Eating Liberally Blog

If you think diabetes and obesity are the two biggest health care crises Americans face these days, you're missing the forest for the trees--literally. Because the roots of all this diet-induced disease lie in two less publicized but even more pernicious epidemics: nature deficit disorder and kitchen illiteracy.

The symptoms include a woeful lack of familiarity with that elusive culinary commodity known as "real food," or "good food," or "slow food", and total estrangement from Mother Earth--who, by the way, keeps hanging around outside pining for a glimpse of you while you remain indoors, mesmerized by your monitor or TV screen and mindlessly munching on ersatz edibles.

Do you have no idea what you're actually eating, where it came from, or how it was grown? You may suffer from one or both of these maladies. Are you fearful of naked food that's not encased in microwave-friendly packaging? Petrified by perishable produce that demands any sort of prep?

Perhaps you'd buy the new wearable feedbag that lets Americans eat more and move less, or sample Taco Bell's new green menu with no ingredients from nature, if these products existed outside the fertile imaginations of the Onion's writers.

If we weren't so divorced from nature, we'd give a rat's ass--make that a double rat's ass--about all those freaky deformed frogs that have been sprouting extra legs in recent decades, and the sexually deformed fish that started popping up in the Potomac a few years back.

As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof pointed out in his column last Sunday and again on Thursday's Colbert Report, scientists increasingly suspect that "a class of chemicals called endocrine disruptors, very widely used in agriculture, industry and consumer products," may be contributing to a scary hodgepodge of health problems in people as well as the disturbing rise in anatomical anomalies in frogs and fish.

Kristof cites a 'landmark' 50-page statement from the Endocrine Society which presents "evidence that endocrine disruptors have effects on male and female reproduction, breast development and cancer, prostate cancer, neuroendocrinology, thyroid, metabolism and obesity, and cardiovascular endocrinology." The statement adds:

I wrote back in 2006 that the EPA had identified endocrine disruption as one of its top six research priorities in 1996. But, a decade later, they had yet to begin testing any candidate chemicals for their endocrine-disrupting potential. Kristof notes that "for now, these chemicals continue to be widely used in agricultural pesticides and industrial compounds. Everybody is exposed."

Sure, you could try to minimize your exposure to these apparent toxins by growing some of your own food without using pesticides and chemicals. But as our farming First Lady's recently discovered, the ground you're cultivating might be tainted anyway, because the chemicals and contaminants we've thoughtlessly dispersed into our air, soil and water in recent decades have a way of lingering.

Our obliviousness to the hazards of a chemically dependent food system have allowed these toxins to accrete in our environment--and our bodies--for far too long. But now, growing tomatoes has replaced throwing tomatoes as a form of protest; millions of Americans are looking to opt out of our toxic food chain by trying to grow some of their own food this year, many for the first time.

If we truly hope to create an alternative food system, though, many more of us will have to roll up our sleeves and get digging. As urban ag pioneer and McArthur genius Will Allen told Elizabeth Royte in next Sunday's New York Times Magazine, "We need 50 million more people growing food on porches, in pots, in side yards.”

Royte notes the inherent challenges for advocates of urban agriculture:

But the edible landscaping trend is taking root wherever there's soil, and even where there isn't, with the help of exhibits like the New York Botanical Garden's Edible Garden, which just opened last weekend and runs through September 13th.

The Edible Garden exhibitions include a Good Food Garden, a Seed Savers Heirloom Vegetable Garden, and a Beginner's Vegetable Garden, along with a half dozen other edible landscape-related exhibits. Rosalind Creasy, whose essential but long-out-of-print book Edible Landscaping has a new edition coming out in 2010, thankfully, designed the Heirloom Vegetable Garden. Other homegrown heroes like Kitchen Gardeners International founder Roger Doiron and Slow Food USA's new president Josh Viertel will be among the featured speakers at events taking place over the course of the summer.

If I may borrow from Stephen Colbert, I'd like to give a tip of the hat to cookware company Anolon, a major sponsor of the NYBG Edible Garden exhibition whose own Creating a Delicious Future campaign seeks to remedy kitchen illiteracy by fostering "a return to eating delicious foods prepared simply at home using fresh, seasonal, local ingredients."

The exhibition's other major sponsor, Scott's Miracle Gro, gets a wag of the finger: hey, guys, great way to greenwash the profits from all those pesticides the EPA's ordered you to take off the shelves.

Another wonderful edible gardening program to which I'll gladly give a shout-out is the Giving Through Growing campaign sponsored by Robert Mondavi's Woodbridge Winery in partnership with The American Community Gardening Association. Woodbridge is donating $40,000 this year to the ACGA to help provide "educational tools, leadership training, and community building strategies to participants in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and Los Angeles." As the Giving Through Growing website notes, the ACGA estimates that over 2,000 new community gardens will be established this year, on top of the 20,000 existing community gardens.

The Giving Through Growing program encourages you to send virtual "eSeeds" to your friends, and for every eSeed that's planted, Woodbridge will donate a dollar to the ACGS. It's a pretty painless way to show support for the folks who are greening our urban spaces.

Those of us who garden understand that food waste can either become "black gold," i.e. soil-enriching compost, or be shipped off to the landfill where it rots and generates methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas. Animal manures, too, can be a blessing to a farmer who raises his livestock on pasture, where the manure returns fertility to the soil as it has for centuries.

But when you crowd farm animals into what Jon Stewart aptly dubbed "an Abu Ghraib of animals" on Thursday's Daily Show in his interview with Food, Inc.'s Robbie Kenner, the massive quantities of manure that result become an environmental disaster.

And when you saturate the soil with synthetic chemicals to grow resource-intensive commodity crops, you deaden and deplete it.

This, then, is the fundamental difference between sustainable agriculture and intensive industrial food production. The first method enriches the soil; the other ultimately ruins it. Destroy the soil, and you destroy your civilization.

Will Allen predicts that 10 million people will plant gardens for the first time this year. But, as he told Elizabeth Royte, "two million of them will eventually drop out," when they get discouraged by pests and insufficient rain--or too much.

That's OK; 8 million new gardeners still adds up to a revolution. So grab your trowel and start digging for democracy. Let's overthrow the cornarchy this 4th of July!

Cross-posted from The Green Fork.

Cross-posted from The Green Fork.

This 4th of July, let's declare our freedom from the "pharmo-petro-chemico-military-industrial-agribusiness" food chain, exemplified by Stephen Colbert's funny but creepy Carlyle-like Prescott Group. Give your patriotic picnics and potlucks a truly independent flavor; serve foods grown "locally, deliciously, and sustainably," as the Food Independence Day campaign is calling on all of us to do--including our elected leaders.

