Worms Eat My Garbage

A little while ago I read Worms Eat My Garbage, by Mary Appelhof, which got me inordinately interested in worms. It's hard to have a regular compost pile if you live in an apartment, but a worm bin solves that problem perfectly. It's compact, neat, doesn't smell, you can keep it inside if you need to, and the worms do most of the work for you. They'll even regulate their population based on how much space and food you give them.

So on Saturday I picked up a "Wriggly Wranch" worm bin at a discounted price from the San Jose Environmental Services. They sell these and other composting systems periodically, and also give composting workshops (see the schedule). You might have to be a resident of Santa Clara county for all that, but other places offer similar things (e.g. San Mateo county). The Worm Dude was also there selling worms, so I got them at the same time.

And so now I've got about a thousand worms (1 lb.) all munching away at the compostable portions of my garbage, making nice fertilizer for my plants, and keeping more stuff out of the dumpsters and landfills. Yay for worms!

(And before any more people ask, no I'm not naming them all....)

Detachment, Unity, and Choice

[A bit more here on the subject of choice, since it seems to be a theme in my mind these days.]

When I was learning Vipassana at my first meditation retreat -- almost a year ago now -- I had one main concern about it. It seemed to me that if you really did manage to let go of desires and aversions, then you would end up never doing anything ever again. How would you make choices? Why would you bother taking any actions? I forget precisely what the teacher told me when I asked about it, and I don't think I fully got it at the time, though I decided it was enough to be getting on with, at least.

The idea is that detachment actually allows you to make completely free choices, unencumbered by fears, worries, selfish desires, etc. That leaves you open to base your decisions and actions solely on whatever knowledge, wisdom, and love you may have. Which is generally better than what we usually do.

I recently read a couple of excellent books by Deepak Chopra that illustrate this really well. The first is Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment. I was surprised to find a portion of the story that took place between Gautama losing his sense of self and his becoming fully enlightened. A peasant girl has found him emaciated and nearly dead, and is nursing him back to health. He's aware of everything around him, but is so detached that there's just nothing there -- no great spiritual leader, no nothing. I found it somewhat alarming but also fascinating at the same time, because that was exactly the fear that came to me last March.

So what is left to do at this point? The final change occurs when he stops identifying with nothing, and begins to identify with everything. That is what makes a Buddha.

But there's still the question of choice. If anything, the Buddha has far more choices after enlightenment, with knowledge and options far beyond what most of us realize. He could even choose to simply remain sitting under the bodhi tree and enjoy his oneness with everything forever. But in his omniscience he also realizes that there are countless other souls out there, still imagining themselves to be separate, alone, and suffering. And the same spiritual passion that drove him for years to find his own enlightenment now guides him to do the same for his newly expanded, universal "self." So he again picks up the body that "he" started in, because all the individuated souls will need that in order to understand how to relate to him, and he uses that to go forth and teach.

The other of Chopra's books I wanted to mention was The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life. This is an incredible but very challenging book, because I think it takes you as far towards complete universal oneness as you can get through mere words and intellect.

But even if we don't get so far as believing/understanding that we are the universe, hopefully we can all agree that we're at least a part of the universe, simply by virtue of being in it. So our choices and actions at any level really are affecting, changing, and therefore creating the universe. We can't help it. Thinking about things that way gives us an interesting new framework of significance or even responsibility in which to evaluate what we do. How might we make different choices if we view them in terms of creating the universe we live in?

Hot Chix Dig Environmentalists

Do you know someone who is both male and environmentally clueless? Then start training him using the power of positive associations, and get him this for Christmas: The Hot Chix Dig 2009 Calendar: Fighting Global Warming One Pinup at a Time. You can also just buy it for anybody who likes this kind of thing. :-)

The whole Hot Chix Dig project is a clever idea, and it doesn't stop at calendars: check out the rest of their galleries, and the blog as well. I know several of the lovely ladies who've been involved and I'm glad they've had a lot of fun "using [their] best assets for an important cause." So go support them! And follow some of their environmentally friendly tips while you're at it!

