It doesn’t appear we will get a solid week of subzero temperatures this winter. Based on the five-day forecast I’m planning to prune the fruit trees on Sunday.
Would that growing food were all there was to worry about.
The challenge has been to assimilate a new work schedule at the home, farm and auto supply store into my writing schedule. Halfway through January, I’m no closer to a plan.
While it may seem self-indulgent, mentioning the word “I” so many times, unless I get this right, it’s curtains for my aspirations as a writer.
I won’t let that happen.
How to use the couple of hours in the morning, my break periods at work, and time in the evenings and on weekends for writing production needs definition. Family, our food system, maintenance on the property, and adding revenue have to be considered as well.
Confident I’ll get there, midweek before the cold it’s not clear how. Something will get figured out. I hope it will be sooner rather than later.
Sixty nine percent of adults age 20 and older were overweight during the period 2011 – 2012, according to the Centers for Disease Control. We hear constantly from medical professionals, dietitians, mass media, politicians, friends and family: to do something about being overweight — and we should — moderate our caloric intake and move.
Despite such commonplaces, something is amiss. It goes beyond notions of eating a “proper diet” and exercising, and most of us don’t really understand what’s right and what’s wrong. Many don’t even learn what is required to live well in the contemporary food culture.
As people move to urban areas — disconnected from how food is grown, processed and marketed — another layer is added to our food system. It includes dining out more often, claims and assertions in mass media about food and food products, and the reduction of daily life to a restricted set of patterns involving less exercise, more processed and prepared foods, and an abundance of food everywhere — unlike in many other places in the world.
Fixing the obesity problem requires more skill than eating and drinking until satiated. What guidance exists among food writers, health professionals and scientists comes under fire from almost every direction.
In the end, we must each make decisions about a personal cuisine or diet. Where will food be sourced? How much cooking will I do at home? How much should I rely on the convenience of an ingredient-based industrial food supply chain? How do I determine the difference between food that tastes good and food that is good for us? There are no easy answers and as time passes we make decisions and live our lives as best we can — making decisions by default.
The film In Defense of Food aired on public television Dec. 30, 2015. In it, author and food writer Michael Pollan takes nutritionism to task.
“Nutritionism is an alleged paradigm that assumes that it is the scientifically identified nutrients in foods that determine the value of individual food stuffs in the diet. In other words, it is the idea that the nutritional value of a food is the sum of all its individual nutrients, vitamins, and other components,” according to Wikipedia.
Pollan’s message in the film is we should “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” and pay less attention to nutritionism. While he has his critics, this seven word statement is as good as any other guidance I’ve heard as help for developing a family cuisine.
Pollan encourages people to eat meat, which is a bone of contention in urban circles, especially among vegans, vegetarians and environmentalists. He neither embraces nor rejects genetically modified organisms in the film, perhaps recognizing that the anti-GMO movement is more marketing than science. If one has been reading Pollan, his affection for bread is well known.
I follow Pollan and a few other food writers. What matters more is the choices made in our kitchen: how will we process the abundance of garden and farm? What cooking oil should we use? Should we buy lettuce at the grocer during winter? Should we eschew making big batches of food in favor of making enough at a time for a single meal? The questions can be endless, each decision of some importance.
For our family, getting started with local food has been an answer to these questions and more. It is easy to know the face of the farmer when it is visible in the bathroom mirror each day. As the circle of food producers and processors expands beyond our lot lines, it gets more complicated, but not impossible.
What’s needed most is to turn off outside influence from time to time and do what seems right. There is nothing to be afraid of. Food itself will help us find a better diet, especially when combined with the complex understanding of the world that comes with being human. Instead of trying to understand food culture, we may be better off to just go on living and take what comes. Going forward, that’s what I plan to do. That is, in addition to moderating caloric intake and moving.
Having yesterday off work at the home, farm and auto supply store, I made a trip to the grocery store and considered last year. Here are some highlights for interested readers.
Reading list.
