reason for the bowtie

Creative out-of-the-box thinking and going through life with a critical eye have something in common.

This past weekend I spoke at the one-day Mom University event on how being a popular kid in school, the confinement to a few generic number of traits, behavioral and physical expressions, also somewhat stunts the development of more defined individual personality traits for a while, and that as parents we can help our kids along in breaking out of that mold.  That requires critical thinking and creativity.  

There is strength in numbers and generally we feel safer when we're among like-minded people.  But staying true to yourself sometimes involves going out on a limb.  The corporate world, for example, can feel so confining to a freethinker and non-conformist.  Many have been breaking out of it for the past few years and become entrepreneurs to work on their own creative terms.

If you prefer to be one of many you may feel safer wearing a tie, if you don't mind sticking up for a bit more creativity you might choose a bowtie instead.  Are you a tie or a bowtie kind of a person?

my phone, my cookbook

When there is a book or library sale I usually come back with a few cookbooks.  I love reading cookbooks for inspiration, and to indulge in the pretty pictures.  Hence, my cookbook library is fairly considerable - but now mostly unused. The NY Times cooking section and the stray magazine here or there are also sometime and one-time sources of inspiration for recipes.  However, once read I rarely go back into a cookbook for inspiration or a recipe, or trying to locate that recipe I cut out from the paper last year.   Hence, I also have a considerable pile of unsorted cut out recipes lying around my kitchen.

 The very modern reason for stopping to use cookbooks for my everyday/everynight referral needs is that I can find what I need so much faster on my phone.  No wonder we're all glued to our devices.  They're just so all round useful.  I can punch in any two or three main ingredients and add -recipe, such as pepper lentil celery recipe (just made that up), and pronto I find a selection of recipes with the ingredients I want to work with.  So practical! You can't do such a reverse search in a paper cookbook, and forget about that pile of newspaper clippings. It's of course different if I want to look up dessert options for a festive meal, or various ways of making panna cotta.  A cookbook can still be useful for such a search.  

 Are cookbooks going the way of the phone book? What works for you?

all the money we need?

Our economy and cultural construct are based on a monetary system of scarcity, which in turn is based on a foundation of competition, and winning versus losing.  Our currency used to be pegged to gold, but is no longer. Thus there is nothing actually backing your paper dollar bill other than our cultural agreement that that bill is actual worth a dollar because the government, and all of us, say so.  

If the scarcity of money is an agreement based on a belief system, then we could conceivably change that.   Enters MMT or Modern Monetary Theory.  This idea turns the idea of monetary issuance and taxes completely on its head.  Instead of the government raising taxes first to spend it later on programs, it offers jobs and social services upfront instead, raises no taxes, and funnels all that tax and government salary money back into the economy. Wow! 

Previously I have written about new economic thoughts like local currencies, hour banks, and a universal basic income.  I have also written about our culture of scarcity.  Yet nature is so abundant.  Where does this idea that there isn't enough come from? I am intrigued. MMT is a new buzzword but a highly controversial theory, as many completely new ideas are. But we need to think out of the present economic box to evolve our culture beyond its current paradigm.

a healthy dose of skepticism

It's not because most do it that it's right, or worthwhile repeating, or adopting without questions.  Living with intention means asking questions and doing what you do with awareness - so knowing why you do, what you do, the way you do it.  When you don't question you conform.  You don't stick out, but you may not have made an informed decision either.    

 Over here people who eat meat mostly eat steaks, chops and roasts.  In other parts of the world all parts of the animal are used, and offal or innards are eaten so no part of the animal gets wasted.  Over here we pay an awful lot for college.  In other parts of the world college is free.  Over here we pay lots and lots for medical care.  In other parts of the world medical care is free or inexpensive. Many boys over here believe most colors are for girls, especially pink and purple.  Hence they wear drab blacks and greys and blues and browns.  

Do you feel more comfortable conforming?  Or do you prefer to dig deeper because you wonder why?  Going against the grain is bit like swimming upstream and it forms character because you have to defend your other way of doing or thinking.  It doesn't matter what it's about, but it matters whether or not you've thought about it before making a decision.

it's part of the culture

Flower shops, chains and independent ones, are a thing in Germany. Everyone buys cut flowers.  You bring them when visiting in the afternoon for coffee and cake, you give them when invited for dinner, you get them for yourself, or you offer them just because.  At home growing up we always had beautiful cut flowers on the birthday table, dad included, no gender bias.

