That Big Ol' Table with All the Homeless and the Homosexuals

Stuff Christian Culture Likes’ Stephanie Drury argued, “You’d never see this many Christians lined up to help at a homeless shelter or food bank. And that’s something Jesus actually said to do.” And then it was added to a meme and went viral. It was a good question – and perhaps fair, though limited. In my experience, Christians tend to line up to do some work of charity – on occasion. Still, every Thanksgiving is more often than once, I guess.  That doesn’t mean that the entire enterprise is not above questioning. But we’ll get to that shortly.

The other night, my friend and fellow progressive Christian blogger Marching On and On turned those “God” quotes on their ear a bit. I reproduced on my Facebook page as a status update.

Dear Christian Right, while you were showing America how much you "love" me by stuffing your fat faces with chicken-fried-hate, half the world was dying of starvation.
- Jesus

There were other imaginary comments (‘cuz you know Jesus didn’t really say that, right?). Others that targeted NASA and self-reflection.

‎”Dear Science, while you spent $2.5 Billion on sending a camera to Mars, we were dying of starvation.
 - Half the World

"Dear Heath, while you are using your fat fingers to type out smart-Alec 'hard stances' on your extravagant smart phone, half the world is dying of starvation.
 – Jesus

If you’re like me, you’re tired of the CfA kerfuffle. But I think there are a lot of applicable points to make from the controversy – from this one-sided culture war*

I’ve got three critical points I’ll raise here, though. Well, two for today; the final point is gonna be stretched out for a moment or two later.

First, oftentimes conservative Christians and other members of the Religious Right -wait for it - are among the first responders in times of crises. They also tend to be generous in terms of giving. We can and probably should ask what they’re giving to, whether it’s effective or not, for what purpose, etc. But I think liberals and lefties tend to downplay this fact. We shouldn’t, because it needs to be acknowledged and taken into account for what it is. In a sense, it should also be commended; in other senses, not so much. But this fact is hardly to be condemned or mocked. They may not line around the block every single day to feed the poor, but they do line up to, for instance, serve soup kitchens or help stock the food pantry or help build houses. In my own experience at least, they do this often.

But that brings us to the second point: Often, Christians – whether conservative or liberal – tend to do things for the poor, rather than with. A soup kitchen is valuable for satiating the physically hungry on that day - at that moment. And serving at a soup kitchen also serves to satiate consciences of the spiritually hungry - those who are performing the service feel better about ourselves for a moment. Those of us who realize that there is something drastically wrong with the world, that somebody should do something about that, we want to and desire to find a release for that tension. We eat - they don't. There's a widening and friction-filled tension there and doing an act of service for those we deem the less fortunate helps to alleviate that tension.

This is an approach that effectively says that the better-off are actually better than those they serve. Can the homeless not share in the giving as well? Or are they not good enough?

Rather this: Can we all be welcome and eat at the same table, everybody bringing and giving and sharing and taking and creating and taking pleasure at what we have brought together? Can we accept the gifts of the homeless and the queer and the middle class and the single mother?

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*I say it’s a one-sided Cultural War because when one party is being attacked by another, that’s what it is – a one-sided war. Conservative Evangelicals and their Religious Right co-horts tend to buy into the concept of culture wars. The way it is framed, it looks like a two sided issue and that “both sides” (whatever that means) are equally invested in that. 

Four Calling Birds

Get it?

Bought some brown rice and beans for next week. In the meantime, I'll be finishing the calling bird in my fridge. Until

I can say one thing. It's hard to be a vegetarian on the West Side of Chicago. I haven't seen a fruit market out here, and the closest supermarket, Dominick's, is prohibitively expensive. So I have to go back into the city to get some fruits and veggies or grains.

Which wouldn't be so bad. But it doesn't make me curious in the least why the local Church's Chicken becomes so popular on 35¢ Thigh Tuesdays. Nor why obesity and obesity-related health problems are such a way-of -life in these under served neighborhoods.

Of course, if we could all afford Whole Foods I guess this would be less of a problem. But other issues have to do with food education, additive addiction, and equity and access. Yet these problems are deeply rooted in traditions of racism and classism. Unless we deal with these issues, we can't expect the cost of health care (for instance) to go down.

Unless we complete ignore the problems of the poor and minorities directly in front of us.

But I can't imagine America doing that... Naw...

Local Sabor (pt 1)

(read pt 2)

Lou Malnati's, Giordano's, Al's Italian Beef, Hot Doug's, Miko's Italian Ice, Gino's East, thousands of street vendors selling tamales year 'round, hundreds of affordable neighborhood taquerias, unaffiliated Maxwell St Polishes, Maggiano's, Metropolitan Coffee, Three Doghead Brewery, The Handlebar, Vienna Beef hot dogs, Rick Bayless and his specialty regional Mexican spots, Kasi's Delis, Intelligentsia Coffee, rib-backs, Margie's Candies, Boarhead Delis, El Borinquen, Honey1 Barbecue, Korean barbeque, world-reknown chefs and gastro-pubs.

