Recognition and remembering

On November 11th, the US will celebrate Veterans Day. I will put a flag out on the front porch as a big wave to all the Veteran’s out there and in recognition to their service.

I remember…

My Dad

I remember…

Great Uncle Harvey

I give recognition to my paternal Grandfather, whom I never met, for his service.

World War I

Do you hang out a flag on Veteran’s Day?

Sincerely, Emily

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Occupy Safeway

One sees these things coming. A venerable locally-owned brand is sold to a national chain, which then abandons it. Boom. Local ownership gone. Safeway, the grocery store chain (or more likely the holding company that owns Safeway), just axed Dominick’s in Chicago. They are closing dozens, for all I know hundreds, of neighborhood stores. I’m hoping that another local chain will reap the windfall, but think it’s more likely we’re going to end up with WalMarts filled with processed foods and a few bruised Chilean apples and e. coli-contaminated salad bags to keep Mrs. Obama and her corporate sponsors happy.

I say No. Here are my demands:

1. Only healthy junk food, with pictures of rain forests and bunnies so I know it’s safe
2. Fresh organic lettuce, sold in plastic bags, preferably pre-cut, because who has time.
3. No dirt– otherwise who KNOWS where that turnip has been
4. Healthy options at MacDonald’s. If you eat a salad with the Big Mac, I’m pretty sure it has fewer calories.
5. Have Maria teach me the proper pronunciation of “habanero” next time she comes to clean
6. All vegetables presented in faux wood bins, with real wicker baskets instead of shopping carts so I can pretend I’m at the Farmers Market, which is full of all these farmers, which can’t be sanitary
7. A special display with 14 different heirloom tomatoes (not 14 types–14 tomatoes) so I can say I’ve seen one. Make sure they cost $7 apiece so I can complain about how organic (sic) is too expensive
8. Candy in the checkout aisle. Because those nuts from Occupy Safeway are blocking access to the candy.
9. Support local farmers! Give them jobs as baggers, since their farms are all mortgaged to the hilt.

Originally posted on the Mahlzeit blog, October 21, 2011.

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Shanksville

What strikes one first about the site of the crash of Flight 93 is how remote it is. A reasonable drive from Pittsburgh, one of the largest metropolitan areas in the U.S., set among forested hills full of resorts and towns, the plane came down in the open fields of a former surface mine, safely removed from habitation.

Unless, as has been speculated, they were shot down where they would do the least damage, the hand of the god is the only explanation. The minute luck that planted them here, where only those on the plane could be hurt, is almost impossible to grasp.

Unlike nearby Gettysburg, where centuries of rain and sun, where replanting and plowing and growing have put the ghosts to rest, they still drift on the breeze in Shanksville.

I was there on a rainy weekday- perhaps 10 people were there. Prayer felt difficult, but I recited a psalm, and the kaddish, and yes, a Muslim prayer as well, inscribed on a scrap phonetically. I placed a pebble on the end of the monument (wondering why there were no pebbles there but mine), to mourn the suffering of the world that was highlighted by this terrible act, and to honor the terrible bravery of the passengers and crew who died.

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The unknown dead

I visited Gettysburg last week; something I’ve always wanted to do. The battlefields are somber but oddly unhaunted. The cemetery, on the other hand is the most haunted place I’ve ever been. The Civil War graves are arranged in concentric rings in the the center of smaller graveyards from subsequent wars upon wars upon wars. You can practically see the Union and Confederate soldiers facing them and screaming in despair, that their sacrifice did not end it.

***

The dead in soft sweeps
Name upon name in the green
thousands and thousands

All the unknown dead
Are waiting in the green grass
for God to name them

Unknown, unknowing
the nameless lost ones lie in rings.
Who will mourn them now?

Stone One forty three
Does your name still matter now?
The goddess knows you

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Sunday Post: Flower Power

Flower Power came onto the scene back in the late 1960’s and 70’s out in Berkley, California. It was a symbol of non-violence and passive resistance. Hippies embraced the idea and started colorful clothing with embroidered flowers and colors. Wearing flowers in their hair and handing out flowers, they became known as “flower children.”

