Archive for June, 2007

The Bullseye Diet

Sharon June 28th, 2007

I’m stealing this idea from my co-author, Aaron Newton - but it was so cool I couldn’t not write about it. In the process of writing our book about how to de-industrialize agriculture _A Nation of Farmers_ Aaron suggested that instead of one 100 mile (or 200 mile or whatever) diet, we think in terms of a bulls eye model, which emphasizes bringing as much of your diet as possible home to your local area.

This would look like a dart board, with a bullseye in the center. That center dot would be your home. And the first question is “how much of my food can I produce here.” For some people, the answer will be very little - only sprouts and a few windowboxes, perhaps. For people like me, the answer will be ‘a lot’ - but the first step is to evaluate your home for food production possibilities. Be imaginative. You think you can’t keep any livestock, right? What about rabbits for angora wool, or meat. How about bantam chickens, kept in cages like pet birds for eggs? What about bees or worms?

You can’t garden out front, because of zoning restrictions? Well how about replacing your front yard lawn with ornamental edibles - beautiful blueberry bushes, grapevines trained to an arbor, a pecan tree. Got shade? Rhubarb and gooseberries will tolerate it, as will many medicinal herbs. And the bottlebrush beauty of black cohosh will look just like you planted it for pretty.

We all know that growing food is important, but it is necessary to realize just *how* important. Industrial conventional agriculture is an ecological disaster. Industrial organic agriculture is increasingly organic only in name - and is just as doused in petroleum as conventional. Agriculture of all kinds is a major contributor to greenhouse gasses. But moreover, food yields are levelling off and falling due to climate change. North Africa lost 2/3 of its grain crops this year, the Australian grain crops dropped by more than 50%. The world has its lowest food reserves since measures have been taken. This is a recipe for famine - large scale, worldwide - even here.

The smaller the plot of land you work, the more productive it is (after some practice). A person with one garden bed who manages it inch by inch can produce yields per square foot that dwarf anything a conventional farmer can produce. A farm of 2 acres is often 200 times more productive in total output (according to Peter Rosset’s Paper _Small is Beautiful__) than a conventional farmer’s use of land. Industrial agriculture is far to *inefficient* in its land use for us to risk continuing it, when human lives are at stake.

Up to now, we’ve thought of efficiency in terms of less labor - if few people could produce more food, that was an efficiency. But it was only efficient because energy was cheap and abundant, and we’re at the end of those days. Now, with a growing world population, climate change and falling yields, we need to return to efficiency PER ACRE - the project of generating the most possible food from each bit of productive land we engage with. Doing so means land for wildlife habitat, the chance to restore stripped soils, the hope of arresting some of the ecological crisis we’ve encountered.

The key, then, is getting as many people involved in farming and gardening as possible. My own assessment is that we need 100 million new Farmers, broadly construed. That is, we need about 1/3 of the American population to take real responsibility for producing some of their own food. It isn’t enough just to create demand - more is going to be asked of all of than simply wanting. Because one out of three means taking responsibility. If we’re to raise food on a small, highly productive scale, we need much more participation. I’ve written more about this here:http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2006/12/50-million-100-million-200-bazillion.html.

The next ring would be the food in your neighborhood. Is there a community garden? Could you create one in a public park or on a vacant lot? Is anyone else growing food? Could you get someone else growing food? I got my neighbor to start a food producing garden by offering to put one in for her as a thank you gift. Aaron gardens on the land of his elderly neighbors, growing food and sharing it with them. My old friend Laurie is growing a garden on her church grounds. Are there churches, businesses, or other folks with land you could engage with? What about getting the neighborhood teenagers involved?

What about foraging in your neighborhood? Even in Manhattan, Wildman Steve Brill offers foraging classes to teach people to eat their local weeds. How much of your food could you get from the neighborhood that way?

Ok, next step would be your town. Are there right to farm laws? Could you get some instituted? How about changing zoning to permit livestock or front yard gardens? Are there any farmers there? Can you patronize them? Have you considered advertising? Put up a sign saying “I would like to buy organic produce from within my community” - maybe someone will start up a market garden. Check into local immigrant communities - many brought their agricultural traditions with them, and they may have surpluses for sale if you ask. Are there old farms with retiring or aging owners - does your town have a plan for protecting that land from development?

So the first three bullseyes are probably all within 10 miles of you. The goal is to get as much as possible, as close as possible. For me, that would be quite a bit. I can get milk, eggs, meat, and most of my produce locally. That isn’t normal - but a gardening movement that gets food back on people’s properties means that this will be increasingly possible.

