Cook Different. (from 11/2)

I was hoping for much inspiration and many chances to put it to paper this month, but a yurt with no electricity does not provide much in the way of infrastructure. Sixty hours of farm work per week and the steady grind of off-grid living do not allow for many thoughts besides “cheeseburger” and “sleep,” either. So here are some belated words about a month of cooking differently.

I was moved to get started on this by the two bushel baskets full of root vegetables and squash that I brought back from the farm. I cooked most of my meals at the farm alone, by candle and flashlight. With no refrigerator and fifty cultivated acres at your doorstep, the possibilities are both exceedingly constrained and wildly liberating. I had stocked up on cans of beans, bags of rice and lentils, quinoa, cashews and oats. Everything else came from the farm - eggs, greens, squash, roots and the last gasp of the summer’s eggplant, tomatoes and peppers. That’s it. Each meal felt like a little sermon, somehow.

I wrote down as many of the yurt dinners as I could. They are all so simple, that on paper they look really boring. You see sweet potato, black bean, egg, kale over and over again. I picked kale like daisies on my walk home.

When you can’t store leftovers and taking out the trash is a pain you have to cook the whole vegetable, and eat every bite. No putting half of that pepper or squash away till next week’s omelette. Your meals change completely, through this. 

Douglas Rushkoff’s article, “Are Jobs Obsolete?” today on CNN Opinion is making the re-blogging rounds like wildfire. (Clearly none of us have jobs.) I like the main conceit here: that we, by politically empowering corporations and growth-at-any-cost capitalism, are making ourselves obsolete. The very purpose of Technology is to replace work, and solving our current “jobs crisis” through more and more technology is self-defeating, if the goal is in fact to “create jobs” and not just maximize efficiency. Unfortunately for us, we really like efficiency, and the cheap consistent stuff that comes with it. We have maximized our productivity to the point that we don’t really need all these people to go to work any more.

The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology, but how can we organize a society around something other than employment? Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with “career” be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful?

Yes Rushkoff, yes! Only…oh dear! He goes on to propose that the future of work is making stuff on the internet. Like….games and websites. Oh god, I just saw the future and we’re all still sitting in front of screens in a meta-universe making widgets.

In his analysis, he doesn’t ever question that the corporations win, or that we’ll stop wanting cheap stuff. Maybe that’s realistic, or maybe people without access or inclination to engage in his utopian/phantom tech economy will return to their agrarian roots and start providing for themselves and their communities. A class of workers who provide organic and local goods for the glued-to-the-screen tech elite? I wish he had used the word “meaningful” a little more carefully. I’m all for organizing a society around something other than employment, but I hope it doesn’t end up being something on a screen. 

This week I was invited out to a mid-sized organic farm to try out for an October apprenticeship position I had applied for. It’s 2 hours away on the North Fork of Long Island, right near the beach. This farm is primarily supported by its CSA (community-supported agriculture), feeding over a thousand families directly, year-round, with no middlemen. They grow 70 varieties of fruits and vegetables, plus another 50 of herbs and flowers. A pretty amazing bounty.

It was an interesting day. Torrential rains the day before had left everything soggy, with the rain continuing as I was shown around and put to work in the greenhouse repotting baby greens. Then came a lesson in seeding, I personally planted 20 trays of 72 future lettuces each. 1,440 heads of lettuce will spring forth from my efforts! I was then taken to the fields to put freshly-picked and mud-laden carrots in to crates. Followed by a lesson in canning - I participated in making about 5 gallons of salsa and sealing it in to little 6 ounce jars.

One thing I like about this work is that it’s quiet without being monotonous. I’ve been thinking about work, in general. Trying to find a paying gig has been rough this summer, and whenever I’ve broken down and gotten an office job I regret every single day under those florescent lights. As I spend more time outdoors I find I am healthier and stronger than I’ve ever been. I made a little three point checklist for myself, while I was planting all that lettuce.

1. Be brave - Don’t make decisions based on fear. Reflect and be honest.
2. Seek work that provides tangible, observable benefits - Not work that benefits those in power more than it does you, or things you don’t believe in. Building or growing something real and useful is worth a thousand cosmetics company websites.
3. Benefit as many people as possible in your work - I secretly long to move off the grid and start a goat-farm-slash-B and B, but there is bigger work to be done. Maybe this could be called “contribute to lasting social change.”