***

Being a child of 1965, I (Sincerely, Emily) was old enough to remember some “Flower Power!” Right this moment, for me, Flower Power brings to mind pollination. (It also has me singing songs from the soundtrack from Forrest Gump) “To everything, turn… turn… turn. There is a season, turn… turn… turn” or “R E S P E C T. Find out what it means to me. R E S P E C T. Take care. TCB”  (TCB = Taking care of business)

***

Funny you should mention that Emily…only the other day I (Fran) reacquainted myself with “Flower Power” in the form of a fibreglass cow wearing gumboots! 😉

“YEAH Baby!” 😉

As Serendipity Farm is suffering the last throes of winter I had to hunt high and low for some flower material. These might be pretty to some folks but Forget-me-nots certainly live up to their name on Serendipity Farm…”WEEDS”! Just flowers in the wrong place 😉

This is a “Where’s Wally” flower

Who needs flowers when you have leaves like this?

I managed to take a few more flower images but I am saving them for Monday’s post…sorry guys, you will just have to take the bait and come see on Monday just what narf7 managed to find under all of the mud, flooded soil and windswept debris. Until then, I am officially envious beyond belief of all of you Northern Hemisphere full flowering summer folks…

***

Flower Power Central! Can you spot me (Alexandra) at the Independent Garden Center show in Chicago last week? (Thank you LaManda Joy for taking the photo!)

 ***

What does “Flower Power” mean to you?

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World Food Day Rant

I confess. When Michelle Obama was in Chicago a few months ago, and visited Walgreens, I stood in front of the television yelling at her.

Why was Michelle Obama, of all people, in Chicago-city of neighborhoods, home of the nation’s most diverse ethnic population, in the middle of the richest farmland in the world, and leader of the WW2 Victory Gardens movement-standing in some anonymous Walgreens, praising them for importing tomatoes from Chile.

Why was she not walking down Clark Street in Rogers Park, where there are probably 15 locally-owned mercados featuring produce raised locally, and run by families living in the neighborhood. Why was she not on Devon Avenue in the 40th ward, another strip of vibrant local economy? How about 57th Street in her own neighborhood, and home, until the big boxes shut it down, of the famous 57th Street Food Co-op? In Chicago “food desert” doesn’t mean no grocery stores– statutorily it means no big national chain stores. So you get the absurdity of the Albany Park “food desert” where there are at least 6 full service, locally-owned grocery stores within 5 blocks of the main intersection at Lawrence and Kedzie.

The solution to healthy food systems and urban vitality is not another vast parking lot, where private security will boot your car if you so much as step onto the sidewalk to mail a letter, but small, locally owned grocery stores, with sensible inspection protocols, and family management.

After the ’68 riots, Chicago let its local economies die. Where once there were dozens of family businesses keeping the neighborhoods, especially the African-American neighborhoods alive, a decades-long shibboleth has been sold us, teaching us that “business” happens on Wall Street or LaSalle Street, over-regulating small businesses while letting the big guys get away with murder and the family silver, and selling our own livelihoods back to us in Big Boxes stocked with the fruits of foreign slave labor. We’ve been spoon fed the lie that a “small business” is someone with 5 million dollars in annual sales, and 250 employees. That’s not a “small business.” A small business is the corner store (NOT the 7-11, but the old-fashioned Mr. Gower-type of store), or the local nfp animal rescue, or the neighborhood clinic.

Once “business” is what your grandpa did, in his shop around the corner from his house, or downstairs from his apartment. You worked there on the weekends and after school, learning how to run a business, a business that you would take over, when your grandpa and your pa got too old. We’ve let not one, or two, but now three generations of business acumen just die in service to the supposed “efficiency” and low prices of Walmart and its ilk.

Walgreen’s is not the answer to food deserts or to sustainable economies. Walgreen’s is the problem. Bring back the neighborhood pharmacists, tailors, shoe repairs, appliance repairs, and grocers.

A coalition of local food activists agrees with me. They’ve created the Statement of Local Food Economy (pdf). You can sign the statement, too. Also- World Food Day.

Originally posted on Mahlzeit blog in 2010.

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Real Local

Local is the new black.

It goes with everything.

Or does it?

Here at Not Dabbling in Normal we want to know how far we can push this local thing. What can you buy locally and what can you really not? How local can you get? Your yard? Your block? Your neighborhood, your state? Can you tell if what you’ve purchased is local?

