The following words have been re-published here with the permission of the author, Jim Dollar. It came by email to the recipients of his mailing list today. If you’d like to buy Jim Dollar’s book, Loose Change, or prints of his beautiful photography, or just sign up for his mailing list, please visit Outlands Press.

He has voiced my thoughts about Katrina better than I ever could, and I thank him for allowing me to share them with you here.

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Hurricane Katrina is a wonderful, or horrendous, example of how close we all are to having nothing at all; of how fine the balance, of how thin the line, between having it made and having nothing at all. How do you live with nothing at all? When all that generally passes for “life” is taken from us, what then? What do we do with nothing with which to do anything? We had better find our core, don’t you think, in something a hurricane cannot destroy—in something moths and rust cannot consume and thieves cannot steal. Our identity, integrity, vision, focus, purpose, clarity and awareness had better be grounded in something other than personal property, in the things we can own, acquire, amass, achieve, use, and control. If it can be taken from it, it we may well be figuring out how to live without it, with how to find our way to the heart of true value which goes with us wherever we go. It seems that, for the most part, we don’t have a clue about what that is, where to find it, how to live in light of it all our lives long.

The second revelation, if you will, from Katrina’s destructive power is that survival is only temporary. If you survive the first storm surge, the second will nail you, and if it doesn’t the levee collapse will do it, and if that doesn’t, the next thing will. Survival is just a word for those who wait for the next big wave. We escape a lion, and a bear devours us, or we escape the lion and the bear, and a cobra strike waylays us, or we make it to the safety of our homes and a black widow spider bites us. We cannot think we have it made and are immune just because we lived through Camille. We cannot swagger about because a thousand have fallen on our right side and ten thousand on our left (Are all these Biblical images wasted on you? How long has it been since you last read the Bible? It’s a wonderful Mirror, Map, and Metaphor, you know. We find ourselves on every page, if we read it with eyes that see), and the scourge has not come near our tent. We can’t be thinking survival proves we enjoy everlasting protection of the Lord God Almighty. If we fall into that temptation, it is only a matter of time before we hear ourselves crying out, “How long, O Lord?” and “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It is hard for survivors to know if they wouldn’t have been better off going in the first wave. Survival is a test for the soul. And, the test is all about how we access value, ascribe worth, understand importance, comprehend meaning and purpose. The test is all about how we see. The advantage of survival is the possibility of expanding perspective. If we survive with the same old frame of mind, we are as good as dead, and may wish we were dead.

The third revelation from Katrina is how in the world do you resettle two and a half million (or whatever the number will be) displaced people? Where do they go? What do you do with them? They are refugees without homes or jobs or futures to speak of. How do you work them back into life? And, as the ice caps melt and the seas rise, what do you do with the populations of Miami, and New York, and Boston, and so on around the world? What we learn with New Orleans, Biloxi, and Gulfport, will help in the future, if anything can help in the future.

The fourth revelation is the recurring lesson about the importance of living in tune with the natural world. Global warming is the result of our contempt for the impact of our living on the world. We cannot live any way we want. We cannot live any way we can imagine. We can say, “It’s my body, and I can do what I want to with it,” but, if we smoke, or over eat, or refuse to exercise, our body eventually does what it wants to with us. Our body has the last word. So does the earth. We will pay a price for living the way we live. We have to live within the boundaries imposed by “the way things are,” or pay a terrible price for our callousness and greed.

The fifth revelation has to do with what we are doing, can do, to become conscious of, aware of, “the way things are.” How can the Bush administration, for instance, continually denounce, dismiss, the warnings about global warming in favor of business as usual and life as they prefer it? How can we maintain lifestyles that destroy the planet? Where do we go to talk about these things? To imagine a different future than the one we are creating by the way we are living? Where do we go to examine our lives and stop living one way and start living another way? Where do we go to talk ourselves out of being stupid and talk ourselves into being smart? If anything is clear, here, it is that we cannot trust elected politicians to be smart. Elected politicians will go with the votes and the money. And, between the two, they will go with the money. But, don’t get me started. The question is how do we change the patterns that are creating a future we cannot live with? Who is going to lead the way for change? Where do we go to talk about these things?