The next step would be your immediate bioregion - perhaps 25 miles from your town. And then outwards to 50 and 100 and 250. But remember, every community, every region has a foodshed (like a watershed) that has to feed it. The further out you go, the more likely you are to bump into someone else’s foodshed. For example, if you live in Manhattan, by the time you get 100 miles in any given direction, you’ve bumped into the foodshed for at least one other medium to large city, as well as a number of heavily populated suburbs and small cities. For example, if you look towards Connecticut, the foodshed for Manhattan at 100 miles is also the foodshed for New Haven, Hartford, Providence (in the sense that it is less than 100 miles for each of these), as well as Bridgeport, Stamford, Waterbury and a host of suburbs and cities. Go north towards me, and you’ve run into the foodshed for Poughkeepsie, Albany, etc…

I’m not criticizing the notion of a 100 mile diet, which has been a powerful tool in teaching people to look locally for food sources. And now, at the beginning of this movement, the 100 mile or 250 mile diet is a great tool. But what if the movement grows, as we hope it will. Can 8 million New Yorkers (or 8 million people in Tucson/Pheonix - I’m using NYC as an example here) have a 100 mile diet? The answer is probably not - it means the foodshed for the region will have to expand. But the only way we can do that fairly is to ensure that as much food as possible is being grown where the people are. That means Victory Gardens on every lawn, in city parks, in neighborhoods. And it means prioritizing food from your very immediate foodshed - from the center circles of your bullseye.

That won’t be easy for many people, and it is a long term project. We can’t necessarily do it today. But the local food movement is growing fast, and demand alone won’t ensure that hunger never strikes Americans, and that we always have enough excess to offer succor and hunger relief to the people who are running out of food because of climate change we caused. If we’re to burn carbon sending grains around the planet, they should be going to the world’s hungry, not to us, whenever possible.

Like a darts game, you won’t always hit your circle. But with practice, you can get a little closer every time. The more food you create in your community, the better off we all are.

Sharon

Putting Another Log on the Fire

Sharon June 27th, 2007

So I got my first internet based marital proposition from someone in federal prison (minimum security, I was assured!) the other day. I’m so proud. Not since I got debunked by the right wing wackos at junkscience.com has a tribute to my work meant so much. I hear Ann Coulter gets 150 proposals a day, but this is my very first
;-). I’ll call him “Rambo” since he mentioned that movie twice in his (long) email to me.

Now ordinarily I wouldn’t make fun - not all prisoners are bad guys, and it certainly has to be one hell of a lonely life. But the gentleman in question was not overly subtle about his goals in marrying this “rollecking farm girl with a survival orientation” (ok, I really liked that phrase, even though he seemed unaware or unconcerned he was proposing bigamy…can we just skip the Groucho Marx puns here ;-), and I feel it acceptable to make a bit of fun, given the language of the proposition. Particularly since he wanted me to wait until his parole in 2013. I was forced to tell him that a. I’m happily monogamous and b. if I weren’t, I’m really not into delayed gratification.

Now this is pretty funny for me. I’m not the sort of woman that people get agonizing unrequited crushes on. The only way I’ll ever be the loveliest girl in the room is if I have dinner with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and these days a date with my husband is an evening spent romantically planting corn or shoveling out the compost pile. I suspect the gentleman in question noticed I was female, the only real relevant requirement, and decided to take a shot. And a lovely esteem enhancement it was, despite the use of the unfortunate term “lay” to describe my person ;-).

What really interested me about the email I got was this - the gentleman in question
graciously offered me his protection in the coming hard times, including an explanation of his experience and training. He knows I live somewhere in the state of New York, and he warned me that I could expect to be overrun by “hordes” of people from Manhattan any time now, when the peak oil apocalypse comes. And as appreciative as I am - Eric, while a wonderful man with many gifts has no experience in underwater demolitions (although given that I live in upstate NY and the creek on my property is rarely more than a foot deep, that might not be tops on the list of survival skills I’m seeking), I did have to decline, if only because I doubt we have until 2013 before the consequences of peak oil begin.

The gentleman in questions seemed sincere, if a little crude, but the proposition he seemed to be making seems a bad sort of deal for me. He’ll protect me from marauding hordes while I farm, have babies for him (oh yes, this was specifically mentioned - I don’t think he realizes that babies already come with the package), and do the “woman-stuff” (his term). Now I’m no starry eyed idealist, nor am I a pacifist. I have a fairly firm and practical relationship to the preservation of my family, my life and my livestock. Guns are useful tools out here in the country, and while I’m not buying my ammo by the crate, I’m also a pragmatist - I’ll use whatever works in my quest to keep coyotes from eating my geese and the wolf from the door.

But I, apparently, get to do all the easy girl work of growing the food while breastfeeding, and cleaning. How nice for me! The gentleman was very clear on this fact - he has no agricultural knowledge of his own, and it seemed as though the “farm” was even more compelling than the “rollicking” part (I just like to write “rollicking.”) Oh, and he mentioned cooking too - he wanted to know if I was a good cook. Well as it happens, I am, and not a half-bad farmer either. And I conceed that in some conceivable situations I might need someone to hold the shotgun while I’m mulching the corn, somehow, the “you cook, clean, plant, harvest, hoe, and I’ll play Rambo” deal didn’t seem like the best trade off I’ve ever gotten. See, I’ve gotten oddly accustomed to sharing work equally, with a real partner. Some days are more equal than others, but the “protection for sex and dinner” deal just doesn’t look that good from my end.

