Dammit, More Planting!

I was watching a program on our local PBS station yesterday on the creation of Morgan Park, a neighborhood in Duluth. (TiVO if you are one of those who pay attention to Duluth’s PBS schedule and wonder how the heck I watched a show from a week ago.)

Morgan Park was a company town built for employees of US Steel. I mean, the real kind of company town where the houses are all kinda the same except more classy for the supervisors’ families, and everyone’s kept very much under the thumb of the bossman. You couldn’t have a messy yard, for instance, or the company would come by and clean it up, docking your pay for the expense. You couldn’t plant trees (which really did make the place look an awful lot like the suburbs I grew up in—flat greenness with a few skinny saplings to break the monotony).

But gardens. There were gardens everywhere. Everyone had one in their backyard. There were huge community gardens, and there was even a garden next to the neighborhood club.

I’m trying to imagine this today. Everyone growing stuff in their backyards that is more about eating than what trendy flowers you bought at the parking lot nursery this spring. It would be such a transformation from what we are now.

It still seems like food gardening is seen as the province of those who have too much time on their hands. The underemployed. The retired. Eco-yuppies. If you garden, then there’s something suspiciously earthy about you.

Up until the 1950s, when American suburbia went all crazy-like, people had gardens because it was sensible.

What happened? Car culture, perhaps. Maybe people were so exhausted by the war effort community togetherness of victory gardens, that when the effort ended they felt relieved at stopping it. Lawns got more manicured and sterile looking. And the gardening that the “ladies of the house” got involved in was flower-centric. It was about fitting in, and showing off your color-sense. An extension of your living room, replete with a bunch of crap like wagon wheels or artfully placed stones.

Nowadays, it seems like anyone with any amount of income at all is hiring someone with brown skin to dash in an hour a week and buzz-tame the lawn into bland uniformity. Weeds are the enemy, and shrubbery is king.

These places rarely have gardens. It would be too messy, I have heard people say. Disturbs the aesthetic, I guess. Attracts vermin or deer, and then you gotta deal with poop that isn’t from your dog and all kinds of wildlife that are probably dangerous or something. Especially I hear the statement that the deer will eat it all and so what’s the point.

Duluth tends to be a little more relaxed than most places. There are community gardens, and people regularly seem to use big parts of their back yards for food growing. But it’s still more rare than it ought to be. It’s weird to drive by houses on the edge of town that have vast lawns unmarred by any growing thing other than grass. So much space!

Will we change, as times get tougher? Will more of us dig up a few feet of sod, and get our fingers in the dirt?

I’m plotting. There are a few portions of our rather wild meadowy yard that are just begging for raised beds for herbs and vegetables.

We already are the recipients of a huge family garden tended by Grandpa Meadowhawk. And I do mean huge. We live all year on the canned tomatoes and green beans, frozen raspberries, jellies and jams. We just ate the last of the onions and carrots. Still have plenty of potatoes and apples, dill and dried parsley. They have chickens too, and I sometimes get off the vegan bandwagon for the eggs. It’s a bounty. And such a help with our food bills!

Garden in Winter

Grandpa Meadowhawk's chickens

So because we are being fed so well from the family garden (where we are banned from helping *at all* mind you. Grandpa and Grandma Meadowhawk enjoy doing things themselves, thank-you-very-much) it’s hard to know what to grow at our own home. Don’t want to end up with excess we can’t use, after all.

But then, so what if we grow too much? Perhaps in tough times we can all sort of enjoy that sense of community. If you grow more than you can use, give it to your neighbors. Share!

(What a concept, eh? Is that crazy hippie talk or what. Sharing. Isn’t someone going to come by and call me a commie?)

We Are One

Trying for Tortillas Flat and Round

Perhaps you read my post about how we’ve decided not to buy veggie stock/broth anymore, but instead have resolved to make our own.

Today was a new experiment.

