Back to the Start

Sometimes it can be tough to bring myself to put up a new post on Thursdays, because I don't want to push the Wordless Wednesday image down the page. Today is one of those days. Yesterday's vintage shot of my father standing in the blue wonderland of snow that surrounded my grandfather's barn back in early 1958 is like a cooling breeze every time I see it, and a welcome contrast to these very hot, horribly dry dog days of the summer of 2011.

But, happily, here's a cool little animation that I have to share. If you want, you can even find out how the film came to be!

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

To market, to market...

I'm trying to catch up on some reading this weekend, and thought I'd share a bit, from Michael Pollan's article, "The Food Movement, Rising," in the New York Review of Books:

[F]ood can serve as “an edible dynamic”—a means to a political end that is only nominally about food itself.

One can get a taste of this social space simply by hanging around a farmers’ market, an activity that a great many people enjoy today regardless of whether they’re in the market for a bunch of carrots or a head of lettuce. Farmers’ markets are thriving, more than five thousand strong, and there is a lot more going on in them than the exchange of money for food. Someone is collecting signatures on a petition. Someone else is playing music. Children are everywhere, sampling fresh produce, talking to farmers. Friends and acquaintances stop to chat. One sociologist calculated that people have ten times as many conversations at the farmers’ market than they do in the supermarket. Socially as well as sensually, the farmers’ market offers a remarkably rich and appealing environment. Someone buying food here may be acting not just as a consumer but also as a neighbor, a citizen, a parent, a cook. In many cities and towns, farmers’ markets have taken on (and not for the first time) the function of a lively new public square.

Have you been? Here at Chez 10K, our kitchen, more and more, revolves around the markets here in Chattanooga. There are a number of them, but our regular haunts are the Wednesday Main Street Market and the Sunday Chattanooga Market. Both are within comfortable biking distance, so going to the market is, in many ways, a very deliberate act for me.

I can confirm what Pollan says above. Going to the farmers market is a social experience. I can't remember the last time I had a real conversation at the grocery store (I often get through talking to no one but the cashier!), but at the farmers market, I am engaged from the moment I hop off my bike -- "beautiful day," "so-and-so has wheat berries today," "the figs have come in" and so on. I see neighbors and friends, along with fellow activists and foodies. We swap tips and recipes while nibbling samples of local cheese. It is a wonderfully immersive experience.

If you want to find a farmers market in your area, check out Local Harvest -- and have fun! The markets are positively bursting at this time of year!

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

WHAT?!? Greenlife goes Whole Foods?!?

I'm finally getting around to slogging through my rss feed to see what I missed while I was distracted with graduation and Germany, and I ran across this: Whole Foods to Buy Greenlife Grocery -- and the transfer happens tomorrow!

I'm not sure how I feel about this. Whole Foods is a good store, but I have my concerns. Greenlife sells a lot of food that was grown here in the local food shed. They sell meat that was raised on a farm run by a guy I know. I'm not sure if the efficiencies of Whole Foods allows for that sort of local commitment. And when it comes to seafood, I've always been confident shopping at Greenlife. Whole Foods, on the other hand, has spent years digging in its heels when it comes to establishing a policy of selling only sustainably harvested fish without a lot of PCBs or methyl-mercury.

Bigger isn't necessarily better -- in fact when it comes to the production and distribution of food, I would argue that smaller is quite often better. There's free range chicken, and then there is chicken that is technically free range, but in spirit only. A factory farm is a factory farm, even if you slap the word "organic" in the mix.

We'll see how it goes. Tomorrow is the official date of transfer, but hopefully no one at Greenlife will notice. I'll keep shopping there, but I'll be watchful (and of course, the Main Street Farmers Market will continue to be my first stop when I shop!).

Food in 2010

Here's what to watch in the coming year (yay! for small farms!).

UPDATE: and on a more local level, there's this!

Saturday Stuff You Might Have Missed

Here's a real hodgepodge from the past week!

• And you thought Episode I was bad? Check out an early draft of the original Star Wars.

• These two girls totally outdo Robert Loggia and Tom Hanks, but then again, they're not supposedly improvising.

• Things disappear! Like the Aral Sea and the Amazon Rainforest -- and beyond that, farms sink!

• Food from around the world: in hospitals and in schools (and speaking of school lunches, there's this too)!

