Kudos to Lafayette College Corn

This post, courtesy of Rhonda:
"I've been back to school a couple days now. Imagine my surprise when I saw plots of corn on the main student quad...they had sent out an email about it a couple days before students got back to school but I thought it was a little thing...with little corn but no...my school went ALL OUT! Different corn varieties grown under different circumstances. This for First Year Seminars; the various freshman college introductory courses will revolve around the book, "Omnivore's Dilemma", and the themes of agriculture, agricultural dependence, how we rely so heavy on corn and corn derived products, and the lack of variety among the stuff we grow. The hope to involve the whole college community, and the town of Easton in the project, needless to say...i thought of you and the article about The Oil We Eat (except this time its corn...).
http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~cornonthequad/creations.html
We have an actual camera to catch possible vandals. People have been sending the link to their parents and arranging times to go call people and wave at them through the corn cam...
Go to the cornblog section to see the corn cam!!! "

There are also tons of campus events going on around corn: a showing of the film King Corn, and "Corn Fest" events and speakers all day Sept. 10 in celebration of their harvest. (see below).

The idea is that the whole school reads the same book and not only do they talk about it, they generate events and action around its message. This year the book is Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. Which is excellent reading, the talk of the town, and deserving of all the praise it's gotten, as far as I'm concerned.

"Corn on the Quad Harvest Fest": Wednesday, September 10 from 4:15 p.m. to about 6:45 p.m.

Come celebrate (and eat) our corn on the quad! Roasted corn, Native American dancers, Cherokee songs and drumming, storytelling, a no-face doll making demonstration and tables with posters and discussions about ethanol, corn genetics, corn and South American culture, campus composting, and solar panels. In case of rain: Farinon Center - Marlo Room

"How We Got Where We Are (with Corn) Today" Wednesday, September 10 from noon to 1:00 p.m. in the Gendebien Room, Skillman Library.

Corn has been implicated in slavery, colonialism, poverty, and obesity, at the same time that it is promoted as a panacea for hunger and even climate change. How did our individual and collective choices cause this humble grain of the Americas to become a global commodity, alternative fuel solution, and mutant pariah? Social science and humanities professors share their disciplines' unique perspectives on contemporary environmental issues related to corn agriculture and its byproducts.

Found it! In Grave Danger of Falling Food

The Permaculture Guy (named Fynn, right?) we met in New Zealand recommended this film highly. It isn't accessible in Netflix, but here's the great news: it's available online! "In Grave Danger of Falling Food," with Bill Mollison. 52:00, well worth watching.

a GREAT resource

The Community Food Security Coalition is up to all the right stuff. Check them out. Their list of publications is especially impressive.

And as long as I'm at it, I also caught this article on urban food deserts, involving a study of London, Ontario Canada. Ok ok, so I'm not the most timely blogger (the study came out in mid-April). But it is fascinating stuff, and, I'm sure, still highly relevant. What especially catches my eye is that the question at play is NOT that the number of supermarkets substantially fewer. Rather, at issue is that suburban giant supermarkets make access to food difficult - it has everything to do with access questions: transportation issues and how neighborhoods incentivize development (for which people and businesses and where). And of course: walking and public transit determine access to grocery stores for the poor - not cars.

Magic Mushrooms: oil-spill clean-ups

My kitchen is almost never caught without mushrooms in the fridge. I love all sorts of ugly mushrooms, with all their goofy-looking gills and super juicy, earthy flavors. But recently I've discovered some things about fungi that make me even more of a fan: Oyster mushrooms (which retail for about $12-18/lb) are being applied in phytoremediation - or should I say, mycoremediation. That is, they have the amazing ability to uptake toxins, from soil or water, and to not become toxic themselves.

The deal is this: Mushrooms need a substrate in order to have their mycelium thrive - and a certain about of light, adequate temperature, and humidity. But once they've got these basic conditions (which are not at all difficult to accomplish - you can even grow oyster mushrooms on coffee beans in your own apartment!) the mushrooms will grow, and flourish.