And please, before you dismiss this as just another frivolous feel-good PR stunt, be aware that Food Independence Day is the brainchild of Roger Doiron, the Kitchen Gardeners International founder who led the call for the White House kitchen garden, which has yielded more produce--and more publicity--than even Roger could have hoped. Yes, he did! And he will, with your help.

But don't stop there. Join me in declaring a war on our tired policy of declaring wars, whether it's the war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on whatever. This habit of framing everything in violent terms impoverishes us all.

In fact, our fixation on making a killing, as opposed to making a living, is what's brought our economy to the brink of collapse, as venture capitalist/eco-preneur Woody Tasch argues brilliantly in his new book. The title, Inquiries Into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as If Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered may be a mouthful, but it's one I'd love to see on everyone's lips, because this book gets right to the heart of everything that's ailing our economy and corroding our culture.

Tasch's book is, in part, about how bad business decisions keep us from having good food. But it's not your (organic) garden-variety indictment of industrial agriculture. Yes, his "Slow Money" concept borrows freely from Italy's Slow Food movement--which famously began as a revolt against a McDonalds in Rome--and Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini wrote the forward to Tasch's book. But Slow Money is not some kind of simplistic, anti-corporate, socialist rant.

Rather, Tasch offers a formula for a new kind of capitalism in which farmers' markets and stock markets both flourish. Tasch's economic agenda is founded on the heretical notion that we need to think about the long term consequences of how we invest our natural resources and our human capital, instead of dwelling on quarterly profits and worshipping the false gods of convenience and consumption.

If we weren't so shortsighted, and so enamored of easy money, we'd be less vulnerable to scummy scammers like Bernie Madoff, the sleazy money lenders, and all the other charlatans who helped create this recession. We might learn to think of our housing as shelter, first and foremost, and long-term investment--not an asset to be flipped, or an ATM. We might also be more willing to confront the serious problems that plague our industrialized food system, as documented in Food, Inc.

But we remain convinced that the hallmark of a healthy economy is endless growth, overlooking the fact that some growths are malignant. And what about growth that's achieved through artificial means? We object to our athletes abusing steroids, but we're told that injecting cows with hormones to squeeze more milk out of them represents progress, as does saturating our soil with chemicals that deplete it and clog our waterways with runoff.

As Michael Pollan points out in Food, Inc., the way we eat has changed more in the last fifty years than in the previous 10,000. In those fifty years, Tasch notes, we've shifted to a food system that "treats the soil as if it were nothing more than a medium for holding plant roots so that they can be force-fed a chemical diet."

Tasch tallies up all the trade-offs we've made in the name of progress that have actually eroded our standard of living; for example, the way we've sacrificed freshness for shelf life. He laments the "economic violence" that permeates our culture of consumption and proposes a radical rethink of our current values--not just the way we do business, but our entire way of life.

Slow Money cites an eclectic range of thinkers, including some of our greatest agrarian philosophers and naturalists, as well as business leaders, professors and economists, who help Tasch make his case for an enlightened, re-localized food system that could bring us wholesome foods affordably without degrading people, animals and the planet.

Sound impossible? It's really our only hope. Don't believe the disinformation campaign being spun by Agribiz lobbyists, about how 'organic agriculture can never feed the world'. Foodie blogger extraordinaire Jill Richardson took on that monocrop myth in a Daily Kos diary on Monday.

But don't just take it from us bloggers. As Rodale Institute CEO Tim LaSalle told me recently:

Tasch seconds this sentiment, but he doesn't just explain why our current system of food production is unsustainable. He offers credible examples of alternative food chains being built one community and one entrepreneur at a time. His expertise and success in both for-profit and nonprofit endeavors, combined with Tasch's understanding of the fundamentals of soil fertility, make Slow Money a must read if you're feeling overwhelmed by the problems of our food chain and want to know how we can move forward. Joan Gussow, through whom I first learned about Tasch and his book, said of him, "He just may be a genius. No, let me amend that. He is a genius. He just may save us."

Cross-posted from The Green Fork.

England and America have historically enjoyed a "special friendship" exemplified by a friendly rivalry and a rich cultural exchange: silly sitcoms, shameless reality shows, cheery and cheesy chick lit, Hollywood's Los Anglo-cized adaptations of Jane Austen, and so on. They've got Nigella Lawson; we've got Rachel Ray (hey, no fair! can we trade?) They've got Jamie Oliver slaughtering a chicken live on British tv, we've got Mark Bittman asking carnivores to only come out at night--or, as he frames it, "Go vegan till 6."

The latest trans-Atlantic trend swap's got the Queen and "Macca"--that's Sir Paul, to us yanks--stealing a page from the U.S.-led "Eat The View" kitchen garden revival and the Meatless Monday movement, two high-profile pro-produce campaigns that are heating up faster than a solar oven in a food desert.

First, Queen Elizabeth adopted Michelle Obama's urban ag agenda by starting her own kitchen garden on the grounds of Buckingham Palace. The Queen and the First Lady have been forging a "special friendship" of their own in recent months, as evidenced by the spontaneous hug Michelle Obama gave the Queen at a reception, to the horror of the protocol police.

Who knows, maybe the Queen's growing friendship with our foremost ambassador for fruits and veggies was a factor in her Majesty's decision to authorize a new victory garden. It's been a long time since the Queen last dabbled in edible landscaping, according to the BBC, which noted that "This is the first time vegetables have been grown in the backyard of the monarch's London residence since World War II."

The BBC story included a photo, taken in 1940, showing the Queen as a young princess wielding a spade and a rake. This time around, the Queen's delegating the digging to her staff. Claire Midgeley, the deputy head gardener, explained the motivation behind the garden:

Michelle Obama said much the same thing yesterday as she joined the fifth-graders who helped plant the White House kitchen garden back in April harvest 73 pounds of lettuce and 12 pounds of peas:

As the Washington Post reported, the First Lady gave a 14 minute speech proving that her foray into front yard farming is far more than the feel-good publicity stunt it may have seemed to skeptics:

If the First Lady and the Queen's shared desire to promote food gardening and healthy eating seems like an unprecedented pairing, Brits witnessed an even more improbable UK/US alliance this week when Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono--famously blamed for breaking up the Beatles--came together on Monday to announce the launch of Sir Paul's Meat Free Mondays campaign.

By coincidence, America's version of the go-veg-once-a-week movement, Meatless Monday, relaunched its website on the very same day, so there's plenty of momentum growing on both sides of the Atlantic for this campaign to start your week off doing something significant to curb your carbon 'foodprint.'

