ElementalMom

Last night, we figured out that “King Corn” was available on Netflix’s instant watch, so we did. And I am still wigging out about it.

Rowan has been reactive to corn products since he was small, so we’ve been a corn-free house for a few years. I wasn’t expecting to go into this to learn anything at all (sorta like my experience with “Super Size Me” and “Fast Food Nation”.) Sometimes, when you’re the only person you know on the “know what you’re eating” bandwagon, (OK, other than my two fave food blogs, the Cleaner Plate Club, who reviewed the film here, and Ethicurean, who reviewed it here, and my peeps over on the foodlab list), you get kinda jaded about yet another film trying desperately to get the average consumer’s attention about what they’re putting in their mouths.

So it’s with no small delight that I report here that there was one, just one, fact in the film that just rocked my world. I’m still geeking out over it. Maybe it’s because I came late to the party (and the film) and the lunacy with food prices going on right now highlights this particular aspect of the corn madness.

Near the end of the film, our heroes, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, interview Earl Butz. Ethicurean says,

Many would argue that Butz, who was secretary of agriculture in the 1970s, is singlehandedly responsible for the corporatization of U.S. farming, the obesity epidemic, and the pollution of vast swathes of America by agricultural chemicals. But face to face with the nonagenarian Bogeyman of the sustainable food movement in his nursing home, the guys can’t quite bring themselves to come in for the rhetorical kill, neither in person nor voiceover.

Friends, this was the most horrifying part of the film, and I’m still metaphorically chewing on it. Butz says flat-out that Americans today pay a smaller percentage of their money for food than any other generation, and that’s the key to our prosperity. In light of the sustainable food movement’s take that we should be paying more and getting real food for it (see grist’s blistering critique of Michael Pollan and Alice Waters’ takes here and the New York Times here), the idea that Butz was able (with what support? Who knows) to make the decision that our health as a nation was to be sacrificed on the altar of prosperity makes me ill.

What grist and the NYT are missing (along with the vast majority of Americans) is that it’s not about dollars and cents; it’s about choosing to eat food which sustains health, and choosing to eat crap which will kill you and make a lot of money for the pharmaceutical industry in the later portion of your life. You will end up paying the money, the question is just whether you want to spend it on food all along the way, or in medical costs at the end.

And in grief and pain, of course. The film interviews a cabby in NYC, whose entire family is diabetic and/or dead from diabetes-related illness. It seems almost cruel and macabre to contrast his family’s story of early, gruesome death, with Butz sitting in his nursing home in his nineties. The man who decided that it was OK for us to eat the inedible and pay the inevitable health cost sits alone, well-groomed and clean into his nineties, while the people on the streets are slowly amputated to the point of choosing death.

Our family has always paid a larger percentage of our budget in food than pretty much anyone I know. When trying to plan last year’s household budget, I gave up in dismay, discovering that not a single budget recommendation I could find included an adequate food percentage (I usually transferred the allotment from “entertainment” and “clothing”, because being a Californian, there surely was no way to shed a dime from “housing”). The folks who deal in finance don’t see the difference between payments to a CSA and trips to McDonald’s; it’s all just “food” on the balance sheet.

This is not the only cogent point in the film; depending on your background, there may or may not be other bits that come as news. The filmmakers make the point that an acre of corn in Iowa touches “everything”, and of course, that alone comes as no surprise to folks who recognize that yes, it’s all connected, isn’t it? So check it out and see if there are any connections in there for you.

is not “research”. But according to this, the plural of research isn’t much either.

More than half the scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency report political interference in their work over the last five years. This, according to a new investigation by the Union of Concerned Scientists, follows on the heels of prior UCS investigations (Food and Drug Administration, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as well as climate scientists at seven federal agencies). The earlier examinations also found significant manipulation of federal science by the Bush administration.

“Our investigation found an agency in crisis,” said UCS’s Francesca Grifo. “Nearly 900 EPA scientists reported political interference in their scientific work. That’s 900 too many. Distorting science to accommodate a narrow political agenda threatens our environment, our health, and our democracy itself.”

