Dept. of AG’s farmers market strikes discordant note

Wandering around the nation’s capital recently I weaved through some tourists and ended up in a cornfield.

Hard to believe, I’m sure, so I took a photo:

The corn was thick and green and tall and everything corn should be. It was grown on a patch of soil just off the Mall, one of the busiest tourists centers in the country. Towering above it in the background loomed the massive Dept. of Ag building.

At first I thought it lovely to see such beautiful crops outside the center of policy making for our country’s food source. As we wandered we saw several of these little urban gardens, including a lovely flower explosion near the Dept. of Treasury and signs for a Dept. of Ag farmers market on Fridays.

Initially I pondered how far we’ve come in a short period to radically change the way we think about food and hopefully soon (but all evidence suggests, not yet) change the way we eat. I mean, can you imagine crops and flowers and a farmers market during the Bush Administration?

Eventually, my thoughts shifted from such pleasantries that this little effort of planting corn was clearly supposed to evoke to a far more cynical view. This was propaganda at its worst. Maybe the Bush Administration did start this farmer’s market after all?

The American Food Culture was once largely agricultural-based: native seeds turned to food and livestock raised on clean ground that turned to clean food. We had no idea what GMO was because it didn’t exist. But with the rise of the industrialized food economy — pretty much McDonald’s, Monsanto and Sysco serve as standard bearers though its far too simplistic to blame only them — we developed the most inexpensive, ecologically destructive and poisonous food system in the world.

The Department of Ag’s role is developing and executing federal government policy on farming, agriculture, forestry, and food. That policy, we well know is beholden to industrial food giants that put onerous burdens on local farmers and tip the scales toward the industrialization of the family farm. That policy has created a food system that favors billionaire stockholders over the people who pay the taxes for the Dept. of Ag to exist. That policy has created a national food system that is not only a joke among the other cultures of the world, but is proving to kill us with greater efficiency than ever before. That policy protects the farm bill, which does more to bastardize the notion of farming (turning entire Midwest states into corn and soybean mills akin to California’s industrialized cattle “ranches” seen from the I-5 freeway) into something few of our grandfathers would even recognize.

I’m admittedly painting with a broom here, over-simplifying a complex problem so interwoven within our culture we barely know how to eradicate ourselves. There simply aren’t enough “Surgeon General Warnings” to protect us from the myriad chemicals and radicals and toxins in our food and in the products we make our food with any longer. Laying it all at the Dept. of Ag building is an oversimplification as well.

But that Gothic monolithic building that covers a prominent block in the nation’s capital stands for something bigger than a patch of goodwill corn can eradicate.

By the time I left the corn patch, the initial pleasure it evoked was gone, replaced by a sadness for the lack of sound government policy, the ability to do anything constructive in the entire complex that is DC and more importantly for the rank hypocrisy that serves as education these days. Spin, the politicians call it. Once used only briefly in election cycles and shirked aside when the task of legislation and leadership began, it is now a 24/7/365 policy of government (and even merging into the media) mind control that’s primary mission is to make obsolete the essential “well-informed electorate.”

We’ve been spun so long we no longer know what stillness is. A corn patch outside the Dept. of Ag is spin, and hides the policy conducted inside that is as disharmonious with farmers markets as Mega Churches are to Christian Community.

Dream Ecology T-shirts capture spirit of San Francisco

We ran into Kelsey Rice at the end of a great morning at the Ferry Building in San Francisco on Saturday morning. Well, we made it a point to run into him at his Dream Ecology booth. His artwork so caught the bride’s attention that she made a point of finding his booth and directing me to it.

 

Immediately I saw a T-shirt I wanted. I made a mental note to return after the paychecks arrive.

Rice is unique because he sells T-shirts of his own design and own making, but he takes his ideas from his woodwork. Many of the designs he takes from his ideas from woodcuts, a truly unique approach to take. As soon as I saw them I thought, “he’s an Effin Artist man.”

What makes them unique? They scream local, not tourist, which likely means the tourist will soon be all over them (I’m sure he won’t mind at all!) They are hand-dyed giving the colors of the shirts a unique character. The wine colored sweatshirt with torn top has a sort of retro Flashdance feel.  The Bride needs that.

He has a brownish tint with orange lettering that I simply have to have.

They have a San Franpsycho feel, but a much better price.  I dig San Franpsycho. Don’t get me wrong; I mean this as a compliment.

The whole process of working with wood and using that for T-shirts that are hand-dyed offer a holistic approach to the art that you have to respect.

