More Deliberate Every Day

McKibben on Local Economies

This post continues the discussion of Bill McKibben's Deep Economy, begun here, continued here, and last touched upon here.  In an attempt to round toward the finish line, we first discussed the relationship between wealth and satisfaction, then moved on to the question of farming and food.  The last post focused on the shortcomings of the economy in principle and how we might see through them to a better future possibility.

This post, continuing many of the same themes, is focused on community.  McKibben spends a great deal of time in the book slowly building a case that local is more powerful than global, that despite the reality that a global approach brings more "stuff" to the table, that stuff is wrought with problems and is in the long run environmentally untenable.  He suggests that this global race has been pursued primarily as a way to grow economic systems that provide more income but less satisfaction, that the result of this pursuit is a food system wherein the objective is calories and not food, and that by disconnecting with the local we have left behind the reasonable social checks-and-balances that ensure our actions do no harm to our neighbors.  What's the alternative?  We need to start making connections with our neighbors, and fast.

Once it gets rolling, the building of connections can accelerate quickly.  We learn once again what skills and gifts our neighbors possess, and they become valuable to us again, literally valuable, people we can start to depend on for some of our food, our capital, our entertainment.  In a sense, this process is already under way on the Web.  Internet scale is neither big nor small; it's distributed, as energy and food supplies may someday be.  The small nodes hook together into something much larger, but not so monolithic it can't easily hive off into new sites and communities and forums.  Despite every effort to turn it into one more television set controlled by the largest info-conglomerates, the Internet continues to operate more like -- to use my favorite metaphor -- a farmers' market, where a million people bring their products to sell.  Or, really, to give away.

This Internet model, McKibben contends, works for a variety of reasons.  First, since each small community has responsibility for the well-being of its members, it is likely to spend more time tending to the health and well-being of the group than in hyper-individualistic pursuits such as wealth-building.  Next, since it is not reliant on any global grid (whether food system or energy or healthcare) it is able to provide for itself, and its individual failures do not put all of society at risk.  It can change and adapt much more quickly.  Also, it is intrinsically fair, since all actions are to the benefit or at the expense of neighbors.

In a sense, all discussion of local economies is about Fair Trade -- about raising wheat and lettuce in a way that honors both farmer and soil; about growing timber in a way that allows loggers to work at a reasonable pace and in a living forest; about saving and producing energy in quantities that don't require military adventure or climatic upheaval.  About giving up some measure of efficiency for other values.  Some of this trade must take place at a distance; as much as possible should take place closer to home, where it saves more energy and builds tighter bonds.  As this effort spreads, our politics will eventually start to change as well.  In a world where more people paid attention to the lives of farmers here and abroad -- met them at the market or on the Net -- it would be hard to maintain the current system of corporate subsidies and ruinous "free trade" agreements.  If fairness demands a slightly higher price, and if that means we need to get along with somewhat smaller quantities, I am confident we will eventually find the tradeoff worth making.

Eventually, McKibben suggests, we must tread more lightly.  And that means not just a smaller carbon footprint but also that we need to lower our voices a bit and listen more carefully to what is going on just around the corner, up the block.  When we are aware of our communities and aware of what each participant brings to the collective table we are more responsive to the needs of the whole, versus each individualistic desire.  This brings with it a level of fairness, sustainability and connectedness that we have lost in an era of speed and greed.

Slow down, he suggests.  And pay attention.

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Speaking of slowing down, here's a quick event announcement.  Friday night at 7pm come enjoy food, film, commentary and art at Memphis' Brook Museum.  From the Brooks site:

Join food celebrity John T. Edge and filmmaker Joe York for an exclusive screening of the film Above the Line: Saving Willie Mae's Scotch House.

Above the Line tells the story of the destruction and subsequent rebuilding of Willie Mae Seaton's famed Scotch House restaurant during Hurricane Katrina.

John is a member of Slow Food Memphis and will have an interesting take on this New Orleans tradition and the regional flavor it represents.  Doors open at 6:30 and admission is $20 for non-members, $10 if you are a member of the museum.  See you there!

On The Road

We're on the road this weekend and away from our "native" computer (can you believe Windows 95 still runs?).  As a result, this isn't a full post but more of a check-in to make sure all is well in cyberspace.  Since I don't have a well-developed meditation for today, I instead point you to the Edible Nation Blog where the discussion today is concerning what is described as being the "mother of all food events" recently announced for early next May in San Francisco. 

