Gen X Settles Down

Or so says Scott Doyon

"Our tragic dearth of interdependencies at the local level is without dispute, and may prove to be our undoing if future circumstances conspire to reinforce just how much we really need each other"

(Gen X traits):
-.. rebel against (divorce).
-...interest is localism and hyper-localism,
-...Mobility declined (staying put)
-...emphasis on local control of government, local production...and local culture…

Bad Food is Subsidized

When Time Magazine becomes a locavore advocate, you know the idea is mainstream. The question is will this become mainstream in practice, or just a different form of conspicuous consumption for people who have the time and resources?

So what's wrong with cheap food and cheap meat...? A lot. For one thing, not all food is equally inexpensive; fruits and vegetables don't receive the same price supports as grains. A study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of potato chips or 875 calories of soda but just 250 calories of vegetables or 170 calories of fresh fruit. With the backing of the government, farmers are producing more calories — some 500 more per person per day since the 1970s — but too many are unhealthy calories. Given that, it's no surprise we're so fat; it simply costs too much to be thin.

....When (fertilizer) runoff from the fields of the Midwest reaches the Gulf of Mexico, it contributes to what's known as a dead zone, a seasonal, approximately 6,000-sq.-mi. area that has almost no oxygen and therefore almost no sea life. Because of the dead zone, the $2.8 billion Gulf of Mexico fishing industry loses 212,000 metric tons of seafood a year...

...So what will it take for sustainable food production to spread? It's clear that scaling up must begin with a sort of scaling down — a distributed system of many local or regional food producers as opposed to just a few massive ones...

....Farmers aren't the enemy — and they deserve real help. We've transformed the essential human profession — growing food — into an industry like any other. "We're hurting for job creation, and industrial food has pushed people off the farm," says Hahn Niman. "We need to make farming real employment, because if you do it right, it's enjoyable work." ...

Food Inc

A new documentary: Food Inc will be shown this Thursday, 4:30 at UC. I would really like to see this:

Written by authors Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) & Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), the film illuminates & exposes the food production system relative to corporate monopolies, government support and health & environmental risks. It alternates charming & frank slaughterhouse imagery to address issues ranging from factory farming, genetically modified crops, increased diabetes, illegal immigrant worker exploitation, e-Coli outbreaks, corn subsidies to reduce meat & fast-food prices & relationship between food corporations & Fed regulators. Presented by the Center for Environmental Genetics.

Free. After the screening, a discussion will be led by a panel that will include UC faculty with expertise in toxicology, industrial hygiene, nutrition, obesity & advocates for local foods & fighting food-borne illness. The film was produced by the team who made An Inconvenient Truth and Charlie Wilson’s War. 94 minutes.

In Kresge Auditorium, Medical Science Building, University of Cincinnati Medical Campus, 231 Albert Sabin Way @ Eden Drive, Cincinnati, OH 45267. Contact info: koprasej at uc dot edu.

A trailer
More movie info

OTR Dollars Next?

I want to throw an idea out there. I have been hearing about various communities that print their own money. I have heard that Jane Jacobs recommended that each city have its own currency. And some economists argue that currency should always be produced in the private sector since the private sector cannot produce currency which can be artificially inflated.

This USA Today story is just one of several articles I have seen lately:

...A small but growing number of cash-strapped communities are printing their own money. Borrowing from a Depression-era idea, they are aiming to help consumers make ends meet and support struggling local businesses.

The systems generally work like this: Businesses and individuals form a network to print currency. Shoppers buy it at a discount — say, 95 cents for $1 value — and spend the full value at stores that accept the currency.

... they encourage people to buy locally. Merchants, hurting because customers have cut back on spending, benefit as consumers spend the local cash.

...Under the BerkShares system, a buyer goes to one of 12 banks and pays $95 for $100 worth of BerkShares, which can be spent in 370 local businesses. Since its start in 2006, the system, the largest of its kind in the country, has circulated $2.3 million worth of BerkShares. In Detroit, three business owners are printing $4,500 worth of Detroit Cheers, which they are handing out to customers to spend in one of 12 shops.

