Return to Blog

After a book writing hiatus, I am back a little, just a little. Not that there was a huge groundswell of demand for me to return to this, but well, it's here when you find it.

In August I managed to finish a book, have interviews for two good academic jobs, return to Pittsburgh without major trauma, and well, isn't that enough?

I'll be posting soon on that new job (I got one of them) and other items, but here's a nice photo of the world's biggest gluten-free sign at Soergel's Orchard in Wexford, PA. They've opened a big natural foods and gluten-free section that's as grand as the sign.

Massachusetts State of Mind

Well, we are here in western Massachusetts for the month of July. I am sitting in a Panera, the least local or interesting place where there's wifi and coffee, but it is close to the movie theater where certain minors are watching a movie on the most glorious sunny day imaginable. This is not the Allison Park Panera, where it's very folksy and familiar (as familiar as an overpriced chain can get) but also very homogeneous. I have managed to find things I like and people I who share lives and interests. There's a kind of adjustment that seems inevitable, but takes work.

Here's there's a set of grandparents, three kids, and a mom with a t-shirt that says "You know what's SO gay? My family..." So, yeah, you would not get that in western Pennsylvania suburbia (maybe in the city; just maybe).

Getting here has been like a bumpy landing while traveling on a propeller plane: it's scary before you're sure it's going to work out. The landscape is the same, though: it's beautiful, it's a bit too precious in its funkiness, it's familiar, and it's clearly not where I live any more. The house we still own is falling into some serious disrepair -- from simple things like broken light fixtures to less simple things like a deck that is completely rotted and sliding glass doors that barely work -- and it makes it hard to live there, especially when I go up into the attic to retrieve items for us to use as furniture while we're there and I see all the things I just left there, unwilling to deal with them when we moved, still unable to deal with them when I come back. Someone reminded me that lots of people have attics full of crap they don't want to face, roofs that need to be re-shingled, and a lack of time to fix even simple things. Coming from the pristine and intensely shiny suburbs, in the glare from their perfect lawns and clean porches, I have forgotten that this is true.

We are imperfect and it is okay.

Weeding Garlic

Yesterday I spent some time out at Meadow Rock Farm weeding garlic.  Susan, who lost her husband only a short while ago, is hard at work keeping the CSA running on her own.  Her aunt and uncle and their honey-colored bassett hound were there hooking up some truck-based watering systems, washing out bins, and just generally helping out.  I did not get to stay for hot meatloaf sandwiches, which is sad since it sounded better than sitting in the bleachers watching a soccer game with a lot of suburban live-through-your-kids types.   I'll be going back soon -- I have more garlic to untangle.

My weeding skills are a little rusty -- especially when you're facing a plot that's had some heavy growth.  Thistle and dandelions, I was prepared for.  But wild geranium plants with carrot-like root structures were driving me crazy, especially since they like to grow right up against the garlic root bulbs.    I wish I could run back up there today and do the other two thirds of the plot.   But I'm supposed to be writing the book and indeed, my writing skills -- at least this kind -- are as rusty as my weeding.    Needless to say, here I am writing something that takes a lot less hovering and fussing.  I just wanted to get this out on paper to prove that I could and to possibly see if this voice could travel back over to the other page.  In the book manuscript, started to write a sentence that said "people crossed over a threshold into our lives" and I thought, is that sociological? academic? too bloggy?  My blog and other writing reads a lot more "academic-y" than it should anyway.    Point is, I want to just take this voice, the good weeding skills that came back after an hour, and bring it off the posting and onto a piece of paper. 

Wish me luck.

Sustaining Local Brilliance

(image: gil and lisa listen intently; craig harris and abby on the right -- literally, not intellectually!)

Every year for the last eleven years, I've gone to a conference sponsored by the Association for the Study of Food and Society and the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society.   Those names are a mouthful, but the issues discussed by academics and activists are practical, significant, and easy to digest if you care about the way we lead our everyday lives.    We discuss sustainable projects ranging from growing methods to labor to consumption, the historical and contemporary conditions that produce cuisines through the mixing of cultures and ingredients, the unequal distribution of goods, services, technology, and information that shapes what we grow and how we eat.    Well, the list goes on.