Clean Up Your Energy Bill

Antonia recently gave me a $5 gift card from Renewable Choice Energy. What that modest amount of money lets you do is basically convert a month's worth of the energy you use to wind power. (Though for me, the 250 kilowatt hours is more like two average months.) You still pay the same amount on your same electric bill, but 250 KWH of wind power energy gets added to the national power grid, chipping away at the 98% of the energy that's coming from non-renewable sources like fossil fuels. They estimate the impact of that as equivalent to not driving 429 miles, or planting 4 trees, or not burning 187 pounds of coal. In addition to the gift cards, you can also sign up for subscription plans on their site.

While I was thinking about that, I went to PG&E's website to check out my actual energy consumption, and I noticed a program they have called ClimateSmart. If you sign up for this, a small amount gets added to each electric bill, calculated to offset your energy usage by investing in projects to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Their estimate for me, based on my last bill of $15.27, was $0.33 or about 2%. At four bucks a year, I think that's worth doing.

So that's two easy things most of us can afford to do to improve our energy usage and our environment. Anybody have other good suggestions?

The Next Book in the Universe

Today I finished recording my first audiobook for Books Aloud, just in time before I leave for Romania. It's cool to have finished it, though I wish I could listen to the whole thing to hear how it turned out, e.g. to see how consistent I was with character voices, etc. (I think something I signed at the beginning said they wouldn't/couldn't give me copies of what I record.) Now the recording is going off to someone else who will transfer the whole thing to cassette tapes, since most of the patrons are blind and therefore have an easier time with tapes than CDs. I'm not sure how long it will take to actually make it into circulation.

They also gave me the next book I'll be reading: another young adult novel called The Last Book in the Universe, by Rodman Philbrick. (Hopefully it won't be the last book I read, though.) I've read a bit of it so far, and the story seems reasonably intriguing, though some of the post-apocalyptic slang feels a bit forced.

Recording for Books Aloud

One of the first volunteer events I did through Hands On Bay Area was with Books Aloud. Last week I auditioned for to be a reader for them, since I have time now to do that kind of thing.

For the audition I had to read 10 minutes each from a kids' book and an adult book, my choice. The kids' book was a no-brainer: The Phantom Tollbooth is one of my all-time favorites for reading out loud. Choosing a specific piece of it, though, was trickier. I eventually went with Chapter 5 ("Short Shrift") not because there was much exciting action going on, but because there were a few different voices, so it would be a good demo. For the other book, I chose The Once and Future King, specifically the amusing scene in Chapter 7 with King Pellinore and Sir Grummore meeting, discussing fewmets, and jousting. Anyway, they both went over pretty well with the committee and they decided to let me start recording for them.

I had my first real recording session today. They assigned me Flush, by Carl Hiassen. (They start all new readers out on kids' books, not that I mind in the least.) It's a decent book, though I have a bit of an issue with how the moral of it seems to be undermined at the end. It works well for reading out loud, though. It's definitely different reading in a little studio into a microphone, rather than actually reading to someone (the recording engineer in the adjacent room doesn't really seem to count). And I have to be a lot more conscious of little mistakes, compared to reading live, so we can go back and fix them. But it's still fun, and it'll be really neat to do a whole book and then be able to send it out for a blind kid somewhere to enjoy.

Unfortunately, their recording schedule is fairly full, so they may mostly be using me to plug up gaps from cancellations for a while. Plus I'm going on two trips in the next two months. So it may take kind of a while to actually get a book finished. I'm hoping to be able to put in more time on it at some point, though, since it's something I won't be able to continue once I eventually start working again.

Hands On Bay Area

I've recently (in the last month or so) started using a site called Hands On Bay Area, which matches volunteers with various community service opportunities throughout the bay area. (There are other chapters of the Hands On Network around the country, too.) It's a handy thing, because it not only helps you find interesting organizations to work with, but makes it easy to sort of "test drive" them. You sign up for everything on a one-off basis, so you get to go help out for an afternoon or evening or something and see what it's like, without having to make a big commitment. Naturally that limits the types of things you can do (Project Read's tutoring program wouldn't fit well in this model, for instance) but you can still find other ways to contribute later on after you've "met" an organization or project you like. Here are some of the things I've done so far:

• Sunday Friends: I spent an afternoon doing arts and crafts and playing games with kids from low income families, while they and their parents developed various positive life skills and earned points they could spend at a "store" of donated food and household items. I quite enjoyed it, and I intend to go back, though I haven't yet managed that.
• Books Aloud: This organization runs a mail-order library of audio books for people who are blind, dyslexic, or otherwise unable to read conventionally. The evening I was there I mostly just dug through their (horrendously cataloged) collection to find things to pack up and send to people. I want to see if I can get involved in the actual recording of the books though, once my schedule allows, since I love reading aloud.
• RAFT - Resource Area for Teachers: Here I was sorting through extremely miscellaneous boxes of office supplies donated by various companies, to be packaged up and sold at low costs to teachers. Doesn't sound like much, but turns out to be a very good flow activity, especially when a whole team of people really gets into a synchronized groove. They also have other projects, like assembling science project kits, again from donated, discarded, or recycled materials.

Anyway, that's my plug for the Hands On Network. If you've ever felt like you wanted to do something to give back to your community but didn't know where to look, this is a good way to get started. And if you find something you're interested in around here (e.g. San Mateo or Santa Clara counties), let me know and maybe I'll be able to go along with you.

Volunteering Abroad

Lacey and I have been doing some research recently on volunteer travel opportunities. We're thinking of planning a trip for March, though we haven't yet decided where, or even specifically what sorts of projects (e.g. environmental conservation, building homes, working with kids in orphanages, etc.). Here are some of the organizations we've been looking at so far, though:

• Globe Aware - Looks good, but they pretty much only do 1-week trips. (I'd rather go for 2 or 3.) Also says that even the airfare is tax deductible. I don't know how standard that is, but it's cool.
• i-to-i - Some interesting touring/volunteering combinations, though I'd probably go for something more work-oriented with maybe just free time to run around on weekends.
• United Planet - I'm particularly interested in the Turkey trip.
• Volunteer Visions - Some really good prices, e.g. for India.

Has anybody had any experience with any of these? Good? Bad? Any other organizations to recommend, or other advice to share? Let me know!

The Ecotopian Perspective

At the Green Festival last year I picked up a 30th anniversary edition copy of Ecotopia, by Ernest Callenbach. It imagines an alternative future (looking forwards from the 1970's) in which Washington, Oregon, and Northern California have seceded from the United States to form a new country called Ecotopia. After decades of little to no communication between the two countries, a US reporter travels to Ecotopia, and this book is made up of his journal entries alternated with the articles he sends back for his newspaper to publish. The country has completely remade its society and technology into a new, ecologically sound, stable-state system (hence the name).

I won't go into the details, since if all that sounds interesting, you should just read it for yourself. But here's why I particularly appreciate it. Whether you agree with all the ideas or not (and yeah, it's a mixed bag) it's the perspective that's important. It steps away from the question "how can we fix or adjust what we have to make it better?" to "what would an ideal system actually look like?" If you ever get bogged down looking at the trees in the first question, use this book to get yourself thinking at the forest level.

- - - - -
This post is part of Blog Action Day. One issue. One day. Thousands of voices.

Thinking Beyond Borders

Thinking Beyond Borders is a relatively new organization that is designing a brilliant program for gap year students between high school and college. A group of 16 students and a few staff members will travel the world for a full academic year, spending a month each in a number of different countries and working on projects with a variety of local NGOs. E.g. in rural Bolivia they'll live with native host families and spend the majority of their time working on clean water projects with one particular organization, while also traveling around visiting and learning about similar organizations in the area. Then on to South Africa for a similar stint working on public health and the AIDS epidemic, and so on to India, China, and Vietnam. The programs are being designed and chosen to provide as diverse an experience in the developing world as possible. Then for six weeks after coming back to the U.S., the students go around making presentations to educational and philanthropic organizations, meeting with representatives from the UN and World Bank, etc. The idea behind having this specifically be a gap year program is that students can then start college right from the beginning with a hugely expanded global perspective, which many people only get after going abroad in junior or senior year, if at all.

What I love about all this is that it works on two levels, both educating future leaders and world-changers while also providing direct service and support to organizations working on the ground in the here and now.

