Category: Writing

Writing about writing, autobiography, cross posting selected work from other places.

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Writing

Feeding the Hungry – Iowa Style

Harvest
Harvest

The United Nations asserted that food production must double by 2050 to meet growing world-wide demand and to combat hunger which affects a billion people who are already here.

The 2009 report explained, “to achieve food security, investment in agricultural research, natural resources, financial services, local infrastructure, market links and safety nets are pivotal. Food prices, already high and volatile, could spike again as droughts, floods and other climate-related events affect harvests.”

In Iowa almost everyone has an opinion on how to feed the world, and there is no denying that the factors listed at the UN are important. There is also a role for increased productivity, measured in food produced per acre, in feeding the world.

To an investor—the kind that derives a living from Wall Street trading—opportunity presents itself. Synthetic biology writer Maxx Chatsko explained on The Motley Fool:

To boost yields and combat pests, farmers will need to increasingly rely on technology ranging from high-yield seeds to agricultural biotechnology to even the Internet of Things.

While progress is being made, consumers in many wealthy nations are demanding that their food be grown using organic farming principles. Some consumers rationalize their purchasing decisions by claiming the health benefits of organic food (which have been thoroughly debunked), the avoidance of health risks associated with genetically modified foods (with which the scientific consensus disagrees), or the more environmentally friendly and sustainable approach to agriculture that organic farming enables.

This chart from Tom Vilsack’s USDA, cited by Chatsko, is a bit misleading:

USDA Organic Food SalesFor anyone who has been in a popular grocery store, box store or warehouse club, the proliferation of organic products is no secret and people are buying them. Growth of this market segment may represent an investment opportunity, or as Chatsko indicated, “the trend in organic food sales hints that opportunity does indeed exist, even if it’s fueled in large part by outsize marketing budgets, a fundamental information gap, or, worst of all, misinformation.” What’s most misleading about the chart is that it is only a market segment, not the global picture. That’s what the UN report was describing.

Local food production doesn’t come up in the UN report or on the Motley Fool analysis, and some of us believe it represents an answer to eliminating hunger. So where is it?

Partly, we are enamored of a few rock star farmers like Joel Salatin. It is hard not to like the stories Salatin tells in books like “Folks, This Ain’t Normal: A Farmer’s Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World.” If Salatin and his ilk are great promoters of eating “real food,” such punditry doesn’t get to solutions to real problems. Thoughtful nuggets like this one distract us,

The world is awash in food and 50 percent of human food goes to waste because of anything from pernickety consumers, or because a Red Cross truck can’t get through a border. If you and I could figure out how to double food production, there would still be people going hungry for a whole lot of socio-economic issues.

We like Salatin, and some of us are glad he is able to make a living by speaking, farming and writing, but a few rock stars will not feed the world.

The story of Cuba tells a different, and I believe more sustainable story. Cuban agricultural systems were disrupted the end of Soviet support, oil imports particularly, in 1989. Reacting to change in the agricultural system became a national necessity as Cubans literally lost weight due to lack of calories. Cuba went local and semi-organic. Christopher D. Cook is among the most recent to recount Cuba’s story in “Cuba’s Harvest of Surprises.”

Cuba’s farmers shifted to organic fertilizers, traditional crops and animal breeds, diversified farming with crop rotations, and non-toxic pest controls emphasizing the use of beneficial plants and insects. This blend of measures is part of a sustainable-agriculture approach known as agroecology. It’s often described as a promising innovation — which is a little ironic given that it draws on age-old peasant farming practices.

There is a case to be made for peasant agriculture as a way to feed the hungry in a sustainable way. In doing so, there are substantial world-wide obstacles, not the least of which is access to land. In the United States people perceive a return to peasant-style lives as unappealing when they already cannot find time in the day. If Cuba represents a possible solution, it needs an advocate, and I don’t mean U.S. normalization with the island nation or a rock star promoter of it’s semi-organic food system.

There is a growing local food movement in the U.S. and it has had successes and challenges. A lot of folks are entering the local food movement only to find that it is tough to make a living. To clarify, by local food movement I refer to producing consumer goods to support a Community Supported Agriculture project, restaurant, farmers market or other geographically local food sales.