A key realization was most of my reading — and I still do a lot — is short articles, mostly on my mobile phone or desktop computers. Of the 10 paper books I read, no regrets — I learned from each of them.
I mentioned in my birthday post, the education and empowerment of women is emerging into a new importance, so the Kristoff/WuDunn book Half the Sky was a better motivator than the others.
Here’s the list with most recently read first.
Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn; On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King; This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate by Naomi Klein; Gilead by Marilynne Robinson; The Perils of Prosperity 1914-32 by William E. Leuchtenburg; The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald; 1381: The Year of the Peasants’ Revolt by Juliet Barker; Poetry City: A Literary Remembrance of Iowa City, Iowa by Dave Morice; Jewelweed by David Rhodes; and The Robber Barons by Matthew Josephson.
Blogging
For the third year I edited Blog for Iowa while Trish Nelson took a summer break. I posted about all five Democratic presidential candidates and got a press pass to attend the Iowa Democratic Party Hall of Fame Celebration July 17 where they spoke. The grab bag of political, environmental, labor and other topics can be found here. The writing speaks for itself.
The post that received the most attention was 5 Reasons Jim Webb’s Stock is Up. There was a vacuum of Iowa coverage of the Jim Webb presidential campaign and my post seemed to fill it for a brief while. Even the candidate posted about my article in social media.
The most popular posts at On Our Own: Sustainability in a Turbulent World were ones written in past years. Autobiography in 1,000 Words, written in 2013, gets consistent, daily page views. Rounding out the top five for the year were my post announcing reasons to caucus for Hillary Clinton in the Feb. 1 Iowa caucus; Climate Change in 200 Words, written in January 2014; my letter to U.S. Senator Joni Ernst advocating for the agreement with Iran over their nuclear weapons program; and a post from 2013 with three photos of some summer pest problems. Readers increasingly recognized me in public because of my writing.
Newspaper Writing
I filed 59 stories with the Iowa City Press Citizen in 2015. When my editor, Emily Nelson, left the newspaper July 2 after a long tenure, it was a signal that the end was approaching. This was confirmed when my new editor, Tricia Brown left Sept. 11. My last story ran Oct. 16.
I covered diverse topics by taking whatever assignment was offered at the Press Citizen. By interviewing startup business owners, people working for non-profits, and many others I met new people.
My favorite newspaper article was about Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey’s visit to Local Harvest CSA. It was also the most fun to write. My article about Bobby and Kayla Thompson and their new hair styling salon in downtown Iowa City was the most popular in 2015, receiving more than 2,500 online views after publication. My advance article about the TaxSlayer Bowl in Jacksonville, Fla., published December 2014, garnered the most online views during my one-year tenure with over 3,000. Print circulation of the paper was about 10,000 according to Gannett’s 2014 annual report.
I don’t have a burning desire to do more newspaper work. It was lowly paid for the investment of time. The monetary income, though slight, went to good use. Freelancing with the Press Citizen helped me realize the importance of having an editor.
Working
Checks came in from nine different employers and contracts during the year with the largest share of income (65 percent) being from Club Demonstration Services, a part time, no benefits job I left in September. Income from CDS will be replaced with income from the home, farm and auto supply store, a full-time job with a benefits package that began Nov. 12. Every other income producing activity was much smaller, with Gannett (15 percent), the apple orchard, the community supported agriculture project, freelance writing and editing, and stipends from my elected office work completing the picture. As the new year begins, I receive only one paycheck, with three other seasonal jobs planned along with my last year of elected office. I need another ten grand in contracts or employment to make financial ends meet this year.
Gardening and Farm Work
The 2015 garden was as productive as it’s ever been. My work at the CSA and the apple orchard continued to teach me new things about growing and selling produce. The garden and both farm jobs are part of the 2016 plan. Combined with related kitchen work, local food is becoming a part of daily life.