Right now Thinking Beyond Borders is still working on fund-raising and program development, getting ready for their first actual program year starting in September 2008. Their goal is to have all the initial fund-raising get the organization to the point where it can be completely self-sustaining on tuition fees alone. The tuition will be comparable to a year at college (they're calling this "the best first year of college you can get") but there will be lots of scholarship opportunities, both built into the program and from ongoing donations. I'm going to be making one of my monthly donations to them, and if you find it interesting too, there's more information on their website and in this video of a talk one of the founders gave at Google a few weeks ago.

Blogging for the Environment

October 15, a week from Monday, is Blog Action Day, and the theme this year is the environment. If you have a blog, use that day to post something related to the environment, in whatever way, shape, or form you prefer. So far, over 7,000 blogs have signed up to participate, with more joining every day. (Not that you have to sign up or anything, but it helps them measure the impact.)

If you're thinking 7,000 blog posts isn't that much in the big scheme of things, Blog Action Day estimates those posts will reach nearly 5 million readers. Putting environmental issues in front of that many people can have a huge effect on public consciousness, and awareness is always the first step in change. So who knows what big things may be set in motion by the combined efforts of individuals sharing their ideas. See the Blog Action Day blog for more on how bloggers can change the world.

Swami Kriyananda

On Sunday, Mom invited me over to Ananda to to see Swami Kriyananda. It was the last talk he was giving in America on this trip before going back to India. He was a direct disciple of Paramhansa Yogananda over 50 years ago, is probably as close to enlightenment or self-realization as anyone alive, and he also founded Ananda communities around the world, so it's like having a living saint come to visit. I've been immensely inspired by him just from reading Asha's book, which is a lovely collection of short stories and memories about him from all sorts of Ananda-affiliated people, so I was very glad to get to see him.

Swamiji is inspiring because he represents so intensely the qualities I want to find and develop in myself. No matter what situation he's in, he just absolutely exudes complete love and joy with every particle of his being. It doesn't matter that he's in his 80s, with his health and body falling apart; he just carries on joyfully letting God work through him and loving everyone around him. If you meet him for the first time and only spend 10 seconds with him, he can still make you feel like the most important, beloved person in the world. It's the most beautiful and powerful kind of personality I can think of.

The talk was gentle in presentation yet intense in content. Many things I believe in and want to strive for, and many that seem frighteningly unattainable. But after the talk was when we had the opportunity to actually greet Swami individually, and that, I think, would make the day worthwhile all on its own. For an hour, people queued up to each get their own few seconds in front of him, to introduce themselves, look into his eyes, and feel his touch as he blessed them. I have to admit that I was kind of nervous and self-conscious going up there for the first time, and I almost missed it through my own distraction, but the feeling was still intense. I don't know what to call it. It wasn't any one of the extreme, specific emotions I've been experiencing recently, but more like pure, and nameless, emotion. I moved to the side and cried quietly for a while, not because I was explicitly sad, but because it was the only way to gently let the feeling move through me. I watched the river of people continue to flow blissfully along in front of him, and the baby whose crying turned to giggles when Swami touched his head.

As the stream turned to a trickle and the end of the line came near, I spent a little while screwing up my courage, then added myself back into the queue. When I was back in front of Swamiji again, I admitted that I'd been through already, but this time wanted to ask for a blessing for someone far away. He very graciously said yes, of course, and as he put his hand on me, I spoke the name of the person with whom I wanted to share this experience. I don't know if I was more conscious this time around, or if I was trying more deliberately to channel the energy, or if it was just from going through a second time, but the nameless mystery emotion was even more powerful than before. It was a while before I was able to come back and focus enough to drive myself home.

If you're interested, the Ananda website has and audio recording of this talk (with video probably coming too), as well as many others. It's not the same as being there, but it's good stuff regardless. I also recommend Swami's reading of a P. G. Wodehouse story.

Blessed Are the Peacemakers

1. Watch the I Know I'm Not Alone music video.
2. Watch the I Know I'm Not Alone documentary (borrow mine if you like).

Michael Franti is a pretty incredible human being and makes good music to boot. He made this documentary traveling through Iraq, Israel and Palestine. He went around with just a guitar, a video camera, and an interpreter, and talked with U.S. soldiers, native soldiers, and people in the streets, homes and hospitals. His message is the importance of communication, and it really hits home when you see him getting Israeli soldiers talking with Palestinians over that crazy big fence they're building.