The truth is out there, because it’s certainly not here, any more…

Friends, as part of blog action day, I’m blogging about the environment.

This is, if you know me, laughable. I have a graduate degree in treehugger. I’m totally evergreeen, yeah?

I had no freaking idea what awareness of my footprint truly was until I moved onboard a boat. Here are a few highlights:

• Water consumption. Here, have two tanks. Use only the water that’s in them, and figure out how long it takes for you to go through that amount. Get progressively more creative about trying to fill the tanks less often.
• Sewage. When you have to drive the boat over to the pumping station to deal with your output, and 100% of the family’s waste is in a nice tank under someone’s bed, suddenly, you become aware of exactly how much waste human beings make, and how much work is involved in processing it. I am utterly nauseated by the amount of water wasted by “normal” flush toilets, now that we have a simple pump toilet, and every cup of water in is a cup of water we’ll have to pump later.
• Food. You have a tiny bit of storage space, and every inch matters, so you go for more food and less packaging. And you start to realize that every package takes up an insane amount of space. And besides that…
• Garbage. Oh my god. In our marina, the garbage dumpster is pretty close, but the recycle bin is a really long haul. So “take out the trash” involves walking 400 yards or so up to the gate, getting a cart, bringing it back, putting in the garbage and recycle bags, walking (uphill) back up to the gate, out to the bin, down to the other bin (probably another 500 yards or so), and coming back. Lovely exercise, yes, but not while slogging around bags of yuck. So you start working out brilliant schemes to minimize trips, and therefore, garbage. I am reminded of a college professor I had, whose family generated one lunchbag’s worth of garbage a week. We are working to emulate him.
• Sustainability. Recently, we had to replace the battery bank. That’s four 150-pound batteries. That’s a ton of expense and a ton of waste, and a giant PITA to get out of the boat, down to the battery place, yada yada yada. I expect the new batteries to last six years, minimum. Someone asked me why I hadn’t just gotten auto batteries, which are cheaper but less durable, and all I could think was “yeah, let’s see you schlep those babies…”. Things in boats are always priced in multiples of $1000 (the term is “boat bucks”), and when you’re looking at massive outlay, you’ll do almost anything to repair, reuse, or otherwise extend a thing’s life. We thought we were in for replacing the water heaters, and when my friend Jon managed to rewire the old one, I almost cried with relief and gratitude.
• Recycling. Not just paper, glass, etc, but other stuff as well. There’s very little free space on a boat, so things like freecycle and paperbackswap just rock. Get a thing, enjoy a thing, give it back to someone else, get a different thing… less attachment, more joy, less clutter, more entertainment.
• DIY. This is *huge* in the liveaboard community. People here know tools, use tools, and it’s expected that if you’re going to call in a pro, it’s because you tried everything and then some before you did. It’s a spirit of self-sufficiency that’s going to be required, if we all don’t quit screwing up the environment we have.

So those are the big things I can think of at the moment. Who knew my footprint could get smaller? I wonder how small it will get before we’re done?

On one of my mommylists, for parents struggling with altering the family diet in response to child allergies, a woman stated that she was buying cartons of nut and rice milks, because she had no time for preparing food. This is my response to the idea that we don’t have time.

I wanted to address this some more, not to pick on anyone, but because it’s a really common refrain in our culture, and it’s something worth thinking about really carefully.

I used to be too busy to prepare food too. Amusingly enough, it was before I had kids. I lived on packages; top ramen, powerbars, mac n cheese.

Now, I work fulltime, I have a nearly five year old and a two year old, I’m the Publications Director for ICAN, I am in the process of fixing up my house and getting it rented while my family moves onboard a boat. I have two freelance editing contracts and two book contracts going right now, and I’m a moderator or leader/contact on four different email lists. And I make two or three meals a day, pretty much every day.