We’ve been buying Buena Vida tortillas for about five years. And we’ve been very loyal customers, since we haven’t cared for the organic brands we tried (except for the spelt ones, which were simply too pricey for regular consumption), and the other non-organic brands all seemed to have trans fats.

And just incidentally, here are the ingredients of Buena Vida brand tortillas: bleached enriched flour, water, modified potato starch, glycerine, wheat gluten, salt, baking powder, potassium sorbate, cellulose gum, monoglycerides, fumeric acid.

Now I’m sure that most of those things have some sort of packaging purpose, but yeah—I’ll think I’d rather have my tortillas sans glycerine, or anything sorbate, gum or acid.

If you think about it, tortillas are simple to make, right? Flour and water and a little salt? All over the Spanish-speaking world, people make their own tortillas, so why not us?

I confess that this is yet another foray into making something that I probably would have been acquainted with long ago, if I hadn’t been raised in a family where dinner came in various types of boxes and plastic bags from the freezer.

So, no. I’ve never made tortillas in my life. Nor have I witnessed them being made by someone else.

I started by checking out Laurel’s Kitchen, which is a necessary text for learning about nutrition, being a vegetarian and basic cooking techniques that you can then modify for a more adventurous palate. (They tend toward a rather 70s hippie blandness that many find a little … overly crunchy.)

I skipped the recipe for corn tortillas, finding that at the end she points to the basics of chapati manufacture as a good way to make regular flour tortillas.

Simple:
Electric skillet on high
3 cups of flour (I used multi-purpose white, bought in bulk)
1 cup water
1 teaspoon of salt
2 tablespoons of oil

Mix then knead until smooth. Then pinch off balls of dough; spread with fingers from the center and then roll out until thin and round. Throw into the skillet until lightly browned in spots. Flip over until done.

The first few I made were definitely nowhere near round, and had too-thin spots or holes in the center. Then some were too thick. But I quickly got better at it. Here are the results:

Ta-da!

Ate one with leftover cajun black bean stew that has passed for an adequate burrito stuffer, topped with freegan salsa and vegan sour cream. Not bad at all.

Sorry Buena Vida. I think we’ll be making our own from now on.

The Bush Depression, My Hair, and the Life of Riley

I hereby dub thee: The Bush Depression. Because there’s no doubt, since certain people are already doing it, that they’re going to try to blame it on Obama. Because somehow, magically, everything is Obama’s fault, even retroactively. Let’s hope it catches on. After all, if we’re not going to send Bush to jail for ordering torture and illegal wiretapping, then he ought to at least get this legacy named after him.

(I have no right to dub it, it seems, say the some 22,000 hits on Google.)

I need to get my hair cut, but I can’t afford it. Not until I get another paycheck. My roots are all dishwater blonde instead of red, and … I really ought to just wear scarves and forget about it for right now. Cutting it myself seems rather desperate. But I’m also afraid not to go to my brilliant but expensive hair stylist. It’s worse since she’s a friend. If she wasn’t I would change up and never look back. (In fact, I once tried to quit, but her talent is like a drug. I use her to keep me from looking too much like the 40-something housewife I feel like I’m becoming. Or am, duh.)

Here are some more quotes from The Great Divide, by Studs Terkel:

From Bruce Bendinger (Terkel calls him an “advertising wunderkind”):

You have the knee-driven underclass, which we continue to market sugar and salt and alcohol and nicotine to. We make a good amount of money off of them. You’ll find black America still drinkin’, still smokin’ a lot of cigarettes, still spending a high percentage of their cash on this. You can understand this in terms of what their options are. Much more concerned with short-term gratification, for reasons that are sad but obvious. Marketing things like potato chips, salty snacks, may seem innocent. If you’re black, chances are you will retain a greater percentage of salt and be more prone to high blood pressure. Take a look at the mortality rates in black America, you’ll find one of the side effects of these consumption patterns. They are fueled by the […] type of marketing, which contributes to—I don’t think you live as long. [….]

