Stone Soup

Hash.

According to a 2012 report released by the Natural Resource Defense Council 40 percent of the food in the United States goes to waste. Much of this is in the production and marketing of pre-packed and pre-prepared foods, and much of it is due to over-sized restaurant portions. But a lot of it just gets tossed from our refrigerators because we forgot to get around to cooking it.

Food waste argues against itself. There are no good reasons to waste food, only good excuses for why it happens. I believe that one of the primary contributors to American food waste is the loss of home life and the domestic art of cooking. Sure, people still make a couple of things here and there, and we will still make a special trip to the store to try a new recipe from the Times, but the art of daily cooking, and the practice of sitting down to eat has been disappearing from our lives since the 1980's. Cooking has become a form of social action.

That we make too much food and then throw it away or let the leftovers go bad is true, but an overlooked and important contribution to food waste is in our food preparation. More specifically, because we no longer cook from scratch or with regularity, we waste more food. Vegetable ends and peels go into the trash or compost instead of a broth. Past-fresh breads and pastries are thrown out instead of cooked into a bread pudding. Leftovers and need to be eaten now items are tossed over for takeout instead of cooked into a improvised hash. Knowing how to prepare our food, what is edible and is not, how long it can be kept, or how to freeze and preserve leftovers or seasonal batches can prevent food waste as well. Do you use the lemon zest before you slice the lemon? Do you remember to toss the squeezed lemon wedges in with the chicken to season it as it roasts?

While food preparation waste may not be the largest contributor to our overall food waste, the NRDC claims that a decrease in our food waste of even 15 percent could feed 25 million Americans annually. Small changes go a long way.

The best things you could be cooking with things you might otherwise throw away:

1. hash
2. vegetable broth
3. sweet or savory bread pudding
4. veggie and cheese spreads/tapenades
5. smoothies and juices

Recipes:

Hash is an dish with protein, veggies and some kind of starch (potatoes etc.) although you can substitute a grain like rice or quinoa.

The New York Times lists lots of simple and delicious hash recipes:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/vegetable-hash-for-an-easy-dinner/

Vegetable and meat broths can be made easily from scraps and frozen until you need them. An easy starter recipe from Frugal Living:

http://frugalliving.about.com/od/makeyourowningredients/r/Vegetable_Broth.htm

Bread puddings are easy and flexible, substitute any kind of bread and add or subtract sweet and savory ingredients.

Ina Garten's Bread Pudding:

http://www.barefootcontessa.com/recipes.aspx?CookBookID=0&RecipeID=813

Veggie and cheese spreads can be made in minutes with bits and pieces of whatever you have lying around. Alton Brown has a great beginners recipe:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/roasted-vegetable-spread-recipe/index.html

Smoothies are almost infinitely variable. Better Homes and Gardens provides a great selection of recipes:

http://www.bhg.com/recipes/drinks/anytime-drinks/smoothie-recipes/

Resources/References:

NRDC Report of Food Waste:

http://www.nrdc.org/food/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf

Get On the Bus

hindsight.

In my 20's I bowed down at the alter of higher education. It was a ticket out of where I came from into the world of adulthood. For years, education remained a hallmark of legitimacy and success amongst my contemporaries, an essential in the development of an adult persona worthy of admiration and praise. As it turns out, what it isn’t, for most people, is a direct path to either a viable vocation or a sense of self definition and fulfillment. As it turns out there is no intellectual or financial shortcut to happiness or the pursuit of an authentic life. There is no end point, just the journey. Now, with all my tangible success as defined by modern society, I find myself out of pace with my contemporaries. The fruits of my previous labors have satisfied my early ambitions, and the expectations of society at large, but no longer satisfy my soul. For all the middle class comforts I may have available to me based on age, career, education, and situation, I appear to be unable to settle, either down, in, or for something less than a true manifestation of myself. I find myself, so to speak, unable to get on the bus. Ironically, I am returning to the University as a place of refuge. No longer a means to an end, education is now a way to practice and hone my craft, to live a life that satisfies my soul. I am often asked, with regard to my returning to school to dance, “And what will you do with your degree?” As a geologist, I was asked this question often enough, and was quite keen to answer it, with all my professionalism and all the things that make me look good on paper, to prove that my choices would serve a greater purpose, push me ahead, in to a new tax bracket, into a new house, a job, stability. I was keen to prove that the fruits of my labor would justify my path, that I would, in fact, be on the bus. Now, my answer is far more simple. What will I do with it? I will dance. I will not wait for outside fulfillment or validation, I am not working towards some future goal of happiness, I am manifesting it, right here, now, as I walk my path. I will dance as though no one is watching, and as for the rest, I’m not particularly worried about it.

A Laying On of Hands

retreat.