A very wise person told me, “either you spend time in the kitchen, or you spend time at the doctor, but one way or another, you’ll spend the time.” When I was young and invincible, I thought she was crazy, but now that I see the people around me going down for one health complaint or another, and I see westerners as a people accepting higher and higher levels of disease as “normal”, I see what she meant. What we eat, and how we eat, as a culture is killing us just as surely as the frog in the slowly-heated pot.

The Carol Flinders essay, “The Keeper of the Keys” that is the introduction to Laurel’s Kitchen has got to be, hands down, the best expression I have ever read, anyplace, for why spending time in food preparation is critical not only to your physical health, but to the mental health, and the heart, of a family. It’s worth the price of the cookbook, even if you can’t eat most of the recipes in there as a GH/CF/DF person. I keep the book for that essay alone, and I read it whenever I freak out about being the kitchen slave. Whenever the siren song of our culture, about being “too busy” starts telling me that I could just buy one, and then I’d have more time.

The learning curve involved with preparing food from scratch is really steep. I have been at this for five years seriously, although I grew up in the country, and I have in fact eaten a hamburger whose recipe started with :”first, go butcher the cow… then grind the meat… then grind the wheatberries for flour….”. I have bought cookbooks that rocked, and some that sucked. I have cycled through crap appliances and things I would not be without. Some recipes went from the bowl to the plate to the compost bin, and some have become family favorites. Our eating habits, our shopping habits, our kitchen supplies, the entire way we think about food has changed completely. It has been maddening, and frustrating, and intriguing, and enlightening. My entire relationship with food has been reworked, for the better.

This does not happen when one allows corporations to feed one’s family.

You know the whole saw about doing your chores, about “Do it happily, or don’t bother doing it”? Same deal with food. I don’t think that someone in an assembly line can make food for my family and have it be energetically the same as the food I prepare. I know that food prepared with care is totally not the same as food prepared for the masses.

There’s a selfish component as well. I have yet to meet commercial food that was even close to as yummy as what I can make. Fresh almond and rice milks are so superior to the stuff in the cartons, it’s ridiculous. Not to mention greener; no carton, no trash, no power to make the factory go. Making them, my process is down to five minutes; it takes way longer than that to earn the money to go to the store to pick up the carton to wait in the line at the checkout and to drive back home again. I think it’s a false economy to always buy what you need, but it’s a thought pattern that has been carefully nurtured in our culture for a very long time about all kinds of things.

I think that one of the finest things about this list of Monica’s is that we can help each other not have the hellish learning curve that I had, share tips for making it faster, more bearable, more accessible, when pretty much the whole rest of the culture is encouraging us to work more to get more money to spend it on suboptimal dietary choices so we spend more on doctors and pharmaceuticals and the whole economy keeps spinning on our graves.

Maybe I’m overly cynical. It wouldn’t be the first time. But if I can encourage you to do no other thing, please think about it really carefully, and see if you can’t find the time. Maybe we can start a revolution with nutmilks…

Yesterday, I went to a highly-recommended salon, to get my hair done. Generally, this is a pretty soothing ritual, wherein I get two hours to chill the heck out and read brainless magazines I’d otherwise not be caught dead reading, and indulge what little vanity I have. My family goes grey early, and I totally refuse. Better living through chemistry! The woman who was doing my hair was not a native english speaker by any stretch, and since conversation was a little difficult, I generally kept my nose poked into my magazine. That was, of course, my first mistake.

I was reading the current issue of Rolling Stone, which featured an interview with Al Gore about Live Earth, and “An Inconvenient Truth”, and a blow-by-blow investigative report by a Rolling Stone reporter Tim Dickinson called “The Secret Campaign of President Bush’s Administration To Deny Global Warming.”

I have an undergraduate degree in Environmental Studies with an emphasis in Marine Interpretation, and all but a thesis’ worth of a master’s degree in the same thing. I am a bona fide, documented, card-carrying kelp-hugging freak. Always have been. I read Al Gore’s first environmental book, “Earth in the Balance“, while in grad school. Being a student rather than a politician, and having rather more latitude in my opinions, I was disappointed by it, as it didn’t seem to go nearly far enough. People, I thought, just didn’t get how bad things were getting.

