Break time

Hi all – just a notice that this blog will be going on an indefinite leave of absence, as my life is getting busy enough that I won’t be able to keep it up regularly.  If you need to contact me, you can do so through www.mac-coop.org.  Thanks for reading!

The language of food

You can’t walk into a grocery store or see any kind of food advertising without seeing one word appear over and over and over again: FRESH!  (In fact, an apple box I picked up from the grocery store is labeled SUPERFRESH!)

There was a time in which the word “fresh” was an objective word with a readily understood meaning.  No, I’m not talking about the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, though that is an important topic for people of my generation.  Rather, the food-related use of the word fresh was actually a measure of the time and distance by which a particular item got from the field to the store – or your table.  Freshness, in other words, was a tool to measure how local a food was.

Enter the sustainable food movement of the last few years (which is here to stay, by the way).  Sustainable food writers criticize the way we grow and distribute food because of the immense quantity of fossil fuels required to transport our food long distances.  This has happened for many reasons, and I’m sure Michael Pollan would love to tell you more about it in one of his books.

Anyway, the response of the major industrial food producers that were under criticism was to do what they always do in times of crisis – turn to marketing.  Whereas in the diet-obsessed 1990s processed food was advertised as “natural” (since debunked as a nearly meaningless term), in the last part of the 2000s, virtually all food is now being marketed as “fresh”.  It is labeled as such regardless of transport distance, time, or the presence of preservative agents or storage methods.

Long term storage of food and preservation are not bad things – they’re good – but the dishonesty of the practice of calling things fresh that clearly aren’t means that the word fresh now means absolutely nothing.

A TV dinner description: "Roast Beef Dinner with a Yorkshire pudding and freshly frozen vegetables in gravy."

I have purchased frozen peas that were labeled as “freshly frozen” (what does that mean?!?).  I have seen TV cooking shows in which products brought from the other side of the planet were labeled as “fresh”.  (I’ve even heard TV chefs call for fresh salt in their recipes!)  I have a bag of dried pretzel sticks in my cupboard that describes that what makes their pretzels so good is their freshness.

What we have going on here is that the food companies know it is easier to stretch the truth and deceive consumers than it is to reconfigure their industrial practices.

Let them have the meaningless terms “fresh” and “natural” (not to mention “goodness”).  I’ll use local and sustainable instead, which are two words they can’t take away, because their practices (global and unsustainable) are the very opposite of these values.  For more information on this, check out www.localharvest.org.

Salad from the garden

This is the second year I’ve been growing a vegetable garden at home, and this year I’m getting a little more ambitious.  Last year I started with a few varietes of tomatoes and peppers (with good results), and this year I’m growing corn, spinach, salad greens (Michelle is holding some in the picture above), 5 kinds of peppers (4 bell, 1 hot), soybeans, sugar snap peas, tall telephone shelling peas, leeks, and 2 kinds of tomatoes.  We also just picked up a Kaffir lime tree and a a Trovita dwarf orange tree…and we’re growing everything in containers!  (We call it our pot garden.)  The place we are renting had all the topsoil scraped off in favor of bark dust, so you can’t grow anything in it.

In addition, this year we joined a CSA (Barn Owl Farms).  CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture, and it refers to the practice of people making arrangments with a farmer to buy produce via a yearly subscription.  Each week, our friends at Barn Owl drop off a box full of fruits and vegetables on our front door!

It is my hope that CSAs will be one step towards our nation moving “back to the future”–to a time in which more food is more local, and we all eat in a way that is a little better for the environment (and a little better for us too).

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a (container) garden salad to eat.

Long live chocolate!

Our microloan investment of the month:

The National Confederation of Dominican Cocoa Producers (Conacado) is a cocoa growers’ cooperative in the Dominican Republic. Conacado’s mission is to boost income and improve living conditions of cocoa producers and their families. To achieve this, Conacado works to improve sustainable use, quality control, efficient marketing and distribution, business skills, and community development. Furthermore, all of its production is fair trade certified and nearly 60% is organic. As the largest association of cocoa growers in the country, Conacado brings together more than 10,000 small-scale farmers working 50% of all cocoa-producing land. In addition to providing microfinance for its members, resources are pumped into repairing and constructing schools, health center facilities, roads, potable water wells and other infrastructure needed.

Craft

I have always been fascinated with people who have mastered one craft or another.  It doesn’t really matter what the craft itself is, but I love to watch and learn from it.