Even more info at the Slow Food Nation site, which includes the following details:

Slow Food Nation will publish a "State of Slow Food 2008" catalog, modeled in concept after the Whole Earth Catalog of 1968, which focused on "tools" for people. This printed and virtual catalog – focused on information - is conceived to be the definitive resource almanac for those interested in current information on slow food issues.

The campaign will peak with a four-day long exposition from May 1-4, 2008 in San Francisco's Fort Mason Center that will attract over 50,000 participants, among them hundreds of farmers, producers, and chefs. It will feature discussions, lectures, exhibits, tastings, demonstrations, an international food film festival, and a market of American artisanal foods.

Sounds like a celebration to me!  Can you say "road trip"?

By the way, call your Mom.  Tomorrow's her day.

Farmers Market: The Season Begins

The photo is of a fig in our backyard:  as noted yesterday they are thriving despite the late frost that took out the top of the tree.

We're excited about Saturday being the season opener of the Memphis Farmers Market.  While we've made a lot of new friends here in Memphis through our adventures in Slow Food and sustainability, the farmers market is the right place to build community and make connections.  And this Saturday will be a day full of strawberries, as will the following week in all likelihood.  Tana Butler of I Heart Farms could barely contain herself when she reflected on a similar experience this weekend:

Speaking of the farmers market—Stella at the Dirty Girl Produce gave me a sample of the new Albion strawberry Joe's growing, and I bought three baskets on the spot. About half didn't make it home because I was handing them out to every kid I saw, and that included the grown-up kids-at-heart who agreed with me that this berry tastes like the first strawberry you ever ate when you were little. Powerful stuff.

You can read her whole post here. 

Of course, I need to give props to the Agricenter Farmers Market too, since it is more readily open and closer to home.  But we're still willing to drive downtown to get to MFM:  the infrequency (Saturdays only) seems to make it more of an event and the farmers bring in more variety as a rule.

Have a good week!

Edible Memphis Countdown

For those of you who might be local to the Memphis area the countdown is on for the launch of Edible Memphis Magazine, a publication brought to our fine community by Melissa and Kjeld Petersen.  The first issue is expected out later this month and good information has it will be available at the Earth Day celebration at Shelby Farms.  The Memphis Flyer published an article on the new magazine last week:

The magazine was started as a quarterly newsletter in Ojai, California, five years ago. Food enthusiasts and co-founders Tracy Ryder and Carole Topalian set out to educate people about food in Ojai, a farming and artists' community in a coastal valley. More specifically, they wanted to create awareness of local foods by focusing on how people shop for, cook, eat, and relate to the food grown in their area. The newsletter included stories about farmers, produce, and markets.

When Saveur magazine included Edible Ojai in its annual "Saveur 100," a list of favorite restaurants, food, drink, people, places, and things in 2004, Ryder and Topalian received countless phone calls from like-minded people who wanted to start a similar newsletter. Ryder and Topalian established Edible Communities within the year. Their goal was to help people set up similar publications. With the assistance of entrepreneur Steve Hock, whose father developed the Visa card, the two created a workable business model that allows them to support the start-up of new magazines while not interfering with the local focus.

You can read the whole article from Memphis Flyer here.  We're already subscribers.  Are you?

100 Mile Diet Blog

Yesterday was the launch date for the 100 Mile Diet blog, and Alisa Smith kicks it off appropriately with a meditation on the spring garden.  Here too in Tennessee we've been talking a great deal about our spring garden, in fact would have gotten it out last weekend had it not been for a late cold snap that resulted in freezes all across the country.  Wouldn't have hurt our root vegetables, though.

This weekend looks like the right weekend for the job, and we're hoping all the materials for our raised-bed garden will arrive in time.  This is a new endeavor for us, and we're excited to be adding another valuable skill in self-sufficience to our tool-belt. 

When we first started investigating the viability of something like a 100-mile diet, it seemed like it would be impossible to realize.  We, at first, could not find any area meat providers (we were looking specifically for pastured beef and free-range chicken).  It was the middle of winter, so obviously all the farmer's markets were closed.  It didn't look promising at all.

