Yesterday, I baked J some cookies as various thanks for letting me join the team. He tries one and asks what's in them, so I respond, cinnamon and nutmeg (in addition to the usual chocolate chips, butter, sugar, etc). I told him too that a friend of mine from before thought they had pumpkin in them because of the spices. The next day, half the people think they're pumpkin cookies, and the other half think there's ginger in them! It's like I'm playing with their minds.
A really great ride up to Metropolis today. The weather was looking crumby, and we had an awful headwind on the way back, but it was just being able to do something I enjoy with people I like to talk to. The sesame bagel with honey and butter tasted especially good for some reason with my customary Earl Grey tea w/milk. Susan and I were talking, and she mentioned many of the other people she studied with at Univ of Chicago couldn't comprehend how she had time to ride bikes so frequently, and we agreed that it was just a different outlook on life. You could either stress out 24/7 about finishing what you're constantly working on, or you could step away for a bit, live a little, and then probably be able to work better/faster/finish your school work and be happier for it. I, for one, know that I'm getting more done because I'm part of the team right now. It gets me out of bed early, gives me a great start to the day, and structures it just enough that I don't allow myself to get lackadaisical. Also, I think just being able to associate with such motivated people as the U of C students really helps.
Tiffany sent me a postcard from Japan today! She and Max are over at the Tokyo Institute of Technology on scholarship right now, which is amazing. It sounds like they're having an awesome time.
The rest of my day: GRE prep, Rhino 4.0, and reading this article from the New York Times Magazine. It describes how the current agrarian sector of America is all petrol based, diminishing and unsustainable. At one point it describes that it was more economically efficient to specialize in one sector of agriculture, such as grains or animals: "But if taking the animals off farms made a certain kind of economic sense, it made no ecological sense whatever: their waste, formerly regarded as a precious source of fertility on the farm, became a pollutant — factory farms are now one of America’s biggest sources of pollution. As Wendell Berry has tartly observed, to take animals off farms and put them on feedlots is to take an elegant solution — animals replenishing the fertility that crops deplete — and neatly divide it into two problems: a fertility problem on the farm and a pollution problem on the feedlot. The former problem is remedied with fossil-fuel fertilizer; the latter is remedied not at all."
On Bike and Build, we rode through many tiny agriculturally based towns that looked tired and malnutritioned, so this article really struck home. To this point, I had made symbolic gestures toward organic foods, but hadn't really thought about the overall embodied energy of creating food, so I'm going to try to be more conscious about that now.
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I agree that our current mass agriculture is not sustainable, but I want to point out that neither is mass-produced organic food. The models of agriculture are the same; monoculture, with addition of exogenous nutrients, be they "organic" or petrol-based. Locally-produced foodstuffs are a much better choice than Cascadian Farms, Goodness Greeness, and the like. I would much rather buy my food from a farmer who has to use the occasional pesticide but who lives less than 100 miles from me and who utilizes sustainable practices such as intelligent crop rotation, co-culture of crops, and fertilization by animals on the farm. Not that I can afford all my food to be so perfect, but I try. Just say YES to farmers markets, and NO to grocery stores!
Oh yea, actually the big thing the article did say was that there's a big boom in farmer's markets, so the government doesn't even need to really do much other then try to help them along. I prefer that too, I'm thinking I should start looking up local ones around Chicago.
It's funny, we even passed through the Cascade Farms, and yea, they're in Washington State which is pretty freakin far away from here (esp by bike...)
try the green city market in lincoln square on saturday (and maybe wednesday?) mornings. thats where i used to go.
I'll look into it. Thanks!
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