Nudging the food system

Last time I was home, my dad and I sat down on opposite sides of his cavernous living room and traded ideas about the food system, he the life-long farmer and I, the big city employee of a nonprofit. The nice thing about these conversations is the way we nudge.

I’m been working on agriculture issues from the other side of the table for the better part of a decade now, mingling my farmer’s daughter instincts with Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver and wisdom gained from earnest conversations with good friends and fellow “revolutionaries.” But I never forget that I left the farm; I don’t have the whole picture. 

I think one of the truest truths in life is that none of us ever have the whole picture. So we nudge.

This time my dad said, “I’ve been thinking about what you told me last time, and I think you are right about the water.” He was referring to the issue of pesticides and why they matter. We talked for a while about run-off, the water table, irrigation and a woman I know whose children were poisoned by the groundwater on her Midwestern farm. We talked about solutions: grass-fed beef and zero-input farming.

“But I’ve been thinking about it,” my dad said, “and I’ve been wondering what farmers with a closed nutrient system do when their animals and produce leave the farm. That’s energy that never comes back.”

I had no answer. It had never occurred to me before. Nudge, nudge.

It just so happens, in the far-away world of New York City, chef and writer George Weld was contemplating the very same problem, and he wrote about it in the most recent issue of Edible Brooklyn. And it just so happens that a story I wrote for Edible Brooklyn  is on the cover of that same issue.

After touring New York City’s waste water treatment plant, George is able to end on a hopeful note, but I’m still concerned that the only real solution is to move home, raise my own food and instal a composting toilet. I’m sure my dad would be happy to have me.

After deciding our food system is probably doomed, Dad showed me his new John Deere, gave me an extended lesson in chemistry and taught me how to ride a bike … again.

 

PS: As a further coincidence, my story in Edible Brooklyn is also about a father bonding with his children over agriculture.

PPS: And speaking of waste water, I also wrote this little thing on page 13 for Edible Manhattan.

We are all watching West Wing

Has anyone else noticed that suddenly we are all watching West Wing? Everyone. Right now. Coworkers, my father, friends in other cities. I assume most of us discovered (or re-discovered) the show when Netflix added it to their line-up, and that their promotion of their own political drama, House of Cards, gave the old series another small boost-by-association.

Since we are all on the same page, I would like to float a little theory: West Wing and Star Trek: The Next Generation are exactly the same show, separated by about 350 years of galactic history. They aren’t just similar, they are the same.

A dream-team of elite, liberal optimists guided by an endlessly inspiring (but very human) leader seek to defend justice and leave the world a better place. As committed to each other as they are the cause, they face danger courageously but almost always wrap things up in about 46 minutes with a dose of humor and slightly saccharine speeches about the grave responsibility of power and the nature of humanity. And I don’t know if there’s a term for the way a show resonates after the credits roll, but if this were a wine tasting, I would say that West Wing and TNG have the same mouthfeel.

Swap the Iraqis for the Romulans, the Prime Directive for the Constitution, and the White House for a Galaxy Class Starship, and I think you will find the shows are interchangeable. And I’m hooked.

Farmers are the way to our hearts

My fascination with ad campaigns began long before Mad Men took us into the smokey boardrooms where ideas and fortunes take shape. Advertisers get a lot of well-deserved flack for engineering the siren songs that drive our overly-materialistic society, but my fascination lies in the simple truth that good advertisers are simply tapping in to what we want. What we really want. No matter how much we claim fidelity, it is their job to see us for the lovelorn sailors we really are and sing accordingly. Sometimes they’re right, and sometimes they’re wrong, but either way we get a peek into what their focus groups and national polls are saying about America.

Which is why I rejoiced when I saw one of last night’s most popular super Bowl ads:

It seems the folks at Chrysler took the temperature of the room and decided that farmers are the way to our hearts. To understand the full implication of this assessment, remember that less than one percent of the U.S. population claim farming as their occupation, meaning that Chrysler surely isn’t planning to make their fortune by selling Ram trucks to the agricultural set. Rather, they are gambling that the words of Paul Harvey (an Oklahoma, I might add) will speak to all of us who like to buy eggs from the farmers’ market or wax nostalgic about the summers we spent helping our grandmother shell her garden peas.

Food has always been the way to our hearts, and it seems America is finally waking up to the fact that farmers are the way to food.

Ram isn’t the first player at the table: check out this ad series for Lays. I’m not in love with the fact that some of the very processed food producers and hawkers who helped drive our national food system into the ground are now trying to capitalize on the growing interest in transparent agriculture.

Now that we are all listening to the same song, let’s recognize the sirens for what they really are and steer clear of the rocks.

PS: Another refreshing cultural barometer is buried in this ad by Toyota. When a little girl asks to be a princess, her fantasy includes a war horse and there’s nothing pink in sight.

