No Tulips!

I've moved!

2011-06-07T19:24:00.000-07:00

Ahhh, the easiest kind of move. No boxes, no expense, no losing the cat, just a simple click of a magic button (they actually call it "the magic button") and all my posts from this blog have been moved to my new blog, Tuulips, hosted this time by Wordpress.

I hope to use this new platform to continue my crusade/quiet voice in the corner for more sensible food policy and to endorse the consumption of edible flowers. Like tulips.
Is NoTulips dead? Maybe. I will probably still use this blog to post random things that don't fit in the food/politics category. So watch out for that.

Thanks for reading.

Food (to the) Rescue

2011-03-11T22:24:00.000-08:00

These days, everyone talks a lot about food production. Where was it grown? Is it free-range? Organic? Fair trade? How fresh is it? Who owns the genetic material? (Pause for satire.)

In the life span of food, like that of humans, everybody seems to coo and fret over the birthing process, but nobody pays much attention to what happens at the end. No, I’m not talking about poop, although poop is important. I’m talking about the food that doesn’t end up in someone’s stomach. According to the blog Wasted Food, 40% of food produced in America ends up in the landfill. Holy tamales. If you’ve ever visited your local dump, just seeing the endless piles of trash is enough to make you swear to never buy anything again. When you consider how much of that junk was once something edible, and how many people on earth are hungry and undernourished, (around 1 billion, according to the UN), it’s truly depressing.

Ahhh, gloom and doom. Got your attention now, don’t I? Actually, what I'm here to write about today wasn’t how sad it is that we throw so much out, but about the exciting phenomenon of food rescue. Recent experiences have shown me that there are superheroes living amongst us, posing as food bank operators, swooping in and snatching perfectly good food from the brink of the trash bin.

Food For Lane County, the major food bank for the Eugene area, is a hotspot of food rescue activity. Like most food banks, Food for Lane County collects provisions from a variety of sources – canned food drives, government commodities, and local growers, processors and retailers. It all comes first to its central warehouse in west Eugene, a place I’ve recently become very familiar with. Since enjoying a stretch of unemployment that allowed me to keep my need for food assistance below the radar via EBT, I found a job cooking for institutionalized teenagers. They eat a lot, and my employer is a non-profit, so I visit Food For Lane County on a weekly basis, collecting donated and rescued food on the behalf of my captive diners (and breakfast-ers, and lunch-ers, and snack-ers...). I say captive because they don’t have much of a choice but to eat whatever I cook for them, which makes it easy to incorporate the FFLC provisions into the menu.

Like thrift shopping or dumpster diving, “shopping” at the FFLC warehouse requires a finely tuned strategy. First, I arrive early, before they open the doors at 8:30. Trucks are coming in with deliveries all day, but the selection is best first thing in the morning. To picture the scene, imagine coupon day at your local grocery store, except that instead of housewives and pensioners, the people waiting in line to elbow their way to the bargains manage food banks all over the county, or run shelters and assistance centers for our many hungry residents. In other words, they’re on a mission. At precisely 8:30, we file in and scramble for the limited number of shopping carts. The best scores are on meat and produce, the most expensive items on my budget, so I start in the walk-in cooler, pulling my hat down around my ears. Three or four people are already in there, loading up their carts and occasionally notifying each other when they come across the good stuff. I join the friendly competition, starting with the dairy section. The first thing I find is a crate full of whipping cream from a local dairy that expires tomorrow. I throw a few into my cart. My mind wanders momentarily to fruit salad with whipped cream and delicious soup, but then I hear talk of deli meat on the other side of the cooler and scurry over. Packages of roasted turkey slices from Market of Choice, a gourmet grocery chain, join the whipping cream. Then I hit the stacks of organic yogurt, a common item here, and random packaged cheese. After taking everything I can use from the deli side of the cooler (and there’s still a lot left over), I move to the produce side. Here I find cabbage, carrots and root vegetables from the FFLC gardens. Assorted boxes from grocery stores carry grapes, avocados, mangos, lettuce and tomatoes. Because the cases of apples, oranges and bananas are stacked higher than me, I take as much as I think the kids will eat. Some of these specimens are too far gone to consume, but some are just perfectly ripe. I once scored a half-dozen containers of strawberries, each containing one moldy berry for ten good ones.

The incredible part of all of this is that, thanks to a new grant to Food For Lane County, it’s all free (it used to cost organizations like ours 14 cents a pound, which is still pretty amazing). The part that I like best, though, is that it’s also all part of that 40% of food that otherwise would be chucked in the trash heap.

Let’s look a little closer at that number. Unless you’ve ever worked in a restaurant or stocked the shelves at a grocery store, it might be a little hard to believe. If you have first-hand experience with the food industry, 40% might even seem low. Even when customers take home what they don’t finish, restaurant kitchens throw out a lot of what they cook, because they always have to make a little extra to avoid running out. Federal food-safety laws dictate how often food can be kept at certain temperatures, how many times it can be reheated, and how long prepared food can be stored before it has to be discarded (usually no longer than a week). When pre-packaged products hit their expiration dates in restaurants or in stores, they also get thrown out. Cafeterias and buffets are notorious for wasting more food than they serve. Kids are the worst food wasters (think about all those elementary school food fights), and they are the ones most often served in cafeterias. Excess food – and therefore wasted food – is also built right into our cultural sense of security. It’s not good enough, in this age of prosperity, to simply have enough. If we don’t have more than enough, we feel somehow cheated or even deprived. We all feel a right to not only eat good food, but to have as much of it as we can pay for.

But enough sociology. One of the coolest things about Food For Lane County is their Food Rescue Express program (sporting the best acronym in the food assistance world – FREX). FREX actually drives to various institutions – hospitals, the university, delis – in the city to pick up food that has been prepared but not served. It all makes its way to the warehouse, where I’ve found tubs of salad dressing, gallons of soup, baggies of peeled and halved bananas, even pre-assembled hot dogs fresh off the FREX trucks (see how they did that?). FREX is a unique model; the FFLC person I talked to said theirs is the only program like it she knows of. Since it's excess food that they're rescuing, it isn’t even close to being old or expired (it's FREX! Ok, I'll stop.)

FREX gleans a small part of the food that goes into FFLC’s warehouse. The rest comes from USDA commodities and donations from local growers and processors. Actually, three-quarters of he food donated to FFLC is locally grown or processed. That means the 63,000 county residents who received emergency food from FFLC last year ate more local food than the average American. And since this is Oregon, many of those local processors and growers are also organic. On my food budget, I can’t always afford to buy Nancy’s yogurt, Toby’s Tofu Pate, Fern Ridge Dairy goat cheese, and bread from Metropol Bakery, but the “underprivileged” kids I serve in my job eat this stuff on a regular basis. The donated products were either packaged wrong or just a little too close to the “sell-by” date (which seems more and more arbitrary to me all the time).

In a way, the work that FFLC does creates a silver lining to the modern world’s inequitable, appearance-obsessed, wasteful food system. If the average shopper wasn’t afraid of buying bruised apples or expired milk at the grocery store, there wouldn’t be much excess to flow over to food banks and those in need of food assistance. The annoying food-contaminant-paranoid FDA rules that make it difficult for small, local food processors to operate also forces a lot of food to be abandoned before it can even be served. The hungry aren’t so picky.

Rescued food not only keeps our landfills slightly more manageable, it also brings an element of variety and dignity to standard emergency food box or soup-kitchen fare. Most US food banks get by on government cheese, dented cans of peaches and stale bread. If you're Lane County's one in three who are eligible for food assistance, you may get to try an avocado for the first time, or even be faced with the enviable problem of using up a pound of locally made chevre.

Maybe “rescued” can be the new food label, like “local”, “natural”, and “organic” that everyone swoons for. After all, the food is here anyway, and if it’s going to the landfill, does it really matter if first came from Chile or New Zealand? Shouldn’t we try to eat that food first, before we worry about producing even more to feed our growing population? Better yet, maybe we can stop the problem at its source by avoiding places that tempt us to buy too much – like Costco and Trader Joe’s (I’m talking specifically about produce. Go ahead and buy container-loads of non-perishables if that’s what you like.) I’m as bad as the next person when it comes to facing the science projects in the back of the refrigerator, but ever since my roommates discovered a free leftover pickup service, our fridge has stayed nice and clean. It works like this: Pretend you’re getting rid of some old junk by placing it in a free box on the curb. Instead of ugly clothes or the Twilight series, just stick your (labeled and meat-free) leftovers out there. Because we live close to a park that homeless people frequent, the food is usually gone within hours. This isn’t a strategy that everyone will feel comfortable with, but all I’m saying is to be creative.

Organizations like Food For Lane County are putting a big dent in that 40% of wasted food, but they can’t rescue all the food. To be sure, some waste is inevitable, but hey – compost happens. The next time you’re out shopping, though, just try to think a little bit less about where your food came from, and pay attention to where it might be going, too. When the mantra of “reduce, reuse, recycle” is applied to the food system, we all eat a little bit better.

Oh, SNAP: Do food stamps make you fat?

2010-12-29T12:40:00.000-08:00

I have a confession to make. For the last six months, I have been using food stamps. It’s easy, and I like it. I get $200 added to a little blue card every month, which I use like a debit card at any convenience store, supermarket, health food store, Asian market, or even farmer’s market within the state of Oregon that I please. Basically, I eat for free, so long as I don’t want to go to a restaurant or the hot food bar at the grocery store.

This might not seem like much of a confession. After all, about 20% of Oregon residents receive food benefits, and along with unemployment checks and the occasional visit to the food bank, it’s how a lot of Americans are scraping by these days. I took an Americorps job in June, and under this government-funded program, participation in SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the title that has replaced the phrase “food stamps” in government-speak) is all but expected. With my initial paperwork, I was given a letter addressed to the local branch of the Department of Human Services, which administers food benefits. To paraphrase, it said “Tuula works for Americorps now. We don’t actually pay her a living wage. Sign her up for food stamps, stat.” Everyone I worked with got the same form, and one-by-one, we trudged down to the DHS office, answered a couple of basic questions about our living expenses, and were handed the magical blue cards.

I remember sitting in my car in the parking lot outside the building, trying to adjust my frame of mind enough to allow myself to go in. Like a lot of people in this country, especially those with immigrant families who lived out some version of the American Dream, I considered accepting any form of federal welfare to be right down there with begging on the street corner. As I sat watching the rain dripping down my windshield, contemplating the course of my life, I started feeling very sorry for myself. Don’t I have a college degree? I wondered. How did I get here? What have I done wrong? Then I remembered: I wanted this. I wanted to do the low-paying, environmental, non-profit, social-service work. It makes me feel good. Besides, the economy is falling apart. I’m lucky to have a job of any kind, and it’s not like I’ll be a welfare bum forever. I pulled my jacket hood over my head, grabbed my letter, and went out into the rain.

That was six months ago. My Americorps term of service up, but I’m still on SNAP as I job search and try to avoid moving in with my parents. As difficult as it was to take the dink to my pride, I’m glad I did it. Not only did having my food bill taken care of allow me to save money while earning less than minimum wage from Americorps (another valuable experience), it also gave me some insights into the economics and geography of how we eat.

Because the SNAP card works exactly like a debit card would, it took me a while to notice any changes in my food buying habits. In fact, using EBT is quite discrete – at the store, they ring up your groceries, you swipe your card, selecting “EBT” instead of “debit/credit”, enter your PIN, take your receipt (which gives you the balance left for that month) and you’re on your way. As someone with a lot of initial guilt and shame surrounding the use of food stamps, I was grateful for this hassle-free process. I didn’t stand out.

That was the grocery store. The farmers market was a different story. After I found out that I could use my EBT card at the Lane County Farmers Market (for some reason, they don’t really advertise this feature), I took the next beautiful Saturday afternoon to stroll downtown with my grocery bag and pick out some fresh, organic veggies. I met my friend Tara, a fellow Americorps member, there. First, we had to visit a little booth, crammed between tables overflowing with produce, where a woman ran $10 off the balance of our cards (they do it in $5 increments) and gave us each ten wooden tokens that she said could be exchanged dollar-for-dollar at any of the farmer’s stands. Unfortunately, she told us, we couldn’t receive change in cash, so if we bought something for 50 cents, we would have to hand over a whole token. We started elbowing our way through the market throngs, and I found some carrots and a basket of strawberries, handed over five tokens, and didn’t get hassled. Tara, on the other hand, just wanted strawberries, and went to a different farmer for them. When she tried to pay, though, the woman behind the table frowned.
“Can you pay with something else?” she asked. “We get charged a fee to exchange those.” In the busy scuffle of the market, Tara didn’t feel like putting up a fight and holding up the line, so we dug through our pockets to produce some change. The woman didn’t seem much happier about the pile of nickles, dimes and quarters she provided, but what did she expect? As Tara pointed out on the walk home, if we had the option to pay some other way, we wouldn’t be on food stamps.

The more I thought about it, the more it irritated me. The whole point of SNAP is to reduce some of the inequity in our food system and give low-income people such as ourselves the option to eat fresh and nutritious food. If farmer’s markets charge their vendors a fee to accept their version of EBT, and farmers are reluctant to sell to individuals using the system, the whole point of the program is lost. I stuck the other five tokens in my purse, where they are still, because the next time I went to the farmers market I forgot to bring them. Clearly, this system needs some work.

But I didn’t shop much at the farmers market this summer anyway. I tried to keep from using my own cash for food and keep my monthly grocery bill within the allotted $200, which was easy as long as I didn’t spring for such items as $3.50 baskets of local strawberries (or meat, which I don’t normally eat anyway). I still bought mostly organic, but local foods were out of my price range. I also found myself cooking a lot more. I couldn’t justify the expense of eating out when I had free food at home, and I also knew that if I spent my food benefits on frozen pizzas and prepared deli items, my account would be empty a lot sooner than if I bought the raw ingredients. Without kids to take care of and clean up after, or a second job to pay a mortgage or whatever, I had the time for this (although, living alone, I got pretty tired spending every evening at home in front of the stove). Of course, if I did have other responsibilities in my life, the quality of what I was eating wouldn’t be nearly as good as it was. Also, I would need more than $200 per person, especially if there were meat-eaters in the family.

So if you’re busy, and you don’t earn much money, participating in the SNAP program makes a lot of sense. Only problem is, most people are much more likely to use food stamps to buy fattening, unhealthy foods that are cheap and easy to prepare. The result? People on SNAP are much more likely to be overweight or obese than those who aren’t, according to some scientists.

Thinking more about grocery transactions recently has also helped me notice where various food outlets are placed. I usually shop at small natural-foods stores, which are concentrated around the center of town where housing and businesses cater to those in the upper income levels. Head toward the outskirts of the city, and you won’t find those cozy shops stuffed with bulk foods, fresh veggies and organic cheese. In fact, even the large grocery chains start dropping off, and for every Albertson’s or Safeway you’ll find three or four Dari-Marts, 7-11s, or Circle-Ks, all variations on the convenience store theme. I notice them because the changeable-letter signs often advertise “We take EBT”. For what, though? Doritos, candy, soft drinks, maybe some milk, eggs or boxed mac-and-cheese. So if you live in one of those neighborhoods, and maybe you don’t have a car, or the ability to bus into town to visit another store, what are your options?

I’m not the first person to notice this phenomenon, and much has been said about the problem of “food deserts” in both rural and urban areas. One proposal that keeps coming up is to not allow the purchase of high-calorie, low-nutrition foods under SNAP. As it currently stands, you can buy pretty much any food item in the grocery or convenience store using your food benefits. The federal SNAP website details what does and does not apply as “food” under the program. Among the things that don’t count: Alcohol, personal care items, vitamins, and live animals (No buying a catfish to fatten up in your living room, sorry). Twinkies, Velveeta and Kool-Aid do count, although most people would probably agree that they have few nutritional differences from toothpaste. The problem is, as SNAP argues in a report, that there would simply be too much administration involved in fine-tuning the definition of “food” to exclude “junk food”. And you know that food processors would find ways around the law if they did, fortifying their products until they met the minimum nutritional requirements.

In the interest of balancing out the junk food eligible for purchase under SNAP, the USDA implemented a program in 2007 that allows farmers markets to accept food stamps. Of course, this doesn’t address the underlying issue of the cost of fresh, locally produced food, so, in some states, other organizations have stepped in to offer subsidies to low-income farmers market shoppers. Still, less than 0.01% of all federal SNAP dollars were spent at farmers markets last year.

Another little-known fact about SNAP is you can also use food benefits to buy seeds for your garden. It’s another nice thought, but one that probably hasn’t been very popular. A lot of the low-income kids I met through the Americorps job this summer hadn’t ever eaten a fresh tomato before. If their parents aren’t buying this kind of stuff, the chances are even lower than they’ll want to grow it themselves.

So SNAP isn’t doing much to improve the health of low-income people in this country, but it probably isn’t the root of the problem, either. Regardless of how you pay for it, cheap, processed, and unhealthy food will always be an option, and more so if you live in a low-income neighborhood. It would be senseless to force stores in these areas to carry fresh produce that would probably just rot in the coolers. There’s an underlying issue here that needs to be addressed: the cycle of poverty and poor diet. If people didn’t grow up eating something, they aren’t usually going to start eating it as adults, and since poverty tends to persists through generations, it also defines the dietary habits of a large segment of the population. So you can make good food affordable, but that doesn’t mean it will replace bad food pound for pound. There’s also the issue of convenience. After working a double shift, your average single mother will probably be more willing to microwave a hot pocket than chop a salad.

Can we ever take fresh, local fruit and vegetables out of the domain of the well-off and align American food values along the lines of apples, not apple pie? Sure. I forgot to mention the steady, free source of local and organic vegetables that I relied on through my summer and fall of being on SNAP: the farm where I worked. When growing food is part of what you do for a living, you’re guaranteed nothing but to eat fairly decently. In fact, for most of human history, people made their living as farmers, and poor folks like me lived off potatoes, greens, fresh eggs, and fruit from the trees. We grew it ourselves. The rich gorged on lard, sugar and beef, got fat, and died of heart disease. Now the tables have turned. Over 70% of Americans are overweight or obese, and I would bet that most of them are currently on or have been on food stamps.

What we need is re-education, and the beginnings of it already exist. The best example I can think of is Farm to School, which takes kids on field trips out of the classroom to farms and also brings fresh food to them in the cafeteria. There’s also the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program, similar to SNAP except with much stricter rules about what can be purchased, and it’s only available to mothers with children under five. It also has a fairly decent website with nutrition information and cooking tips, although it gets a bit patronizing (“Did you know that fruits and vegetables are naturally low in calories?” No waaay...)

As for me, I look forward to one day having the financial freedom to put my toothpaste, beer and bananas on the same piece of plastic. Maybe the fact that I have successfully used food stamps without packing on a layer of winter fat says something, but I think the average person on SNAP has a lot more hurdles to jump than I on the way to healthy living. Let’s fix our food system first, the one that pushed high-calorie diets on low-income people, and maybe we can all eat a bit fresher.

Find a farmer's market that accepts SNAP or WIC here.

Bring on the Tulips

2010-05-01T12:08:00.000-07:00

Greetings,

You may have noticed the lack of blog postings here lately. Put another way, it seems that over the last few months, I reduced the volume of original content on this blog to match that of the rest of the blog-o-sphere (Huffington Post, anyone?) While they rehash the daily news, mining it for valuable gossip and tossing out the uninteresting facts, this blog seems to prefer presenting nothingness as what it is.

Still, the total lack of content here has given my blog the abandoned appearance of your neighborhood GM dealership, and I am not okay with that. I had a job to do, and that was to report on my wanderings and share what I've learned from them, for better or for worse. As a blogger, I try to step outside of my life from time to time and peer back in to see what larger connections can be drawn between my own experiences and what's going on in the world at large. Since February, it seems I've lost the ability to be the outsider in my own life, casually observing events as they transpire and reporting on them for your reading pleasure. Instead, somewhere in between wrestling crab pots and getting in touch with my fisherwoman self, I lost my cool and my ability to step into the third person. I didn't fall down as a writer, luckily, only as a blogger, and I managed to record - in a small heap of nearly illegible legal pads - most of my whirlwind journey as a rookie deckhand in one of the world's most dangerous fisheries. (During this time, I also found myself out of not one but two separate laptops). One day, these notes may even manifest themselves in a more readable format, but don't hold your breath.
So that's as far as I'll go for formal excuses. In the meantime, however, another strange thing has happened, something that's made me question the whole idea that launched this blog (in its eventual form as a food-and-farm advocacy tool) in the first place. This personal revelation may not seem as momentous as the catastrophic earthquakes that weakened bits of our society's foundations in the past couple of months, or the fact that at this moment, all the oil trapped in the rock beneath the Gulf of Mexico seems to be gushing out and headed for the Everglades, but it's significant nonetheless. My confession - and it is a little embarrassing to admit in this context - is this: I have been admiring tulips.

Readers of this blog may or may not have recognized my longstanding commitment to tulip eradication. Really, any flower (except those that precede fruit, of course) may be considered frivolous and unnecessary to daily existence, but tulips, for me, have always been a worst offender. I felt this way even before I read Michael Pollan's (author of The Omnivore's Dilemma) opinion on tulips in his book The Botany of Desire. He puts it this way: "Among flowers, the tulip is one of the most extravagantly useless." Unlike most of the flowers that humans have domesticated and bred selectively to serve our purposes, the tulip has no scent, no edible parts, and no medicinal qualities. On the basis of its beauty alone, it still wielded considerable flower power at one time. As Pollan describes in the book (which I highly recommend), no other flower has been as amenable to the corruption of the free market. In 16th-century Holland, it launched a lucrative futures market in tulip notes - slips of paper that promised future deliveries of high-value tulip bulbs. At one point, a prized tulip (like the Semper Augustus in the image here) could go for more than the cost of a big house on the canal. Speculation escalated out of control, and when the bubble burst, individuals who had invested their life's savings in these promissory notes found themselves holding useless slips of paper, without so much as a bulb to put in their gardens.
Tulips bothered me for other reasons than their historical role in setting a precedent for irresponsible trade. On a personal, aesthetic level, for instance, they have always seemed far over the top. With their primary colors, unnaturally straight stalks, and uniform appearance, they seem to go against what is natural, with no charming qualities to redeem them. Daffodils are frumpy and frilly but still cute, in a way. Roses - well, at least they have their dignity. Even dandelions are edible. Honestly, I didn't see the point of tulips, and every time I saw one, I wondered why people couldn't obsess over something a little bit more substantial and, to get right to the point, edible. Also, I didn't like the fact that my name (Tuula) is often misread as ending in "lip", as if I might be the type of person who goes around identifying herself as the sex organ of a plant.
Given my zero-tolerance policy toward the tulip - both the word and the flower itself - the name of this blog came up rather naturally. Everything worked fine until this spring, when my hard-nosed stance against tulips began to gradually erode. Maybe it was the brutally cold December we had here in Oregon and the generally hopeless post-holiday feeling I was experiencing, but when flower stalks began poking themselves out of the ground in late January, I didn't experience the usual sense of nausea over the anticipated floral show. On the Oregon coast, winter is short-lived, but the rainy and wet spring, with its endless assault of Pacific storm fronts, seems to take six months. It's not that I looked forward to the day when I would have to nod to the charming faces of a crowd of gaudy, candy-colored blooms ecstatically announcing the arrival of spring. But when those flowers arrived, suddenly the ceaseless grey of the sky, the ocean, and the windy highway I drove every day was enlivened with pink, yellow, purple, orange and red flowers. I tried to ignore them, at first, but they mocked me from parking lot dividers and window boxes in town, from every single front yard in my neighborhood, from behind the crumbling brick along my grandma's front walk. Resistance was futile.

The tipping point came on a walk I took one evening through my neighborhood. I noticed about ten huge tulips growing in a neighbor's garden, looking like half-inflated. bubble-gum pink birthday baloons upon thick green stalks. Their enormous size startled me, and I had to have a closer look. I approached cautiously and peered inside one, noting how the petals just barely overlapped one another as they curved gracefully inward. I never imagined something so orderly, so tame and pleasing, occurring in nature. I stared into the flower for a while, probably long enough for whoever was watching inside the house to consider phoning the poilce, but didn't touch it. It seemed like it would be a thing easily distuurbed. The next time I came across a smaller version of this marvel in my grandmother's front garden, I gently felt its petal. Just as I suspected. Smoother than skin.
The tulips, I had to admit, had defeated me. In all their uselessness, and despite their inane obedience to human selection and cultivation, they were beautiful and put joy into my day from that point forward. Now that I am back in Eugene, where spring is a bit behind the more temperate coast, I am experiencing a tulip re-run, and it's just as chidishly pleasurable as it was the first time around.
My war on tulips is officially over. I have called off the troops; they are frolicking homeward with ridiculous garlands on their heads. What does this mean for the future of the blog? I haven't worked that out yet. Like my attitude toward flowers, my approach to the craft of writing has changed. There are other projects that have eclipsed blogging in this venue, which I will hopefully share at a later date. Employment-wise, my next gig is with Northwest Youth Corps in Eugene, where I will be leading summer day camps for kids that allow them to experience food production first hand. (In other words, I will be happily demonstrating the finer points of playing in the dirt and greenhouse-grazing at the NWYC Farm.) I would love to start up a complimentary project involving some sort of educational blog that is kid-friendly. Right now, I'm still working on removing the crab-bait smell from my clothing and finding myself (another &%$!@) laptop.
So thank you for reading NoTulips, and stay tuned for its reincarnation. Many of you have shared with me that this blogging effort has been entertaining or inspring in some way (I even apparently recruited my replacement at Collins Farm!) and your encouragement has been incredibly helpful in keeping the words flowing. As soon as my next project is up and running, you'll be sure to hear about it. In the meantime, keep eating well.

Tuula(lip)

The Deckhand's Tale: How Landless Farmers Spend Their Winters

2010-02-02T22:54:00.000-08:00

Opening the door of the Newport, Oregon Starbucks, I spot Captain Dave immediately. In grease-stained jean overalls and a peaked fisherman’s cap, he stands out against the plush green velour of the sofa chair he’s parked himself in. As I approach and introduce myself, he sizes me up with his one good eye, feeling his grizzled white beard like he’s asking for its advice. I take the chair next to his. The coffee shop is loud, and I lean in to catch what he’s saying as he rattles off a rant about his previous deckhands (druggies, scumbags) and gives me a brief outline of his typically rural-white-Oregonian-male political views (do-gooders, you’ve been warned). Nonetheless, he's confident that hiring women deckhands, even completely inexperienced ones, is a smart business strategy. We're not interested in stealing his tools, he tells me, and we're easier to get along with. My eligibility for employment established from his end, he then he asks me why I want to work on a fishing boat.

Somehow, although I was aware that I was going to a job interview this morning for a position I had expressed an interest in, I didn’t really have an answer to that question. The job posting he’d placed on craigslist had simply filled my three main requirements for employment these days: it didn’t require any previous experience, it sounded interesting, and it was something I could quit after two or three months without feeling guilty. No, I didn’t have any idea what I was getting into. Fishing hasn’t been a lifelong dream of mine. It's just that I was swiftly discovering the limitations of farming as a career choice.

Although those farmers lucky enough to have land to live and work on have plenty to keep them occupied (not to mention fed) through the winter months, I found myself greeting 2010 with no work and no carrots or potatoes in cold storage. Telling prospective employers that you’ll likely be leaving them come springtime in order to participate in the planting season doesn't really give you a leg up on the competition. But what scared me more than unemployment was the potential boredom of clicking a mouse or shuffling files all day. More than that, even though I tried telling myself that whatever menial employment I found would only be to get me through the winter season, the thought struck me that I might wake up five years later and find myself going to the same dreary office, driven ever forward through a bleak but not completely miserable existence by the promise of a bigger paycheck. My goals and reality thus in conflict, I found the months of January through March were stretched before me like a giant white question mark on a giant white space (in the middle of a giant white cloud of obscurity, no less).

In fact, any close examination of large blank spaces present around the first of the year would have revealed me right in the middle, hunkered down at my Grandma’s place on the central Oregon coast, watching my bank account balance dwindle. Then, on a whim, I responded to Dave’s “Deckhand Wanted” ad, explaining in the message I left that I probably wasn’t what he was looking for but I did need a job. To my complete surprise, he called back, and we arranged to meet at Starbucks. After I explained to him that day that the temporary, erratic, somewhat dangerous and often uncomfortable nature of the work he was offering was precisely what attracted me to it, he hired me, probably more out of curiosity than real faith in my potential as a deckhand. It helped that at the time he put his ad out, he didn’t have a crew – which would normally consist of two to three trained individuals working from December through August, the length of the crabbing season. There were crabs out at sea waiting to be caught, and his desperation was such that he’d rather train “girls” than try his luck with the riff-raff that normally hung around the docks. If I stuck with it, he told me, and if the crab are good, there’s money to be made. So far, this year’s crab season looks like it will be a record-breaker for Oregon – fishermen brought in $60 million dollars’ worth in the first month alone (in a typical year, the fishery is said to be worth about $44 million.) A deckhand typically takes around a 10% cut of the catch; depending on the price of crab and how much was caught, this can mean $50 to $500 per fishing day. Suddenly, I didn’t hear Dave’s rantings about do-gooder environmentalists or worry about the impact only having one good eye might have on his navigational skills. I was in. From now ‘till spring, I decided then and there, I’ll be farming the high seas.

The day after the interview, I met up with Dave down at the Port of Newport, where all the commercial fishing vessels (around 100) make harbor. As we stepped onto the docks, the briny scent of the ocean entered my brain via my nostrils and stirred up a few memories. Although I've never so much as set foot on a commercial boat, I actually grew up in small fishing village on the southern Oregon coast about 150 miles from Newport. Port Orford is one of the few coastal settlements that attempts to keep fishing as the defining industry of its economy, pushing hard against the tourist chintz that seems to have transformed the rest of the coast into an endless series of glass-blowing studios and Moe’s seafood joints. As a kid there, vacationing Californians and refugees from the Valley never really crossed my radar; I dug my sandcastles and hung around on the commercial fishing docks in peace. Today, the sound of pylons creaking in the water brings me back to the many late nights I spent with my father and older brother, fighting sleep and throwing our crab pot off the old wooden dock at low tide in hopes of pulling up the next evening’s supper. We just did it for fun; the men and women who run boats out of the harbors of Port Orford, Newport and Oregon’s many other fishing towns do it for their livelihoods. It’s a dangerous profession – in 2008, a federal study declared Oregon’s Dungeness crab fishery to be the nation's deadliest (more dangerous than Alaska’s king crab fishery, which is the subject of the Discovery Channel’s “Deadliest Catch”). In good seasons, like the one so far this year, the money seems to justify the risk for fishing families. But there could be something else about it, too. The men who own fishing boats that I’ve met in Newport so far give me the feeling that they would be out there on the ocean even if they didn’t rely on the paycheck.

The relationships men have with boats is one of those earthly mysteries, and suffice it to say that when I met Captain Dave’s “baby,” I felt like I should have kissed her hand. The Golden Sunrise, as we'll call her, is a 36-foot fiberglass boat rigged to pull crab pots from the deep or cast longlines for tuna and salmon. She has red, orange and yellow stripes running across her hull and a definite personality. When Dave and his crew aren’t out at sea, he told me, we’re either working on equipment (making buoys, coiling ropes, repairing and building crab pots) or fixing up the boat. She’s temperamental, he explained, patting the steering wheel inside the cabin and adding a few more words aside that I didn’t quite catch. They weren’t meant for me anyway.

As it turned out, the Golden Sunrise and I had the opportunity to get to know each other quite well before actually traveling to sea together. For the rest of January, the coast was hammered with weather system after weather system, keeping us shorebound. As Dave puts it, "It's called fishing, goddamn it, it's not called catching." It's always a gamble. To make up for the lack of fishing days, Dave offered me paid labor in his shop and I accepted gladly. Putting sealer on the emergency "survival suits" for the boat, wrapping buoy ropes and drilling holes in bait jars, I began to get a better idea of what going out on the boat would be like. The time ashore also gave me a chance to get to know my fellow deckhand, Hannah. a feisty Minnesotan in a position remarkably similar position to mine - 23, broke and dreaming dreams of sandy silt loam and prizewinning tomatoes. She’s spent the past three years working at her friends’ organic farm back home and admits that she misses it. But she also saw the attraction in heading west and spending a bit of time on a fishing boat. I liked her attitude, and suddenly, Dave’s political rants and weirdly oozing right eye became a lot more bearable. That, or the crotchety old guy was starting to grow on me too.

Next time: My first bout with seasicknesses; then, we (finally) catch a few crabs.

Farming Apprenticeships (part two): The Verdict

2010-01-04T21:58:00.000-08:00

Note: This post is a continuation of last month's, in which I gave an overview of farming apprenticeship programs and something of an explanation for their sudden popularity. This segment attempts to summarize my own experience as an apprentice – for those considering doing it, parents of young people threatening to do it, and those otherwise interested.

... Do I now aspire to possess my own ten acres, a cow and a pile of debt? Will the dirt ever come out from under my fingernails?

I’ve been trying, but I can’t seem to develop an objective analysis of the apprenticeship program that defined my life for six months. It would be like sending your parents a report card for their performance during your childhood. Looking back over the journals I kept while working with the Collins, I see rants, reflections, stories about the people I met and many, many attempts to describe the beauty and wonder of the place I found myself living. My formal goal in undertaking the apprenticeship was to learn about what it takes to sustain a small farm; the day-to-day tasks as well as the personal commitment involved. Informally, I was really trying to see if I was up for it, if all my romantic ideas around farming held up to the reality of the job itself.

