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So one of the wonderful things which happens when ones children near pubescence is that said children inevitably develop social lives independent from the play dates, sports & gatherings parents arrange for them and inevitably forget to include parents in the itinerary for such events and so get invited to birthday parties which they conveniently forget to tell parents about, make said parent broke after paying for all of the social expenses and lands the parent(s) mere hours away from committing the ultimate in social faux-pas; sending one’s child to a birthday party without a gift. Today was one such day, I was surprised to find out through a phone call from a panicky mum looking for RSVPs. Luckily I’m a crafty mum and was able to save the day, or at least my sanity, if you don’t mind my saying so. A trip to the local liquidators for a $10 yoga mat, a rifling through the fabric/trims stash and an hour of drafting/cutting/sewing time later; behold the magnificent yoga mat & carrier!
And the only reason I get to be all smug about it is because my daughter, upon seeing the gift I’d made for her friend exclaimed ‘Ugh! I was hoping it was for me!’ and hasn’t taken it off since.
Yay! I win!
I know – ‘umamification’ is totally a made up word but, as always, I feel I’ve a firm enough grasp on the English language to indulge myself in bastardizing it here and there. Plus I figure if you can get past that, dear readers, you’re probably at least a little masochistic and look forward to being inflicted with the soap-boxing to come.
The second and third sections of The Omnivore’s Dilemma have done very little to quell the fears about the organic food industry I cited in my first post about the book, though I’m not left with the feeling that all hope is lost, either. Like Pollan, I want my organic food dollars to go to the pastoral ideal of the fertile, self-sufficient, organic farm I hold in my imagination, one like the farm my maternal grandparents have worked for an eternity with chickens running amongst the raspberry bushes, happy pigs slumbering in shade of a shed, cows blocking highway traffic so they can make their trek from one grassy range to another. A farm which, for all intents and purposes, would not qualify for the ‘organic’ label, but follows a small-scale, animal-lead production methodology which allows pigs to be pigs and chickens to be chickens and beef to be beef…and that’s probably the message which resonates most profoundly about this section of the book; recognizing the term ‘organic’ as part of the industrial food chain’s rhetoric, contradictory outside of that context and then being called to either re-appropriate it or drop it altogether…which certainly appeals to my quasi-Marxist sensibilities and my desire for passive resistance through stepping around the industrial food machine, but gives me butterflies in practice as it promises to be a fairly large commitment. I’ll actually have to talk to people, question their practices, let them know when they don’t meet my expectations, let them know what my expectations are…become part of the negotiation and actually seek out chickenier chickens and beefier bovines.
Alright, perhaps that’s a bit dramatic. I already do a lot of that stuff; I’m hardly a label-dependent consumer, and I’ve never really fully developed an apathy bone, but remember my corn-fed cow freak-out from my first post? There’s obviously some room for improvement. It’s understood this section of the book is very much about gaining a more intimate understanding of our food’s life cycle, an appreciation for the alchemy of pastoral farming and setting standards for a food chain which emphasises quality over quantity. This really set the little businessy portion of my brain to ticking; it’s not enough for me to rest on the laurels of ‘buying right.’ If I want that ideal pastoral farm to be the producer of my food stuffs then I need to take a vested interest in its health and welfare, go out of my way to invest in it and promote it, and ultimately to make it part of the business that is me because the cost-benefit analysis of the alternative already looks grim and is terrifying when plugged into a spreadsheet. Now I’m wondering about all of the ways one might adopt a farm and am committed to stretching my political muscles a little further.
All that said, I’m really excited for the next section. It’s all about foods from the forest which is a topic near and dear to my little hunter’s daughter heart.
Despite the sprogs & I having our own, personal sketchbooks, there is one large one which gets kicked around the house, often lives on the top of the fridge or in my basket of ongoing projects, which has attained communal status. As someone who tends to view her sketchbooks as being as intimate as journals I fully encourage this as it indulges my voyeuristic tendencies without the guilt of prying into their personal things and I get to giggle when the munchkins come across anatomically correct life drawings and cluck their tongues and rather emphatically come out with things like ‘Mom! Come on! You did NOT draw a PENIS in here!’ Luckily any pink parts don’t belong to anyone they know as I keep all of the good porn in my own personal sketchbooks. See why I wouldn’t want to go snooping through theirs? I also have serious issues with sharing my work. As such, this particular sketchbook has proven to be a valuable contribution to Me Getting Over Myself(tm) and it’s much cheaper than therapy.