In the Ecuadorian Amazon, the guys who write at the Fungal Jungle blog successfully used mushrooms to clean up an oil spill and talk about the whole process. An oil spill recently happened in the San Francisco Bay (see here for the oil spill story) and... you guessed it - mushrooms - with a growing substrate of human hair mats (yes, human hair... bet you didn't guess that part!) are being used in some experimental sites for cleaning it up. Kudos to the folks at Matter of Trust for collecting human hair for just this purpose. The YouTube video about the clean-up is worth checking out.

I'm all for supporting cancer research and wigs for those treated for cancer, like the Locks of Love and Pantene program of using hair for wigs. But next time I chop off my locks, Matter of Trust is getting my donation; it'll be my little contribution back to the fungi kingdom, and the Earth.

Soup and Jane Addams

An old community organizing mantra goes something like this:
Give them food, and they will come.
This worked in social-work pioneer Jane Addams' time, as she promoted women's rights, children's well-being, and mediated labor disputes in Chicago at one of the nations first settlement houses. And now it's back in vogue, and again thriving at the Hull House:

Hull-House Kitchen: Rethinking Soup
Every Tuesday
Noon-1:30
Residents' Dining Hall
800 S. Halsted St., Chicago
312.413.5353

FREE
(donations from $.01 to $1,000,000 gladly accepted)

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

The Hull-House Kitchen will reopen on Tuesday, August 19th for Rethinking Soup from noon to 1:30. We hope you will come and find out what your fellow community members have been up to during the hiatus.

The day's program will include a special listening session with short audio-docs about food and other enticing subjects chosen with help from Third Coast International Audio Festival.

Gather every Tuesday to eat delicious, healthy soup and have fresh, organic conversation about many of the urgent social, cultural, economic, and environmental food issues facing us all.

Please join us in the historic Residents' Dining Hall, where Upton Sinclair, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B.DuBois, Gertrude Stein and other important social reformers met to share meals and ideals, debate one another, and conspire to change the world. Activists, farmers, doctors, economists, artists, and guest chefs will join us each week to present their ideas and projects.

The Fruit and Labor of Love

Today's INSPIRATION: Meals with Dignity out of Homelessness

This Sunday morning I awoke at 6:00 am. Yes, it was early. But not that bad, considering that by 9:00 I'd done a good deed for the week and already felt like I'd made something of my day. I hopped on my bike, rode about a mile south of my house to Uptown, and cooked breakfast for the homeless.

We're not talking soup-kitchen style volunteering, though. Oh no. Far better! This was at the Inspiration Cafe. I've long volunteered here, since the days I was 16 and seeking community service hours in high school. At the time, Inspiration was run out of a basement, a shoe-string budget, and was serving about 30 people. It was still a big step up from their roots, in 1989, serving meals out of a red wagon. These days, it is a vibrant non-profit, which continues doing great work. They have a full open-to-the-public restaurant, culinary training courses for its clients, catering, and are even selling aprons and locally-roasted fair-trade organic coffee over the internet.

The basic idea: the homeless/mentally ill/ unemployed/ recovering substance abusers deserve dignity. Getting out of these tough situations is not just about getting free meals, as most soup kitchens or shelters would have it. Instead, Inspiration thinks about it as a question of developing healthy human interactions, by being treated with respect and dignity. Giving people contact with case workers, and offering free food to people who have a commitment to improving their conditions, is a great way to start. When you throw a little job training, life-skills training, and case-worker support into the picture, things start to change, bit by bit.

This morning made me think a lot about the power of food - especially in restaurant settings. It helped me think about some of the basic components of dignity in those situations- that you can send something back if you're dissatisfied, you are entitled to be particular about how you want your eggs, and to be able to have blueberries in your fruit salad and whole-grain fresh bread even if the food is free, and you're unemployed or homeless. I was reminded that getting better at treating yourself with respect and getting treated with respect by other people is probably one of the biggest ways to 'do something good.' The acts of dining and of cooking are essential to how it begins - you draw people in with food - and through the simple act of doing something both simple and creative, get a hook which seems to work pretty well at making situations better for people.

Special thanks to Willy, Dan, and my dad Stan for all the smiles and jokes as we scrambled eggs, cooked the bacon, and made those hash browns!