How people access land is a key constraint to entering the local food business. Local food production also relies on cheap labor—barter agreements, volunteers and lowly paid professional staff. Like with so-called traditional farming, success has been elusive and often requires government subsidies or working off the farm to pay basic, year-round living expenses.

Jaclyn Moyer, a Slate writer who operates a 10-acre farm in California, asked some key questions of the often rosy picture painted of small scale, local food producers. “Do you make a living? Can you afford rent, healthcare? Can you pay your labor a living wage?” She answered her own questions, “if the reporter had asked me these questions, I would have said no.”

Global hunger is a real problem, to which “feeding the world,” especially from Iowa, is no solution. Increasing food production is, has been and will remain a key challenge to agriculture as long as the value of a day’s work is eroded by marketplace demands. There is nothing new about that, and the introduction of farm subsidies during the New Deal is rooted in this basic problem with farm life.

There is a lot we can do to alleviate hunger. For urban dwellers, there is a substantial opportunity in food recovery, about which I wrote for the newspaper. Donations of food, money and time to a food bank all produce positive results toward hunger elimination. The use of urban space has potential for local food production. Whether one grows herbs on a window ledge or plants some kale and tomatoes on a few square feet in the backyard, everything helps increase the amount of available food for people who need it. These are small things that can make an impact.

Growing world population is not a new issue, but the limits of our ecosystem to sustain people are becoming increasingly evident. While a row crop farmer may be able to carve out a living by increasing yield or reducing input costs, it isn’t a solution to world hunger. As the UN pointed out, it is about more than productivity. It is about climate change, political issues, finance and land as much as it is about growing food. Until those issues come to be recognized and closer to resolution we can do as many small scale things as we like and people will continue to go hungry.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t do what we can. We should. At the same time, if we don’t accept what the UN has said is the problem, then someone with standing, and less of an axe to grind, should get to work on the issue. Don’t look for a rock star to do it. Hope is the solution lies within each one of us working together.

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Writing

Roasted Pepper Garlic Spread

Cheese Spread with Pickles
Cheese Spread with Pickles

The warehouse club sells packs of six 8-ounce bars of cream cheese. I bought one.

A basic use-it-up strategy is to make a spread for crackers and bread for after work snacking or luncheon. It’s easy.

Soften a bar of cream cheese on the counter until it reaches room temperature. Unwrap it into the bowl of a food processor.

On the bits and pieces shelf in the pantry locate some roasted bell peppers. Add about one whole pepper’s worth to the bowl. Roast your own if you have them, but in winter, who does?

Add one peeled clove of garlic and process until the texture is smooth.

The basic spread could be seasoned as you like it, although I found garlic is enough. Spread on crackers, toast or bread, Top it with pickled bits from the ice box: cucumbers, olives, beets or radishes and no finer winter snack can be found. If we lived in Russia a shot of vodka would be a mandatory accompaniment.

Much though I enjoy thinking and writing about cooking and processing food, it’s not why I blog. That is, the food’s not the story, the process is.

My first blog in 2007 was an effort to provide a place for our daughter to keep up with the home front. Not sure how much she reads it now, but she has been and remains a primary audience regardless of where I have gone with this writing. Luckily, I have grown a larger, supplemental audience.

Learning and writing about food preparation exemplifies a main process for understanding complex topics. There are few recipes simpler than the one above, but its simplicity belies complexity that led me to it. It is easy to collect recipes, more difficult to decide which batch of 25 will go into a seasonal repertory, and harder still to align a cuisine to seasonal, local food. Writing this blog helps with all of that behind the scenes, when all the reader sees is the end of the process in the form of a recipe.

So it is with the other main topics: sustainability, politics, the environment, worklife, climate change and local food. A constant trying-out of ideas and phrasing. Most of what I see in daily life is complex and simply recording what may have happened through a viewpoint not that interesting.

This blog is a process that leads hopefully to better living. I am thankful for anyone who follows along.

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Writing

Kale Canceled

Fresh Kale
Fresh Kale

Had to have known this was coming from my seed company:

Earlier this season you placed an order with us which included 365.11, Winterbor F1 PKT.  Unfortunately, due to a supply problem we have canceled your order for the item listed.

