Hazelfaern Again

September 23, 2007

Luz: Girl of the Knowing

Go, now, and check out Luz: Girl of the Knowing! Then come back and tell me how it awesome it is :)

From the creatrix, Claudia Davila:

"LUZ was inspired by my first ever (self-published) comic book, SPOILED, a tale about the relationship between humankind and nature in relation to peak oil — the end of the petroleum era. Unlike the comic book, this web strip will contain practical skills to learn for when fossil energy ends. Our heroine is Luz, a girl on a mission to gather "the knowing": knowledge and experience about sustainable survival for humans, specifically in urban centers. Occasionally we’ll glimpse into Luz’s musings about the human condition and our connection, or lack thereof, to the natural world. I hope you enjoy this bi-weekly strip, while accumulating "the knowing" for yourself as the post-petroleum era approaches."

September 16, 2007

Plenty: The Grace of Owning Up to Enough

Filed under: Wholebrain Sustenance, Jen Says Go!, What's Jen Reading? — Jen @ 11:12 am

Admittedly, I read this book several months ago, yet it’s had such an impact on me I wanted to turn back time and review it here.

Plenty is the story of James and Alisa Smith, a Toronto couple who spend a year eating nothing but local foods. Their joint decision is set off by an impromptu gathered feast they share with friends while temporarily stuck in their summer retreat in the mountains. When they return back to their normal workaday life in the city, James, who’s documented some less than appealing facts about the sugar trade and other aspects of the global food supply for his day job, talks his girlfriend into attempting this experiment with him: to only eat foods that have traveled 100 miles or less from source to dinner plate.

And though James and Alisa do no planning whasoever — they discover that no one in their region grows wheat so they go without flour for nine months until stumbling over some rougue farmer in the area who not only grows wheat but mills it, too — the sincerity and tenacity of this couple makes for an absorbing story.

The two are talented writers who take turns narrating chapter by chapter. They talk about the changes that have occurred in their region from the early 1900’s to the present, they talk about the challenges they faced with this diet, living in an apartment in a big city, trying to work with local foods while honoring their previous commitment to a strict vegetarianism in which they eat no meat, dairy or eggs (but do eat fish — to my mind, their definition of vegetarian is a little loose to begin with and becomes progressively less strict through the book) yet the whole of the book culminates in an invitation to join them in their adventure.

Local eating has an immediate impact on the environment through reducing carbon emissions from lengthy transportation (most foods travel a minimum of 3,000 miles from field to plate). It also helps to keep communities interconnected — just consider that your average customer has 10 times as many conversations at the local Farmer’s Market as at the local big box supermarket. Farmer’s Markets help ensure that farmers and their help receive a living wage and relatedly this helps to reduce our need for cheap and frequently illegal labor — which means local foods may help us with the security of our borders.

I can’t resist pointing out, however, the difference between the two versions of this book that were released in Canada and in the US. The Canadian version is a straightforward description of what this book is about. The US version, on the other hand, is almost a plea before the reader can look any further — "Bear in mind that we have plenty right now — this book is not about depriviation! Here, look at this big juicy tomato!" And it really isn’t about deprivation. It’s about an  awareness that will hopefully lead to revitilization.

At least it certainly has been for me. A few things I’ve discovered along the way: our two local Farmer’s Markets, the Old Guilford Mill which was originally built in  1767 and  not only currently makes local flours, grits, dried fruits, and baking mixes but also supplies it’s own power, as well as Local Harvest which connects individuals to local farmers and CSA programs and Slow Foods the organization which will supply any interested visitor with information about their own regional resources.
 

September 15, 2007

Back to the Future, Victoria, With a Vengeance

Herland, a nearly-lost feminist Utopian novel by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a hundred years later, is still an absolute romp.

The nut-shell synopsis:

The era is Victorian. Three gallavanting, adventurous men, one with a small fortune, a gadget collection and an ego that will remind future generations of James Bond minus the day job, stumble upon a lost nation composed entirely of women that the trio cheekily nickname Herland. Herland  was suddenly cut off from the rest of human civilization over a thousand years prior in the midst of a civil insurrection and a landslide that deprived the early city-state of it’s men. Those first women managed to survive when one of the women experienced spontaneous parthenogenesis, a literal virgin birth. And Voila, the world is gifted with a true Mother Country.

This is heady material written by a real Victorian feminist agitator (who also ran her own newspaper and authored several other critical texts). Yet it’s also a comedy written in the classic satirical style of Enlightenment writers like Voltaire and Jonathon Swift.

Only here, as opposed to using a naive and wide-eyed outsider along the lines of Voltaire’s Candide or the Ingenue, Gilman has created a whole nation of naive and sincere outsider women to act as a cast of straight-ladies who ask disturbing and only somewhat artless questions of our visiting Victorian gentlemen. For instance, if women shouldn’t work why is it that, in the outside world, over 3/4’s of the female population are employeed in paying labor? Is poverty meant to be a statement on individual worth? Who does marriage benefit and what is it’s true purpose? There are real comic gems in our explorer-narrator’s hapless responses.