During the Depression, local governments, businesses and individuals issued currency, known as scrip, to keep commerce flowing when bank closings led to a cash shortage.

There is also a book about this and related subjects called Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age. I think something like this could work in maybe the OTR or Downtown Cincinnati community.

Getting Information on Twitter

Do you twitter? If so, there are a number of local resources that you can follow on twitter for information. A couple of avid Cincinnati Twitterers (I refuse to use the term twiterati) have started to compile a list of local resources on Twitter.

The list includes local restaurants (@TaketheCakeCafe tweets their daily specials), local arts organizations (@cincyartmuseum tweets their upcoming exhibitions and lectures), sports teams (most of the ones I see seem to be managed by a third-party) and local media.

The activity can be pretty wide ranging. @Cincienquirer tweets heavily as news comes in. They also provide links to the stories on their web site. @CincyCAC, on the other hand, hasn't tweeted since November. Some just tweet the facts, while others (like @wlwt) have been know to inject a little personality into their tweets.

A lot of these organizations listen, as well. I remember tweeting after the election about how difficult it was to find easy tables of election results on the Enquirer site. Not long after I received a message from @cincienquirer asking how they could help.

So if you are on Twitter check out this list for some potentially good follows. If you aren't on Twitter, perhaps this will give you a reason to check it out. If you know any accounts that should be added to the list send a direct message to @RadioCarla and she will update her list.

Udders

Our milk makers: 

We volunteered to do the weekly milk pickup for our herdshare, and met our herd. It was a good trip, and I am still absorbing the implications. If you are interested in a herdshare, Cincy Locavore has some good info.

Raccoon: The Other Dark Meat

Natural foods, unprocessed and untouched by modern production methods, are all the rage nowadays. This could prove to be the perfect food for urban locavores intent on harvesting a reliable source of wild game.

Some excerpts from an article in The Kansas City Star:

"Raccoon, which made the first edition of The Joy of Cooking in 1931, is labor-intensive but well worth the time, aficionados say. Raccoons go for $3 to $7 — each, not per pound — and will feed about five adults. Four, if they’re really hungry. Those who dine on raccoon meat sound the same refrain: It’s good eatin’.

As long as you can get past the “ick” factor that it’s a varmint, more often seen flattened on asphalt than featured on a restaurant menu. (One exception: French restaurant Le Fou Frog served raccoon about a dozen years ago, a waiter said.) Eating varmints is even in vogue these days, at least in Britain. The New York Times reported last week that Brits are eating squirrels with wild abandon.

“Raccoon meat is some of the healthiest meat you can eat,” says Jeff Beringer, a furbearer resource biologist with the Missouri Department of Conservation. “During grad school, my roommate and I ate 32 coons one winter. It was all free, and it was really good. If you think about being green and eating organically, raccoon meat is the ultimate organic food,” with no steroids, no antibiotics, no growth hormones.

And when people eat wild meat, Beringer says, “it reminds the modernized society — people who usually eat food from a plastic wrapper — where food comes from."

In Ohio, raccoon season ends on the last day of January, and there's no daily bag limit, so get 'em while the gettin's good. You'll need a valid hunting or trapping license unless you're having problem raccoon interactions with your pets, or are eradicating dangerous raccoons from your dwelling.

The Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources says, "Raccoons are well adapted to urban living. Raccoon damage typically involves raiding gardens, upsetting trash cans and taking up residence in chimneys, attics or other unwanted areas. Control is not difficult, but requires persistence.

Nuisance or sick raccoons may be trapped without a permit, but it is illegal to live trap and relocate them to a new area. In order to prevent the possible spread of raccoon diseases in Ohio, all live trapped raccoons must be released again on the homeowner's property or humanely euthanized."

Once that's done, you'll find some tasty raccoon recipes here. Or head down to the Mercantile Library and see if they have a first edition of "The Joy of Cooking".

First Cow-share Milk

Gifts from wife to husband this year included a share in a cow (a gallon every other week). It is great to know where your food comes from, and tastes great too.