My kids are not the obsessive doodlers and drawers that I am so the thing I love most especially about this sketchbook is that it’s ultimately mine. After the loin fruits have been through therapy, realised all of the ways that I’ve screwed with their minds, have flown the coop to start lives and families of their own leaving me with empty-nest syndrome and a new-found sense of passive aggression (c’mon, it’s unavoidable, really) I have pieces of them to look back upon – a visual representation of their development as human beings and possibly a wee bit of their souls…mwuhahahaha…and stuff.
But I digress. Let’s talk about the contents.
I love this figure study by the son. It’s so testosterone-fueled and I think he was flowing with instructions from a manga how-to book when he did it but some of the poses are so wonderfully fluid it through my eyes it looks like a split second under the strobes at a rave.
Shoes by the daughter. These must be at least 2 years old and I think they’re a pretty astounding attempt at perspective and 3 dimensional output from the hands of an 8 year old.
That’s an unfinished robot drawing of mine.
That’s the son’s re-imagining of it. It’s so cute that his robot has a shiney, new, badass helmet but maintains the same desperate pose.
Another old one. I think this is a comment on my drinking habits (see? unavoidable!) but I love the stylized shadow from an unknown light source and the presence of the sun from the wrong direction for casting said shadow and the misplaced apostrophe and that the bottle looks a bit like it’s screaming and about to explode.
That’s a collaborative piece between the daughter and nephew #1. There is an almost 4 year age gap between the two of them and and their drawings and need to label it all show it (notice the daughter has a handle on shadows and light sources now?) but it all came out as a pretty cohesive piece in terms of colours and style. I really think that nephew #1 (#1 only because he’s the eldest, not because he’s a favourite) is the recipient of the obsessive doodler/pack rat/maker of things gene.
And just to prove that I can get over myself, that’s a doodle I did Friday evening which inspired the above drawing by the nephew & daughter. It’s a bird’s eye view of a fort my sister, my cousin and I established under some cedar trees on our grandparents farm when we were youngins. Remembering it makes me laugh. We really did makes lists of chores to do; we created a fire pit rather responsibly placed just outside the dwelling which never ever held a fire. We made brooms out of cedar boughs to sweep the joint. We also had a bathroom which my sister reminded me of but I forgot to put in. The fort’s not there anymore because the gravel pit ate it up but we had some fun times in that spot…even if we did take ourselves a little too seriously.
As is the way of the interwebs, my post regarding The Omnivore’s Dilemma produced a response which lead to an affinity which, in turn, led to a challenge…or something like that. I took the lot of it to the dinner table Thursday night and the mister, the sprogs and myself agreed to rise to the challenge on the basis that there’s always room for improvement. We got over giving ourselves a pat on the back for the things we already have in place and decided to start the challenge with a weekly, one hour blackout (which will be Mondays from 8pmish to 9pmish) and reading/brainstorming session. At 11 & almost 13 I think they’re ready to wrap their minds around the likes of Diet for a Small Planet so I can probe their young, pliable minds for ideas on which steps to take next.
For more information on Emily’s EcoJustice challenge click here.
Wish us luck!
The Sierpinski Carpet realised in yummy butter cookie dough. 
Geeky gastronomy warms the cockles of my nerdy little heart. Evil Mad Scientist, you are my new hero.
Galileo says so.
The mister saw fit to bring back a copy of The Omnivore’s Dilemma from Montreal a couple of weeks ago. As he’s not allowed to read it until he’s fully digested Foucault’s Pendulum I decided to pick it up as my thinking (as opposed to purely entertaining) book of the moment. I finished reading the first ‘chapter’ (section?) over coffee on my front porch this morning and though I’m not prepared to get into a full review of the book at this moment I do have some initial thoughts and reactions I feel the need to air so I’ve chosen to do so here. Perhaps I’ll bore you all with a play-by-play as I read along. The book’s formatting – following four meals back to their natural sources and reminding us of our relationship to the ingredients all the way – is rather conducive to that. Perhaps I just won’t be arsed. We’ll see.
