The air is hushed between going and coming.
It’s still.

A chill 

trips down my spine and hangs
on the air.

It’s heaviness 
drips
off my fingers,
off
 my blue suede moccasins
into a puddle under the desk
where I would be working
if it weren’t for

the big space
between
one thing and another.

Fill the room 
with belly laughs to keep from sighing.

My virtue is not patience, 
but what is good just
won’t be rushed.

Roomie Chris just got home. I went up to throw a load of delicates into the washer and heard a bunch of shouting from the front of the house:

“GET DOWN, GET DOWN, GET DOWN!”

Twas a policeman, gun drawn, arresting a shirtless man with long dreads. Chris was watching out the peephole and saw another man run away down the street.

I was chatting with a friend this weekend about where she’s going to move when she starts a new job in a few months. “You should move to my neighborhood!” I said. “But don’t you feel unsafe at night?” she asked, eyebrows raised.

Honestly, not really. But maybe I have a false sense of security.

The only time I’ve felt personally threatened was once when I was riding on the sidewalk because the line of cars was pressed up against the curb so close that there was no where to go and a man lunged toward me apparently trying to knock me off. There was the horrible time that our friend Mike got jumped on the end of the block and then there are stories from Tim about gun shots in the back alley.

Apparently, the corner a block away is some kind of special intersection for a local gang and you don’t really want to hang ’round there. Then this weekend, we found out from Bates St. historian and clean-up orchestrator, Ms. Regans, that tagging on the garage doors of vacant lots ends up becoming a sign that advertises, “deal drugs here.”

It’s fascinating to try to understand what a difference it can make to clean a street, paint over graffiti, have people outside.

I love my neighborhood. It’s one of the very best parts about living in DC and I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else (even Mt. Pleasant, which seems like a sylvan paradise, and also is the place — I’ve been informed — where all the “cool foodies” hang out…)

Around here, people are relaxed. They smile and look at me and say hello. They hang out on the street in the evenings and talk. There are lots of families. Sometimes I jump double-dutch with two little girls a few doors down (not very successfully) and their amazingly beautiful mother. The kids from the nearby KIPP academy stare at me when I ride back from work, and they wave back when I wave even though I’m 100% sure they think my helmet is totally uncool.

When I first arrived, I felt uncomfortable. I stood out. The way I looked and the way I dressed. I felt exposed. Now, I feel like my neighbors have my back.

A few weekends ago, I took a posse down to Florida market including coworkers from NSAC, visiting intern Kara from the Michael Fields Ag Institute (holla!), and friend Sara. We explored and laughed and made friends with taxidermed ruminants and then some folks followed me back home to cook up some traditional Cambodian fare.

We made Ban Chao (savory turmeric crepes) and papaya salad (recipe below) and vegetarian fresh rolls (aka goi cuon) with the quick kind of peanut sauce.

What a lovely way to spend an afternoon.

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This is the first of a few posts I’m planning on Florida market (aka Union, aka Capitol City). The whole area is slated for redevelopment — a plan that’s been evolving for the past 3+ years and is surrounded by controversy. It’s a totally fascinating story and something I wish a real journalist would take up. Sara R?!

I am obsessed with Florida market. Anyone I meet these days ends up with an earful about my favorite place in the whole district. I love markets. I really really do. Especially the ones that are a little gritty, that remind one that food isn’t meant to be intimidating or inaccessible, or elitist, but something elemental, raw, real, that we all share.

The Union Market buildings were built in the first phase of market construction from 1929 to 1931 and designed by architect E.L. Bullock Jr. in a reduced “Classical Revival” style.

Florida market is gritty. So much so in fact, that people who have visited sometimes crinkle their noses when I mention it. “You buy things there?” they ask. “But those dumpsters with rotting produce! The trucks! The exhaust! The derelicts! The peeling paint and vacant buildings and signs in foreign languages. The noise, the heat and the smell, and the butchers in that warehouse with all that MEAT.”

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I eat it up. This is the place that feeds DC. The wholesalers in the market distribute to restaurants and retail grocers throughout the district. No one who eats out or shops outside of farmers’ markets can pretend like they don’t eat from here. And when you come here in person, you can find all sorts of treasures you can’t find at Safeway, at Eastern, or even at the wonderful Freshfarm markets.

Also known as Capitol City market or Union Market, this is the place where the “other half” of DC shops. Mostly African and Latino families, with some Southeast Asian representation and occasional neighborhood hipster looking for a deal on tahini.

On Saturdays, most of the shops are open for retail sales, including Sam Wang produce, where besides the staples, you can find banana flowers, shiso leaf, nopales, chayote, lotus root, thai parsley, mini thai eggplant, masa, frozen banana leaves, tamarind pods, plantain, and every starchy root your heart desireth.