Better yet, go online and buy one. I suspect you’ll not be disappointed.

The Sting: Californians give water to billion dollar companies

Remember the movie The Sting?

Coolest hustle ever. Made the shysters look like heroes. As a kid I thought it was the best con ever. It holds nothing on the con the billion dollar businesses like Coca Cola have pulled off. They are making billions every year, taking water from one of the dry-est states in the US, and selling it to people with plenty of water, causing severe environmental impact while doing it.  Now that’s a con. Californians are the one getting stung, but know it, and continue to give our money over to the corporations who have more of it than we will ever see.

I know it happens. I see it. I just can’t get my mind around it.

Mother Jones helps in that regard:

Bottled-water drinkers, we have a problem: There’s a good chance that your water comes from California, a state experiencing the third-driest year on record.

The details of where and how bottling companies get their water are often quite murky, but generally speaking, bottled water falls into two categories. The first is “spring water,” or groundwater that’s collected, according to the EPA, “at the point where water flows naturally to the earth’s surface or from a borehole that taps into the underground source.” About 55 percent of bottled water in the United States is spring water, including Crystal Geyser and Arrowhead.

The other 45 percent comes from the municipal water supply, meaning that companies, including Aquafina and Dasani, simply treat tap water—the same stuff that comes out of your faucet at home—and bottle it up. (Weird, right?)

But regardless of whether companies bottle from springs or the tap, lots of them are using water in exactly the areas that need it most right now.

I still recall the first time I went to the movies with a pastor friend of mine and they charged us for water. He looked at them increduously and then looked at me and then back at them.

“You want to charge me for water? That’s free right over there in that faucet? … Is this cause I’m black!” he asked.

The idea that we’d pay money for free water was absurd not too long ago. But somehow they convinced us that its absurd to drink the free stuff. Free must equal bad, or unsafe. Perhaps that made sense when the names of bottled waters were exclusively Evian or Perrier because the rich tend to think paying more equals better. But Dasani? Dasani is tap water put in a chemical-laden plastic bottle made of fossil fuels and shipped with fossil fuels to places that routinely have better tasting water than the tap they poured in the first place.

Dasani is Coca Cola by the way. Tap water. By a giant soda maker.

Now that’s absurd. Yet we play along paying billions every year … what’s worse is we KNOW it and STILL do it.

To organicanize your kitchen, I have become more convinced than ever that these are the absolutely vital first steps. I will go so far as to say it is nearly unconscionable NOT to take these steps.

1) Use tap water in the house. Never bring another bottled water in the house again. If you think it tastes bad, then buy a purifying in your home. A simply water pitcher made by Brita will save 300 plastic water bottles.

2) Spend $20 on a good, non-plastic water bottle and start taking it with you, just in case you get thirsty. We use to have water fountains everywhere. Cities got rid of them, like pay phones, because we didn’t use them. So have a spare. If you are one of those who likes water in your car at all times, fill a couple of bottles, put them in a carrier and bingo.

3) If you are like me and like sparkling water invest the $100 for a soda stream so you can make your own. Cut a lemon, blast your tap water in the little machine splash it with the lemon and you have great sparkling water.

That’s it. Remove the environmental blight of water bottles. Remove the cancer causing plastic bottles from your kitchen. Remove the con that tells us we are less than if we don’t buy water that until twenty years ago would have been absurd to buy.

My future grandkids and every other native Californian like me thank you.

Night hike captures moon’s art across SF skyline

My camera couldn’t capture it but my memory sealed it forever.

My oldest daughter asked me to join her on a night hike in the Marin headlands recently.

We started at dusk and soon broke a sweat scampering up the steep terrain.

 

Darkness fell. The path was illuminated mostly by a few scant stars.

We wondered a couple of times if her directionally challenged significant other had gotten us lost and whether we’d soon be food for cougars.

Soon we crested the hill’s peak. The bay bridge that forever tells me I’m home glistened. Yet the skyline had an odd orangish hue, as if the building lights had been purposefully colored for some type of event.

We had come to see this, but it still seemed somewhat unfathomable. As the moon rose, we saw the source of the artistic expression. The super moon (I call them Italian moons as they spur romance wherever they rise) rose like a diva with a dramatic entrance on a grand stage. Her light bathed the city I love in warm colors and brilliance against a the black backdrop of the night sky.

We stared in awe. She rose fuller, soon leaving a perfect trail across the bay right to the foot of the dramatic, appropriately dressed in Orange for the theme of the night, Golden Gate bridge.

Home, I thought. This is home.

And it was glorious.