One of my favorite things to advocate for in terms of the promotion of a healthy environment and good nutrition is the formation of community. Or, put differently, the loss of community in the modern way of life appears to be intimately linked to the destruction of the environment and the deterioration of public health.

We began to lose community in the process of trying to create it. In building suburbs we created lifestyles based on long, isolating, gas-guzzling commutes that eroded our personal time making social interaction and exercise harder to come by. Beyond that, we designed our suburbs without sidewalks, town centers, or public play spaces, effectively isolating our children from one another and putting them and their caretakers back in the car in order to grocery shop or go to the park. Of course, once you’re in the car, the likelihood of each person on a particular street going to a different park or grocery store increases, decreasing the casual everyday interactions between neighbors that do so much to foster community. The time and energy required to prepare meals of whole foods from local sources was also squeezed out by the distribution of our lives across a greater geography and our increasing desire for “down time” and instant gratification.

And isolation breeds isolation. Once disconnected from our neighbors and surrounding community, we are more likely to tell ourselves that video tennis is a reasonable substitute for actually going to play tennis, forgetting that going to play tennis may involve taking a walk, running into the neighbors, getting substantively more exercise and valuable vitamin D, and interacting with our children and the environment.

And infrastructure breeds infrastructure. Once we are tied to our cars for all of our activities we need an increasingly large number of roads, increasing in size, to handle our increasing numbers and increasingly large cars. Retreating to our houses necessitates larger and larger houses, filled with more and more things, to fill the void left by the absence of regular social interaction and the necessary chores of a conscious lifestyle. Consumption itself becomes a hobby. Instead of community centers, our houses become show pieces, museums to ourselves with all the accoutrements of a modern lifestyle, televisions, stereos, Jacuzzi tubs, and little evidence of actual interaction with the world at large.

I suggest that the formation and fostering of community in and of itself is an act of subversion, or at least a tangible protest of the current status quo. I believe that community is one antidote to deteriorating pubic health, eroded social services, environmental decline and climate change, and the propagation of an unhealthy and unsustainable popular monoculture. And it’s easy. And it’s free.

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out

apathy.

This week, the Nielsen media-trackers announced that the average American now watches an all-time high of 151 hours of television a month. Five hours a day. This number is up from last year, when we only watched 145 hours of television a month. This number, of course, does not include movies, anything on-line, video phones, or the eight hours a day most of us spend in front of a computer at work. This number, as frightening as it is, does not tell us the more important piece of information, total screen time. But if you work a desk job and watch your five hours a day of tv, you're already spending more than half your day, and ultimately your life, staring into a screen. As something of an understatement, we need to consider the connections between our 25% rate of obesity nationwide, the rising occurrence of diabetes, and the estimated 10 percent of the population suffering from depression at any given moment and how much screen time we get. But more than anything, we need to get up. Stand up, walk around, do your dishes, some tai chi, taxes, whatever. Life is short, participate.


References:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/TV/02/24/us.video.nielsen/index.html?iref=newssearch
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/1926814/Depression-Statistics-in-US-Households
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/02/tv-usage-grows.html

If a Tree Falls

lcd.

Barack and Michelle Obama entering the inaugural ball on January 20, 2009. What strikes me about this image is that everyone in the audience is viewing the moment via their cell phones and cameras. Not just the press corps, but the attendees, everyone.

This is a phenomenon that I struggle with. Which is more important, participating in the moment, or documenting it? This was an easier question when our technology was still cumbersome and unfamiliar (picture the annoying Dad carrying an eight pound video recorder through an entire family vacation). But now, it's not as easy to draw a line between participation and documentation.

Which is more important, experiencing the moment fully, or being able to share it almost instantaneously with your family, friends, or blog followers? Is the experience somehow enhanced by being able to share it in nearly real time? Is the experience somehow diminished if it's not recorded? That seems to be the modern consensus if the picture above carries any significance. But then, there was a press corps present, a member of which took the picture, so the moment above was, in fact, being recorded. What's astounding is how many people felt the need to record it themselves.

I worry that we are entering an era in which our identities are somehow so tied to other people, that we will all become trees in the forest, afraid that our experiences, our lives, ourselves, will be lost, or perhaps not exist at all, if no one is around to witness it.

Do or Do Not.

design.

In post-WWII Poland the communist authority officially sanctioned only one artistic movement, Socialist Realism, a style of realism intended to further propagandize socialism and communism. By the 1970's a new communist Poland had emerged in response to social unrest and a failing economy. Citizens were granted limited freedom of speech and access to western media. In isolation, a new Polish aesthetic developed. As some consequence of this new modernity, western movies were imported, but released with new poster art, as demonstrated above in the official movie poster for the Polish release of Star Wars.

http://www.theartofposter.com/newex.htm

Star Wars - gwiezdne wojny Limited edition art poster with the film subject. 400 copies printed Original Polish poster designer: Michal Ksiazek