May I offer a suggestion to the male survivalist lovelorn (and any really tough lesbians with the same assumptions ;-)) - peak oil doesn’t actually mean that we get to go back to living the “Put another log on the fire” life (And ain’t I gonna take you fishin’ with me someday/Now a man can’t love a woman more than that…). There are whole forums out there are of people who imagine that handling peak oil is just a matter of a good gun, an isolated homestead and someone to do the cooking and sewing. I’ve got to say, I suspect that the reason those forums tend to have a 8-1 male female ratio (and half the guys seem to be single), may have something to do with the fact that underneath the rhetoric there’s a “Yay, back to the stone age with all the girls” theme. Often, women are referred to as “our women,” most often by people who don’t own any ;-).

But the thing is, it doesn’t matter how many guns you have or how much ammo you’ve got - unless you live in the movies, if the purple haired mutants come around, two people are going to get their asses kicked by 3 or more people. Isolated homesteads aren’t that common, actually - most of them are surrounded by other people who also like isolated homesteads, and they all get to be isolated together. And unless you plan to revise our incest taboos, at least once a generation (and probably quite a bit more often), everyone is going to have to come out of their cave and get to know the neighbors.

So obviously, soloing isn’t the answer (sorry Rambo!). Which means communities. Which means doing the work of community building - you know, having relationships with people. I’m not talking about setting up an ecovillage (no implied attacks on people who are, just not my thing) - I’m talking about building community with the people who live near you. And the way you do that is usually not exciting or dramatic - it rarely (at this stage) involves everyone learning to work together to defeat the marauding whatevertheyare a la the Magnificent Seven (Shoot, I was aiming for the horse!). Mostly, it involves knowing people well enough to trust them. And how do you do that? The boring way. You stop up and have a chat. You ask after the baby or the grandkids. You bring soup when someone gets sick and have a party now and again. You barter. You trade. You talk. You offer to help with something, show up, do a solid day’s work, and do it again next time, proving that you mean what you say. That is, you do all the girly (and men do it too - I’m making fun here) stuff of talking, having relationships, being nice, paying attention and helping out.

Now I can’t swear that Rambo’s services might never be useful. But I do know, that fixating today on Rambo’s solution is the quickest way to bring about the nasty future he wants to protect me from. Social breakdown and violence happens when infrastructure fails. So building shadow infrastructure - ordinary people prepared to pick up the slack when institutions fail is a #1 priority. What we need right now is as much engagement as possible with other people. And even with Rambo at my back, I can only fight off, oh, maybe 12 (yeah, right) marauders (personal nukes are on my “to get” list right after the solar panels ;-). Ultimately, a bigger group of people, or a luckier one or one with less to lose can always take what they want. The best hope I have is to make sure that things don’t degrade that far. Because if they do - I’ve already lost. Civilian casualties, accidental deaths and friendly fire constitute almost 40% of all deaths in any given conflict - not starting the battle is my potential salvation. Speaking as a Mom, I don’t want to win anything that involves my kids getting hurt even accidentally. If it ever (g-d forbid) comes to that, we’ll deal. But when you’ve got an investment in the long term, short term thinking is a big mistake.

So Rambo, I’m afraid we just weren’t meant to be. But I do want to throw his offer open - he didn’t strike me as a picky sort, and I do have quite a few female readers. So if anyone is looking for a man with demolitions experience and an eye to survival, I’m sure he won’t mind if I pass his email along.

Sharon

Discipline and Pleasure

Sharon June 26th, 2007

What a fun title for an essay, don’t you think? Nicely evocative of Foucault, and equally of S&M, it sounds like we’re on entirely different sort of blog, doesn’t it ? Unfortunately for all of you (and my chances of getting rich writing this stuff), I’m not speaking of anything quite so sexy, but of the pleasures of self-discipline.

And that’s a tough sell in America. We tend to associate pleasure with the release of discipline - sex is all about letting go, and so are our personal pleasures - we get our fun from exceeding limits, refusing to be constrained. Fun is blowing too much money shopping or eating a quart of Ben and Jerry’s alone. And trust me, I’ve done my share of that sort of fun.

But there are other categories of pleasure that depend on self discipline. Consider sports, for example. If you run the bases backwards, you’ve ruined the baseball game. We make all sorts of limiting rules to make sports fun to play, fun to watch - and the delight is in seeing how one can produce the best results within the disciplinary structure of the rules. If we blow them off, we’re entitled to shout (if we’re being extremely polite) “but that’s not sporting.” And the notion of sportingness - the idea that some kind of structured fairness is required to get the best possible results is a deep one.