Given the role that livestock production plays in producing greenhouse gas emissions, cutting back on our meat consumption just makes sense, and making a habit of doing so one day a week is a win-win, benefiting your own health and the planet's. As Moby, who's as famous these days for his NYC vegan café Teany as for his music, said at the Meat Free Monday launch:

It's heartening to see two of Britain's best known citizens lobbying on behalf of a plant-based diet, or what Michael Pollan--another Meatless Mondays advocate--calls "the resolarization of our food chain." Here comes the sun, indeed. I just hope this trend endures longer than Madonna's marriage, or David Beckham's hairline. This is one cross cultural exchange that we really need to nurture.

Cross-posted from The Green Fork.

Robbie Kenner didn't mean to make a horror film when he started working on Food, Inc.. But you can't shine a light on our food chain without exposing some ugly truths. As Michael Pollan says in the opening of Food, Inc.:

Whether we're ready to have that pastoral veneer peeled away is the question. Pollan and his fellow investigative journalist Eric Schlosser, the Fast Food Nation author who co-produced Food, Inc., with Kenner, are determined to fling open the doors to those rank, cavernous CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) and force us to confront the nasty consequences of our addiction to cheap processed convenience foods.

America the Beautiful? Um, not so much, these days. Let's do an inventory:

Amber waves of grain: sure, we've still got 'em. But the corn we subsidize now isn't even edible. It's only good for three things:

1. Fattening up cows--although, as Food Inc. reveals, their digestive tracts aren't equipped to digest corn, so it makes them sick and creates a breeding ground for the potentially lethal E. coli 0157:H7 bacteria, which sickened 73,000 people in the U.S. in 2007.

Do statistics like that make your eyes glaze over? Food, Inc. will make you weep at the story of Kevin Kowalcyk, a healthy, beautiful two and a half year-old boy who died after eating a hamburger contaminated with E.coli. The tragedy turned his mother Barbara into a food safety advocate lobbying to give the USDA the power to crack down on producers of tainted meat, with a bill named after her son. After seven years of lobbying, "Kevin's Law" has yet to pass.

2. Fattening us up on HFCS-filled soda and processed convenience foods, which makes us sick. One in three Americans born after 2000 will contract early onset diabetes, as Food, Inc. points out--unless you're a minority, in which case, the rate will be one in two.

And who knows what all those GMOs (genetically modified organisms) lurking in 70% of our processed foods are doing to our bodies and our environment? Not to mention the pesticides, bisphenol A and phlalates that permeate our food chain. Studies suggest these contaminants may be linked to dozens of diseases.

3. Ethanol, the bogus alternative fuel that's more boondoggle than boon. Not only is it not a solution to our energy needs, it may actually be worse than gas when it comes to global warming. And speaking of our energy-intenstive way of life...

Purple mountain majesties: If our mountains are purple these days, it's 'cause they've been bruised and battered by mountaintop mining removal, a practice which entails blasting the tops off mountains and dumping the resulting rubble into creeks and streams. Jim Hightower calls the mountaintop mining removal that's destroying the Appalachians "ecocide,...the total annihilation of a priceless ecosystem that is older than the Himalayas."

We could do an awful lot to conserve energy if we shifted to a diet dominated by local, seasonal produce, and bypassed factory farm animal products in favor of grass-fed meat and poultry from farmers like Food, Inc.'s Joel Salatin, the wry, quotable contrarian who's become the poster boy for sustainable agriculture. Such a change would dramatically reduce the amount of fossil fuels we use to grow and transport our food. But that would require agricultural policies that actually encouraged American farmers to grow more fruits and vegetables, and less feed corn, which brings us to...

The fruited plain: The USDA tells us to consume five to nine servings a day of fruits and vegetables even as it marginalizes the farmers who grow these so-called "specialty crops". The fruit and vegetable farmers aren't powerful enough to buy themselves favorable legislation, as the corn and livestock lobbyists do. Michael Pollan calls it "the silence of the yams," and until the USDA decides to put our money where it keeps telling us to put our mouths, you'll be able to get four burgers for the price of one salad at McDonalds.

With all the resources it takes to produce a pound of beef, shouldn't a salad cost less than a burger? Not to mention the hidden costs of industrial livestock production, like the contamination of our waterways from...

Sea to shining sea: excess fertilizer runoff feeds the algae blooms that create dead zones along our shores and dull our oceans' gleam, along with all that discarded plastic from our disposable consumer culture. There's so much junk floating around in the ocean now that it's impeding the search for the remains of Air France Flight 447.

We've been heading down this polluted path for decades. George Carlin provided us with his own satirical ode to catastrophic consumption back in 1972:

Maybe we're finally ready to change course, 37 years later. Food, Inc. exposes the dark side of the American diet in a compelling--and surprisingly entertaining--way. Will you lose your appetite for factory farmed foods after you've seen it? I hope so. But its stated goal is to leave you "hungry for change," the kind of change that's transforming the way we think about how--and where--our food is grown.

Yes, Food, Inc. is a horror story, of sorts, but it's no scarier than the tall tales that Agribiz and Big Food have been spinning in their efforts to ensnare you in their monoculture myths of efficiency, convenience and affordability. They'd have you believe that the folks behind Food, Inc. are technology-hating luddites and arugula-eating elitists who want the world to subsist on wormy apples.

They'd also love it if you'd take their word for it that their methods of farming are super sustainable. And our food supply's plenty safe, thank you very much. More frequent inspections and stringent regulations? That will just drive up the price of food.

But as Food, Inc. clearly shows, industrial agriculture's cutting corners in some lethal and inhumane ways, and our cheap food supply is poisoning Americans on a scale that Al Qaeda could only dream of.

It's all well and good to espouse shopping at farmers markets and growing our own food wherever possible. We can also demand better from our corporations and our government. But the fact remains that fruits and vegetables are unavailable--or unaffordable--to many low-income Americans.

Industrial agriculture's got the cheap part down. Sustainable agriculture's got the fresh, healthy part of the equation covered. The burning question we need to ask was raised by Grist blogger Tom Laskawy in a recent email to some colleagues pondering this issue of access: Do all Americans have the right to affordable, fresh, healthy food?

Big Ag and Big Food insist that their food chain is doing a perfectly swell job of meeting all our needs. Oh, beautiful, for specious lies. Food, Inc.'s implied answer to Laskawy's question is yes, we all have that right, but we'll have to fight for it.

Cross-posted from The Green Fork.

Formerly squeamish suburbanites are learning what every little kid knows instinctively--dirt and worms are cool. If you're on the cutting edge, you've already stopped trimming your lawn and started clipping your nails, 'cause the era of manicured hands and manicured lawns is officially over. It's time to tear up your turf, grow 'clean' food, and get some dirt under your nails, because nothing says "sustainable" like particles of soil clinging to your fingers--or your fingerlings.

