Counting

I once knew a way to count many things. In the fall there would be red and yellow leaves on the sidewalk and I could count each upturned star or crescent and all of the hidden potato bugs and ants scurrying beneath them. I could count the shingles on my neighbor’s roof or the number of crows on a telephone wire or the lights in the suburbs, just outside of the city. I could count the number of times the tallest building in the city flashed its blue light. The counting seemed to happen from a tall person’s perspective, because a tall person (or someone with access to a chair or a ladder) has enough perspective to count these types of things. And this counting occupied my thoughts; like the rhythm of a jump rope or feedback from my amp.

At some point the sky turned a little black and my mind became muddled with the future tense. You know in movies when you watch calendar pages flutter away and in the background there are amplified sounds of flapping wings and flashes of white paper? The flapping sound is desperate; not like the calculated movements of a large bird of prey responding to shifting air pressure.

Brilliantly, I try to escape these flapping birds (like Melanie Daniels in The Birds, but more clever and less skittish).

I start out at the top of a mountain, leaning against a conveniently positioned limestone slab, staring out at the Columbia, surrounded by brambles and Uva Ursi. I try to think about counting here. What if I could see the schools of fish beneath the black blue river, black dots fanning themselves around in patterns more complicated than I could understand.

Later it is raining in that way that draws thick ribbons down the windows, and I watch the black cat watch the rain. Counting raindrops is more complicated because one can quickly become two, or three can quickly become one, so your work requires split second calculations that can only occur if you are in a well-prepared state of mind. The problem is worsened when I ride the bus and water has leaked in and moves back and forth along the bottom of the window frame as the bus stops and starts down the darkened asphalt. One drop becomes a puddle in a matter of seconds, slipping back and forth in this black rubber crack.

In the end, all the pieces that I’ve been taught to break apart, to separate, to count, just move like water.

What are you really buying?

Phil Howard at Michigan State U. made these (and many more) charts of the structure of the organic food industry. Go here to see them better.

Maps

So I have a "This American Life" addiction that was really prompted by the hour(ish) bus excursion I take to school three times a week. Now, because of lucky backlog, I also listen to it when I run around, but it's harder to concentrate with all of the bouncing and crinkly ear bud noises.

Anyway, tonight, on the bus, I had one of those moments where I try very hard not to smile to myself (because people aren't supposed to be happy on the bus, particularly independent of communicating with another person). Portland Elvis was there carrying a brown lunch sack with "Elvis" written in purple mom-style cursive on the front. For those of you who don't know, Portland Elvis does the impersonation thing at Saturday Market with a mini guitar and a white suit and sometimes you accidentally run into him at Voodoo Donuts and your friends start a conversation with him about old Buffy episodes. Portland Elvis made me smile first. Then Ira Glass was talking to a guy named Denis Wood who "creates maps that are like novels" of the things in his neighborhood that folks don't often notice or pay attention to. That made me smile again. We were just leaving the Lloyd Center bus stop.

Here are some pictures of the maps.

Notice the pumpkin map on the far right. I can't handle it.

Here is the link to the episode. The second act is about the different tones the hum of machines/appliances in our lives inherently have (heaters, air conditioners, computers, toaster ovens) and how, depending on the combination of intervals, they could effect our mood or our experience in a particular environment. Pure gold.

Kitchen Middens

(This is our new lady chicken. She has floppy feathered feet.)

I've been reading some M.F.K. Fisher and thinking a little about how, as it has been said before, Fisher used food as a cultural metaphor. With all of this attention being paid to folks like Marion Nestle and Michael Pollan for writing books about food and the consequences of our food choices, I've started thinking about how it's important for us not to fall prey to the trendiness of their ideas just because they're trendy (okay, duh, don't stop eating bread because one guy writes a book about how you should stop eating bread) but think about them in the context of how thinking about food more could, in addition to making people and the earth healthier, bring people together and create a space where people might stop and exist in the present.

I suck at existing in the present.

There are still all of these dicey issues about whether taking pleasure in food is something reserved for the upper classes, that folks who have to work all day to feed their kids anything (whether it be vegetable soup or hamburger helper) don't have the energy or time to follow this foodie path. Or, in a larger sense, the number of hungry people in the world who don't have anything resembling the choices we have when we walk down the aisle at New Seasons. There are issues related to farm workers rights, natural resource distribution, industrial agriculture and meat production. None of it is simple. I guess I just need to keep working on where I draw the line.