Jim Dollar
Presbyterian Church of the Covenant
Inclusive, Open-Minded, and Home for Your Soul
501 S. Mendenhall St.
Greensboro, NC 27403
http://www.athinkingchurch.org
http://www.outlandspress.com

Because I just ordered two Tifblue blueberries for the garden, I decided to do a google search to see if there was any information about a blueberry permaculture guild. I found this excerpt from a post on the permaculture listserv archives:

“Apios and blueberry or cranberry (which is just another blueberry that happens not to be blue or taste as good) is an example of a natural association of co-evolved plants, one might think. Except that most of the species of blueberry that associate with apios are not from the warmer areas where apios evolved. No the Native Americans brought apios into the picture and the assocation, while spontaneous, is not an example of coevolution.”

Which led me to google Apios. Apios, or groundnut, is an acid-loving native perennial vine that is nitrogen-fixing and shade-tolerant. It also happens to be edible - both the tubers and the seeds. I was considering planting these two blueberries in front of a willow oak. My soil is very acid anyway, but I understand that oak leaves are acidic as well. There is an ugly chain-link fence behind the oak tree. Apios might be a perfect companion plant in my blueberry-oak guild. Now, where do I get it?

Information on Apios

I’m writing this post belatedly and plugging it in to the right date, because I need to mention for the record that I braved the skeeters long enough to begin planting my fall garden.

I was rushing to get my root vegetable seeds in the ground while the moon was still waning because I’m trying to remember to plant with the moon phases this year. My brain is not with the moon program yet because I’ve forgotten about it most of the year. I caught a little rain from Katrina afterwards but not as much as we’d hoped. Anyway:

Cherrybelle radishes
Early Wonder Tall Top beets (from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange)
Red Wethersfield onions (from the Monticello seed collection - precious few in the packet, by the way)

In between the Mortgage Lifters and the eggplants toward the front of the center vegetable bed.

Local Girl Makes Good

Louella Hill, local-food ambassador, answers Grist’s questions
29 Aug 2005

Since my husband monopolized the computer yesterday, I’m at home on my lunch hour blogging. I just discovered that peanut butter and orange-jalapeno jelly is a great sandwich combination! My co-worker swears by peanut butter and mint jelly, but I can’t quite go there yet.

The ribs are in the freezer, but I did eat Niman Ranch bacon on my BLTs this weekend. My eyes rolled back in my head. I can’t get too hooked on bacon, though; it will have to be an occasional treat because of my cholesterol level. My good cholesterol is always high (could it be the butterbeans?), and my bad cholesterol has been dropping for the past two years. I get checked again in a few weeks so I’m trying to behave. I will be extremely resistant to going on any more medication of any kind.

We’re enjoying the few precious Brandywine tomatoes that have ripened this week. Next year I will plant more Brandywines. The Mortgage Lifters are fun, but for a two-person family the Brandywines are a better size. Because I hate to waste food and you never, repeat, never refrigerate a tomato. A large Brandywine will make three tomato sandwiches, and a sweeter, more delicious tomato does not exist on this planet.

I had the heady experience of becoming a Flappy Bird on the TTLB ecosystem for three days, before suddenly sinking in rank by about 3000 and de-evolving to a Slithering Reptile again. Will I ever be able to soar with the wind again? If I hover in between, does this mean that I can be a pterodactyl? I always related to that Calvin and Hobbes fantasy.

I found a terrific blog recently that I think you will all enjoy called Farmgirl Fare. Susan writes about her experiences as an organic farmer and artisan baker in Missouri. The photography is lovely and the writing is about Slow Food at its best.