Action!- or -When the universe hands you a pamphlet

After a fruitless attempt to see the fireworks from our neighborhood on the 4th of July, Tobia and I came back to our building and found this pamphlet tacked to the community message board. It was apparently published by the Institute for Making Infinity Comprehensible.

You know those things you struggle with, Chelsey? The question at the heart of all questions? Here’s a pamphlet. 

As the pamphlet explains, here I am, one of 7 billion people awash in the sea of possibilities that make up our days, but no matter what I have or where I go, there is always MORE. More, more, more. So should I follow my passions and desires endlessly, never settling, or should I seek inner peace by turning away from desire and embracing gratitude for all that I have? If you don’t pursue your deepest desires, how can you be sure you are doing so in the name of peace and not cowardice? But desire is perpetual. We can’t continue to desire things once we have possessed them, so we find new things to want.

Oh, pamphlet, you know me so well.

But this isn’t a story about the 4th of July, it is a story about the new year and how I plan to live it. In 2012, I only made one resolution: wear more leggings. It was my most successful resolution ever. So this year my resolution is only one word, and it is really more of a manta: Action. As the back of the pamphlet says, under a heading of the same name:

Here you are reading this pamphlet instead of taking advantage of the few productive decades left in your life. [The pamphlet is harsh.] Do Something, and make it worthwhile. It is time to make this count. Look at all the other amazing things people are doing. You don’t see them reading this pamphlet.

Hear, hear! Well said, pamphlet! Action it is. Career action, love action, even action action, as in feet on the pavement. But this doesn’t mean I am abandoning  gratitude and peace in favor of desire, it is just that I realize more and more that it is action, not stillness, that really brings me peace. So this year I am zeroing in on the things that trouble my mind and eliminating them, whether it is the towels that won’t fit in my kitchen drawer, the shoes that want to run or the tightness in my chest when I walk into a bookstore and realize that nothing there has my name in it, not even the magazines.

This year, may you find the question at the heart of all of your questions and the pamphlet to go with it. May you take action!

A few of my favorite Christmas things

We really enjoyed our Christmas tree this year. This is the first Christmas we have spent alone, just the three of us), our first Christmas in New York and the first time we have ever gotten a real tree. For years we had a skinny little “natural” looking tree from Hobby Lobby that we loved with all our hearts, but small and scrawny as it was, we couldn’t justify storing it once we no longer had an attic or a basement (or a closet, for that matter), so it went to live with my in-laws, where we can still visit it when we go home. Because we left for three whole weeks last year, we didn’t get a tree, and I contented myself with hanging my garland of tiny elf clothes, which was almost enough.

But we missed our ornaments. Or at least I did. One of Jeff’s unique qualities is his almost total disregard for  keepsakes, at least in the abstract. The very items most people would save if their house was on fire are the things he periodically petitions me to throw away: the photo albums, the Christmas ornaments, etc.

Anyway, I ignored his early protests (that’s just what you have to do) and started trying to think of a way I could have a tree without having a whole tree in my house. I was contemplating something involving curly willow and branches leftover from Hurricane Sandy when this little guy found me at the farmers’ market. Right away I knew it was the most perfect tree I had ever seen. Actually, it is the most perfect tree I can imagine, and I am already sorry that it won’t last forever. It literally fell into my arms when I stopped to examine it. Look at how perfectly it fits on top of the subwoofer! Look at the way it reaches its little branch out toward the curtain! I love it! It was too little for lights, so we wrapped some at the bottom and covered them with cheesecloth to diffuse the glow.

Not all of our ornaments would fit, but the smaller ones did. Like this little shoe from Morocco:

Peter gave us this little red candle, and we got a pair of birds on our honeymoon in Mexico:

A couple of my ornaments, like the little hat and mittens, came from my old job at Oklahoma Living magazine, where we had an annual handmade ornament contest. We also have a few pretty things my mother-in-law has given us over the years. She has great taste in ornaments, like the snowman below. 

But wait … what’s that behind the snowman? Why, that’s my pride and joy. The best ornament to ever come out of the Oklahoma Living ornament contest and one of my favorite possessions of all time! Ladies, and gentlemen, I give you The Skunk Skull:

He is coated with pearlescent paint and has a little poof for a nose and a set of googly eyes.  He came in a bullet box. It took us two years to figure out what kind of skull he is. I’m not usually a fan of taxidermy or ghoulish things, but I do love people, Oklahoma and good stories, and for me The Skunk Skull and the bullet box he rode in on are the best of all those things.

Autumn in Green-Wood Cemetery

This is our street as seen from Battle Hill inside Green-Wood Cemetery. We are extremely lucky to have a place of such great beauty surrounding our block on two sides. And, no, it isn’t creepy – not at all. We think of it as a giant park, albeit one that doesn’t allow dogs, which means we don’t walk there nearly as often as we would like to. The cemetery’s diverse collection of trees (roughly 8,000 of them) put on an amazing show in the fall, so this year we resolved to spend more time enjoying them, and they reciprocated by holding their color for a whopping eight weeks or so.

