Highlights

I had a retail day, one where I have to go and deal with stores and merchants. I am the odd female who gets no kick from shopping, but every now and then, things sneak up on me, and I need to go out and get a few things. In this case, I needed to dispute a bill for cancelled long-distance service, pick up some canning lids, and find something to wear for the school auction (my wardrobe shrank considerably with my size).

I try AT&T’s online avatar, but she dons a frown when I tell her she hasn’t guessed what my problem is. She is the victim of a bad parser and bad animation, and I almost feel sorry for her. I end up on the phone (the call may have been monitored for quality assurance, at least I hope it was) with a customer service representative whose goal it is to provide me excellent service. But she is locked into screens popping up, asking her to read a script to me. The call drags on for nearly 15 minutes, as she tries to sell me more services for an account I thought I closed a month ago, but which keeps generating bills. I know she’s only trying to make a living, but I shouldn’t have to ask her to stop reading from the script twice. I am upset by how assertive and rude I must be with her, since I far prefer polite and kind. I blame the large corporate attitude that has taken away her power to read a caller and respond intelligently. Perhaps she and the avatar can have a cup of coffee together someday, and commiserate.

Next stop, Fred Meyer, once a local establishment, now a Kroger puppet. This time my checkout clerk is a computer screen, and it only takes a second to punch the button to interrupt the disembodied female voice asking if I have a Fred Meyer Rewards Card. I feel a bit rude cutting her off: maybe she can join the AT&T kaffee klatch.

All around me are people shopping with cell phones attached to their ears; one woman is having an emotional discussion while she throws cake mix in her cart. A man stands in the snack aisle, paralyzed by what he is hearing. A grandmother gossips about a mutual friend while she leafs through a rack of designer blouses. They are both disengaged from the here and now; they have chosen to be alone in public, to not connect. I wonder to myself if they hang up when they go through the checkout, or if they treat the clerks with respect.

I stand alone, the only adult in Nordstrom Rack who obviously hasn’t had her – or his – hair done recently (in my case, it’s something over 30 years). My highlights, shimmering silvery grey, are natural. This time, my clerk is a real person, with a warm, personable smile. When she sees me pulling a debit card out of a thrift store wallet, she smiles, and asks the question in the negative: “You don’t have a Nordstrom card, do you?” I smile and shake my head, and she says, “I bet you don’t want one.” We both laugh. “No, thank you.” She has been allowed to treat me as a person, and I can treat her humanly as well. I appreciate her smile, and hope that I’m not the only one who gives her one today.

Far away from home

I saw him only once, as he furtively crossed the traffic circle. We both stopped what we were doing to get a clear look at each other. The neighbor’s son said he thought he saw him too, but didn’t believe his eyes. But last night, we all heard him: three clear, lonely howls, no full moon needed. We figure this natural predator has been forced into this awkward co-existence as his natural habitat falls to Planned Urban Developments. The notion that our incursion into this relatively undisturbed territory will have no effect on the animals that live there doesn’t figure into the balance sheet. The green belt behind our development, where the population of rabbits is running rampant as the bunnies breed like, well, rabbits, is obviously more attractive to him than bulldozers. He is slender and shy, our neighborhood coyote, and I fear for him if anyone in authority hears about him.

Last night, on my way home from supper out with a bunch of friends, Darling Husband towed our two sons into the library, and I ducked into the supermarket next door to pick up an ice cream fix. I settled on the marginally responsible choice of Ben & Jerry’s Dave Matthews Band Magic Brownie. On my way to the checkout, I picked up a small block of Tillamook jack cheese for quesadillas tomorrow evening, and, emboldened by finding something remotely edible in a mainstream market, stopped at the table of baked goods in the bakery department. They had a clamshell of miniature croissants – cocktail croissants, they call them – so I tucked them into the basket slung over my arm. Once home, as I unpacked, I glanced at the label: no real surprises there, other than disappointment that they had used hydrogenated margarine along with butter, but then I saw where they had come from. Arizona. Yup, that’s right, they had traveled more than a thousand miles to get here. My mind races: are they more French than we are here? Is there something about the desert that is more conducive to baking (I would have thought the opposite, handling pastry on a hot day can be miserable)? Do bakers prefer retiring to/living in arid climes? I can’t make sense of it, but I feel a bit like the child watching the naked emperor walk by, shouting, “croissants from Arizona don’t add up!”

And I admit sadness in feeling like the childlike voice in a sea of blind followers. I am profoundly disappointed that the majority of folks seem to think it completely normal when they find baked goods hundreds of miles from home, but who consider it not normal to find a wild animal living in its native habitat. I am thrilled to the core by the normalcy of nature asserting itself in our backyards. But I fear for the emperor’s subjects.

How many cows?