In particular, I recommend that you read her article, Ten Tips for Better Bread. If you’re a baker, you’ll love it. If you appreciate what bakers do, you’ll love it. If you don’t bake bread, you’ll want to start! I haven’t tried to knead bread in years because of my tendinitis, but I think I might try it again this coming weekend.

Farmgirl Fare
Ten Tips for Better Bread

A terrific blog by an organic farmer/artisan cook in Missouri. Inspiring, practical, beautiful, and entertaining!

I ordered a copy of Bread Alone today, and I’m going to inventory my bread-baking supplies tonight in order to prepare for Labor Day weekend. Yep, I’m jumping back on the bread baking horse!

Richard the Pig hangs out with his buddies at the Goat Lady Dairy Farm.

All right. I did it. I bought some baby back ribs this morning from Back Woods Farms at the Greensboro Farmer’s Curb Market. Wes Peterson changed the name of his business to avoid confusion with a Peterson who is selling conventionally raised meat at the Piedmont Triad Farmer’s Market at Sandy Ridge Road.

To understand the significance of this, you should know that I have boycotted pork since around 1996. I am enormously concerned about the effects of huge industrial hog farms on our state’s environment and quality of life. Plus, I had a mind-meld with a pig on a truck in which he was in a complete panic. I won’t tell you what he told me. It was a private thing just between us, and can’t be articulated in human words anyway.

In the past year, as I have become aware of the changing conditions of our food supply, and the importance of buying locally on the economy and the environment, I have finally come to this conclusion. I am going to support the small farmers who make an effort to provide us with healthy, humanely produced meat, poultry, egg, and dairy products. As much as I would like to become a vegetarian, it is not going to happen any time soon. And if I can eat something that used to breathe, what’s the difference between eating seafood and beef? Or pork? Or chicken? As long as these animals are raised in a pleasant environment in natural conditions and taken care of, they are better off than in the wild. My reasoning was that we’d be better off without pigs altogether than for them to be raised in horrible conditions. I still believe that is true, but it is not a practical solution. It won’t happen. But we do have choices now.

Until recently, you couldn’t get humanely farm-raised pork with no antibiotics or growth hormones unless you were buddies with a small farmer who raised his own. Now, with large companies like Niman Ranch and small farmers like Wes Peterson getting into the game, you can. It’s a different market these days. More and more consumers are demanding meat products that aren’t raised in filthy, disgusting conditions. You can also buy chicken, beef, turkey, and lamb. Deep Roots Market and Earth Fare carry organic, free-range, and antibiotic/hormone-free meats if you can’t make it to the farmers’ markets.

Now, I don’t know if I’ll be able to make myself eat these ribs. I’ve conditioned my mind against it for about nine years now, and you can convince yourself of anything if you work hard enough at it. My brain says, don’t eat a pig. It’s an intelligent creature whose only purpose in life is to suffer for our gain. But Wes is doing us, and pigs, a service here, and if I don’t eat these, my husband will be happy to have them all to himself.

I highly recommend that everyone watch The Meatrix. What will it be for you, the red pill or the blue pill? The video starts up when you open the page.

(Cross-posted at …slowly she turned and Slow Food Piedmont Triad.)

Earlier this year, I posted that the USDA had stranded small organic businesses when they reversed a decision to oversee organic certification for cosmetics. Now, they have reversed their reversal. This is good news for folks like me who are extremely sensitive to perfumes and whose-knows-what chemicals, but the bigger issue is truth in labeling.

Without the USDA requirements, there would be anarchy in product labeling, said Craig Minowa, an environmental scientist for the Minnesota-based Organic Consumers Assn.

“There are a number of industries making millions annually by making misleading claims,” Minowa said, often by adding trace amounts of organic materials to traditional chemical compounds. “Now, consumers can look for the USDA seal and know the product met tough standards.”