• How much do we love to defend marriage?? Oh, so much that the fun overflowed from one video into another! Also, we like to mock Pat Robertson with beautiful music videos.

• In medical and curing blindness news, this is really awesome.

• Do you like to have pictures with your data? Something to make it seem less dry and less science-y? Then you're going to like these sites.

• Did you have a video made of your wedding? If so, it's going to seem so incredibly lame after you watch this one.

• Watch out, all you greedy, overbearing religious cult-like groups! Scientology has Scientologists have been banned, and those awful Mormons have been taken down another notch. Ha.

• Attention Ferris Fans! Cameron's home is for sale!

• And finally, some quotes for the week (we'll start with the icky and work our way to the more reasonable):

Let’s hope that the key conferences aren’t when she’s menstruating or something, or just before she’s going to menstruate.

-- G. Gordon Liddy, troglodyte, doing an awfully good job of making the other neanderthals of his ilk look almost human by comparison. (Update: and there's always the problem of bears.)

Honestly folks. If we paid as much attention to the sexual activities of Catholic priests as we do to homosexuals wanting to marry, we probably could have saved a lot of children from years of guilt, shame, anger and pain.

-- Helen Philpot

Eating Local

I purchased my 2009 CSA subscription this past week and then ran across a couple of links that showed me that other people are thinking about local sources of food.

First off is Outstanding in the Field, which explores the connection between the earth under your feet and the food on your table, while serving al fresco dinners in farm fields, and other earthy locations. Take a long, lazy look around the web site -- it's a charming and ambitious idea!

I also read about food and freedom over at Front Porch Republic. Living downtown, with a classic city-sized, postage-stamp lawn, I don't have the resources to grow my own food. The next best thing, I think, is to support local farmers, so that there are local farms, using local land and expertise -- keeping those resources, well... LOCAL.

It would be nice if there were more local land dedicated to farming, and more people engaged in the process, but, of course, that would happen if more people became involved in taking advantage of local food sources. Have you visited a farm in your area? Looked into getting a CSA subscription? Shopped at your local farmers' market? If so, good for you! You're supporting the home team! ;-)

Sunny Day!

Well, I got out of the house today! It was a very busy day and I actually took a picture! Of some people with a tractor. And now, all that fresh air has me feeling pleasantly sleepy. Ahhh... I'm ready for spring...

Friday Creature

I popped by Crabtree Farms this week, and caught this guy, hard at work. Lately, with all the bad news about bees, I'm always glad to see the few that are left.

Have you got the Olympics Fever yet?!? I'm pretty psyched -- I've loved watching the games since I was a kid -- but I'm going to make a quick trip out of town for a wedding before I can sink into the coverage. Have a great weekend (and go say hello to the arkettes!)!

Catching Up...

I've got some links lying around in my rss reader. Some of them are a little dated (going back a week or so), but they're all worth sharing.

• Looking for a way to beat higher grocery prices? Ever considered Community-Supported Agriculture? There are quite a few CSA Farms in Tennessee. Surely, we've all had enough of the failed global food system.
• Here's a great interview with Rachel Maddow, #50 on the Telegraph's 50 most influential US political pundits list (and, of course, my favorite pundit).
• And once again -- and I can't believe there is anyone left who is still willing to peddle this crap (but unfortunately, the group includes the idiots and misogynists currently running the show in DC) -- the evidence continues to show that abstinence-only education DOESN'T WORK:

  Programs teaching U.S. schoolchildren to abstain from sex have not cut teen pregnancies or sexually transmitted diseases or delayed the age at which sex begins. [...] Vast sums of federal monies continue to be directed toward these programs. And, in fact, there is evidence to suggest that some of these programs are even harmful and have negative consequences by not providing adequate information for those teens who do become sexually active.

The Week Ahead, and Freddie on Abortion

Well, here's what I've found to read this weekend (which didn't involve too much time spent reading as Crabtree Farms had their fall plant sale, so I spent most of Saturday out in the yard, playing in the dirt).

Extensive reports from the people on the ground in Iraq and on the people playing politics in DC give us some sense of where we are as Bush's promised moment of reckoning approaches.

And in related news (at least in that it involves a presidential candidate), it turns out that Freddie Thompson can't decide whether or not abortion should be considered a crime.