BYE FOR NOW

Well, I'm nearly done. Another half hour, I'm hoping. And then no more coursework, possibly ever in my life, though, when I said that to my sister, she said it's hard to imagine that I won't ever take a class again. True enough. But I'm daydreaming now that those future classes will involve coming home with handmade art objects or sore muscles and not this tired brain I have now.

I'm off first thing in the morning on my glorious, long-awaited vacation. You won't hear from me for awhile, not that that's all that unusual.

A TINY WINDOW


Source: www.feasta.org

What follows is an excerpt of an email I sent to my poor longsuffering partner who is trying to have a fulfilling vacation in Berlin. I'm trying to write my final essay of my grad programme and am tying myself in knots, having read too much and thought too much to write a simple basic report on why local food is or is not good for sustainability. Here's the excerpt:

I'm reading an article now about how most of the rural development
farm-level entrepreneurial advocacy of local food (which is generally me in
a way) fails to address issues of social justice and the distribution of the
profits made on "premium" value-added products associated with local food
markets. Very Marxist and all and I think a useful argument for me to think
about.

Questions for the conclusion may be something like looking at a balance of
economic, environmental and social benefits of local food, and the potential
gaps in who they fall to. I.e. who eats the food and who gets the profits.
While there may be inherent sustainability benefits on the food miles and
less infrastructure front, it is also important to look at the
sustainability as an economic development and social justice issue--is it
just creating a haves and have nots among farmers? Is it creating a diverse
agri-food landscape that challenges the industrial high production model,
and the oft-linked consolidated retailer price and quality control system,
or is it in many cases creating a dual system of cheap, mass-produced,
environmentally destructive food for some people, with expensive, "quality,"
artisanal and environmentally friendly foods and markets for others? In
other words, are these alternative food supply chains actually a challenge
to the prevailing system, or are they niche markets which, as they grow, if
they do, will become part of the existing system of downward price pressure,
more generic conceptions of quality and environmental standards (this can be
seen in copy-cat labels of natural, fresh, nature-friendly, etc.), and a
mass-produced "locality" identity fetishism that loses traceability as it
expands and may or may not actually mean all of the farm family friendly and
positive environmental things it implies to buyers?

So, structure. Local is good for these reasons (and these people have said
so). It has often been assumed or asserted to have these additional
desirable qualities or effects (social bonding, trust, re-locating of rural
and regional identities, value capture for farmers, etc.). Several of these
have been questioned based on views of economic motivation, uneven
distribution of rents, defensive localism, etc. Conclusion: the basic
reasons that local is good generally stand. The more recent analyses of how
the supply chains work and who benefits are idealistic, peasantising and
don't stand up to long-term projections or meaningful market saturation
scenarios.

Now, this is a hard conclusion to come to, because everyone in my department
is on the side of Kathe Kollwitz pretty peasants in fields versions of
things (I know she had horrible images, but didn't she also have these?),
with the picture of family farmers reclaiming their rightful share of retail
value. But I really am starting to think about the equity issues
here--because the current state of research is all about case studies of
successful eco-entrepreneurs and alternative networks and cooperative
marketing groups, and about how this diversifies the agri-food system in
general. I agree, but I also think it's very much a them that have, gain
scenario. If you research farmers in Cornwall who are invovled in quality
food schemes, a very high percentage, which i could look up, moved to the
rural area in order to start a farm business, with specialty foods,
artisanal methods and idyllic lifestyle in mind. Most of the ones who are
making it are those who see outside the farm life box. They think like
consumers. Is that a problem? Not really. They have a market. But is
building a rural development scheme on the experiences of yuppie farmers
with vision a viable plan? Especially when the market for expensive
targeted premium foods is limited? Not so sure.

Oh boy. didn't mean to do all that. And it's a very recent stage of
thinking on this. I already have questions for myself. And I know that
there is still plenty of room for market growth, particularly if there is a bigger
steady, more widespread demand (like that of public procurement, for
example) and that more environmetnally and socially sound systems are better
and so some are better than none.