Bendinger

There’s a new kind of poverty in America. It’s time. All the people makin’ all this cash, you know what they don’t got? And I’m one of ’em. They don’t got time. The time-poor. Both of ’em are workin’. They’re workin’ hard, makin’ all this money, fifty, sixty hours a week. Mom isn’t home makin’ the tuna casserole. They both come home beat from their jobs. They’re gonna go out, they’re gonna order pizza. They don’t have time to make dinner, to do a lot of things. It’s really changed the way a lot of America lives. My lawyer says every couple in business together needs a wife, because there’s no one who’s cookin’ the dinner, who’s cleanin’ the house.

Another way that’s reshaping America is the move from parenting to child management. You don’t have mom raising the kids. She gets ’em till it’s time for Montessori, then she’s back in the work force to make the money to pay for Montessori and the designer kids’ clothes.

[From The Great Divide, by Studs Terkel, which was published in 1987.]

I guess I get to this point: At least I don’t eat bad food. At least I have plenty of time to live in my house, love my family, and be in the present instead of being stuck looking ever toward a mythical retirement. At least I have time to read books. At least I have time to drink tea and look out the window. At least going for a walk in the woods isn’t outside the realm of possibility.

I live the life of Riley. Not being able to get a haircut is way down on the list of things that ought to cause me any stress.

I’m a Cog in the Machine

I think the primary function of cold on me is that I want to stay home and listen to Ketil Bjørnstad and David Darling and just brood on stuff.

I’m feeling a little weird, because I’ve broken through a boundary I’d hoped I’d never have to. You see, I have spent my entire career-life avoiding the big beast of School Districts. I mean, okay—I accepted that I’d entered the profession of teaching, even the ridiculous idea that grammar and literature were somehow equal in importance in this world, but to actually enter the School System seemed like going too far entirely.

I became an English teacher because at age 18 the only thing I wanted to do was read and write until i was too old and blind to do so. And I suppose I shuddered in horror at the thought that I might be expected to sell something or be perky for any length of time.

So I became a teacher because it seemed like something I could be into: spreading the love of reading and writing to the street tough and delicate goth girl alike. I was pretty good at it. Kind of bought into the “teachers are saints” idea—that teachers were sort of ascetics who did what they did because they loved knowledge above all else. (Yeah… no.)

When I graduated from college, the idea of working for a big district made me blanch. So instead I thought of going overseas to Department of Defense schools, teaching on army bases in exotic locales like Bahrain or the Philippines where supposedly you got a maid whether you wanted one or not. I couldn’t do that right off, though. For that, you needed to have two years’ teaching experience or a Masters Degree. The idea of staying in college didn’t appeal. I was sick of being poor. (Oh, poor me, who had to watch every penny for four years.) So I looked at all the Chicago Tribune classifieds and fixated on romantic teachery destinations like wagon trains for delinquents and the Navajo Indian reservation in New Mexico, where I tried to imagine myself living on a windy desert plain in a trailer with no plumbing.

I never ended up going off to the desert or the wagon train schools, but did always keep my career in small alternative schools where I was gifted with a large amount of autonomy, the ability to forget curricula designed by bureaucrats and stay attached to my idealism.

For a while. Then it was: do I really want to spend the rest of my life being an authority figure over children and young adults who are essentially being stunted by the whole monolith of industrial-era schooling? (Kids in alternative schools are often just “rejects” of the mainstream system.) There’s so much wrong with what’s going on there. But staying out of the Beast that are big school systems? That was a priority.

At one point, I left teaching entirely to work as a cabdriver, and then a lowly bookstore clerk. (These were supposed to fund my foray into a writing career, but as I ought to have known, lower-skill jobs take a lot of time and energy.) A few years ago, I ended up seeking the financial security of substitute teaching. It’s an easy way to have a job without having to go to it every day. If I want to stay home, I can; and I work as much as I need to to pay the bills. But I still managed to stay at smaller schools: private, charter, tribal. Anything to stay out of the Beast.