I worked hard to keep maintain my lofty ideas about farming over the months I spent living and working with the Collins. As they will be the first to admit, Bob and Ann are a bit worn out by the whole job. Granted, things are better than when they were dairy farmers, waking up at 4 AM to milk cows that eventually started costing them more per year than they earned. Still, most visitors to the farm become overwhelmed simply by being told what goes on here. It’s a lot of work, and by the end of the apprenticeship, I understood why most long-time farmers don’t share the bright-eyed enthusiasm of young wannabes. It’s hard, often thankless work. But I also learned why they’re still there, doing it. The energetic, gung-ho attitude may not be immediately visible, but their passion for the lifestyle they chose is still there lying just beneath the surface. Just as some city kids wouldn’t touch a manure shovel with a ten-foot pole, Bob and Ann would last about three minutes in an office. The animals under their care, the river that skirts their property, the 69 acres that they call home are as much a part of them as their hair or skin.

After a few weeks at Collins Farm, I started to feel this way a bit, too – attached to the place in a way that made me wonder, when it came down to it, whether I would actually be able to leave. Maybe it’s the seductive beauty of Vancouver Island or the fact that every day was a chance to play outside. Sure, there were some long hours spent bent over pulling weeds and picking vegetables, but since most of those activities were new to me, they took a while to get dull and repetitive. In between, I gorged myself on blackberries and strawberries, climbed trees to pick apples, wandered the woods aimlessly to find mushrooms (or to walk the goats), and shoveled around piles of dirt and manure under the guise of creating compost. Honestly, sometimes I couldn’t believe I was being paid, however meagerly, for that level of enjoyment.

Second to finding out that work didn’t have to be a miserable activity, the most valuable aspect of being a farm apprentice turned out to be the mentoring relationships that I was able to develop with Bob, Ann and people like Andrea, Connie and Crystal who were a near-daily presence during the summer months. Without a lesson plan, a schedule or any sort of formal discussion, they managed to impart a ton of valuable information on how to grow food and turn it into a semblance of a livelihood: the economics of homemade pie and hungry tourists, the “joys of backyard cheese making," how to pick a perfectly ripe strawberry and catch a pig on the run.

Farming apprenticeships are criticized for being a product of privilege; an option only available to those who can afford to work for little or no pay for an entire summer. One commenter on the New York Times article mentioned in the previous post calls such positions “a time-honored tradition for children of the wealthy” to fill the summer months. It’s an interesting point. Although my mom quit supporting me as soon as I graduated, the fact that I had no student loans to pay off allowed me complete freedom in choosing the route I would take next. I assessed my personal and financial needs, looked at the state of the world and, deciding it needs more farmers, jumped into the apprenticeship program with both feet. Did I feel privileged? Absolutely. I lived in a place that people from all over the world pay through the nose to visit, ate almost exclusively organic, home-cooked, local food, and learned how to feed myself and come a few steps closer to self-sufficiency. Those non-monetary forms of payment added up to be more than any “real” job could have provided me with, especially just coming out of college in a major recession. Meanwhile, many of my fellow graduates languished in their parents’ basements, looking for nonexistent jobs and wondering if they should go back for a Master’s in business administration. I came away with skills that I’m finding a new job market for – in managing community gardens and CSA programs, helping restaurants and stores source food locally, or assisting small farms in going organic.

My last few days at the Collins’ place were difficult. It didn’t seem fair that I was leaving; the Christmas season was just upon us and there was so much to do. I went through the motions anyway, and Ann and Bob made sure I got to do everything one last time – go for a ride on Jesse the big Belgian mare, eat all my favorite foods, see all of our friends from around the community at a fantastic Thanksgiving Day potluck. The day before I left turned out to be the first sunny day we’d had in weeks (after record rainfall all November), and Mount Arrowsmith, the towering face of granite that greeted me nearly every morning for two seasons, appeared dusted with snow just as it’d been when I first arrived in June.

Before I left, Ann and Bob gave me a painting of that mountain, gorgeously rendered in watercolor by an artist friend of theirs. I put it carefully in the back window of my fully stuffed car. Then I got in the car with it and drove down the driveway, watching the two of them growing smaller in my rearview mirror. They were the ones I hated to leave the most. They weren’t simply friends to me or even surrogate parents. Our relationship was more similar to that of close accomplices. Although the Collins are the ones responsible for creating what is now a diverse farm that feeds the close-knit community around it, I felt like that season – the second one that they had grown for the local market – had been a milestone. The worldwide craze around eating locally and knowing where food comes from had started to hit our little valley, and real progress began to be made toward making the entire island more self-sufficient. I’d come to experience some of the joy of working on the land and with people who understood the value of that, for the guiltlessness of laboring for ideas that I believe in completely. At Collins Farm I think I glimpsed an outcome that was greater than the whole, something right in a world that usually seems wrong.

As far as my own desire to become a farmer, well, as much as I hate making long-term plans about my future, it's definitely tempting. But first, I need a few more seasons' experience under my belt and a small mountain of cash - it's as difficult to get into farming as it is to get out, it seems. Now that winter's set in, I'm simply biding my time (and honing my couch surfing skills) until I can once again turn my efforts toward the worthwhile goal of feeding people.

That dirt under my nails? Long gone. My itch to put it back there? Stronger than ever.

Farming Apprenticeships: Pitchfork Pastoralism

2009-12-20T17:12:00.000-08:00

Imagine an afternoon in mid-June sprinkled with late-arriving spring rains. Graduation rituals are being held all over the country, including here, at the University of Oregon in Eugene. The Environmental Studies program ceremony is held outside, and everyone’s too jubilant and excited to mind a few light showers. As the proceedings wind to a close and the distribution of diplomas is about to begin, the program head announces that graduates will be asked to state their post-graduation plans into the microphone as they cross the stage. In unison, the few dozen black-robed young adults in the audience gulp.

I quickly maneuver my way to the back of the line to give myself time to think. My immediate plans after graduation are to embark on a six-month apprenticeship on an organic farm. This is surely not what the esteemed administrators of my program want to hear about. I can almost hear my parents’ doubts about my unconventional career launch ringing in my ears. Why couldn’t I have a promising job as a wind power engineer or parks manager lined up? For the first time, I question my decision to postpone my entrance into the “real world” by following my passion for food and gardening to one of the lowest-paying professions in the world.

Luckily, unbeknownst to me, many of my colleagues had the same idea about their futures. After four or five graduates made their announcements (“Get a job”; “Live I my parents’ basement”; “Save the world”), somebody said something about going to work on a farm. He said it quietly, into his collar, but I heard it. A few others also made this admission. As I looked out into the audience, nobody was gasping with horror, fainting or weeping – just the typical “I’m so proud” sniffles.

By the time my turn finally came around, I hiked the stairs confidently, accepted the coveted slip of paper, and faced the audience. “Work on an organic farm,” I said, “Write. Save the world.” I could hear my father wincing, but I didn’t care. Suddenly, I was part of a movement.

The University of Oregon, apparently, is not the only postsecondary institution pumping out graduates who refuse to let a little higher education get in between themselves at a fulfilling back-to-the-land lifestyle. According to the New York Times, more and more students are spending their summers on farms, with the goal of either being farmers or otherwise participating in organic food production. Those without immediate connections to the farming community – like me six months ago – can find positions relatively easily using online databases. One site has over 1500 entry-level, mostly unpaid farm work positions listed, and claimed to have nearly as many applicants in 2009 (for a complete list of farm internship databases, see the end of this post). If trends continue, the number of people wanting to learn about organic practices at the ground level will soon outpace the number of farms who are able to accommodate them.

The New York Times’ reporter on this story is downright cynical about the whole phenomena. “During a recession,” she says, “a summer on the farm provides respite from grim job hunts and as much bohemian cachet as backpacking through Europe.” Sure, organic food is extremely trendy, and in this job market, most are lucky to find any work at all. Still, I think the fact that all of these educated, idealistic people are choosing to throw their energy and bright-eyed enthusiasm into farming – instead of, say, construction work – speaks less of our need for hipster credibility and more toward a fundamental change that is taking place in our society.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that any of these newly converted farmers have any idea what they’re getting into. Many seem to hold farming in some golden light, summoning up clichés of the value of working with your hands and getting in touch with nature. This attitude has deep cultural roots. Ever since the invention of agriculture – and its evil stepchild, civilization – agrarian lifestyles have been painted as the antidote to the moral corruption brought about by technology and urbanization. In endless lyrical passages about the beautifully simplistic lives of rural shepherds, the ancient Greek poet Virgil fantasized about life in the countryside. His characters spent a lot of time singing praises to nature and gathering wildflowers in May.

Of course, if Virgil had taken the time for a saunter into the countryside, he would have found an abundance of sheep but a severe shortage of the innocence and merriment he portrayed in his writing. Like modern people in urban and rural contexts, those blessed folk would have likely been struggling for survival on too little land under the burden of too many taxes, all the while quarreling with their spouses, neglecting their sheep and bumming food off their neighbors. They were human, after all, just as sheep herders are today, no less or more morally pure than those who make a career out of car repair or accounting.

Still, the idea that the pastoral lifestyle elevates standards for human interactions has stuck now for millennia, with hundreds more poets and artists adding to the grand illusion. Modern-day writers make the whole situation worse by proposing a “return” to our agrarian roots as an antidote to the confusion and complication of modern society. If only we could all live off the land, in harmony with mother nature, all our problems would be solved – or so the rhetoric goes. Enter the wave of agricultural internships, apprenticeships and volunteer programs.

The basic idea is this: Farm volunteers can work just a couple of days or up to a full season. An internship implies at least part of a season’s commitment, while apprenticeships can last even longer. Room (ranging from a tent pitched in the fields to private cabins) and board (meals with the family or free access to farm produce) is almost always provided. Apprentices sometimes receive pay – one article I read described a farm that provided “a salary of a $1000/month, room, board, a $50/month bonus for working until the end of the season, $30 extra for every farmers market they attend, and a performance bonus of up to $2000”. That right there is enough to activate the salivary glands of any liberal-arts graduate who has spent weeks unsuccessfully trolling Craigslist for work. (The farm ended the program after being sued for back wages – the hazy legislation around agricultural apprenticeships is one of the challenges its participants must deal with.) What kind of work is involved? Well, some farmers consider inexperienced but enthusiastic volunteers to be an easily exploitable source of free labor. Others expect a little self-direction and leave the worker to find his or her own work around the farm. Some apprenticeships, like mine, can include tasks like food preservation or even community outreach to build support for local foods. Although the words can often mean different things, for convenience’s sake, I’ll refer to volunteer, internship and apprenticeship program as “apprenticeships” here.

Other than a lack of standardization (and, let’s face it, standardizing things usually ends up making them boring and predictable) and sometimes bloated expectations on behalf of the apprentices, I believe apprenticeships are one of the most effective tools we have in revitalizing farming, its role in the economy, and people’s approach to food. The current generation of farmers is aging – in twenty years or so, they won’t be able to produce food for us anymore. Meanwhile, we import most of what we consume anyway, and our agricultural land is being gobbled up by subdivisions and freeways. But the realities of peak oil, climate change and economic collapse are making it abundantly clear that this is not the direction we want to be heading. We can’t all be farmers, but we can certainly do a better job of feeding ourselves, stop flooding the global market with agricultural surpluses, and clean up the planet a bit by transitioning to organic practices. A key step in this transition is training the new farmers. While traditional agricultural colleges are stuck in the old paradigm of industrial methods and bigger is better, organic farmers know better. When they open their farms up to apprenticeships, they have the opportunity to share their knowledge with clueless city kids in an environment that is unmatched in the world of public education. With the low student-to-instructor ratio (usually one or two apprentices per family farm), absence of tests, and abundance of real-world experience, learning in an apprenticeship is not simply an end result but a process that allows for personal as well as "professional" growth.

Granted, apprenticeships won’t work for every farmer or idealistic, world-saving graduate. As for my own experience in the trenches of hands-on agricultural learning, well, it was enlightening. Do I now aspire to possess my own ten acres, a cow and a pile of debt? Will the dirt ever come out from under my fingernails?

Stay tuned for next time.

In the meantime, you know you want to abandon whatever it is you’re doing to grow some vegetables, so check out the following sites:

Field Guide for Beginning Farmers - This is a great place to start; it gives an overview of farming apprenticeships available in North America and what to expect.

Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms

SOIL (Stewards Of Irreplaceable Land) Apprenticeships (Canada)

United States Department of Agriculture - Sustainable Agriculture Internships/Apprenticeships database (North America)

Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association - Farm Apprenticeships (Maine, USA)

The Rodale Institute Classifieds (USA)

Northeast Organic Farming Association (Northeast USA)

Oh, and I now have a semi-professional blogging gig with Conducive Magazine. Read my posts here (and if you ever come across an ad on the site, by all means, click the heck out of that thing).

Haberdash Your Turkey Day

2009-11-18T20:20:00.000-08:00

Recently, my good friend Max asked me to write a food column for a promotional men's fashion magazine he's involved with somehow (those advertising people have their fingers in a lot of pies). I quavered a bit, but the clincher was the name of the publication: Haberdashers. With a name like that, how could I say no?
According to Wiktionary, a haberdasher is

1. A dealer in ribbons, buttons, thread, needles and similar sewing goods.
2. (US) A men's outfitter, usually a men's haberdasher.
3. (British) A member of the Haberdashers livery company.

To me, "haberdash" sounds like a verb meaning to scramble, confuse and befuddle. Maybe they named it that because that's generally the feeling most men have about fashion (or at least, that's how they dress). But maybe I'm just not British enough to understand the proper use of a perfectly respectable word like "haberdasher".
I trust that I won't be subjecting my readership - now expanded to moneyed, fashion-conscious men aged 30-45! - to much repetition by reposting the article here. Happy Thanksgiving - with apologies to my Canadian friends, who celebrate the harvest at an earlier time that actually corresponds with real-time harvesting.

A Fresh Look for the Holiday Feast

Maybe you’re a vegetarian yourself, or maybe your girlfriend is vegan and your mom refuses to eat anything that might be fattening. Perhaps everyone’s just tired of the same old turkey dinner with stuffing on the side. So what to do about holiday meals that are traditionally centered around fattening ourselves up for the winter? Well, maybe it’s time to simply break the mold. You might have already by offering to host a holiday meal or share the responsibility of planning and cooking with your family and friends. Now what? Here are a few ideas to get you started.
First off, don’t even consider meat-substitute products, which tend to be bland and, frankly, a bit of a cop-out. If you must have something that looks like turkey or ham on the table, by all means get a real one – but go for maximum freshness, flavor and social responsibility by finding an animal that was raised free-range. The easiest way to do this is to Google “free range”, your meat of choice and your state or region for a list of farms that will be happy to provide you with what you need.
For any special meal that you don’t feel like spending days preparing for, the key is to keep the food simple, flavorful and interesting. If you base the meal on vegetables and buy good quality, fresh ingredients, it will also be light and packed with nutrition. If you can find a farmers’ market that is still open in late fall, this will be the best place to shop. Otherwise, just stick with seasonal ingredients – there’s a reason squashes, potatoes, greens, mushrooms, apples and pears have traditionally starred in winter feasts. All are at their best now. If you haven’t cooked much before, don’t be intimidated. It’s really not that hard, especially if you practice a bit before the big day. Or, go potluck style. If everyone brings something made to their standards, all are guaranteed to go home satisfied.
If you’re the host, you will likely be responsible for the main course. For a delicious vegetarian (or vegan) entrée that also looks beautiful on the table, stuff a pumpkin or other winter squash. To feed a large number of people, choose a medium-sized pumpkin, but don’t go too large – it must fit on a cookie sheet when halved. Better yet, use smaller acorn squashes, which have a unique shape and more flavorful “meat”. Roast the squash first by halving it, scooping out the seeds, and placing cut-side down on the cookie sheet. Bake in a 350º oven until tender (30-50 minutes, depending on the size). Only roast the squash until tender; don’t let it get too soft. For the stuffing, you can find plenty of recipes on the internet, but a good combination is bread cubes, gorgonzola cheese, leeks, mushrooms and hazelnuts. Or try bread crumbs, dried cranberries that have been soaked in a bit of water, sausage, onion and garlic. Include fresh herbs like parsley and sage and sauté the vegetables first in a bit of butter or olive oil before mixing with the other ingredients. Place the stuffing in the roasted squash, then bake it again at 400º for 10-15 minutes, or until stuffing is hot and browned on top.
Mashed potatoes are simple to jazz up with a bit of color and flavor by adding kale. Simply steam your unpeeled potatoes (steaming maintains maximum nutritional value in the vegetables, as does leaving the peel on) until nearly done, then throw in an equal amount of chopped kale, whose nutty flavor compliments the potatoes quite nicely. Steam another 5-10 minutes until the kale is wilted. Mash the potatoes and kale with a bit of butter, and milk, cream or sour cream. If your guests are garlic fans, add a fresh crushed clove or two.
Just because you’re going veggie doesn’t mean you have to skip gravy. In fact, a mushroom gravy will tie the whole meal together and add a measure of decadence without the fat. The best part is, it’s easy to make by sautéing a mix of fresh mushrooms (shitake, crimini, oyster or chantrelles) in butter, then adding garlic, onion and a splash of soy sauce and red wine. Dilute a tablespoon of cornstarch in a bit of cold water; add it to the vegetables with a cup of vegetable broth. Keep mixing until gravy thickens. You can make this the day before and simply reheat before serving. Just try not to consume the entire pot as you "taste test".
Depending on the size of the group and how elaborate you want to be, you can add vegetable side dishes and salads as needed. Try carrots, turnips or beets roasted just until tender and prepare a simple green salad to please all palates. For dessert, baked apples are a breeze and delicious served with vanilla yogurt or ice cream. Core the apples and dust with brown sugar and cinnamon, then fill the cores with raisins and walnuts and bake at 350º until soft.
Don’t be surprised if you end up feeling a bit stuffed at the end of this meal – this food may prove more tempting than your traditional fare. Holidays are for celebrating, so eat up in good conscience with a meal that’s delicious, filling and good for you and the planet.

The Sun Always Shines in Farmville: A critical analysis of FB’s most popular game

2009-11-08T22:45:00.000-08:00

I realize I’ve been a bit negligent in updating my blog lately. Over the past few days, my time off has been absorbed by two practically useless but hopelessly addictive activities: TvDuck.com and Farmville.
The first allows me to catch up with favorite shows that I had previously believed were only available “south of the border” in the good ol’ USA. Where else can you experience the petty depravity of Desperate Housewives and the brilliant awkwardness of The Office, all conveniently on your laptop screen? When I arrived in the great frozen north, I was saddened and disillusioned to find a message on both ABC and NBC’s websites informing me that these cultural gems were “not yet available” for viewing in Canada. Looking back, I should have known there was a way around this, but I embraced the opportunity to wean myself of TV without questioning it too much. I have sort of a love-hate relationship with the boob tube since it entered my life about five years ago (we never watched it when I was growing up). It always ends up leaving my brain feeling like jello, but at the same time, I feel like it’s very important to learn about the delicacy of extramarital affairs and just how insane life in the corporate world can be. So when TvDuck, which allows you to watch pretty much any TV show you want up here in the great frozen north, arrived on the scene, I waved goodbye to my grand schemes to learn German and read a dozen books now that the busy summer is over. Soon, any sense of cognitive strength I thought I’d gained since exiting the formalized educational system has completely dissolved. Woe is me.
That’s not what I’m here to discuss, however. While I’m waiting for my shows to buffer, I’ve been toying around with the Facebook sensation Farmville. As with most trend-driven activities that give participants a sense of social accomplishment among their peers, I’m sadly behind on this one. I try to be sort of a curmudgeon about technology and time-wasting activities (I may waste entire evenings watching TV online, but I am appropriately resentful while I’m doing it), and on the rare occasion I do attend that must-see film or buy a hot new album, I do it weeks if not months behind the pop culture schedule. Farmville only was released in June, but in just a few weeks it had become the most popular game ever to hit Facebook. and as of the end of October had 63 million users. As one news article put it, that means in the US, Farmville users outnumber real farmers 60 to 1.
Farmville annoyed me even before I knew these disheartening statistics, so I think it came as a bit of a surprise a few days ago when I appeared on my friends’ Facebook news feeds as the latest convert. Sure, my disdain still creeps under the surface, but so far, Farmville just fascinates me. For the Facebook-less (faceless?), I’ll just say that Farmville is an “application” that you add to your profile that allows you to play a game with friends that simulates the business of farming. You start off with a couple of “fields” and a limited selection of seeds. Your friends on Facebook that also play the game are your “neighbors”, and they help out by giving gifts of livestock, fruit trees and infrastructure. You can “visit” your neighbors’ farms and help out by dumping bags of fertilizer on their partially grown crops. There always seems to be things to do on the farm – one aspect in which this game actually mimics reality quite well. The crops take anywhere between four hours to a few days to ripen, and must be harvested before they wither. You harvest by clicking on the “harvesting tool” and then clicking on the finished crop. Follow a similar procedure to plow and replant the field. When you harvest, you earn “coins”, which you can then use to expand your farm and buy more stuff for it.
The first time I logged on to Farmville, I was greeted by hokey ragtime music that was probably intended to make me feel more agrarian. I chose an avatar, which defaulted to something looking like a wide-eyed blonde five-year-old in purple overalls. Everything in the game appears in this cartoonish, colorful style, a bit curious for a site mostly used by teens and adults. After I planted some strawberries and eggplants, I visited a neighbor’s farm. I did this by clicking on her avatar, which looked cooler with a purple Mohawk. When her farm loaded on my screen, though, I noticed that the farmer was nowhere to be found. Odd. On a virtual farm with no visible escape routes (not even a road or driveway), where does an avatar hide?
Despite the absence of the farmer, the farm looked quite spiffy. In fact, it made my strawberries and eggplants look like a weed patch. Fruit trees of every kind (banana growing with cherry), a bicycle, daffodils, a well, and something called a “horse topiary”. Herds of cattle and sheep stood around staring blankly into space and blinking occasionally (with an effect that was overall a little creepy, actually). My friend had clearly been at this a while. I briefly wondered if my little farm would ever attain this level of opulence.
The next morning, I checked my email to find a note from my sister, who I’d also added as a Farmville neighbor. Like the rest of the tech-enabled world, she’s already been playing this for a while. “Quick, go harvest your strawberries!” the email read. There was a sight note of panic to it. I clicked over to my virtual farm, where there were now withered stalks where my young strawberry plants had been the day before. I looked back at the email – it was sent before I’d even gotten out of bed. Apparently, the berries ripen in four hours, and the game expects you to sit in front of your computer watching this take place lest you miss the event. After all, avatars don’t take part in unnecessary outside activities like sleeping or going to work, so why should you?
Later, I called my sister up, and she explained to me the central rule of the game: “The sun always shines in Farmville.” I thought she was relaying a nugget of wisdom through some sort of cryptic metaphor, but then I realized it was actually quite straightforward. In a virtual world, there’s no reason for cloudy days or even night time. And without the physical restrictions of the berry ripening process, there’s no reason strawberries shouldn’t be ready in four hours. Or four seconds, for that matter.
I wonder if some Monsanto engineer didn’t create this game as an extension of some sort of genetically engineered, chemically controlled agricultural fantasy. After all, it’s the perfect, predictable environment for growing crops – the type of environment agricultural scientists are working hard to perfect. With hydroponics, you can deliver exactly what plants need to the root system without the inconvenient medium of soil. Animals bred to a robot-like level of complacency and stupidity perform the duties of looking cute and growing meat without the worry of pasture and fences. Of course, rather than standing and blinking on a flat green surface, those real-life animals are kept in decidedly un-pastoral pens and cages in enormous barns. But that would be the dark side of Farmville that we don’t see.
But maybe I’m looking too far into this. After all, the game clearly wasn’t structured to stand up to critical analysis; in fact, its profit motives are rather thinly concealed. This evening, as I explored the game a bit farther, I clicked on the “market”, where you buy the seeds, animals and infrastructure you want. Under the “homes” tab, I found manors, villas and a variety of other domiciles for my avatar to occupy. I clicked on the “homestead,” the most basic option, but was informed I didn’t have enough coins to buy the place. But I didn’t have to worry! I was redirected to a page where, using my Visa or Paypal account, I could simply buy more coins. Suddenly, I was the federal reserve of my own farm nation, churning out my own money as I needed it. If I didn’t want to fork over my hard-earned dollars, I could also participate in a carefully selected variety of online scams that only required my personal information to load me up on enough farm coin to purchase the homestead of my avatar’s dreams. This particular feature has generated some ire on the interwebs – apparently quite a few people have fallen for the scams and aren’t happy about it.
So Farmville’s not the perfect model for real-time agriculture, and I don’t think anything but a physical piece of land ever will be. I’m curious what this newest gaming trend – which is unique in its lack of guns, fast cars, or any of the usual computer game fare – indicates about our evolving culture. Is the appeal here, as one Zynga (the software company that developed Farmville) VP told BusinessWire, in “people's instinct to nurture”? Are we collectively so desperate to go back to our agricultural roots that we must turn to virtual reality to fill that need? Or is Farmville just another iteration of the standard monopoly-style game, where the player must make smart economic decisions to win? If so, I wonder how good this is for the situation of real farmers – if farming’s just a matter of harvesting your strawberries on time and picking the best place for your horse topiary, why can’t these hayseeds pull it together and make some money at it?
Farmville will probably go the way of Donkey Kong, Neopets and Lemonade Stand, but it is an interesting stop on the internet train and a fun diversion for my down time between cooking giant batches of tomato sauce and shoveling goat manure. In case some Farmville game creator happens to be reading this, though, I’ll offer a few suggestions to make it more realistic. Make a mortgage payment due daily, and if the player doesn’t fork it over, take a square of ripening eggplants and magically place a condo on it (you were forced to subdivide and sell). Send a crop blight through every so often just to liven things up a bit, or announce at random intervals that the twenty squares of soybeans you planted are now worth a third of what they were yesterday. Allow the cute, blinking animals to reproduce so that there can be even cuter baby animals running around. And when an avatar goes to visit a “neighbor’s” farm, make that other player’s avatar be there to offer a cup of coffee and a slice of pie. It’s things like that, after all, that make this whole farming game worthwhile.

New kids on the farm scene: Succession and the future of food

2009-10-27T21:27:00.000-07:00

Over the past couple of millennia that agriculture has been around, it’s overcome some major hurdles. Be it disease, drought or pestilence, our species has so far managed to invent our way out of trouble, keeping the food supply just ahead of the human population. Lately, though, it seems we’ve hit quite a number of limiting factors: the availability of land, water, and new variations on the genetic code that fool the pests for another generation of crops. But while we might have expected to eventually run out of space and technological fixes, another looming shortage involves a different kind of resource: manpower. Farmers are aging, and there doesn’t seem to be a new crop of them to take over the job of growing our food.
This fact was illustrated for me a couple of weekends ago, when Bob, Ann and I climbed into the old farm truck to rattle down to the Shannon farm and pick up some plastic sheeting. The Shannons run a dairy farm – the only one left in the valley, actually – and use the plastic to wrap the feed for the cows. They can’t reuse it, but the Collins find it great to lay down in the garden and keep the weeds at bay.
It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon. The sun doesn’t seem to want to succumb to the typical fall gloom here on the island, and was out warming the golden leaves of the maples lining the Shannon driveway. We pulled up to the house and knocked on the door.
The Shannons are old friends of the Collins. Before Bob and Ann quit the dairy business, they and a small cohort of other farmers constantly relied on each other for equipment parts, emergency help and moral support. Old bonds die hard, and so this visit was just as much about catching up with each other as it was about recycling plastic.
Terry answered the door and his wife, Donna joined us in the kitchen to sip Earl Grey and discuss the state of agriculture in the valley. After a bit, the conversation turned to the upcoming Christmas party organized by the Farmers’ Institute, a group that advocates for farmers and serves as a sort of social catalyst for those who often have a limited off-farm life. But neither the Collins nor the Shannons were too excited about the party this year, actually, considering last year’s disappointment. The ladies who planned the event had decided that since nobody usually danced at the party, they wouldn’t have music, either. They also put a ban on alcohol and shut it down at 9 pm.
“The good thing was, you were done early enough to get drunk at home and not have to worry about who was driving!” Donna noted.
“Maybe there’ll be more young people this year,” somebody said. Terry laughed.
“Last year, we were the young people.”
There was a time, apparently, when the Farmers’ Institute Christmas party was quite the event. Everybody came down and had a good time. Ann used to be the one in charge of planning them, and one year, she even hired a belly dancer. That was about the time some of the older folk decided she wouldn’t be the one to plan them anymore. The problem was not that everyone suddenly got conservative. It was simply that there were so few farmers remaining in the area, and most of those who did remain couldn’t handle more excitement than a hip replacement.

Lots of reports come out about the “succession” problem in agriculture, reducing the facts to dry figures. The average age of a farmer in the United States is 57. One-third of all farmers in Canada will retire before 2035. Seventy percent of US farmland – most of it owned by family farms – will be changing hands in the next 20 years. Behind those numbers, the human face of the problem was made clear to me in that conversation at the Shannons’: No more parties. No more young people. No more farmers once those who remain sell off their land – whether to developers or to agribusiness – and retire. If the land is paved over, food will have to come from elsewhere. If the land goes to a corporate farm, the control of our food supply is consolidated even further. There just doesn’t appear to be enough people stepping up to the plate. Although the whole local food trend is on the up and up, farming still isn’t quite “sexy” enough to be considered a career option by most people my age. In the popular eye, agriculture doesn’t have the prestige of law or the heroism of medicine. Not to mention what usually is cited as the most important factor: There’s no money in it. I’m not sure which of these reasons is actually causing the profession of farming to die off with my parents’ generation. But the results are immediate and self-perpetuating. Universities all over North America are shutting down agriculture programs because of a lack of interest, taking with them valuable extension offices and other services to the agricultural community. As farmers retire, they are more likely to give up their land to urban sprawl or sell it to the nearest mega agribusiness operation than pass it on to their children, who are understandably reluctant to consign themselves to a lifetime of earning less than the minimum wage (one farmer at a recent meeting here said that, all told, he earns about $5.00 an hour at his job). Because of constantly rising real estate prices and the sad truth that farmland is worth more when the crop is condos, if a young person does happen to decide on a career in agriculture, they have a hard time finding a place to do it anymore.
When the world’s population increases by a third in the next 40 years, I imagine that a lot more of us will be rushing to what’s left of our agricultural land to try to crank out some more food. We’ll probably not want to wreak further environmental havoc, so organic methods will be in demand. But who will teach us how to do it? Unless we cryogenically freeze the farmers we have today and find some way to harvest their knowledge in the future, we could be up a creek, and the brown stuff in the water will probably be more chemical than animal.

I don’t want to preach gloom and doom here. While most children of farmers go off to find employment that actually pays a salary, there are the few that hang on. In fact, the Shannon farm will soon see a fourth generation of the family take the reins. Terry and Donna’s son Josh is the next in line, and he’s committed to making the farm work for another few decades. Since Terry’s grandfather came out from the dust-choked plains of Alberta in the 1930s, the farm has weathered economic ups and downs in the region, survived the mad cow outbreak of 2006 that did in other dairy farms, and managed to expand to over 500 acres. But their story is not typical. In fact, as far as the Collins can tell, the Shannons are currently the only farmers in the region with a successor. Their position of relative financial security probably has a lot to do with that.
Still, one way or another, those who want sustainable livelihoods based on producing food are finding their way into farming. And the new generation of farmers – even if they’re smaller in number– are doing things a bit differently this time. They understand the difference between growth for growth’s sake and sustainably managing land for the long term. Today, farmers can look at historical disasters like the dust bowl and modern-day tragedies like the droughts in Australia and think twice before over-plowing and freely sucking rivers dry. Not that all farms that started before our current problems – climate change, peak oil, water shortages – started spiraling out of control were operating unsustainably. Most just didn’t know better, and when squeezed by low commodity prices, were forced to try to pump higher and higher yields out of each acre. In comparison, for farmers starting out today, it’s almost impossible not to take environmental and social equity concerns into consideration in the business plan. This new ethic is reflected in the “manifesto” of a (highly inspiring) website dedicated to cataloging young farmers in the United States, Serve Your Country Food: “[We are] motivated by a force of intention that cannot be rationalized economically, with lives driven by an instinct for direct action and stewardship that honors the planet, people, and place, we are the allies of every American.”

So there are young farmers out there, and some of them are quite radically committed to making up for agriculture’s previous errors and energizing their peers into joining the cause. This leads me to another way to view the “succession problem”: by recognizing that farming itself is changing. While farms will always be an important source of food and other agricultural products, the conventional agriculture model that requires trading hard-earned cash for food sometimes isn’t the best option. It doesn’t work, for example, for those who don’t have much cash to spare but still want – and have a right to – fresh, non-polluted food. Instead, more people are planting their own gardens, working agriculture into the urban infrastructure and finding other ways to grow food other than on traditional farms. They are farmers in their own right, although the census will never count this as their primary occupation. On the other hand, farmers are seeing more income coming from agritourism (combining tourist accommodations with farming), educational programs and value-added food production. They still produce food on the side, but perhaps they, too, are not considered “farmers” under the black and white definitions of labor statistics. And that’s ok. It doesn’t mean farmers will ever be obsolete. Not every city or region is suited for agriculture, and for the majority of communities, a completely local food economy is simply impossible or impractical. For example, places like Pheonix, Arizona will probably always be better off importing their food from elsewhere rather than trying to bargain for some of its water so they can grow their own tomatoes. After all, we sustainability-pushers have to be realistic: Not everyone is going to move to a lush river valley so they can grow their own food and trade with other farmers. In fact, that would be impossible. It’s the 21st century. Compromise is key. And so is hope. Those who can’t run out and take over for aging farmers are at least becoming aware and supportive of family farms. Others, like those listed on Serve Your Country Food, are working on filling in the gaps. I, for one, plan to do my best to make the annual Farmers Institute of Port Alberni Christmas party as raucous as possible.
Update: Yes! magazine has an excellent photoessay on young farmers across America.

Summing it all up

2009-10-20T22:30:00.000-07:00

I don't normally post other people's writing/research, but this piece is fairly straightforward, somewhat frightening and hopefully, inspiring. The source is CommonDreams.org, a great source for humanitarian and environmental news.