End of Excerpt. So that's where my brain is, and why I never write. And today and tomorrow I have to finish this essay so I can go see my dear supportive Jason (who actually answered this in a meaningful way from a hostel lobby in Berlin).

Wish me luck.

A Bug's Life

Today I turned in my dissertation research proposal. I worked so hard on it and I'm kind of proud of it, even though it's just the proposal and it was geared to the professor who assigned it and so doesn't reflect much-needed logistical information i'll have to hammer out with my supervisor.

I spent the day in a suit (a not so fancy, velvety brown one) at a conference on sustainable public sector food procurement (school, hospital and prison meals) with representatives of lots of important organisations. I networked where I could, but that's surprisingly hard to do when they all have lots of information useful to me and I don't have much to offer them--they realize I'm a student and move on to someone who can do something for them! Their loss, I reckon. To be fair, most were not like that. But when the abrupt turn-away happens, it can really throw you! Mostly I learned lots by keeping quiet and listening.

Two essays and an exam to go!

Then I'm off to meet my darling husband (who will have spent the weekend in Berlin) and spend a glorious week of no required anything in Prague, Vienna and Budapest. Going to school in Europe was a mighty fine idea. I haven't had much time to research sight-seeing, but we are so going to see this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundertwasserhaus

And soon after that, my mom, dad and sister are coming to visit! Unfortunately, the rest of the family can't make it. But I'm really looking forward to showing the small version of my family around Cardiff, South Wales and London. I love the idea of being able to show them where we've spent this whole important year that almost no one from home (except Corey) will ever see.

OOPS!

Photos on this blog are temporarily disabled. I store them on a friend's server, which is having a problem this week. They'll all reappear in about a week, when he gets back from a long trip.

DISHEVELED. WRITERLY. STILL NOT DONE.

Well, I've done it. I've become that scruffy grad student writer type that I wanted to be, then swooned over, then wanted to be again. For several days last week, I shuffled around the house with my coffee cup (usually with cold coffee because I'd absentmindedly left it in the other room at some point and forgotten to drink it but needed the caffeine and couldn't be bothered to spend the time making more), trying to get work done. I never washed the cup, just filled it when it ran dry, and I wore the same clothes for days in a row--even went in to school in them.

I stared at the screen, typed furiously in bursts, developed tics for when I couldn't think, and developed 'writing habits.' The best of these involves working in every chair in the house (plus my bed) during the course of one heavy writing day. What happens is I hit a block, can't think clearly, don't know which problem to tackle next. So what do I do? I move to a new space--a new chair, the desk instead of the table, my bed instead of the arm chair by the window--and then I work until it happens again. It works pretty well; I recommend it.

Less productive habits include eating too much toast (and not enough else), watching horrible home buying and/or cooking shows as a study break, and making a really obsessive round of all the blogs I've ever heard of about every half hour. If your hit counts have gone up, don't get too excited--it might just be that I've got essays due!

So far, these mechanisms have gotten me through all of last semester and 2 presentations and 3 essays of this semester. I've got two more essays due this week, an exam and one final essay due next week. I should post a picture at the end of May--or even a series to document my deterioration--I'm sure I'll have some serious Einstein hair, coffee-stained clothes and panda bear eyes by the end of this. I guess we'll need to have some video to capture the jittery insanity of it all, as well.

Writing is still hard and I'm not sure any of it is decent. For this last essay, I was extremely pleased with the new structure that came to me miraculously in a 4:00 am vision the night before it was due, but less than impressed with the actual text I managed to write to fill in the glorious shell. If only I had had a couple more hours, you'd be seeing me near the words Nobel and groundbreaking in the New York Times before long. Alas, I had to turn in some sloppiness. My beloved endearing proclaimed his certainty that the ideas will shine through. I'm not so sure. I think I've learned the lesson that looking and acting like an insane genius does not turn you into one.