 While I was waiting in line at the flower shop a few days ago in Germany, a young man picked two bunches of tulips and had them arranged with some pretty leaves.  He said he was three minutes from home and asked if he needed to cut the stems again once back, obviously interested in their care.  An older man bought two bunches of narcissus, for himself I gathered, because he had them wrapped in plain brown paper, no arranging.  A woman got forsythia branches for her home.  I waited in line to have the flowers for my mom prettied up with greenery.  

Flowers are not only a women's thing in Germany, as I could attest from the diverse line of shoppers.  The displays are abundant, arranged by type of flower and color. The cost is always reasonable. You can take the flowers home as is, or, as many people do, have them arranged professionally with skill and greens, wrapped in gift wrap or plain brown paper, all for just a small extra fee.

Cut flowers are part of the culture.  They add to the enjoyment of life, they beautify a corner of your home, or place a glint of pleasure in the eyes of the receiver.

a real market

Supermarket shopping is somewhat sterile and aseptic when compared to how people in other parts of the world shop.  We are used to our clean and brightly lit stores with their tiled floors, and aisles and aisles of packaged goods. Neat and organized, and most food out of the way of hands and noses.  Only on the perimeter can you find fresh fish and produce, but even the meat is prepackaged and sealed in plastic, and most bakery items are factory made and displayed in clamshells or plastic bags.  Items are bar coded and prices are set.

In a search for authenticity, freshness, local produce and a more direct connection to our food, farmer's markets have taken off in the past twenty or so years in this country, but many of them have an air of exclusivity and are expensive. Not so in other parts of the world.  

Markets, either open air or in permanent indoor halls, are the way the rest of the world shops.  In European markets we admire abundant displays of cheeses, produce piled high in attractive pyramid shapes or displayed in baskets, meats and charcuterie spreads, just caught fish and shellfish glistening with freshness on crushed ice, locally baked breads and pastries, but also clothing, cleaning products, flowers, and food stalls for a coffee or snack while you shop.  The French touch and smell their produce to make sure it meets their standard of ripeness and aroma.  The fruit merchant will ask you when you want to eat your melon and select it based on its level of ripeness.  When you buy fish you look at its eyes and gills to ascertain freshness, and to make sure it doesn't smell, well fishy. Cheese too needs to be bought for when you want to eat it.  Too hard it will need to sit for a few days, too soft it is past its prime.   Do you want to eat it today, tomorrow, or the day after?  The cheesemonger will help you select your cheese accordingly. The butcher may ask how you plan to prepare your chosen cut and perhaps offer a recipe.

The colorful markets of Africa, Asia or South America, are even more exotic to us.  The souks in North Africa are organized by type for better comparison.  In the slipper souk you find stall after stall of nothing but slippers, while the spice souk has stand after stand of spices heaped into neat cones on flat wicker trays, and the date souk specializes in the myriad types of dates of which Morocco has over one hundred.  Here, the vendor may give you a date or a few nuts to taste to persuade you that his are the best, here you need to bargain because it's part of the game and prices are not set.  You can buy everything in these markets, including live fish and live poultry, clothes, dishes, spices, or household items.  In more rural areas the wares are spread out on cloths or tarps on the ground, as we have seen in India. The smells by the fish or cheese stands may be pungent, the colors of spices piled high on trays are vibrant, the sights and sounds of live poultry kept in large wicker baskets in a Chinese market are noisy.

We lose aliveness, authenticity, rawness, real connection to our food, as well as the beauty of these enticing displays that make us want to taste and buy all of these wonderful foods,  when we remain in our gentrified bubble.  It's good to get out every once in a while to see other realities.  Here an earlier related post on the need to get out.

odd produce

Sometimes, established cultural patterns no longer serve, maybe they never have.  Take food waste that stems from unusually shaped produce. Whoever determined that carrots had to be straight and shaped just so?  Not two legs, definitely not three or more legs, only one single root leg, although children delight in detecting animal and human forms in some of these odd shaped root vegetables. That Bell peppers shouldn't be gnarly?  That all apples in a bag had to be the same size? Or that potatoes should be nice and evenly round?  Odd shapes of course do not alter the taste or nutritional content one bit. 

According to the website Ugly Produce is Beautiful, in the US annually "about 6 billion pounds of producego largely unharvested or unsold for aesthetic reasons." That is insane!  What hubris. It's not new news that we don't have to produce more food to stave off world hunger, but that world hunger stems from distribution and waste problems.  Industrialization of the food distribution system made packaging of evenly shaped produce more convenient, although square watermelons did not make it into the mainstream, and supermarkets like the display quality of evenly shaped produce.