But now, on a sort of whim fueled by the foreboding of our financially bereft near-future, I applied to become a member of the School District’s substitute pool. It was either that or apply to work for the census, which, while probably interesting, pays crap. If I’m going to work for a bureaucracy, I might as well get paid as much as possible.

I like kids. I do. I look forward to hanging out with them and perhaps making their imprisonment less onerous for a few hours. I feel stupid to whine about having yet another job, but I am now employed in more “jobs” than I ever have had in my life, while still making well under the poverty level.

The one glaring thing about all this, of course, is that I can still count it as a personal choice. I have no right to complain when there are thousands losing their jobs every day with little to no prospect for replacement income.

[Looking for pictures to illustrate “substitute teacher”? Oy. Every page of images has at least two pornos and a mug shot. I kinda lost heart.]

ABC Cheerleaders: Really?

I don’t know whether to feel optimistic or tell ABC to suck it. Click the photo to view ABC’s latest attempt to tell us it will all be just fiiiiine.

(photo cc-Steve Rhodes)

Musician–>Recycler Genius

Instead of Potatoes

One question we had to ask ourselves the other night: do we think we’re too good to eat Stovetop Stuffing? Not if it’s freegan.

Eating healthily is important to us. We have built an organic life, with much of our produce coming from a very large family garden. But with times getting tougher, and an anticipated severe restriction in our collective income, we’ve been experimenting with ways to cut our food budget without falling completely off the deep end. Which we may have done, with our recent dip back into Freeganism.

The problem with eating freegan, of course, is not so much the deviation from a vegan diet—since we’re not buying or supporting factory farmed meat or participating in encouraging animal death, our diet might fall within the ethical parameters of veganism if not the dietary. It’s more a question of chemicals. I’m not worried about the ethics or aesthetics of dumpster diving. I’m worried about the crap that I might be inviting into my body when I eat something non-organic. Or, worse, some overly processed crap that some company has stuffed into a box and called “food.”

Mr. Meadowhawk saved three boxes of Stovetop stuffing from the dumpster on New Year’s Eve. So after much grimacing and gnashing of teeth … or a few read-aloud performances of the ingredients list and a mutually agreed upon assessment that this was a dietically terribly thing to do to ourselves… we’ve decided to eat them. I mean, we could give them away. But Mr. Meadowhawk is uncomfortable with sharing the fact of our freegan foray proudly, as I might otherwise. Giving someone food without telling them it came from a dumpster is unethical. And since we don’t want to be a topic of either admiring or critical gossip on this matter at the moment, we’d prefer to eat it. It’s easier than going on food stamps.

So let’s look at what we’ll be ingesting:

Calories 160
Sodium 430mg
Ingredients: enriched wheat flour, high fructose corn syrup, dried onions, salt, partially hydrogenated soybean and/or cottonseed oil, hydrolyzed soy protein, yeast, cooked chicken and chicken broth, maltodextrin, dried celery, monosodium glutamate, dried parsley, spice (?), sugar, caramel color, turmeric, disodium guanylate, disodium inosinate with BHA, BHT, citric acid and propyl gallate as preservatives.

I’m supposed to know that MSG and preservatives and high fructose corn syrup and partially hydrogenated oils aren’t good for me. But since I don’t really know why, I guess I’d better look it up.

…

MSG: made from fermented sugar sources, a flavor enhancer that might give people migraines or might cause breathing problems in some people. Okay real food does not need “flavor enhancing” with something that looks like this and isn’t salt:

MSG

High Fructose Corn Syrup: makes you fat because your body doesn’t process it like real food.

Partially Hydrogenated Oil: Trans Fat !!! Same as above.

Caramel Coloring: supposedly toxic (no proof to that scientifically); might contain GMO corn.