Seems it was only last spring there was a huge recall of ground beef. First it was 75,000 pounds; then 445,000. Then it hit 5.7 million pounds. I started wondering how many cows to took to produce (for it is production, not raising on this scale) this amount of shrink-wrapped meat. And then a much quieter headline this week: Topps meats has recalled 21.7 million pounds of ground beef.

The details are similar to all recalls: sold under different brands, packages up to one year old, save wrapper for a refund. But the scale is mind-boggling. It’s not the largest recall ever: that dubious honor goes to Pilgrim's Pride, who recalled more than 27 million pounds of poultry in 2002, and Hudson Foods, who recalled 25 million pounds of ground beef in 1997.

As a child of depression babies, I was taught that thrift was a virtue, that waste was a sin. So, it saddens me doubly to see not only the frozen patties being disposed of (where? will the toxin leach into our groundwater and wells along with the antibiotics and hormones?), as well as all the energy and effort that went into making them being wasted.

How many cows did it take? Well, the friendly folks at the Cattlemen's Beef Board and National Cattlemen's Beef Association tell me that a cow will yield 180-225 pounds of ground beef. Simple arithmetic tells me that it took between 96,444 and 120,555 head of cattle to produce the meat affected by the recall. That seems a drop in the bucket of the 100 million or so beef cattle in this country, but it’s still a small town’s population.

According to the USDA, a cow eats between 80-90 pounds of food each day. The cattlemen tell me that it’ll take me 18-22 months to reach maturity for slaughter. That means somewhere between 5,208,000,000 and 5,728,800,000 pounds of feed had to be produced and transported to feed those cattle. They also needed water, though there is a discrepancy of information out there. Predictably, information is politically colored: the cattlemen tell me that cow needs a mere 435 gallons per cow, for a total of only 9,439,500,000 gallons. Vegesource tells me that it’s more like 2,500 gallons a head, or 54,250,000,000 gallons. I imagine the truth lies somewhere in between, but neither number is terribly encouraging.

I have honestly no idea how much of the other “input” went into these factory animals: roughage to replace grass (oyster shells, sand, poultry feathers, and rough plastic pellets); vitamins to replace greens (vitamin A); growth hormones to reduce the time to market (Because estradiol, a form of human estrogen is a natural hormone, it can be fed to the cows and they can still be considered natural); estrus suppressants (Heifers grow faster if they don’t menstruate); antibiotics (for common feedlot conditions: peneumonia, pinkeye or shipping fever syndrome, bovine respiratory disease complex); and vaccines (7-way blackleg (including overeating) plus tetanus).

If you can shake that off, let’s move on to output. Jubilee Farm’s Farmer Erick tells me in one of his epistles that fifty pounds is the accepted figure for the amount of manure a cow produces in a day. Our fictional herd will produce between 6,249,600,000 and 9,548,000,000 pounds of manure over their life cycle. In addition to the sheer massive disposal problem that billions of pounds of manure creates, it also contains the excess hormones and anitbiotics shed by the animals. They will leech into the groundwater supply and recycle back to all of us, whether or not we need or want of hormone replacement therapy or antibiotic treatment.

There’s also the matter of greenhouse gases: using EPA numbers, I estimate that our herd will flatulate to the tune of 20,387,393 to 31,147,407 pounds of methane over their lifespan.

This really stinks, in more ways than one. After investing all this time, energy and water, this meat will need to be destroyed. I’ve been considering the cows that made up this recall as an immense single herd, but they only came together at processing, where one source of bacterial contamination was spread to all of them. This kind of waste makes it amply clear that large scale meat production is not as efficient—or safe—as we’re led to believe. I guess size really does matter.

Autumn wind

The autumn wind blows open the gate,
St. Michael, for you we wait.
We follow you, show us the way,
With joy we greet this autumn day!
Good morning! good morning!

Just as I was ready to tuck in my computer for the night, I heard it. Plink, plunk on the new shed roof. Yes, the rain is finally here. And tomorrow’s Michaelmas festival? No worry, for it is merely autumn rains, torrential, then clearing enough to let a few sunbeams sneak through before it starts again. We think rain boots are an important part of any school event, and the children will slay the dragon come rain or come shine.

A smile breaks out as I look out the kitchen window this morning: everything is washed clean, the valley on the neighbor’s roof is brimming with leaves from their big-leaf maple, and our garden has a light dusting of golden cedar needles. The cedar tree smiles back at me, waving its handfuls of needles turned color but not yet dropped. We know we will mulch the flower beds together, he and I. I am content with life, warm in my home, the beauty around me, and the love in my life.

We will eat as a community today, one of the few chances we have to break bread as one. First grade will supply the bread: baskets brimming with little rolls, big rolls, crusty and soft, homemade and store-bought, and one mom will surely bring her excellent gluten free ones. To me has fallen the task of making salad dressing, as I balked when asked to purchase some. A double batch of Number One’s first teacher’s dressing will be our contribution.