Or art, for that matter. Sonnets without form aren’t sonnets. Even the freest art forms begin with limiting structures - the frame around the canvas, the first positions of ballet, the language of poetry. The limits get pushed all the time, but before you push the limits, you understand them, you work within them, so that you know what you are extending.

How about childhood? It isn’t just to keep Mom and Dad from going crazy that parents establish discipline. Research has shown that children are most comfortable within firm, and known boundaries. It is scary to have no limits, to run wild in the world without constraint. ‘No” and “we do this, but not this” help children understand and adapt to their world. Chances are, most of us have fond memories of the structures created by discipline - if they were part of our lives, we usually remember sit down family dinners, coming in when the street lights go on and homework time with a mix of irritation and fondness - but more fondness, often, than irritation. We take pleasure in childhood in part because of its boundaries.

Courtesy and manners are another kind of self-discipline that can come with enormous pleasures. Who doesn’t like to receive a thank-you note, or doesn’t prefer a stiff “let’s agree to disagree” to a punch in the face. When important events occur, the structure of how we birth and wed, welcome and mourn become a means of comfort.

The simple fact is that discipline is part of culture. The way we limit ourselves is also the way we indicate our membership, and our love.

Several people have reminded me that in order to be compelling, the Riot for Austerity has to convince people that they will have fun doing it. And they are right. But in order to call this optimization exercise fun, we have to think hard about what fun is.

Fun is both blowing all the limits occasionally, and living gracefully within them. I’m all for feasting, celebration, riot (that’s why we’re doing this, after all), dancing in the streets, mocking power, getting drunk, welcoming guests - occasionally. This is fun stuff, and we need it in our lives. But we can’t spend every day drunk, or spending too much, or overeating. The simple fact is that we’ve lost our sense of balance, and we often do these things too frequently.

Everyday pleasures are different. They come from self-discipline. The discipline that creates ritual, routine, self-comfort. They come from culture and limitation. Within these limits - within the straits of “what we customarily eat, do, say, don’t say” is where our comfort lies. This is, perhaps, the art of daily life, the creation of beauty and artistry, craft and delight from the simple boundaries set around you - your time, the people, the way you treat each other. This is the pleasure of storytime, chicken soup and bread for dinner, singing together, playing your game or climbing your tree or reading your book. It is what we do, and it is constrained because without constraint, it wouldn’t be ours.

And that’s where the pleasure of the Riot for Austerity lies for me. It increases my taste for the festival moments, makes the day of special foods or wild dancing a deeper pleasure, and at the same time, it reinforces the delight of ritual. Self-discipline requires that I think, be mindful and aware of what I am doing, what choices I’m making. It requires I extract the maximum pleasure and comfort from each use of energy, instead of heedlessly simply taking.

In the Riot model, the food is better, fresher, tastier, and cooked at home. It is more nutritious and offers more sensory delight. The shower I take is more deeply appreciated, because I can’t use water heedlessly. There is less waste, and less burden of managing waste. There is more reason to be in the moment, less reason to run from place to place, a slower pace, more quiet, more reason to watch and listen and learn. There is a greater intimacy with the world around me - an awareness of my watershed, my foodshed, the sources of my energy. It turns out, that for me, I can easily derive the same amount of pleasure or more from less - so what was my past usage for?

But more importantly, there’s a sense of life as art. It requires a greater creativity and imagination than my daily life before the riot. What I do is now a dance of balance, a poetic form they didn’t teach me about in graduate school, in which economy and discipline combine to create something a little more than what I had before.

Sharon

Getting Over Picky

Sharon June 25th, 2007

Yesterday’s project was a serious strawberry harvest, and today I’ll make lots and lots of jam - 50 pints, I estimate. Strawberry is the univeral favorite among the kids, so we grow lots. The kids helped (hindered ;-)) with the picking in their own inimicable ways. Eli plopped himself down on the straw and began a two-fisted strawberry eating project, with an occasional languid toss of one into a basket. Isaiah took his bucket and began a quest for only the biggest, reddest, ripest strawberries, which meant his picking rate was about 6 an hour, 4 of which were promptly eaten. Asher likes to pick, but by the time the strawberries get from his little hands to the bucket, they often must be discretely disposed of, while lavish praise for helping is dispensed. Only Simon really picks at this stage, and he takes great pleasure in bossing people around while he does it. “Don’t step there, Eli, you’ll squish the strawberries.” “Isaiah, no eating!” (Here Mommy intervenes to say that Eli is fine and so is eating - her mouth is full, so she’s no hypocrite ;-). And when Asher accidentally ate a green strawberry and said “yuk,” Simon erupted in outrage “No saying yuk!”

Now this last is a firm rule in our household, although there are exceptions for babies eating truly gross things like green strawberries or dog food (don’t ask). But my kids are powerfully enjoined never, ever to complain that food is “yucky” or “gross.” They can say “this isn’t my favorite.” They can say, “no, thank you.” They are not required to eat anything they don’t like (although seconds and dessert, if any, depend on reasonable eating). But the first “ugh” or “yuk” gets you a very stern warning, and a second means you leave the table and don’t eat again until your next meal. The same is true about discussing food that is not present in the same terms. None of my children have ever had to have this happen more than once.