[Thanks to Quena for first playing me "Red Beans and Rice" way back in Costa Rica, and for Antonia for introducing me to the rest of Michael Franti & Spearhead's stuff.]

What Should I Eat?

The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, by Peter Singer and Jim Mason, was recommended to me by Antonia and made a good followup to The Omnivore's Dilemma. Some of the information in it is similar, but it also spends more time talking about things like free trade and economic considerations, and also explicitly addressing various ethical arguments about what we eat. So it did some serious work on the internal debate slowly going on in my head about whether I should become vegetarian or vegan.

First, here's my current situation: I eat beef and pork pretty infrequently, and fish only slightly more. The majority of the meat I eat is poultry, and I think even that is in reasonably modest amounts. A good portion of my meals are vegetarian already, thanks to the fine chefs at work providing veggie options. So why am I not vegetarian or vegan yet? I'll list my main reasons, and then further thoughts on them from reading Singer and Mason's book.

Human beings are omnivores. Why should I go against Nature?
This kind of a view may be somewhat supported by Michael Pollan's argument about domestic animals co-evolving into a symbiotic relationship with people. However, factory farms and such things go pretty violently against Nature, supposed symbiotic relationships or not, and it can be a lot of work to find and verify more humane sources of meat and animal products. And of course, just because we are something "naturally" doesn't mean it necessarily shouldn't be transcended. E.g. it would be right for a "naturally" belligerent person to learn to control his temper. So while I still do not feel that eating meat is outright wrong, in and of itself, there are so many other wrong factors involved in most meat eating today that I'm willing to let this go of this particular argument. It's just a lazy reliance on the status quo anyway.

Effort vs. Benefit
Vegetarian might be reasonably do-able, but going entirely vegan has always seemed like a great deal of work for me. Food is nice and all, but I've never really been interested in devoting much time or energy to it. That's why I've never learned to cook much and base a lot of my food choices on the "quick and easy" criteria. Being vegan seems like I would have to start allocating way more brain cycles, time, and effort into figuring what I can eat in any given situation, and I'm not crazy about that. It makes me wonder if the incremental benefit of cutting out animal products from one single person's diet is worth it, especially if I'm not a heavy meat eater anyway.

I'm still on the fence about this. However, there are a few points from The Way We Eat that can put the benefit into perspective. I will call them the three E's, just because I can.

• Efficiency: It takes 21 lbs of plant food to produce 1 lb of beef. The ratio is less dramatic for other meats, but the fact remains that we can feed more people far more efficiently if we use more plants and less meats.
• Environment: Due to all the factors involved in meat production, switching from an average American meat eating diet to completely vegan saves the atmosphere from 1.5 tons of CO2 a year. That's half again as much as the benefit of switching from a regular to a hybrid car.
• Evangelism: The more vegetarians and vegans that omnivores see out there "in real life," the more normal it will seem, and the more the ideas and practices will spread. So there would be some amount of a snowball effect, beyond simply my own personal decision (though unfortunately we don't have a good number to measure that).

Practicality and Social Factors
This is perhaps just a more specific example of the "Effort" point above, and can probably be addressed by the same benefit arguments, but I'll list it anyway. If I'm visiting an omnivore who is kind enough to host and feed me, I don't want to put them to extra work just to accommodate me. If I travel somewhere, I want to try the foods the natives eat. For that matter, I want to be adaptable, and not thrown off by places that may not have a lot of vegetarian options. Now that I think about it, maybe there's actually some primal survival instinct at work here, making me reluctant to artificially restrict my possible food sources.

Food I Like
I'd like to say my will power makes this a non-issue, but really, there's stuff I'd be sad to stop eating. I'm thinking fondly right now of some salmon I had on Friday, but I could probably deal with cutting out meat, I think. (And yes, fish are animals.) Cheese might be more problematic. I wouldn't much miss milk and eggs in and of themselves, but they do go into certain wonderful things that would be painful to give up, and here my sweet tooth begins clamoring about ice cream and cookies, though other things could fall in this category, too. Unfortunately, I didn't get much out of the book to address this issue, aside from the fact that there are more and more vegetarian/vegan animal product alternatives available now than ever before. Having tried some such things, I don't necessarily find them all convincing, though admittedly I don't have a wide experience. Though do they really need to be "convincing" substitutes, or just good in their own right? As an example, I got to help make vegan ginger apple ice cream with Antonia this afternoon. To me, it still seems significantly different from "real" ice cream. It was, however, very good. (Thanks, Antonia!)