This month, we’re going to get “real” at Not Dabbling again. Emily B, Emily S, Suzy, Ryan, Xan, Miranda and DeeDee are going to buy local and only local. We’re talking food, transportation, underwear, cat food, clothes, you name it. We’re going to find out what can we buy that’s locally produced, and what we can’t. If it isn’t produced locally, we’re going to try to find locally-owned shops. And if we can’t do that, we’ll find out what can we live without, and what we have to have.

***

This challenge is perfectly timed for me, Miranda. I have been feeling utterly disconnected from my food lately, and recently had an epiphany of sorts. You can read more about my recent re-connection with seasonal food at Pocket Pause, and i’m looking forward to sharing my new found inspiration here at Not Dabbling.

***

Food is easy. It’s the other stuff. I need curtains, which I can make, but if there is a fabric mill or curtain rod factory within 2,000 miles of Chicago I’ll eat my hat. On the other hand, many communities have shops like this one– a locally owned, owner-managed True Value Hardware.

***

How close to home do you think you can get? Join the Challenge! Let us know in the comments;  leave us a link to your blog and we’ll create a participants blog roll.

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Urbs in villam

Chicago’s motto is Urbs in horto:  City in a garden.

And flowers are nice. I love the gardens that our city has shoe-horned into every nook and cranny. I love that they give away a million tulip bulbs every year after the bloom is done. I love our world-class park system.

But imagine a city that remembers that gardens do not mean flowers alone. Imagine a city that integrates food production within the existing urban fabric. Cafe lined streets on which restaurants grow the food that they serve to patrons. Homes with window boxes filled with Swiss chard and cherry tomatoes instead of petunias and ivy. Office buildings that eschew tulip beds on favor of tomato-filled planters, where employees pick their lunch, instead of picking up their lunch. Imagine city governments that rewrite codes to make it easy for unused land to be used for temporary community gardens. Imagine suburban city councils and home owners associations that see the beauty in an eggplant and let people plant them wherever the sun is, be it front yard or back.

Imagine Urbs in villam. City in a farm.

Today, people in urban areas don’t know how to grow food, but during WW2 Chicagoans started 500 community gardens & 75,000 home gardens. They harvested more than 2,000,000 POUNDS of food and led the nation in the Victory Gardens movement. What if we reached  back into our past to do it again—to make home and community gardening the norm. What if we created an attitude that could lead to edible plantings in every sunny yard, park, store window, work place, and empty lot in the city, private and public.

Urban dwellers in particular, and all Americans–urban, suburban, rural–cannot keep relying on remote, even overseas, sources for our food. It costs too much in personal, economic and planetary health. It divides us from our very DNA, which evolved for us to be farmers and gatherers. Urbs in villam has planters full of tulips down one side of the street, and planters full of tomatoes down the other. By seizing opportunities like the economic crisis that halted construction, leaving lots empty, we can integrate food production into spaces that we already have.

The key is to educate our citizens about how easy it can be to grow our own food, where we live and eat it.

What is your community doing to bring food production home?

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From language to law to community

There are steps to creating a sustainable life.

In our society the realities of sustainability run up against the national character. Rigid self-sufficiency and individualism are the holy grail; in the words of Maxwell Anderson, how you can tell an American is that you cannot tell him what to do, even when it’s in his own best interest. In the current political insanity, any suggestion that we try to save our common heritage–like, for instance, the air–through sensible regulation, is excoriated as “removing choice.”

Enter the idea of the commons–those things that we own together, starting with the air, but also the water, the language, the creative works of humanity.

What I’ve discovered through the creation of the Peterson Garden Project, is that for many sustainable initiatives that revolve around community action, we lack a language. The language of communal action has been removed from the dialog, or vilified as “communist” or “socialist.” But some things, even most things cannot be done alone. The old saying that ‘your right to swing your fist ends at my nose” needs to be understood again to extend to our food and our health.

A new language does exist, in the old language, through the concept of the commons. What we hold together. What we all must use, but also spare, share, and save. Where our right to swing our so-called individual rights ends at the epidemic asthma in the inner cities because of pollutants, or the loss of aquifers because private owners have drained the wetlands that used to belong to all of us. We’ve allowed private bank accounts to be the fist, but haven’t stopped their swing at our collective nose.

Last week was the annual Good Fest Festival in Chicago (formerly the Family Farmed Fest), a really wonderful trade show all about restoring local, sustainable food systems to the urban landscape.  The exhibitors are all local farmers and food makers. It’s where I first learned how to change my diet to nearly 100% local food.