But we’ve committed ourselves to eating what we’ve rescued, secretly, on an evening when no children must be fed. Is it food or isn’t it? Do we really think we’re so high and mighty that we won’t eat the same food that America eats all the time?

On the back of the box there is a recipe for “Easy Chicken Bake”. It calls for chicken, the box of stuffing, “spread”, sour cream, a can of cream of chicken soup (condensed), and a bag of frozen mixed vegetables.

Here’s what I did instead:
1 can of mock duck, drained and cut into pieces
(Received on Freecycle, but it’s from Taiwan and so we hope it isn’t full of some environmental pollutant.)
some tofu “sour cream”
(a Sarah Kramer recipe)
some firm tofu, soy milk and faux chicken broth, blended together
the box of Stovetop stuffing (freegan recovery)
4 T butter (freegan recovery)
a carrot, chopped (from the organic garden)
a stalk of celery, chopped
a hunk of turnip, chopped
some leftover swiss chard, chopped
five mushrooms, chopped
(all organic, bought at the local co-op.)

Hopefully, all the healthy stuff outbalanced the stuff that seems chemically problematic. Honestly, it was tasty, if in fact it was poison. I didn’t get a headache or otherwise feel poorly. Neither did Mr. Meadowhawk. But we aren’t happy about ingesting stuff so full of carbs and stuff that Kraft has decided people should eat.

So I wallow in this conundrum, which I’m sure most readers would find tedious and overly hippiefied, if not elitist and ridiculous. Is food that is more like “food” with quotation marks around it better left in the dumpster? We’re rescuing stuff that already counts as a hideous waste of energy (packaging, processing) and even a crime against nature. But does that mean we have to willingly take the chemicals infused into it into our own bodies to metabolize it? If we are not willing to eat it ourselves, why would we inflict it on a person less fortunate than we are? Are homeless people or food shelf visitors less deserving of good food than the rest of us?

Two more boxes to go.

My Un-American Life

An interesting article written by Jonathan Tasini in Working Life.

Every day, there is another example of the conspiracy of silence that pervades the traditional media’s description of the current economic crisis. Sure, de-regulation, greed and pure stupidity has a lot to do with it. But, in truth, the underlying reason for the collapse has been a persistent war on the wages of American workers. Call it—egads—class warfare.

What is astonishing, and aggravating, is that much of the traditional media continues to point the finger at workers—those wild-spending people who just bought all those yachts, fur coats and mansions in far-away countries. And, now, shame on them, those wild-spending workers are doing something awful—they are saving money.

From Working Life

Mr. Meadowhawk and I have been discussing the same thing at home when the kids are gone and we get ranty and full of Bohemian Highway red wine.

The bosses stole the people’s money by keeping the money for themselves instead of paying them what they deserved. Then they invested in firms who lent that money to the people at interest, so that they could live the “American Dream” promised to them. Then when the people started defaulting on their loans, the banks took their houses. Then the government gave the banks a lot of money. Not the people.

Sigh.

This is why I spend more and more time walking in the woods drowning this shit out with silence.

It’s funny too—the part about how our frugality is going to prolong the Depression we’re entering. (Well, perhaps not ours, since we’ve been living simply for many years, not being so fond of WalMart and other purveyors of plastic crap. But the newfound frugality of “the masses.”) I suppose it’s true. But honestly, I’d rather see us as a people start figuring out how to live differently, instead of pumping up the same old empty lifestyle of alienation.

I think Freecycle and dumpster-diving gives you a unique perspective on just how much useful stuff becomes garbage to people. And what happens to it? What about the mountains of used clothing in third world countries? Ah, anyway…

I will never forget the conversation I had with my parents, while we sat in a café in Italy one hot August afternoon ten years ago. They were informing me that my lifestyle was not only un-American, but hurting the economy. I wasn’t using my degree to make as much money as I could, you see. I wasn’t returning the investment properly. Credit has always been taboo in my family, and so I’ve never run up significant debt. I have used my degree to keep myself afloat, but not to become secure. Having grown up well-off, it never seemed like a healthy goal to me—too much time lost, too much family togetherness frittered away and then stuffed into alienating over-scheduled vacations. And I’ve got some silly artistic ideas that keep me from being fully employable.