The operator of the CSA where I worked last summer explained the kale seed problem in more detail:

For the past three years weather conditions around the world have impacted seed supplies.  For the second year there is a shortage of kale seed.  Turns out the big hybrid kale seed suppliers are in Europe and they were all affected by disease.  Fortunately I had ordered and saved seed from my favorite varieties last year.  So for those of you who were secretly happy there might be a shortage of kale it’s not going to happen.

Kale Seeds
Kale Seeds

The seed shortage is only half the problem. Demand for the leafy green vegetable has soared, with many people now including kale in smoothies, soups, casseroles, and salted snacks in the form of kale chips. Luckily I have two packets of kale seeds received as a gift last fall.

Kale was one of the most common green vegetables through the end of the Middle Ages. Because it grow and tastes better after the first frost, there has been plenty of it to go around.

Immediate plans are to look at garden stores to see if there are some packets of seeds available. However, I may have to make do.

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Writing

Writing Into the New Year

Writing About Apples
Writing About Apples

Writing is about finding an audience. The prospects for any writer to develop a multitude of readers is slight and we take what we can get.

Suffice it that in time of social media some will follow, but whether and what they will read is an open question for which there are no native answers.

We put things out there, promote them as we can, and hope for the best.

There is a craft of writing, and the more I write in the 400-1,000 word form, the easier it comes. Countless blog posts, letters to the editor, speeches and emails have been a continuous written work in progress since my first published pieces in the 1970s. When I read my early work, it’s clear I’m getting better.

That said, I’ll be writing into 2015 with some of the same topics—gardening, local food, peace and justice, politics, and living in society—as I have.

There is a reality to deal with: sustaining a process to support writing. Steven King’s idea that writing is a form of self-hypnosis is a good starting place for this. As a writer, it is possible to set aside existential demands to focus on words for a few hours each day. The goal is to have about four hours of writing per day, hopefully according to a regular routine. When we come out of the trance, reality is there again, waiting like slobbery dogs of war to fill our attention.

Dealing with existential demands is incorporated into my writing, and the posts written with the tag “worklife” are examples of this. See the tag cloud in the right column.

At the same time, wonder, imagination and anticipation seem better topics for writing. Hope that whatever dirt from which we spring will be seeded, grow, flower and reproduce with the sweetest scent of pollination. We need a form of hypnosis to forget quotidian lives and experiences that seek to fill our attention the way water seeks its own level. Writing cannot only be escape, but must be engagement in the human condition without drowning.

This morning in late January is what we have lived for so long. Here’s hoping to build an audience and create something that matters in the page pixels in front of us. And continue to believe that’s possible.

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Writing

Cooking – Sort Of

Soup Ingredients
Soup Ingredients

When there are two of us, dinner is usually a snap. I cook some dishes like there is a whole crew, and it leaves an ice box full of leftovers—it’s easy to grab a jar of homemade chili and call it dinner.

The six-pack of eight ounce packages of cream cheese needed to be used. Yesterday I made a spread of one package, roasted red peppers, three cloves of garlic, and a tablespoon of mayonnaise. Once the cream cheese is to room temperature, everything comes together in the food processor. Three cloves of garlic bordered on being too much, but the spread will serve for a couple of days.

This morning a pot of mixed beans is cooking. On the cutting board are generous mounds of carrot, celery and onion. Once the beans are cooked, the whole lot will go into the pot with some bay leaves and enough homemade stock to cover. It will simmer a couple of hours until it becomes soup—just in time for lunch before I head over to the warehouse for a shift.

While there is prep work, and transformation with heat, is this really cooking? At a basic level it is. Acquired knowledge about spreads, soups and chili makes the work quick and easy. Even a long prep and cooking time, like there is with bean soup, is not hard. However, it is certainly not glamorous or particularly inventive. It is subsistence at the most basic level: turning raw material into food for sustenance.