Place in a jar with a lid

1½ cups extra virgin olive oil
1 cup lemon juice

Add ½-1 tsp each of the following (to taste):

Chopped parsley
Crushed garlic
Chopped onion
Celery salt
Salt & pepper

Shake to blend and serve.

Bucking the trend

When Number One Son was a baby, I was blessed with a three-month subscription to a service that magically bought me soft, clean diapers and took away the icky ones. I was hooked. Not only wasn’t I adding more stuff to the landfill, my baby’s sensitive bottom (I can hear him rolling his eyeballs about now) was wrapped in something far better for it.

With Little One, I wanted to continue using cloth, but Darling Husband had a suggestion: let’s wash our own. Since he’s the Laundry Guy in our household, I could have the same easy life, and the person making the deliveries would be cute. I was sold.

I went online and bought $75 worth of organic cotton diapers and another $25 of covers and doodads. While I was there, I discovered legions of people devoted to cloth diapering, but in the end what appealed to me most wasn’t the nifty Velcro covers or the brownie points for being a good Earth denizen. It was the liberating realization that we would never run out of diapers again. No more calling the service before the truck left, upping the order to add ten more, no more forgetting to set out the bag on pickup day, no planning around vacations, and certainly never having to run to the store for more. Nope, diapers became like socks: need some, wash some.

The flimsy plastic bottle of water has become ubiquitous: on someone’s desk, a case in the back of the car (“for the kids”), in a catered buffet spread. One of the best selling brands of water is Aquafina. What most people don’t realize is that it is produced by PepsiCo, and is nothing more than filtered tap water. I would reckon that the vast majority of us have access to a faucet in our homes. It’s not a huge leap to remember a water bottle along with your wallet and cell phone. (If filtered water is important, filters for the fixture or a pitcher can provide the same product.) Imagine how good it feels, knowing you have a bottle of water in the car when you’re going through the deli checkout. Not only can you save yourself a dollar, you don’t have to worry about treacherous leaching plastic and bulging landfills.

For the same reasons, I adore my soymilk maker. It’s much easier to keep a stock of soybeans in a corner of the cupboard than it is to lug home case after case. I no longer have to decorticate containers to meet recycling requirements. I can use the milk I make for savory dishes or sweeten it for cocoa as I please (I sweetened it with Irish cream syrup the other evening…). The glass jug I use to store it in the fridge is washable and reusable. I never run out of soymilk. Could it be any better? In a perfect world, I would use local biodynamic soybeans, and would power the machine with solar panels on my roof instead of being beholden to PSE. I settle for organic beans from Eastern Washington, and keep waiting for the tipping point when solar technology catches up with my shady yard.

Remember the spinach scare last year? Because everyone, from mass-retail supermarkets to smaller stores like Trader Joe’s, was relying on the same large corporation to provide the bags of spinach, the whole thing fell apart. If you wanted spinach, you were simply out of luck. Unless of course, you grew your own or bought from a small, local producer—like we did. There were no limits on our enjoyment of spinach.

When you have an infant, diapers are a part of life. We all need water to survive. Food is a part of our everyday life, and how and what we eat has a huge influence on the quality of our life. When we took back the diapers from Kimberly-Clark and Procter & Gamble, they became a piece of clothing that we owned, and ceased being a revenue stream for a large corporation. When I put a purple Nalgene water bottle in my car, I cut off Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. When we grow or make our own food or source it locally, we are rejecting the over-packaged, mass-produced commodity designed to last forever and generate profits for truly glutinous corporations. Food can be true to itself, and feed us. The irony is that all these options wind up being cheaper. It seems there is no money in marketing to independent folks. So go ahead. Own your food. Be free.

The kitchen sink

With a kid home sick from school right on the tail end of a trip, creativity in leftovers was called for. Luckily, there were still a few items in the garden, so not all was from the freezer or a can. I rounded up all the odd homegrown potatoes (I counted at least four different types), cut them up, seasoned and roasted them. The freezer had a package of Hempler’s bratwurst, which are so tasty that the boys (all three of them) fight over the fifth one. (The packages have, over the years, had six, four, and now five sausages in them.) I resorted to frozen peas for a token green item.

***

Right on the heels of our fast food binge (though Burgerville’s fast food is slower and better for you than the market leaders), I read Mark Morford on Wendy’s new Baconator burger, which is garnished with six strips of bacon and boasts 51 grams of fat. That’s 830 calories before we add the fries, and we can’t forget the fries and the Coke. Call it 1300 even. For the record, I gain weight at anything more than 1200 calories a day.