This rule also applies to regularly visiting other children who I babysit for, and has been applied by Isaiah (to Mommy’s horror and embarassment) to a visiting guest who was describing a meal she strongly disliked. And while we had a long talk afterwards about how being a good host and not embarassing guests or making them uncomfortable, I’ve never been sorry about this rule. My children can recite our reasoning as well, “This is very important to Mommy. All her jobs are about making other people have enough to eat, so we don’t waste food and we don’t say mean things about it, and we do say a blessing before we eat.”

The world is a hungry place. Millions of people world wide don’t get enough food - 2 billion are food insecure, including millions in our own country. Hunger and its associated illnesses kill millions of people every day. Saying “gross” to food that is good for you, nutritious and just doesn’t happen to suit your palate seems to me to be wrong. Everyone has food preferences - but the notion that there’s an inherent ickiness to anything someone considers food is just wrong - or rather, it isn’t anything more disgusting that what you eat.

Seriously, think about it. Grossed out by someone who eats organ meats? Why is muscle tissue somehow nicer? Don’t like the idea of fermented, spiced kimchi? But you eat the coagulated milk of live animals as cheese? Grossed out by vegemite? Well, other people think peanut butter is just as vile. You eat pringles, and you want to tell someone their rutabagas are bad ;-)?

Me, I don’t like anything gelatinous (no aspic) and I avoid soft boiled eggs. Never acquired a taste for vegemite, and I’m only so-so about chocolate (I like adulterated with other things, like peanut butter and fruit, and in milk form - people who are serious chocolate people tell me this is heresy). I keep kosher at home, and won’t eat non-kosher animals when out, and I try to eat sustainably whenever possible, although I don’t bitch when I’m a guest somewhere else. But I don’t find anything wrong with the things I don’t eat, and there are circumstances in which I would eat all of them. Visiting a distant connection on Java, for example, we were fed an elaborate meal by a very poor family. I’m still not totally clear on what sea animal was involved, although I’m sure it wasn’t kosher - but it was delicious, and offered with generosity and kindness.

I’m one of the less-picky people on the planet. I’ve eaten things in my travels that ordinarily get a chorus of “EWW!” - and liked many of them. My husband is similar, and together we’ve managed to raise four comparatively unpicky kids. A lot of this is sheer luck - you spin your wheel, you take your chances. For example, we have an autistic son, and autistic children are notoriously poor eaters, often because they have strong sensory issues with food textures and smells. Eli is a spectacularly good eater by autistic standards (actually, compared to many of my friends’ kids he’s a spectacularly good eater, although there are things he avoids, like cheese) This is a huge advantage in our quest to cut emissions and eat sustainably - because it means that we can truly take advantage of what is fresh, local and in-season. Some of it, however, I think is a product of two things. We eat everything. And we garden.

I was talking strawberries to a friend of mine the other day, and she was saying she buys them all year ’round for her daughter because they and bananas are the only fruits her daughter will eat. We, on the other hand, eat strawberries like mad for a month in June, and then enjoy dried strawberries, strawberry sauce and strawberry jam until the next year’s harvest. When the first strawberries come in, everyone eats the few bites with reverence. A few days later, when there are enough, we gorge until the juice pours down our faces. By the end of the month, we’ve eaten strawberries every day, canned dozens of jars of jam, lived with the scent of dehydrating strawberries, and we’re ready for something else. And here come cherries, peaches, plums, raspberries and blueberries to take up the slack.

But, of course, my children *eat* cherries, peaches, plums, raspberries and blueberries. But a child who eats only strawberries and bananas can’t eat a seasonal diet - even imagining a modest importation of bananas, that’s a tough, fruit-free life. And since this child also doesn’t eat whole grains, chicken in non-nugget forms, greens, peppers, carrots, broccoli or any vegetables other than corn, peas and cucumbers, that lack of fruit is a real problem, health wise.

And why doesn’t this sweet little girl eat any fruit? Well it is possible that there’s a real underlying issue to her pickiness - that she has sensory issues, unrecognized food allergies or some other deep reason. But I know her family well enough to guess not - I’m guessing the root is simply that her Mom is a picky eater too. Her Mom doesn’t eat cranberries, eggplant or beans of any kind, squash, sweet potatoes, any cheese but cream, brown rice, brown bread, or drink unflavored beverages (ie, water). And Mom, perhaps because she too knows the pain of eating something she doesn’t like, doesn’t require her kids to try things, and gently passes along her own prejudices. When they came to dinner, older child would eat only plain rice (white) or pasta (also white) at my house, and they would ask me to produce a seperate bowl of these, even if they weren’t on the menu. Now I’m big on guests being curteous to hosts, so I did, but there was some discreet eye-rolling.