I met a lot of people in the Agroecology course that seemed to live by these rules. It impressed me deeply, how brave they were and how engaged in the fight they are. So many also grew food, in the midst of all that do-gooding and research and adventure. Providing food for your family with your own hands - it seems like such an important part of life that I didn’t even know I was missing.

Anyway, my day on the farm left me with a few reservations, but in the end I was offered the apprenticeship and I said yes. I will live in a yurt, pick sweet potatoes, and practice living bravely while doing tangible work. And if you visit, then maybe you’ll make a salad that I grew, and the circle will be complete.

(Aerial photo of Montana farmland - from greeniacs.com. “Soil erosion is second only to population growth as the biggest environmental problem the world faces.” - David Pimentel, professor of ecology at Cornell)

“Farming - that is, the cultivation of soil - is by its nature not truly sustainable, because it tends to disturb or unbalance the delicate microorganic life of the soil. Add toxic chemicals to the disturbance and you have microbial mayhem. Add erosion and plant nutrient loss and you have a formula for ecological collapse.”  - Gene Logsdon, Holy Shit

I just finished a great book by Gene Logsdon called Holy Shit, about managing manure on all different scales. It was both enlightening and commonsensical, but what was really great in this thinly-veiled revolutionary tract was how my own attitudes towards poop did a 180, without me noticing. I closed the book and immediately went to google “how to fertilize garden with urine.”

Logsdon writes “invariably, at the root of every [civilization’s] collapse was an agricultural mistake. Or perhaps, more accurately, at the root of every decline was an agricultural advancement that did not admit to the laws of natural limitation…” Archeological research on the great fallen civilizations of the Americas shows that the peoples’ diets became increasingly reliant on corn. Overpopulation followed prosperity, and epidemics of diet-related diseases ensued, food became scarce as soil degraded, and all hell broke loose. We’re at least 3 for 5 right now.

One component of sustainable agriculture is the recycling of nutrients. Most animal products in this country come from feedlots, where manure is a big problem. I’m sure CAFOs and waste lagoons are familiar to you if you are reading this. If petroleum-based fertilizers were eliminated from agriculture, and well-managed manure - which is pretty much free - were used in its place, well, shit. The industry would save billions of dollars (Thus saving billions in tax subsidies for you and me). Millions of barrels of oil. Animals wouldn’t be left to stand in it all day every day on a feedlot, getting infections that spread to the meat. Catastrophic nutrient loss would be curbed. Logsdon predicts the price of manure eventually eclipsing the commercial value of the animals themselves. As oil becomes more scarce and commercially farmed land continues to degrade, that’s not so far-fetched.

“Hiding waste or encouraging cultural attitudes that make it a problem and not an opportunity is myopically unsustainable.” I think removing the stigma and fear we have attached to manure (human and animal both) is an important step in becoming a society that respects the land and has a future in it. As the closing line of Holy Shit reminds us, “Sooner or later, we must learn to live in the same world as our colons.”

Since our move to a place with a backyard, I have reclaimed one of my most cherished summer homemaking activities: hanging damp laundry on the line. I know it’s so retro. Kitsch, even. The stuff of Portlyn faux-homesteaders (foamsteaders?) who are learning to make cheese in their new eco-friendly apartments, starting gluten-free cupcakeries with adorable names and wearing aprons in public. I know that in the modern age we should want to be free from this throwback drudgery. Even so, it really is nice, a contemplative arranging of damp cloth, hanging around you in cool personal microclimate.

It makes me think about homesteading. J and I read the seminal memoir “The Good Life” this winter, in which the New York intellectuals Helen and Scott Nearing take off to the woods of Vermont in search of a self-sufficient lifestyle with revolutionary underpinnings. They were sick to death of the rat race, the meaningless consumption of modern city life, the shallow social gatherings and the disconnection with nature. And this was in the 1930s. Their painstaking account of the following sixty years of good living includes step-by-step instructions on everything from composting to building a Swiss chalet by hand out of river rock.

What would it be like to spend your days producing what you need to live, instead of working-for-someone-else-to-make-money-to-trade-for-what-you-need to live? Shortening the distance between these two economic points is appealing to more and more of us. I watched the new film “The Greenhorns” last night, which profiles a couple dozen young farmers from across the country. They discuss what it’s like to start their businesses; some have been farmers for generations, while some were perfect city slickers when they first started out. Some are reclaiming inner-city space, while others have found themselves on hundreds of rural acres. The Jeffersonian ideal of a self-sufficient nation is beginning to appeal to those of us that had never given a second thought to what’s on the grocery store shelves or why we should get an office job. I liked what farmer Amy Courtney, of Davenport CA, said about why she decided to start: “I’m doing the best that I can to live honestly. I’m not relying on economic structures that have been set up to benefit some and hurt others to make my livelihood.”