Mini farms are sprouting up in front yards, back yards, on rooftops, and sunny windowsills. Early adopters have taken chickens under their wings, and put bins of scrap-happy red wigglers under their kitchen sinks to compost the coffee grounds. Here in uber-urban NYC, my friends are planting illicit patches of herbs on their fire escapes, a practice hypothetically frowned on by the NY fire department. But who's gonna get busted for growing basil? Everybody knows that firefighters cook up a storm when they're not racing off to put out other folks' fires.

Illicit bee-keeping, on the other hand, can be a stickier endeavor, which is why there's a move to make it legal in NYC, where--to the astonishment of many--chicken keeping is actually permitted.

It shouldn't be such a surprise, really, because a half-century ago, "chickens were all the rage in the United States, and not just among farmers," as Nicolette Hahn Niman notes in her memoir Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms, adding that "these were times when people had limited entertainment options--no movies, no television, and no computers...contact with chickens was about as commonplace as interactions are today with dogs and cats."

Speaking of cats, Catwoman Eartha Kitt kept chickens and grew greens in her Beverly Hills backyard. It's a shame she didn't live long enough to see farming become fashionable; I'm sure Kitt would have pounced on Carleen Madigan's The Backyard Homestead and added it to her Christmas wishlist for Santa, baby.

Madigan's book, aptly billed as "the Indispensible Guide To Food Self-Sufficiency" is an invaluable resource to help you tackle just about any homegrown, made-from-scratch project, from growing your own fruits, veggies and livestock to preserving it in the form of canning, curing, brewing, preserving, etc. Dominique Browning, the former editor of the late, lamented House & Garden (what other shelter magazine would have Bill McKibben contribute a column on composting?) gave it a rave in last Sunday's New York Times Book Review:

Madigan's got the goods, and she wants you to have them, too:

The Backyard Homestead is for anyone who's tantalized by the prospect of producing even a little bit of your own food, regardless of where you live. So if you've got those back-to-the-land fantasies but your town is more Wal-Mart than Walden Pond, don't despair: The Backyard Homestead will help you make your dreams come true.

By GUEST BLOGGER Lorna Sass

cross-posted from LornaSassAtLarge

(Kat: Lorna Sass, the whole grain goddess/pressure cooker queen whose visionary cookbooks are my bible, has kindly shared with us her take on Ana Joane's terrific new food doc FRESH and her own recent encounter with a Utah farmer who's reclaiming our food chain in the same spirit as FRESH's agrarian all-star cast.)

Wednesday night I saw a fine documentary called FRESH in which farmers using brilliantly conceived, sustainable growing methods were celebrated for the heroes they are.

The film, directed with great sensitivity by Anna Joanes, portrays the palpable joy of farmers like Joel Salatin in rural Virginia and Will Allen in urban Milwaukee who are finding ways to farm that create high-quality food profitably and chemical free. It was thrilling to have Salatin, Allen, chef Dan Barber of Blue Hill, and nutritionist/organic gardener/author Joan Gussow emerge after the screening to take questions.

The film and panelists received a standing ovation. It was a thrilling moment, full of hope that we are on the cusp of great and long overdue change in American agriculture. (For more details on the growing grassroots movement towards sustainable farming, a great site to visit is eatwellguide. I subscribe to their informative blog The Green Fork on an RSS feed.)

Before viewing the happy pigs, cows, chickens, and sprightly salad greens of these two featured farmers, I had to close my eyes during those moments when the devastating conditions of factory farming were screened. A few times in the film, we witness a vacant look in the eyes of an average-Joe farming couple caught up in a nasty procedure that “grows” chickens inhumanely. During the interview, two beloved poodles cuddle on their laps, a visual that brilliantly captures the irony and tragedy of an animal-raising system that splits human psyches asunder.

On my recent trip to Utah, I met a farmer hero like Salatin and Allen by a combination of chance and determination. Despite the magnificent scenery all around us, The Sweetie and I were beginning to languish about the fourth day into the trip. Looking forward to eating well prepared, real food means a great deal to both of us, and we were having a rough time finding anything healthy to put on our plates. There were overweight people and fast-food restaurants all around us, and we’d run out of the wholegrain bread I’d brought along for breakfast…

So when we were served a complimentary appetizer of fresh, lightly pickled vegetables at a delightful restaurant called Cafe Diablo in the tiny town of Torrey, we immediately asked their source and were told about Randy Ramsley’s Mesa Farm Market Bakery and Cafe in nearby Caineville. In addition to wanting to see those veggies at their source, it so happened that Randys’ farm was right on scenic route 24.

So the next day, we headed for his place and traveled for what seemed like hours through variably gorgeous and desolate landscapes before suddenly out of nowhere there appeared this shack on the right side of the road:

It was about 4 p.m. and the place looked very closed, but I spotted a silver-haired man at the back and decided to knock on the front door. Someone opened the door and there was Randy, who turned out to be the farmer and just about everything else at the moment.

Once inside, the place looked pretty barren of veggies and sandwiches, so we asked for some iced coffee. Randy said he thought that could be done and proceeded to grind some fair-trade beans and make us a fresh batch, which proved to be the best coffee we had on the trip.

Once revived, I spotted some freshly baked loaves and was thrilled to learn that some were made of wholegrain flour. Good, that would be breakfast and maybe part of the lunch for the next few days. Randy had already delivered his organic salad greens and other vegetables to Cafe Diablo and another terrific restaurant called Hell’s Backbone Grill in Boulder (yes, there is a Boulder, Utah), so we couldn’t buy any of those, but we had a chance to chat as we sipped the fresh brew.

“How did you end up farming on this desolate stretch of road?” I asked.

Randy was hiking through the Caineville area, spotted the land, and knew it was going to be his job to farm there. “We are farming in the heart of the Caineville Badlands,” he explained to us (and in further detail on his beautiful web site). “These badlands are some of the ‘baddest’ badlands in North America. Yet we grow what we believe to be some of the most heavenly tasting organic fruits and vegetables on the planet.”

Through hard work, creative genius, and a belief in his mission to provide high quality food to those who can’t otherwise get it, Randy and his co-workers have developed a method of farming sustainably in the Utah desert at the same time as he improves the soil in these badlands. He uses a type of drip irrigation developed in Israel and maintains a herd of goats to do the weeding. The goats digest the weeds, and drop their fertilizing pellets onto the soil. Little by little he’s developing a small artisanal cheese business based on the goat milk.