Now I’m not talking here about food allergies, medical conditions or religious and ethical scruples, or distaste for stuff we shouldn’t be eating anyway (hostess snowball prejudices are good with me) but about garden variety pickiness, the “I just don’t like it.” And most (not all!) of the picky kids I know come from picky parents, or non-picky parents who make food into one of the BIG DEALS. I’ve never met a little kid whose parents made a big thing about not liking things who didn’t do the same, or one whose parents scrutinized every bite and worried a lot about it (and again, I’m not talking about people with medically fragile kids who need to worry about these things) who didn’t appear, at some point to have thought “Cool, found a button to push - fun!”

The thing is, most picky parents don’t really admit the connection. A friend of mine’s son suddenly went from eating all vegetables to nearly none, but his Dad ardently denies it has any connection to the fact that Daddy only eats lettuce and peppers. Friends of mine wince when their kid complains about the food at my house (and no, not because we make a big deal about it - they don’t even know about our rule), but I’ve heard the mother say, “No, honey, you won’t like that. I’ll get you something else.” Hmmm…

I’m going to take the risk of ticking a lot of people off by saying that at least 80% of food pickiness in the absence of aggravating conditions (sensory stuff, toddlerhood, etc…) is of parental creation. We’re tolerating it, even encouraging it - and there’s a real and serious price. We’ve somehow got the wacky idea that their health is less important than that they screw up their courage and eat some brown rice. Yes, it is fine to hate lima beans. Everyone is allowed a couple of things they don’t eat simply because they don’t want to. But if you also don’t eat tepary beans, black beans, soy beans, pinto beans, adzuki beans, along with 20 or 30 other things, you’ve cut signficantly back on your ability to adapt to a changing world and diet. Dealing with children’s picky eating, which is really important, starts with dealing with adult pickiness.

In children, elderly people and the sick, this can actually be fatal. Studies done in World War II Britain on dietary changes caused by the war showed that young children, elderly people and sick people will, when confronted with a major, sudden, crisis induced dietary change will simply stop eating - the medical term is “appetite fatigue” and it is real and serious phenomenon. Most of them eventually adapted, but periods of malnutrition can have long term consequences for babies, young children and people made vulnerable by illness and disability. And sometimes people just died, unable to make dietary adaptations.

So (and g-d forbid) given a situation where favorite foods became suddenly unavailable, people in your family who don’t have a wide-ranging diet, particularly one of foods that are often available without trucking, could really suffer from this. The solution is to get used to eating your local diet now - while also trying lots of new things - new grains, new tastes, new ways of eating things, particularly those that suit your area.

It certainly reduces your ability to eat locally and sustainably if you are a picky eater. You can join a CSA, but you are likely to get a basket full of things that you don’t want to eat sometimes - maybe if you have a friend whose pickiness is a perfect mirror image of yours it would work, but otherwise, it means wasting food. You can grow a garden, but a lot of the best storing crops and the things that get you through a winter are “hard” foods - if you don’t any root crop but onions and potatoes, it’ll be one long winter. How much richer would things be with beets, celeriac, shallots, carrots, parnsips, parsley root, kohlrabi and turnips?

How do grownups get over long-ingrained habits of not eating things, of thinking “yuck?” Well, first we realize how high the stakes are. In a rich, priveleged world, where your emissions don’t matter and you can buy the three vegetables you like every week, and if you don’t enjoy the meal at the dinner party, well, you go home and eat again, it doesn’t matter what you eat much. You still get fed. You still get a reasonable approximation of balance (in some cases - we’re most of us not eating enough produce, and we’ve certainly got dietary health problems up the wazoo). But we don’t live in that world any more - none of us do. Pretending we can is lying to ourselves.

We don’t have the luxury of not caring about our impact. We don’t have the luxury of wasting food - food I waste at home means more at the store out of my budget and more ecological impact, and moral problems in a increasingly food scarce world. And the day may not be too far away when more and more of us can’t afford to be picky - food prices are rising rapidly, in large part because of the ethanol boom. Millions of Americans are hungry now - it may not be that long before we are affected. So we simply can’t throw good food out, or demand only expensive, extra meals for ourselves. Health care costs are rising fast enough that we simply can’t afford to get sick because we don’t eat well. And if hard times do come, not being adapted to a locally, sustainbly available diet could actually kill people, harm our children’s growth, and make us sick.

The same is true for even healthy people about abrupt dietary transitions. If you eat a lot of meat 3 times a day, and suddenly your protein source has to shift to legumes because of poverty or lack of access, you are in for some serious intestinal distress. Have you only been eating processed foods and bleached grains? Well, tolerating whole grains, especially lots of whole wheat will not be a pleasant or easy experience. Have you always, always, always used canned cream of mushroom soup in your Christmas greenbeans? How traumatic will it be in hard times to switch to chard with a homemade sauce? It is far easier to adapt to eating whole grains right now, to put some beans in your diet gradually, change your holiday specialties one at a time.