But the most intriguing questions Gilman asks are the ones she never actually puts into words — what would happen to our world if we valued nurturing over competition or insight over personality?

Pinko Commie San Francisco History

Filed under: Wholebrain Sustenance, Jen Says Go!, What's Jen Reading? — Jen @ 10:08 pm

 

Direct Action is the highly entertaining, narrative quasi-fictional history of the Livermore Action Group, or LAG, a highly prolific anti-nuclear political collective that gathered together in the early 80’s to protest Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab, specifically, and a laissez-faiere culture that could support a weapons technology with the capacity to obliterate life-as-we-know-it, in general.

I have to admit I’m still fascinated, weeks later, with the process of Consensus decision-making, the combination of radical spirituality with radical politics and the fact that the rag-tag group of vastly disparate individuals described in this book managed to work together as diligently and loyally as they did.

Lavishly illustrated with a bit of eye candy on every page or so, the novel was a quick and delicious read even at 700 pages+.

(I have to admit, however, that since I was carrying this book in my pack to and from work while using my bicycle for transit, I was really glad when I reached the end!)

Pulling the Pieces Together: Deep Ecology, Humane Economy and Human Purposefulness

Ever since I read a few lines about FDR’s influential appointee to the New York State Power Authority, Leland Olds, and then later, a few words about E.F Shumacher, author of Small is Beautiful, I’ve been fascinated by the concept of liberal economics — not something I’ve heard much about.

Which is why I jumped on Deep Economy the moment I found it in my local library’s collection.

Admittedly, Deep Economy is not a lesson in economics — at least, not in the fashion of tedia which you might apply to your tax return. It is, however, a fascinating overview of the ways in which the US economy and, more specifically, our beliefs about that economy and the imperative of economic growth, intersect with the health of the planet, the viability of our communities and the elusive nature of human happiness.

In that sense, Deep Economy picks up the threads and interweaves the philosophies of Deep Ecology, the Local Foods movement and what is shaping up to be the Local Community movement into one decisive and pondersome whole.

Paired with another book I’m currently reading, Your Money or Your Life, it’s almost enough to usher in the new Age of Sincerity.

Hot Damn, It’s a Vegan Cooking Zine

Filed under: Jen Says Go!, From the Vegan Soapbox, What's Jen Reading? — Jen @ 8:44 pm

I do believe this is my favorite cookbook — and it’s not even really a cookbook. It’s a collection of 2 seperate and distinct serial cooking zines with a common (well, somewhat common) theme.

Hot Damn and Hell Yeah: Recipes for Hungry Banditos is a fantastic Tex-Mex inspired collection of vegan recipes written up by some bloke in Australia named Ryan Splint.

The Dirty South Cookbook is a collection of authentic, veganized Southern recipes written up by someone who’s recently vacated the South — authoressed by a lady named Vanessa.

I love both collections for their simplicity and their usefulness. Recipes include homemade worchestershire sauce, mexican chili gravy, black bean salsa, almost sour cream, flour tortillas, red beans and rice, black bean and sweet potato burritos, pumpkin soup, 3 different kinds of chili, a couple of southwestern burgers, spiced ice cream and apple enchiladas; hush puppies, johnny cakes, maccaroni casserole, turnip stew, black eyed pea cakes, carrot salad, roasted pepper salad, corn meal mush, red velvet cake, sweet potato pudding and amalgamation cake. Whew, it’s a mouthful in so many ways :D

I have been looking for a recipe for flour tortillas for some time, so I was really excited to find one in this cookbook. So far I’m still trying to master the thickness factor (so the tortillas don’t turn out like savory pancakes so much…) but the recipe is otherwise fantastic. I’ve also fallen in love with the black bean and sweet potato burritos, the black eyed pea cakes (so damn tasty both hot and cold) and, believe it or not, corn meal mush, which is actually quite a bit like cream of wheat’s love child after a smoldering fling with quick-cook grits. I recommend doctoring it up all savory like, especially with tahini, Earth Balance and a touch of chili powder. Yum.

But the best part is that these recipes work so well with the local food I’ve been trying to eat more of.

For more zany fun with the  DIY ethos (including but not limited to vegan food), I’d also highly recommend a visit to the zines publisher, Microcosm Publishing

September 9, 2007

What’s Jen Reading?

Filed under: Wholebrain Sustenance, What's Jen Reading? — Jen @ 5:39 pm

So I spent an hour this afternoon blogging about my most recent reading adventure when an auto-update shut down my browser and killed my fresh post.

Bah! Bugger it. What I’d really like to do is start a tradition of book-recommendation for my blog, preferably one that doesn’t seriously stress me out. You see, I may not be into spending an hour every other day cross-anylizing my insights and deeper preferences over a given tome, but I can spend a few minutes cobbling a picture of what I’m reading into an entry window, if nothing else but for future reference (and a slightly shadow way to keep my blog freshly updated, ha).

SO! Rather than giving the deep post-feminist insights I was originally prepping for this space, I’ll give you a spectrum in pictures of what I’ve been reading lately — comments possible at a later date.

   

                                                                                                                                                                                                                

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