On World Food Day: Crunching the Numbers

by Roger Doiron

1: number of new kitchen gardens planted at the White House this year AP
1943: the last time food was grown at the White House White House
20 million: the number of new gardens planted in 1943 LA Times
40%: percentage of nation's produce coming from gardens in 1943 LA Times
7 million: estimated number of new food gardens planted in the US in 2009 NGA
$2000: amount of savings possible per year from a 40' x 40' garden KGI
90%: percentage of fruit/vegetable varieties lost in the US the last 100 years CNN
3500: number of vegetable varieties owned by Monsanto Monsanto
18,467: number of new small farms counted in the last agricultural census USDA
4,685: number of farmers markets nationwide USDA
4,100: number of Wal-mart stores and clubs in the US Wal-mart
187,000 ft² : average area of a Wal-mart superstore Wal-mart
60,112 ft²: average area of a farmers' market USDA
9.5 million: number of imported food shipments arriving in the US each year Huffington Post
226,377: number of establishments registered to export food to the US Huffington Post
200: number of on-site inspections of these establishments conducted by the FDA last year Huffington Post
76 million: number of people who fall ill each year due to food poisoning CDC
50 gallons: volume of sugared beverages consumed per person in the US each year LA Times
22,727: number of Olympic-sized swimming pools those beverages would fill Answers.com
$15 billion: annual estimated revenue of a penny-per-ounce tax on soda LA Times
$20.5 billion: Coca-Cola's gross profit in 2008 Coca-Cola
72 million: number of American adults considered obese CDC
33%: percentage of US children likely to develop obesity or Type 2 diabetes CDC
10-15 years: average number of years their lives will be shortened as a result CDC
57 years: average age of the American farmer USDA
25 days: average shelf-life of a Twinkie Snopes
350 parts per million: sustainable level of CO² in atmosphere 350.org
390 parts per million: current level of CO² in the atmosphere NOAA
31%: percentage of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions attributable to food and agriculture IPCC
2020: year by which many geologists feel the world will have reached "peak oil" production UK Research Centre
10 calories: average amount of fossil fuel energy required to produce 1 calorie of food energy in industrialized food systems Cornell
29,100 calories: estimated fossil fuel calories required to produce one order of Outback Steakhouse Aussie Cheese Fries Men's Health
1 billion: number of hungry people in the world in 2009 FAO
9.1 billion: projected world population in the year 2050 US Census
70%: percentage increase in global food production required to feed that projected population FAO
70%: percentage of world's fresh water used for agricultural purposes UNESCO
1.8 billion: number of people expected to experience "water scarcity" in the year 2025 UNEP
0: number of new, oil-rich, water-rich, fertile and inhabitable planets we are likely to discover in the next 40 years
1: number of people needed to make a positive difference in any of the above: you!

Roger Doiron is Founding Director of Kitchen Gardeners International, an IATP Food and Society Fellow, and, if you believe the folks at Huffington Post, one of the top Green Game Changers of 2009. After the heartbreaking sweep of the Red Sox Sunday, he recently changed his own game from baseball to football.

Blight Fright: Wheat’s precarious position in the food supply

2009-10-07T21:48:00.000-07:00

Your average aspiring self-sufficient, food-conscious home or community will likely contain a few staple ingredients or food sources that are local and sustainably produced (or at least as close to sustainable as mere mortals can achieve). You’ve got your farmers-market veggies, free-range eggs, organic dairy products, perhaps even some meat from a local grower if you’re so (gastronomically and financially) inclined.
But there’s one key ingredient missing from this happy pie of wholesome foodery. In fact, you would be hard-pressed to make any sort of pie without it. It’s grain – more specifically, wheat. In most parts of the world, its production is still stuck in the industrial, grossly unsustainable way of doing things, which is unfortunate because it’s such a central part of the Western diet. Had any bread, shredded wheat, crackers, pasta, or doughnuts today? Then you’ll see my point – wheat is everywhere. And while it may not seem to be in short supply, any person on a low income will tell you that the price of all of the above items has risen sharply in the last year or so. That’s because wheat is facing some serious global problems – disease, drought and heightened demand – that is causing the price to skyrocket on the global commodity market.
Clearly, wheat is another example of a food staple that is vitally important to re-localize. Having grains nearby, in the hands of hundreds of small farmers (or better yet, individual consumers with backyard gardens), instead of under the lock and key of four or five global conglomerates, makes their availability a surer bet. Only problem is, if you’re trying to be a locavore, bread and wheat products are one area in which you’re likely to break the local-food diet on a regular basis. Farmers growing for a local market tend to stick to vegetables, meat and eggs. Because of the processing (grinding into flour and other products) needed, wheat and other grains have managed to stay centralized, distributed from regional mills.
Let’s follow a typical pound of flour from the field to your morning pancakes. Once the grain is harvested (whether that farm is organic or conventional) it goes to a regional collection point. In Oregon, for example, all the wheat grown by farmers in the Willamette Valley (the main agricultural part of the state) gets trucked up to temporary storage somewhere near Portland. From there, it goes onto containers headed for Asia. That’s right. For all the millions of acres of grain produced close to home, only a tiny percentage of it makes it to the state’s only commercial grain milling facility in Eugene, and an even smaller percentage is actually consumed in the state. So those pancakes you ate this morning were more likely to be made from grain from the Midwest than from close to home. Of course, there's no way to know for sure, thanks to centralized distribution.
Sounds crazy, you say? Sorry, it’s all economics. The lowest price can only be obtained by controlling the supply through a limited number of processing facilities and shipping it out to retailers as needed. Do you like your cheap box of pancake mix? Do you? Well, then don’t ask so many questions.

In the meantime, local-food advocates keep harping on the need to circumvent this consolidated system – which applies not only to wheat but also just about any food product you can think of – and reestablish direct producer-to-consumer relationships. But why? Put simply, it’s a matter of food security. This means two things: the safety of the food we actually consume, and our ability to obtain it in the first place.
Let’s go back to the bag of mix you used to make your pancakes. Contamination in centralized processing plants (which is what recently compromised the safety of peanuts), isn’t the only problem. Black stem rust, a fungus that attacks wheat plants, is a looming but under-reported threat to wheat harvests around the world. It’s been around a long time – probably as long as wheat has been domesticated – but modern-day strains have been bred to resist the fungus. Now, as if it’s starring in its own terrible sci-fi flick, it’s back – with a vengeance. The fungus has finally evolved the genetic upper hand to destroy previously immune plants. Scientists are calling the new strain Ug99, for the country, Uganda, where it has hit the hardest, leaving behind acre upon acre of ashen, inedible wheat. It seems to be getting more virulent as it progresses, and is so immediately devastating to crops that the US (who else?) once bred it as a biological weapon.
We shouldn't have bothered - Ug99 is wreaking havoc all on its own, causing famine and strife all over Africa and the Middle East. We're not hearing much about it now, but as soon as it spreads to developed countries, I imagine that we will hear more.
Ironically, even Norman Bourlag, the much-lauded father of the “green revolution” and industrial agriculture, had to admit that the Ug99 problem is an unintended side-effect of the way conventional agriculture seeks to extract the most production out of a given piece of land. According to this article in NewScientist:

Ug99 will find agriculture has changed to its liking in the decades stem rust has been away. "Forty years ago most wheat wasn't irrigated and heavily fertilised," says Borlaug. Now, thanks to the Green Revolution he helped bring about, it is. That means modern wheat fields are a damper, denser thicket of stems, where dew can linger till noon - just right for fungus.

What Borlaug fails to mention is that not only do wheat plants grow closer together now than ever before, those plants are genetically identical thanks to hybridization. Farmers don’t save their own wheat for replanting, they buy it from a seed company (ie, Monsanto), which has developed wheat genetically programmed to produce the highest yield possible. So when a disease or fungus like Ug99 hits the genetic jackpot that allows it to destroy a wheat plant, it can destroy virtually all wheat plants, because there are only a few varieties grown in the world.
Ug99 isn’t the only threat to the world’s food supply, either. Since the beginning of the year, farmers in Canada and the Midwest have noticed a sharp increase in cases of Fusarium head blight, another fungus that affects wheat, barley, oats, rye, corn and grasses used to feed livestock. This one is sneakier: it doesn’t destroy plants right away but makes their grain toxic to consume. That means any slip-up in our notoriously shaky food-safety inspection system could poison hundreds or thousands of innocent pancake-eaters.
The most frustrating part about all of this is that there’s not much the average consumer can do to voice his or her protest against the way wheat is grown and distributed. Sure, we can buy organic, but organic grain is no more resistant to the diseases bred by conventional agriculture than its chemically nurtured counterparts. And “big organic” uses centralized distribution systems that, like any centralized system, erase the connections between producer and consumer until it’s impossible to tell where any given bag of flour was grown.
Still, one thing organic growers can’t do is spray their fields down with fungicide at the slightest hint of black stem rust, which is what conventional growers will surely do. And there is one way to ensure both the supply and safety of your wheat: grow and mill it yourself. I’m not being facetious. It takes surprisingly little grain to feed a family (ten families can live off one measly acre, according to an anonymous informational signboard at the Port Alberni fair last month), and there are actually super-compact mills built today that you can squeeze under your kitchen sink. Unless you live next door to a giant commercial wheat farm, there’s little chance of any global wheat pandemics affecting your plants.
Unfortunately, I have no personal experience with wheat cultivation, so I won’t instruct you on it here (perhaps in a future blog!) Instead, I’ll post yet another recipe, one that I’ve become quite familiar with since becoming the designated baker of Collins Farm. I’ve been making bread practically since I could reach the kitchen counter, but only started making yeast-free bread this summer. It has a unique flavor and texture but a dedicated fan base at our farm market. I’m a bit conflicted about selling it since bread is so deliciously simple to make, so I’m hoping making the recipe public will make kitchen revolutionaries out of a few of you.
The most important step is to find some local flour. If you live in Oregon, the local grain I discussed above is sold under the name Bob’s Red Mill. You can probably also find local farmers that grow grains if you ask around (try Willamette Farm and Food Coalition’s directory) If you live in Port Alberni, find Wayne Smith at the Farmer’s Market at the Harbor Quay – he sources his own organic grain and grinds it up fresh. It’s incredible stuff.

Tuula’s Whole Grain Bread
Makes 2 loaves

To make from starter:
Starter takes about 48 hours to ferment, but it makes awesome bread and eliminates the need for yeast. I start in the morning two days before I want to make bread. Combine a cup of water and a cup of whole wheat flour in an airtight container. Keep it in a warm place where it won’t be disturbed (in the oven with the light on is good). The next morning, “feed” it by adding another cup of flour and another cup of water. It should be bubbly and smell “yeasty”. Set it aside again until you make your bread (that evening or the next morning). You can keep the starter going for as long as you like but it will turn into sourdough starter after about a week (you can find lots of instructionals online for making sourdough bread this way).

To make from yeast:
Use active dry yeast (not instant) or fresh yeast, which is available from bakeries.
In a large bowl, dissolve 2 tablespoons molasses or honey* in 2 cups lukewarm water (no hotter than 115 degrees). Sprinkle in 1 ½ tablespoons yeast and allow to sit for ten minutes, or until it looks bubbly.

*Molasses gives a nice dark color to the bread but some prefer the flavor of honey, so use both if you like.

Bread recipe
2 cups starter or 1 1/2 tablespoons yeast
1 ½ cups water (in addition to water used in yeast method)
2 tablespoons molasses or honey*
2 tablespoons oil (vegetable or olive work fine)
½ teaspoon salt
7 cups whole wheat flour
½ cup dry 7-grain cereal
½ cup cooked brown rice (or substitute more cereal)
½ cup any combination flax seeds, sunflower seeds and/or pumpkin seeds

1. Add 1 cup hot water to the 7-grain cereal, set aside to soak.
2. Prepare yeast mixture as above or pour starter into a large bowl. Add molasses (if using starter), oil, salt and 2 cups of the flour. Mix well (lumps are ok) and add soaked cereal, rice and seeds.
3. Continue adding flour until a dough forms. Turn onto a floured counter and knead for 10 minutes or until dough is smooth and elastic.
4. Place dough in a clean and oiled bowl, flip to coat both sides. Allow to rise two hours at room temperature or overnight in the refrigerator.
5. When dough has risen (it will not double in volume but perhaps get close depending on the strength of your yeast/starter), punch it down. Divide it into two loaves and place in bread pans or on baking sheets. Brush the loaves with a beaten egg and sprinkle on some extra seeds (this is optional but makes the loaves look prettier). Make a ½ inch deep cut lengthwise along the top of the loaf.
6. If dough was refrigerated, allow to rise an additional hour in the pans. If not, half an hour or so should do the trick. Again, the dough will not rise significantly but should grow a bit.
7. Bake at 375 for about an hour. Bread will brown on top and sound hollow when tapped. Allow to cool in pans for a few minutes, then turn onto racks to cool. Do not bag until completely cooled.

Milk of the Gods

2009-09-27T22:57:00.000-07:00

My adventures in goat milking on Collins Farm, in five parts.

I. Inspiration
Food is delicious. We all know this. But there are some foods that are extra delicious, foods that make you drool at the very thought, foods that one would go through great lengths to obtain. These foods, of course, are different for each person. For me, chèvre, or goat milk cheese, is quite high up on the list.
Most people know goat cheese as feta, the tangy, crumbly stuff usually thrown on Greek salads and pizzas. Chèvre can also be made like cream cheese, a flavorful spread that’s excellent on toast, crackers, salad, apples and right off the knife. This substance is one of the things I would take onto a desert island; I would marry it if only it had a better personality; I would sell my own grandmother if it came right down to it (not really, but you get the picture). Actually, that’s the only downfall of chèvre: it’s darned expensive. At Safeway, a potato-sized log of low-quality goat cheese runs around five bucks. For a really good, locally made kind, you can pay three times that much. In fact, in my college days, my monthly grocery budget looked a little like this:
Fruits and vegetables (organic, of course): $60
Dry beans, rice, flour, tofu and yogurt: $50
Coffee: $20
Chèvre: $50
Well, something like that, anyway. Anyway, the point is, I like chèvre. Since coming to the farm, however, I’ve adopted a mostly local diet (my new motto is, “Will work for vegetables”), which meant no goat cheese. Until now.

II. The Goats

I have to admit that the goats have played a sadly minor role in my life on the farm so far. I don’t think I’ve even mentioned them on this blog before, and seeing as how everyone’s online these days, they’ve probably noticed that. So I’ll offer a formal apology and waste no more time in introducing them.

Miss G (left). This old goat belongs to Andrea, the fiercely independent mother of four who works with me at Arrowvale. In her prime, Miss G produced a gallon of milk a day, effectively nurturing Andrea's kids through their formative years in addition to her own. When Andrea moved into a house without a yard, Miss G shacked up here, where she seems pretty happy. She’s fourteen, which is older than goats are even supposed to live, but though she’s a gummy, graying, rack-of-bones old granny (probably a granny several times over, in fact), she is the indisputable matriarch of the goat pen. Miss G loves kale, sunflowers and banana peels, and will head-butt anyone who gets in the way of her eating her fill. She’s too old to be milked, so I’ll move on to the stars of this story.

Spotty (center). Surprisingly enough, Spotty is white with black and brown spots. This spring, she gave birth to two little white goats, who we recently weaned along with Dotty’s single offspring. (Among goats, giving birth to twins or even triplets is the norm.) Spotty is a friendly goat who keeps her beard clean and would never dream of stooping to the shenanagins of her younger pen-mate. She loves just about anything, especially squash, banana peels and carrots.

Dotty (right). True to her name, Dotty is black with white spots and crazy, but more like a motorcycle racer than an eccentric aunt. She wears a blue dog collar, which helps when you’re trying to catch her, but getting close enough in the first place is the real challenge. Dotty has simple tastes, preferring goat feed (grain) to most other foods, but likes to try what the other goats are eating so she can spit it on the ground and crush it under her hooves. She smokes Marlboros and has a tattoo of a snake on her left shoulder.

III. The Milk
A few fun facts about goats and their milk:
Goat milk is consumed by more people worldwide than cows' milk.
Goats are the earliest known domesticated farm animal.
Goat milk takes on the flavor of whatever the goat eats. If the goat has lots of sweet clover, the milk will be sweet. If she gets into something really bitter, watch out.
The ancient Greeks and pagans worshiped a god named Pan, who had the legs and feet of a goat and played the original pan flute. He was notorious for his lustfulness, going around making love to nymphs and instigating orgies. It is said that in order to remove this clearly dangerous being from the cultural lexicon, early Christians modeled the devil after the goat.
In Hindu mythology, the god Shiva also appears with the horns of a goat or bull, an incarnation known as “Pashupati”.
Male goats (“bucks”) smell foul. I’ve never smelled one, but numerous sources have told me they are fond of rubbing urine in their beards and generally being disgusting. If you keep a buck around the doe goats, their milk will also start to smell this way.
Goat milk can be consumed by people with an intolerance to cow milk, but scientists aren’t really sure why.

IV. The (not so) Tragic Departure of the Little Goats
All summer long, Andrea and I have been eying the udders of Dotty and Spotty wistfully. Their three young ones, given the opportunity to nurse long past the time they might have otherwise been weaned, got all the milk. There wasn’t anything we could do about it but laugh at the overgrown kids when they crawled on their knees to get under their short mothers. Really though, these little goats were a pain in the neck. They crawled through the manger where we would feed them and stand in everyone's food, pooping on it and causing Miss G to roll her eyes in disgust. They dug a hole under their little barn so they could escape. And they cried whenever they thought they could trick somebody into feeding them.
Finally, last week, the little goats found a new home (a relative who needed them to give her bored border collie something to herd), so we undertook the difficult task of separation. The three little ones went down to a pen by the barn, and the moms stayed in their pen at the top of the campground. They cried for a day straight and Spotty escaped several times to go see her little ones. It was all very heartbreaking and would have made a very good Disney film where the baby goats are sold to a cruel circus master and embark on a long journey back home. In reality, all that happened was that Spotty and Dotty seemed to get over it pretty quickly, and the little ones started to get hoarse, sounding like squawking seagulls by the end of the second day. In the meantime, I closed in on our milky bounty at last.

V. The Milking
The day of the first milking was also Andrea’s day off, which put the duty of training me on Ann’s shoulders. I was desperately in need of instruction, considering I’d never gotten milk out of anything but a plastic bottle and my interaction with the goats has been limited to giving them their grain, filling their water bucket, and poking kitchen scraps to them through the fence. In preparation for milking, I found a four-gallon bucket and scrubbed it clean, then reported back to Ann. She eyed my bucket doubtfully. “Don’t you think that’s a little large?” she asked, politely. I shrugged my shoulders, so without another word we headed over to the goat pen.
Spotty and Dotty are pygmy goats, which means their heads reach no higher than four feet, and their udders dangle a scant eight inches or so above the ground. In fact, pygmies aren't even bred to be dairy goats; they're supposed to serve as petting zoo animals or as companions for lonely elephants in captivity. I observed their unfortunate lack of height when the first goat was on the milking bench in front of us, and immediately realized why Ann had had doubts about my optimistically sized bucket. I went to the kitchen for a smaller plastic pail and returned.
Spotty was the first one to come through the gate, so we started on her. Luring her onto the stand with grain, we placed a halter around her head. I tried to hold her still while Ann, who grew up on a dairy farm and ran one here for fifteen years, bent over behind the goat and began pumping out white jets of liquid like she was brushing her teeth. Good, I thought. This isn’t so hard after all. After a bit, she gave me a turn, so we switched positions. I placed my hands on the two fleshy teats and squeezed.
Nothing happened. I tried again, putting a little bit more muscle into it this time. Still nothing. Ann tried to explain how the trick was in closing your fingers one at a time, starting with the top one. I couldn’t seem to relay this information to my fingers, which simply pressed the teat uselessly into my palm. I had a the sudden, draining feeling that this was one of those skills bred into farmers, like knowing when the rains are coming or how to grow a pumpkin to the size of a wheelbarrow, and I would never get it.
In the meantime, the good-natured Spotty was putting up a heck of a fight. She and Dotty hadn’t been milked before, and I imagine the feeling of it was pretty weird. She kicked, she squirmed, she shook her head. I stayed stubbornly in place, my hands between her back legs, trying to gain in thirty seconds a skill that I knew would serve me well for the rest of my life. All I could manage, though, was to avoid her hooves when they came flying at me.
At that point, Ian, a friendly Australian from the Yukon who is on an extended camping stay here with his family, strolled up. “Want me to hold a leg for you?” he inquired. “Sure,” Ann and I said, and he grabbed one of her back legs. That put an end to the kicking. I applied myself with renewed determination, squeezing and pulling and muttering under my breath. Then, suddenly, I saw a white mist erupt from one of her teats. I tried to duplicate this result on the other side. After a few tries, a small stream of milk sprayed sideways into the air. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.
When Dotty got on the stand, the project turned into a group effort. Reinforcements were called; Bob stood at Dotty’s head with Ann while John, Ann’s brother, and another fellow he works with joined Ian in holding various moving parts of the goat. A few other campers strolled up to watch this diversion. Farmer Bill, a neighbor who cuts our hay, rolled by in his tractor and threw in a few pieces of sage advice. I could feel sweat tricking down my hairline, fueled by frustration and the bright early September sun. After I'd gotten about half a cup, I handed it off to Ann. She milked most of it out, then gave me one last turn. I gripped her udder more confidently this time, observing that it was significantly less full-feeling now. We were nearly there. I squeezed out a couple of jets of milk, and Dotty kicked the pail over on me.

The next day, Andrea instructed me in the fine art of milk storage before we got to milking. In essence, always use a cloth to filter your milk, and use it up within a couple of days or it starts to get, as she put it, “goaty”. This factor may explain why goat’s milk isn’t popular in developed countries like the US and Canada, where milk travels long distances and sits on shelves before being consumed in a deteriorated, super-goaty state.
After we had gathered our clean containers, our udder-cleaning cloth and the all-important grain bait for the goats, Andrea and I went out to the pen. Spotty volunteered first again, hopping up onto the new milking bench that Bob had constructed the night before. Rather than hunching behind the goat to milk, Andrea showed me a different technique – sitting next to the goat, facing the rear, one shoulder into her side. I gave it a shot and slowly but steadily began coaxing milk into the pail. With my ear to her belly, I could hear the food gurgling down to her stomach and smell that clean barn-y smell that is one of the best parts of being on a farm. Gradually, I developed a rhythm, which worked for about ten seconds until my hands started to cramp up. Andrea expertly finished the job and we moved on to rebel Dotty.
Goats are smart, and Dotty figured out this game fast. At the sound of grain hitting the feed bucket, all three goats rush to the gate like cats after a can of tuna. Since Spotty is the boldest, she usually gets there first and slips out before the others when we open the gate. Dotty, though, hangs back, looking at me with wild eyes that seem to say “Come on in here and catch me. I dare you.” So I slip in, shutting the gate behind me, and face off with the little black goat. We size each other up, locking eyes and planting our feet firmly on the ground. Dotty makes a feint to the left. I charge directly forward, putting the rock pile in the center of their pen between us. She gallops joyously around it and to the other side of the pen. I follow slowly, keeping low to the ground, arms outstretched. Cornered, she makes a desperate lunge to sail by me. I grab her collar on the fly and stumble sideways for a few feet as she continues her trajectory. Andrea cheers and opens the gate, and I drag her to it. Before long, she’s on the milking bench. The fight isn’t over, but it’s certainly less intense than yesterday’s. Half an hour - and a few sore fingers - later, I’m in the kitchen following Andrea’s recipe for home made chocolate pudding.
This pudding is deliciously rich and not a bit goaty, but my craving for chèvre has not yet been satisfied (it takes at least a gallon of milk to make cheese, and we get about six cups a day). The adventure, in other words, is not over yet. But my fridge is now stocked with jars of milk and the time of the cheesemaking is near. In the meantime, go make some chocolate pudding – just be sure to use whole milk for maximum fatty goodness.

Andrea’s Fabulous Chocolate Pudding

1 c sugar
1/4 c flour
½ c cocoa powder
4 c whole milk

Whisk together dry ingredients in a small, heavy-bottomed pan. Add enough milk to make a paste (about 1 ½ cups) and whisk until lump-free. Add the rest of the milk and whisk smooth. Heat over a medium-high flame until mixture boils, stirring constantly. This will take about 20 minutes. (We recommend doing your pudding exercises in this time: squats, leg stretches, curls with heavy objects lying around the kitchen. You can then enjoy pudding guilt-free. Alternatively, grab your internet access device of choice and watch this video repeatedly.) Once boiled, remove from heat and cover, stirring occasionally until cool. Eat warm or refrigerate and consume within three days.

100 chickens, 50 carnies, one camera

2009-09-14T20:23:00.000-07:00

Port Alberni's Fall Fair last weekend opened my eyes to a whole new spectrum of rural life. Over the course of twenty-four hours (sleeping in a borrowed tent-trailer with Andrea, the biggest Fair enthusiast I've ever met), I witnessed not only the usual puke-cyclone rides and pie judging, but also power tool racing, tractor pulling competitions and logger sports. The real reason I was there, however, was to man an agricultural display put together by a group of local farmers (including Collins Farm). We brought out our prize produce, grains, canned goods and mysterious food preservation implements (dehydrator, pressure cooker, juicer, etc) and explained it all to fairgoers as they strolled by. Hopefully, they learned something and didn't confuse us with the sideshows. I also had a chance to chat with Wayne Smith, who for the last few years has been growing grains like wheat and rye in Port Alberni, filling the "last 100-mile-diet niche". Thanks to him, eating 100% locally is now slightly more realistic for people living in the area. It's a very exciting time to be on Vancouver Island, at least from an agricultural and food security standpoint (especially since where I left off in Oregon, the Bean and Grain Project was just in its second year). I feel like I'm seeing the local food revolution unfold before my very eyes. But more on that in another post.
Rather than try to piece together a bunch of photos into the blog format (Blogger is wonderful, but its photo uploader is as useless as a flat wheelbarrow tire), I'm trying something different this time. The entire album of fantastic, fur-filled, foody fair photos - with captions! - should appear in the slide show below. (It's not perfect, either. Click the big green "play" button, then push the smaller "pause" button that appears toward the bottom of the photo to scroll through them manually.) Better yet, click here to go to the album directly.

Quatch: The hunt for Bigfoot comes to my front door

2009-09-09T21:45:00.000-07:00

We get some interesting guests up here at Arrowvale Campground, where I spend most of my time outside the farm garden. The average summer weekend produces an entire cross-section of the Vancouver Island tourist population - family reunion-ers, partying teenagers, backpackers, displaced trailer park residents, lost Europeans in rented RVs, and surfers on their way to the beach. By far the most interesting crew, however, were the Sasquatch hunters who recently blessed us with their presence.
“Hunters,” of course, is not the preferred term for members of the Bigfoot Researchers Organization, or BFRO for short. After all, as one told me quite seriously, you don’t hunt Bigfoots. You must lure them in. How? Well, you can broadcast a sound-engineered version of their calls into the forest in the middle of the night. Or, you can entice Bigfoot using his favorite food – pancakes.
Despite the scientific pretenses, the group of thirty or so Sasquatch enthusiasts seemed more into questing for live treasure than documenting data, although they did much of both during their three days here. The international team of wilderness explorers, wildlife enthusiasts, rogue scientists and freelance videographers were loosely organized around the mission of capturing irrefutable evidence of Bigfoot’s existence. And they had chosen British Columbia, specifically Vancouver Island and in particular our little valley in which to complete this mission. Of course, it took me a little while to recognize the honor.
Unlike Bigfoot, I do not possess any remarkable skills in extrasensory perception (more on that in a moment). So, when a man about forty years old rolled up in his fifty-foot RV with Florida plates, I made the mistake of assuming he was another rich tourist checking in for a week of relaxing in his air-conditioned yacht on wheels munching smoked salmon and gruyére cheese. But when he came into the office to register he seemed like an amiable enough person, so I asked him whether he’d gone ahead and installed a landing strip on the top of his gargantuan mobile home. He informed me that he in fact needed the space afforded by this state-of-the-art vehicle in order to store his equipment. What equipment, I asked. Oh, video cameras, microphones, lights, that kind of stuff. I asked if he was filming some sort of reality show.
“Oh no,” he said. “This is a bigger deal than you think.”
“Oh yeah? Should I be excited?” I responded, not bothering to hold back sarcasm anymore.
“I can’t tell you anything about it now,” he said mysteriously. Then he ordered a strawberry-banana smoothie to take back to his RV.

I asked Ann about our mysterious guest as soon as he left. Rather than try to explain, she handed me a business card with an emblem of a large two-legged beast drawn in the style of the Island’s indigenous tribes. “Bigfoot Researchers Organization,” it said, and underneath, “Jim Thurgood, Investigator.”
“There’ll be a whole group of them down there,” she told me, indicating the cluster of campsites in the trees near our house. Jim was the first of the crew to arrive. They were to camp with us for three days, going on three “expeditions” into the nearby forests to search for signs of Bigfoot. Sasquatch. The Abominable Snowman. They were completely serious. And they were literally outside my front door. I couldn’t believe my good fortune.

Jim came back later for more refreshments and I let it be known that I was on to his secret. We chatted about sightings in the area (there had been several promising ones), the best time to spot a bigfoot (at night) and how the group was planning on finally bringing legitimacy to its chosen field of research (by capturing clear footage of the beast itself). My newfound fascination with Sasquatch established, I hinted that because of my extensive journalism training I would be the perfect person to assist the camera crew out there in the dark (actually, I wouldn’t know which end of a video camera is up). He took the bait. Why not come along? He told me he’d run it by the group’s ringleader when she arrived the next day. Meanwhile, he said, it’d be best to do some research. Check out the website and read up on just what it is we’ll be looking for out there.

That night, I called my mom to tell her the exciting news about Sasquatch. She laughed.
“You know, ‘quatch’ is German for nonsense,” she reminded me. Despite living in the US for the past 35 years, my mother has never lost her good German sense of cultural superiority. It was just the confirmation I needed. Anything your parents scoff at is pretty much guaranteed to be interesting.
Next, I followed Jim’s advice and hopped on the interwebs to see if there was anything to his story. Googling “Bigfoot” and “Vancouver Island” actually turned up quite a few hits, but the BFRO's website was, as promised, a gold mine of information. I learned that 2,000-10,000 sasquatches are estimated to exist in North America alone. I spent a brief moment looking over the pages and pages of sasquatch reports and sightings. I also found some useful information on sasquatch identification:
Appearance: Ape-like. Long, reddish-brown to black hair (not fur!). Six to ten feet in height.
Smell: “Intense, disagreeable stench, comparable to the odor of smegma.”
Gait: Averages 5’ in length. Sasquatches walk without straightening their knees.
Top Speed: 40 mph.
Habitat: Forests. They tend to be migratory, though they do build an occasional “nest” out of branches and moss.
Call: A loud scream, roar or howl. Also, “Giggling, laughing and crying sounds have been heard, sometimes in response to appropriate events.”

I skimmed long explanations about why so few decent pictures of sasquatch have ever been produced (they’re nocturnal, nobody ever has a camera handy, etc.) and learned what a sasquatch eats for dinner (deer, elk, raccoons, beavers, ducks or rodents). But the most interesting section of the website by far is the archive of aboriginal Canadian and Native American bigfoot legends.
According to the site, most Native tribes across North America have some sort of story about “big man” in the woods. Sixty separate terms for "Sasquatch" have been identified among these stories. My favorite comes from the Salish, who inhabit southern British Columbia and the Island.

A Nehalem man was not married. He would go hunting and permit the married people to have the meat he got. One summer he killed an elk, and he saved the blood. He took the elk's bladder and filled it with the blood. He made a camp near there. He placed that bladder of blood near his feet, lay down, and went to sleep. Wild Man came and helped himself to the elk meat.
The man awoke. He was too warm, he was sweating. "Goodness! What is the matter?" he asked himself, looking about. It was like daylight, there was such a great fire burning there. Wild Man had placed large pieces of bark between the man and the fire so the man would not get too hot while he slept. You see, he treated that fellow well. When he spoke to him, Wild Man called the man "My nephew."
The man awoke to see Wild Man, that extremely large man, sitting by the fire. He had the fat ribs and front of that elk on a stick, roasting them by the fire. He said, "This is how I am getting to be. I am getting to be always on the bum, these days. I travel all over, I cannot find any elk. I took your elk, dear nephew, I took your elk meat."
That man stretched himself, he had forgotten about that bladder of blood. He kicked it with his feet, causing it to make a noise. Wild Man looked around; he said, "It sounds as if a storm were coming." (A Wild Man does not like to travel when it is storming.) Wild Man was afraid of that noise, he kept kicking that bladder of blood. He said, "Yes, a storm is coming." Wild Man asked, "My dear nephew, would you tell me the best place to run to?" That man showed Wild Man a high bluff. "Over in that direction is a good place to run," he told him. Wild Man started out running. Soon the man heard him fall over that bluff.

Poor Wild Man, always on the bum and falling off bluffs in the night.
Although many of the stories are similar to this one, describing humans reacting in what might be considered a natural manner (scared out of their boots or angry that sasquatch has stolen some food), it seems that at least some tribes had a more peaceful relationship with the bigfoots. They considered him a “big brother,” an inter-dimensional being (much like a spirit or ghost) that would appear in times of change. According to the introduction, “Some elders regard him as standing on the "border" between animal-style consciousness and human-style consciousness, which gives him a special kind of power.” Another medicine man says, “He is both spirit and real being, but he can also glide through the forest, like a moose with big antlers, as though the trees weren't there...”
That would explain the lack of video footage. It seems that a successful sasquatch researcher must be on the lookout for the paranormal as well as the simply big and hairy. But all the similar stories and detailed descriptions got me thinking. Maybe there was something to this “quatch” after all.