I like watching a barber cut someone’s hair.  I think Alton Brown’s Good Eats is the best cooking show ever because of the way it focuses on teaching and learning rather than impressing your friends and neighbors.  As a child, I remember watching Bob Ross, the hippie painter guy on PBS, in absolute fascination.  (I actually just came across some online video clips of his show, and it’s like being six years old all over again–mostly in a good way.)  I think a great way to spend a Friday night is at a jazz club where you can see great musicians applying their skills in a live performance.  Recently, I’ve been watching interviews on the classic show Inside the Actors Studio, in which actors discuss how they go about their work.

What is it about people that have mastered a craft that is so appealing?  Perhaps it is because each of them share a fundamental optimism about life.  You don’t put years of effort into learning how to act, paint, build cabinets, play jazz, or cut hair if you don’t think it actually makes some kind of difference in your life and the lives of others around you.

There’s also a certainy humility in the process of perfecting a craft, because by picking just one thing to be really good at, you are acknowledging an entire range of things you’re not as good at (and are leaving those things to other, more skilled, people).

Paul is supporting coffee production?!? Is this the end times?

Michelle and I recently made a commitment to take a certain percentage of the funds we put towards traditional investments and make an additional contribution each month towards so-called “micro-loans” through www.microplace.com.  Microloans are small loans given to people who are poor (many in Third World countries) so they can start a new business or support an existing one.  There is a strong focus on women borrowers, because they are far better at using the loan wisely and repaying it than men.  (We men seem to screw everything up!)

The website we found is doing something creative–they’re promoting these loans as an investment opportunity for individuals.  They have the potential to be high risk, and have very low returns (usually below the rate of inflation), but that’s not the point.  The point is to take some of the money I have available to me because I happened to be born in the richest country in the history of the world, and to spread that wealth around to others.  I’m taking money that would otherwise just sit in a savings account and allowing someone else to use it that needs it more than me at the moment.

The microloan we have chosen to support at this time is Coopetarrazú, a fair-trade-certified coffee growers’ cooperative in Costa Rica.  People who know me may be shocked, because I think coffee is one of the most vile tasting substances on the planet.  But, that’s not the point.  The point is I get to support an organization that is working to develop sustainable production practices.  The meager amount of funds we invest help Coopetarrazú to pay its coffee growers in advance, so they can pay their bills through the year instead of having to wait for a single payment at the end of the season.

Hope you decide to check out the website and see if this kind of thing is right for you.

Can Star Trek save us from ourselves?

(This blog post is brought to you from the Taking-Entertainment-Too-Seriously Department of Theology and Television.)

I watched my fair share of Star Trek: The Next Generation when I was a teenager.  None of the other series really appealed to me, nor was I a Star Trek nerd, but I liked how this particular series would talk about social or philosophical ideas.

I stumbled across a good opinion article a few days ago that was trying to explain why Star Trek remains appealing, 45 years after the television debut of the original series.  The article specifically caught my attention because of this section:

“Will we have the wisdom to move toward a Star Trek future, where all countries join together to achieve a common goal while maintaining respect for individual cultural differences? Will we as a species ultimately discard the religious myths that separate us and get in the way, realistically addressing the world around us?”

Though this quote wasn’t the main point of the article, it did catch my attention.  For the author, religion (characterized as either a myth, or in another section of the article, a superstition) is something that separates human beings and prevents us from working towards shared goals.  Since I know my history, I know that there is some truth in this.

The real question here, as I see it, is about stories and authority.

Stories, including what the author calls myths or superstitions, are what drive our cultural identities.  We collectively do whatever it is we do because our stories tell us who we are, what we care about, and how we should act.  For example:

(As an American or Frenchman or Russian, I should…
Or, as a Buddhist or Christian or Wiccan, I should…)

Such stories require us to place our loyalty and our fate in the hands of either the story of religion, broadly defined, or the story of the state.  Despite claims to the contrary, no one can refuse this choice without self-destructing.  (Read The Last Battle in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia series for an example of this.  “The dwarves are for the dwarves!”  You’ll see what I mean.)

If we get rid of the religious stories “that separate us and get in the way”, there is only one alternative for our loyalty–the state.  In Star Trek, this is the Federation, an alliance of humans and aliens that work together to explore the universe and learn from one another.  This works great because the Federation is entirely self-regulating–its leaders hold the Federation accountable to its ideals without any pressure from their constituents to do so.