Conclusions
None at this time. However, I am going to start experimenting a bit, first by paying more attention to how many things I regularly eat that contain animal products, and second by seeing how many of them can be eliminated without too much effort. (I'm thinking all meat here, at the very least.) At that point, I'll need to take another look around and see what kinds of things are left, how much of them I'm consuming, and what my alternatives are. We'll see where this takes me.

Peaceful Warrior

When I heard last year that Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman was being made into a movie, I didn't know whether to be apprehensive or excited. Unfortunately, it had a limited release and completely flopped -- because apparently nobody who reviewed it actually grokked it -- so I didn't get to find out. An interesting thing is going on now, though. They've decided to try re-releasing it, and they're also giving away free tickets for opening weekend (this weekend) as a different kind of marketing tactic, hoping it will then spread by word of mouth. (Story here, free tickets here.) So this is me doing my part for my free ticket.

Go see this movie if you enjoy: Buddhism, personal development, conscious living, "new-age" metaphysics, men's gymnastics, UC Berkeley, or, heck, gas stations. If you want to know more about it than that, go read about the book on Amazon.com or something, 'cause I'm bad at movie reviews. However, I will say that I ended up being quite pleased by the movie overall. It is by no means the equal of the book, but I think it's really about the best adaptation one could expect of it. While a lot was left out, they also added some scenes, most which surprised me by how good and "in character" they were.

Mom went to see it with me, and she was a bit worried because of what happened the last time I took her to a movie. The previews weren't helping, either. Apparently the theater had no idea who their audience was (or didn't have anything to fit us). Three in a row of the many previews were for The Condemned, Shrek 3, and Spiderman 3. Bit of a mix, that. Once the movie started, though, she realized it was safe and started trusting me again.

I recommend the book more than anything, of course (and as usual). But do go see the movie, too. There aren't enough movies like this around, so filmmakers need all the encouragement we can give them.

Where Is Your Christmas Money Going?

I like what the Seva Foundation is doing with their gifts of service. You make a donation to provide a poor family in South America with clean water in their home, or to get eye surgery for a blind person in Tibet to see again, or one of many other options. Then Seva provides a gift card that you can give to your recipient. Now granted, you could always donate to any charity in honor of somebody else, so it seems that all Seva is really adding here is the card. But it's the decision to frame the donations this way that is so brilliant, and it brings philanthropy into an entirely different realm of spending, putting it (hopefully) more in view of some people who might ordinarily spend much more on a batch of Christmas gifts than on donations to charities. Any amount of money that can be diverted from ravenous December purchasing to creating serious quality of life improvements in less fortunate communities is money well repurposed in my book.

So I'm just going to put this out there as an option for anyone who hasn't yet spent all of their Christmas budget. I realize there are still lots of very useful, meaningful, traditional gifts to give to your friends and family, and I also realize that it's just plain old fun to do that sometimes. But consider adding in some gifts of service, from Seva or from any other organization that's significant to you. Maybe for the person who has everything and is impossible to shop for. Maybe for someone who's made an important difference in your life, to show them you're passing on the positive influences in the world. Whatever the case, you know it's a gift that will be put to good use.

Carbon Offsets

I'm flying up to Portland this weekend to visit Lacey, along with Dad and Betty Lue. Thanks to Sustainable Travel International I learned that my personal share of this flight will create about 0.37 tons of CO2 emissions. But for less than $7.00, I can offset that through their MyClimate program, which invests in climate protection projects around the world. Not as good as avoiding the pollution in the first place, of course, but a heck of a lot better than nothing. In addition to air travel, there's a calculator to figure out carbon offsets for other things, like driving and home energy. There are other companies out there that offer other sorts of offset programs as well, some approaching it more along the lines of planting a certain number of trees, if you prefer that sort of thing. So if you're traveling this holiday season (or anytime, really) consider chipping in a few extra dollars at one of these places and help clean up a little bit of this mess we're all making.