Well apparently, they’re coming to the party. I haven’t seen “An Inconvenient Truth” yet. I already understand that we’re rapidly making the planet uninhabitable, by our current standards, and that we’re so somnolent that most Americans are still arguing about it as if it might possibly not be true. It’s in our Netflix queue, though.

In every other place I have traveled to in the last five years, upon discovering that I was mainland American, someone has taken me aside, and earnestly said “what is it going to take for you people to realize what’s happening? Here where we are….” and then they go on to talk about the very real changes they’re observing. In New Zealand, the seasons have shifted several months. In Puerto Rico, the rainy season is longer and longer, and the heat is, well, hotter. In Hawaii, they’re seeing erosion, and the cumulative effects of eustasy.

I guess because we’re continental, we can afford a little more cluelessness, a little more obliviousness. I guess that denial feels good.

Me? I sat there in the chair and felt cold.

A few posts ago, I talked about how Cindy Sheehan has given up on America as a political institution, and I agreed. Giving up on a nation is painful, but doable, as the world is filled with other governments that have a lot to recommend them. But giving up on a climate? On a planet I’m very fond of? That’s significantly harder to do, without ending up sitting in a corner, in the sort of shock that renders you actionless.

For part of my childhood, my family hung out with survivalists. And from them, I learned a lot about what certain paranoid mental states look like, and I also learned a lot about basic survival, what it looks like, and what you need to be prepared to deal with. I read Dmitri Orlov’s “Closing the Collapse Gap” and howled with laughter, because he manages to state, with humor, what I generally see around me anyway. Collapse of this system, this empire, is eminent. It’s not a question, in my mind. I am pretty sure that it’s something my children are going to have to deal with.

So if the empire collapses, and the environment collapses… what then?

What then is that even to myself, I start sounding like a paranoid nutcase. I enumerate the basic necessities, I think through means of securing supplies of said necessities, I think about the relative mental and physical fitness that’s required to ensure that one copes with what comes in as reasonable, equitable, and fair a manner as possible. I don’t believe in hoarding, I think that’s ridiculous. I once knew a survivalist who’d built himself a bunker and stockpiled 100 pairs of levis. I asked him what happened if his bunker disappeared, and how he’d cope without levis. And he was unable to answer. His security was locked in a certain coping response, and despite being a survivalist, which means that he’d self-identified as someone who’d faced the idea that things could indeed get very bad, he still wasn’t to a place where he’d given up the need for certain material objects.

If you think about it for a moment, you’ll realize that I just said that a nutcase stockpiling levis has more going for him with regards to connecting to current reality than our government does.

The reality, as I see it, is that as a culture, we’ve gotten fat, lazy, tired, and stupid. Most of us aren’t in good enough shape to walk for a mile, let alone sustain the sort of endurance needed to, say, acquire one’s own food consistently. We require copious quantities of sunscreen to cope with minimal sun exposure without frying to a crisp. We get bent out of shape when our little conveniences are denied us, even temporarily. Our routines have become us, and we are somehow incapable of interacting with the biological world we came from.

Buying a Prius and replacing your lightbulbs isn’t enough. It’s far too late for that. And if we were actually out in the real, biological, environment more, instead of safely cooped up in our little boxes, we’d see it as clearly as people in other places do.

We have some serious catching up to do, if we’re going to make it. We have to step up and face the big ugly. And yet, I believe deeply in my heart that we must do so without the hostility and violence that tends to characterize survival discussions. It’s not about guns, people, it’s about water. Even in a survival situation, you can live without a gun for a day, but you cannot live without water for the same amount of time. Don’t bother stockpiling ammo; learn how to harvest dew or how to make a solar still. And then teach every single person you know how to do the same thing. This isn’t about you. It is about us all.

And by the way? My hair looks great. Now I just need to secure a supply of walnuts, for after the fall, so I don’t show my grey…