The art of living deeply entails inspecting and questioning cultural patterns so that you do something because it makes sense to you, not because everyone else does it - the lemming syndrome.  Through our CSA we get whatever produce is harvested, even or odd shaped, regular or irregular.  And awareness about so-called ugly produce is growing in all industrialized countries. I just signed up for deliveries of ugly organic produce at half price.  Delivered to my door.  Counters food waste. Couldn't be more convenient.

a new math

We are so used to this type of math:

                                    100 - 30 = 70

 But how about this instead?

                                    100 - 30 = 110

The first equation is how conventional agriculture works.  We grow and harvest crops, which deplete the soil of nutrients and minerals, the soil erodes (it literally flies away at alarming rates because the soil lies bare from fall to spring and the wind takes it away), we desperately throw chemical fertilizer and pesticides at it, the ecosystem degrades, insect and bird populations shrink, carbon goes up, we eek out another harvest until the input needs to be increased yet again.

Although there are wide differences in organic practices, the organic label or certification more or less only specifies a clean version of conventional agriculture in that the chemical fertilizers and pesticides are substituted with natural inputs (and no GMOs permitted).  Still, mostly purchased inputs, but not toxic, process is similar.  Soil and mineral content are certainly richer than compared to conventional agriculture, and organic practices maintain the soil, but they don’t by definition regenerate it. Sheldon Frith explains that the main difference between organic and regenerative agriculture is that organic is mainly chemically based, while regenerative is ecologically and biologically based.  

Regenerative agriculture is based on the premise that through a complete understanding of, and cooperation in sync with, the local ecosystem, we end up with something better than where we started.  Wow! Sounds unreal? Regenerative agriculture works without outside inputs and actually rebuilds the soil and ecosystem on an ongoing basis, and even though the crops extract minerals and nutrients from the soil, as time goes by the ecosystem becomes stronger and more complex, and the soil healthier. Regenerative agricultural systems are unique and local with no one-size-fits-all prescriptions.  Biodynamic agriculture and permaculture are such regenerative agricultural models and I have written about them previously.

Key features of regenerative agriculture are the rebuilding and retention of our depleted topsoil through no-till practices and growing perennial crops (I have previously written about these too), the reestablishment of grasslands, and carbon sequestration, among others. Healthier soil means more mineral and nutrient rich food for us, a healthier ecosystem all around, and packing some of that surplus carbon away into the soil.  

Don’t ditch your Prius yet, but this practice counters climate change! Win-win!  

sizzling energy

My husband called me from the voting place early in the morning and reported that the energy was sizzling, a photographer was documenting for the local press, people were chatting, and he encouraged me to come out and vote right away instead of waiting until later in the day.

The parking lot was indeed full when I arrived not long after, and an air of anticipation permeated the voting place.  I felt an almost giddy excitement, the way children anticipate Christmas in the hopes for good things.  The energy was indeed crispy and it wasn't even 9am yet.  The election officers had arrived at 5am to be ready for when polls opened at 6.    Several had their first or second of many coffee cups in front of them, anticipating a long and busy day, until 10 at night.  

I could feel the spirit, the energy, the hopefulness at the polling place.  No matter what your convictions, expectations, or wishes for this momentous and important election - in the end we all come from the same place of hope, anticipation, and a wish for a turn for the better.  Voting is all the more meaningful when you know that every vote counts, as it does in the mid-terms.  It looks like people have been jolted out of their voter complacency. It's encouraging.  Democracy only works if we participate in it.

always new words

There are two words I have come across quite a bit lately, and you won't find them in an older print dictionary.  They are words that express new cultural patterns and sensibilities.  Language is always a work in progress and adapts to new ways of thinking. Shakespeare may be difficult to understand, while the more recent language of Charles Dickens may simply sound old fashioned.  But both are proof that we think and speak differently now than then.  Think of how the meaning of the word gayhas changed over time.  In addition to such shifts in meaning, we also invent brand new words for ideas and products that didn't exist previously.

Othering, used as a verb, is such a new word.  It refers to putting up a mental and verbal barrier, or depersonalizing an entire group of people or even animals, when we distinguish them as "them, not us," or as other. It is a term that has become so relevant in an age of bipartisanship, binarism, divisiveness, and the reduction of issues to either wrong or right.   While the word otheris of course not new, using it as a verb, as in othering, is new.

Woke is the second word.  Woke is a word of African-American origin that means being aware and awakened to social and cultural issues of change.  The word's meaning hasn't changed much, but it has entered mainstream language and awareness.  

It is interesting to experience language changing right in front of my eyes.  Woke and otheringwere not in my vocabulary and awareness a few years ago, yet the need to express what these words convey has birthed them and spread their use.  Do you know any new words?