The problem for us is that no state is self-regulating.  All states wield power, and the human desire for power means that people will always be tempted to use that power for selfish reasons.  Think about the leaders of the Soviet Union, slavery in the British Empire, or even some of our own nation’s policies today.  Without accountability, a state will seek and exercise power to the exclusion of everything else.  If we get rid of our religious stories, there is no value structure left that can give a reason why we should think that things be different than they are now.

Star Trek does have a religious story–the myth of scientific and techological progress.  That story unifies the people and commands their allegiance.   Without it, all you have is a bunch of humans and Klingons shooting at each other for all time.  And, as we all know, those kinds of special effects are expensive to produce.  They’d be much better off just sitting around on the bridge of the Enterprise and having a nice, quiet, philosophical chat.  Now that’s entertainment!

The last battle is over

Tonight, we had our last Chronicles of Narnia group, as we finished the final book in the series (aptly named The Last Battle).  We’ve been meeting most every Sunday night since September.  All I can say is that it was not only worth it, but that I look forward to reading these books to my kids someday.  “Further up and further in!”

“Past performance…

…is no guarantee of future results”, or so the old economics quote goes.  I’m discovering the same is true when it comes to my use of technology.

Consider my involvement with technology:

• I’ve built probably 30 computers in my life.
• I’m the webmaster for my church, and use HTML, PHP, XML, and RSS coding languages (to a greater or lesser extent).
• I play video games constantly.
• I record and optimize devotionals and sermons using professional audio software.
• I have this blog.
• As a child, I did computer programming for fun.
• I wrote my master’s thesis on Christianity and video games.

And yet:

• This week, I closed my Facebook account.
• About a year ago, I gave up my cell phone for a landline.  A landline!  (My landlord had to jackhammer out the concrete walk going up to my house to run the cable.  It wasn’t connected properly when the house was built, and no one who has ever lived in my rental has actually tried connecting a landline phone before.)
• I got rid of my TV years ago.
• I don’t have an iPod or any other portable media device (I do listen to digital music on my computer.)
• I got together with a group of  friends to play board games last night.  (You know, the games that come in the big cardboard box?)

How can I possibly explain these inconsistencies in my use of technology?

I’m not sure I can, but I can try.

I am a person who, at a very young age, knew that music came on cassettes and that Mr. Rogers was on the TV.  As time went by, I was the person in the family that was the early adopter of technology, whether it was our Apple IIe computer, the original Nintendo gaming console (we just called it “Nintendo” then), or PC modem technology to play games “online” through a direct phone line connection between two houses before anyone dreamed the Internet would allow people to do this.

Now, I’m finding more value in my life from seeking simplicity than complexity.  This means that a cell phone is an unnecessary burden, since I don’t think I can appreciate the world around me if I’m always on call for someone else.  Same goes for the iPod…it is usually harder for me to observe the world if my brain is busy listening to music at the same time.

The key teaching of Jesus that has resonated for me is the teaching, “Therefore, do not worry about your life…”, and if worrying is useless, then TV must be out, with its endless panic-inducing ‘news’ cycle.

I suppose when it comes right down to it, I’ve spent a lot of my life using technology that has isolated me from genuine, face-to-face human contact.  I’m trying to make up for that now, which means putting my attention on things that bring people together in person.  (That’s my job at the church in a nutshell.)

“Thanks for listening”

One of the great things about the emergence of the Internet as a tool for video communication is that we can hear the voices of the past speak to us as if they were right here in the room with us.  I certainly make ample use of this in my Theology of Jazz class, but I’m also a fan of a long-running show called Inside the Actor’s Studio.  It features interviews, a couple hours in length, with well-known people in the movie and TV industry so we can hear the stories of their life.

I watched an interview with Conan O’Brien, and part of another with Robin Williams, and then found myself watching one with Steven Spielberg.  The interviews traditionally close with the question, “If heaven exists, what do you hope God will say to you once you arrive?”

Spielberg, fresh off a discussion of his World War II epics, Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan, said that he hoped God would say “Thanks for listening.”  The audience was stunned by his answer.  (Check out the clip here.)

In a Q & A session with acting students in the audience (which you can see here), he expanded upon his answer: “It was taught to me from childhood that the most important thing I could do as a Jew was to listen.  [My parents meant] listen to yourself, listen to those little whispers that we tend to not want to hear because they’re too soft.  We tend to somehow listen to the shout, not the whisper, and so listening carefully is what I was taught all my life…when people don’t listen, it’s not that they don’t learn; they just deny themselves tremendous opportunities and glorious choices – they deny themselves this!”

As  a church that focuses on listening as one of the three critical components of our vision, I don’t think I could say it any better.