But if you’ve hated broccoli for fifty years, it will be a challenge to start eating it. Now if you have plenty of locally available, healthy green options you love around, there’s no reason to choose the broccoli over the kale. But what if broccoli is it - if the bugs got the kale crop? You need to eat it and you might as well like it. Or what if you are a meat and potatoes person, and now you are being told that you can only eat grassfed meat, and not that much of it? How do you get there? Now the good news is that you only have to do this for local, seasonal, sustainable foods - if you think twinkies are vile, you don’t have to do anything about that. No worries about your extreme distaste for barbecue chips, and go right on hating McNuggets - in fact, we encourage that. The other good news is that the things your are learning to like - whole grains, fresh vegetables, not so much meat - these things are really good for you. There’s really no down side.

The first thing to remember is that you have overcome instinctive food preferences before. There are exceptions, but comparatively few people loved coffee, beer, wine, tea, sushi or strong cheese the first time they tasted it. It took a while to develop a liking for these tastes. Similarly, I’m going to bet that your idea of a perfect day no longer involves candy for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Tastes change. You can change them. We just have to do the work. They say a toddler often has to see a food on their plate 20 times before it seems familiar enough to eat it.

What’s the magic trick? Lie. Like a rug. Lie to yourself. Lie to your kids (but don’t do in an obvious way - kids are really not stupid). Explore your acting talent. You are going to convince yourself to not only like X hated food (one at a time), you are going to enjoy it. So the first step is to tell yourself you will like it, and to eat a little. Trust me, it won’t kill you. Try the kindergarten method - three bites. And then keep putting it on your plate. Smile at it. Think friendly thoughts. Think how wonderful it is to try something new. Think how lucky you are to have it. Find something you like about the taste.

Perhaps the problem is the cooking method - do you cook vegetables until they are grey? Do you like highly seasoned foods, and most veggies are kind of bland? Try a quick steam, or eating it raw. Or perhaps you should add hot sauce, lots of garlic or herbs. Learn to cook your food well. Throw it in with something you do like - put the greens in with the bacon, or toss the peppers in with your pasta salad. Decide to like it - and keep trying for at least a few months, introducing the food regularly to your table. Cook it several ways - my mother likes peeled broccoli stems and raw, fresh picked asparagus, but not broccoli florets or steamed asparagus. Try it raw, steamed, pureed, tossed with pasta, covered with something you like.

Convince yourself that meat isn’t the main part of every meal - a lot of this is simply attitude adjustment. Maybe you’ll always prefer turkey to baked beans, or no kale to kale. But being able to eat the kale and the baked beans enriches your life.

Don’t complain about your food. Be grateful for it - don’t call it names, and if you can thank someone or something for it - G-d, the farmers who grew it, the soil it came from. Food matters in this world. We can’t afford to treat it lightly.

Teach your kids the same lessons. Remember, no matter how many faces they make, it won’t kill them to eat kale. It is a time-honored tradition to torture your children with green vegetables, and as far as I know, no one has died yet. Don’t over-sympathize with their distaste - kids tastes are much more malleable than yours, and you aren’t doing them any favors.

IMHO, the best hardline method is simply to keep serving them the same meal until they eat it - won’t eat beans? Ok, but nothing else is offered, and there will be beans again for lunch tomorrow. When they get hungry enough, they’ll eat. Loving every bite is not a prerequisite for life, and missing the occasional meal won’t kill anyone.

I admit, I’m usually not that hardline. But you don’t get seconds or dessert unless you eat everything. You don’t get snacks between meals - if you are hungry, that plate of beans is still there. And you don’t, under pain of getting to know just how yucky hunger is, complain about the food.

But hardline alone isn’t enough to make your kids really good eaters - they also need to know what’s wonderful and fun about food. That means getting them involved - bringing them into the kitchen, the garden, out to the farmer’s market. Get them involved in the process - where did that carrot come from? Take them to the pick your own and let them get their own apples. Let them have their garden and have them help in yours. Let them have their own chickens, care for them and be in charge of the eggs.

There’s something really different about food you’ve grown yourself. Kids who wouldn’t touch a zucchini or eat eggs normally will beg their parents to help them cook zucchini frittata (assuming someone’s mentioned that there is something you can do with both those things) if it is *their* zucchini and *their* eggs. Simon and Isaiah were very resistant to salad, but they’ve invented their own - rainbow salad. It has chopped nuts, dried fruit, greens they pick and edible flowers - johnny jump ups, daylily petals, begonia petals, borage flowers, nasturtium blossoms. With lemon-herb dressing they’ll eat their weight, and pick the ingredients as well.

Food is, afterall, fun. It tastes good. If they don’t have to compete with sugarfrosted flakes, there’s really nothing not to like about a ripe peach, or a berry. If you act like you like homemade tofu marinated in garlic sauce as much as steak, your kids will never know that the two aren’t supposed to be equally good. And since they both *are* good, your kids will grow up liking them both, most likely. Who knows, after a little practice at this deception, you might even believe it yourself.