The next day, a few more BFRO Investigators showed up. As I sipped my morning coffee on the deck outside our office, one took a seat at the next table. Ann, as eager as I was to get me on an expedition, introduced us. His name was Ingmar, and he’d come all the way from Sweden, where he worked as an archeologist, to take part in three separate Bigfoot hunts. The first was in northern California; the second on the BC mainland. This would be his last before heading home. In contrast to Jim’s casual, salesman-like approach to describing his search for Sasquatch, Ingmar – with intense blue eyes, a shining bald head and height rivaling the Wild Man himself – was all seriousness. I asked him what made him interested in bigfoot research. He asked me the same question right back. But after warming up a little bit, Ingmar proved an animated and enthusiastic believer in the bigfoots. His interpretation of the available data has convinced him that a “higher primate,” a creature that evolved from the same line that produced Homo sapiens, exists in many remote regions of the continent. By using the term “higher primate”, he clarified, he is not implying that sasquatches are more evolved than human beings. Still, he admits, some aspects of their behavior cannot be explained through traditional scientific knowledge.
“This animal does not want to be found,” he told me. On his expedition on the mainland, the closest he got to a sighting was when he and a partner heard loud crashing in the trees nearby. This experience is typical of those who purposefully or accidentally encounter bigfoots in the wild. Bigfoot always senses a human presence, Ingmar said, and moves the other direction, sometimes taking the time to try to scare off potential pursuers first. While acute hearing, smell and vision might allow bigfoots to remain so elusive, Ingmar suspects they may have a sixth sense about them – perhaps ESP – that tips them off when people are around. But he’s not saying anything for sure.
Later that morning, as I was washing the lettuce we brought up from the garden, the expedition's honcho, Grace, stopped by. She looked about 50, with neatly coifed blonde hair and a tight-lipped expression. Ann brought up the question of my participation in the expedition.
“No, not possible,” Grace said, crushing in one sentence two days’ worth of fervent hoping on the part of the crew at Collins Farm. Many people had gone through great effort, making many sacrifices, to take part in this expedition, she scolded us. Also, there was too much of a safety risk involved in bringing member of the “public” along.

Despite Grace’s discouragement, I continued to pick the brains of the friendlier BFRO researchers whenever I got the chance. That afternoon, Ingmar brought his photo album up to show us pictures of bigfoot prints he’d found in the snow of the Sierra Nevadas. The way we all crowded around the book and oohed and awed, you’d think Ingmar was a delighted new father. The prints were clear enough, but he only ever found one at a time in the patchy snow along the high mountain road. They were longer than his own rather large feet and twice as wide. As he described excitedly how there was absolutely not another human being in the area to create fake prints and how the measurements fit body proportions calculated from photographs of Sasquatch, I felt myself again being swayed.

The evening of the first expedition arrived. They had picked a site where there had been recent reports of bigfoot “activity”, where they would monitor the area from the hours of midnight to three or four AM. I was beginning to think maybe it was a good thing that I wasn’t going along.
The next morning, a couple of the BFROs showed up for coffee, bleary-eyed. We eagerly questioned them. The biggest event of the night, they reported, was that one of the drivers had gotten her car stuck on a rock.
The second evening, they traveled to a nearby lake, but evidence of Bigfoot there was similarly lacking. Jim speculated that it had been raining too much lately, meaning that the bigfoots weren’t being forced to come to large bodies of water to drink. The group remained hopeful; I heard not a glimmer of doubt among those who waited out the daylight hours around the office. But I was also beginning to sense a continuum of bigfoot fanaticism among the BFROs. There were those, like Ingmar, who dedicated most of their free time (and cash) to the pursuit of Bigfoot. Then there were others, including one father-son duo from Kansas that I talked to, who considered it a good excuse to travel somewhere they’d never been before. Dan and Jason were helicopter mechanics in the Army. Their buddies at work had laughed at them, they told me, but the now-infamous 1960’s Patterson footage (of a bigfoot walking, then turning to face the camera before disappearing into the woods) and other photos convinced them. You never know what’s out there in the woods, they figure. You just never know.

The third evening’s expedition brought “exciting” results. No, not a sighting. No prints or smegma-like stench, either. It was a bigfoot call. A roar, actually – one too powerful to belong to a bear or cougar. They’d caught it clearly on their audio equipment. Sadly, though, I was not authorized to listen to the recording, but they did say they'd put it on the website whenever they decided the public would be ready to handle it. (I’ll update when that actually happens.)
After that, the BFRO researchers packed up rather quietly – and sleepily, I suspect – and went their various ways. I’ll admit to falling victim to bigfoot-mania myself for those three days. I avoided the woods at night and scanned the path to the garden during the day for big footprints. And I didn’t think to look into Grace’s use of the word “sacrifices” until her entire crew went home.
A couple of days later, my BFRO afterglow subsided, and I did a little more digging on their website. I found that in addition to paying for their own travel, lodging and food while on expedition, members of the BFRO must pay $300 a pop to participate. No word on what that fee actually goes to, since the organization doesn’t seem to do any of the normal research-organization activities (advocate for wildlife habitat; or provide money to independent scientists). Plus, the costs of equipment like Jim’s is all covered by the organization’s founder, a billionaire by the name of Matt Moneymaker. For real. And in a final twist of good fortune, Matt – who goes on most of the expeditions but always stays in a hotel – needed to stop by the campground on his way out of town to pick up some items left for him by his comrades.
Matt Moneymaker is a bit of a bigfoot celebrity. He’s been on Coast to Coast, a conspiracy and paranormal-focused AM talk show, and he was interviewed (then ridiculed) by Fox News. Tempered by a lifetime of charming people for the sake of animals, Moneymaker (whose name, he says, was badly translated from the German “Geltmacher” – literally, “gold maker” – when his ancestors immigrated to the United Sates) has adopted a persona that’s a cross between the ShamWow pitchman and Steve Irwin.
He certainly didn’t look as I’ve always imagined billionaires to look when he stopped by that afternoon to get his box of stuff. He was clean-cut but dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, and talked a bit too loud. We couldn’t resist asking him, as we’d asked the rest of the BRFO researchers probably dozens of times, why there weren’t more pictures of bigfoot. He went into Irwin mode, describing an instance on another expedition when he’d been close to a whole swarm of the beasts.
“They were right there in front of me!” he told us, “Like this!” He rose up on the balls of his feet and lifted his arms over his head, bigfoot-style. “I could smell them! They stank! Ten feet away – they were throwing huge boulders and tree branches! We had to take cover!” He continued on a rant about people never believing eyewitness reports because we expect everything to be televised these days, concluding that one day he'll make his documentary about Bigfoot and then we'll all be sorry. At the end, he smiled again, thanked us for hosting the BFRO, and made his escape as we sat in stunned silence.
After he left, Ann commented in her usual dry-as-a-bone style: “Boy, he was a bit defensive, eh?”

So ends the tale of the BFRO at Arrowvale. In retrospect, I’m not so disappointed that I didn’t get to go on an expedition. Bigfoot would not have provided nearly the same level of comic relief and personality as his would-be discoverers. Still, when I go out at night, I keep my ears (and nostrils) open. You never know what’s out there.

And the winner is...

2009-08-24T20:50:00.000-07:00

I'm publishing a blog post rerun tonight. Now, I don't normally believe in reruns, in fact I rank them right down there with tick bites and GM corn. But this may be the most exciting thing I've ever written - not for most people, probably, but for the simple fact that it is actually the first bit of writing I've ever made money on. Yes, that's right, this little blog has now been recognized and awarded through the University of Oregon's study abroad program. They asked for an entry of a blog post written about a study abroad trip taken in the last year, and I had a lot posts to choose from. I polished up one I wrote after going on one of my weekend homestays in India, and assumed I'd either pushed my luck too far in submitting an hour before the deadline or they hated it so much they didn't even think it warranted a response. Then, lo and behold, I received an email saying I'd won first place.
So, with no further ado, I give you the first ever re-run and first cash cow of NoTulips.

Spelling Lessons from Krishna

My second weekend homestay is to take place at the home of a farmer-turned-artist who is a friend of Sunita, the woman I’m working and living with during my three-month internship. She makes the arrangements that Friday and, after finding the right bus, I’m only two skull-rattling hours away from a little weekend relaxation. Luckily, I get a seat, and enjoy a stimulating conversation with two young schoolboys who quiz me on my spelling, finding my American method of spelling words like “color” and “favorite” absolutely hilarious.
When I finally get off the bus in the city of Sagar, it’s nearly dark. I approach the row of rickshaw drivers at the bus stop, clutching the piece of paper Sunita gave me with my host’s address and phone number. I tell the nearest driver where I want to go: Radhakrishna’s house in a nearby village called Banghadde. Houses don’t have numbers here, and streets rarely have names, but Sunita told me everyone here knows where this house is. Radhakrishna is an artist of some local fame and one of the prominent landowners in his village.
We take off down the tree-lined avenue, going past a giant shrine featuring lions’ heads, gods, goddesses and various other brightly colored carvings. The streets are packed with vendors, women with baskets on their heads, dirty kids, bicycles, motorbikes, trucks and automobiles. After a few minutes, we pull up in front of a fenced-off building at the outskirts of town. Sunita had told me the village I was headed to is a few kilometers away from Sagar, but I forget that fact for the moment, excited by the fact that I see a sign, written in English, announcing this as the place of Shri Ramakrishna. I pay off the driver, extract my backpack and camera bag from the back of the rickshaw, and head toward the gate.
A bunch of young men are milling around the entrance to Shri Ramakrishna’s. I hang back, uncertain of how to best make my presence known, until one notices me and beckons me into the covered porch. He pulls me up a plastic chair behind a table and urges me to sit down. Then he leans over the table, and the interrogation begins.
“From where do you come? What is your business here? Who are you?” Somehow, this doesn’t feel right. I try to explain that I’m a guest of Radhakrishna for the weekend and if I could just talk to him everything will be ok. Nothing seems to get through.
Finally, I’m ushered into a small office in a room off the porch. Inside, there are two desks; behind one sits a middle-aged man with intense dark brown eyes. Between his eyes there’s a bright red dot, signifying religious faith. He wears a powder-blue shirt with a funny short collar, and his hair and mustache are neatly trimmed. I take a seat across from him. The blue walls lit by fluorescent bulbs glare down at me. Behind the desk is a framed black and white photo of a guru, hung with strands of plastic flowers and beads.

“Who?” The man behind the desk asks when I tell him my weekend host’s name.
“I’m staying here this weekend,” I insist. When would they stop this rigmarole and take me to my room?
“You can’t stay here, madam,” the man informs me. “Our rooms are for students only.”
Much back and forth arguing ensues. All his words sound like they’re spoken through a large potato lodged at the back of his mouth, and according to him, my English is equally awful. Indians have a way of integrating English words into their native language, and when faced with a foreigner, they simply mash together all the English words they know and leave out or mumble the intervening ones. The result is, at best, difficult to follow. Of course, it doesn’t help that my accent is something they’ve never encountered before – Sagar is not a city that tourists usually find.
Eventually, our semblance of conversation unravels our mutual confusion. It turns out that I am speaking to the director of Shri Ramakrishna Residential School, an ashram for boys. The man whom I’ve utterly befuddled is Thimmappa, the director of the school. Apparently, the rickshaw driver thought Ramakrishna is close enough to Radhakrishna and dumped me here. In my excitement, I hadn’t noticed the difference in spelling either. Maybe those boys on the bus would have. A sense of panic begins to rise in my throat.
Luckily, Thimmappa finds me amusing, if somewhat of an encumbrance. He can’t host me at the ashram, but neither will he hear of my ridiculous schemes to leave, find another rickshaw, and travel to Banghadde at this late hour. It is now about seven in the evening, but according to him, it’s a dangerous trip fraught with unknown danger for a young female traveling alone – the least of which may be tigers and rickshaw accidents.
One cultural trait of urban Indians I’m swiftly discovering is that they have an intense fear of forests, darkness and unknown rural stretches. So no matter how many ways I try to insist, Thimmappa does not believe there exists in this city one rickshaw driver with the courage to take me to my destination, or even somebody with a car I could hire. Tut-tutting at my foolishness, he calls in one of the half-dozen men who are now plastered to the doorway, staring at the alien in their midst, to bring me a cup of coffee. I tell him that I don’t want any (Indian coffee is usually awful, made by boiling instant coffee, milk and tons of sugar) but I’m swiftly realizing I’m not in control of the situation. Thimmappa is already on the phone to the English teacher he’s decided I’ll be spending the night with. We can discuss the possibility of transport to Banghadde in the morning.
Thimmappa seems to think the situation is under control, but I have fears of my own. I’ve traveled before. I’ve been trained to stick to plans, avoid talking to strangers, and to mistrust unknown situations. My mind is made up: I don’t trust this place, I don’t trust Thimmappa, and I certainly don’t trust his English teacher. I need to get out.
I get firm with him, demanding that he call the real Radhakrishna, whose number is on the piece of paper that is suddenly my only lifeline. But when he calls, Radhakrishna is not home, and his daughter doesn’t speak English and is immune to my pleas to be rescued. I try calling Sunita, but she can’t help me at this point. Rickshaw drivers who don’t know their way around and overly hospitable ashram directors were not in our plan. But she seems calm, not understanding my desperation and panic. Why not just wait until the morning?
By the time the coffee arrives, my schedule has been reworked for me. The English teacher has been contacted and will be here in fifteen minutes, but as far as I could tell, no attempts were made to find a driver willing to take me to my homestay. I have now reached the pinnacle of internal rage and have to work to keep the desperation out of my voice. My coffee shakes in my hand. Somehow, the stubborn but placid man behind the desk has elicited a level of frustration in me previously only witnessed by algebra teachers and my parents when I was a teen. I feel like throwing the cup of boiling hot coffee at him. Who was he to tell me I couldn’t pay whoever I want to get me out of this godforsaken place? Why was I so stupid to get myself in this situation in the first place? Why do all Indians have such silly, identical names?

All there is to do now is wait. Thimmappa sits back in his chair and places the tips of his fingers together. He considers me, observes my frustration with slight amusement. I stare back defiantly. It’s awkwardly silent for a moment, but he isn’t gearing up for a fifteen-minute staring contest. He’s preparing a lecture.
He quietly gestures to the picture on the wall above him.
“Do you know who this is?”
“No,” I tell him. Who cares, I think to myself.
“This is Shri Ramakrishna.” Oh. The photo looks about fifty years old and the man pictured is no spring chicken. This guy isn’t having any weekend guests.
“In 1839,” he says, repeating the date for clarity, “he went to Amerika and brought respect to the Hindu religion. He did this with a speech. In which, he call all the Amerikans ‘brothers and sisters’.” He pauses to take a deep breath, overwhelmed by the significance of it all. “Brothers and sisters,” he continues. “With this, he convince the Amerikans.”
I slowly warm up to the story. It turns out this guy Ramakrishna is the one who introduced Hinduism to the US and set up a bunch of ashrams and community centers there. He had many followers, including the Beatles and some of the more influential American yogis.
“You see,” Thimmappa continues, “Hindu religion is like an ocean. All the religions are in it. However, all other religions are only rivers. But all lead to God. Many ways, one God.” He goes on like this for a while, not preaching but explaining.
As he talks, I begin to consider the possibility Thimmappa isn’t so bad after all. I relax slightly, calmed by the chanting prayers of the boys in the next room. The crowd by the door slowly loses interest, and my unshaken coffee develops the smooth skin of boiled milk.

Before I can make a conclusive reassessment of my situation, however, the English teacher arrives. She’s extremely nice and acts like having me stay the night would be the best thing since Ramakrishna went to Amerika. I’m all ready to follow her out the door when the phone on the desk rings. Thimmappa holds up a finger as he talks, so we wait. When he hangs up, he informs me that they’ve drummed up a rickshaw driver who thinks he can manage the scary drive to Banghadde. Apparently, someone had been working behind the scenes.
A minute later, the driver is there, and I’m given the option of staying in Sagar or going off with him. As much as I like the English teacher, I realize I can’t pass up the opportunity to get to Radhakrishna’s, where they’re expecting me. More than that, I’m embarrassed at having mistrusted the ashram people and refused their hospitality. I thank everyone and climb in the rickshaw, a bit sorry to be leaving what was suddenly a safe haven.
As we rumble off toward Banghadde, I get a chance to process the whole experience. It’s one of the many times during my trip to India that I’m forced to admit I have been totally, completely and foolishly wrong about something. While I’d been scoffing at the rickshaw drivers for their forest-phobia, my fear of Indians is just as unfounded. No matter how much I’ve prepared myself for it and expected it, not a single person I’ve encountered here has tried to rob me, abduct me, or even take advantage of my confusion. And the overly cautious, callous exterior I’ve fostered is not only useless, it’s made me extremely impolite in the face of traditional Indian hospitality. While my actions this evening could be completely rationalized by a sensible need to look out for myself, there are lessons here that go beyond spelling words. Mistrusting somebody just because they happen to be male or Indian is as unfair here as it would be back home.
We’re on the highway now, the dark forest whizzing by. I can see the lights of Banghadde ahead of us. Through my weariness and feelings of being completely overwhelmed, one thought shines through: to survive my travels, I must allow myself some naievete, a healthy does of innocence. It’s the one thing people everywhere tend to forget – that although some individuals can’t be trusted, there are even more out there who just want to help. After all, as Ramakrishna would put it, we are all brothers and sisters.

Radhakrisna Banghadde, with some of his mud and plant-based paintings.

Farm Tour, part 2

2009-08-22T22:17:00.001-07:00

Aaaaand we’re back. Moving on from the strawberry patch, we venture out into the cow pasture. Watch out for, er, manure patches.

This is most of the herd, converted from the dairy fleet that the Collins kept for thirty years. Now they’re raised for meat, which we sell along with the produce on the local market.

These are the calves that were born this summer. The black one in the middle has grown quite a bit since the first part of the tour! (That’s virtual reality for you – the time dimension doesn’t always line up.)

This is the hay field, which was just cut before the photo was taken. A neighboring farmer baled it for us and we picked it all up and put it in the barn. With the help of the Collins’ sons I learned how to drive a tractor and how not to stack hay bales, and earned myself three red blisters for the effort. Turns out lifting 100 pounds of hay by thin pieces of baling twine a few dozen times is tough on an ex-city-person’s fingers.

This is the hay field that was cut earlier in the summer, now hosting a flock of real Canadians (geese!). Behind them are three huge cottonwood trees, probably some of the biggest on the island according to some forestry people who paid a visit recently.

We just hiked all the way back across the fields and returned to the garden. These sunflowers are grown for the market, where they’re sold along with the cosmos and dahlias here. Although Andrea and I first considered flowers an almost criminally useless thing to grow, we have conceded that they really are quite pretty (and, as Ann points out, people buy them).

Tour guests Jordan and Madison, aged 7 and 4, stop for a photo with some tomatoes they found in the greenhouse before heading up to see the pigs living in the pen beside the barn.

Henrietta and Hernia, the two pigs who swam the river. They’re a lot bigger now but excitable as ever. Hernia earned his name by herniating part of his intestine through his belly button. They usually running a lap or two around their pen whenever people come to see them, and they go crazy rolling in the mud pit in the middle of their pen.

The pigs love berries, potatoes, and being scratched on the back. Turn on the hose on a hot day and they’ll go hog wild, so to speak, frolicking like pups and grunting the whole time. (The pigs are probably my favorite, so please avoid discussion of bacon at this point in the tour.)

Hernia: “Pigs are smarter than dogs.”
Carmen: “Well, at least I don’t lie in mud all day and get fat.”
Hernia: “I hear your mother has fleas. Oink.”

And that concludes our farm tour. This view is from the far pasture (where we saw the geese). The property ends here at the river. You can just make out the house, the barn and the greenhouse beyond all that grass – about 40 acres of it. I still can't believe I live here.
The farm is doing well and people are coming out to the market in far greater numbers than last year. For the time being, then, it seems this piece of paradise will stay paradisaical and continue producing food for the valley. Hope you enjoyed the tour.

A Virtual Farm Tour, part 1

2009-08-18T21:12:00.000-07:00

Collins Farm is in the full swing of summer now. Each morning we haul in a couple flats of strawberries, a bin of tomatoes and a bucket of lettuce, and we’re barely staying ahead of the harvest. Luckily, Port Albernians have also shown up with reinforcements to buy all the goodies at our Saturday markets and even during the week.
In the afternoons, we often take groups of curious campers to see what’s “down the hill”. Kids are fascinated with the chickens, piggies and horses, and the grownups usually walk back up to the campground full of plans for their own gardens. On Sunday, I took the afternoon off of kitchen duty and followed one of Ann’s farm tours with my camera.

First stop, the barn, home to the horses, donkeys, cows and one cat.

Buster the barn kitty. No, you can’t have him. He’s mine. I mean, he’s the farm’s. We need him to catch mice and keep the cobwebs off the top of that old milk tank.

It was an exciting morning a couple weeks ago when we went down to the barn to find one of our cows giving birth. She was the last of our herd to do so this year, and the only one I actually got to see in the act.

Well, sort of. We watched the feet hang out for a little while, then decided she probably wanted her privacy and went up for breakfast. When we came back, the little guy was already wobbling around under his mom.

This is the view of the farm up by the barn. We'll look at the garden first, then the chickens (just outside the frame to the right) and stop in the strawberry patch between the two big fields. Then we'll pay a visit to the cows and head through the hay field towards the three big trees in the distance. Hope you're wearing your walking shoes.

Ripley, Phoxy and Paris, three of our Canadian horses out in the pasture for the evening.

In the garden, Ann picks some cucumbers for the tour group. Behind them, the corn has reached gargantuan heights.

Peeking under the giant squash leaves, we find these baby pumpkins - a sneak preview for Halloween.

Lettuce, carrots and beets. Behind them on the fence are the peas. We’ll get to the sun umbrellas in a minute when we visit the chickens.

Our laying hens (plus one watchful rooster) roam around in this pen, pecking at kitchen scraps and harassing their roommates, the three paranoid little ducks.

Although the ducks have their own little barn away from the chicken house, they never quite seem to feel safe and cling together like a gang of teenage girls, yakking away at each other in duck-ese. Of course, if they feel like going for a swim, they are capable of swallowing their fears and jumping in the water trough. This utterly disgusts the chickens, who would much rather take a dirt bath.

Sun umbrellas provide shade and protection from the eagles, who have been known to swoop down and steal the poultry.

The chickens share a laying box, which they enter through a door from the inside of their house.

The box has a little door on it that we open to gather the eggs.

This chicken has kindly modeled the laying process for us, but I think today she is just sitting on them. Once she leaves we peek into the hay and find…

Breakfast.

Now we head out toward the strawberry patch and cow pasture, on the way checking up on the apple trees.

These sunflowers are “volunteers”, but they make great shade when picking strawberries out here. It takes two people about an hour each morning to pick just half of the patch.

Yum. These plants are the “ever-bearing” variety, which means they started putting out berries in June and won’t quit until the frost comes. In the meantime, we’re filling up our freezers and jam cupboards.

Bees are fun to photograph, and they actually don’t sting because they’re so focused on harvesting the pollen.

In the early morning when we’re picking sunflowers for market, the bees are sleeping on the flowers and refuse to be woken up. They hang onto the flowers no matter how much blowing, shaking and wiping you do. If we were braver, we could probably just remove them by hand, but usually we just leave them on and let them fly away later – hopefully not in somebody’s house!

We now interrupt this exclusive tour for lunch. Join us again tomorrow for more cute kids and animals, this blog’s first concession on its hard-nosed anti-flower position, and yet another pretty view of the farm.

On the River

2009-08-11T22:39:00.000-07:00

Inspired by/in tribute to Edward Abbey’s wonderful documentation of his float down Glen Canyon in the book Desert Solitaire.

When a cool breeze, a precursor to evening, rushes across the water and over your face, when you’re eye level with the water and the party downstream moves out of earshot, the river almost seems wild. I let myself believe, for a moment, that I’m here two hundred years ago, before the loggers and the homesteaders and the tourists started arriving by the boatload. It’s like squinting at someone in a hazy bar and convincing yourself, just for a moment, that he or she is more beautiful than you first observed.
Not that the river, especially on a sweltering day like today, isn’t beautiful. The sun, low in the sky, highlights each ripple on the wide, shallow expanse of water moving slowly toward the Alberni Inlet and eventually the Pacific. Trees loom on either side like living canyon walls, taking on a slightly disjointed appearance with the slanted shadow cast by the sun. It’s that long, hot stretch of summer that reaches lazily between July and August, but the river always has somewhere to go ¬– crisp, cool and smelling of high forests.

We’re close to the end of our float. Crystal and I, hot and tired after the Saturday market, had set our inner tubes in a few miles upstream of the farm and spent the past three hours taking our time coming home. This river, which runs right by Collins Farm, is known as the Somass. The salmon run here in greater numbers than any other river in North America – earning Port Alberni (the closest city to us) the title of Salmon Capital of the World.

We aren’t too concerned with salmon, though, other to watch them jump as we float effortlessly down the river. I keep one eye skyward in search of eagles, which are another common sight in these parts. Just last week, Peter and I were in the barn chatting with the horses when we noticed a crowd of vultures gathering around a glistening, translucent blob of cow afterbirth in the field. We stood on the lower rung of the fence watching, and soon an eagle joined in the feast. To us, it seemed like an undignified way for such a regal bird to get a meal, but eagles are, after all, scavengers. A second eagle landed and the vultures began to back away, and with good reason. Even from five hundred feet away, I could catch the sharp, menacing look in the bigger birds’ eyes. We stayed where we were, trying to keep still, the toes of our boots pointed firmly toward the dirt.

The Somass drifts past a shooting range, a large greenhouse, a few small farms and quite a few houses. Crystal and I get off our tubes and bask in the sun whenever we feel in need of a break. At other points, curiosity simply gets the better of us. The Field of Weeds, for example, demanded investigation. From the river, we could make out over a rocky embankment hundreds of tall, strange-looking plants. Crystal is here on the WWOOF (Willing Workers on Organic Farms) program and is, like me, interested in all that grows. We park our tubes, climb up the rocks and up onto a large pasture hosting a few cows and some geese. The odd plants take up half the field, but we can’t quite figure out what they are. They grow two or three feet apart over bare ground, towering over our heads with thick stalks, huge leaves and pointy heads that bend over with their own weight. A few that have fallen over sprout three or four new heads out of the side. I express jealousy for the plant’s ability to bud offspring so effortlessly; Crystal admires its resilience in the face of potential setbacks.
Life lessons learned, we decide the best course of action will be to run through the plants with our arms outstretched, yelling nonsense at the top of our lungs and feeling the beat of hundreds of stalks against our hands. It doesn’t solve the mystery, but it gives the cows something to ponder over as they chew their cud.

***

Back on the river, I’m daydreaming with my chin pointed toward the empty sky when I notice Crystal out of the corner of my eye, floating with the top of her head in the water. I question her motives. She tells me I have to experience this perspective, so I follow suit, leaning all the way back on my tube until I’m taking in my bobbing surroundings upside-down. I have to admit that this is unexpectedly amazing. The last few of my cares and worries, already fried to a crisp in the sun, fall right out my ears. The trees look even taller. The water and sky are even bluer. I feel like Lucy in the sky with diamonds. Few experiences in life require a person to instantly begin singing at the top of their lungs, but this is one of them.

The only possible threat to our enjoyment this afternoon may be an encounter with George Fleagle. Mr. Fleagle represents the crème-de-la-crème of the Port Alberni beer-gutted, tobacco-stained bachelor crowd. I’d met him a couple of weeks ago while swimming in the river with Crystal and Andre, another WOOF-er, near her farm. He came snorkeling down the river, unnoticed by us until he popped out of the water just as Crystal was lighting a cigarette, sure that she wouldn’t mind if he bummed one and oh, by the way, do you gals ever want to go tubing? We claimed a strong aversion to water, a defense that was probably undermined by the fact that we were in bathing suits, dripping wet by the side of a river. George stuck around anyway, educating us on the many pleasures of inner tubing and the river in general.
I was due back at the farm soon and decided to head home, leaving Crystal to deal with our new friend. My car was parked in her driveway at the top of the hill a short distance away. I hadn’t been paying much attention when we came down, and it was my first time there. Naturally, I assumed I would find it anyway and became utterly and completely lost in the thick brush. I ended up back down near the river, but some thirty feet away from the path I was supposed to be on with a thick patch of thistles blocking my way forward. Luckily, I could see my friends from where I stood, so swallowed my pride and yelled for direction. George, who happened to have grown up in the very house Crystal was staying in, jumped to the rescue. He gallantly escorted me up the hill, questioning my rash decision to move to Canada all by myself without anyone to help me along. Because of my embarrassment, I found myself being what probably came off as friendly to the hopeful Fleagel, who now considered himself a bonafide hero. He promised to come visit me at work.
When I told Ann and Bob about the experience, they seemed quite amused. My gut feeling – namely, nausea – about him had been dead-on. George had grown up with their two sons – he and his friends habitually threw rocks at their campground sign, picked on their kids and generally made nuisances of themselves. Fleagle was a man who lived up to his name.
Thankfully, we haven’t seen him yet, and the prospect of a redneck admirer has turned into a favorite farm joke instead of an actual threat. Still, when we near crowds of young guys on the river, I sink a little lower in my tube, ready to go for an impromptu swim.

But the waters are surprisingly quiet today. Tubing is something of a sport in this town, where most of the kids seem to have nothing to do but drink beer, smoke pot and go for a float, often taking with them giant boom boxes strapped to rafts, which shake the trees to their roots for miles around. Like many places in the Pacific Northwest, the two major industries here – logging and fishing – collapsed on themselves in the latter part of the last century. This leaves the young people with the unexciting prospects of collecting welfare checks and scrambling for tourist dollars if they wish to remain in the area. Boredom seems to hang heavy over the town. If only they could all be bussed out to Collins Farm to pull weeds. All, of course, except the pesky Fleagle.

***

Before the river meanders around to our jumping-off point at the farm, it flattens out and gets wide for a long, shallow stretch. Over the sound of water scurrying over rock we hear music – not the obnoxious thump of a tuber’s bass but a lighter melody. It actually sounds like the trees themselves are ringing.
The music gets louder, coming from the left bank ahead now. I crane my neck to peer through the underbrush. Then I spot the source. A ray of lingering sunlight makes its way through the trees and illuminates a man standing with his back to us, his arms flying across the keys of a huge xylophone, wooden mallets in hand. The chiming, stacatto music rises on the breeze above his back yard, his house, and the river. He seems to be performing for nobody but himself and the trees, completely lost in the joy of it. I stand up in the shin-high water, entranced by the sight and the sound, the sudden reminder of life’s endless mystery.

Planning for Eat-Ability

2009-08-08T10:06:00.000-07:00

Imagine a setting in which people can live, access life's necessities without need for motorized transportation, and never worry about having adequate food or water. There are a thousand types of communities that might come to mind, but one of them is probably not a typical suburban or rural housing subdivision. Somehow, though, the majority of people in North America and other developed regions live in these kinds of developments. They sprawl like lichen on a rock across rural landscapes - without an outwardly visible source of food or water. Placed far from urban areas, with cul-de-sac after cul-de-sac of nearly identical houses and no other necessary amenities nearby, suburban and ex-urban (i.e., stuck in the middle of nowhere) developments are a prime example of bad design. They're impossible to walk through - most lack sidewalks or logical footpaths between cul-de-sacs. To access work, school, or stores, residents have no other option than to hop in their cars, get on the freeway, and find the nearest suburban center. The only remnants of nature might be found in the fake pond at the golf course or perhaps in the subdivision's name - "Willow Crest" or "Fox Hollow". And worst of all, most of these developments are built smack on top of prime farmland. From a food security perspective, this manner of paving over and occupying the landscape is fairly frightening.

Of course, some developers talk about "sustainable development" (a puzzling little oxymoron) or planning for "livability". They throw in a few bike paths and extra trees. Still, these greenwashing tactics don't solve the root problems of urban sprawl: isolation of communities and the destructin of ecologically valuable unpaved land that has the added benefit of keeping the population fed.
Thanks to rural land speculation and the cycle of decline in inner cities, this pattern of development has been difficult to stop or even slow, although the present recession is helping immensely. Still, the sight of sprawling asphalt and rows of single-family dwellings from an airplane window has the power to throw me into a funk of hopelessness for days.
But wait! Could there be a slow shift in consciousness here? I was recently mailed an article (the old-fashioned way, no less) describing the hottest trend in housing developments: organic farms. And I don't mean developers are buying out farmers and naming the subdivisions "Pesticide-Free Strawberry Fields" instead of "Shady Oak Glen". No, according the New York Times article, farms are now considered "subdivision amenities" by many developers. Instead of building homes around golf courses, they are putting in organic farms to draw in yuppie foodies or perhaps those who have ideas about living in a rural area. Residents can even pitch in around the farm and share in the harvest. Of course, the article left out some of the potential difficulties that immediately come to mind. What happens when the breeze shifts and some unfortunate homeowner realizes they've purchased the olfactory privilege of living downwind from the chicken house? Will residents tolerate the drone of a tractor disturbing the peaceful summer ambiance?

Apparently, somebody has figured out a way to make it work, because the developments do seem to have caught on. They probably won't work everywhere - not all sprawl takes place on pristine farmland with ample water - and they certainly don't cure the basic problems inherent in urban sprawl mentioned above, but I suppose if people must live in subdivisions, they might as well have a convenient, safe food source nearby. The logical next steps will be to put in a school, a few small, locally owned stores and restaurants, and public gathering spaces, eliminating the need to drive thirty minutes for a coffee fix or a new rake. Put it all together, and a sprawling city will have devolved into a cluster of small towns. Livability? Absolutely. Eat-ability? Even better.

Stuffed Zucchini or Summer Squash

2009-08-02T12:06:00.000-07:00

It's the age-old summer "problem" of gardeners: too much zucchini. We have them in droves, along with patty pans, which are a neat UFO-shaped squash. It's probably the only thing a vegetarian might take one look at and think "Boy, that would look beautiful stuffed".
This is a very flexible recipe, and I've changed it to accommodate various diets over the years. A vegan version would probably be possible by either substituting the eggs and cheese with some replacement product, or simply leaving them out and having a more crumbly final product.