I have just returned from this year's conference, which was in State College, PA, a town I've been visiting regularly since 1981 (in-law family).  Not as exciting as last year in New Orleans, you'd think, but there was beauty to be found, especially in the tours the day before the paper sessions began.  I went on the Dairy Diversity tour, starting at Meyer's Dairy, a local milk and ice cream stand that we stop at all the time.  The ice cream is good, the milk is incredible, and it was cool getting to go behind the scenes, walk through the bottling section and then into the walk-in freezer where you could stare out over the products on the shelf and into the store itself.     

Then we went on to Triangle Organics, Elmer King's small Amish farm producing raw milk, ghee, and butter.    A beautiful place where these lovely ladies live.

(triangle organic cows)

On to the Elk Creek Cafe  in Millheim, with sustainable community, good beer, and local food in abundance (and more ice cream, the best of the day, I thought).   More farms with, as one of my van-mates kept exclaiming annoyingly, "amazing camembert,"  made by an unassuming dairy farmer("it's just cheese," he said) who, when describing the process behind a smoked cheese, simply asserted, "when in doubt, smoke it."   

We all want shirts with that across the front.

All weekend there was lots of evidence that the foodie label attaches to agriculture-types, agricultural concerns shape foodie interests -- it's a mixed up, shook up world.    Finally, the tour took us to the Industrial Strength Penn State  Berkey Creamery, where a dude in a suit described cows as "commodities who really are happy in their stalls" and stood beside the multi-million dollar equipment designed to train budding food scientists headed to Ben and Jerry's, Breyer's, and beyond.  My favorite part was meeting Rufus, who is 4 and clearly a budding food scholar, and my best photos are of him, but I'm not sharing without parental permission.

Back in the insularity of the Penn Stater hotel and conference center, there were too many papers to describe, although as always, I was drawn to a ton of sustainability panels that I simply couldn't attend, heard some great papers on food and culture, and was profoundly impressed by the array of grad student work intermingled on all the panels.  Finally, I think, we are taking race and class and gender seriously.  The DeVault panels were solid all the way around.  What's still in my head: Kerstin's happy take on German food blogs, Psyche's cut-to-the-bone analysis of the ways in which her husband's Ghanian sisters integrate their feeding work into her mixed-food-culture marriage, Liora's sensitive eye trained on the market in Tel Aviv,  Kelsey's images of older African American women from Gee's Bend, talking about the changes in food over their lifetime, and Emily Bailey's contemplative stories about food in a convent where the average age is 69.

I loved talking over breakfast with the "older" scholars (I can say that, as Gil stands poised for early retirement, but he's not old in any other sense) whose calm assessments reassure me that scholarship keeps going despite recessions, intellectual fads, sexist department chairs who screw up your work environment, and worn idealism.  I love knowing that Alex will wear his Spam t shirt some time during the weekend.

I watched Annie, with that deep hawk gaze, working hard with a group of presenters right before their panel, coordinating their talks. I thrilled when Jan P. told Syd that her paper provided her with excellent pedagogical evidence for the marriage penalty.  I laughed til it hurt with Netta every time we went up the elevator and turned to the ENDLESS hallway down to our room (I'll try to post Kristina's image of it), enhanced by the optically challenging carpet design.

(image: endless penn stater hallway courtesy of kristina nies)

 I am always thrilled to escape with Danny so that we can cover everything we need to (from kids to Chicago to teaching to community activism and beyond), walking, knowing he'll get us where we need to go (although this time I still have blisters...and his souveneir map).    Talking with Jessica, Beth, and Syd over the din of the crazy Austrian bistro, Herwig's (finish your plate -- that's my only warning), meeting Martha, who  (yes, academic rock star worship) personally KNOWS Dorothy Smith well enough to have her just read over her PAPER.    Thanks for letting me crash on the memory foam bed in your hotel room, Martha.