On his 50 acres, he also has an acre of fruit trees. In the middle of it is a chicken coop. As explained by Randy, the 50 or so chickens eat garden waste, bugs, weeds, and fallen fruit. They provide eggs as well as nitrogen-rich fertilizer. When he makes deliveries of bread and vegetables to the restaurants he serves, he collects their waste vegetable oil and turns it into biodiesel, then uses the biofuel to run the pumps and tractor.

It’s a circular system like the ones described by Salatin and Allen. Nothing is wasted, the soil becomes richer in nutrients each year, and people get to eat the healthiest food they’ve ever tasted.

Meeting Randy was a highlight of our trip to Utah. We came away knowing we’d met someone who was doing the work that he loved and was meant to do, and we were the richer for the experience. As for me, it’s been a long time since I’ve had any living heroes and I feel very lucky to have met three of them in the space of one week.

Eating Liberally is not, technically, a catering service. However, we do delight in dishing up tasty food seasoned with a dash of democracy and a sprinkling of subversion, when the occasion calls for it.

And this Saturday, May 30th, is one such occasion: our annual Living Liberally celebration, emceed by Air America's Sam Seder. Together with our Liberally colleagues, we'll be honoring Media Matters For America, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, and Jack & Jill Politics for their outstanding contributions to the progressive cause.

We've adapted some of our favorite recipes from Scott Stringer's Go Green East Harlem Cookbook for the event, adding a few twists of our own and plenty of farm fresh veggies from the Union Square Greenmarket, some grown right here in New York City! Here's what attendees to our gala will be noshing on:

Upstate/Downstate Beans ‘n’ Baby Greens: an urban/rural partnership of Cayuga Pure Organics pinto, kidney & black beans from Ithaca & Queens County Farm Museum micro salad greens: yes, we can all just get along!

Spicy Buffalo Wingnuts: humanely raised chicken wings marinated in a tangy, multi-ethnic blend of local, grass-fed yogurt, spices and hot peppers guaranteed to give Lou Dobbs indigestion.

Spicy Buffalo Wing-nots: a vegan version of the above, featuring our own made-from-scratch seitan in a silken tofu marinade.

Green-Collar’d Greens: …because farming is the ultimate green job! A fine mess o’ locally grown, tender young kale, collard, turnip & beet greens lightly sautéed with garlic & scallions.

Grassroot/Netroot Veggie Slaw: a rainbow coalition of locally grown heirloom beets, Japanese turnips, and carrots--which, unlike House Minority Leader John Boehner, get their orange hue naturally ‘cause they’re chock full of beta carotene.

No-More-Food-Desert Desserts: sweet treats high in fruits, grains and vegetables, just like every community should be, regardless of income!

(Additional note: The Borough President recorded an invitation for you all to join us...thought you might like to see. - justin)

Cross-posted from The Green Fork.

The front yard farming phenomenon is so hot now that People magazine recently did a story on it, "From Lawn to Lunch." But when Michelle Obama tore up a patch of the White House lawn to plant a kitchen garden, she inadvertently fertilized another growing movement: a flourishing Agribiz campaign to portray kitchen gardeners and 'good food movement' advocates as dangerous zealots out to shove fresh, untainted, ie. aggressively wholesome foods down America's collective throat and force us all to grow our own veggies--all without benefit of pesticides or chemicals.

Why? Because the rising influence of folks like Michael Pollan, Marion Nestle, and other high profile "food cops," to quote the uber-astroturf (i.e. fake grassroots) Center For Consumer Freedom, is bad for Agribiz's bottom line. The more people know about how our food's grown and produced, the more likely they are to demand better, healthier--i.e. less profitable--food.

And now, Monsanto, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, and their Big Food buddies have to contend with a whole flurry of food documentaries that reveal just how screwed up our food chain's become over the past half-century. On June 12th, Participant Media will release Food, Inc., which they hope will be the "Inconvenient Truth" of our food system.

Monsanto, not surprisingly, is one of the villains in Food, Inc., so it's launched a pr offensive dismissing the documentary as pure propaganda that "demonizes American farmers." The only problem with this line of attack is that it's blatantly false, and there's no better proof of that than another outstanding food documentary, FRESH, which premieres this week in New York, Boston and DC. As FRESH director Ana Joanes says, her film "celebrates the farmers, thinkers and business people across America who are re-inventing our food system."

Food, Inc. and FRESH both feature Joel Salatin, the Virginia farmer profiled in Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, and Pollan himself appears in both films as well. But despite the apparent overlap, the two films are very different.

Each provides a much-needed public service, but where Food, Inc. airs a laundry list of factory farming's dirty secrets, Fresh makes a beeline past the manure lagoons, veal crates, contaminated food and monoculture madness to land us in truly greener pastures, whether it's in rural Virginia with Salatin or in urban Milwaukee at McArthur genius Will Allen's farm, Growing Power.

I've been excited about FRESH ever since my colleague Kate Croft, one of the prime movers and shakers behind New York University's Sustainability Task Force and a consultant/blogger (as am I) for the Eat Well Guide, told me about it a couple of months ago, and introduced me to Ana.

Ana grew up in Switzerland, but she's been living in the U.S. for more than 15 years. Her interest in the cultural and environmental impact of globalization drew her here to earn her BA in political science from Barnard college, followed by a degree from Columbia Law School. Before dedicating herself to film making, Ana founded Reel Youth, Inc., a video production program for youth coming out of detention, and other under-served youth.

Now, after making FRESH, she's become, like myself, a kind of accidental sustainable agtivist:

KT: Fresh is an essential companion piece to Food, Inc., but while both films expose the fundamental flaws in our food chain, your documentary focuses on folks who are committed to sustainable food production, whereas Food, Inc.'s primary purpose is to expose the horrors of Agribiz. At what point during the filming of Fresh did you become aware of Food, Inc.? And did it affect your decisions as a director?

AJ: Robert Kenner, the director of Food, Inc., contacted me sometime during the fall of 2007. Robbie had gotten my info from Joel when he was filming there (at Polyface Farm). We talked for a long time and have been in touch since. Learning about Food, Inc. did not affect any of my decisions, besides perhaps some strategical concerns with regard to a release date. But the structure and focus of my movie was in no way influenced by my conversation with Robert. Also, I only got to see his movie recently and so did not really know so much what to expect (although I knew our movies would be very different.)

KT: You first started working on Fresh in late 2005, before Omnivore's Dilemma came out, "locavore" entered the lexicon, and Wal-Mart became the nation's leading seller of "organic" milk. Did you sense back then that you were documenting a growing movement?