I don’t know if that lifestyle is for J and I, but then I’ve never known deep satisfaction in my work. How can I best support the change we all want to see in our country? Practitioner, academic, advocate, educator? Can I somehow become all four?

People who work at changing the food system surprise me by being strikingly optimistic, compared to their environmentalist brethren. Most say, often with a beatific smile, that the system is headed for complete collapse. This is, I gather, great news.

When people discuss models for change, though, they sometimes sound like they are painstakingly working on this new concept that is going to blow everyone’s minds and you’ve never heard it before and it’s round and you can roll stuff on it…..as though 1) communities have never fed themselves before and 2) no major industry has ever collapsed.

I like to think about the collapse part. My favorite industrial collapse this decade is that of the music industry. My colleagues in the food world are not all familiar with this event, so I will summarize:

Long ago, in the 1990s, the music industry was controlled by only a handful of enormous corporations that had systematically bought up all the smaller ones. They controlled the lion’s share of music revenue, exploited artists and fans, and created a whole world of support jobs that kept the whole thing going.

Enter the widespread use of the internet and recording software. As technology expanded and improved, two things happened. One is that artists were able to circumvent the labels’ ruling over their art by self-releasing their work, and offering digital versions of albums and videos, so that you no longer needed the big guys’ cash or connections to make and sell music. The second thing that happened was that the consumer suddenly had access to exponentially more product than was available before. Obscure genres, rare demos, viral media, the world of music is blown wide open.

One by one, the record labels begin to tank. Not that the little guys were striking it rich very often. Sales of music decreased by half in the 2000s. People are spending less and getting more.

So who wins? Obviously the consumer. But the artists, though they are not raking in the bucks, have won the freedom to create under their own terms. The new music industry is diffuse, and favors people who have multiple skillsets, marketing savvy, unusual sounds, good design sense - anything to cut through the racket of democracy.

How do we apply this to food systems? Good question. Maybe we can’t draw a perfect analogy here. But I do like the similarities between the players - 5 corporations that control almost every brand in the grocery store. Corrupt and predatory treatment of producers and consumers. A growing public discontent with the status quo. Farmers markets as an analog equivalent of CD Baby, which distributes independent artists. Small farmers are the indie bands of the 1990s.

With these parallels in mind, I’d like to propose the agents of change: 1) way more independent farmers 2) more education for consumers 3) ease of distribution. Can we make a model like Ebay or Amazon work in the food world? Will someday anyone who has a backyard crop of broccoli find someone to sell it to?  Let’s hope so, before there’s none left in the store.

I might expand on this further, there’s a thesis for some grad student in here somewhere…

At the International Agroecology Shortcourse (www.agroecology.org), we spent two weeks in classrooms, in fields, in markets and most importantly, in conversation. I met highly respected professors, graduate students, farmers, activists, and thinkers of all stripes.

In the picture above our class is braving the gale at Swanton Berry Farm, as Jim Cochran, the first organic commercial strawberry grower, tells us about how he’s improving conditions for his workers. He signed a contract with the UFW, which is rare, and offers his employees full benefits and a share in the company, which is unheard-of.

He and Larry Yee are working on a little plan to overhaul our nation’s entire food system. No big deal.

Yes, we have some tomatoes. We have some tomatoes, today!

I’m back from a month in California, that soul-searching type of journey you go on to find yourself (again, some more) and as usual the state did not disappoint. Seems that a yearly soul-search is a good palate cleanser. It’s nice to look back on the past year and see some teensy progress towards defining a goal, if not actually moving in its direction.

Though the slugs and adverse weather conditions have demolished most of our dreams of homesteading in Brooklyn, the tomatoes and broccoli soldier on, and for this I am very grateful.

So now it’s February. Three blizzards’ snow is dog-piled around the city, the melt comes seldom and when it does it drips right in your hair half the time. The previous entry of this blog mentions being strangled by the seasons and noise of New York, which is true, though we have learned that these factors can be mitigated by a change of scenery and especially with a good bathtub. After a small crisis wherein we decided not to move to California this year, J and I opened up the surprisingly large door of “staying in New York,” which meant getting a place all to ourselves, and my starting school. The little essay below was the first step in what may turn out to be a big change, or an orientation, towards work and even life.