I've forgotten the endless meetings already, but I felt like the Tazmanian devil, jumping up and down to make sure we got something done, wanting it to end before it started (the only time I felt that way all week), and sighing at how much there still is to do in order to keep this thing, this precious moment, and group that I love, going.   

I posted this, added Kristina's photo, and now have to stop myself from deleting that last sentence. It's so raw -- I wrote it almost immediately upon coming home -- certainly not normative to have strong feelings about a marginal 300-person organization (that's not a cult) that could certainly survive if i were not in the forest to hear the trees falling.  I'm leaving the sentence in.

Digging In

(maybe some photos soon...i used real film in a 35mm camera.  slows things down a bit...)

I bought some perennials on Monday.  Things with silver foliage. Straw-like flowers. A scented geranium.  Something with purple leaves.  Variegated sage. A lupine -- because two tiny ones came back on their own and they're too fragile to accomplish much bloom this year.  Cut them some slack -- give them a big sibling to do the work for this July and then next year they'll be big and this one will be setting up shop more permanently.  

Last year I pulled out a corner of the endless pachysandra that wraps around our house and started planting a few things: a little mint and oregano and the lupine.  They got all gangly by fall but they came back this year with more heft.  Just today, I planted the whole corner full of what I bought.  

I think it's because Zack rototilled a big area in the yard, serious about getting a vegetable garden in.  It messes with the pristine yard effect, which I like.  I raked about a third of it, put in beans, pumpkins, lettuce, and cilantro.    Then I gave up for a while (although I have some things started indoors -- but those always disappoint.  Start out strong, miss a day of watering and they turn into sad, dead, floppy things.  Maybe this year they won't...).   

But then he went and bought fencing material this week and in between bouts with allergies ("Is this allergies? Do you think that's why I'm tired?"  "Yes, now just take something already.") is putting in the metal fence posts.  Nothing fancy -- wire and those ordinary metal green posts, a temporary gate -- but the beans are already popping up and the deer here come in ravenous hordes, so we'd better get it protected before too long.      

It's weird gardening in suburbia.  We're on a corner, on the road that many people take to get into the development, although it's grassy on three sides, woods in the way back, and I haven't heard a car all day (lawn mowers, however, are constant.  If I were a good backyard activist, I'd be dropping my dandelion seeds all over the place and sticking flyers in their mailboxes about reduced pesticide use).   Still, when my butt is up in the air and I'm weeding, the cars that do go by certainly slow down and stare.  These are the kind of people who talk when there's a rake left on the front steps or your fallen oak leaves aren't removed until Thanksgiving.    

Why should this matter?  I haven't done a vegetable garden since we first moved to Pelham, over 13 years ago.  When we first moved out there, we were on what counts as a busy road in Pelham, enough so that we never wanted pets for fear they'd get hit by a car.  When students left town, it became a thoroughfare, so we called it "the beach," sitting on the deck listening to waves and waves of cars.   But the garden was in the back, by the big shed, Marcia and Lynn's cottage, and the tree with the orioles, so it seemed removed and protected and since I had no children to eat up my time, grad school to avoid, and a sunny flat yard, we had abundant vegetables and herbs. No fence.

Our next house  -- the one we still have in Massachusetts -- was too deep in the woods and while my perennial beds and rock walls were nice (not as cool as my serious gardening friends, but hey, there's a big Buddha statue and gooseneck lustrife and a giant blue hosta), there were no veggies except in pots and window boxes.  That's when we joined the farm and my love was channeled in the direction of well-tended acreage in Hadley.  I wasn't doing the tending, per se, but I could go and pick whenever I wanted, walk around the fields, get cool in the store room, and soak it all in.  I'm not lying when I tell people I miss the Food Bank Farm more than anything else in Massachusetts.