 

UPDATE: Valeree, has a link to a decent story on herd shares.

Palin, Regional Culture and Small Towns

I've started 3 posts about Sarah Palin in the whirlwind 4 days since her debut on the national stage, and I have to say, I am glad I have not published any of them.... In vain, I will attempt again to make a relevant connection between her and the subject of this blog.

I have been thinking about how important "place" is. And since my business is architecture, I've mostly been thinking about how this affects what kind of buildings we construct. And I will probably post more about this next week.

I've also been thinking of the uniqueness of Cincinnati, and I definitely want to follow up the thoughts that Visualingual posted last month: Cincinnati is the cincinnatiest.

But today, I've also been thinking about how different places produce different people. Even in our wide country, which sometimes seems in danger of being overrun with strip-mall and fast-food sameness, and in which network television has almost eliminated speech idiosyncrasies and accents, we have fascinating regions that we fail to appreciate. Or almost worse, we like the idea of them, but pave them over with suburban development crap. The odd result is that the undeveloped backwoods are the only places that seem to retain strong individual characteristics. Think places like Harlan Kentucky, or Over-the-Rhine, or you name the place...before it gets gentrified.

One strong example of local culture is the Palin Family. They are distinctly Alaskan. Maybe even distinctly Wasillian, I wouldn't know. Look at her family photos, her accent. From her husband's goatee to her names of her kids (van palin referencing, Van Halen). She is total Americana, albeit Alaskan style.

 

And I readily admit, that I like it. Very open, brash...But part of what I like is the similarities to my adolescence in suburban Cincinnati. This family looks a lot like people I grew up with, and apparently even likes the same 1980's rock music. In my childhood, I can't remember too many grandmothers and daughters pregnant in the same year or many people who snow-machined, but the attitude is definitely familiar.

That said, I am tired of the meme that rural/small town America is The Real America. Take for example the hypocrisy of Guiliani last night mocking Obama as a "cosmopolitan". Wasn't Guiliani mayor of the most Cosmopolitan city in the world?

I don't like the divide, but if it is going to be there, it is time for the urbanites to have one of their own in the White House. When was the last time we had a president that called a a big city home? Was it FDR? JFK?

OTR is America. So is Harlan County KY. So is south side Chicago. The suburbs and the small towns, the hunters and the oil workers don;t have the corner on Americanism or patriotism. When they act like they do, it is demeaning and maybe even elitist...

Vine Kroger Organic

More examples of the Vine Street Kroger attempting to sell to a higher income demographic:

 

On a side note, most organic milk seems to be ultra-pasteurized (cooked at a higher temperature). The ultra-pasteruzation gives the milk a very long shelf life, but does kill all life in the milk...

Just Cured Smoked Salmon

Please join Just Cured at Findlay Market, on Saturday and Sunday, May 17 and 18. I will be providing sample tastes at a table near Luken's Poultry, Fish and Seafood on the west side of the main Market House. You will also be able to purchase Just Cured smoked salmon this weekend at Luken's stand at the Market. For the time being, we will sell our smoked salmon sliced to your order at a special discounted price of $6 per quarter pound.

We are not in full production yet; we are testing the equipment and honing our production procedures. The salmon, if I do say so, however, is first rate, and I do not want a single ounce to go to waste.

About Just Cured European Style Smoked Salmon:
Our goal is to produce the finest quality smoked salmon possible. Our salmon has a very moist, fresh texture and a light smoke flavor. Our salmon is hand produced using the most traditional of techniques. -Michael Brown

UPDATE: Website here

Localvore or Locavore

I recently read, that the word Locavore, was voted the best new word or 2007. I think the origination of the term is "eating food that is grown locally". I agree with that sentiment, but also try to support local hardware stores and shops too.

However, it is definitely possible to go over-board with this sentiment. For example, we bought a car a few years ago, partially because the dealer is within walking distance.

....we should have read Consumer Reports first.

Anyway, I would like to coin a new word: Locablog.