PS. Yes, I know the photo has nothing to do with anything. I just thought you needed something to look at. It's from St. Fagan's Museum of Welsh Life, taken last summer, before I lost my mind.

SALSA

I wrote the first part of this post last September. Most of it is still true. Updates below.

Remember I said that I'd found a Mexican place that looked like it wouldn't charge ten pounds for a burrito? Well, I've yet to see it open. I managed to find some tiny cans of vegetarian refried beans and a container of salsa without corn ingredients of any kind, some tortillas and even "soured cream." But the beans were terrible (and expensive) and the salsa was somehow gelled with guar gum. Yum. So I decided to make some salsa. Without any cookbooks or ready access to the internet, I bought what I believed to be the appropriate ingredients and then thought about it a little. I then gave in and managed to look up some recipes on the internet, but since they all seemed to be about mango and cucumber and corn, or involved oven roasting (we still don't have use of our oven--but the parts should be here any day now), I gleaned the basics and set about doing it my way. I must admit it turned out pretty well. For those of you who care, here's what I did:

Roast a red pepper lightly on a fork over gas flame. Chop and set aside after it cools. Take a bunch of small tomatoes and sort of flash-fry them whole in a tiny bit of oil, stirring frequently so they get more than one edge cooked some. Take them out to cool after a short while, as skins start to split a little. Then throw in some chunks of onion and a sliced chili or two and stir-fry quickly until charred edges and softened, adding garlic at the very end as the pan cools. Chop up the tomatoes, drain, chop the onions/chilis and mix it all together in a bowl. Add the red pepper and some raw chopped garlic. Season with salt, some cumin, a bit of black pepper, some chopped cilantro and a few squeezes of lime. Yum, yum.

And I've got some black beans soaking, as I can't find them canned here. Tomorrow's going to be a Mexican extravaganza at our house.

UPDATE:

Have since seen mexican place open, and found another. But both have sweet overly thick salsa-like stuff, thereby making it not very mexican. So I still make salsa at home, weekly. Now I make it without cooking tomatoes or onions, without red peppers, and only roast the chili peppers over the gas stove flame. Delicious, and a staple of our diets 'round here. We've also managed to find canned refried beans, which don't compare to stewed black beans, but who has the time, really?

I'm also learning to make indian food, as the ingredients are easily bought in any corner store here, and I have an indian friend who let me in on some secrets.

Not news for those of us with corn allergies

Corey Jo recently recommended that I read some Michael Pollan for fun once I'm done with all this essay writing business (still four to go!) Apparently he's going to be in Portland and Seattle. (Info at the bottom of the post, for those of you in Seattle)

Anyway, here's a quote from a news article about his new book, The Omnivore's Dilemma. It's interesting in general, but also think about it from the point of view of poor little old me, who can't have corn in any form without getting a monster migraine for days. It's not comforting, but it's also no surprise if you've ever tried to avoid corn. It's everywhere in every form in every food. Just one more reason to avoid processed foods, candy and soft drinks.

C'mon people, 66 pounds of high fructose corn syrup, per person, per year!? Gross.

Our food pyramid teeters on petrochemicals and corn syrup
Oregonian, Sunday, April 30, 2006
JOHN FOYSTON

"When I started trying to follow the industrial food chain . . . I expected that my investigation would lead me to a wide variety of places," Pollan writes in "The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals." "(But) at the very end of these food chains, I invariably found myself in almost exactly the same place: a farm field in the American Corn Belt. The great edifice of variety and choice that is the American supermarket turns out to rest on a remarkably narrow biological foundation . . . dominated by a single species: Zea mays, the giant tropical grass most Americans know as corn."

The costs of a food chain founded upon cheap energy, chemicals and an oversupply of cheap corn go beyond the oil consumed. Our corn monoculture is a disaster for almost everyone. American farmers are going broke, our soil, water and health are being degraded, cattle live in vast compounds eating food they were never evolved to digest, and our citizenry grows ever fatter as we eat our way through the corn glut.