If you are looking to eat a local diet now, when in many places options are at their broadest, try joining Liz at Pocket Farm on her “One Local Summer” project http://www.pocketfarm.com/?cat=21

Cheers,

Sharon

52 Weeks Down - Week 9 - Deplasticize Your Life

Sharon June 25th, 2007

If you didn’t see the article on plastic oceans (the one with the horrible turtle pictures), you should definitely read it here - this is really important:http://www.bestlifeonline.com/cms/publish/health-fitness/Our_oceans_are_turning_into_plastic_are_we_2.shtml. Because we all knew that plastic never breaks down entirely, but I don’t think everyone realized that what happens is that plastic fragments and mixes in with your water, your soil, your food, and the food and water of plants and animals, and then it makes its way into our bodies. How is a really troubling and scary story. Definitely read the article.

Now this is stuff never, ever meant to be ingested - full of endocrine disrupters (messes with your hormones), carcinogens (warm plastic mixed with liquid creates dioxin among other things), traces benzene (liver cancer) and all sorts of things that no one ever meant for us to eat, breathe and bathe in.

Now this plastic warms the planet a couple of times - when it is manufactured from oil, when it is recycled (if it is, most isn’t - more on this in a minute), and when it goes into a landfill and helps mix with organic garbage to produce methane. And since cancer treatment isn’t exactly low input, you could argue that it warms the planet again - when we have our surgeries and other treatments from the illnesses caused by becoming a plastic world.

The plastics industry has spent a long time convincing us that plastics are recyclable - they have those nice arrows, so they must be ok, right? But in fact only a few varieties of plastic are recyclable, plastic recycling is quite energy intensive, and after you recycle that plastic container into a bumper or recycled plastic lumber, that’s it - next stop is the landfill or your water table.

So what do we do about this? The first thing is to buy no new plastic, or as little as humanly possible. Don’t take that plastic bag at the grocery store - when you do so, you are saying “make another.” Don’t buy things packaged in plastic if you can avoid it - and tell your store manager “I’d really like to purchase that - but not with all that plastic packaging.” Whenever possible, buy things with no or minimal packaging, or that uses recycled glass, metal or paper only. The only way to stop the plastic plague is stop making a market for it.

That’s never going to be perfect - there are some necessary things that only come in plastic. In our house it is disposable pull-ups required by law for our disabled son. Computers only come in plastic - and electronic waste is a whole ‘nother issue, to be discussed soon. But the less you use, the better. In other houses it will be something else - but minimize plastic usage and keep looking. Here’s a fascinating blog by a woman who trying to spend a whole year without plastic
http://plasticfree.blogspot.com/.

What about the plastic you do have? The first thing you want to do is get it out of contact with hot food, acidic foods or liquids. Food grade plastic buckets are probably fine for dry goods you keep cool. But I strongly recommend avoiding plastic for things like olive oil, honey, molasses, etc… I don’t like plastic bristle toothbrushes, plastic baby bottles or anything else that goes into your mouth, although we have some too. Personally, I also dislike plastic bath toys, although I haven’t fully eliminated them. But pthlates (soft plastics) and hot water don’t mix, especially in the bodies of little people. I often wonder whether when we finally trace the origins of autism, we’ll find it is a plastic problem - but that’s just my personal speculation.

The easiest way to avoid plastic at the grocery store is to bring cloth bags, buy in bulk (particularly in places that will allow you to bring your own glass containers for things like honey, olive oil, vinegar and molasses), and choose items packaged as minimally as possible. Remember, metal and glass are more energy intensive in manufacture than plastics, although their lifetime impact is less because they can be recycled multiple times - so minimizing all packaging is a good idea. Plastics are also in a number of makeup and body care products - I don’t know about you, but I don’t think “pretty” is worth the PBDEs and POPs and their consequences. Buy plastic free.

While having plastic mixed with your food isn’t such a good idea, it is always a good idea to reuse the plastic you do have - don’t just throw it out. When you do that, you begin the process of putting it into the world’s food chain. Plastic materials can and should be used for any non-food or bath purpose you can think of, because the longer they are in use in your house, the longer their total time before they start shredding into the soil. So store your screws, crayons and stitch counters in those plastic containers. Wear those acrylic sweaters until you’ve worn them out, and replace them with wool or organic cotton. Fix that plastic stuff whenever you can, don’t just throw it out. We brought it into the world - we have the obligation to keep it useful as long as possible.

And the plastic you *can* justify purchasing is recycled plastic, especially for long term usage - go ahead and use plastic lumber on your deck, as long as it is made from 100% recycled plastic. We want more of the plastic we have to be recycled - at the same time that we stop making more. But most important is simply to stop buying it - to find alternatives whenever possible and tell people “I don’t want to bring more plastics into the world.”

Sharon

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