You have to understand that the cemetery is really a multi-use facility, and it has a long history of serving the living as well as the dead. They have an app for god’s sake. The wealthy families who built mausoleums more than a century ago used them as weekend getaways. Never mind that the building would one day hold their corpse, the view over the East River must have been amazing. I admire that kind of practicality, and I hope that when we take photos like the ones below, we are honoring them in some way. But maybe that’s a stretch.

Getting our Thanksgiving on: Thanksgiving Eve

 

Photos above by Peter

By now I’m sure you’ve seen this video, which demonstrates what will happen if gay men aren’t allowed to marry each other. Well, ladies, I am here to tell you that what every girl needs is not one, but two gay husbands. I imported mine special from England, which really added a little class to my holiday preparations, but I digress. Peter and Richard arrived the Friday before Thanksgiving, so by Wednesday they had spent plenty of time exploring, and I had shown them lots of great NYC spots, like the cemetery and our local taco truck. Thrilling! I told them the one thing we had to do on Wednesday was go into Manhattan and pick up our turkey from Violet Hill Farms at Union Market, which is becoming an annual tradition (here I am last year in the same green coat with the turkey in my bag). They said that they were happy to go with me to the farmers’ market (!) and that furthermore, we could do whatever I wanted while we were in Manhattan. Oh sweet mother of all things holy.

To understand why this was such a big deal, you have know that my actual husband is a straight man. You also have to understand that with all of  all of Manhattan — capital of the world, center of culture — laid at my feet, I only had one thing in mind: The hats.

But I’m going to do a separate post about the hats so I can explain properly.

First we went to the market, where we browsed the Christmas stalls (and no one rushed me!), found our turkey (Richard named her Nigella on account of her breasts) and picked up a few stray veggies (they helped me carry everything!). They even bought me flowers. Then we headed uptown for the hats and gazed at the Flatiron Building for a while before heading back to Brooklyn, where we walked for blocks and blocks and bought even more food. This was where the British part really came in handy, because they were incapable of complaining, even when I made them carry 30 pounds of groceries and we got off at the wrong subway stop by accident.

After all that, they were still game to go back into Manhattan to see the parade balloons being inflated. They might not have been game, but they are British, so they weren’t about to tell me how they actually felt. It takes about an hour to get to the Natural History Museum, which is where all of the Macy’s balloons wait for their big moment. We climbed out of the subway and saw this:

(Photo by Peter)

Poor elf! The Smurfs, Buzz Lightyear and even Santa were in the same, sad situation. If the other balloons faired better, we never found out because after about a block we were shuffled into a line that apparently led to the real line. After 45 minutes in the line line, we bailed, happy that we had at least got a glimpse of the magic that is 300,000 cubic feet of corralled helium.

When all was said and done, I felt a little bad that we had spent so much time on the balloon expedition, but all in all I think I did a good job of exposing them to all that is Thanksgiving Eve in NYC: the food procurement, the crowds, the excessive walking with heavy bags. And New York played her part well. On the way to the grocery in Brooklyn, we were walking past a row of lovely brownstones on a mostly deserted street when we noticed a man standing on a stoop with a bouquet of flowers. Just as we passed the house, an older woman opened the door and greeted him with the kind of surprised jubilation you usually only see in movies. He was home for the holiday. When you spend nearly an hour in a line line, packed like sardines on the sidewalk, all the humanity can seem like too much. But it is that same proximity and shared public space that makes my favorite New York moments possible.

November in brief

1) In early November I spent a lot of time being grateful for two things: I live on high ground and I work from home. From our perch near the top of Brooklyn, Hurricane Sandy was just another (really windy) day. As reports of the crippled transit system trickled in, we realized that we were stuck on our island. Which was fine because Jeff’s office in downtown Manhattan was closed first one day, then a week, and then indefinitely when it was revealed that at least five feet of water had swept into the lobby (not to mention the basement and subbasement), carrying a man’s body with it and frying all of the wiring. So after two reconnaissance missions to carry office equipment down 21 flights of stairs, Jeff has been working at home, and Ellie and I have (mostly) been happy to have him.

2) When the subways (mostly) opened again, we took advantage of our new MoMA membership. You know what would be be even more stressful than setting up a regular garage sale? Setting up a garage sale that is actually an art installation. At the MoMA.

3) You know what’s better than Momofuku’s pork buns? Copying Momofuku’s pork buns with your girlfriends on a hot July day in Oklahoma when you drink too much and accidently bake the dough you are trying to rise and the plastic bowl it is sitting in. But the next best thing is eating the real buns with one of those friends for the first time and realizing you did right by that pork belly all those months ago. 4) Then these guys showed up from England….