Over the last 8 months I have come to believe that it should not be acceptable to ignore where your food comes from or how your consumption behaviors affect your own health as well as the world at large. If everyone on earth consumed the way Americans do, we would need 4.5 more earths to support us. As it stands, we are currently using 30% more natural resources than the earth can provide long-term.

With 50% of the earth’s landmass currently being used for agriculture, the food question may be the most critical one we can ask.

Get to work.

After somehow putting the advertising agency out of business, it became a little clearer to me that I should find something to do with myself that is both fulfilling and also interesting, in a long-term sort of way. This is a question that I’ve been avoiding for many years, while I continued to beat my head full bore against the wall of the Brooklyn music scene. Grad School (which should always appear in a drippy horror film font) has been looming off in the distance forever, waiting for me to settle on an emphasis, or a location, or some burning question that has gone unanswered in the literature. I don’t want to be a therapist, I don’t want to experiment on mice or monkeys, I do want to do something relevant and even (is this a stretch?) become employable some day.

So, in the spirit of ignoring and avoiding the day-to-day aimlessness I have created in New York, I took off on an epic road trip with my similarly-souled boyfriend. We are burned out here, we are no longer as artistically useful as we once were, we are strangled by the seasons and the never-ending noise of this place. We hiked, camped, drove, hundreds of miles of road from Vegas to the sea and around and back again. The dream trip, the soul-searching perfect road movie, the landscapes vast and wild, or else orderly beyond comprehension, rows of oranges, lemons, houses, fields.


Lesson 1 - access to food is good
The arguable high point of the trip was the discovery of a farm stand in Moss Landing advertising “Avocados, 7 for $1.” Heaven, indeed, and they were small and precious and perfectly ripe. Everything at the stand was perfect-seeming; cherries for a dollar a pound, corn and asparagus and brussels sprouts and endless stone fruits and berries. Almost everything was grown locally, mostly coming from the giant farms that surrounded us there and further in to the Salinas Valley. It felt good to be there, and to see families from every economic strata piling up their own mountains of good fresh food. This is not the typical experience in the greenmarkets of New York city, where food is often prohibitively expensive for working-class people, and the climate does not allow for this variety and size of crops.

I wonder how different families that live in this area shop. Do they all know about places like this? Do all centers of agriculture have good access to the crops for the local people? Do people who live places where food is harder to grow rely a lot more on processed food? What are the factors that influence these things (socioeconomic status, cultural food traditions, transportation options, chain stores, fast food…)?

Lesson 2 - unsafe at this speed?
When you drive down from the coast mountain ranges headed west, and you finally come within view of the sea, the great surprise is, of course, that you can’t see anything but a wall of fog and haze, especially in the summertime. This is a drag, and a feature of the steep coastlines and elevation drops in this part of the state. This is why Ugg boots; the chilly damp summers freeze the tootsies of the surfers. I was always under the impression that the thick soup in the air was nothing but this summer fog, until I was straightened out by some literature at a state park overlook. The opacity in the coastal air was only partially due to atmosphere, but quite a bit more due to the pollution from agriculture.

Now driving through the farmland began to turn sinister, watching the teams of people in the hundred-degree heat picking lettuces and artichokes. They were wearing hoodies and baseball caps and long pants to protect themselves from the sun. No shade anywhere. Handling food that had been grown with chemicals that had turned the air brown. My sense of injustice riled, I did a little googling. The United Farm Workers have made little headway in this state, with 650,000 people working the fields. 15 people have died of the heat in the fields since Schwarzenegger took office. 50% of the people working the fields are here illegally. A law mandating minimum wage for farm workers was finally passed this summer. Some of these workers work overnight with headlamps, and sleep right there next to the crops that they harvest.

How does this type of farming affect families? The farms hire people that are well under working age and here either illegally or with a Seasonal Agriculture visa. How many kids start working in the fields instead of finishing school? Are immigration crackdowns common? What pesticides are common to which crops, and what are the health risks of exposure? To what extent do different farms or crop industries take necessary precautions to protect their workers? Do organic farms treat their workers better than industrial ones? Are there epidemiological studies taking place in farming communities, to track cancer and asthma and other pesticide-related diseases? Do workers on industrial farms actually learn anything about farming? Do they dream of having their own farms? Do they grow food at home, or did they used to before they came to the states?

I’ll just throw this stream up and keep going tomorrow. Thanks dad, for the homework.