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Most families fill up two or three cardboard boxes with produce. Receipts I’ve average $60-100. Many folks ask the cashier to let them know when they hit a limit — “All I’ve got is $67 today, so let me know when we get there.” — some get to the end of the weighing and decide to put back the pumelo or melon because it puts them just over.

Sam Wang’s just one of the many shops. Down the way is a tofu production facility where you can get a tub of three super-fresh tofu blocks for $3. My roommate who once ran the kitchen at a vegetarian restaurant in town used to bike here every morning to buy in bulk.

You can also get a huge bag of fresh sprouts for $3 that’s bigger than a baby, but I don’t recommend it unless you plan to make pho for an army.

So far, I’ve brought about a dozen friends to the market with me on mini trips and all of them have found something to love:

Besides the produce, there’s a wonderful Halal market with basil seed juice (?!), samosas, frozen ready-made paratha, ginger tea, and lots of spices. Apparently you can also get goats, but I haven’t had time to set up a spit, so I haven’t indulged yet.

Then there’s the flea market where you can find everything from rusty industrial muffin tins to dancing panda radios, and also some useful things like an adapter for your beat-up no-frills cell-phone or sea foam stilettos to add a splash to your otherwise staid pantsuit.

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There’s a great market directory here of the businesses that sell direct to consumers. See you there Saturdays.

Three weeks or so ago, I sent in my Letter of Intent to register at UC Davis in the fall.

In two months and a bit, I’ll be back in California starting a research position; by the end of September, I expect to be deep into classes, papers, and starting on some of the projects I’ve been dreaming up.

It was hard to decide to go back to school and it was hard to decide to go to Davis, but now that I’ve finally settled on a plan, it feels darn good.

Now that I’ve painted the broad strokes of the next couple of years, it’s becoming more and more exciting to layer in the details. So many of the experiences I’ve had over the last three months are connecting back to the work that I’ll be doing in Davis; people that I continue to meet, places I visit, reports I read — they’re all giving me inspiration for what I can do with two years of financial support, university resources, and lots of excitement and energy.

I’ll be in a program called Community and Regional Development, focusing on community economic development through food systems; looking at the ways that community-based agri-food businesses can create jobs, empower people, improve the physical environment, improve people’s health, and promote cultural change that, among other things, may lead to more cooperation, more compassion, more participation, and ultimately, a more satisfied, happy society.

When you start to get immersed in the food systems milieu, the same concepts come up again and again. The same examples  too. Hardwick, Vermont is one of those examples: a town that supposedly epitomizes what’s possible when business savvy meets food, meets community; throw in a whole lot of elbow grease and voila! an economic and cultural miracle. Down-and-out old quarry town town transformed into a agri-food mecca.

So when a friend recommended Hewitt’s book, The Town that Food Saved, of course I had to read it to see what all the fuss was about. More and more people have a hunch that there’s something magical about community and local and regional “systems,” or at least as opposed to the centralized, industrialized system that we’ve created over the past 100 or so years and this book starts to articulate and demystify some of this magic, not through theory or metrics, but through a story.

The beginning and end of the book are slightly worn, the same concepts you’ll find recycled in your typical industrial-ag critiques and I took issue with some specific points of the discussion that didn’t seem entirely accurate, but the book was completely redeemed by the conversational exposition of the people at the heart of this town.

In the end, the story fired me up, made me feel excited to act, to get out there and buy a a mobile food truck and hire a few students and get produce from local farms and serve people food. By the end, all I wanted to do was be one of the “Toms” (the one who is slightly less obsessed with himself, perhaps) who are the drivers of this story. I was jumping out of my skin, crawling with anticipation, with ideas.

Now, a few weeks later, the flutters have died down a bit in my gut and I’ve started to think more deeply about what I need to DO and I’m feeling a deep sense of satisfaction and purpose.

Hooray for inspiration.

Mmm…. sassafras from Eastern Market in Detroit.

I’m going to try to make rootbeer this weekend when my sis comes to visit. Just need a 2-liter bottle and some sugar. Yum yum.

Every weekend I spend in DC, I fall in love a little bit more. It’s a small town full of brilliant, motivated, passionate people who all seem to be connected to one another in a complicated, but pretty tiny social network. It’s a transitional town where people come and go and folks seem open to experience. Plus, it’s below the Mason-Dixon line, which (I’ve been told) means that folks are just naturally more friendly.