In October I decided to write a longer piece — a memoir of my time in the local food movement since retiring from my transportation career. In the article On Not Being Vachel Lindsay, I explained:
The first subject will be a memoir about the evolution of my understanding of local food over the last six years. The goal is a 25,000-word essay that can be combined with other short pieces into a self-published book. Book sales will become a way for people to contribute financially to my work at events.
After leaving CDS in September, it was optimistic to believe I could write 1,000 words a day while preoccupied with a search for income. As the year ended, and now that I have an income base with the work at the home, farm and auto supply store, I expect to resume this writing. I drafted about 6,000 words last year and posted a snippet here.
On New Year’s Eve I reviewed my activity diary and found a disproportionate number of personal contacts were related to politics. My work at Blog for Iowa got me involved, and I expect it will continue. Once we get past the Iowa caucuses I hope to reduce my involvement in politics to a more sustainable level.
In 2015 I spent time writing almost every day. With the practice, I’m confident something good will come of it in 2016.
It became clear at CRST Logistics I couldn’t combine writing with a career the way William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and every college teacher who took ink to paper did.
Yesterday I finished the season at the orchard. Freelancing for the newspaper slowed down. It is time once again to set writing aside and work on that necessary task – generating cash to pay expenses.
What do I want to do? Whatever I can to cover ongoing expenses, pay down debt, and enable my writing.
While not a neophyte in the art of the job search, I have a lot to learn. The work I’ve done in retail and as a correspondent may not be around the way it has been.
A recent article at Business Insider lists jobs that are at risk of being automated. The list includes not only retail salespersons and newspaper correspondents, but loan officers, receptionists, taxi drivers, security guards, fast food cooks, bartenders, financial advisers, and musicians. These are all position I might have considered. Suffice it this job search must identify more sustainable work than what these professions offer.
“A significant factor in the decline of the quality of jobs in the United States has been employers’ increasing reliance on ‘non-regular’ employees,” Steven Hill wrote at Salon, “(It is) a growing army of freelancers, temps, contractors, part-timers, day laborers, micro-entrepreneurs, gig-preneurs, solo-preneurs, contingent labor, perma-lancers and perma-temps.”
I embrace such a lifestyle, yet creating a sustainable portfolio of such work has been challenging. Careful attention to budget and managing expenses is essential and is the easier part of the process. What is hard is recognizing the life-cycle of a specific engagement and properly planning for a continuous revenue stream.
“Where I landed after a career in transportation was with a portfolio of activities, some paid and some not,” I wrote in a presentation for the Solon Public Library, “I value all of the work I do and have to make choices on how I spend my time. My life is a systematic and thoughtful process of continuous evaluation and improvement.”
I need to get better at it.
The transition of newspapers, like what is happening at Gannett, is ongoing and incomplete. More and more, the local paper has articles written by reporters further up the organizational structure, blocking out space for freelancers. I enjoyed a good run writing for the Iowa City Press Citizen, but there hasn’t been a story offered in a month. The lesson learned is it is okay to take work to build experience, but as a freelancer the thread to the newspaper can be dependent upon a particular editor. Mine left a while back.
In a world where companies increasingly do away with full time employees using apps and algorithms to manage a pool of part-time workers, being a fulfillment person in such a system has its vagaries and downside. To make such jobs work requires a personal infrastructure to take care of basic needs separately from companies who offer employment. For many years this was exactly what companies wanted – a flexible, variable labor expense that could be ramped up during peak demand and ramped down during the slow times in a business cycle. I developed a support structure where part-time or temporary jobs can be plugged in, but underestimated the continuous need for business development.
During a recent interview for a retail sales position, I was asked my salary requirements. I need between $20,000 and $24,000 per year to pay expenses and may have priced myself out of the job. The reality is we must make our own opportunities or subjugate our lives to what has become a new form of indentured servitude. Instead of booking passage to prosperity in a new world, today such workers struggle to get by in a society that seems interested only in making a buck from you’re here today, gone tomorrow labor.
I worked for great people during much of my working life. Going forward, knowing my potential manager before taking a job will be an important consideration. This learning came from constant experimentation and reflection on the jobs I’ve held since re-purposing in 2009. It’s no secret a significant reason people leave jobs is they don’t get along with their manager.