Now things have turned around a bit.  Our first delivery of local, pastured beef is to arrive today, and the quarter should take us a while to finish.  We've been eating local free-range chicken, duck and goose eggs for over a month now, with a steady supply to back it up.  The Easy-Way store, while not reliable for much by way of local products, is a great source of area honey and molasses (thanks for the tip to Paulette).

And now, like Alisa in the great north, we're ready for our garden.  From the blog post:

There are always new things to discover in new neighbourhoods. Hoping to buy my tomato seeds, I looked up garden shops in the phone book. I was excited to see how many there were–until I realized all but one were actually hydroponics stores! Guess we know what the main crop is around here.

However, visiting the one proper shop, only four blocks away, gave me some other tomato inspirations. Sweet Million, a cherry variety that grows to eight feet tall. Also Longkeeper, an orange-red fruit that keeps 12 weeks after it’s picked. Neat to think of having frseh local tomoates as late as December. These plants are a little ambitious for balcony gardening perhaps–I’ll have to invest in some extra-big pots.

While our new co-op apartment is blessed with two large patios, we don’t know yet if we’ll get a garden plot for this year. Our old one is too far away. We’re keeping our fingers crossed. A big priority for me is leaving space in it for winter crops that are planted a bit later in the year, because it’s hardest to buy local vegetables in the cold months. Through spring seems like an odd time to think of winter, it’s the winter-hardy plants that feed the local-eater as late as April.

We, too, are excited about gaining a better understanding of seasonal vegetables, aligning our diet more closely with natural cycles.  And we're even ambitious enough to think we might be able to eat food from our own garden into next winter.  But let's get through spring, first.

Mike Biltonen on Local

Mike Biltonen, writing at his blog Organic Schmorganic, is starting to get tired of all the excitement being generated from the recent Time coverage on local foods.  His frustrations originate from the realization that "local" is anything but "new," and rather than being a hot trend it is a return to simplicity and self-reliance that pre-dates the modern conveniences we've become so accustomed to.

It's the way his ancestors approached life:

They were able to get what they needed to subsist either by growing it or getting it from other local farmers or merchants. There wasn’t ever a thought about buying local or imported; organic or conventional. It was just local because that’s all there really was. Even by the time the government stole their farm, the US had just begun shipping grain overseas and planting the seeds for a global food system. We had yet to understand what a global food system or corporatized farm policy would do to us a nation. Today, we’re an obese nation eating vast quantities of overprocessed foods grown god knows where. But back then local was all there was.

The recent discussions over the virtues of local versus whatever else made me realize that there were times when local was all there was. Local is not some grand new idea or food trend, but rather the way it simply should be and was. Organic isn’t a new idea either. Prior to the beginning of industrial revolution and the development of pesticides, organic was just the way that people grew food. And they grew it locally, as well. Local, organic food—a so-called gold standard—imagine that. The only differences between then and now are mired in details of methodology, packaging, and promotion. And I use the word mired purposefully because to look at it any differently is to lose sight of the fact that all this discussion about “local” is really just a rediscovery of our roots and who we are as a culture and a nation.

He concludes his blog post by pointing out that more valuable that reading Time is to "rediscover the monumental writings of folks like Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson."  I'll take that coaching, being new to this whole discussion, and carry on with my reading.  You can read the whole post here.

100 Mile Diet - Coming Soon

I can't wait for this book.  Checking out the site I'm reminded that all our talk and reading comes down to actually making a serious commitment to a different way of life.  Cheers to Alisa and James for making the commitment and then following through.  The blog about their book tour, and the local foods they encounter along the way, will be great.  From the site:

"Like many great adventures, the 100-mile diet began with a memorable feast. Stranded in their off-the-grid summer cottage in the Canadian wilderness, Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon turned to the land around them. They caught a trout, picked mushrooms in the forest, and mulled apples from an abandoned orchard with rose hips in wine. The meal was truly satisfying; every ingredient had a story, a direct line they could trace from the soil to their forks. The experience raised a question: Was it possible to eat this way in their everyday lives?

Back in the city, they began to research the origins of the items that stocked the shelves of their local super market. They were shocked to discover that a typical ingredient in a North American meal travels roughly the distance between Boulder, Colorado, and New York City before it reaches the plate. Like so many people, Smith and MacKinnon were trying to live more lightly on the planet; meanwhile, their “SUV diet” was producing greenhouse gases and smog at an unparalleled rate. So they decided on an experiment. For one year they would eat only food produced within 100 miles of their Vancouver home."