(Little is eaten as yellow kernels. Instead, we eat it as ingredients and sweeteners such as high-fructose corn syrup: each of us swills 66 pounds of HFCS a year.)

The glut is a boon for corporations such as Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, which sell the chemicals, feed and seed, who buy and process the corn, slaughter the livestock and transport food. And it's a boon for the corn itself, Pollan says.

"Of all the species that have figured out how to thrive in a world dominated by Homo sapiens, surely no other has succeeded more spectacularly -- has colonized more acres and bodies -- than Zea mays, the grass that domesticated its domesticator."

IN SEATTLE:
May 12th
KUOW Weekday, 94.9 FM
9:00-10:00 AM interview with Steve Scher on KUOW's Weekday
AND
Omnivore's Dilemma Reading
www.thirdplacebooks.com
6:30 PM, free reading at
Third Place Books
17171 Bothell Way NE.
For more information call 206-366-3333.

Dear Prifysgol Caerdydd:

Two things. (or maybe three)

1. If you are going to decide what is a fair or reasonable amount of work for a 10 credit course, and give this a value in page numbers in a handbook, please advise your professors that that page number is meant to signify assignments of a certain size which should equate to a fair and reasonable amount of work. Please tell them that giving much larger topics than can be adequately covered in that page length, and then “letting” students go over it “some” without penalty because the topic is too big defeats the entire purpose. They may also be interested to know that, in addition to defeating the purpose, it is worse than just having longer page requirements because students must not only meet the specs of the assignment, but then spend hours creatively wordsmithing and whittling away important bits of argument to get it down to “nearly” assigned number of pages.

2. If you are going to create a class in which a group research project is the entire assignment, with findings to be presented orally to the class and submitted in a written report, please don’t then at the last minute tell them that the presentation is entirely ungraded because so many people mess it up and its really just for good practice in presenting out loud. Especially if some students are freaking adults who have spoken in public a time or two and who have put in the hours of preparation they know are the way to make it go smoothly.

3. Also, in that group project class, please please please find some way to judge individual students on their work and not give everyone in a group the same grade with no way to distinguish who did what or, (as has been the case in two out of three groups examined through participatory research by this author) who did nothing at all or did a thing so badly that it had to be redone last minute by other group members. While it is clear that you mean to give a “real world” experience of team project work and peer motivation, please note that students are not given hiring or firing choice in this scenario, nor is there the option, which may exist in some real world situations, to just give the lazy person a section and let them sink or swim and have their job depend on it. The class project scenario encourages what your fine institution has taught me to identify as “free rider” problems. Lesser students know that students who care about anything will not let the project fail, and that the professor cannot back down from the single-group-grade/motivate-your-peers platform, and so there is really nothing other group members can do except get it done while they stare into space (or in a hypothetical situation, at the clock, while the real students hack away at his writing, letting him squirm because they know he’s scheduled to be out drinking and that he’s useless in the room, but that they are not about to set him free until it’s done and up to snuff.) On the other hand, it does allow dedicated, hardworking students to realize how much better they are than the rest of the world. And they know this holds some kind of value, somewhere. Or at least they can hope.

CAERDYDD COLFEN II

CARDIFF TREE / CAERDYDD COLFEN

In Case You Forgot, I Live in the UK

I got an email today from a friend here. It included the following:

"Today is pretty rubbish for work for me too. The old grey cells straining a bit...am planning to go to footie tonight but may bottle it as am feeling cream crackered."

She's great and I'd love her even if she didn't say such excellent british things. I think "cream crackered" is the new "plumb tuckered" in my vocabulary.

For you, Sioned (who's Welsh in case y'all can't tell), who requested more Seattle stuff on the blog, here's the Seattle translation:

"Yeah, today sucks for me,too. My brain's totally fried ... was gonna go practice with my band (or paint or work on my screenplay or some other arty endeavor), but'll probably scrap it 'cuz A of all) I'm beat, and second, I don't feel like it. "

It would probably, most often, have more cursing in Seattle, but this here is a family blog.