Yesterday I multi-tasked at the orchard, something we do when the end of season draws near. In addition to helping customers find apples to pick, I prepared samples of eight varieties of apples. Customers, other employees and I had many engaged conversations about apples, their parentage and uses – it’s great work if you can get it. It was the last day of the season and my manager invited me back next year.
The local food movement is a growing group of individual operators struggling to make a living and an impact in a turbulent world.
It is a nascent system directly tied to our consumer culture, dependent upon disposable income and open mindedness in meeting humankind’s most basic need.
I spent six years in our local food culture and can say food we consume is not all local, and needn’t be. At the same time there are benefits of a local food system beyond better taste, eating fresh, and knowing the farmer who produced the groceries.
In our home fall canning leads to a pantry full of soup, tomatoes, hot peppers, sauerkraut, vinegar, apple sauce, pickles and sundry items from the garden and farm. The freezer gets filled with bell peppers, apples, broccoli and sweet corn. It is food – as local as it gets – driven by what is fresh, abundant and on hand.
Along with home processed goods are bits and pieces from all over the globe, each serving a purpose in our culinary lives. Putting ingredients together in a personalized cuisine is where the local food movement will live or die.
More people seek processed or precooked food because of a perception there is too little time for cooking. If adding kale to a smoothie seems easy, making a stir fry using kale is less so. Contemporary consumers want a quick and easy path to making meals and snacks, and don’t have the patience it requires to add new recipes to their repertoire. Cuisine as an expression of local culture has been tossed out the window by many.
Having worked in the local food system, whether at home, on a farm, or in a retail store, has been an important part of my life since retiring in 2009. It is a way of life to grow food for direct consumption or sales. Local food is also a jumble even if farmers and consumers want it to be more organized and systematic.
One operator runs a community supported agriculture project where members pay in the spring to help avoid a farm loan then share in the luck, good or bad, of the farm. Another sells chits which can be used to buy the face value of any goods at a local outlet framed as a “store.” Another grows specific crops to sell to restaurants, absorbing any financial risk. All of this leads us to a point where an onion isn’t only an onion anymore. And it’s not about the onion but the culture.
If someone could organize a local food system, there may be a living in it. That misses the point. Local food systems are intended to cut out the middlemen in the food supply chain. At the same time, faced with a need for scalability, most operators could potentially use the help of local food brokers.
While some of the figures of a sustainable, local food movement – Alice Waters, Joel Salatin, Fred Kirschenmann, and others – are well known, a sense of coherence or agreement on basic terms seems missing among local producers. It is as if operators would rather work inside the bubble of what works for them personally as long as it does work for them. In a way that is not much different from how corn, soybean, egg and livestock producers view their operations.
Where we go from here is uncertain. Something I hope to discover in the pages of this memoir of my experience in with our food system.
On June 23, 2009 I made my last business trip in a career with many of them.
Arriving in Chicago on the corporate aircraft, we drove to the Loop to explain the account transition precipitated by my retirement to our largest customer. The meeting took place at their corporate office in the Wrigley Building. We could see the recently completed Trump Tower Chicago through the windows. It had become time to change the skyline of my life.
I had taken to dozing off during staff meetings and lost interest in getting along with the other members of the management team. It was time to make my exit. I hoped to do so with some measure of grace and didn’t know what would be next.
Now, I do.
After years of experimentation, volunteering, and a portfolio of part-time and temporary jobs, I have begun to write in earnest, and intend to make something more than 500-1,000 word posts for publication in newspapers, on blogs, and in other outlets.
The first subject will be a memoir about the evolution of my understanding of local food over the last six years. The goal is a 25,000-word essay that can be combined with other short pieces into a self-published book. Book sales will become a way for people to contribute financially to my work at events.
Equipped with a reasonably sound memory, a sheaf of recent writing on food, labor, farming, gardening, cooking and agriculture, I’m ready.