See the whole story at the LA Times: Organic Beauty Products Get a Lift With USDA About-Face

I grew up in a small farming community on the North/South Carolina line, where we grew most of our own fruits and vegetables and preserved them to eat year-round. In my home, frozen “TV” dinners were unheard of, and eating out at a restaurant of any kind was rare. Even the nearby burger joints were not fast food chains, and pizza delivery did not exist. Chinese food was exotic. Eating out, a special occasion, usually meant a road trip down to Calabash to eat fried seafood.

The mid-day meal, which we called dinner, was the biggest meal of the day. We always had a meat, two vegetables, bread (often cornbread or biscuits), dessert, and iced tea. The vegetables almost always included Silver Queen corn and one of these three: butterbeans, field peas, or green beans. Beans and peas were flavored with ham hocks or fatback, and bacon grease was saved in a container next to the stove to be reused. Supper was a light meal, usually consisting of sandwiches or soup, and milk.

Sundays were special. We always had pancakes or waffles for breakfast, and the first two were given to the beagles, Bullet and Sherman, who proudly buried them in the field out back. After church, my mother always cooked fried chicken, and I honestly have never tasted any fried chicken that good since. Sunday also meant biscuits–little delicate ones made with shortening–and some kind of luscious pie, cobbler, or cake.

These days I know that I have a rich food history. At the time, I took for granted that everyone ate as well as our family. For this reason, I only have fleeting images of food as a very young child.

The Sixties

My earliest memory is of my great aunt’s cornbread. In the part of southeastern North Carolina where I grew up, cornbread was fried, not baked. No one could ever duplicate Aunt Pauline’s cornbread. It was pancake-like in the middle and crunchy-lacey around the edges, and one piece filled a small skillet.

Our milk came from Mr. Cook’s cow down the road, and we kept it in a glass orange juice bottle that we washed and reused. My mother made the children chocolate milk every night. She did not keep soft drinks at home. She made us Kool-Aid and froze it in ice cube trays during the summer for treats. If we saved up our allowance we could spend it on a Mountain Dew, which was a regional product at that time, or a Nehi grape soda at the store.

Snacks seemed to revolve around peanut butter, or maybe I just remember them because I love peanut butter so much. Pieces of banana with peanut butter. Ritz crackers with peanut butter. There is no other kind of peanut butter except Peter Pan. My brother and I both became addicts. We stole jars of Peter Pan from the kitchen and hid them under the bed to furtively eat it out of the jar with a spoon.

I was fortunate that I was old enough to experience my grandfather’s farm in sandy central South Carolina. He was an agriculture teacher (as was my own father) and raised just about every kind of food on his farm. It was this knowledge and a lot of hard work that got my mother’s family through the Depression. My grandfather grew tobacco at one time, but he also had just about every kind of fruit and nut tree, grapevines, strawberries, chickens in the yard, and a fish pond. One of my very earliest memories was of being terrorized by a feisty rooster who chased me around the house pecking the backs of my chubby legs. That rooster ended up on the supper table.

The Seventies

Back in Marietta, my mother was in charge of the garden, which was located in the field behind our house. She started the children off in gardening by putting them in charge of radishes and zinnias. The money crops at our farm were tobacco, field corn, and soybeans, but my father usually planted a few rows of sweet corn and other vegetables to supplement the garden at the house. We filled three large freezers with peas, butterbeans, squash, corn, blueberries, fish, and shrimp every year. Green beans, stewed apples and tomatoes were canned, and cucumbers and watermelon rinds were pickled.

My father had two major sources of joy when it came to food. One was his blueberry patch. He began it as a hobby collection of several varieties, and kept adding to it until the harvest far surpassed our needs and our friends’ needs. I was an entrepreneurial child, and began selling bags of blueberries door-to-door on my bicycle. By the time I graduated from high school, I had a select list of customers for whom I picked berries, and a thriving pick-your-own business. Because of the diversity of the patch, our blueberries ripened over an extended period of time, and I picked blueberries for hours during the day, and then I picked them all night in my dreams. My favorites were the sky blue Tifblues, which could grow as large as a quarter on the tops of the bushes. I had to climb a ladder and stretch to get to them. I did not eat many berries, though. It was too much of a good thing.