Three years into the experiment with life away from New England and into western PA suburbs, I am still not settled, always looking to find a way home, stifling my "it's because we're in Pittsburgh" response when something goes awry or an acquaintance says something stupid (because my friends and acquaintances in Massachusetts never said anything stupid. Never. And they could fly. Take that!).   

But the rototilled space draws my attention.  It made the decision to buy the perennials possible.  I don't know why, but maybe because I've had the experience over and over of making things grow.  Not perfectly, mind you. No one has that -- there's always squash bugs and drought or mold and rabbits.  But successfully.    My daughters have grown up in the house where veggies come in pots, getting their experience with agriculture at the Farm, a different kind of rooted-in love for over 10 years. 

I guess I'm saying that the deer may eat every last seedling to the ground (my friend claims they even eat her jalapeno pepper plants!) and things may die when we do go to Massachusetts for July, but maybe it's good for me to dig in, put in some plants that will return for me next year, if I'm still here, or if not, give someone else a reason to poke around in the dirt.

What I hope I'll get in a few years:

image from "All That Grows in Gardens and Nature"

About Erik, On Grief and Hope

This is a picture of Erik Selby,  farmer and  radio announcer.  He and his wife Susan  and his father-in-law ran a beautiful CSA called Meadow Rock Farm in Butler, PA.  Erik passed away suddenly last week and I am saddened by it.

As writers, there are certain issues that draw us in but remain elusive.  To speak about knowing someone and about loss is to enter into the realm of the cliched and the overwrought.   For me, it's almost impossible to write without considering the ontological, especially knowing the Other, so I've got to enter that fray each day armed with descriptions, new and old.  But loss is complicated in a different way.  The losses in my stage of life, in my geographic, social, and cultural context are different from the losses of those who live with war or poverty or other hardships.   I quote at length from a story by Jane Smiley, who has chronicled the kinds of worlds I often inhabit:  

..it seems to me that I have arrived at the age of grief. Others arrive there sooner. Almost no one arrives much later. I don't think it is years themselves or the disintegration of the body. Most of our bodies are better taken care of and better-looking than ever. What it is, is what we know, now, that in spite of ourselves we have stopped to think about it.  It is not only that we know that love ends, children are stolen, parents die feeling that their lives have been meaningless. It is not only that, by this time, a lot of acquaintances and friends have died and all the others are getting ready to sooner or later. It is more that the barriers between the circumstances of oneself and of the rest of the world have broken down, after all -- after all that schooling, all that care. Lord, if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me. But when you are thirty-three or thirty-five, the cup must come around, cannot pass from you, and it is the same cup of pain that every mortal drinks from. Dana cried over Mrs. Hilton. My eyes filled during the nightly news. Obviously we were grieving for ourselves, but we were also thinking that if THEY were feeling what we were feeling, how could they stand it? We were grieving for them, too.  I understand that later you come to an age of hope, or at least resignation. I suspect it takes a long time to get there.

(The Age of Grief, Ivy Books, 1977)

I find myself in the position of caring a great deal about people I hardly have the right to say I know.   

Zack met Erik and Susan at a farmer's market outside of a local vineyard.  In what I like to think of as a valiant attempt to make me happy here, away from my beloved Food Bank Farm in Hadley, he went in search of local farms and CSAs and he stumbled upon the most engaging couple behind a table with beautiful tomatoes, cilantro, fresh garlic, and lettuce. And Erik immediately saw in Zack that this was about the vegetables but not just about the vegetables.  He loaded Zack and Zoe down with lots of extra goodies, which were brought home with enthusiasm that, for once, I did not squelch in a downpour of distain (because I am, unfortunately, a snob about the things I love).    And, when with that enthusiasm unabated,  Zack took me to meet Erik and Susan one Saturday afternoon, I couldn't help but share it.  Erik was a person who radiated kindness (without guile or gumption) right through his eyes.   Yes, it's a cliche, but dammit, you felt as if you knew him immediately -- and if you didn't, you walked away happy to have met him, wanting to come back for more.    Knowing he and Susan were part of my world made it a better place, one with hope.  There is nothing better to look forward to than beautiful things grown by people who take joy in each vegetable.  Just look at how he'd photographed their produce, the garden, and the chickens and you see the maker behind the thing made.