This year my friend LaManda Joy of The Yarden, founder of The Peterson Garden Project, was on the panel “Growing A Good Food Community”, about building urban communities through gardening and creating gardens by building urban communities. The interesting thing was that her fellow panelists were my old high school friend Jay Walljasper and Julie Ristau of On The Commons.

The panel, moderated by Megan Larmer of Slow Food Chicago, was beautifully constructed around the steps we need to take back collective ownership, working in a very American way, through individual action.

It starts, as I say, with the language. Jay talked about first, the need to start thinking again about the commons, and also laid out a basic way to think about the commons again. As important, he talked about how language can lead this new, old way of thinking, focusing right in on the difficulties I have had getting funders in particular to understand that what we’re doing is not a farm with a single owner or board, but collective action for individual benefit.

But it cannot stop with the language; only talking only works for academics. Enter Julie Riskau, founder and former publisher of the Utne Reader and current spokeperson for On The Commons. Julie talked about turning language into policy initiatives of the sort that lead to intelligent municipal ordinances which, for instance, stop creating criminals of people who put their edible gardens in their front yards because that is where the sun is.

But policy is only effective with an army of individuals putting it to work at street level. Which is where LaManda Joy and her Pop-up Victory Gardens come in, as well as the many other community gardening, and community preserving, and farmers markets, local school councils, in fact all of the community-based efforts that will save our cities and towns.

We need to restore the language, so we can affect the law, so we can own the activities that will make our communities livable.

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Conspicuous sustainability

Sustainability for a middle class American is an oxymoron. Our entire way of life is premised on unsustainability. We live in houses bigger than we need (even those of us in “small” houses). Americans own more cars than households; in fact, more cars than drivers. We are blessed with constantly fully-stocked shelves at the grocery store or even the farmers’ market, which simply leads to mountains of trash to make way for the new stock coming in. We have instantaneous access to any product we need; if we can’t get it at our local Target, it’s on the website.

We live in caverns of trash that we call our homes–basement, storage shed, attic, closets, full of things we might even use, but don’t really need.

And the strangest manifestation of this is what I’m calling “conspicuous sustainability.”

If you only buy t-shirts made from organic cotton, or hemp, but you have 9 of them, you’re indulging in conspicuous sustainability. Your full CSA share, where you end up discarding half the box because you don’t know what to do with all that kale. Sending your child to Eco Camp, three states away. Buying a Volt, when you have a perfectly functional ’07 Saturn in the garage.

The oddest manifestation of conspicuous sustainability is the seed swap.

The sustainability cred is immaculate–it’s barter, it’s local, it’s communal, it’s green things. It’s gardening.

The first seed swap I went to I got completely wrong. I’d been gardening for decades in isolation and didn’t know about “seed fanatics”–people who love seeds for their own sake. I thought seed swaps were for seeds you couldn’t buy, so I brought carefully packaged seeds that I had saved.

People showed up with huge boxes, systems even, of commercial seeds. They were for the most part bona fide sustainable–organic, small producers, heirloom varieties. No Burpee’s here. But commercially packaged, and people had dozens and dozens of them, far more than they could plant unless they happened to be the head gardener at Blenheim Palace. They would then lament at how they always bought too many, and would proceed to swap with other addicts, as often as not leaving with even more seeds than they’d come with.

I never used to do the seed catalogs much. I’d see what I could find at the garden center, then supplement with a couple of packages from Pinetree or Territorial. I had no idea that there were people who spent fifty or sixty dollars (or more) on seeds Every Single Year no matter what they still had in their stash.

It disturbs me.

It isn’t sustainable just because you’re buying from a sustainable merchant for a sustainable purpose. Part of the point of sustainability is to not consume, or produce, more than you need. Seed swaps bother me. I find them at best inconsistent, and at worst a little stomach turning.

There’s a thing in fiction writing called “internal consistency.” The best fiction creates a universe where people behave believably; a universe without deus ex machina fixes, or the convenient sudden appearances of long-lost cousins (can you tell I’ve been watching Downton?).

Sustainability is not a “lifestyle choice.” It’s not a fashion. It’s a philosophy that requires consideration about decisions and actions and purchases, from the tiniest seed to the hybrid Hummer. Perhaps it’s a little self-righteous of me, but I believe that every life should be internally consistent. If you want to live lightly on the earth, all of your actions should be consistent with that goal, to as great an extent as is possible.

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