Sure, there are those who might be a little too into the ‘game’ — collecting connections like baseball cards (or Magic cards for the fantasy inclined), racking up favors, perfecting tactics, but I’ve been fortunate to mostly a crowd of interesting and genuine people.

To those who bemoan the black and grey suits, the wonkiness, the who-do-you-work-for-who-do-you-knowiness of the district, I say: come to Bates House to hang out and your soul will be revived. Next party’s Saturday April 17th — hope you can make it.

One weekend in February, we threw a little brunch party. Around 25 friends and neighbors came to snack on cinnamon rolls and frittata and drink delicious coffee. The first guest arrived a little before 11, and the last one headed out the door around 6. Seven hours of community and conversation: not bad for a lazy Sunday.

The drink station set-up. Strong coffee, Bailey’s, tea and mango puree. Yum.

Marcie making French toast and Chris on BACON, BACON, BACON.

Happy Chris and the first guests, partaking of food (plus the back wheel of my bicycle making a cameo appearance in the left corner)

Greg, the ex-architect and documentary film maker chatting with neighbor Lara, public health advocate and server at a legendary local bar.

Friends in the happy food corner, where most of Bates eating action happens.

Bates love.

The die-hards, sticking it out till the end. Can you spot the two ethnomusicologists in this picture? The activist who works directly with victims of human trafficking? DC, you are ridiculous.

I love airports and airplanes. I love the feeling of being between places, in transition. And I love the anonymity — it’s the best of places for watching people, and also for meeting folks you might not otherwise meet on the street.

Yesterday, when I squeezed into Seat 14F (a window seat), it just so happened that the man already occupying the middle seat was a farmer. I noticed this, not because of any hint from his dress or demeanor, but because when he kindly got up to let me in,  I noticed his bag — a freebie from some sort of national ag association.

So I asked him about it and he told me that he was a farmer who grew sugar. “Beets?” I asked, and his face lit up. “You must know farming then?” he said. “Well, kinda,” I shrugged, and told him where I worked, and about my brief farming experience.

We talked the rest of the flight — about his clever daughters and about how my parents met and about the time he took his son to the Rose Bowl. I found out that in addition to farming part-time with his son, my new friend was a crop insurance agent and a representative of the Michigan Bean Commission. He traveled around the world to trade shows and meetings marketing Michigan dry beans: azukis, great northern, black beans, to name a few. He had been recently to Cancun and Barcelona and was soon off to Paris.

Apparently, Saginaw is the capitol of dry beans and sugar beets in Michigan. Sugar beets, in case you didn’t know, make sugar — the regular white grainy kind you pour into your coffee or sprinkle on your cereal (do people still do that?). Saginaw Valley, where lots of these beets are grown, lies between the thumb and forefinger of the Michigan glove, about two hours by car from the metro Detroit airport. My friend explained that people grew sugar beets there because the processing plants were nearby in the thumb. This awesome article from MSU tells more about the history of sugar beet production and processing in the state.

Beyond beets, I also learned a little bit about crop insurance. My friend had been in DC to chat with folks at the USDA and on the Hill about the crop insurance business and the proposed cuts to crop insurance in Obama’s 2011 budget. It was fascinating to hear his perspective — “Why should the government penalize me for making a profit?” — and compare it to the perspective I share with the Obama administration and the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition where I work:

From Obama’s 2011 budget proposal: “Crop-insurance companies currently benefit from huge windfall profits due to the structure and terms of the Government’s contract with the companies.” The Wall Street Journal reports that “a USDA study showed that a reasonable rate of return on equity for private crop-insurance companies is 12.8%, but the average now is 16.8%. USDA data show government payments to crop insurers have more than doubled in recent years, jumping from $1.8 billion in 2006 to $3.8 billion in 2009 while the total number of policies held by farmers has declined.”

Add to this the fact that my friend explained that until recently, when a former employee set up shop and became competition, he was the only insurer in his local area. I felt less sympathetic then to his side of the story, but it made me remember once again that in the end, farmers are businessmen and to him, these cuts might mean that he won’t be able to pay for his adventurous daughter to study abroad in Paris or to help his son buy land to start his own farm. And there’s the rub of government — how do you distribute resources equitably? How do you re-distribute when something’s not working — it seems much easier to give than to take something away.

Disclaimer: I am not an expert on life cycle assessment or energy use in food production (yet!); this is just a way to dip my toe into obviously complicated issues that I find fascinating… Also all this discussion really is a really really long lead-in to talk about the School of Natural Resources and the Environment at University of Michigan, where I’ve been accepted! Hooray!

Numbers can lie, but sometimes they can be gosh-darn illuminating.

Here’s some data that hammers home the extent to which our food system here in the US has morphed into something that just plain doesn’t make sense.

