Despite my frustrations and frequent tirades (of which my parents and roommates were the long-suffering beneficiaries), I never seriously considered transferring, and am deeply grateful for the friendships and opportunities Wheaton gave me.

Still, I can’t help wondering how much of who I am and what I think today is a reaction against Wheaton’s conservative side. I’m for marriage equality and think abortion should be legal. I think global warming is a big enough problem that I’m holding off on owning a car for as long as possible and I’m living on an organic farm that can’t exactly escape the accusations of “hippie” and “commune”. I’m secretly rooting for the public option in healthcare reform in hopes that it will slowly take over until we have a single-payer system (and my politics would generally make me a better European than American). Though I wish he hadn’t ordered the surge in Afghanistan, I am apparently one of the only white people not souring on Barack Obama(and I’ve been a fan so long that I got up at 4am and stood outside in Springfield in January to hear him announce his run for president). All of these things are open to debate and subject to change. Knowing I would have vehemently disagreed with all of this four years ago helps keep things in perspective!

Still, I have the sneaky suspicion that this wasn’t where Wheaton meant me to end up - most importantly because I consider all of what I listed compatible with my identity as a Christian.

Also, I no longer consider myself an evangelical. I happily shed the term for two reasons:

a) Why hold on to something so loaded with connotations of social, political and theological beliefs I don’t hold? (And, for the record, I suspect that few people who do not consider themselves to be either an evangelical or a fundamentalist who recognizes a distinction between the two.)
b) I no longer believe that Christianity has a monopoly on spiritual truth or the sole vision of the way the world should be, so the evangelism part of it no longer applies.

That’s easier to say in a blog post after I had the humorous experience of “outing” myself to a number of Wheaton professors and administrators during a mock interview for the Rhodes. We spent a good 10 minutes on my definition of social justice and how it related to my understanding of salvation (which, needless to say, did not come up in my actual interview). Nonetheless, I post this with some trepidation. We’ll see if it stays up after I get comments from my most faithful reader (hi Mom!).