Stuffed Zucchini or Summer Squash

4 medium zucchini, summer squash or patty pan (or one giant one)
3 garlic cloves, minced
1 onion, chopped
1 egg
½ cup minced fresh herbs (parsley, oregano, basil and/or sage)
1 tomato, chopped
1 cup bread crumbs (can also use part cooked rice or quick oats)
1 cup grated cheese (cheddar, swiss or mozzarella)
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper

2 cups tomato sauce (to top)

1. Prepare the squash. Halve zucchinis lengthwise after cutting off ends; slice the tops off patty pan squash. Scrape out the insides and set aside. Arrange the shells in an oiled baking pan or cookie sheet with edges.
2. Sauté garlic and onion in olive oil a large frying pan until onion just begins to brown. Grate or finely chop the insides of the squash and add to onions. Cook for 10-15 minutes, until most of the liquid has evaporated. Remove the pan from heat.
3. Meanwhile, precook the squash shells. Add about a half inch of water to the baking pan and bake in a 375° oven for about 10 minutes, until shells are tender but not soggy. Drain the pan before filling the shells.
4. To the cooked vegetables add herbs, chopped tomato, bread crumbs, cheese and salt and pepper to taste. Fill the squash shells with the mixture.
5. Bake the squash at 375° for 20-30 minutes, until tops are golden brown and filling sizzles. Serve with heated tomato sauce and enjoy.

No-cheese (low fat?) version:
Add one more egg, and increase the bread crumbs (or rice or quick oats) to 2 cups.

Carnivore version:
Omit bread crumbs, decrease cheese to ½ cup. Add 1 lb cooked hamburger or turkey burger to filling.

Harvest

2009-07-24T22:57:00.001-07:00

We start early, before the temperature begins to creep up and everything – the harvest and those who pick it – starts to fade in the midday sun. Vancouver Island is at a high latitude, so the sun comes up around 5 AM and doesn’t go down until about 9 in the evening. Luckily, the light doesn’t keep me from sleeping all the way till 7, when I wake up to CBC (the Canadian version of BBC) on the radio and stiffly move myself out of bed. The going is slow because I started learning to ride horses on Wednesday. It feels like somebody’s taken a rake to the muscles of my inner legs. (As far as my progress in riding goes, my instructor summed it up nicely after the first lesson: “You did good today,” he said. “You showed up.”)
Aftermath of my extracurricular activities aside, harvest day is probably my favorite time around the farm. So I stretch carefully, shower, and head up to the campground office to make myself some breakfast. Because the office is open from 8 in the morning till 9 at night, we hardly do anything at the house but sleep (and write!). I savor my berries and yogurt as I sit with Ann and Andrea, who are already laying out the game plan for market this week. Market is on Saturday, and instead of hauling our produce all the way into Port Alberni, we simply hold it here, where we have a somewhat captive customer base (campers) and the space to make it an event. We hold a pancake breakfast and hayride; the kids play with the goats while their parents take a stroll by the river.
But that will all take place tomorrow. The produce is the main act, and it’s still waiting in the garden for us to retrieve it. We finish our coffee, gather up some buckets, and head down the hill, border collies herding us along.
Crystal is already in the garden and Connie arrives shortly after. We are an all-girl vegetable-picking machine. Andrea heads to the potato patch – she loves digging around in the dirt. I grab scissors and start on the kale and swiss chard. Connie hits up the greenhouse for cucumbers and tomatoes, and Crystal pulls the netting off the long rows of carrots. Half an hour later, I’m still lost in the brilliant red stems of the chard, feeling slightly overwhelmed and mentally full. Every time I pick vegetables my mind moves immediately to washing, chopping and cooking them, in any way I know how and a few I don’t think are possible (chard muffins?). After thirty or so chard plants, I get the dizzying feeling of there simply being too much food here for any one person to eat. I guess that’s the only way I can part with it come morning. As I fill my last bucket with greens and throw up my hands, Crystal comes walking down the row, a bright orange, freshly washed, perfect carrot in her outstretched hand.
“Second breakfast?” Indeed.

It’s getting late in the summer, and the garden is in full production mode now. This is only the Collins’ second year growing produce for a local market, but there is certainly no lack of variety. By the end of the morning we have the truck loaded up with greens, potatoes, turnips, beets, carrots, squash, cucumbers, cabbage, broccoli, tomatoes, eggplants, lettuce, peas, rhubarb, strawberries and flowers. We unload in the office – which also houses a small commercial kitchen – and start washing and bagging. The unfortunate side of the local market is nobody seems to want to buy anything that’s not in a bag. If we do leave it in baskets or buckets, they’ll bag it themselves before they buy it.
I excuse myself from this somewhat depressing process to start making lunch. I have a little challenge going with myself to use the most vegetables in one meal as possible. With a little storebought ginger and soy sauce, I squeeze seven into a giant stir fry (record: eight veggies). We take a bit of a break and eat outside on the deck in the last bit of shade. It’s getting hot – the thermometer reads 30 Celsius. Up until a week or so ago this meant nothing to me, and it actually made the heat easier to bear. What you don’t know can’t hurt you. In India, nobody ever really knew what temperature it was, so there was no complaining. Well, my mother was kind enough to email me a handy conversion chart and I now know that when it’s 30, it’s not just below freezing but in fact 86 in the clunky old Fahrenheit system. And when it’s 30 at noon and just getting started, it’s going to be a hot day.
Back inside, it’s time to switch the A/C on. With the freezers, refrigerators and oven going all day, it can get hotter inside than outside without the aid of this wonderful little invention. Feeling more comfortable now, I start on the bread and spend the afternoon registering campers with floury hands. Breads are my experimental addition to the farmers’ market, and so far, it’s been a mild success. The best part is, we keep the ugly loaves and whatever doesn’t sell. Contrary to popular belief, breadmaking isn’t actually that difficult or time consuming. You just have to be able to hang around the kitchen for a few hours, so campground management actually is a good side activity.
Campers are an interesting lot. They fall into three main categories: those who are on vacation and so are determined not to fuss about anything so that they can have a good time; those who are on vacation and so are determined to be completely picky about everything so that they can have a good time; and teenagers who come from town to throw parties at the campground. Any afternoon will produce any combination of these types. I had the good fortune to be eating dinner while some partying teenagers came and rented a couple sites. We’re all pretty tired of the loud music, piles of trash and general obnoxiousness that comes along with these customers, but Ann and Bob were ready this time. They raised three kids and can be pretty scary. Sitting in the corner, absorbed in my bread and cucumber salad, I even felt a little shaky in my boots as the two of them loom over the group of would-be rabble-rousers.
“Now, you’re not going to have a large group of people down there, are you?” Ann asks, though it’s more of a statement than a question. The kids are wide-eyed and innocent.
“Oh, no.” Having been in their shoes more than once only a few years ago, I know that deceptive tone all too well. I can almost see the thought bubbles resting above their heads, and they don’t contain words but pictures of beer and thumping stereos. Bob sees them too and walks over to the counter.
“No music down there,” he tells them.
“None at all?” they whine.
“Absolutely not. You don’t want us to come down there at three in the morning to tell you to shut it off, got it?” A mafia contract killer could not have sounded more threatening. They’ve got it. They shuffle out. Yet another crisis averted – we hope.

I finish eating and walk down to the house to read a bit. Before bed, I help Bob move the “chicken tractor”. This ingenious little pen, which holds all our meat birds, is open at the bottom so the chickens can scratch at the grass. It gets moved once or twice a day, so they can fertilize a new patch of soil while getting some fresh grubs to eat – a win-win situation.
After the moving is done, Bob heads out to the pasture to move irrigation pipes. I walk up the hill, worn out and not sure where my farming mentors get the energy to work the 15-hour or more days that they do (Ann is still up at the office). As I pass the barn, I hear a friendly but demanding “meiow!” It’s Buster, the friendly black-and-white barn cat. He proves irresistible. Instead of going inside, I sit with him on an old picnic table that overlooks the farm. From here, we can see the garden, the pasture with the horses and cows grazing, the forest beyond and Mount Arrowsmith towering above it all. It’s a view that takes my breath away still after almost a month living here. I watch the sun turn the mountainside pink and gold, the cool evening air taking away some of my fatigue. Buster relaxes on my lap, his purr rumbling against my fingers. It’s one of those perfect moments that seem to arise so easily in this place. Despite all the work that goes into planting, watering, weeding and harvesting produce, I still can’t help but find it miraculous that so many good things come out of the simple inputs of soil, manure, seeds and water. As long as that formula continues to work, we’ll never go hungry here. And that’s a pretty good feeling.

First impressions of the farm

2009-07-09T21:07:00.000-07:00

It took about six hours to reach Port Alberni (the town on Vancouver Island closest to Collins Farm) from Seattle. Shortly after crossing the border, I arrived at the ferry terminal just south of the city of Vancouver (just for the sake of confusion, apparently, the city of Vancouver is not actually on Vancouver Island). I missed the midafternoon ferry so waited around for the evening one, entertaining myself at the food court/mini mall/casino placed on the dock just in case passengers don't feel broke enough after paying the $60 fare to get a car across the water. The ferry trip took about two hours, gliding comfortably across the grey water under a grey sky. It started raining shortly after we departed, but when I arrived at the other side and drove off the ferry, things started to clear up. I shot the above photo just off the highway on my way to Port Alberni. My car and I felt like we were in some sort of ad.

The view off of my new front porch at the Collins' farmhouse. In the background you can see the faint outline of Mount Arrowsmith, the highest peak on the island. Just below that are three huge cottonwood trees, rumored to be the largest in the region. Most of the farm acerage is either forest or campsite, but the fields visible in this photo provide fodder for cattle, donkeys and horses (five thoroughbred Canadians and one Belgian mare). The Collins ran a dairy operation for many years but changes in the laws that used to protect dairy farmers ran them out of business. Diversification is their current survival strategy: The garden beds are planted in carrots, cabbage, squash, corn, peas, radishes, kale, chard, artichokes, flowers and a few other veggies. In the middle we have strawberries and potatoes in large number. The foreground? I'll give you a hint: get ready for a deluge of blackberry recipes.

Here comes Jessie, the Belgian draft horse. She's 18 hands with hooves the size of dinner plates, but don't let her size fool you - she's a big softie who loves a belly scratch.

The two Canadian stallions, Paris and Ripley. Listen closely, you can just hear it... "Eh?"

This is the Arrowvale Campground office and cafe. We mostly serve up coffee, pie and ice cream, but the kitchen has become my fresh produce laboratory and personal bakery. The cafe is also the location of our Saturday pancake breakfasts in conjunction with the farmers' market we host. The rest of the week, it's sort of a farmhand break room and second home for Bob, Ann and me.

The view to the north, off the deck of the office. The river is just below.

On Canada Day, Crystal (another girl who helps out on the farm part-time) and I went to town to see the parade. Canada day falls on July 1 and is Canada's equivalent of the US' Independence Day. The parade featured dozens of horses, even more 4X4 trucks, some old tractors and logging equipment, and a ton of cute kids. After that, we watched them cut a gigantic cake in the form of the Canadian flag, ate some overpriced Chinese food at the "International" festival, and retreated back to the countryside where we decided we're better off.

The Stamp river, which flows into the valley's main river, the Somass. It floods regularly and rarely runs low; salmon migrate up and downriver each season to the delight of fishermen and bears. We pump irrigation water straight out of the river, no water right required. It's a very different picture from Oregon and the rest of the American West, where, as Twain famously said, "whiskey's for drinkin' and water's for fightin' over."

Crystal washes vegetables for market on Saturday. We sell the fresh produce outside the office, where farmers from across the river also sell eggs, herbs and vegetables. There's also a Saturday farmers' market in Port Alberni, which we view as a good sign - enough people are forgoing Safeway's offerings to be able to support two markets in the coummunity.

Some people get crop circles, we get alien carrots.

Full moon from earlier this week over the farm. Andrea, our full-time garden manager and my personal farming mentor has been interested lately in planting and harvesting by the moon. According to this school of thought, the moon influences plant life cycles just like it pulls the tides in and out. It all has to do with water and gravitational forces. Anyway, since the moon is full, we seeded new carrots today (root vegetables, which grow best when the moon is waning). I'll be sure to post an update on our celestial gardening. Speaking of the moon, it's probably up now and time for me to hit the hay.

When Pigs Swim

2009-07-08T21:46:00.000-07:00

We crash through the thick forest in a single-file line: Andrea, Ann, Carmen and me. Carmen, the border collie, is sniffing out the bushes. Ann and I are shaking buckets of grain and calling in what we hope is a beckoning tone: "Heeere, piggy piggy piggies! Good piggies!"
Despite this effort, no soft oinking noises can be heard in the shrubbery. Ann suggests we make our way down to the river bank to look for tracks. The thought hadn't yet occurred to me or Andrea, another woman who works on the Collins' farm. We're having a hard time comprehending how the pigs got themselves lost over here in the first place. Three weeks ago, they bolted from their pen at the Collins' farm, which is just across the river. Granted, it's not a huge river, but they're not very big pigs, either. Still in disbelief that they actually swam over here, I gaze up into the tall branches of the cottonwoods surrounding us. You never know where a highly mobile pig might hide.

This Tuesday-afternoon swine hunt takes place on my second day as apprentice at Ann and Bob Collins' farm on Vancouver Island. Because agriculture hasn't been profitable here for many years, Ann and Bob also run a campground that provides extra income from tourists willing to pay to pitch a tent or park an RV on the farm's non-agricultural land. What that means for me is that a typical day might have me running the register, preparing food, cleaning the two campground cottages, pulling weeds, feeding animals and of course harvesting the organic bounty. Pig hunting, on the other hand, was not in the job description. I considered it a bonus activity.

The two pigs came to the farm about three weeks ago, before I arrived. They were only in their pen a couple of days before they got spooked by the donkeys and took off through their electric fence. The last anybody saw of them, they were tearing through the woods toward the river. Thinking they couldn't have gotten too far, Ann and Bob called all the neighbors (excepting those across the river), but nobody had seen them. Ann figured they were dead; Bob, a fiction writer, imagined them building a raft and setting off for an adventure, Huck Finn style.
Then, Monday night as I was washing up the dinner dishes, the phone rang. I picked up. It was Georgina, across the river, asking when somebody was going to come pick up the pigs that had been hanging around with her cows the past two days. I told her we would let her know and hung up, scratching my head.
When Bob and Ann returned, I told them about the call. They were thrilled. "Can pigs swim?" I asked. "Sure," Bob said. I still wasn't sure if I believed him. "We'll go pig hunting tomorrow," he added. Proof was on the way.

The next morning, we loaded up the buckets of grain in the back of the truck, attached a trailer to haul the pigs in, and drove through town and to the other side of the river. Bob stayed with the truck while Ann, Andrea (who once lived on this side of the river), Carmen the border collie and I started to comb the forest. As we looked, we discussed whether we should have brought a lasso or if it was even possible to catch a pig on the run. But Ann was confident: The pigs had to be hungry after their long adventure. Luring them into the trailer with a bucket of grain would be a piece of cake. We just had to find them first.
The river bank held no tracks. Using our tracking skills, we deduced that they had been borrowing through the forest underbrush, but not even Carmen, a professional animal herder, could sniff them out. I began to feel a little silly and hung back with Ann at the water's edge, pulling thorns out of my shoes and trying to think like a pig. Then we heard Andrea yelling. She'd found the fugitive pigs!
We broke out into a trot and met up with her at the cattle pen. For some reason we hadn't thought to check there, but there they were, darting around under the bellies of the cows, who were going crazy at the sight of the grain in our buckets. The four or so cows began leaping about, long strings of drool coming from their mouths. Finally, the little hairy black pigs got over their fear of us and slipped under the fence, heading nose-first for the grain buckets. We let them have a sample and then started heading back to the road, continuing to shake the buckets. The pigs followed, their minds no longer on escape but on food. Ann led them straight into the trailer and shut the door. Carmen and I brought up the rear, she more disappointed than I that we hadn't actually needed to chase or herd anybody.

It didn't strike me until later that what the Collins are trying to do here - preserve the farming community and build a market for local foods - is quite similar to catching pigs. I'm not comparing people to chubby livestock, but I have noticed over the years that food is a strong motivator for the human type of animal. Screaming kid at the grocery store? He just wants a candy bar. Squabbling family at the holidays? A tray of cookies does the trick. Angry drunken party getting out of control? Order a pizza. The same principle applies to getting people excited about things in a more positive way. Talk to them about agricultural subsidies, the Farm Bill or food miles traveled and their eyes will glaze over, but put that glaze on a fresh fruit tart or a roast ham and the whole issue becomes a lot more relevant. As Alice Waters said, "food is the one central thing about human experience that can open up both our senses and our conscience to our place in the world." A person who experiences the freshness and flavor of a locally produced vegetable might not go out right away and plant a garden, but they might think a bit differently about food from then on.
Unlike Eugene, Oregon, Port Alberni, BC hasn't quite been hit yet by the local foods craze. I see this as a good thing: There's a lot of room for community education. This weekend, I showed a few campers - one mom and three little girls - around the farm after one of the little girls begged to see the horses. After stopping in at the barn, we walked around the pasture, garden and chicken coop. I'll never forget the look of amazement in the girls' eyes as they examined the three fresh eggs, one of them pale green, waiting in the laying box. I let them keep the green egg, object of much fascination, on promises that they would come back for market day the following weekend.
Most food in Port Alberni is purchased through major grocery chains, and most of the farmers have disappeared from the valley, unable to support their businesses. I don't have illusions about seeing this trend turn around while I'm here, but I think one-on-one interactions that farm visitors get can help spark some sort of change. We don't need to catch people, we just need to show them the better option. After all, if the bucket of grain is tasty enough, even wayward, river-swimming pigs can be led back home.

Penne with Kale and Lentils

2009-07-06T21:30:00.000-07:00

Today we are a food blog.
One of my projects over the past week has been figuring out new ways to use the abundance of kale the Collins Farm garden has provided us with. This recipe was adapted from one I found on Epicurious.com (awesome site), but I changed it enough to warrant calling it my own. My plan is to come up with a few more kale tricks before the farmer's market on Saturday so I can hand recipes out to puzzled customers who seem to regard kale as some sort of alien lettuce.
So, with on further ado, I present:

Penne Pasta with Kale and Lentils

Kale is a highly nutritious and sweet-tasting green that is complimented well by the earthy taste of lentils, which add protein and fibre to this dish. The cheese is optional but gives it a bit of delicious creaminess. Add fresh garden herbs like oregano, basil or parsley for your own twist.

1 lb (fresh!) kale, cut into strips
2 lbs penne pasta, or any other short pasta (regular or multigrain)
1 cup lentils (any type)
1 onion, chopped
4 cloves of garlic, finely chopped (use more as you desire, of course)
4 T olive oil
3 oz (85 g) parmesan or other hard cheese like asiago, grated
Salt and pepper
Red pepper flakes (optional, for added spice)

Cook lentils in 2 cups water for 20 minutes. Meanwhile, steam kale for 7-8 minutes, or until tender. Set kale aside and keep the water boiling. Add the pasta to the boiling water, stir, and cook until al dente (10-12 minutes). Drain and return pasta to the pot. Sauté the onion and garlic in olive oil until onions are translucent. Add to pasta along with the lentils, kale and grated cheese. Stir and season to taste.

The Amazing Shape-Shifting Blog! Plus, the next chapter.

2009-07-05T23:09:00.000-07:00

Blogs are funny things. I haven't actually kept up with many since the whole craze started, but my limited observation of them tells me that, unlike with books or even magazines, it's okay to change tone, intent, format and content entirely from post to post. Some are updated hourly; some - like mine - tend toward neglect. Still, it's a project I enjoy, even if my purposes are not entirely clear.
With that in mind, I'm going to ask this blog to take yet another leap, and I hope this old faithful multimedia horse can keep up. What started as a class project two years ago turned into a venue for my rants, then a travelogue when I went to India. I believe the next stage in its evolution (or perhaps devolution) will be some sort of combination of its previous functions. I've changed locations again, and I'm feeling rant-y. I also have quite a few stories to relay. There are many pictures and recipes to post, and I've started trying to write more creative stuff which I may be brave enough to share. Now that I'm no longer required to think like a journalist (just the facts, please!) I'm trying to approach writing in a new way. Adding a dose of fun, hopefully, with less concern over word counts and marketability.
All of this re-evaluation tells me that this blog may start to have an even more confused identity than it already has. It's taking a form of its own, one that I haven't really pinned down.

I suppose this was to be expected with the recent changes that have come about in my own life. I'm no longer a college student. I participated in two graduation ceremonies (running, with tassels flapping in one hand an high heels clutched in the other, from one ceremony to the other, thanks to some bad scheduling on the UO's part). I'm now qualified to serve up a double dose of BS (that's Bachelor of Science, thank you): Environmental Studies and Journalism. I packed up my four years of accumulated junk and put the into my newly acquired automobile. I said goodbye to beloved friends, apartment, and bicycle. And I let out a big WHOOOHOOO!! as I crossed the border into British Columbia.

At the same time, I had no idea what to expect once I got here. I knew very little about my next stage in life as I zoomed up the I5, only that I was ready to get out of the city and try something new. A few months earlier, realizing that I wasn't ready to launch a "career" straight away, and also that I had absolutely no reason to (no heavy debt, no dependents, no desire to own a yacht in ten years), I decided to look into other options. I thought about what I like to do (other than write, which I can do anywhere): eat, cook, garden, educate people about where food comes from. It didn't take me long to start looking for farms.
WWOOF (Willing Workers on Organic Farms) is one organization that has gained attention along with the whole organics movement. SOIL (Stewards of Irreplaceable Land) Apprenticeships operates under a similar structure, but lists farms only in Canada. After spending a couple of weeks on both websites, I had my choices narrowed down to a few farms in the Pacific Northwest. I sent out emails and applications. I kept my fingers crossed.

When Ann Collins called me from Vancouver Island, BC, what she described sounded perfect. She told me that she and her husband had been farming for 30 years on a fertile piece of land by a river in the Alberni Valley. They grew vegetables and kept goats, chickens and horses. Securing the local food supply was their priority. As an apprentice, I would get to help out with all aspects of their farming operation, plus cook to my heart's content and spend my free time on the river or in the abundant forests surrounding the farm. Worried that I was drooling into the telephone, I told Ann I'd think about it. I then spent the next week or so trying to come up with a reason I shouldn't just go for it. I failed. I sent them an email and said to expect me post-graduation.

So here I am, typing in my bedroom at the farm house, my laptop resting on a handmade quilt. There's dirt permanently under my fingernails and I'm completely blowing my new early bedtime in order to finally update my poor blog.
Pictures and more tidbits from the farming life to arrive shortly. In the meantime, check out the farm website. (Who would have thought those two words would ever go together? Ah, the digital age.) The short update is this: So far, I'm having the time of my life.

Class of 2009: The Earth is Hiring

2009-06-02T00:11:00.000-07:00

The author Paul Hawken gave a speech at the University of Portland’s graduation ceremony last month, which beautifully sums up my thoughts on finishing my bachelor's in what some are calling the “worst year ever to graduate.” I highly recommend reading the entire thing, but here are the parts that really struck me (emphasis mine):

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn't bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: You are Brilliant, and the Earth is Hiring. The earth couldn't afford to send recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here's the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don't be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren't optimistic, you haven't got a pulse.
...

This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.

Before I read this speech, I knew I wasn’t going to take the typical career trajectory that most college graduates shoot for, even if they don’t make it. I just can’t see myself getting much joy out of – or helping many other people by – finding a 9-5 job in something I’m marginally interested in, going into debt buying a house and starting a family, and doing pretty much the same thing for the rest of my life. I know this is a route many people find great satisfaction in, but I think I’ve always known it’s not me, even if I temporarily allowed myself to believe, like most college students, that my degree would privilege me to this kind of future. The American Dream. Take it or leave it.
But now it seems that even if I’d wanted to do all that, this status quo – working purely for personal gain, keeping to our private family groups, expecting the next generation to fix the problems we create along the way – is no longer what we can expect maintain as a species. I think this is what Hawken is really saying, but in a nicer way: Wake up and smell the coffee, kids. The times, they really are a-changin’ now (with apologies to Bob Dylan).

Not too long ago, after returning from India and realizing the long stretch of time (yes, six months can seem like an eternity) before graduation, and waking up to hear news of the economy’s death throes every morning, it was a little tough to actually get out of bed and go to class. I actually felt sorry for myself: What, oh what, will I do with my seemingly useless journalism degree? How will I ever find a job and not disappoint my family and everyone who has sacrificed to put me through college?
Luckily, in the intervening time, I’ve gained a little perspective. That is, things are never as bad as the media would like you to believe – and a journalism student of all people should know this. As Hawken says, “We are the only species on the planet without full employment. Brilliant.” No kidding. In fact the situation’s gotten so bad, the best and brightest graduates this year appear to be steering away from Wall Street and financial jobs, applying their efforts toward endeavors that actually generate something for society other than cash – becoming doctors, scientists, and researchers, people who can bail us out of the jam we’re currently in. That was according to a New York Times article I read but can’t seem to find now.
It’s almost ironic: for decades, we’ve had a brain drain, similar to what countries like India are going through. There, smart kids succeed by going to study engineering and medicine at Western schools, then they never come home to apply those skills where they’re needed the most. In this country, those who are passionate about social justice, the environment and helping the needy go almost by default to the “developing” world. Every time I tell somebody about what I care about these days, they suggest I join the Peace Corps. As if there’s no poverty or need in this country. Sunita Rao, my India mentor, is on a Fulbright visit to the US, and she observes what she calls a “poverty of hope” – a problem just as severe as her country’s financial burden.
Here are a few facts I unearthed while writing my thesis: The percentage of farmers under 35 dropped from 15% in 1954 to 7.8% in 1997. Today, less than 1% of Americans work as farmers, a number so insignificant that the US Census threw out farming as a distinct employment category. In 2002, 77% of farm workers surveyed were foreign-born, and 53% lacked authorization to work in the U.S. Farm family members accounted for 69% of farm labor in 1998, but the average age of farm owners was 54.3, indicating that the next generation of family farmers is quite smaller than the one currently at retirement age.
So here we have two sides of the same problem: Too many people who want to participate in the second-tier level of the economy, activities like finance that are not directly related to survivability, and too few people focused on providing the very basics like food. Although we rank ourselves superior to the “third world,” our society is, in the words of S. S. Wilson, “overdeveloped.” Which way to turn?

A couple of months ago, I quit sending applications and resumes to floundering newspapers in my area, stopped gazing hopelessly at job listings (and the cost of rent) in cities like Portland and Seattle. I started looking into doing things that, as my father woefully points out every time I speak to him, I could have done without a college degree. And I started getting very, very excited. Willing Workers on Organic Farms (WWOOF), which connects people with internships and volunteer positions with farms around the world, is a wonderful program, as is its Canadian equivalent, SOIL Apprenticeships. After contacting several sites, I found one that fit my interests up on Vancouver Island, BC. I start later this month. Although I wish I had found a way to do this in my own country, have no doubt that I will return triumphant, a practical education under my belt, pitchfork in hand. And I have to say, Dad, that I’m not sure I could have done this without my liberal arts degree: Nothing else could have made me this idealistic. Or maybe it was just that darn trip to India. Either way, I’m excited and hopeful about the future. This could be the best year ever to graduate.

Oregon Local Foods part 2: What’s for dinner?

2009-05-26T01:10:00.000-07:00

Cassava root. Salmonberry. Black Republican cherries.
Never heard of them? There’s probably a reason for that – they are all edible plants native to the Willamette Valley here in Oregon. At one time, native Oregonians (from the Kalapooia and other tribes) ate cassava like we eat French fries today. Berry bushes in hundreds of varieties provided a wild harvest to anyone who knew how to tell a delicious snack from a bellyache. The black Republican cherry tree was introduced as a commercial crop in 1860, producing a plum-like fruit that was known throughout the Northwest.
Today, the cassava is protected as one of the few remaining indigenous plants in the area, our berry diet is limited to the two or three varieties that accompany peanut butter in sandwiches, and the words “black Republican” only bring to mind awful jokes.
But the irony is more immediate than that. Faced with a food culture that has been completely commodified, stripped of all regional identity and packed into neat little boxes (salmon burger, anyone?), chefs and food aficionados around the Willamette Valley are scratching wildly, looking for dishes that we can claim and incorporate into a distinctive local cuisine. I feel their pain – the lack of “American” food, leave alone Oregonian or Pacific Northwestern food is something I’ve long failed to understand. Once, a friend and I brainstormed an entire afternoon trying to think of something to cook for Saudi Arabian friends coming over for an authentic American dinner. We ended up making enchiladas. Close enough –as long as our guests never find their way south of the border.
It’s not that we don’t have material to work with in this region. Heirlooms like the black Republicans, including apple, pear and nut trees, as well as a varieties of beans, vegetables and berries, have been cultivated here since the first white settlers set up camp. The sense of local pride that has evolved around these crops is revealed in some of their names: Gramma Walters bean; Oregon Champion gooseberry. Because they are for one reason or another not commercially viable (delicate fruit, short shelf life, inconsistent production), many are in danger of extinction. Today, only a few, very old black Republican trees survive in the Eugene area and nowhere else, according to a book compiled by Gary Paul Nabhan, a well known ecologist and localization writer. The loss of heirloom varieties would be a blow to local agriculture, not just for cultural reasons but also because locally adapted crops tend to be hardier, better suited to the climate and soil conditions and thus less likely to need chemical inputs to thrive.
Anyway, anyone trying to establish a regional cuisine in Oregon has my full support, especially given some of the difficulties involved. Salmon is no longer an obvious choice for any of the Pacific Northwest. Gary Nabhan splits North America into distinct bioregions based on indigenous food traditions, and names this corner of the continent Salmon Nation. I support the idea behind this effort, but wish we could move beyond this beleaguered fish for its basis. One species is limited as a basis for an entire cuisine, and nobody with an ounce of ecological awareness would (or should) be caught dead eating anything but wild-caught salmon, whose numbers are swiftly dwindling anyway. In addition, any food trend that might eventually filter its way down to the masses (ie broke college students who find cooking an enjoyable form of productive procrastination) must be affordable, but most restaurants that attempt to differentiate their fare from that of Seattle or Portland tend to be in the price range of middle-aged urbanites with real jobs. In this economy, that leaves out roughly half of the population. (Really, though: the poverty rate in the Eugene area is higher than the state average, and Oregon is now has the second-highest unemployment rate in the nation.) Although the efforts of local chefs to get us to eat seasonally and locally with braised lamb in wild mushroom sauce are admirable, they aren’t the American’s South’s cornbread and grits. That is, you won’t see many of us switching from ramen-based diets anytime soon. As I mentioned in the previous post, the industrial food system has gotten most people used to food made from two or three major plants plus meat. It’s cheap and childishly easy to prepare (or pick up at the drive-thru window). Some serious re-education is in order before we can even think about preparing regionally based foods.
That said, I do see some adventurous farmers and blogger/cooks in the area making steps in these directions, first making the food available and then showing people that it’s not rocket science to put it together. Farmers near Corvallis are making serious efforts to reintroduce bean and grain production in the Willamette Valley; one Eugene-based blog has a recipe for black bean brownies. Is that the smell of synergy baking?
I’m not suggesting that Oregon farmers abandon all commodity crops for fields of waving cassava and garbanzos. After all, grass seed production generates $1.6 billion in economic activity in the state, and how else would every suburban home be able to cultivate an overwatered green monoculture without these farmers? Plus, other forms of agriculture are just way too much work, and since there simply aren’t enough illegal immigrants to go around, who will do it? On the other hand, small, organic farms have been shown to provide more ecosystem-like benefits while being more productive per acre than huge operations. And aren’t we facing something like a global food crisis? Wouldn’t it make more sense to give up just a few of those acres for diversified food production rooted in local traditions that we can all take pride in?
It’s all too confusing for me. I think I’ll just head to the kitchen to see if I can make black bean brownies that look as good as the picture on that blog. I only wish I had some black Republican cherry ice cream to put on top of them.

Academia, meet Blogosphere

2009-05-04T17:01:00.000-07:00

As I sit at my laptop after a long, hard, weekend of procrastination, trying to decide whether it’s justifiable to write a blog post rather than work on my environmental studies thesis, I am suddenly struck with a brilliant idea. Why not break down my thesis, which examines food system localization as a route to sustainability in the Eugene area, into blog-able chunks that would help me develop my ideas and keep this space from looking completely dead?
I’ve worked around the issue of food policy for a while, and I think most citizens are now aware that our system of growing, processing, distributing of food is convoluted, irrational, and above all, unsustainable. It’s detrimental to the environment and our bodies, a path to almost certain disaster.
But it wasn’t always that way. Just prior to the industrial revolution and continuing through the middle part of the last century, farmers actually grew crops that people could eat (not acre upon acre of cow food) and sold them in local markets. Most housewives kept gardens. People knew how to cook and enjoyed tastier, more nutritious food.
The idea for my thesis topic came out of my work on food-related issues in India and a question I’ve been working around in my head since returning: is it really possible to recreate a localized food system like we used to have here and that “developing” countries like India still enjoy? How do we incorporate current food distribution and consumption modes – Walmart superstores, Taco Bell, processed cheese – into that model? Obviously, we’re not going back to a 19th century ideal here, where everybody lives on their five acres, grows their own food, and knows what to do with it. There’s not enough land to go around and most people aren’t interested in getting their hands dirty (farmers currently make up less than 1% of the entire U.S. labor force). Still, there’s an interest in at least mimicking this model, and the proliferation of farmers’ markets, restaurants advertising locally grown ingredients, and general public awareness about food issues says something. The question is, even if all of us give up Italian noodles and Australian wine, can individual locales – counties, states, regions – really feed the people who live there?
It depends on the place. Luckily for me, the Willamette Valley (the area between the Cascades and the Coast range in Oregon) has at least the potential to feed its own population. We have an abundance of small, organic farms and some systems in place to get that food to local consumers. Unluckily, no matter how progressive we like to think ourselves to be, we’re no different from the rest of America. We (especially college students) shop at Safeway, enjoy the occasional Dairy Queen stop, and indulge ourselves with January strawberries. And there’s good economic reason for those decisions. Yes, there’s a strong backing for local foods, but it’s still a niche market, with produce available only at high-end grocery stores and natural food marts with reputations (founded and unfounded) for being expense. Also, there are the frightening prospects of bulk bins and soy cheese to drive away most mainstream food buyers.
If the underlying goal in revamping our food system is to achieve greater sustainability – a slippery concept, but to summarize four pages of my thesis, the ability to continue on the current course for many generations to come – we might have to reexamine if local is actually better. For example, let’s take wheat, which almost everyone buys in some form or another. Soft white, the kind used to make pastas and tortillas, is grown in huge quantities in the Willamette Valley, and with a better system to store and process the grains, we could be enjoying a completely local supply. But, because of the global wheat commodity market, it’s a lot easier to sell that wheat at top dollar to a distributor who will ship it to Asia or Europe, which is what currently happens to 100% of the wheat grown in the Valley. Buy a bag of noodles anywhere in Oregon, and there’s only a miniscule chance the wheat came from anywhere within a 100-mile radius.
Is this a bad thing? It depends what you value. A network of small, independently run grain mills and storage facilities in the Willamette Valley might sound perfectly utopian, but is it really more efficient? It would probably require complicating the already dizzying web of producers, distributors, processors and retailers even further, involving huge amounts of effort and organization. Compared to this, a system in which all the wheat grown goes to a central location, is processed and re-distributed to where it’s most needed (ie where the price is right) sounds almost logical.
So that’s my thesis topic in a (lengthy) nutshell. Stay tuned for next week, when I’ll sniff out where food is being grown in my vicinity and who is actually eating it.