At a thousand words a day, the essay should be complete by year’s end. Hopefully people will find it unique and worth reading. If I’m lucky, it will be a contribution toward expanding the local food movement.
These days I wonder less about my readership than I used to. While my numbers are nowhere near the popular Jackie Collins who succumbed to breast cancer yesterday, I continually run into people who read my online work and provide positive feedback.
It’s not an income source, but it could be the start of something.
Some of my newspaper work gets more page views, and of course there’s the print version, but still, the autobiography post has gotten lasting attention through the almost two years it has been out there.
When a person writes, having an audience is an important part of it.
When he was in Cedar Rapids, Al Gore spoke about raising readerships and its importance in the post-Internet adoption era. He used Finnegan and Jackson Harries, identical twin brothers who developed the YouTube channel JacksGap: A Story Telling Project Inspired By Travel, as an example. The site has over 4 million subscribers.
Finn Harries sat at my table, and while I was supposed to be his mentor, he offered a lot more for me to learn than I him. When Finn Harries posts something, in any medium, people read and respond. They have been able to commercialize what they do, and that’s important to sustainability.
The limited amount of paid writing I’ve done has served my craft more than my wallet. What is a suitable goal for someone like me to generate income from writing?
It seems more important to work on readership. There may someday be enough readers to support formal publication of my writing, or lead to a paying gig. Gaining a readership is more important than an accumulation of posted pieces that get a couple thousand page views, which is where I am today.
That means continuing daily writing, and posting some of it on this blog. Learning my craft is important, but less so than understanding why people read me and mining that vein. Going forward that’s where I plan to spend my writing time.
Leaves of soybeans turn, painting a landscape of green, amber and gold as the plants die, pods wither and beans dry in the field. Tall corn is also losing its green, its growing season done. Soon harvest will be here.
Freedom comes with being an unpaid blogger. Posting what I will with only the sense of propriety and culture gained over six decades restraining me, on days like today, I write about myself.
Outbuilding in Johnson County
Yesterday started with interviewing a farmer for a freelance article. Before going to the county seat, I interviewed another. When people talk about a “career” they often don’t consider how complicated a farmer’s life is. There is income from farm operations, but it often doesn’t cover the bills, so growing vegetables, selling eggs and becoming a sales representative for a national business are added into the mix.
People don’t farm alone. There is always a network of family and friends to lend a hand with the physically demanding work. It has been that way since we took the land from those who lived here before in the 19th Century.
Caucus Card
After the interview I drove into the county seat at Linn and Market Streets to meet up with organizers for the Hillary Clinton campaign. I signed a caucus card and offered to canvass some area people I know, bring food to their Iowa City office when I come to town, and help organize an event or two.
After that, I walked to Old Brick where Free Press Action Fund had organized a meeting about advocating for Internet access, affordability and freedom. More than a dozen people attended and at the end we took this group photo.
Free Press Action Fund Training at Old Brick
It was a long day, capped by getting caught in a rainstorm. Luckily it relented before getting thoroughly drenched.
Friday’s Brandywine, Rose and Beefsteak Tomato Harvest
Each day for the last two weeks I picked an apple and tasted it. The crop of Red Delicious is abundant and I want to make sure when the majority is harvested they are at the peak of sweet crispness. We’re almost there.
The pear harvest was limited to what could be reached. The tree grew well above the house leaving some ripe pears beyond the reach of even my long picking pole. We have enough to eat fresh and some leftover for apple-pear sauce.
Tomatoes are coming in faster than they can be eaten fresh. The plan is to can smaller ones whole and the slicers diced. There should be plenty of jars to fill the pantry shelves. The by-products of juice and ground bits and pieces will make soup or chili, although there is a limit to how much can be canned and used over the next year.
The bell pepper plants are flowering again and celery continues to grow. The main job of deconstructing the garden in preparation for winter will soon begin.
But for now, it’s time to pick and preserve as much of the harvest as we can.
Journey Home 
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