An introduction to a new set of socio-political ideals about food is (apparently) kind of like buying a new car in that one sees it everywhere within the first few weeks after adoption. I think I realised the full effect of the read yesterday while visiting our local farmer’s market determined to bring home an interesting and organic new cut of beef or buffalo or elk to play with. The latter two being out of my price range and offering nothing I considered interesting enough to justify the expense I turned to the many many offerings of the former, all purporting to be ‘certified organic’ but then also listing ‘corn-fed’ as being one of the value-added benefits of their beef. Newsflash – cows aren’t naturally gifted in the processing of corn. They can only do so with the aid of loads of hormones and antibiotics assisting them in converting those precious (and cheap) calories into the steaks we all know and love. While this isn’t news to me, it has been a long time since I’ve thought about it. So the question is begged: what then, is ‘organic’? Who defines it? Who measures it and by what means?
I don’t have immediate answers to those questions, but I’m certainly bloody-minded enough to go searching for them and, though I’m certain the answers will vary from region to region, I’m kind of hoping they’ll be answered later in the book. Or that some clever indices I can follow will be presented at the very least, but more on that later. The thing is that the issue of cows not being able to process corn natural is a mere scratching of the surface of the plant’s place in the global food debate. The real issue is that corn, with human aid, has circumvented all of the laws of natural selection to become a dominant organism on our planet and in our digestive systems. Getting into the nitty gritty of all of that is beyond the scope of this post – just go read the book – this post is about my feeling of betrayal, akin to the betrayal I felt toward my own genetics upon reading The Selfish Gene. Like Dawkins, Pollan is a radical messenger of radical truths who has transformed the favourite summer treat this (quasi) farm-bred girl, raised on the plantable, sustainable, preservable holy trinity of vegetation that is squash, beans and, of course, corn into an alien overlord infiltration of Orwellian proportions. He makes it quite easy to draw the line of responsibility between corn and global warming, poverty, malnutrition, alcoholism and even war. Granted, cow corn is different from people corn. The stuff we buy from roadside tables on lazy Sunday drives is not responsible for all of this as such, but my overactive imagination can’t help drawing the parallels. Mind = blown. I’ve not yet decided what my long-term response to this will be. This section of the book had me checking all of the labels of the all of the jars of all of the products we have in the cupboards and fridges and I can say with some relief that my lack of sweet tooth keeps us away from the onslaught of corn bi-products in the few processed foods that we do keep around the house. We’re hardly every day meat-eaters in this house, we do try to stay fairly low on the food chain and we don’t own a car but even those efforts don’t seem to be enough in the face of this. Needless to say I left all traces of beef at the market yesterday but did come home with organic, corn free, birdseed for our feeders. Damn you, Michael Pollan. Damn you all to hell for making corn my new boogey man.
So that Etsy store I’ve been talking about getting up and running for ever and ever and ever + one day? It’s there! And I’ve put stuff in it! Here’s a little teaser of what I put up:
They may not be all loaded yet but they should be there soon. It was kind of scary clicking the ‘finish’ button.
So when I started this blog I had the goal to keep it up and share sources of inspiration and current projects and the like on a daily (or almost daily) basis. However life happens, sometimes in the form of daughters acquiring a slipped capital femoral epiphysis and needing to go to see a pediatric orthopedic surgeon in Toronto for rushed surgery before her overactive 11 year old body makes it worse. I’m only saying that sometimes that happens. Not always, thankfully. She only has two of the damned things so I’m hoping that always isn’t an option anyway. It’s always good to have goals.
Hopefully I’ll get to updating with the intended kind of content and not medical kind of content in the not too distant future. In the meantime, I have posted two thingies over at the food blog for your perusal.
And for your amusement, here’s a picture of what a stressed out mommy does after a week of worrying about slipped capital femoral epiphyses:
Having more leftovers than energy tonight I decided to make use of a bunch of them; using what was left and frozen our mussels glutton-fest, 3 pieces of bacon and a handful of potatoes from breakfast this morning, some frozen corn which wasn’t enough to put into anything else and some cream which wasn’t like to be used anytime soon I was able to put together a lovely chowder in about 10 minutes. And now I remember how I made it through college without starving.
Fin.
cushti 