AJ: yes. When I started thinking about making this documentary, my focus was much broader. I thought to look at people and initiatives not only in farming but energy, architecture, technology, etc., and although I was finding out about amazing people and stories through my research, it became clear, almost from the start, that what was going on at the food level was the most exciting.

One thing in particular struck me: I was finding programs, initiatives, people ALL OVER the world, in apparently completely different environmental, cultural, and political environments, and yet they all shared key attributes: they all had a grassroots, bottom-up quality, as well as an incredibly integrated approach to the work they were doing.

"Yes, it's about food," these initiatives seemed to say, "but it's really about education, health, quality of work, environmental preservation, our spiritual well-being..." Food, I started to realize, was both a microcosm of the problems (economic consolidation, environmental destruction, exploitation of workers, oil crisis, etc.) and of the solutions. And because food plays such an intimate and immediate role in our everyday lives, it's a powerful entry point to discuss and address these challenges.

Food is a central part of our social and cultural fabric and we can instantly observe the consequences when we change our eating habits--not only in our pleasure and health, but on the vitality of our local economy, on our community and environment.

KT: You grew up in Switzerland and came to the U.S. as a student. There's a perception, validated by recent studies, that Europeans and Americans have very different eating habits. Did you notice this when you first arrived in the U.S.?

AJ: I think that what I noticed the most was how I missed the fresh products I grew up taking for granted. Tomatoes that actually have taste. Great salads. Yogurt and cheeses (it's much easier now to get great yogurt and cheese than it was when I first got here.) And being in New York, it didn't take long before I found myself eating all my meals out. It's hard to resist the "convenience" ethos that's so pervasive in New York and perhaps around the country.

I also came to realize that the price of food was much cheaper in the US, at least compared to Switzerland. Not only are restaurants very expensive back home--and therefore a much less regular occurrence--but food purchased at the supermarket is expensive, as well. People back home don't have the expectation that food should be cheap, so they spend a much larger portion of their income on food. Also, although we have amazing farmers' markets, the quality of food in the supermarket was always great and I never had to think about where to go to buy food. In New York, depending on your neighborhood, the difference in quality can be dramatic.

KT: Do you find that your own relationship to food has changed since you made FRESH?

AJ: When I started making FRESH, my main relationship with food was one of dieting and guilt. I would choose food based on calories, mostly. I think I always had a fairly healthy diet, to the extent that I never ate much junk, and always enjoyed vegetables and fruits, but I never thought of the quality of the meat, vegetables, or fruits that I was eating, or the impact that it has on my health, my community, and the environment.

To be honest, it never really crossed my mind to think of the way that food was raised/produced, or to worry about it. It also never crossed my mind that the food I was eating might be contributing to my not feeling good, having low energy, gaining weight, and possibly to my long-term well-being.

As I started making the documentary, my food anxiety mostly increased: I was still mostly concerned about calories, but I also started wondering about the pesticides, hormones, and antibiotics that might be in the food I was eating. I started thinking of all the "health snacks" I was eating that contained GMOs and the unknown health risk attached to that food.

But my habits didn't change much at first. The change happened slowly and with a general change in my outlook and lifestyle. It was as if my inquiry into our food system helped me realize not only our communal dysfunctions and misplaced priorities, but mine as well.

I started to try to find more balance in my life, to find or look for pleasure in daily activities, in the "process" of life, rather than constantly running after the next "thing" that was going to make me happier, better, more something or the other. Eating well was no longer about (or only about) improving my health or not gaining weight, it was about pleasure: taking care of myself and the folks that I love and taking the time to do so.

I also came to realize how important it was for me to align my actions with my heart and mind. I have always been concerned with the destruction of the environment and the exploitation of people. But I did not always align my actions with my belief. Once I started living a more aware/conscious life, I felt great pleasure and satisfaction in acting in ways that support my beliefs. It was not a sacrifice--which is how I had always thought about it--but a relief.

KT: You're about to become a mother (congratulations!) Have you figured out how you'll equip your child to cope with a culinary culture where cheap, fast and toxic is the norm and fresh, untainted produce is seen as a luxury for an elite few?

AJ: No, I have no idea. I mean, I'll certainly feed him/her great food and hope to introduce him/her to the pleasures of gardening and cooking, and thereby influence his/her tastebuds for life. But I have no doubt my kid is going to get exposed to foods that will taste absolutely wonderful to him/her and that he/she will want more of them...and I have no idea how I'll deal with that. I do think celebrating food and making shopping and cooking a joy, as well as the sharing around a table on a daily basis, will go a long way--at least I hope!

KT: What's the most drastic change you've witnessed on the real food front in the years since you began this project? What gives you the greatest hope that we can really transform the way we eat and grow food in this country?

AJ: It seems to me that food has become a substantial focus for Americans. The mainstream news and cyberspace are filled with information and discussion ranging from concern about the latest food scare to a favorite recipe. This shift in American's awareness is both dramatic and fills me with great hope.

The sustainable food movement is, in essence, a grassroots movement advocating for a change in awareness, a shift in our relationship with each other and with our environment, a new social and economic paradigm. Like any deep cultural change, it starts small and slowly grows, then accelerates as it reaches a critical mass. Michelle Obama's garden is a reflection on how far and wide "real food" ideas have reached. More than a reflection, though, Michelle's garden will be a catalyst for raising awareness even further, and is evidence of our government's receptivity to the concerns and demands of sustainable food advocates.

It is this, and the amazing people that I encounter through my work, their energy and dedication, that keep me hopeful. Hopefulness is simply the knowledge that change is possible and that we can participate in it. Lin Yutang said that "Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence."

Cross-posted from The Green Fork.

Q. What's the difference between a pigeon and an investment banker?

A. A pigeon can still make a deposit on a BMW.

Don't laugh--bird poop's a precious resource. I dispense pellets of Peruvian seabird guano to my gardening friends as if they were Pez, because, as the Worm's Way gardening supply catalogue explains, "There is nothing like it for accelerating growth".

If only guano could goose our stalled economy. Robert Frank, the Cornell economics professor, New York Times columnist, and author, most recently, of Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class, declared in a speech last month at Skidmore college--which he prefaced with that pigeon joke--that Americans are worse off now than we were during the Great Depression.

We face a significant decline in our standard of living, Frank warned in his speech, the keynote for The Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference on The Pursuit of Happiness. The conference, co-hosted by Bard College and Skidmore College, brought a group of academics together to scrutinize one of America's most cherished birthrights through a Dickensian lens.

Why? Well, this may not be the best of times, or the worst of times, but in this era of profound economic uncertainty and social unrest, it's as good a time as any for "a reassessment of happiness," the conference's co-organizer, Barbara Black, Skidmore associate professor of English, noted, adding that "tragedy, loss, or challenge can make us more committed to happiness; deeply unhappy times often generate a renewed interest in the power of optimism."