5) … and we got our Thanksgiving on! Photo by Peter Lyon. Not sure who the Quattros are. We just used them for their sign. 

Yesterday

Yesterday a man wearing a vegetable tie, who had Grade A maple syrup in the cup holder of his Corolla, pulled up outside my apartment to take me to Long Island, where we would celebrate a cooperative of 40+ school districts that have banded together to buy Grade B potatoes for their school lunch programs. Before we made it out of Brooklyn, I had already heard the geologic history of the region’s ridges (glaciers!), and I thought to myself, “God, I love New Yorkers!”

It was a day that just kept giving:

I helped two of my colleagues distribute Farm to School materials at an elementary school. Last year, parents got together to paint an elaborate rain forest scene on all four walls of the school cafeteria – their very own “Rainforest Cafe,” complete with a river made out of blue tile! I’m also grateful to work in a field where a carrot brooch and a veggie tie are practically required.

After Long Island, we made an unplanned (on my part) stop in Greenpoint, where a group of women in agriculture were meeting on the second floor of an art gallery on an otherwise industrial block. This was the shower curtain in the bathroom at the gallery.

It wouldn’t be a full day without an unplanned trip to Manhattan. My veggie-tie colleague had another meeting to get to, and we calculated that it would be faster for me ride with him into Manhattan and get a subway home from there then it would have been to make it from one side of Brooklyn to another on the G. And besides, I never get to ride in cars anymore, and the company was good.

Our soundtrack for the day, which I highly recommend.

This was the scene in Manhattan, above ground and below.

After just an hour-and-a-half at home, I went to an event at 61 Local, a bar that also hosts a weekly CSA. A CSA. In a bar. Besides the low lighting, I challenge you to find anything wrong with that scenario.

Leaving the bar, I met this guy, who keeps watch over a shop on Smith Street and enjoys having his ears scratched.

Goodnight, Brooklyn.

Hitting the pavement

I’ve started something new: running. I can’t tell you how new this is to me. Well, I guess I can try. I was a deeply unathletic child. Kids in third grade made fun of the way I ran in PE class, so I responded by skipping, which I knew I was very, very good at since I frequently won gold in the “50-meter skip” Olympic event I held in my own head, while commentators noted my perfect form and stag-like, leaping style.

I’m sure you can imagine how well the skipping was received.

The message I got—the mental note I made—was that really using my body wasn’t for me. The Olympics and everything things else would stay contained safely in my head. To be fair to my classmates, I was already a bookworm with a strong disinclination toward the physical. But the jeering didn’t help. I adopted an attitude one might call, “The Pretentious Non-Athelete.”

As a result, I have run a full mile exactly once in my life. I was 12-years-old, and my PE class went outside to “run the U,” a dirt road that passed my tiny, country school, curved at the bottom of the hill and came back  into town, making a mile-long loop. I usually approached the U as a potential torture device I would have no part of. I started at a brisk jog to avoid completely demoralizing our pretty, young PE teacher, but slowed to a walk before reaching the curve since it was obvious to me and everyone else that I would never finish anyway. It didn’t occur to me that running part of the way might be something I could build on a little each day.

But for some reason, one day I didn’t stop. I passed my friends and kept going, chugging along beside Amanda Lacy, our class’s best athlete, to the very last step. I’ll never forget how proud and surprised Mrs. Whetzal was to see me. Amanda said, “I don’t know why I went so slow today. I’m not feeling that great.” But in truth, she was kind, and the fact that she ran beside me instead of passing me was probably the only reason I finished.

The very same thing—the companion effect —was the little push I needed to start my current campaign. I was already contemplating a Couch-to-5K program of some kind after noticing my nice Brooks were getting more than a little worn on the bottom. I bought them over a year ago when Jeff was working at a high-end running store in Oklahoma City, and despite stressing to Jeff at the time that I planned to walk in my Brooks, I feel really bad that I have almost used up a pair of expensive running shoes without actually running. So when Tobia suggested we start a running program together, I finally decided it was time. I downloaded the 5K Runner app, and we chatted through our first session, which I think amounted to jogging for a combined total of 5 or 6 minutes.

Unfortunately, Tobia is on a medical leave from running at the moment, and for a few days after our first outing I focused mostly on the carb loading stage of  running and neglected the act itself. But having jogged on my own a couple more times now, I think it might actually be something I can do. The app is helpful, finally demonstrating the lesson I never got in PE class, which is that effort does count for something, and that, minus a serious medical condition, it is highly probable I will continue to improve.  I actually don’t really care if I ever complete the app and run 5K—I will be happy if I can just keep running on a regular basis without absolutely hating it.

There is one thing spurring me on, and since I have run on about three occasions, I feel qualified to let you in on this little insider’s tip: When you run, you get places faster. Groundbreaking! You can thank me later.