At any rate, I’m still aghast at the idea that earning lots of money and then being sure to spend it adequately on the “economy” is the American Way of Life, and that I’m somehow foreign-minded for aiming otherwise. Ah well.

Homeschooling at Our House

One of the most commonly cited criticisms of homeschooling is that it is a choice only available to the rich. That it costs thousands of dollars a year to do it well, and must involve a single-income household (largely viewed also as a lifestyle only available to the well-to-do).

We are, of course, a prime example of why this isn’t true.

We both work and have full adult lives, but we do manage to nearly always have one of us home to assist in and facilitate learning, which at this point usually involves being available to prompt discussion or answer questions. The 12yo boy involved has been on this path of his own choice since he was in 3rd grade, and is largely of an independent mind when it comes to what he’s up to at any given point.

Kid Genius faces the big World of Knowledge with his own weapons

Perhaps it is our higher education degrees that enabled us to feel confident enough to eschew expensive curricula, but we’ve never come close to missing the artificial organization of teacher-created structure. That, in my opinion as someone with a Secondary Ed degree, is what you have to use when you have a big classroom. The advantage of one-on-one instruction (or small groups) is that you can follow the interests of the child(ren). And that is precisely what we do, though after a few years of unstructured math, we have invested in a grade-level workbook.

There were some major investments that have made it all possible, I must admit.

We bought Tivo and a basic digital cable package, for instance. This means there are always interesting and timely documentaries and films immediately accessible for watching. The Science Channel and both History and History International are fabulous resources. Our trade-off as expense goes is that we do not view movies in the theatre more than about four times a year or rent DVDs.

At any given time of the day, Boy Genius can pull up programs we recorded months ago on atomic science or the environment or ancient Troy. There is, we believe, a whole lot of TV that is usefully educational, especially if you can eliminate the commercials.

(Incidentally, we don’t really think he’s a genius, nor do we call him that, but he is pretty smart, and more so every day. I think I might be being sarcastic by using it here.)

Also, we have made sure that each individual in our home is equipped with a decent personal computer with wi-fi access. We feel that competing either within the home or at school for computer time is a major obstacle to learning to use technology properly and expertly. No, he isn’t allowed to spend his every waking moment burning up his eyes on screens, but he is given much freedom to explore the Net and the uses of various programs. (With supervision, of course. And we use the standard Google SafeSearch, which he hasn’t yet noticed or figured out how to disable … yet.)

Beyond this, there are classes in martial arts twice a week, and snowboarding and piano lessons. Soccer in the summer. Those sorts of things cost a lot for our income, of course. But I think every family does what they can to get their kids into being active and musical. These would be our most stressful expenses, actually, except BG wants to participate in these things. If he had to be made to practice piano, for instance, that would make things pretty different.

So with these initial investments, the time commitment both in the home and in our homeschooling neighborhood, and community resources like the library, we have more than what we need to homeschool effectively.

Today’s schedule, as a for instance: He spent the first hour or so making a movie on XtraNormal, a new, free, online movie maker. Then we watched Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which led to a discussion of Shakespeare, Hamlet, existentialism and the meaning of life. Right now he’s practicing his piano, and then he’ll learn a bit of Norwegian (his chosen foreign language) or we’ll read Sir Walter Scott’sRob Roy together. Then he wants to get back into movie-making, which will push “school time” far past the time when his sister returns from “The Institution.”

A pretty typical day at home. Don’t worry, though, he gets out to visit and hang with friends most days of the week, often as a part of “school.”