West Lawn: Death and Commerce in the American Landscape

2009-04-22T00:09:00.000-07:00

[Note: This is an essay I wrote for my Contemporary American Landscapes class, in which we were assigned to take the bus to a random place in Eugene and write about what we found. It turned out a bit more morbid than I would have expected, but the results were interesting nonetheless.]

Any landscape architect wishing to achieve the stately, respectable, American appearance of West Lawn Memorial Park on Danebo Road can easily do so by mimicking the following design strategies. First, plant Douglas fir in a long, neat line near the busy road and wait sixty years for them to fatten. Clear the rest of the land and put in rows uniform headstones, and throw in a couple of American flags and a fake waterfall for ambiance. Then, be sure the cemetery is situated in a sprawling, industrial end of town, across the street from such barbed-wired establishments as Bad Bitch Choppers and Pacific Metals. It will easily be the most attractive enterprise in the area by simple process of elimination.
West Lawn’s unexpectedly dignified appearance is what first drew me in as I wandered up Danebo from West 11th last weekend. West Eugene is notorious for its sketchiness, and I’d arrived at its most distant fringe: the bus stop just past Wal-Mart, realm of speeding semis and disaffected young men in black hoodies. In this setting, West Lawn Memorial Park appeared a peaceful refuge. I paused for a moment on the narrow shoulder to appreciate the neat daffodil bed around the large sign at the entrance. Looking down, I noticed something misshapen and feathery by my feet. A dead bird. I didn’t know it yet, but that’s the closest encounter I would have with my own mortality at this thoroughly modern American cemetery.
“Cemetery,” of course, isn’t the term the West Lawn proprietors would prefer. The sign out front advertises “funerals, cremations, and memorial park,” dignifiedly refusing to allude to the unpleasantness of death with more descriptive words. This is a safe place, it seems to announce. We’re sorry you have to come here, but we do welcome your business.
It’s a Sunday – prime grave-visiting day – but there are only two cars in the West Lawn parking lot and they might as well belong to the former drivers belowground. The place is deserted. However, it’s not entirely unpleasant, either: The “park” lives up to its promise of shady trees, green lawns and inviting benches. Only a sign warning of a security camera in the parking lot reminds me that this is not a public space. At the top of the upward-sloping pavement is a red brick building with a slanted roof and generic stained-glass window. Though it at first appears to be a church, this is in fact a non-religious “Chapel of Memories” attached to the West Lawn office, part of the one-stop-shopping funeral package offered by the business.
I wander toward the waterfall nestled in a grove of trees between the parking lot and the grassy hillside of burial plots. Another sign tells me I’ve entered the Memorial Garden. A walkway meanders among shrubbery and shiny granite markers, most of which are blank, unwritten pages in the West Lawn death ledger. One is freshly engraved: “Teresa Morales, 1940-2009. Mamá siempre estarás en nuestro corazón,” it reads, the inscription accented by carved roses. I move on, drawn to the sound of the waterfall, which almost manages to drown out the hum of traffic on Danebo. Peering inside the water, I spot a plastic koi fish on a pole, disfigured by a healthy growth of algae.
The Memorial Garden is not disorderly but lacks cohesion, its elements holding in common only their newness, like displays at a home and garden show. Next to the small pool is a wood gazebo with a bench inside, and next to that a stone box that looks like a chest of drawers (I later learn its name: "columbarium". The units inside are known as "niches" and can store the ashes of one to two people.) A little farther down the circular path is another stone box and cardboard sign: Private Mausoleum. Available for purchase.
Memory and sales just became too closely tied for my tastes. I exit the garden for the wide open space of the cemetery proper. A cold wind sweeps over the grass, fluttering plastic flowers and miniature flags. In the distance, I can make out the roof of a Target store. Stenciled wooden signs demarcate sections of the graveyard in a fashion reminiscent of a Disneyland parking lot. Only here, instead of leaving your car in "Goofy," you can abandon your carcass in "David" or "Peace." For children, there's "Baby Circle," watched over by a statue of a marble angel kissing a fawn. One segment has bushes cut into a strange funnel shape; another is shaped into a mound with a single tree growing in the center. Is it the tree of life? A symbol of the lone individual reaching toward heaven?
I’m stirred from my ponderings by a blue Pontiac that drives up suddenly, a white-haired woman at the wheel. Disregarding the parking lot, she takes advantage of the cemetery's paved lanes and pulls up to a point near the headstone of her choice. It takes her less than three minutes to exchange the flowers and get back in her car.

What does the landscape of West Lawn reveal about Eugenians, living and dead? As J.B. Jackson, the great American landscape critic, has pointed out, Americans – and Europeans before us – have a long tradition of collecting populations of the deceased and placing them under the ground. Traditionally, those with higher social status were buried closer to the church, but in general we prefer to hide away these groupings of bodies, behind a glade of trees or outside of town somewhere. In these locations, plots tend to be rectangular, like the squared-off spaces – houses, fields – in which their occupants spent their lives.
Landscape truly is history made visible, as Jackson said, and this modern graveyard reflects changes in American habits and values over the past hundred or so years. It’s egalitarian, yes – now everyone can be buried near a church. Of course, that church can’t be a real one in the sense of being affiliated with a religious institution. That would narrow the customer base.
So religion, which once was integral to culture, has been reduced to a representation in this landscape. Death is a business here, made abstract by the mingling of cash with the respectable facade of the cemetery. Walking through, I don’t feel morbid, just curious. Who would want to be buried in this place? My best theory is that few actually chose this end. Perhaps these dead are all relations of the country’s transitory class, people who came here to seek their fortune and moved on long ago, choosing an economical site on cheap West Eugene land for a quick and easy burial. The lack of family plots may be evidence of this theory. Or maybe these discrete, nearly identical units are simply indicators of a society that simultaneously values individuality and conformity, where a membership to any community is a burden but standing out comes at a cost. By becoming conspicuous consumers – of fancy caskets, a “niche” near the waterfall, dozens of flowers – even in death, we make that passing less threatening for ourselves and easier for loved ones to bear.
Judging by the abundance of blank plots and markers in West Lawn, its owners are at least subconsciously counting on the next generation of dead sharing the values of those already in the ground. They’re not the only ones, though; we all depend on the eventuality of these slots becoming filled. Babies are born each day, newcomers fill apartment complexes and suburbs. We always need more space.
I watch the lady in the Pontiac drive off and turn to leave as well. As I do, I notice a backhoe in the next field over, pouring out a cloud of black smoke that stands out against the grey sky. It doesn’t take long for me to figure out what it’s doing over there in that far corner of the hedged-in lawn. Shovelful after shovelful, a new grave is quietly being dug.

Food in Washington: Two important new developments

2009-04-01T18:54:00.000-07:00

John Adams did it. Eleanor Roosevelt did it. The Clintons even had a few pots of it on the White House roof. Now, though, the Obamas are promoting the plants in a bigger way than ever before: a 1100 square foot vegetable garden just outside their back door.

A class of third-graders helped Michelle Obama break ground for the new garden on March 20th, creating an oasis of potential food in the otherwise immaculate house lawn (I commend her budget-minded use of free child labor). The entire Obama family plans on pitching in to keep the organic garden going through the growing season.
Why vegetables and why now? The plan didn't come from thin air - food policy activists have lobbied the president for months to set this example for Americans, although Ms. Obama has cites her motivations as desire to increase the freshness of the produce her family consumes. Of course, there' s more to it than that. Home gardens like this one are a simple, direct way to localize the food system and have the added benefit of educating the neighbors about diet and maybe even food politics. Although the idea is gaining momentum among the general public, it still has elite and/or west-coast-hippie-weirdo connotations, fears that will likely be alleviated by the sight of the Obamas getting their hands dirty and eating arugula.
The plan is not without historical precedent. Sixty years ago, Victory Gardens – as popularized by Eleanor Roosevelt – were incredibly successful in alleviating hunger and freeing up cash to fight a war. Today, hunger is still a concern, the underlying cause being that suddenly none of us have any more cash. The article about the presidential garden in the New York Times noted that the total cost of seeds, mulch and other supplies was $200 – a start-up cost that will be greatly reduced in future years.

This development demonstrates that the Obamas and others in Washington clearly have food system sustainability on their minds, even if they may not point directly to it for political reasons. That’s why I was surprised to get an email this week that cried out alarmingly from my inbox with the subject heading “Government may forbid organic farming!”
Well, it grabs your attention way more than “A House bill that is still in committee proposes reorganizing the FDA and placing greater surveillance on food production and processing,” but that’s really what the email was about. The scare was focused on H.R. 875, which is similar to another proposed bill, H.R. 759. The bills were written in response to the peanut scare and other recent food safety problems. H.R. 875, the “Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009” seems to be overkill, creating a Food Safety Administration under the Department of Health and allowing the FDA to mandate recalls (currently they can only “recommend” them, which they recently did for the salmonella-tainted peanuts). However, it says nothing specific about organics and in no way bans private vegetable gardens or seed saving, as the Ron Paul diehards who probably inspired the email I received are proclaiming.
Still, any legislation that requires small, organic farmers to undergo more inspections and fill out more paperwork will certainly hurt those businesses. Here’s what Oregon Representative Peter Defazio has to say on the matter:
“I am certainly mindful of the impact on small farmers this bill could have. My district is home to many wonderful specialty crops with small-scale producers, and I have been a backyard gardener for years. Routine inspections of farms would still remain under the jurisdiction of states. FDA officials will not be showing up on farms to inspect it on a regular basis. There is no language in the bill that would penalize or shut down backyard farmers.” (From a form email response to one I sent him.)

That pretty much resolved my qualms, though I still question why there is no legislation, at least none that I’ve heard of, that actually addresses the underlying problem of our industrialized food system that led to the peanut problem and countless other food safety issues over the years. One need only recall the name “Peanut Corporation of America” to be reminded of the enormous scale and complexity of the processing pathways that typically lead from the peanut field to a package of Nut Butters at the corner store. It wasn’t the “Peanut Company of Alabama” or the “Nut Processing Cooperative of Skippy County” that was running the rat-infested, leaky factory. We should know by now that having a huge, centralized processing facility run by a single entity makes it impossible to track and monitor food processing - be it for tomatoes, beef, spinach or Mr. Peanut. The system is simply too vast humans to control it. And the Ron Paulians, of all people, should recognize that.

Despite the false starts, there are good signs here that food policy is moving in the right direction in this country at last. If the Obamas have a vegetable garden and people are at least recognizing that the FDA is dysfunctional, it’s a good start. Get out there and play in the dirt, lawmakers, and let’s see what else we can uproot and change.

NPR Picture Show: Isolated exurban communities and cement deserts

2009-03-19T12:21:00.000-07:00

There are two great things about Over: The American Landscape at the Tipping Point. One: Pictures? On National Public Radio’s website? Fret all you want about journalism dying; there really are some “old” media outlets embracing the idea of multimedia content, and doing it with quality. It makes sense for NPR to embrace slideshows as a way of presenting information – for those of us who spend way too much time reading (thanks, humanities courses!) it’s always nice to be presented ideas in a different way, be it audible or visual. If I was an NPR nerd before, now I’m a full-on fanatic. And I'm not alone.
Of course, the other reason I was inspired by this Picture Show in particular was because of the straightforward, frightening way it presents a particular aspect of this country: urban sprawl, freeways, aqueducts, and other features of our indulgent lifestyles. Aeriel photography provides a viewpoint that is just unfamiliar enough to provoke a whole new way of understanding the homogenized, isolated places that some of us live in. At the same time, as a Westerner, I found the images of expensive developments built on the shoreline and subdivision after subdivision depressingly familiar. The photographs also provide a sense of cause and effect – an image of a three-quarter-mile long freeway intersection is followed a few slides later by an oil tanker, part of what the caption calls the “unseen network” that fuels our personal transportation.
Even more shocking than those photos, however, are the images of the places that oil and freeways can take you to. A suburb stuck randomly in Utah farmland. A community (if we can call it that, although it doesn’t look very communal) called “Harborwalk” built on a Texas wetland, complete with artificial beaches. The places that future archeologists will uncover, shake their heads and ask, “What were they thinking?”

Art exhibition review: "Juxtaposed"

2009-03-03T19:08:00.001-08:00

Not the Same:
“Juxtaposed” at the Maude Kerns Art Center

Machine parts and moss.
Alarm and absurdity.
Substance and empty space.
What do the above items have in common? Nothing – that’s the point. They’re juxtaposed, internally conflicted. Or are they?
This is not a question ripe for answering, but for a visual aid, visit the Maude Kerns Art Center between now and March 20th and take in its main exhibit, “Juxtaposed.” The sculptures and installations on display are from six artists – three of them local to Eugene – who are fond of consciously positioning unlike objects and ideas side by side. Each unique, provocative piece on display explores the tensions that tend to make viewers most uncomfortable, encouraging comparisons that are sometimes humorous, sometimes disturbing.

The Maude Kerns itself is a bit of an anomaly among Eugene's art galleries. Housed in an old church in a residential district, the non-profit Art Center has a folksiness and approachability that defies the cold glass exteriors of downtown’s art halls. With classes and lectures happening regularly and studios just next door, the venue prides itself in its ability to engage the whole community in art.
The journey through “Juxtaposed” may start from any of three entrances – another quirky feature of the converted building is the lack of a definitive main door. Visitors wandering in from the street side, however, will first confront Gerrit Van Ness’ installation “Campaign Trail,” a cynical take on the American elections process. The piece invokes the game of Candyland with lollipops, bright colors, and giant walking feet following a path – one made of dollar signs. Van Ness’ other works in the exhibit take jabs at Wal-Mart, bureaucracy and hypocrisy in general. Each piece functions as a 3-D, pop-art political cartoon, though most lack the biting cleverness that can be found in the editorial pages. And with the Bush Era over and an economic crises at hand, Van Ness’ lingering outrage over stolen votes and corporate profits feels a bit passé.
Better to enter the exhibition from the other end, where “Judging the Heart,” a site-specific installation by artist Mike Walsh, compares ancient and modern-day conflicts in the Middle East. The four boxes, or “Gates,” contain representational artifacts of ancient Egypt as well as modern-day maps of the region. Faces of soldiers are stenciled, ghostlike, on the glass, and the last box houses an image of George Bush. However, this political reference, in contrast to that made by Van Ness, speaks poignantly to the endlessness of war and the difficulty of measuring morality. Vertical ladders between the boxes possibly indicate an exit route in each stage of history.
The two pieces by James O’Keefe also approach serious subjects – nothingness and insanity – but do so with interactive whimsy, social commentary lurking just beneath the surface. “Psychological Storage Unit” is the quintessential impractical business model: Insert a quarter in the slot, the ramshackle cart instructs with stenciled lettering, and then write your psychological hang-up of choice on no more than three sheets of paper. Return for the problem later or just leave it behind. Psychoses already packed away are evidenced by the dozens of boxes, drawers and containers stacked on the cart, with labels like “illusions,” “violent thoughts,” and “panic attacks.” Metamorphosed by their kooky setting, these conditions become infinitely less frightening.
Here’s a juxtaposition: Next to O’Keefe’s fanciful construction is John Paul Gardner’s modernistic installation “Boundary.” A single set of parallel red fishing lines beam across the stage at the end of the room, creating a tension between movement and solid walls. “Range 1-4,” Gardener’s series of drawings also on display, capture the same effect with less drama.
Also working with the idea of flatness and dimensionality is Afrikaner sculptor Andries Fourie. His piece “The Carrion Eaters” is plantlike in form, with metal plates bearing silkscreened images – including a human heart, carnivores, a slingshot and a windmill – reaching out on solid vines. “Talking to Mr. Bhengu About Cattle” employs another metal plate along with a wood frame, a meat grinder, and a water faucet. This and Fourie’s third work on display, a frayed jacket hung with metal keys, defy interpretation. Perhaps the juxtaposition invoked here is that between logic and artistic inspiration.
The artist with the most work on display in this exhibition is Jud Turner, whose found object sculptures incorporate the contradictions between nature and technology; past and present. Witness a tree growing out of jumbled engine parts, a zeppelin strung from clouds and a machine that incorporates a human femur. Turner’s Artist Statement is almost as interesting as his art, describing how an exploration of quantum physics led to his fascination with dichotomies. “I have many ideas for sculptures roaming around in my imagination,” it reads, “but only those that operate on multiple levels of meaning and visual satisfaction are featured in the physical world.”

Visual satisfaction may, at times, take precedence over meaning in “Juxtaposed,” but the artists do aptly define and explore the theme, each making a unique contribution to the well-executed exhibit. By placing together objects and ideas of unequal stature, they demystify one while bringing new meaning to the other. Ultimately, out of disorder comes order, these reactions creating a sense of the grand congruency of the universe.

Environmentalism: East vs West

2009-02-24T18:30:00.000-08:00

[Note: This is half of a two-part Oregon Voice article comparing approaches to environmentalism on the East and West coasts of the US. A fellow student from New Jersey is writing the other half, so it should be an interesting final product (I believe they're looking at printing next month, so look for it on oregonvoice.com) This article is also in draft form, so feedback is appreciated!]

West Coast: Keeping the Green in our Wallets

I believe the ideals of environmentalism on the west coast are best embodied by my father, an old-school conservative who grasps better than a lot of eco-conscious Generation Y-ers these days what it means to reduce, reuse and recycle. Raised by a depression-generation single mother and with decades as a small business owner behind him, the man knows how to cut corners. Yes, it’s admirable, but if you’re not careful, this frugality can deliver some unpleasant surprises.
I learned this lesson the hard way one family vacation in Hawaii a few years ago. Having forgotten to pack my own, I asked dad if I could borrow some floss. Instead of the customary plastic case containing a spool, he handed me single, suspicious-looking waxy strand. However, it was generously long, for which I give him credit. I accepted the offering, ran it between my molars and deposited it in the wastebasket as usual.
An hour later, it was his turn to perform the ritual pre-bed hygiene. He went into the bathroom. Then he came back out. With admirable coolness, he asked, “Hey, where’d you put that floss?”
“What floss?” I asked.
“The floss I gave you earlier.”
“Um, threw it away,” I said, a little confused. He looked at me with an expression of mixed disappointment for having lost his floss and dismay at my carelessness.
“Tuula,” he sighed. “That was my only piece.”

Safe in the bathroom wastebasket – where even my father wouldn’t delve – that floss was spared from the mango-fiber and pineapple-strand hell that was sure to have lain ahead during those fourteen days in the tropics.
Of course, the frayed and gummy quality of his floss over the course of that trip would never have fazed my dad. For him, stretching consumer goods beyond their reasonable lifespan is not just a way of life, it’s an ongoing little game he plays with our throw-away society. There’s nothing he enjoys more than plucking something out a discard pile, brushing it off, and using it for the next twenty years. The wobbly, undersized bicycle he rides came from a gulley near his house. He drags his firewood in off the beach. If he does come across something new, he ensures it’s darn well expired before he disposes of it himself – writing on every square inch of a used envelope and wearing t-shirts until they’re more hole than fabric.
It would be nice to believe that this thriftiness goes beyond penny-pinching and is based in a more deeply rooted conservationist ethic. But if such a philosophy does exist, it is buried under a strong aversion to environmental and social “do-gooders” that defines my father’s political views. Instead – perhaps out of a simple desire to save funds – Pop has invented his own form of environmentalism, one that rejects the entire concept of consumables.

These days, recycling the items we use in our daily lives falls under the self-righteous headings of “sustainability” or being “green” – terms that would be nice to write off on east-coast yuppies but that we’re culpable for perpetrating as well. Worse, we’ve allowed marketers to convince us to attempt to buy our way out of our multiple, converging environmental disasters with such things as hybrid cars and organic cotton clothing sold at Wal-Mart. After all, in this era of plenty, one of the luxuries we’ve earned ourselves is the ability to throw things away and purchase newer, better, greener versions. A classic example of this are the well intentioned “light bulb exchange” campaigns that you see cropping up form time to time. Sure, it sounds nice to get a free fluorescent bulb, which will save who knows how many megawatts of electricity, but do we have to throw away thousands of perfectly good “old” bulbs in order to make the transition?
So, in this context of this hip(ocritical) eco-friendliness, can west-coasters keep our cool and rationally discern between what’s good for the earth and what simply makes us feel good? The west coast in general, and Oregon in particular, has a good reputation for not only rejecting the pretentious but also enacting legislation that helps make it easier to reduce our collective footprint (which is itself a slippery concept, but we’ll run with it). Oregon was the first state to create a bottle deposit system, providing broke college students and the homeless in 11 states now the opportunity to regain some of their beer money. Its somewhat controversial land-use system – in which urban growth boundaries are strictly enforced and land designated as agricultural must remain that way – has also been heralded by environmentalists. And of course, one can’t discuss green policies without tipping a hat to Portland, where happy citizens bike, recycle and build energy-efficient structures with an air of smugness that should itself be monitored by the EPA.
Oregon’s neighbors generate a good amount of eco-friendly smug themselves. California was the first state to place emissions caps on new vehicles lower than those imposed by the federal government and is generally ahead of its east-coast counterparts in environmental leadership. Washington gained attention this winter for refusing to put salt on Seattle’s roads, irritating commuters around Puget Sound but probably generating a lot of gratitude among those who live in its waters.

Of course, good ol’ dad scoffs at all of the above schemes, and maybe he’s right to do so. But at some point, the priority needs to be placed not only on protecting consumers from themselves, but also on protecting the earth from our resource-gobbling, polluting habits. The west coast does a reasonably good job of doing so, even if we’re sometimes given to “greenwashing.” One thing’s for sure, though – you won’t find many east coast yuppie environmentalists reusing floss.

The digital age has arrived: A eulogy for broadcast

2009-02-17T17:55:00.000-08:00

Television is dead. Long live television!

As of this morning, my TV doesn’t work anymore. I didn’t do anything to provoke this, and it’s not as if I wasn’t warned. The FCC set this date months ago for the final tradition to 100% digital broadcasting, and I, as usual, am behind the curve.
Considering that my rabbit ears were on their last legs, delivering a snowy and erratic signal to my screen, and that I only actually employed them once a week for Sunday night Desperate Housewives, this doesn’t have a huge impact on my life. My roommate and I will continue to watch previous seasons of Lost online and The L Word on DVD. Instead of investing $70 for the converter box that will allow us to receive the new digital signals, I’ll spend a few bucks on one of those cool cables that lets you put your computer screen on the television screen. When Sunday nights roll around, the wireless connection had better not go out.
But there are qualities about watching TV the old-fashioned way I’ll miss, and it’s not just the fun of trying to squint out what the ever-devious Housewives are up to in that suburban blizzard of static. The first thing is the inflexibility of it. DH is a big deal in my group of friends, and on Sunday evenings, there’s usually about eight of us squeezed into my living room. We tease and nag each other before turning on the TV at 9 to watch the same thing happening among older and more beautiful people on screen. How will I get everyone to shut up at 8:59 if they know we can now actually roll the show whenever we want? Come to think of it, how will I get them there in the first place? It won’t be too long until we’re all calling each other saying “You know, I just have too much homework, how does Monday night work for you?” Monday turns into Tuesday, then Wednesday, and then another week goes by without this important social event.
Another thing I like about broadcast television is ads. Yes, I usually mute them, but I live in a happy bubble of forward-thinking, largely unmaterialistic (mostly because we’re poor) people. How will I be reminded that people actually buy – no, wrap their entire lives around having – crap made by Lexus and Adidas if the television isn’t there to remind me that I should be too? I might grow large-headed without that constant sense of brand inadequacy.
So, TV, it’s sad to see you turned into no more than a very bulky laptop screen. Those rabbit ears are cute, but they’ll be out by the dumpster as soon as one of us gets around to getting rid of them, and some slightly less useless item will take their place on top of the stereo speaker. Perhaps my leftover New Year’s party hat or a kitchen appliance that I don’t have room for on the counter. I have no use for digital signals. Sorry, FCC, you may just have to change your name to Federal Internet Commission.

Down with grass!

2009-02-07T15:56:00.000-08:00

In the summer of 2008, farmer Harry MacCormack did something on his land that hasn’t been done in the Willamette Valley for over twenty years. In this small act, unbeknownst to most of his neighbors in nearby Corvallis, Oregon, he may have sparked a revolution that could transform the state’s economic structure and create a model for sustainable communities across the country.

So what was MacCormack up to on his farm last summer? He was growing beans. As food and fuel prices rise around the world and Oregon residents scramble for ways to reduce their demands on our fragile environment and economy, farmers are moving toward a solution that may seem simple in hindsight. Instead of devoting 80% of cropland acres to grass seed, an inedible crop of which very little actually stays in the region, farmers led by MacCormack are beginning a movement to use the valley’s fertile lands for growing food. Beans, grains, and other staples used to be primary crops in the region until suburban lawns and golf courses made grass seed a hot commodity. Today, this cash crop is as popular as ever, but increased problems with field burning and chemical use has farmers searching for alternatives.

MacCormack’s experimental planting, known by the coalition of farmers, distributors and retailers he works with as the “Bean and Grain Project,” could be the alternative. But the initiative is not without its detractors: some environmentalists say that attempting to grow certain crops in Oregon would require even more chemicals and energy than it would in their native environments. Many farmers simply cannot afford to switch from grass seed to less profitable crops. And eco-conscious as they may be, most food buyers in the region are used to the low prices allowed by importing beans and grains from countries where standards of living are lower.

Read more about the bean and grain project here: http://www.mudcitypress.com/beanandgrain.html

Why writers should not hate artists

2009-01-30T13:24:00.000-08:00

I sip coffee from my white ceramic mug at Cafe Roma near campus, waiting for my group members to arrive. I’m uncharacteristically early, and pass the time by eavesdropping on the born-again Christians in passionate conversation at the table next to me.

A couple of minutes later, the two I was waiting for arrive, and we begin on the task at hand. One of my final journalism classes is a course on “Writing for the Arts,” and we’re assigned to interview four different artists in class. The person my group happens to be interviewing has a frustratingly visual website, with a two-sentence bio of the artist and an abundance of photos. We’re word-bound people. We can’t compile our list of hard-hitting questions without some more background information.

“Exploring the intrinsic value of timeless knowledge,” I read aloud off a photo caption. The girl next to me, wearing absurdly large frameless glasses over her small round face, sighs with frustration.

“I hate artists,” she growls. I laugh a little in sympathy; the statement I’d just read is exactly the type of vague language that has been excised from any good journalism student’s lexicon through years of writing classes. But I haven’t been brainwashed to the point of intolerance for those who still find words like these useful. After all, aren’t writers also artists? Shouldn’t we show some solidarity? Sure, our medium is words, sentences and metaphors, but we face the same challenge that artists do of expressing the formless and wordless dimensions of human thought. Not only that, but we are compensated for our work on the same crappy pay scale.

I pose the question to my two peers. The large-glasses girl scoffs. “I’m no artist,” she claims. The guy across the table is on my side, but doesn’t appear to have ever considered the question before. I decide not to pursue the topic and we move on with our work.

Still, the question lingers in the back of my mind, and I begin wondering what gave me the idea that I was an artist in the first place. My roommate, Willa, happens to be a “real” artist, a surprisingly grounded and practical person who consistently amazes me with her productivity. I guess that’s why I’ve put so much consideration into my status as an artist: Our household is so overflowing with paintings, sketches, and shelf upon shelf of ceramic pots that I have to justify my relative invisibility. When visitors come and swoon over our walls, I point at my laptop and closet full of journals indignantly, protesting, “It’s all in there, I’m creative too!”

It so happens that the evening after the group meeting at Roma, Willa invites me to a special lecture put on by the art department on campus. I’ve always been an art appreciator, and I need an excuse not to write an essay for English class, so I go.

The lecture is by an artist visiting from New York, Shinique Smith, who specializes in sculptures featuring cord-bounded bundles of used clothing. As I settle into my seat in the lecture hall full of pink-haired, thrift-store chic artsy types, I realize I’ve never been to an event quite like this before. I’ve interviewed a couple of artists and had many more informal conversations with them, but the people I spoke with were always “translating” their ideas to me, a layperson unversed in the complexities of art. The artist speaking tonight is here simply to explain her work to a group of art students. They speak the same language.

This becomes apparent during the Q&A section at the end of the lecture. People ask Smith why she has worked for so many years with bundled clothing, and she answers simply that she hasn’t explored the extent of the medium yet. One student wants to know what Smith does first when she gets up in the morning, and they chat about that. Meanwhile, the journalist inside me is screaming. What kind of an answer is “haven’t explored the extent of the medium”? Who cares what she does when she gets up in the morning? What are the wider social implications of her work? Does she really think all that bunched up fabric does anyone any good?

I restrain myself with the simple fact that nobody else seems bothered by this, and that the work itself is interesting and beautiful. Without being told, I sense the quiet restraint in the sculpture and the hint of human form beneath it.

On the walk home, I begin to understand why writing about the arts is so difficult: art was never really meant to be put into words, especially not a news format. The challenge to the arts writer is creating an idea of the artist’s meaning by holding up and examining inexpressible concepts related to love, hate and everything in between. In this context, words become like clumsy sticks used to pick up diamonds, and we’re constantly, carefully testing our (not to mention our editor’s) tolerance for vagueness and obscurity. The reader, on the other hand, is looking for quick, descriptive news stories that come to some concrete point. Artists seem to specialize in dangling their point just out of your mental reach.

Before signing up for Writing for the Arts, I wanted to take an investigative reporting course but ended up not being able to make the commute to Portland, where it was to be held. I considered Writing for the Arts an acceptable, if less exciting and challenging, substitute.

So these past four weeks, instead of chasing criminals and sleuthing after lying politicians (and it’s a good time to be in Portland for that type of thing), I’ve been spending my time getting as introverted and broody as my artsy friends. I drink too much coffee and play out mental car chases with the purpose of art being my elusive prey. (Ok, the too much coffee thing is not new.) As I do so, I’m rooting out my own preconceived notions about what constitutes an “important” story.

Conclusion: I may never find success in transforming bundles of clothing into crisp, descriptive and readable news stories, but one thing is for sure: This is a tough class. And writers who think they are not artists may as well quit while they're ahead.

The death of mainstream media?

2009-01-22T19:53:00.000-08:00

The Eugene Weekly this week ran a blurb about UO School of Journalism Dean Tim Gleason's cry for help for dying newspapers around the state and country. Apparently, he spoke on the subject at a recent City Club meeting. Someone then questioned him about the need to actually support the advertising-driven, PR-clogged mainstream media. The statistic that 75% of news stories come from press releases was mentioned. Gleason made some indignant response about the public benefitting from the close ties between public relations (ie advertisers) and newspapers, they just don't realize it. The Weekly's position was, well, if nobody wants to read that drivel any more, why should anybody pay reporters to produce it?
A logical argument. But I've been writing a lot of those "My Goals in Journalism" essays lately, part of several journalism internship applications (yes, it seems I'm addicted to the temporal, cold-water-plunge thrill of intern gigs), and I have a few cents to contribute to this discussion.
Yes, the state of mainstream media in this country is pretty sorry. Even a person who hasn't spent the past four years scrutinizing media outlets will probably admit that a lot of the stories we see on television and in magazines and newspapers are shallow, blatantly pro-[insert disliked industry here], and generally useless. In the meantime, we have security camera footage of the Airbus crashing into the Hudson, and anyone with a blog and access to a computer can have a readership. (Hi, readership! Thanks for supporting this 100% PR-free blog!). And this is just the beginning - once every grandma has a video phone, we'll all be silmultaneous consumers and producers of media content. So, you may ask, why keep journalists around?
Well, hate to say it, but a lot of us are better at it than you. Grandma might have seen Mrs. Plum get murdered with the brass candlestick in the drawing room, but she probably doesn't know how to scour the microfilm at the library to get Mrs. Plum's complete criminal history and shed more light on the situation. I'm talking about the good reporting that does still happen, the other 25% (and shrinking) of stories. Yes, it may be more efficient to have a whole army of citizen reporters working through online media providers, providing egalatarian, user-picked content, but that doesn't make it better. As the Weekly pointed out, "The most popular, widely read article online of any newspaper in the Northwest in recent years was a story about a man who died after having sex with a horse." Sometimes, the newspaper's primary purpose isn't to give readers the content they want to see but the content they need to see.
Not to say that the current state of affairs doesn't need fixing - a lot of fixing. If people aren't reading those important stories, it's probably a sign that the storytelling has not been adequate. And this whole selling out thing needs to end, somehow. I, for one, feel that the integrity of my Journalism degree (which I will recieve, godwilling, this June) has been compromised by the fact that I share it with Public Relations and Advertising students coming out of the same school. Not that these fields are not legitimate and can't be put to good use (check out greenwashingindex.com). It's just that, in most professional applications, they stand for everything news reporters should stand against. Twisting of the facts for profit. Hiding other certain facts to make your employer look better. When you think about it, these degree programs should be placed as far away as possible from the true Journalism programs. Like, in the business school.