Over the last year, we had a lively email exchange in which he (through Susan) made it clear that it warmed his soul to know there were people who loved the farm, wanted the CSA to succeed, and enjoyed eating their vegetables.  They wanted us to come visit with the dog (even though I'm sure she'd wreak havoc among the fowl).  They supplied me with enough to roast tomatoes for freezing, to make all the food for Zoe's bat mitzvah (100 people), and to enjoy garlic all winter long.   This year they'd asked me to help them market the farm a bit more (in exchange for a share! Much too generous -- and too certain I actually had something to offer that was worth it).  It was just after I'd written back with a whole list of ridiculous ideas, thoughts, and connections that Erik passed away. An unfinished conversation, I am now thinking about how I might be a small factor in getting Susan the farm help she will need to make it through this season.  I cannot imagine even remotely what else I could offer for solace in her loss.    

The cliches trail me: my imaginings of the world, my sense of its possibilities, of my own place in it, who I am and who I could be, and what we have to offer each other is much richer, wider, and hopeful because I knew Erik even for a little while.   In that passage, what Smiley's character doesn't yet see (and perhaps what I am learning) is that the people we grieve for are sometimes the path to hope rather than resignation.

How to Prevent Swine Flu

I just love this.  I don't have the original photographer info -- it was circulated in a email -- but I wish I could get in touch with this person and tell them how much I love this.   Anyone who's ever had a baby give you that kind of kiss knows that this is one happy pig.   And having hugged a few pigs, I can say that the baby is clearly blissful, too.   Pigs are good creatures.  H1N1 really should be named  the "Humans are disease-carrying messes" virus.  

My apologies for not having more to say lately. It's all being absorbed by the great big end of the semester/finish a million projects writing machine.  

Tom's Shoes Event April 16th

Hey! Take your shoes off!  Yes, well, it's still mud season here in western PA (and I'm sure it's just barely that in western MA), but Tom's Shoes, the great company that sends shoes to developing countries (NICE new beautiful shoes, too, not just your worn out Nikes...), is sponsoring an event on the 16th -- it's go shoeless day.   

I explained the event in detail on the Green Connoisseur Blog on April 14th (today, underneath the morel mushroom mention...) so take a look and consider kicking off your shoes while your tooling around the office, walking over to lunch, or hanging out on campus.  And if you've got the bucks, Tom's shoes come in an amazing variety of colors, shapes, styles (vegan, less vegan, yoga-inspired, and so on), and for each pair you buy, one pair gets donated to a kid somewhere who might get to school and back without risking infection and parasite-borne diseases through their feet.   

With a little help from my friends

If I were able to do this more, pretty much every single post would be about my friends.  It's no accident that somehow the things I write about are, underneath, really about how we strive for these relationships despite all the obstacles.   

I don't want to write about how much I miss the community of people who held me together in Pelham and Amherst.  It's one of the other critical aspects of my life where words fail.  I have been working hard on finding local friends. I'm doing okay at it. Not great, mind you, but okay.  The cultural divide is sometimes uncrossable, the geography of suburbia unforgiving, and the weirdness of academia infuriating.   The other day I compared it to how my African American students feel when they are in the minority in class and everyone expects them to "speak" for the black experience.  

As. if. there. were. just. one.  