Hope is all the rage, these days, but hope is cheap. That's why the current administration can afford to dispense it so liberally. Happiness, on the other hand, is in much shorter supply, making it the truly hot commodity--or it would be, if you could actually buy it.

We've been trying to buy our way to bliss since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, but we still haven't figured out how to manufacture happiness for the masses. As Deirdre D'Albertis, Black's co-organizer and an associate professor of English at Bard, told me, we've got more in common with Victorian Brits than you might think; ordinary people as well as intellectuals "were concerned with the rise of conspicuous consumption or the worship of what they called "Mammon". You may know him as the god of "Greed is Good".

Then, as now, writers and social activists wondered how to "equitably distribute the wealth generated by a great empire," D'Albertis said, "as well as what the impact of rapid industrialization was doing to the English countryside". D'Albertis credits these nineteenth century 'thought leaders', as they'd be branded today, for inspiring a wide range of current social movements, including environmentalism, utilitarianism, liberalism, and that bête noire of wingnut blowhards, socialism.

So it was only fitting that this group of sepia-steeped scholars launched their conference with Frank, whose latest New York Times column puts those tea-stained tax protestors through the wringer and finds their arguments against taxing the rich decidedly weak.

Frank, an economist who subscribes to the Keynesian theory that our government needs to spend more, not less, at a time like this, believes that our economy won't recover anytime soon without a new New Deal. His speech, entitled "Unsolicited Advice For The Obama Administration," proposed that we spend the stimulus on "a massive laundry list of projects to revitalize the public sphere". You know, repair our crumbling bridges, upgrade our antiquated railway system, improve access to health care and better our schools, for example.

Conservatives carp that the stimulus is "a mere spending program". As Frank drily noted, "That's the whole point." Note, too, that improving education for the less affluent is an investment that would benefit us all. As New York Times economics reporter David Leonhardt noted recently, one unexpected bonus of the Great Depression was a surge in school enrollment among teenagers who would have otherwise dropped out to take a factory job:

But rabid tea-baggers will tell you (watch for flying flecks of spittle) that using taxpayer dollars for the betterment of society is a form of fascism. A teary-eyed Glenn Beck called it tyranny. As Jon Stewart pointed out, Beck was apparently confusing tyranny with democracy, but hey, nuance is for liberal weenies. So is community organizing. And community gardens. Especially community gardens filled with organically grown fruits and vegetables! And soup kitchens that serve mushroom risotto and pumpkin soup!

This last category drew the ire of conservative blogger Julie Gunlock, who went off half-cocked the other day about food banks and soup kitchens that are supposedly guilty of committing tax payer-financed food snobbery by offering their clientele fresh, wholesome meals instead of nutritionally bankrupt processed foods and donated donuts.

Gunlock notes that Obama's stimulus package contains $150 million for food banks and other organizations that provide food to people in need. Citing an unacceptably delicious-sounding meal served at a California soup kitchen, she huffed "No wonder these places need a bailout," adding that dispensing donuts or other unhealthy foods to the down-and-out does them no great disservice:

Another conservative blogger, Ken Shepard, whose website NewsBusters is dedicated to exposing liberal media bias, derides Obama's pick to head the Center For Disease Control, Dr. Thomas Frieden, as a "nanny state activist" because he favors a "sin tax" on soda pop.

The Seattle Times, on the other hand, applauded the choice of Frieden, noting that he's won the admiration of the public-health community in his role as New York City's health commissioner "for tackling unhealthy habits behind diseases, including smoking, obesity and poor diet."

Shepard objects to Frieden's proposed penny-per-ounce excise tax on sugared beverages on the grounds that "it's designed to hurt. Its purpose is to discourage you from buying soda, on the grounds that soda, like smoking, is bad for you." He goes on:

Well, actually, no, sometimes, and maybe, maybe not.

First, soda's not a food. It's a beverage with no redeeming nutritional value. An 8 ounce soda is the liquid equivalent of a candy bar, so chugging a 64 ounce Double Gulp Coke is comparable to eating 8 candy bars.

Second, yes, food can be a good thing--especially fresh, unprocessed plant-based foods that are full of fiber, nutrients and antioxidants.

Other foods, especially convenience foods and processed meats, are loaded with toxins, empty calories, excess sodium and other disease-inducing ingredients that contribute to the epidemic of ill health that afflicts so many Americans.

Third, is it really a matter of choice? I have several friends who claim they are addicted to soda and can't do without it. And they may be right. David Kessler, the former FDA commissioner, has a new book, The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite , which reveals how the food industry manipulates us to consume excess calories.

Kessler spent years researching the causes of our obesity epidemic and discovered that foods high in fat, salt and sugar alter the brain's chemistry in ways that compel people to overeat. As he told the Washington Post:

You could argue that excess soda consumption is a choice, but if it is, it's a bad choice. So what, some folks say--it's a free country, and people are free to make bad choices. Meanwhile, these are the same people who oppose taxes on the grounds that it's "our" money, and
we know better than the government how best to spend it.

But in fact, we've made some astonishingly idiotic choices. We've been seeking satisfaction from things that haven't actually enhanced our lives: outsized houses with mortgages we couldn't pay; cars with lousy mileage whose tanks we can't afford to fill; dollar menus that are giving us all kinds of diseases our health care system's not equipped to treat; and so on. What's the difference between an overly bubbly housing market and sugary carbonated beverages? Both appeal to our infantile desire for instant gratification.

That's why Robert Frank believes that Americans stand to benefit from the reduced standard of living that seems inevitable. He takes issue with the doom-and-gloomers who peddle pessimism porn and Depression lust. Where they see "protracted misery," Frank sees a higher quality of life.

Yes, times are tough--and they're likely to get worse, but Frank's take is that things aren't as bad as they seem, despite our dire economic circumstances. In fact, we stand to gain by losing. Why? Because our "satisfaction depends more on relative consumption than absolute consumption".

In other words, we don't mind having to make do with less if our neighbors and coworkers are making do with less as well. It's the sense that other people are much better off than we are that breeds dissatisfaction, even if our own circumstances are fairly comfortable.

So a stimulus package that improves our collective well-being may be our best hope for happiness. But we've got some high hurdles to overcome--many of them self-imposed.

As New York City's new public health commissioner, Thomas Farley, pointed out in his book Prescription For A Healthy Nation, "about half of all deaths in the United States are caused by individual human behavior: too many of us smoke, drink alcohol, eat high-calorie and high-fat foods, don't get enough exercise, and use cars and guns to kill ourselves and each other. The major reason why we Americans die early is that we behave in an unhealthy way. It is what we do that makes us sick, not lack of access to medical care."