As easy as this type of cooking is, there is a temptation to use prepackaged, precooked food as the main course in a cuisine. There are so many varieties of processed food, a person could go for months without having the same dish twice. At a price point of around $10 for a multi-serving package, processed food seems cheap, even if it isn’t. In the end, any home cooking is leveraged from the idea of controlling what we eat and the ingredients from which food is made more so than food cost. For the most part processed food is an infrequent convenience or comfort.

With the abundance of food in the U.S., it is hard to figure how people go hungry. They do. Even in our community of about 5,000 people we have a food bank that is well used. Perhaps we have gotten too far from producing meals in a kitchen from raw ingredients.

My mixed bean soup is easy to make, but there is a process to be learned and followed. It will make a dozen servings, and whatever the cost, that is cheap both in money and in work. We need to eat, so why not some bean soup? Why not indeed.

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Writing

On Our Own 2014 Review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog. The meaning of these statistics is unclear, except to say that I am thankful for people who read my writing in this space.

Best wishes for a happy new year.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 8,300 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

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Writing

Night Storm

The Ditch in Winter
Ditch in Winter

LAKE MACBRIDE— Just before running my mobile phone through the washing machine, I searched the Internet for Hyemeyohsts Storm.

There were a few search results— what little information there was full of controversy. It was 2 a.m. and I hadn’t turned the lights on.

The year Seven Arrows was published, Chuck Storm was a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Iowa, where he taught a course titled, “American Indian Signs and Symbols.” His wife Swan accompanied him everywhere he went, and would roll cigarettes for him as he told stories once a week for a couple of hours. That was before smoking was banned in classrooms.

I got an A in the course. Everyone did. Storm confronted the administration and made a case for the grade, and got his way. A lot of people who attended the classes weren’t registered. To call it a “class” was a stretch, as the curriculum was disjointed and sometimes incoherent, if one existed at all. What happened each week just happened, and I suppose that was part of the learning.

Storm welcomed us to visit their apartment, and one evening I did. Unannounced, and perhaps a little rude, I appeared at their door, and Swan welcomed me in. They were working with someone who had a issue with film. He was wrapped in celluloid from which he broke free. Afterward, Swan used a hand sweeper—the kind I use to pick up pine needles after the Christmas tree is removed—to clean the carpet, then we dispersed for the evening.

Seven Arrows was a work of fiction, and as such, it was easy to accept. While it claimed to be “the first book about the Ways of the Plains People to be written entirely by an Indian,” it was sometimes uncertain which stories were part of oral tradition, and which were fictionalized.

A number of modern writers have called Storm a fake Indian.

“Hyemeyohsts Storm, whose first name is hard to spell and to say, was another faker who made a minor fortune with his fake Indian book, Seven Arrows,” Dr. Dean Chavers wrote in the Native American Times. “It tried to be a genuine representation of the ceremonies of the Cheyenne people, but it came out as hippie mish-mash, just right for the 1970s.”

Storm has been accused of exploiting native traditions, of selling spirituality, and of being a plastic shaman and plastic Indian. I don’t know about that, and when I knew him he seemed genuine enough—as genuine as any writer I met during my undergraduate studies.

Why life would lead me here is uncertain. A whim from the beyond, as Meyer Baba might call it. What I know is I wasn’t ready to replace my mobile phone, or to consider negativity clouding the view of life as I knew it four decades ago. Perhaps it was just a night storm.

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Writing

Newspaper

Garage Sign
Garage Sign

LAKE MACBRIDE— It’s been a dubious endeavor.

After discontinuing our subscription to the daily (except Sunday) newspaper years ago, I began freelancing for them. Feeling a need to subscribe again, I did.

The carrier came and left no paper on the inaugural subscription day. Perhaps communications between sales and circulation is not all it could be, although friction between these entities has been a bone of contention since I learned the structure back in the 1960s. For my part, I’ve always been an operations guy. Leave the delivery of services to me, and production and sales to someone else. Still, no paper despite my distraction recounting personal history.

Complaining is not my bag. At least that’s what I believe. While developing a tolerance for the human condition, sometimes I fall short. When we know a little bit more about something, like the structure of newspapers, one can get a bit whiny. That is not becoming of the 60-something.

Yesterday I distributed some 1,400 samples of a pastry confection to people in the warehouse. There were a lot of smiles as the imminent Thanksgiving holiday precipitated whole families arriving to shop together.