The Omnivore's Dilemma

I recently finished reading (well, listening to) The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan. The dilemma in question is that, unlike a cow which will generally just eat grass and not worry about it, omnivores can eat nearly anything, and thus have to constantly decide which of the available anythings they should eat. As human beings, we've complicated this even beyond the mere question of whether something will poison or nourish us. With the immense industrial systems we've set up to produce and deliver our food, we also have to (or should) consider the effect our food has on our planet, the morality of how we're treating the animals, and more. As Pollan says throughout, food has to be not only good to eat, but good to think. We should be able to know exactly what went into our meals and still be okay with eating them.

The book is subtitled "A Natural History of Four Meals." The meals in question are "industrial" (most of what we typically buy in the stores these days), two kinds of organic, and directly hunted/grown/foraged (mostly for comparative purposes). The industrial part was the scariest. I hadn't realized what a huge part of our food system is completely based on corn. Corn has basically gotten itself into a symbiotic relationship with human beings, where we help it reproduce and grow as a species far more than it could have managed on its own, all the while scrambling to find more ways to use it all up, and get people to consume more. It was giving me serious flashbacks to Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide (augmented by the fact that this book has one of the same narrators from those). Add to that the mega-corporations running the stuff, not to mention the government subsidies that dig us farther into the corn hole, and the whole thing just looks like an unstoppable behemoth.

In terms of organic, it turns out that industrial organic (e.g. Whole Foods kind of stuff) is nearly as bad. They eschew a lot of the chemicals regular industrial systems use, but since they don't practice any other sustainable techniques, that just makes it harder to protect crops from disease, keep the livestock healthy, etc. There's also a lot of deception, e.g. with "free range" chickens, that basically just have a small door to a bare patch of ground that they never venture into in their few short weeks of life. Plus there's still the issue of transporting all this food around the country or around the world, which adds the same environmental and health costs as hauling around the industrial food.

Pollan's biggest strength, I think, is his ability to convey complete systems in his writing, giving us vivid, and detailed yet panoramic views of how so many pieces are interwoven to make a functional whole. Or, in the case of the industrial food system, a dysfunctional whole. The meat-raising division is completely cut off from the agricultural, and both get heavy doses of chemicals thrown in. Both systems create enormous amounts of toxic waste that would otherwise, in nature, have been recycled to nourish other parts of the ecosystem. One of the book's most memorable moments is when he points out that we've basically used all our wonderful technology and ingenuity to split one simple, elegant solution into multiple complex problems. The best example of the alternative -- that is, keeping a simple, integrated solution in the context of organized farming -- is in his "beyond organic" example, the second of the two organics, after the industrial variety. The farm he describes is completely self-sustaining. The chickens and pigs and cows and grass and trees and everything else are balanced absolutely perfectly, so that every part of the puzzle is beneficial to every other part. It's really beautiful how it all works. The farm also does strictly local business, and refuses to ship its food anywhere it can't easily drive a van around to.

Anyway, the whole thing is rather eye-opening. I highly recommend reading it and considering whether your food is good to eat or good to think, or neither or both.

Hugging

BBC NEWS | UK | England | Nottinghamshire | City's group hug in name of art
I think this is wonderful. The world needs more hugging.

I Just Gave Someone 2/5 of a Cow

Mom recently told me about Heifer International, which I chose for my current monthly donation. It's a charity with a good, teach-a-man-to-fish sort of approach. Rather than just giving people temporary help and food, you can contribute to a more long-term solution where people are given livestock, taught to take care of it, and then agree to pass on some of the animals' offspring to other needy families. For different prices, you can choose to donate a variety of different animals, including cows, goats, pigs, ducks, bees, and even water buffalo or llamas. There are also trees or seedlings for any of you vegan-types who might be against exploiting animals. You can buy "shares" of some of the larger, costlier animals, which is how I got the fractional cow donated. Hopefully someone else will come up with the other 3/5 of it, or else there's going to be a disappointed recipient somewhere. Anyway, I just thought that was a good thing to share. Feel free to chip in with me on this cow.