The last few weeks: some concluding thoughts

2008-12-27T08:07:00.000-08:00

After the MUWCI camp, the last couple of weeks of my internship seemed to rush by like a speeding bus. Suddenly, there were a dozen procrastinated projects to wrap up and I plunged into work like never before.
There’s another reason for this sudden intensification of work – I was also avoiding the deep thinking that should come with the conclusion of what’s been billed as a life-changing experience. Has my life changed? If so, how? What am I taking home? Do I even want to go home? Will my tick bites ever heal? These are some of the questions that have been swarming around in my head.
My internship with Vanastree officially ended with the month of November, and my plan had been to take off for a whirlwind tour of India before flying home on December 18th. As the end of November neared, however, I did do enough reflection to realize that I was probably happiest and more at peace than I’ve ever been in my life at Sunita’s farm and was in no hurry to leave. After a short trip to the ancient ruins surrounding the city of Hampi to the North, I came back in early December to pack my bags and participate in a Vanastree picnic.
Because Vanastree’s collective base is so scattered among the countless villages in Uttara Kannada district, many of the women don’t know members outside their own seed groups. Also, because domestic life is so labor intensive here, most don’t take even a day’s holiday very often. This “field trip” was an opportunity to air everyone out and give them a chance to get to know one another. It was also my opportunity to see the women I’ve gotten to know over the last few weeks one last time, and be introduced to many others I hadn’t met yet.
On the day of the picnic, the eighty or so women met up in Sirsi and piled into two busses. I sat in front of the first one, perched on the engine box between the driver and the two front seat passengers (the idea of a seat is often a very loose one here). Looking behind me, I saw for the first time the visible range of people my little NGO includes. Women close to my age sat next to wizened grandmothers. A few had come in crisp silk saris, while others’ saris were a little threadbare but still scrubbed meticulously clean. Some wore the more casual kurta (long shirt) and baggy pants as I did. All were chatting happily, the scent of coconut oil and jasmine flowers from their hair wafting around the bus.
The first stop was an apiary (bee farm) close to Sirsi. Keeping bees is an easy way to ensure good crop pollination while of course harvesting delicious honey, and we were hoping that by showing the women this place a few more of them would put bee boxes in their home gardens. We all stood in a huge circle, introduced ourselves, and then watched in awe as the beekeeper dismantled one of his bee boxes, containing a very active colony of rock bees, one of several native bee species here. The workers are the only ones with stingers, and they were all out gathering pollen, so we were able to examine the perfect octagonal cells in peace. Some contained tiny bee larvae.
After the demo, we sampled some honey and bombarded the beekeeper with questions. Then it was back to the bus and a short drive to the picnic site.
We pulled up to a beautiful spot by the river, shaded by huge trees. Everybody went down to the water to cool their feet. Out in the water near the opposite shore, there was a little shrine on a circular cement platform, and it didn’t take long for everyone to hike up their saris and wade out to it. One by one, they circled the Shiva linga counterclockwise, bowed down, and sat in the shade of the thatched roof, water rushing all around.
Before lunch we gathered under one of the trees and Manorama addressed a few words to the crowd. Then there was an unexpected “Word from the Intern”. She turned the floor over to me.
I paused an awkwardly long time. What could I say? There was too much to express, a large amount of it difficult to put into words. Despite the unstructured nature of the collective, I felt like they were all my overseers, the heart and soul of the organization that I had tried hard to be of service to. Had I accomplished what I came to do? Sunita had said that it had been helpful to have me around, but there are so many things outside of our control. If I had learned anything, it was the value of the self-sustaining, food secure system in place here. And it’s the small farmers and home gardeners, not interns, who are responsible for that.
After a deep breath, the words that came to my mouth were of thanks. Each of the stories of these women has been more inspiring than the rest, the final touch being that now they were here relaxing by the water as if none of their difficulties had ever transpired. And here I was, a complete outsider, as much a part of the group as someone from the other side of the planet could hope to be.
I’m sure I didn’t put all that too elegantly as a I stammered in front of eighty sets of expectant eyes, but I hope the message came through. Then came the Q&A. How did you like the food? (Delicious.) Did we try to feed you too much? (Yes, but I liked it.) What’s the biggest difference between the US and India?
Uhhh.
Stuck again. The constant noise, I wanted to say. The unimaginably huge population. The complete absence of Wal-Mart and overweight families. These are not useful comparisons. I tried to think bigger picture. Finally, I had it.
“A little thing known as ‘adjust’,” I said. Shortly into my stay, Sunita and I had been walking to the office, recovering from a harrowingly crowded tempo (private bus) ride when she explained “adjust” to me. Imagine you have one orange and there are twelve people. Indian politeness says that you should share the orange, and everybody will get a piece, no matter how small. You adjust. Same with the seats on the tempo or any other problem arising from the conflict between too many people and too few resources. “We’ll adjust” might as well be India’s unofficial slogan, the way people here take into stride situations that I find awkward or downright uncomfortable.
I think this idea is more than just a response to an allocation problem. It’s a way of approaching life that many from Eastern cultures share. Though it might be a gross generalization, people in the west are characteristically individualistic. It’s hard to solve problems or get much done because there’s always somebody’s ego in the way, some need that has to be taken into account. “We’ll adjust” smoothes over all those issues. It’s the opposite of “me first”. It’s the reason collectives like Vanastree work so well – everybody sharing what they have. I doubt things would run so well back home, where everything is personal property and seed companies place top priority on patenting effective seeds.

I enjoyed the rest of my stay a bit easier after that, having put into words the fascination with this Indian cultural aspect that had been forming in my head over the past three months. I went to Kerala, which was beautiful and fascinating, and stopped back at Sirsi on my way to Mumbai to catch my plane home. Mushtaq drove me to the train station in Hubli, recreating backwards the journey I’d made on my very first day in India.
As we left Sirsi behind us, I tried to think more on the way about what has changed about my approach to the country. Maybe I’d grown accustomed to a few things – the potholed road, for instance, and the monkeys scampering just out of reach of the van’s tires. I started to think I’d gotten used to the way things look here. But as we headed north, out of the jungley lushness of the Malnad and into the drier Deccan, where ox-drawn carts are commonplace and the locals wear colorful clothes and jewelry quite different from anything found in Sirsi, I found myself staring just as I did in September. India is full of surprises, I thought for the thousandth time since arriving. I could probably spend years here and still not get enough of the brilliant green rice paddies, the chaotic streets, the temples like islands of serenity in the sea of constantly active people. I leaned back in my seat, read again the pink-lettered “SMILE” on Mushtaq’s side mirror, and grinned as I stared at the scenery whizzing past.

Field Notes blog

2008-12-23T15:57:00.000-08:00

My fame and recognition as a blogger continues to grow: Here's a post I wrote for IE3's blog Field Notes. IE3 is the organization that coordinated my internship with Vanastree.

http://ie3global.ous.edu/blog/ (Go to Dec 8)

Next: National Geographic.

Really though, I have to give credit to IE3 for putting me in touch with Vanastree and making this whole adventure possible. IE3 is really an awesome organization for getting students to spend time abroad for worthwhile causes. Thanks especially to Natanya Desai for seeing me through the entire process, from application to getting home again.

Oregon Voice essay published!

2008-12-22T10:19:00.000-08:00

Due to my excellent connections at the prestigious Oregon Voice magazine, I managed to get an article published in their first issue this year. "Development versus disorder in the land of holy cows" is about losing my way and re-affirming my affection for developing nations on the winding and thoroughly confusing roads of Sirsi town.
Check it out: oregonvoice.com

Favorite posts?

2008-12-05T08:10:00.000-08:00

As a writer, sometimes the most difficult part of the job is knowing what parts of your work suck and which are actually interesting and/or entertaining. I’ve been scrolling fruitlessly through my 45-page word document of blog posts from the past three months, looking for some choice bits to evolve into essays to submit to Glimpse. Progress is slow: My eyes tend to glaze over in the sea of words and I start wondering if there’s anything to eat. It all looks the same to me.
So I’m asking for your help, if you happen to have kept up with my rambling stories here: leave a comment or send me an email with a little feedback regarding which posts you enjoyed and which allowed your stomach to distract you. I’ll take three or four “good” ones and polish them up for some potential clips. Thanks. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think there are some overripe bananas in the kitchen.

The attack of the 11th-graders!

2008-11-27T08:16:00.000-08:00

This past week I had the pleasure of spending eight days with a gang of eleven 16-18 year olds, most of whom were coming to rural India (and for some, rural anywhere) for the first time.
And no, the word “pleasure” is not used sarcastically. Sure, I’d forgotten this particular age group’s ability to entertain themselves with fart noises and terrible renditions of Jay-Z hits, but overall I was impressed with their inquisitiveness, willingness to try new things, and the many small signs that they may one day becoming functional adults in the strange and high-pressure environment they’re growing up in.
The “kids” are students at Mahindra United World College of India, Mahindra being the name of the auto manufacturer that funded the school. There are United World Colleges in several nations, and their mission is to bring together small but diverse groups of students for 11th and 12th grades. Their standards tend to be high but they incorporate innovative teaching strategies and try to give students a sense of social responsibility with their educations. Every term, they go on a “project week”, visiting an NGO in another part of the country for a little outside-the-classroom learning (the only useful kind, in my opinion). The 200 students split up into groups based on which location they choose, and the NGO is given free reign over the program for the entire week.
This is the third project week that Vanastree has hosted. Still, Sunita and I were more than a bit nervous as we waited for the van full of expectant students and one teacher to arrive last Saturday. MUWCI (which they pronounce “mew-key”) is located near Pune, a big city with all the amenities. Here in Karkolli village, where Sunita’s farm and many of the Vanastree women live, there are no bags of Lay’s, no cold bottles of Coke, no showers, and, on that particular morning and for several hours at a time in the last few days, no electricity (although there are several hydroelectric dams in Karnataka, most of the power goes off to Bangalore and when there are shortages, the utilities know it’s the rural people they can cut off without fear of retribution). We weren’t sure what to expect and had no idea what they were expecting, either. Last year, the students had been confused as to the purpose of their visit and seemed in constant need of junk-food fixes. The week ahead was packed with activities and it seemed everyone would either have to sink or swim.
The van finally came, and 11 tired teens, fresh off the overnight train from school, trudged up the stairs to the terrace above the guest room. We served them fresh lemonade and snacks and made our introductions, then heard theirs: All first-years (11th grade) save one second-year. Two were from Malaysia, two from Germany, four from India, one each from Nepal, Mongolia and Hong Kong. If you boiled down the entire University of Oregon student body, it probably still wouldn’t be as diverse as this group. Suddenly, it became clear to me that while they might be here to learn from me (well, mostly from Sunita), I would probably learn more from them.
In the week that followed, we removed invasive weeds from a nearby temple, talked to Manorama and a couple other Vanastree women about their livelihoods, went on hikes and saw snakes, a scorpion and a million birds. Then we moved to Mathigatta, where I did my first homestay in September, on the way stopping at Yana, a beautiful natural rock formation. More treks and a little agroforestry lesson for the students. On the way, I got too many tick bites to count, gained an appreciation for wildlife watching, and had some good conversations with students.
Like most high-achieving 11th graders, many of the MUWCI students were preoccupied with college and getting the right education to “succeed” in the world. In anticipation of this, our program included a little talk by me about my internship, how I got it, what I’ve been doing for three months, etc. At the end, most of the questions focused on the facts that I am earning credit for this and that my degree actually requires me to get some hands-on experience outside the classroom. For some, it's a new concept.
Answering the questions, I started to get some sort of grasp on the background most of these students have. In most countries in the East (India, China, Malaysia, etc.), learning is extremely textbook-based and competitive. While I hesitate to praise the United States’ education system in any way, I now can appreciate that we do give some priority to critical thinking, discussion, and learning by doing. I never thought I’d see the benefit in writing all those boring essays in English or dissecting formaldehyde-soaked frogs in biology, but when compared with memorizing facts out of a book to regurgitate them on a test later on, it almost sounds like fun. The level of competition these students have to face is also unimaginable to me. Because there are so many students, most vying for coveted scholarships to schools in the West, a difference of one percentage point could leave you “stuck” in your home country, facing the same painful type of education if you think you can stomach going on for a Bachelor’s. At least at the higher levels, one can assume that the rules will be relaxed a bit - many of the students gave battle stories of being hit with rulers or sticks and even kicked for misbehaving. My worst memory of punishment is being made to sit "on the wall" during recess for singing "99 bottles of beer on the wall" on the bus and being the only one brave enough to admit it.
While watching birds one early evening toward the end of the week, I found myself talking to the “Malaysians” (perhaps on diversity overload, the students have a perhaps insensitive but cute way of referring to each other by nationality), Daniel and Roshan. They described a problem that, in my mind, the final nail in the coffin of formalized education: standardized tests in Malaysia. According to my sources, who should know, the government contorts the test results to hide schools that are underperforming. If you do well on a test in a school that is already doing well, you might actually end up with a score lower than that of a student who didn’t to so well but happened to attend a school that needed a “boost”. According to the Malaysians, this is not a problem unique to their country, as many developing nations are vying to make themselves look better. Luckily, MUWCI ignores standardized test results, probably for this very reason, and instead interviews applicants personally and asks them to debate each other on various subjects.
But coming to a school like MUWCI doesn’t end the treadmill of competition for motivated students like Daniel and Roshan. The light at the end of the tunnel is just becoming visible: a western university, preferably Oxford or Ivy League. While countries at the forefront of the industrialization race, like India, tend to have fairly good schools, there’s an extra bit of incentive for students to head to the US or Europe: liberal arts. I have to admit that I suddenly understand their drive. In comparison to the Eastern system, schools like mine offer unlimited sets of opportunities, socially and academically. Students are given the opportunity not just to gain an education but also to discover new things about themselves. And in their own quests for diversity, the west’s universities offer thousands of scholarships, many full-ride, to students from far-flung places. Their countries of origin, then, lose all their smartest students, leaving them with a massive brain drain that is expected to soon have real economic impacts. Think of all the engineers and doctors you know that are Indian, and imagine if the top 5% of students in every high school in the US left the country, never to return (or even send remittances), and you’ll get some idea of the problem.

Faced with all this information, I had no basis upon which to either encourage the students to seek a higher education (not that they needed encouragement) or convince them to try to give their home countries a second chance by studying or working there. The global system requires a degree, earning a degree worth anything requires heading west.
However, I don’t think there's much to justify paying top dollar for reputedly "good" schools, so I explained the state university system to them as an alternative. I think that fact that I don’t come from Harvard and yet seem fairly intelligent helped my argument – most seemed to assume that state universities are only for those who don’t know or can’t afford better. It seems that Princeton, Oxford, Cornell and the rest have a death grip on the world’s degree market, one built entirely on reputation and not much else. I don’t plan on letting a location on my diploma influence what I can and can’t do in the future, and I don’t see much reason for anyone else to, either. So perhaps through my conversations with eleven brave and open-minded students, I put one small hatchet-mark in the coffin of higher education.

How is India?

2008-11-07T20:58:00.000-08:00

I get asked this question a lot, usually by people back home, but sometimes by people who I talk to on the bus or other random places. I’ve worked up a series of answers, none of which are useful in conversation, at which time I usually answer “great”, trying not to be sarcastic and add something like “How is it for you?”

How is India?
India is like having a considerate but awkward boyfriend who refills your water glass before leaving the cafeteria table and always saves a seat for you on the bus, then takes half an hour to work up the nerve to start a conversation.

India is wildly entertaining, especially when being introduced to children. The best story is when I met one little boy, who, upon hearing my name, looked up at me carefully, the wheels in his head turning rapidly. The first thing everyone wants to know is where I’m from, and he thought he could figure this out on his own, even though he’d never met a “foreign” before.
“China?” He asked.
I think his thought process was something like “Ok, blonde hair, blue eyes, tall – oh, what the hell, they all look the same to me.”

India is a devoted friend you met five minutes earlier, the young Muslim woman who stands in the rain on the side of a busy road waving goodbye as the bus pulls away, a flashy sliver of pink showing under her black burqa.

India is the 19th century American west – seemingly lawless, incredibly entrepreneurial, where women are treated as ladies in public and servants at home. Only here there’s no opportunity to start afresh. Where you’re from, what your parents do, and what religion you follow are the main criteria by which you are always assessed and categorized.

India is completely fearless. While in Bangalore, I walked to a mall “up the street” from where we were staying. Turns out it was up the street, through a construction site (unbarricaded, of course), and down a busy overpass. No sidewalks. While I was walking on the overpass, cars whizzing by my elbow at top speed, a little girl ran up next to me and started doing cartwheels to earn a few rupees. I paid her off to avoid what seemed likely to be a grisly accident, although she acted as if she might as well be doing tricks on my front lawn.

India is a 24-hour soundtrack. In the city, there’s the constant background of horns from the nearest road – the rickshaw’s low buzz, short blasts from trucks, high-pitched honks from motorcycles, musical tones from tricked-out cars, feeble dings from bikes – over which crows call out, kids shout, telephones ring, clothes are scrubbed and, invariably, someone is drilling concrete or hammering. On the farm, cicadas, songbirds, owls, crickets and frogs replace the horns, with monkey calls and shouts from the neighbors occasionally chiming in.

India is paparazzi with camera phones. Apparently, the sight of a foreign is so thrilling to some people (mostly 15-20 year old boys) that they must take a photo. Somewhere, five or six Indian guys now have a picture of an angry white woman flipping them off to show all their friends.

India is dirty. Not just in a trash sense, although you can find it just about everywhere in layers of various thicknesses, but in a dusty, grimy sense. At first I thought Sunita was just obsessed with baths and sweeping the floor but then I realized every time you step onto a road or open a window you’re being assaulted by the dirt that seems to fly everywhere. Although Sirsi has plenty of paved roads there always seem to be strips of bare ground in between, constantly stirred up by the flow of human, auto and animal traffic. There are no emissions standards for vehicles, which creates another dirt factor when you think about all the exhaust going into your lungs and onto your clothes (which must be washed after one wearing).

India is a good review of economics 101. For example, this morning I laid in bed, unwilling to go out into the damp, chilly air, and calculated how much I would pay for a hot, fresh cup of Sumatran roast from my favorite Eugene coffee shop. The result came out somewhere between $15-$20, which I then converted into an opportunity cost of four pints of good Oregon microbrew or 3.7 calzones from the Dough co.

Tick Season: My war with the wildlife continues

2008-11-05T21:12:00.000-08:00

I never thought I’d say this, but I miss the leeches. Now that the monsoons have passed, the weather has dried out, and a new pest is ruining my walks around the farm. Unlike leeches, however, these menaces attack without notice, only inflicting real pain approximately twelve hours later.
I liked the leeches because they’re so blatant, like a tank rolling through your village. With a little practice, you can feel their cold, slimy approach on your feet and become an expert at flicking them away before they do any real harm. If they do bite, you get an unreasonable amount of blood that is sure to elicit sympathy from anyone with you. Within a few days, the wound simply heals over with a bit of itching.
Ticks are like secret agents. They’re the jungle’s contract killers, moving without detection. You can happily frolic in the grass without consequence for hours, and only know you’ve been attacked when you find the red bumps on your stomach and thighs (for some reason, this area of the body is like veal to a tick). Even then, it’s easy to mistake the bite for that of the mosquito (nighttime air raiders). Only when you spot the pinprick-sized culprit just under your skin do you know you’ve been hit, and then there’s nothing you can do but claw at it like a junkie and wait for the itch to start.
A quick Wikipedia search proves my position: “According to Pliny the Elder, ticks are ‘the foulest and nastiest creatures that be.’” Although, like the other creatures that attack in the jungle, all they want is a little blood, some ticks can hang around for days on your skin, happily growing fat. Some people have allergic reactions and form welts around a bite. Luckily I just have the normal reaction of intense itching that lasts weeks.
I miss the leeches. They have personality, inching along frantically, feeling blindly with their little heads for a warm place to attach. When they do manage to bite and fill up with blood, they drop off after about twenty minutes. Then they’re even more comical, barely able to move, engorged and happy. Jungle kids play with them like other kids play with earthworms. And of course there are the medicinal applications; medieval as they may be, ticks have no such usefulness.
Ticks are just hateful. And there’s no time when this fact becomes more apparent than at three in the morning when the itch comes. You wake up scratching, and continue until your now fully-alert brain says it’s probably best to stop, although the bites demand otherwise. So you quit, throwing your hands above the covers, telling yourself it will pass.
It doesn’t pass. The itching turns to burning. The ticks demand your attention. And so you give it to them, turning on the light, removing all your clothes, and slowly picking at each bite until the culprit is gone. By then, you’re wide awake and angry as heck, without a leech to burn or a mosquito to satisfyingly squash against the wall.
I now declare jihad on ticks.

A random cultural note: Kanglish

2008-11-05T20:54:00.000-08:00

“Kanglish” is what I’ve been calling the interesting Kannada (local language of Karnataka) version of English that many have been using to communicate with me. It’s similar to “Hinglish”, the popular term for Hindi English. The following is a short glossary, which I’ll hopefully be adding to as I hear more.

Kanglish (and some Hinglish)

tank (n.) – A lake. “Behind the trees is a large tank. Many fishes.”

tanks (intj.) – Thanks. (“Tanks for coming.”)

homely (adj.) – Comfortable, at home. “Please make yourself homely.”

foreign (n) – A non-Indian person. (“Foreign! Foreign!”; used as a rallying cry to bring forth a hoard of schoolchildren to watch me walk down the street.)

adjust (v) – What you do when 13 people and two kids need to be transported in an 8-person car, when the scheduled power cuts are extended from 7 am to 2 pm and 7 pm to midnight every day, when there are two cups of rice and ten people, or when you’re holding a meeting in which only half the participants share a common language. (“We’ll adjust”; a common saying.)

suiting shirting (n, v) – Dressy western clothes, or the act of putting them on. (“Silks, saris, suitings shirtings sold here!”)

snap (n) – Photo. (“May we have a snap with you?”; Usually coming from a bold mother of six who will then herd the entire family, including cousins and passers-by into the shot and make her husband take the photo.)

Britisher (n) – Person from the United Kingdom, usually in the historical (colonial) sense. (“The Britishers built a huge fort on that hill.”) However, there are also the upper-class Indians who are more British than the Britishers, speaking with English accents that are simply, well, top-drawer. When they open their mouths, I expect them to excuse themselves for afternoon tea with the Queen before heading off for a jolly hunt.

tube light (n) – Somebody who is a bit slow to catch on, like a fluorescent bulb. (“That George W is a bit of a tube light, isn’t he?”)

At last, my journalism training is of some use...

2008-10-31T01:37:00.000-07:00

This article was actually accepted by TerraGreen, a small environmental journal based in India, so I've taken it down since it's now theirs (I believe I may even be getting paid). Hopefully one day there will be a link to post here, but so far it's slow in coming... Indian Standard Time.

Deepauli

2008-10-31T01:21:00.000-07:00

Check out the pictures!

The Hindu festival of lights, known as Diwali in other parts of the country, started off with a bang and quieted down from there. We’re at the farm for this major holiday after spending Monday and Tuesday at the office. The neighbors, who welcome any opportunities to scare the monkeys out of their areca trees, are lighting off fireworks at seven in the morning. Time for me to get up anyway.
In the kitchen, Sunita is already lighting the fire under the geezer, or wood-fired hot water heater. This is always quite a task because it’s so damp here, even newspaper must be coaxed into burning. But winter is moving in, it’s a chilly, misty morning, and hot water feels extra nice on days like this. Besides, it’s part of the pooja, or Deepauli ritual, to have a thorough scrub before moving on to the day’s other activities.
We have our baths (this is the common term, although dumping cups of water over yourself from a bucket feels more like a slow-paced shower to me) and head up to Mangu and Savithri’s house. Mangu is Sunita’s farmhand and since they live just a couple hundred feet away, it makes sense to combine activities. Besides, our biogas burner is malfunctioning (Again. There’s always plenty of gas but the stove itself always manages to break down). Since the central focus of Deepauli is on a midday feast, not having a stove is a hindrance.
As I clumsily grate coconut on the floor of Savithri’s kitchen, using a special round knife mounted on a board, Sunita toasts cashews in ghee (clarified butter that is to Indians what chocolate is to us) for paisa. Paisa is a pudding made from milk, molasses, vermicilli (a thin spaghetti-like pasta), and dried fruit and nuts. After that, I peel the turmeric roots, staining my fingers yellow. Between the red mosquito bites dotting my hands, the product of my night at the office when I forgot my repellant, and the new yellow tinge, I’m beginning to look like an Easter egg. Savithri and Mangu run around making flower and leaf garlands for the cows.
Deepauli is a three-day festival, each day focused on a different aspect of celebrations and rituals. Yesterday was the shopkeeper’s day, and they all hung the garlands in their stores, hired live musicians, and did pooja in their shops. Today is cow day, and it happens to fall on the day Sunita and I usually stay home from the office (the bumpy commute more than two times a week is too much). Plus, we’re on a farm, and that’s a great excuse to celebrate her four cows, who keep us in ample supplies of milk, yogurt, butter, ghee, buttermilk, and paneer cheese.
Around 1 pm, we all assemble at the cowshed. Savihtri has dusted white rangoli patterns on the dirt outside, accented with flowers. Sunita lights incense cones and a small brass lamp. Chanting quietly, she hangs mango leaves and holy basil (both sacred plants) on a line above the door, and rubs red kumkum powder and yellow turmeric on either side of the entrance.
Then the cow pooja begins. First, Mangu goes in and rubs the red and yellow powders on the cows’ foreheads. They’re already wearing their flower garlands and looking quite pretty. However, I get the distinct impression that they’d rather be out grazing, even though they’re curious about all the attention they’re suddenly getting. “Maybe there’s food involved,” I can almost here them telling each other. After the powder comes more flowers placed in the cavity behind their heads (these cows are significantly bonier than any American variety, though not skinny). Then Mangu waves the brass lamp around their heads, bathes their feet in water, and douses them with fresh coconut milk. Savithri follows with more kumkum.
Then, much to the cows’ relief, comes the food. The other three haven’t eaten all day (I only lasted till 10), because the pooja requires first offering the food to the cows before eating yourself. From a silver tray, we hand them bananas, apples, and balls of sweets. Then Savithri brings out the lunch itself: full meals laid out on banana leaves. The first cow seems more interested in the leaf than the rice, chutney and other dishes on top of it, but the others politely lick up the people food before devouring the leaves.
After that, spurred by the delicious smells now wafting from the cowshed, we apply the kumkum to our own foreheads and head inside to eat.
While I was grating and peeling, Savithri had prepared a feast. One by one, she ladles out her concoctions on my leaf. Rice topped with sambar, a liquidy, spicy dish with large chunks of colocasia root (a hearty tuber). A dahl made from lentils. Fried papads, which resemble large potato chips but are made from rice flour. A steamed rice flour loaf called carbu sliced into thick round pieces, topped with ghee. Cucumber and coconut salad. And, finally, a delicious turmeric chutney, sweet and spicy and lightly coconut-y at the same time. Of course, for dessert there is paisa. All of the food and flavors are specific to this area – Karnataka’s cuisine varies from one village to the next due to both their isolation and the particular vegetables and grains that are grown there. Colocasia and turmeric, for example, are found in every garden, so it’s not coincidence that they’re considered vital to the local Deepauli feast.
Having sampled everything thoroughly (the chutney three or four times), I am barely able to roll myself back down the path to Sunita’s house. The only thing to do now is take a long nap in the afternoon heat.

Mushtaq, the driver, is scheduled to come at 4:00 to take us on a few Deepauli visits. A bit like trick-or-treaters, Indians on Deepauli go around and visit all their friends and neighbors, bringing snacks from home and receiving even more snacks at every house. There’s even a sort of costuming involved – tradition states that everyone should wear new clothes. In anticipation of this, I’d happily gone to a mall in Bangalore (a surreal experience after a month on a farm) and purchased a new skirt and blouse. Unfortunately, I’d had no clean clothes upon arriving back at Sunita’s after the Bangalore trip, and needed something nice to wear for a festival in Yellapur. So I busted out the new clothes, assuming that they would stay new enough for Deepauli. It turned out to be a particularly rough day not only because the blouse spontaneously decided to lose a couple of its buttons (luckily most sari-wearers have plenty of safety pins), but also with the unexpected challenges of some intestinal trouble, village boys attempting to take pictures of me with camera phones, and a couple of conversion-bent Hindu men.
Anyway, all this meant that (since I am a great procrastinator) I would need to cut my nap short to sew my buttons back on and make sure that this time, there would be no wardrobe malfunctions in front of traditional women dressed in their finest.
When all has been secured, Sunita and I walk up the road to meet Mushtaq at the gate, carrying a large stalk of bananas and a basket with apples, oranges and containers of leftover paisa (Sunita cooked enough for a hungry elephant).
The first stop is Manorama’s. She’s a very active member of Vanastree and also one of Sunita’s good friends. Although she doesn’t speak much English, I’ve found it impossible not to like her – she’s incredibly multi-talented, churning out dried bananas for sale, running a seed exchange group, managing her farm and home garden, and of course working in the Vanastree office a couple of days out of the week. Going back to her house always reminds me of my second day in India, when she’d shown up with her son, Vivek, at Sunita’s needing a photographer. She was taking a class in environmental journalism and they were asking her to provide pictures for a story she was writing on her dried banana business. With my new camera and new-intern enthusiasm, it seemed I was the person for the job. They squeezed me on to the back of the family motorcycle, which was pretty thrilling for me, considering it was probably my second or third motorcycle ride, ever, and of course the first with no helmet and two other passengers, whizzing down bumpy narrow roads in the jungle. At her house, Manorama introduced me to her daughter and made us dosas, the paper-thin rice flour pancakes dipped in molasses and ghee that I’ve come to consider probably the tastiest food in the country. Her dosas still stand out in my mind as the best, maybe just because they were the first, or maybe because I want to believe that the quality of the person determines the quality of the dosa.
I was delighted then, when Manorama ushered us into the kitchen for special Deepauli dosas, which include ground cucumber and colocasia in the batter. It was only after I’d automatically settled down on the floor and dug in with my fingers that I realized how far I’ve come – that first dosa meal, I was very confused as to why she was putting food on leaves on the floor in front of a polished wooden board with little legs. Luckily her daughter sat down on her board first and didn’t laugh when I said “Ohhhhhh...”
Manorama’s Deepauli dosas were also delicious, crisp and hot, although the lingering fullness from the afternoon meal kept me from having more than a couple. We finished off with chai and then said goodbye, begging off offers for more food.
The next stop is a woman named Ganga’s place. She lives four kilometers from the village, a distance she covers regularly by foot carrying her vegetables to sell at the market. She’s also a member of Vanastree, and one of the things they recently received funding for was installing a phone at her house, which adds some degree of convenience to her life. In return, she raises tree saplings and sells them to locals, although the land she’s using is ironically encroached forest land itself. Basically, this means the land is officially under the Karnataka Forest Department’s jurisdiction and meant as a tree preserve, although in practice the department is so involved in illegal logging operations it would be difficult to say they play any role in conservation. Of course, if you haven’t bribed your local official lately, they’re quick to jump down your throat as soon as you take down a tree that’s in your way. There’s a new law in congress now, the Forest Rights Act, that could make it easier to persecute encroachers like Ganga. Tribal-rights organizations and environmental groups are working to amend it it, saying the officials will only go after these smaller cases and ignore the bigger issues, such as government-approved hydroelectric dams that swallow up hundreds of acres of forests.
I have to duck to enter the doorway of Ganga’s small house. They don’t have electricity all the way out here, so it’s a bit cavelike inside. A dog is tied up by the window on the far side, distracting me long enough to miss seeing a man sitting on the floor to my left. Sunita introduces him as Ganga’s husband. He’d broken both his legs harvesting areca nuts from the tall, pole-like trees a few months ago. A traditional Ayurvedic bone setter in the village set his legs, and he’s now able to walk around, but must find new employment.
Ganga sits us down and puts the red kumkum powder on our foreheads. Then she and Sunita begin discussing in Kannada an upcoming student workshop we’re hosting, and I tune out to take in the view visible through the side doorway. The house is on a hillside and most of it has been cleared, allowing for expansive views of the valley below, only obstructed by a single pair of red underpants hanging on the line in the yard. The sun is just beginning to set behind the leafy, crooked-branched trees. Despite the day-to-day difficulties, I get the feeling that life is fairly peaceful out here.
We’re spared from having to stuff in more Deepauli treats, because Ganga has actually listened to our protestations and packed us a little to-go bag of food. We break off Mushtaq’s conversation with Ganga’s son and climb back in the van. Heading back into the village, we note that most houses have lights on and have a mini celebration – we’ve been experiencing scheduled power cuts every evening for the past week. Apparently this is a little festival-of-lights gift from the electric authorities.
The third visit is at Radhka’s, who I spent a weekend with earlier this month. Compared to Ganga, she’s very well off, with a large, well-lit house near the village. But she’s also another person I really like – easy to laugh, pleasantly plump, and a devout Hindu. She explains to us the story of Deepauli, and Sunita translates: Essentially, Deepauli is the celebration of the triumph of good over evil. Legend has it that the lord Vishnu, the destroyer, had banished the good demon Bali to the underworld by stepping on his head. On the third day of Deepauli (which is today) Bali makes his triumphant return, restoring balance to the world.
Radhka gives us more blessings and powder, and then we’re off to our last stop, the house of a couple I’ve met only briefly before. It’s completely dark now, and the stars are out in full force. In fact, the sky is thick with them, to the point where it seems more silver than black. Those lights are reflected in the pathway leading up to the house we’re visiting, where they’ve placed oil lamps (small dishes filled with oil and a wick) along the edges. The fancy rangoli pattern is also surrounded by candles. The orangey glow of the lights reminds me a bit of Halloween, and I realized my recent sadness at missing this holiday at home was premature – we’ve practically recreated it here.
After a short visit and some more snacks (deep-fried bananas, very good), we head for home. It’s time to light our own lamps.
Deepauli lamps are more than a representation of the good that is supposed to prevail around this time; they are also lit in reverence to the people you’re thinking of and wish could be celebrating the holiday with you. Sunita, who’s a transplant from Bangalore with many friends too busy to come visit, has a lot of lamps to light. After nearly two months away from home, so do I. One by one, we add tiny flames to her porch, until it looks like a cruise ship at night. The last lamp is set on the holy basil shrine at the edge of the small lawn. We sit on the porch for a long time, listening to the chorus of cicadas and frogs, eating fruit and thinking our own thoughts. Then the lights all start blurring into blob of sleepiness and I know it’s time for bed.