I think about this a lot, particularly if I'm out to eat somewhere fancy (this week, Toro Bravo, presently my favorite Portland restaurant). It is a privilege, and I think about the fact that I am wasting resources and time that could be used to make a less advantaged persons (or animals) life just a little bit better. But I take care of chickens so I know where my eggs are coming from, I canned the hell out of my farm discount this summer, I try to grow as much food as I can, we have two full rain barrels I can use to water my plants.

But sometimes, it all feels a little shady.

I suppose, if I were try to reconcile this for myself, choosing to invest time in thinking about food and taking pleasure in something sensual like eating, leads to more connections (family/community/nature) that are difficult to create in a "Bowling Alone" American public. This doesn't make it entirely reasonable, but it takes a little of the sting out. When Ruth Reichl talks about interviewing Fisher in one of her memoirs (Comfort Me With Apples), I remember thinking about how renegade Fisher was in her thinking about food. Reichl was sent there to write an article for Ms. (I think) only to realize that Fisher didn't effectively fit the feminist profile. Fisher wasn't trying to create social change, provide prescriptions for how we should reconnect with environment, or bring back some past survival knowledge we've lost while we were watching Survivor. Instead she used food to ignite some passion, some connection that lots of us are losing track of as time moves forward. Food, especially food choice, is a privilege, and in no way do I think it's reasonable or fair to partake in unaware extravagance. But we can learn a little from Ms. Fisher's approach.

Enough ranting. Read some Mary Francis (Consider the Oyster, How to Cook a Wolf).

In other news, did you hear about that romance novel that plagiarized an article about black-footed ferrets? (and I know it's Newsweek. I'm sorry. Here's the New York Times version if that will make you feel better.).

Also, I made this tonight. It was very nice.

Saturday Afternoon Orientation

It is wintery, cold, and this tree in our yard decided to start blooming.

Baby fava beans.

The Intro

A brief explanation: back in the old days, folks thought that eating an eggplant could drive you insane. The Italians named the fruit melanzana, which is derived from the Latin mala insana or "mad apple. " (see this and this for more information on eggplant history and eggplant recipes). As a member of the nightshade (Solanaceae) family, which includes more volatile members such as Jimson Weed and Deadly Nightshade, eggplant contains small amounts of a toxic alkaloid called solanine which has made people ill and in the past has made people nervous about our purple nightshade friend.

All of this is somewhat beside the point. I am not really nervous about a little eggplant.

I am nervous about where things in our world and our environment are headed; nervous and maybe a little angry. This nervousness has prompted me to work on learning to be self-sufficient and I'll talk about the whole old-lady canning, baking, mushroom hunting, and chicken raising behavior later. And this nervousness has prompted me to regularly consider the continuing environmental and societal failures of current farm and agricultural policies when alternatives have been proven to be economically viable. More specifically, some farmers have succeeded at maintaining and increasing output without destroying soil, polluting land, and creating enormous amounts of waste (see Joel Salatin's closed-loop system articles on the bottom right-hand side). And I'll likely talk about some of this later on.

So here is the deal: I think having information (happy and upsetting) is important. And this is a place where I can do that. Last week I sat through a lecture on "Education for Sustainability" by a representative from UNESCO/United Nations University where he talked about the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the legislation that stemmed from the spill (the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, and the shift from single hulled ships, to double hulled ships). The presenter talked about how the consequences of this shift were not fully considered and, on the coasts where the non-active single hulled ships were left, men work all day pulling the ships on to the land and salvaging the materials to build other boats and structures. Yet the oil sludge still inside these tankers seeps out into the ground and down the coast, killing fish and causing members of the local community to lose their jobs. These fisherman are then forced, in a vicious cycle, to make a living salvaging materials from these ships.

I want to talk about reconsidering consequences and shifting our tunnel vision from its short-term comfort zone to long-term consequences. And I want to talk about reconnecting with each other and the world around us. It will be, at times, a little touchy-feely and I apologize for that. But touchy-feely isn't always bad. As Mr. Forster puts it in Howard's End: "Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die."

Part of not living in fragments means finding the good stuff around us and sharing it with folks. This will also be about good, not intense and not preachy stuff. Don't be worried.

Today's Recommendations:

1. See There Will Be Blood and cringe at Daniel Day-Lewis.
2. Eat the green papaya salad at Pok Pok with the crazy spicy crab sauce.
3. Bake this lemon olive-oil cake.
4. Read David Foster Wallace's "Consider the Lobster."
5. Listen to Otis Redding's "These Arms of Mine" and My Bloody Valentine's Loveless and don't let the January sky make you feel sad or caustrophobic.