I enjoyed their conversations—carried on as if I wasn’t there. Men discussed how women could use a food item. Parents and grand parents marshaled children as they navigated the tall steel stacked with palletized product. Patrons with Irish whiskey in their carts lingered in the cheese aisle living large with dairy. It was a specialized soup of humanity and I was ladling it into my bowl attentively.

What I can say about my work in the warehouse is limited. Since I need the income to support my writing, one dasn’t disrupt things. Framing only general and positive remarks in public, there is a story to tell, but it must be told later, after I move on to what’s next to pay the bills. One always believes there will be a next thing.

But this morning, right now, I am writing. For now, that’s enough to accept the varied and imperfect life I have been living.

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Work Life Writing

Meeting at the Cemetery

Rural Cemetery
Rural Cemetery

BIG GROVE TOWNSHIP— There was trouble last night at the cemetery, the first such trouble since I was elected township trustee.

It had to do with who could be buried in whose plot, and the trustee who coordinates plot sales and burials wanted to discuss the issue. The funeral is Friday, so no time for dalliance. We are meeting at 8:30 a.m.

Two years into my term, being a township trustee has provided a steady stream of learning about our community. There has been time to consider things, and almost no controversy—just repeated expression of wills about what should get done and how. Any conflicts that surfaced were quickly resolved.

I’m confident we will figure this one out.

Yesterday it was shown that Mary Landrieu did have 59 votes to proceed on Keystone XL, and that’s all she had. The bill overriding the executive process on evaluation and approval of the project now goes into the dustbin of the 113th Congress. It likely will be back next congress.

I spent part of the last two days transcribing testimony to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, carbon dioxide particularly.

“I began my career as a summer intern at EPA 42 years ago under what has euphemistically become known as Russell House One,” Dianne Dillon Ridgely said. “I was a 19-year old kid. And what is most dramatic is much of what we addressed that summer—in terms of air pollution, in terms of the public’s engagement on power production—are exactly the same things, particularly in terms of coal, that we are still addressing and fighting 42 years later, and to me that is really a sad commentary.”

Ridgley is a 42-year veteran of governmental action (or inaction) on clean air and clean water, having been appointed by Presidents Clinton, Bush 41 and Bush 43 to international delegations to address environmental issues. We’re still addressing them. There is hope the EPA’s actions won’t be blocked by the 114th Congress, something the presumed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell indicated is high on his to-do list. Time will tell, but I believe we are on the right side of history regardless of what the Congress does.

My last workday at the local paper was Sunday. It will feel a little weird to be able to focus on my writing on the weekends instead of proof reading the paper. The bucket of part time paid jobs is down to three, and one of those is finished the second week in December. When the number surged to eight last summer, it was too much to juggle. Having found a bottom, the goal for next year is to keep what remains, and use it as a base. In addition, I will seek paid writing jobs and temporary positions and opportunities that can add a few C-notes to the treasury each month. What remains is that I work to support my ability to write.

Hope against hope, I want to get out in the yard and mulch the leaves, and shorten the grass. For that to happen, the snow needs to melt, the yard dry out, and half a day of warmer temperatures roll in. In these days of crazy weather, that is possible, however improbable. That’s where this Wednesday finds me.

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Writing

Snow Came

Snow Cover
Snow Cover

LAKE MACBRIDE— The first snowfall precipitates the innate idiocy of people who forget, or refuse to recall that it gets slippery when snow falls on the roadway. Coming across Mehaffey Bridge Road after a shift at the warehouse, a long lineup of cars was stopped with headlights on. Two cars were in the ditch with the sheriff nearby. I hope no one was hurt.

A snowplow came in the oncoming lane dropping sand and salt, so three of us jumped over and drove around the obstruction. If nothing else, I am a confident winter driver, having weathered all kinds of conditions in the U.S. and in Germany.

Crops are still in the field, but other than that, we needed the moisture. It’s still snowing.

The kale in the garden looks green from the house, but this may be the end of it. Part of tomorrow will be checking it for edibility. There are also vegetables going bad in the fridge, and those will go to compost when I check the kale. The growing season may officially be over.