Farley's picking up right where Frieden left off, to the consternation of nanny state naysayers who don't want to pick up the tab for other folks' poor choices, or pay a 'sin tax' for their own. Hey, all you tea-baggers, I hate to break the news, but you're already paying. We all are.

Painting by James Howard Kunstler

Originally published on AlterNet.

I grew up in Woodland Hills, Calif., a nominally pastoral, petrocentric Los Angeles suburb, so peak oil prognosticator James Howard Kunstler's dim view of our car-crazed culture really resonates with me.

Kunstler's relentless skewering of suburbia, and his penchant for apocalyptic predictions have landed him a reputation as a cranky Cassandra. But as Ben McGrath observed while strolling around Saratoga Springs with Kunstler for a recent New Yorker piece, "Far from the image of the stereotypical Chicken Little, he was more like an amiable town crier whom the citizenry regarded fondly, if a bit skeptically."

So, when a friend and I found ourselves headed to Kunstler's neck of the woods for a conference recently, we arranged to have dinner with Saratoga Springs' resident soothsayer. Contrary to his contrarian reputation, Kunstler proved to be an affable, upbeat guy.

We chatted about food, politics, urban planning, gardening and a dozen other topics, but I'm not much of a note-taker; I'd rather eat than tweet. So our dinner conversation was off the record, including, mercifully, his ribald remarks about Alice Waters and Martha Stewart, which decency should preclude me from even alluding to.

However, he graciously agreed to answer my questions via e-mail about his conversion from carnivore to (mostly) vegan and other foodish and fuelish topics.

KT: Let's get right to the meat of the matter--or, rather, the lack thereof. You used to enjoy eating "lots of meat, duck fat, butter by the firkin". What made you decide to go more or less vegan in recent months? Was it hard to make the transition to a plant-based diet?

JHK: It was as simple as a trip to the doctor's office. My cholesterol and blood pressure were too high. I had to take some radical action. I've enjoyed the challenge of cooking with a very different range of ingredients. But I like cooking and am pretty good at it -- I worked in many restaurant kitchens when I was a starving bohemian -- and I figured a lot of things out. For instance, that you can make stocks and sauces by braising onions and aromatics without oil or butter. The only thing I really miss is making really bravura dishes for company, like chicken pie with a butter-saturated crust, duck-and-sausage gumbo, brownies... You get the picture.... I'm still excited by the challenge of vegan (or nearly vegan -- I use skim milk) cookery. There are some excellent cookbooks out there, by the way, like Vegan With a Vengeance by Isa Chandra Moskowitz, The Accidental Vegan by Devra Gartenstein, and the Candle Cafe Cookbook by Joy Pierson and Bart Potenza.

KT: A study's just come out showing that although the French spend two hours eating each day--roughly twice as long as we do--they're among the slimmest of the 18 nations in the study. Americans were the fattest, with more than one in three Americans qualifying as obese. How would you explain this phenomenon? What compels Americans to eat so many of our meals in our cars?

JHK: Americans eat so many meals in cars because 1.) the infrastructure of daily life is engineered for extreme car dependency, and 2.) because the paucity of decent quality public space and so-called "third places" (gathering places) for the working classes (and lower) -- and remember, it is the working classes and poor who are way disproportionately obese. The people portrayed in Vanity Fair Magazine are not fat. I suspect that the amount of time Americans spend in their cars is roughly proportionate to the amount of time French people spend at the table. Fast food is not a new phenomenon in the USA, however. Frances Trollope's sensational travel book of the 1830s, "The Domestic Manners of the Americans" dwells on the horrifying spectacle of our hotel dining rooms, where people bolted their food with disgusting manners. Americans have been in a tearing rush for 200 years.

KT: In The Long Emergency, published in 2005, you predicted with astounding accuracy how the sub-prime mortgage meltdown would unfold. Your latest novel, World Made By Hand, takes place in the near future after a massive flu outbreak that originated in Mexico. Um, what should we start worrying about next?

JHK: Worry about the "recovery" that never comes and the insidious collapse of our institutions and arrangements that will proceed from this. Worry about lost incomes and vocations that will never come back (e.g. marketing exec for Target, Inc.) and the need to find new ways to be useful to your fellow human beings (and incidentally perhaps earn a living). Worry about finding a community to live in that is cohesive enough to stave off anarchy at the local level. Worry about building the best garden you can and making good compost. Worry about how difficult it is to learn how to play a musical instrument at age 47.

KT: You recently wrote "there's no way we can continue the petro-agriculture system of farming and the Cheez Doodle and Pepsi Cola diet that it services. The public is absolutely zombified in the face of this problem -- perhaps a result of the diet itself." OK, so how will we stock our post-peak oil pantries? Do we really need to start hoarding rice and beans?

JHK: Get some kind of a hand-cranked home grain mill. Personally, I think it is indeed a good idea to lay in a supply of beans, lentils, rice, oats, other grains and don't forget salt, boullion (soups can sustain us with any number of ingredients), dried onion flakes, spices (chilies and curries especially). Our just-in-time, three-day's-worth-of-inventory supermarket system is very susceptible to disruption. And we're very far from establishing workable local food networks in this country. The fragility of Petro-Ag is being aggravated by the collapse of bank lending now. Farmers need borrowed money desperately. Capital is as important an "input" as methane-based fertilizers. I think we could see problems with food production and distribution anytime from here on.

KT: You're an avid gardener. Do you grow much of your own food? Do you worry that you'll have to guard your greens with a gun if our collapsing economy sends the mall rats outdoors to forage after the food courts run out of pretzel nuggets?

JHK: I don't grow any grains. I have successfully grown potatoes, but won't this year. (I'm renting my current house and its accompanying property.) This year I'll be planting mostly leafy greens (collards, kale, chard, lettuces plus some peppers and tomatoes (pure frivolity). It is not hard to imagine that food theft will become a problem. The trouble, though, is that the sort of people liable to do the thieving are exactly those with the poorest skills in cooking. You have to know what to do with kale to make it worth stealing. It may be more like kitchen theft: "...what's that you got on the stove, pal...?"

KT: You evidently enjoy cooking and entertaining. Who would your dream dinner guests be (limiting your guest list to those folks who are currently among the living)?

JHK: I have a pretty good revolving cast of characters among my friends locally who make regular visits to my table. This week, a farming couple who are renting 20 acres off a wealthy land-truster (and doing a great job of market gardening) are coming over, along with the Rolling Stone environmental reporter and his wife, who is writing a gardening book. I don't need no steenkin' outatown celebrities.