Through all this, I am unaccountably blessed (and I almost never use that word) with a far-flung network of friends, most of whom are academics, most write about food, and most (but not all) are women.   We usually see each other once a year at a conference, sometimes more by chance and luck.   But we talk on email every week and by Friday I am always laughing.  This week one friend (she is a budget goddess in an academic school) had a boss who really needs a time out (for those of you without kids, follow the link).  Another has a new college president with plans for borrowing heavily and building an amusement park on the campus (I am honestly not exaggerating much here: an example and another).   A third one spent the week doing administrative work requested by her chair (work the chair probably should have done herself), only to have the information deemed "irrelevant" in a meeting by -- you guessed it -- the same chair.  My other two friends are struggling with tenure, underpaid, and have toddlers.  That should be enough right there.  Me: well, there's always a saga.  This week I read the program for my beloved conference (the place where the universe comes together and the planets align) and lo and behold, the department chair who was central to my intimate understanding of sexual harassment as "hostile work environment" is presenting a paper at my conference. MY conference.  where I go to be with MY friends.   

Being my beloved friends, they devised at least seven terrific ways to make me feel safe, including something called the Cape Breton Liberation Army, which involves seagulls on laxatives.    Since we'd all planned on coming to the conference in our favorite Michelle Obama outfits (yes, we love her), I suspect that our showing of arms (the flesh kind) will be enough of a wall of protection (although my Italian friend says he does not look so good in pumps and pearls...)

This Friday, we each strategized our survival: infusing ginger ale with alcohol, living closer so we can share hair dye (a joke I cannot explain, but I do not believe any of us actually use hair dye, although I think at least a few might have gone for purple in the 80s), and watching movies all weekend long.   

Do you think this is what the Beatles had in mind?  I do.

turtle image from here.

On Cats and Contradictions

Quest is literally looking down on my work right now.  He seems so cute and tiny in this picture as compared to his belly shot on the left (see "The CDC Can't Map Me"...).

I have been thinking about cats lately, even though the dog tends to occupy my imagination more fully.  Warren asked, on his Facebook page (!!!), "do pets make us better writers?" and of course the answer is yes.  Emmett is warming my chair right now.

 Leah's 18 year old cat Fez passed away last week -- Arlene and Martha shepherded him through life without Leah and then a sad but safe acquiescence to age.  His passing inspired a whole host of poems and reminiscences, not surprising since Leah's world was full of writers and cat lovers.  Here is what I wrote to Arlene:

I am just back from Baltimore -- no people home (they are out eating Japanese, something I am sure they do regularly when I am away) and after the dog has wiggled and jumped on me and made it clear that she hates when I leave and has gotten a lot of attention and food, I am finally upstairs at my computer and the old cat Zuli has been keeping my spot on the bed warm and full of fur. The two younger cats want in and out of the house, just like the dog, but Zuli is here and he waits until I am settled and as soon as the computer is out of reach, he will lie on my chest and make the anxieties go away and we will talk about Fez because he understands what it means to keep going even with diabetes and autoimmune skin problems and cataracts and he will let me know when it's enough, but not quite yet.

Our cats (and dogs) are luckier than many other animals.  We live in a world where folks are willing to spend thousands of dollars on acute medical care for their animals, but are equally willing to abandon them on the side of the road.   My dog walks have been marred by the endless parade of dead creatures on the side of the road -- it is spring in Pennsylvania and the loss of raccoons, possums, squirrels, and cats is the main harbinger.   I have to stop and check the cats, see if they have collars, move them out of traffic, and ask Zack to bury the ones that have been on the side of the road near the walking path for too long.  I have a deep anger at not only the hit-and-run drivers, but the others who can drive on by, honk at me for stopping.

It reminds me of the disparities in the way we view people, too, lives that matter and lives that don't.  In answering a question about violence to transgender folks, one of my students wrote, "if the murderer had been more understanding of her situation, perhaps she would not have ended up dead... he would not have used such violence against an innocent person."    I love the students for their optimism and hope about human potential.  I have to find ways to gently tell them the world they live in is not so straightforward, that innocence is no protection, and that understanding is a good first step, but it won't erase the contradictions of violence and love.

And here is Zuli:

p.s. Although today's post is about the cats, it's Scarlett's birthday. A good day for another walk.