The second source of food pride for my father was his reputation as a salt-water fisherman. He owned a rag-tag little marina on the Intercoastal Waterway between Sunset Beach and Calabash that serviced shrimp boats. Every Saturday he went down to Bonaparte Marina to check on his business and to fish for red drum around Bird Island. It is testimony to his fishing ability that for a long time I thought that a fish less than 12 inches long was too small to keep. Needless to say, we had fresh fish and shrimp on a regular basis, and plenty more to go in those freezers.

I didn’t understand the bounty of my family’s provisions, and I fell into the cheeseburger/hot dog/junk food habit any time they were available. I made myself a fried bologna, cheese, sweet pickle, and mayonnaise sandwich every day to take to school for lunch. I recreated this food horror later in my adult years and concluded once again that I was a very strange child.

The Eighties and Nineties

As it happens with most college students, moving away from home made me nostalgic for my mother’s cooking. When I went home for a weekend, I wolfed down butterbeans and corn. My mother often made country-style venison and grits for me, because she knew that I could only get that dish at home. Since our farm adjoins a huge swamp, we have a large deer population and people often gave us venison in exchange for allowing them to hunt on our land.

Perhaps my mother’s talents in the kitchen hurt me in this respect, because I didn’t learn to cook from her. My father wasn’t patient with my mistakes, so I was let off the hook on the inside chores and did yard work instead. I became interested in cooking after sharing an apartment with a good cook. Later I worked in a bookstore where I feverishly copied recipes from cookbooks. I became good friends with a couple of gourmet cooks who taught me a lot. However, it was all about taste. I did not think about how the food choices I made affected my health or the environment.

That turning point came in 1986. I was in a hospital coffee shop with my sister, taking a break from sitting with my father, who was dying of colon cancer several floors above us. My sister was quiet, and then said in disgust, “How can you eat that?” I looked in surprise at the sausage biscuit in my hand. The two things connected.

That is not to say that I became a health nut. (Neither did my sister.) But the seed was planted and I thought about what I put into my body from that day forward. The following years were filled with attempts to quit smoking and brief forays into vegetarianism. I did quit smoking for good in 1995, and made other lifestyle changes to promote my health. I joined a natural foods co-op in 1990 and planted a small organic garden. My interest in history led me to a fascination with heirloom vegetables. I stopped buying pork in the late 1990s after becoming aware of what large hog farms were doing to our environment and quality of life in North Carolina. We never seemed to have enough money to make all my buying choices as ecologically sound as I wished. Finally, moderation became my mantra. I did what I could within the circumstances of my life, and I felt better about it. Now I find that I am able to add more green choices bit by bit by educating myself about my options.

The 21st Century

The next seed was planted when I went on a farm tour and saw Charlie Headington’s backyard. He lives close by and I was inspired to do the same with my own backyard. This more intensive contact with the earth and my subsequent entry into the MALS program not only strengthened my resolve to “walk my talk,” but to revive an earlier interest in voluntary simplicity as a spiritual path. My attention to food has moved from a personal curiosity to a wider-reaching global concern. Part of this concern has stemmed from watching small farms wither away as industrial agriculture and residential development encroaches.

My recent involvement with Slow Food has enlightened me about the importance of local food and quality humane animal operations. Namely, that the re-emergence of these food sources indicates a growing trend that the public needs to know more about so that the consumers can connect with the farmers, and vice-versa. Many farmers, such as my brother, have not been aware that they have options other than traditional agricultural methods. I do not believe at this time that it will be possible to bring back the old days of agriculture, but I am filled with hope that we can preserve at least part of my family heritage along with the improvement of the quality of life for millions of others here on Earth.

Fresh Gets Invited to the Cool Table

By MARIAN BURROS
Published: August 24, 2005
New York Times