I imagine someone who orders this must be ravenously hungry. A niggling voice reminds me of a piece I read a few days back about how food is less nutritious in terms of micronutrients and phytochemicals. I can’t help but think there has to be some correlation between our “appetite” for the extreme things the fast food industry is pushing, and the logical extrapolation that we have to eat more to get the same amount of the nutrients we did twenty years ago.

I think that hungry person is also looking for something other than food, but they're not sure what. Marketing preys on our insecurities: if nature is telling you that nutrients are lacking and culture tells you that you are lacking, you will be on the lookout for something, which meshes nicely with the obvious sophistication of the marketing machine. When you’re hungry, you don’t think clearly. Which is a recipe for disaster.

***

Air fresheners have hit the fan: an environmental group is suing to have air fresheners regulated because the chemicals they contain are clearly implicated in air quality and respiratory and reproductive health issues. The response is predictable: faced with irrefutable evidence, one company has pulled and quarantined their products. The folks who open a window after using the bathroom are feeling vindicated, while others sputter that they need their plug-in scents to keep their houses and stores smelling fresh and clean. I can safely predict new product lines cashing in on natural scented oils, potpourri and baking soda. They’ll still contain noxious chemicals of course, just ones that aren’t on anybody’s bad list. And it’s unlikely that the government will defy lobbyists and require disclosing the ingredients. Plus ça change…

***

All this talk gets many people upset, worried that the government is becoming a nanny state. Part of me agrees, reasoning that we should just let people kill themselves with smoking, eating poorly, or inhaling toxins. But I also understand that harming one member of our society harms us all. I watched my father kill himself with his pipe; I now see my brother repeating the pattern, this time with food from the supermarket. Diagnosed with arterial disease, his doctor does not prescribe a diet void of hydrogenated fats and rich in omega-3 fatty acids, but gets out his pad and writes a scrip for Prilosec and blood thinners and tells him to avoid leafy greens. The corporations that manufacture foodstuffs continue to profit, as do the drug companies who have no interest in seeing people adopt healthy habits. It all boils down to money – big money – and that makes my blood boil. The money to be made in buying unprocessed local food simply can’t satisfy the greed of the huge corporations.

***

Which brings me back to my bare cupboards. I’m left with a bunch of fruit well past its prime in the bowl, a mess of leftover rice in the fridge and a lonely packet of Umpqua Valley ground lamb in the freezer. All the fruit goes into a pot with plenty of sugar, making jam that I have dubbed “kitchen sink” for its mishmash of ingredients (blackberries, plums, blueberries, one peach, half a pear and a lemon). The lamb had me scratching my head: the garden had two smallish but ripe tomatoes, but I didn’t want to sacrifice them to roast with the lamb, and besides that really wants feta, of which I have none. Tomatoes in hand, I walk past the grape arbor. Of course! I pick a few dozen leaves, mix up half the lamb with some leftover rice, and roll up some dolmas. The rest of the lamb got the garlic and dill treatment and roasted. The tomatoes got eaten, just like that. And the whole house smells of lovely, sweet garlic.

Homecoming

A sniffly Little One is curled up in my bed, fast asleep in the warm nest made by us getting up this morning. It was a full weekend, as I attended a choir reunion at my Alma Mater, and the boys made their way south to attend the culmination of two days’ intense rehearsal, an alumni choir concert. We arrived home late last night, after far too many hours on the road (think dark, rain, freeway), and all promptly fell into bed. Little One awoke with a cold.

Other than that, there were a few meals of note over the weekend: The Ram’s Head Pub in Northwest Portland, where I feted my re-found freedom (however brief) with a half-pint of cider and a hamburger and salad—said burger being made of Oregon Country Beef, the same stuff that makes its way onto our table regularly. In Salem, I opted for take-out Chinese from Kwan’s one evening: curled up in a motel room with parchment chicken, snow peas and cable TV harked right back to my college days, though a pan of half-baked brownies would have really completed the moment. I grazed on a few University-supplied meals, there were a few salads along the way, and a couple cups of tea soothed my rusty throat.

On the way home, we stopped at Burgerville. Understand that my poor, deprived children have never been to the golden arches (quick, call Child Protection Services!). Part of it is the principle: they occupy a medieval structure in our graduate University town of Freiburg, Germany, and had the audacity to prominently affix their name on the centuries-old plaster. Not to mention the doubtful quality of what they sell and the co-branding marketing strategy, often aimed at children. But dear old local Burgerville, unhip to us when we lived there, gets huge points for making their burgers from Oregon Country Beef (and slapping on a thick slice of Tillamook cheddar) and fries from Northwest potatoes, along with their commitment to using wind power and recycling their oil into biodiesel.

I can make only two admittedly picky suggestions: one, that they learn to make milkshakes as good as those at Dude’s. And if they could just convince their marketing folks to use a dictionary, we’d be set.