It seems that we consume about 10.3 Quads of energy per year to produce, process, package, transport, sell, store and prepare our food. For all that, what do we get? 1.4 Quads of actual food energy.

Graphic from the University of Michigan that I also used in a presentation that I gave at the Fullerton Public Library back in October.

Interestingly, this 10.3 Quads used to produce our food is about 10% of the total energy consumed annually in the US. But what, you may ask, is a Quad? According to the illustrious Wikipedia, it’s:

• 8,007,000,000 Gallons (US) of gasoline or…  about 530 million 15-gallon fill-ups at the station?
• 293,071,000,000 Kilowatt-hours (kWh) or… powering 1 million 100 watt lightbulbs for 334 years

Yeah, I know that still doesn’t help much, sorry. I tried.

But really, the sheer amount is irrelevant. It’s the ratio that matters. This means that for every SEVEN units of fossil energy we’re putting in, we’re getting out only ONE unit of food energy. Huh?!

I’ve heard stats that “in the past” (e.g. pre-industrialized ag) one unit of fossil fuel energy would produce TWO units of food. Nothing at my fingertips to corroborate that, but it makes some sense if we can agree that food was grown with fewer industrial inputs (requiring fossil fuels), traveled shorter distances, was less processed, and used less packaging.

Some quick searching confirmed my expectation that organic production seems to require much less energy for many farm products than its conventional counterpart. This 22-year study by the Rodale Institute and partners showed that organic farming of corn and soybeans used an average of 30% less fossil energy, even when yield was accounted for (in fact, yield over the period of the experiment was the same for organic and conventional because soil fertility declined on the conventional plots).

But as we can see from the chart above, production is only about 20% of the story. After we’ve grown the food, we’ve still got to send it somewhere and wash it and pack it and maybe grind it up into something totally different and send it somewhere else and then cook it. It makes sense that organic production would use fewer fossil fuels when you consider that it restricts the use of pesticides and fertilizers, but in some cases, I’d imagine that when you look at the full product, some organic foods have a higher total energy cost than their conventionally available counterparts because they are transported further distances and in smaller (less efficient) batches.

This study by the UK’s Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food has a fascinating breakdown of energy use for organic versus conventional products per unit of output. The chart also breaks down the energy costs into categories: distribution, collection transport, fertilizers, etc. When all is taken into account, the organic crops they studied still used less energy for the most part, except for carrots.

However, the full report shows that the model they used assumes that produce is imported only as far away as Southern Europe and does not account for the large amount of imported organic produce from even further afield.

Isn’t the devil always in the details?

Anyway, it’s complex. It makes me wonder if we’ll ever get to the point where right under the nutrition facts, our labels will include a little line for joules of energy and kg of GhGs. Pepsico has really already gotten this started by labeling its Tropicana juices with the carbon footprint.

But seriously, will some text that tells me this orange juice costs 1.7 kg of carbon really ever mean anything to me? We talk about consumer literacy, but this is a case in which I tend to think that change needs to come at the system level, not at the level of individual consumers. It’s just too much to ask of a person to weigh all those choices: nutrition, price, environment, social… for every product, every time you’re purchasing food.

Fascinating stuff, and all things I could pursue if I decide to go the University of Michigan for their MS program in Sustainable Systems at the School of Natural Resources and the Environment. That graph up top came out of a study by Dr. Greg Keoleian who teaches in the program and is a guru of life cycle assessment, not only based on environmental indicators, but also incorporating social indicators for a variety of products. Plus, I could apply in my first year for the joint-MBA program in the Erb Institute to learn about how to bring these metrics into the business of food.

Pretty different from Community Development at Davis: more technical, more science-y, perhaps more of a birds’ eye view of sustainability (though there are also folks in the school who focus on Behavior, Education and Communication so I could bridge the two).

I like that I would learn tangible skills (life cycle assessment) in the U-Mich program but on the other hand, I know that I want to be a practitioner at the community level — in a small company or nonprofit — and not a researcher or a sustainability manager at Pepsico (at least I think) so it’s hard to say.

Other things influencing my thinking:

• plus: U-Mich has already committed to giving me some financial assistance,
• plus: I’ve never lived in the middle of the country and there’s so much interesting stuff going on in Michigan food-wise (especially Detroit!),
• huge, potentially deal-breaking MINUS: Boyfriend Jaime did not get in there.

My boyfriend Jaime sent this to me. He is on his way to becoming a fancy scientist who studies the impacts of salmon farms on wild salmon populations. He is incredibly supportive and, if you can’t tell, he has a sense of humor.

from Toothpaste for Dinner