One-Ant Revolution?

2008-10-28T02:06:00.000-07:00

“Cooking the Navadarshanam Way”, it turns out, means using a minimum of oils and refined sugar to prepare food. Two trustees are vegan, they all fast often, and everybody loves raw foods. Luckily, they’ve mastered the art of healthy cooking and most of the dishes were very good. Fresh salads of coconut, cucumber and herbs, spicy curries served over red rice, vegan cakes and herbal teas kept me pretty well fed.
As much as I enjoyed just cooking and eating, I wanted to see how and where Navadarshanam was getting all this food. My experiences with Vanastree so far have comprised sort of a crash-course in small-scale agriculture and food politics, so Navadarshanam’s food production system promised to be another piece of this neverending puzzle. To my initial disappointment, however I found that they don’t have such a system per say. No matter how much I pestered Ananthu, the one who might be loosely be labeled as “in charge” of the place, I couldn’t get a precise explanation for this. Eventually, however, I figured out the reasons seem to be two-fold: the first is a series of “problems” in growing crops that he alluded to (I assume this has to do with the typical difficulties of weather, soil and animal invaders), and the second is the dedication to “natural farming” that one of the founding trustees, Pratab, brought with him.
A few decades ago, Pratab was living in a farming commune when he read Masanoba Fukuoka’s The One-Straw Revolution, which I quoted in a previous post. Fukuoka basically invented natural farming (though, again, it draws on previous traditions) in Japan, and his ideas have been extremely influential to the organic farming movement. Basically, natural farming asks how to reduce the inputs, both of labor and materials, involved in growing food. The answer he came up with was to eliminate everything – don’t weed, don’t apply compost, don’t till, and certainly don’t use synthetic pesticides, herbicides or fertilizer. Most of his experiments had to do with rice, and the amazing thing is, it actually worked. In fact, he recorded higher yields than conventionally grown rice, and of course did a lot less work than those farmers. He also applied this method to growing vegetables: scattering seeds, seeing what came up, and then harvesting it, leaving an little of the crop to reseed for next year. Seeing success in that as well, he opened up a whole school and his books became bestsellers.
Of course, something that works on one mountainside in Japan won’t necessarily work everywhere else, but the idea has been applied in many areas, most recently resulting in the “no-till” agriculture movement popular in the US. And when Pratab read the book, he shared it with his fellow commune members, who then decided to try natural farming on their land. They lived this way (without starving!) for quite a few years, and Pratab became a fervent believer in the method. He describes this whole experience in the introduction to One Straw Revolution that he later wrote.
Pratab went on to become a professor of anthropology at Harvard and wrote many books of his own, but now he lives in Bangalore with a second home at Navadarshanam. In fact, he led my group on a couple of walks, talking quietly the whole way about everything from the benefits of eating ants (which he also demonstrated) to the dangers of industrial agriculture. A sturdy, ever-smiling old fellow, Pratab will talk your ear off if you let him, which many of us did because everything he said seemed somehow steeped in wisdom, although it could have just been his reputation getting ahead of him or the power of the thick white beard.
Still a highly dedicated follower of natural farming and plant-based diets, Pratab has encouraged the Navadarshanam leaders toward a similar lifestyle. After reforesting the 100 acres that they’d invested in, the trustees found that they could harvest quite a bit of food from wild plants. They haven’t gone so far as to include ants in the official menu (and Pratab prefers to pick them fresh off the cow dung anyway), but most of the greens and some other vegetables are found in the forest. Other than that, they get most of their food from outside sources, but plans are in the works to try (again) with a vegetable garden based on biodynamics, a whole other system that I have a very limited understanding of. This effort is what finally reassured me that Navadarshanam’s goals might just be practical and that when the eventual apocalypse does come, their little commune might not be a bad place to be.

So I left Navadarshanam a little sadly, wishing I had more time to hang out in Ananthu’s library, tease Tania and Manuel about their rotis, and listen to Pratab rant in his quiet way about society and the way we eat. Instead, the international team crammed in a car with and a generous family from Bangalore who was heading back there. As the clamoring city abruptly rose around us, I put my pastoral dreams behind me and instead focused on the fried foods and sugary desserts that would soon be confounding my digestive system but delighting my taste buds.

Navadarshanam, pt 2

2008-10-27T02:53:00.000-07:00

The next three days provide a comfortable routine of food preparations, walks, and conversations with fellow workshoppers and Navadarshanam trustees, which slowly erodes my cynicism and changes my perspective from looking at what the place isn’t to appreciating it for what it is: an apolitical space for people with very specific ideals to live out a model lifestyle.
The most important insight I gained at ND came from observing the lack of political spin that surrounds their philosophies. I think this comes as a result of approaching life from a strictly spiritual perspective, one based in traditional Eastern schools of thought advocating unselfishness and living within one’s means. From this, the trustees arrived at five practical applications for their living space: reforestation of the bare land; energy and water independence; renewable building materials (mud bricks and wood); natural farming; and eating healthfully. They don’t really advertise themselves as living “sustainably” or having an “alternative lifestyle” – they’re not fighting the commercial world or pushing changes on anybody. So there’s nothing to be political about. Also, their practices aren’t really new, as traditional Indians have done these things (minus the high-tech solar panels) for centuries. Hinduism, like many religions, advocates simplicity and awareness of people and beings other than oneself.
This cultural context might explain why most of the workshop participants seemed fairly mainstream*. They weren’t interested in going off the grid or changing the government’s policy toward organic farmers, they just wanted to learn how to cook good food, and the setting happened to be one in which they picked up a lot of “environmental” messages as well. But in India, unlike in the US, people can dip into these kinds of “unconventional” areas without being labeled with the glorious spectrum of labels we have for anything different – from “environmentalist” to “hippie” – simply because going back to the land in this way is anything but unconventional. Globalization only started (in its current form) a couple of decades ago. While Americans would have to go back to colonial days to reach the minimal level of impact places like ND strive toward, Indians only need look to the nearest village, where people regularly gather “biofuel” (wood) and practice “green architecture” (mud and thatch huts, which are always cool inside). As a result, buying organic food (which is not prohibitively expensive here, if you can find it) or trying to conserve electricity is not a political statement like it is often made to be in the US, it’s simply an extension of being a rational, future-minded person.

*With the exception of my fellow “international team” members – Tania and Manuel from Colombia who shared my inability to fry a proper roti or appreciate pickled lemon rind.

Navadarshanam, part 1

2008-10-25T22:29:00.000-07:00

When Sunita puts me in the hired car that is to take me to my next stop, Navadarshanam, I’m still in the food-politics doldrums of the GREEN Foundation conference. Adding to my frustrations was the fact that the panel on “Women and Access to Markets”, during which was Vanastree’s presentation, had been cut short due to other panels (which didn’t address gender issues) taking up more than their allotted time, and then the next speaker (another man) droned on for twenty minutes longer than he should have. At home, I wouldn’t put much emotional stock in such things, but in this country, where women are only beginning to get a toehold in any sort of public sphere, it was an affront, especially since their role in preserving traditional farming practices is huge. Because women normally take on the responsibility of feeding families, it is they who preserve the most nutritious and high-yielding varieties of crops, and they who are hit first when food is short.
Anyway, the two-hour car ride to Navadarshanam, most of it through the city, ends up leaving me little time to regain my composure, chock-full as it is of things to gape at. Roads and overpasses are being built an astonishing rate to keep up with the population growth, and old buildings are bought up, knocked down and replaced with asphalt in a matter of weeks. There’s more traffic than I could have imagined, and it’s still a holiday. I see corporate buildings with inexplicable architecture (on the way back a couple of days later, we were unable to decide whether one was supposed to be a spaceship or an ocean liner) across the street from slums. People swarm everywhere, some tapping at the window with open mouths and crying babies.
Finally, we reach the outskirts and drive through some agricultural land. Soon we cross over into Tamil Nadu (the next state), and drive though a couple of small villages with slightly happier-looking kids running around skinny and barefoot. Old men sit on stoops and watch the car go by.
Still, arriving at Navadarshanam is like landing on a different planet. We go through a gate, park, and the driver drops my bag by one of the three buildings there. Surrounded as we are by huge trees, I can’t see much beyond that, but there are colorful murals on the walls and all seems clean and orderly. Presently, a woman comes up the path and directs me toward another building, where my workshop is beginning. I’m here to spend three days learning how to cook “the Navadarshanam way”. Not sure what the “way” is but the cooking part had sounded like fun, so I signed up.

At the workshop session, which I slip into a few minutes late, all the fifteen or so participants are introduce themselves in turn. Most are housewives from Bangalore, but a couple brought their husbands and then there are some others who, like me, just happened upon the place. After the intros, Ananthu, the founding trustee, talks a little about what Navadarshanam actually is.
Eighteen years ago, Ananthu and a few friends decided to leave civilization for a place of their own where they could pursue a sustainable livelihood and apply their spiritual philosophies more actively to their lives. Basically, ND operates as a trust in which all the half-dozen or so trustees share resources (from tools to food) and live harmoniously on the same land – 115 acres of it, most of which has been left as wild land.
Well, ok, says my Bangalore-hardened brain when Ananthu wraps up. That all sounds well and good, but we all know communism doesn’t work on a large scale, so what are they trying to prove? And what are they doing to help the villagers just outside their gates? With all this land, shouldn’t they be exporting food? What good are all these trees to anybody? Who cares about spiritual ideals when there are hungry people?

I don’t push for answers at that time. I haven’t yet lost all patience, and I do have three days to interrogate, so I eat my dinner quietly and allow myself to be calmed slightly by evening prayers – chanted beautifully over a chorus of frogs and cicadas.
That night, before falling asleep, I read a little in the book I’m working on, Wendell Berry’s The Gift of Good Land. He writes about attending a conference about hunger and food politics, in which a bunch of academics debated policies abstractly, without firsthand knowledge of the very issue they’re discussing or any real grasp on its root causes (ie, poor land management). I was struck by how similar his feeling of being worn out and frustrated was to mine.
After the conference, however, Berry goes out to interview some farmers, and even though the situation is dismal (poverty and water scarcity), he feels better about being there than in the city amongst the “experts”. The following lines were the first thing since leaving the NIAS campus that made me feel slightly better:

“In the presence of the problems intelligence encounters details. It is like stepping from slippery footing onto dry rock. The relief if physical. And it is hopeful, too, for it is in the presence of the problems that their solutions will be found. Solutions have perhaps the most furtive habits of any creatures; they reveal themselves very hesitantly in artificial light, and never enter air-conditioned rooms.” (from “Three Ways of Farming in the Southwest”)

I’m not in the presence of problems yet, but there are details to be found here. Whether they bring forth any solutions remains to be seen.

[Pictures of Navadarshanam here.]

Not just blogging...

2008-10-21T00:19:00.000-07:00

See? I actually do real work around here.

Food fights in Bangalore

2008-10-20T21:52:00.000-07:00

[This post is from two weeks ago, when I set off for Bangalore for some travels in the area. Bangalore is the capital of Karnataka, home to at minimum 7 million people and growing. It also hosts number of NGOs and other groups working directly and indirectly on sustainable agriculture and development issues. My first stop is a two-day seminar on small-scale agriculture in the city itself.]

The journey from Sirsi to Bangalore – despite taking ten hours over bumpy roads – was actually quite comfortable thanks to the wonder of sleeper busses. Like sleeper cars in trains, these public transportation marvels feature narrow bunks surrounded by thick curtains, behind which the traveler may pass out for the duration of the trip. Within an hour of boarding, the financial news (which I have a sick fascination with, like a car accident) coming through my ipod lulled me into dreams of credit default swaps and naked short sellers.

The only unnerving part of the trip was the “rest stop” at 2 AM– most of the travelers were men, forcing me and my full bladder to dash across the darkened highway alone, flashlight in hand, to find a bush, all the time trying not to imagine the many ways I might die or, worse, miss the bus as it pulled away. In record time, I took care of business and climbed back into my bunk, none the worse for the wear.

When we reach Bangalore, it’s the tail end of a ten-day long holiday, so traffic isn’t bad. It’s raining, though, making the sight of the abject poverty – families living under tarps, mothers with young babies begging for change, streetside vendor after vendor selling the same unwanted wares – all the more depressing. It’s my first real encounter with a major Indian city, and the Malnad region where I work is by comparison very well off. I’ve come across probably two beggars in Sirsi. To the best of my ability, I put up a mental wall and worried instead about how I would locate Sunita in this enormous place.

Luckily, the conductor had assumed correctly that I would not recognize my stop name when he called it out, and jabs a finger in my direction when I am to get off. I stumble down the aisle with my overstuffed backpack and Sunita is waiting just outside, as promised (she’s already been here in Bangalore a couple of days). We get in the rick and zoom off to the NIAS campus.

On the way, Sunita explains that NIAS stands for the National Institute of Advanced Studies, one of the more prestigious universities in the country. It was actually founded by the same man who created the Tata empire,

India

’s largest corporation. Tata is similar to GE in the states, with holdings in auto manufacturing, housing, media and just about anything else they can think of. The seminar Sunita and I are attending is entitled “Farmers, Livelihood and Trade” and is focused primarily on increasing the market share of small organic farmers. It’s actually being put on by GREEN (Genetic Resource Ecology Energy Nutrition) Foundation, one of the major agricultural NGOs in the area.

On arrival, we are given one of the guest rooms that NAIS has set aside for conferences such as these. In the walled-off campus with security guards at the gates, I can almost pretend I’m back in Sirsi. The biggest difference is nobody stares at me here – they’re all used to foreigners.

At the elaborate breakfast provided, I meet Dr. Vanaja Ramprasad, the surprisingly approachable and grandmotherly director of Green Foundation, who has been dedicated to improving the livelihoods of farmers for decades. An hour later (only half an hour behind schedule!) the conference kicks off with a lecture by Devinda Sharma, a journalist and expert on genetically modified crops and agro-politics. I’ve been given the intern’s honor of taking notes for the next two days, but I would have been riveted anyway: this guy is pretty incensed about the state of agriculture and

India

’s farmers.

Most of Sharma’s talk relates to the WTO and its liberalization of international markets. Pre-WTO, India’s GDP was 25% of the world total. It was a net exporter of food, meaning it shipped out more spices, grains and produce than it bought from other nations, and it didn’t rely on any of them to feed its population. 80% of Indians were employed in the agricultural sector.

Under the WTO, however, the balance began to shift. Heavily subsidized grains from the US began flooding the market, and all the nations who couldn’t compete were told to focus their agricultural production on exports to keep up.

The result was predictable. As Sharma put it, “Importing food is importing unemployment.” Today, India is headed down a path to attain a similar socioeconomic profile to the US, where less than 1% of the population (and dropping) grow agricultural products and a farmer living in Iowa would starve if his local grocery store suddenly ran out of supplies (due to, say, a fuel shortage) because he’s surrounded by a thousand miles of inedible corn and soybeans. The only difference is, there are simply too many people and not enough land for this system to work in

India

. Somewhere, something or somebody has to give, and I saw those somebodies outside my bus window on the way here. Most of those millions of homeless people are refugees from villages, where they’ve given up on the agricultural life because they can’t afford it (and because it doesn’t provide the glitzy lifestyle they’ve been watching on TV). People in the cities prefer cheap white rice and imported wheat, and crops grown for export must meet standards only attained through chemical inputs (large size, consistent color and texture, perfect skins). Farming using chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides requires economies of scale unattainable by the average small land owner.

As Sharma and the other speakers at the seminar explained, organic farming is supposed to be the antidote to all this mess, but it lacks the government backing to really make it work. Commercial, “conventional” agriculture (using chemical inputs) is, of course, subsidized ever since the WTO arrived, which makes it very competitive in domestic and international markets. Organic farmers receive no such help. In fact, they have to pay for organic certification by often-sketchy certification boards, who in classic Indian style create a tangled network of bureaucratic procedures and paperwork. The farmers, on the other hand, are usually not the corporate-world dropouts who usually take up organic farming in the States. They’re simply trying to sell produce that has been grown the only way they’ve known how for centuries – without outside inputs and with minimal impact on the land.

Although I’ve been studying this stuff for a while, hearing it again and talking to the people who are running against these problems in real life left me feeling disheartened. The second day involved more group discussions with farmers and other interested parties, including one incident that was sort of the highlight for me: an organic farmers vs. biochemical company representative throwdown. This fellow actually had the gall to get up in front of the entire room of 100-some organic farmers and declare that organic food doesn’t taste as good as conventional. In true Indian fashion, he was quite straightforwardly told to shove it. We didn’t see him the rest of the conference.

Despite that happy episode, I left the conference feeling frustrated and a bit hopeless, not only because of what I’d heard, but also because of what I hadn’t heard – an actual solution or at least a plan. Sure, in our air-conditioned haven with meals provided every four hours, we’d come up with a list of “policy recommendations” for the Indian government. But after witnessing during the last few weeks the clumsiness of India’s bureaucracy and the ease with which it is ignored by most citizens, I have my doubts that policy recommendations will have any impact at all. In fact, many of the policies we’d recommended – like setting up farmer-owned organic brands and providing subsidies to organic farmers – already exist, they just aren’t working. While it’s nice to have neat summations of the problems, their solutions, I suspect, are hiding somewhere else.

Next stop: Navadarshanam, a collective just outside Bangalore that’s too natural for organics, where I’ll learn how to find the best ants for eating and become part of the best International Team since the Special Olympics.

Pictures

2008-10-16T01:10:00.000-07:00

From Radhakrishna and Charaka

Radhakrishna (the real Radhakrishna) + a visit to a textile cooperative
Sirsi and the Vanastree office
Pretty flowers

A concise history of agriculture (5000 BCE – present)

2008-10-16T01:06:00.000-07:00

[Based on trips to farms across the region and discussions with experts on food politics of various degrees of irrationality, I've formulated the following easy-to-use historical guide. Accuracy not guaranteed.]

Pre-agriculture (the hunter-gatherers): Hey, those grains growing in the field are pretty good. Let’s pick up a whole bunch of them and then we’ll have more food. (Unknown number of grain varieties available.)

Cultivation (the farmers): Hey, let’s plant a bunch of one grain on the field, flood it with water to drown the plants we don’t want, and spread animal dung over the whole thing. Then we’ll have more food! (upwards of 50,000 rice varieties developed.)

The Green Revolution (the Western scientists): Hey, you farmers plant this hybrid rice and use our chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. Then you’ll have more food to give us! (6 varieties bred and sold.)

The Second Greed Revolution (the geneticists): Hey, since you now have a larger population than you can feed using hybrid rice, plant this genetically modified rice instead! Just don’t keep the seeds because we have an intellectual property right. Then you’ll have more food and we’ll get more of the cash crops you’re growing instead!

The Organic Movement (the Western backlash): Screw that. I know what, let’s plant a bunch of one grain on the field, flood it with water to drown the plants we don’t want, and spread animal dung over the whole thing. Then we can sell it at a high price to all the ex-farmers living in the city! (20,000 rice varieties remain to work with.)

Post-agriculture (the no-till enthusiasts): We shouldn’t have even been eating and cultivating grains in the first place. Let’s gather only what grows in the wild. Who needs more food?

Returning to the Source

2008-10-10T04:03:00.000-07:00

I found the following quote in one of the many organic agriculture-related books I’ve been reading, and thought that since I’m not able to update my blog often this month, all you readers out there in blogland could just chew on this:

“It seems that the limit of scientific development has been reached, misgivings have begun to be felt, and the time for reappraisal has arrived. That which was viewed as primitive and backward is now unexpectedly seen to be far ahead of modern science...
To the extent that people separate themselves from nature, they spin out further and further from the center. At the same time, a centripetal effect asserts itself and the desire to return to nature arises. But if people merely become caught up in reacting, moving to the left or to the right, depending on conditions, the result is only more activity. The non-moving point of origin, which lies outside the realm of relativity, is passed over, unnoticed. I believe that even “returning-to-nature” and anti-pollution activities, no matter how commendable, are not moving toward a genuine solution if they are carried out solely in reaction to the overdevelopment of the present age.”
–Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution

Spelling Lessons from Krishna

2008-10-08T04:02:00.000-07:00

My second weekend homestay is to take place at the home of a farmer-turned-artist who is a friend of Sunita, the woman I’m working and living with during my three-month internship. She makes the arrangements that Friday and, after finding the right bus, I’m only two skull-rattling hours away from a little weekend relaxation. Luckily, I get a seat, and enjoy a stimulating conversation with two young schoolboys who quiz me on my spelling, finding my American method of spelling words like “color” and “favorite” absolutely hilarious.
When I finally get off the bus in the city of Sagar, it’s nearly dark. I approach the row of rickshaw drivers at the bus stop, clutching the piece of paper Sunita gave me with my host’s address and phone number. I tell the nearest driver where I want to go: Radhakrishna’s house in a nearby village called Banghadde. Houses don’t have numbers here, and streets rarely have names, but Sunita told me everyone here knows where this house is. Radhakrishna is an artist of some local fame and one of the prominent landowners in his village.
We take off down the tree-lined avenue, going past a giant shrine featuring lions’ heads, gods, goddesses and various other brightly colored carvings. The streets are packed with vendors, women with baskets on their heads, dirty kids, bicycles, motorbikes, trucks and automobiles. After a few minutes, we pull up in front of a fenced-off building at the outskirts of town. Sunita had told me the village I was headed to is a few kilometers away from Sagar, but I forget that fact for the moment, excited by the fact that I see a sign, written in English, announcing this as the place of Shri Ramakrishna. I pay off the driver, extract my backpack and camera bag from the back of the rickshaw, and head toward the gate.
A bunch of young men are milling around the entrance to Shri Ramakrishna’s. I hang back, uncertain of how to best make my presence known, until one notices me and beckons me into the covered porch. He pulls me up a plastic chair behind a table and urges me to sit down. Then he leans over the table, and the interrogation begins.
“From where do you come? What is your business here? Who are you?” Somehow, this doesn’t feel right. I try to explain that I’m a guest of Radhakrishna for the weekend and if I could just talk to him everything will be ok. Nothing seems to get through.
Finally, I’m ushered into a small office in a room off the porch. Inside, there are two desks; behind one sits a middle-aged man with intense dark brown eyes. Between his eyes there’s a bright red dot, signifying religious faith. He wears a powder-blue shirt with a funny short collar, and his hair and mustache are neatly trimmed. I take a seat across from him. The blue walls lit by fluorescent bulbs glare down at me. Behind the desk is a framed black and white photo of a guru, hung with strands of plastic flowers and beads.

“Who?” The man behind the desk asks when I tell him my weekend host’s name.
“I’m staying here this weekend,” I insist. When would they stop this rigmarole and take me to my room?
“You can’t stay here, madam,” the man informs me. “Our rooms are for students only.”
Much back and forth arguing ensues. All his words sound like they’re spoken through a large potato lodged at the back of his mouth, and according to him, my English is equally awful. Indians have a way of integrating English words into their native language, and when faced with a foreigner, they simply mash together all the English words they know and leave out or mumble the intervening ones. The result is, at best, difficult to follow. Of course, it doesn’t help that my accent is something they’ve never encountered before – Sagar is not a city that tourists usually find.
Eventually, our semblance of conversation unravels our mutual confusion. It turns out that I am speaking to the director of Shri Ramakrishna Residential School, an ashram for boys. The man whom I’ve utterly befuddled is Thimmappa, the director of the school. Apparently, the rickshaw driver thought Ramakrishna is close enough to Radhakrishna and dumped me here. In my excitement, I hadn’t noticed the difference in spelling either. Maybe those boys on the bus would have. A sense of panic begins to rise in my throat.
Luckily, Thimmappa finds me amusing, if somewhat of an encumbrance. He can’t host me at the ashram, but neither will he hear of my ridiculous schemes to leave, find another rickshaw, and travel to Banghadde at this late hour. It is now about seven in the evening, but according to him, it’s a dangerous trip fraught with unknown danger for a young female traveling alone – the least of which may be tigers and rickshaw accidents.
One cultural trait of urban Indians I’m swiftly discovering is that they have an intense fear of forests, darkness and unknown rural stretches. So no matter how many ways I try to insist, Thimmappa does not believe there exists in this city one rickshaw driver with the courage to take me to my destination, or even somebody with a car I could hire. Tut-tutting at my foolishness, he calls in one of the half-dozen men who are now plastered to the doorway, staring at the alien in their midst, to bring me a cup of coffee. I tell him that I don’t want any (Indian coffee is usually awful, made by boiling instant coffee, milk and tons of sugar) but I’m swiftly realizing I’m not in control of the situation. Thimmappa is already on the phone to the English teacher he’s decided I’ll be spending the night with. We can discuss the possibility of transport to Banghadde in the morning.
Thimmappa seems to think the situation is under control, but I have fears of my own. I’ve traveled before. I’ve been trained to stick to plans, avoid talking to strangers, and to mistrust unknown situations. My mind is made up: I don’t trust this place, I don’t trust Thimmappa, and I certainly don’t trust his English teacher. I need to get out.
I get firm with him, demanding that he call the real Radhakrishna, whose number is on the piece of paper that is suddenly my only lifeline. But when he calls, Radhakrishna is not home, and his daughter doesn’t speak English and is immune to my pleas to be rescued. I try calling Sunita, but she can’t help me at this point. Rickshaw drivers who don’t know their way around and overly hospitable ashram directors were not in our plan. But she seems calm, not understanding my desperation and panic. Why not just wait until the morning?
By the time the coffee arrives, my schedule has been reworked for me. The English teacher has been contacted and will be here in fifteen minutes, but as far as I could tell, no attempts were made to find a driver willing to take me to my homestay. I have now reached the pinnacle of internal rage and have to work to keep the desperation out of my voice. My coffee shakes in my hand. Somehow, the stubborn but placid man behind the desk has elicited a level of frustration in me previously only witnessed by algebra teachers and my parents when I was a teen. I feel like throwing the cup of boiling hot coffee at him. Who was he to tell me I couldn’t pay whoever I want to get me out of this godforsaken place? Why was I so stupid to get myself in this situation in the first place? Why do all Indians have such silly, identical names?

All there is to do now is wait. Thimmappa sits back in his chair and places the tips of his fingers together. He considers me, observes my frustration with slight amusement. I stare back defiantly. It’s awkwardly silent for a moment, but he isn’t gearing up for a fifteen-minute staring contest. He’s preparing a lecture.
He quietly gestures to the picture on the wall above him.
“Do you know who this is?”
“No,” I tell him. Who cares, I think to myself.
“This is Shri Ramakrishna.” Oh. The photo looks about fifty years old and the man pictured is no spring chicken. This guy isn’t having any weekend guests.
“In 1839,” he says, repeating the date for clarity, “he went to Amerika and brought respect to the Hindu religion. He did this with a speech. In which, he call all the Amerikans ‘brothers and sisters’.” He pauses to take a deep breath, overwhelmed by the significance of it all. “Brothers and sisters,” he continues. “With this, he convince the Amerikans.”
I slowly warm up to the story. It turns out this guy Ramakrishna is the one who introduced Hinduism to the US and set up a bunch of ashrams and community centers there. He had many followers, including the Beatles and some of the more influential American yogis.
“You see,” Thimmappa continues, “Hindu religion is like an ocean. All the religions are in it. However, all other religions are only rivers. But all lead to God. Many ways, one God.” He goes on like this for a while, not preaching but explaining.
As he talks, I begin to consider the possibility Thimmappa isn’t so bad after all. I relax slightly, calmed by the chanting prayers of the boys in the next room. The crowd by the door slowly loses interest, and my unshaken coffee develops the smooth skin of boiled milk.

Before I can make a conclusive reassessment of my situation, however, the English teacher arrives. She’s extremely nice and acts like having me stay the night would be the best thing since Ramakrishna went to Amerika. I’m all ready to follow her out the door when the phone on the desk rings. Thimmappa holds up a finger as he talks, so we wait. When he hangs up, he informs me that they’ve drummed up a rickshaw driver who thinks he can manage the scary drive to Banghadde. Apparently, someone had been working behind the scenes.
A minute later, the driver is there, and I’m given the option of staying in Sagar or going off with him. As much as I like the English teacher, I realize I can’t pass up the opportunity to get to Radhakrishna’s, where they’re expecting me. More than that, I’m embarrassed at having mistrusted the ashram people and refused their hospitality. I thank everyone and climb in the rickshaw, a bit sorry to be leaving what was suddenly a safe haven.
As we rumble off toward Banghadde, I get a chance to process the whole experience. It’s one of the many times during my trip to India that I’m forced to admit I have been totally, completely and foolishly wrong about something. While I’d been scoffing at the rickshaw drivers for their forest-phobia, my fear of Indians is just as unfounded. No matter how much I’ve prepared myself for it and expected it, not a single person I’ve encountered here has tried to rob me, abduct me, or even take advantage of my confusion. And the overly cautious, callous exterior I’ve fostered is not only useless, it’s made me extremely impolite in the face of traditional Indian hospitality. While my actions this evening could be completely rationalized by a sensible need to look out for myself, there are lessons here that go beyond spelling words. Mistrusting somebody just because they happen to be male or Indian is as unfair here as it would be back home.
We’re on the highway now, the dark forest whizzing by. I can see the lights of Banghadde ahead of us. Through my weariness and feelings of being completely overwhelmed, one thought shines through: to survive my travels, I must allow myself some naievete, a healthy does of innocence. It’s the one thing people everywhere tend to forget – that although some individuals can’t be trusted, there are even more out there who just want to help. After all, as Ramakrishna would put it, we are all brothers and sisters.

It all comes down to eyebrows

2008-10-06T03:59:00.000-07:00

[The weekend previous to the coast trip, Sunita arranged another homestay for me. This time it was with a farmer who is also somewhat famous regionally for his traditional mud art. I’ve posted pictures here and so won’t write a separate blog about that weekend itself.
What was even more interesting was the way there, so I’ve just typed up what I wrote down when I finally got to Radhakrishna’s.]

The voyage to my weekend homestay begins, as most of my adventures do here, with a bus ride.
As we idle in the Sirsi station, I sit gazing moodily out the window wondering how Sunita could be so confident I would get from Sirsi to the city of Sagar two hours away, then to Banghadde, a tiny village beyond there, with nothing but a slip of paper with my host’s address and my own nonexistent navigation skills. Rain muddies the window, turning the usual chaos outside into a brownish kaleidoscope of confusion.
Just before the bus starts moving, a mother and two little boys in school uniforms scramble on. The little boys lock their eyes on me from the time they first step foot on the aisle, and I shift my backpack to my lap to uncover one of the last available seats. When they reach my row in the back of the bus, they hang back awkwardly, unsure how to handle this – thing – that is between them and a comfortable ride. (Here, nobody just takes a seat, they always ask first, even when the bus is full.) Their mother gives them a prod forward and one of the little boys pipes up.
“Madam, who sits here?”
“Nobody. You sit here.” Cautiously, they climb on, and mom squeezes in across the aisle. I resume my brooding out the window, until I can no longer ignore the burning of four brown eyes into the back of my head. I turn to see what reminds me of two oversized baby birds in matching outfits straining upwards from a vinyl nest. I can’t help laughing a little bit, and this is all the encouragement they need. The boy closest to the aisle, obviously the brains behind the operation, whispers something in his brother’s ear. This one, the translator, looks at me and asks,
“Where are you going?”
“Sagar,” I say.
“And you come from Amerika?”
“Yes.” They’re thrilled.
“I like Amerika,” he says earnestly. His brother finally works up the nerve to speak and cuts him off.
“I like Bangalore.”
“I’ve never been to Bangalore,” I say, to shock and dismay from both my seatmates. Then suddenly the formalities are over.
“How do you spell ‘color’?” One demands. I tell him. Uproarious laughter ensues, echoing up and down the bus. A few people turn and look at me as if I’m from Mars.
“Nooooo, C-O-L-O-U-R!” They scream in unison. Whatever. I proceed to spell center and favorite for them, to more shrieks of glee at my complete ignorance of proper British English. When that gets old, their mom across the aisle has some questions, which the boys translate for me.
“In Amerika, the streets are very clean?” Reluctantly, I admit that yes, they are usually. How to explain to a third grader that our garbage is neatly hidden away in landfills, allowing us to produce more per capita than any other country on earth?
“And every house you have a dustbin and a bell?” I figure he’s talking about doorbells, which exist here too but only in newer homes. I tell them yes again.
After that, they examine with fascination my eyeglasses, not believing that I actually need them to see anything farther than two feet away, and my driver’s license, not understanding the concept of a certification to pilot a vehicle. Then, the conversation gradually deteriorates into babble about monkeys and arguments about the superiority of Bangalore over America.
They get off at a major stop, and as they wait in the aisle to disembark, the bolder of the two looks at me and points to his eyebrow.
“Black,” he says, the complete sentences of his relatively excellent English suddenly gone.
“Do I have something in my eyebrow?” I ask.
“Black,” he says again. “Your eyebrows – white.” I stop rubbing my lower forehead.
“Yeah,” I admit, “They’re pretty much white.” He cocks head, considering this. Then he seems to arrive at some philosophical conclusion about racial differences, shrugs his shoulders, and skips off down the aisle.