Italian, Mexican, Polish, Louisiana South, Ethiopian, Argentine, Indian, Eastern European, Russian, Thai, Brazilian, Jewish, Cuban, Pakistani, Puerto Rican, Haitian, Slavic, Ecuadorian, Dominican, Mississippi South, Irish, German, Japanese, Bolivian, Moroccan, Chinese...

"No finer words in the English language than 'Encased meats',"  Hot Doug's. Image courtesy of   Iforgetwho. If these are from your blog, please lemme know. I tagged and then lost the original blog and had to re-write much of it. This pic was saved.

The city of Chicago is built around these delicious ethnic enclaves - many of whom have had the opportunity to mezcla with otra styles and produce some odd and wonderful culinary delights (have I mentioned jibaritos and Italian beef sandwiches?).

Nobody should ever have to eat anything boring or dry or tasteless or centralized or freeze-dried in a warehouse or kept under a heating lamp. Eighty percent of the profits from every shake of celery salt should go right back to this wondrous city.

Whether we go out a couple of times a month or for every meal, there is no reason a Chicagoan has to eat the same meal more than once in her life. There are no more excuses to settle and dull our tastebuds and cultural experiences.

And yet we settle consistently for the McDonald'sPizzaHutBurgerKingDunkinDonutsMillerCoorsTacoBellStarbucksSubway conglomertes. Oddly enough, it is the multinational corporations that maintain, export, and import bland, one-world, hegemony. They co-opt, falsify, then sell a cultural idea.

• Rather than being adventurous, are we settling for tried, true, and bland?
• Rather than having special meals prepared and made fresh from our order, are we opting for ready-made, deep-frozen, and super-processed patties heated and assembled on-site?
• Rather than sixty percent of our dollars going back into our neighborhoods, do we hope that what little wages local workers (if there are any, for many commute) are able to bring home that they'll invest at our next-door businesses?
• Rather than building a network of community, trust, and quality, do we support the entrenched faceless corporations that are accountable to no one?
• Rather than supporting our neighbors in their endeavors, are we settling for giving our hard-earned money back to the multinational corporations that are ruining our food supply, our governments, our way of life, our lives?

A study has shown that buying locally not only spurs development - and is better for the environment - but puts twice as much money into the economy as buying through chains. This study focused on the purchasing power of going through a farmer's market vs a supermarket - but I recognize that that may not be an option yet for many people. Buying from independent restaurants and stores allows a good start to build local sustainability.

Further from the Times article that the study was highlighted in:

[M]any local economies are languishing not because too little cash comes in, but as a result of what happens to that money. "Money is like blood. It needs to keep moving around to keep the economy going," he says, noting that when money is spent elsewhere—at big supermarkets, non-locally owned utilities and other services such as on-line retailers—"it flows out, like a wound." By shopping at the corner store instead of the big box, consumers keep their communities from becoming what the NEF calls "ghost towns" (areas devoid of neighborhood shops and services) or "clone towns", where Main Street now looks like every other Main Street with the same fast-food and retail chains

.
Eating and buying local keeps our neighborhoods, towns, burbs, etc from falling into the trap where one is lucky to land a minimum wage job with virtually no chance of elevating.

And it's yummy!

(pt 2 is here)

Eating Local - The Necessity

From Chef Gaston D. Merideth:

Chicken today contains 266 percent more fat than it did 40 years ago.

What’s more, today’s chicken also has 33 percent less protein, according to a study from the Institute of Brain Chemistry and Human Nutrition at London Mejtropolitan University. The problem is modern farming practices. Cramped environments and unnatural diets produce birds that have the same weight problems as the humans who eat them

University of Washington researchers calculated the cost discrepancy between healthy food and junk foods and found that 2,000 calories of junk food rings up at a measly $3.52 a day. Yet for 2,000 calories of nutritious grub, the researchers plunked down $36. To add insult to fiscal injury, out of every dollar you spend on food, only 19 cents goes toward the stuff you eat. The other 81 percent goes toward marketing, manufacturing, and packaging. Think about that the next time your grocery bill jumps into triple-digit dollars.

Image courtesy of Earth Song

Let's face facts, we're talking a lot about food these days. Food safety. Food desserts. Natural foods. Whole foods. Organic foods. Processed, frozen and thawed, unrecognizable food. Food shortages. Food security. Food democracy.

But the corporatization of our food supply leaves us less in touch with not only what we are eating, but our role in this planet and our identities as people.

And there's no shortage of talk about this phenomenon. Which is good. We need to have this conversation because nearly every other voice surrounding us in telling us that what and how we are eating is fine and great and can't really be changed even if we desired it to be (which we would never do, we're told).

Movies like Food, Inc., King Corn, The Economics of Happiness (highly recommended for this series), Super Size Me, and books like The Carnivore's Dilemma and Fast Food Nation have caused us to begin talking about doing something different.

Because, in case you missed the intro, Chicken contains 266 percent more fat than it did 40 years ago.

That's nearly three times as fat as in the early 70's. Not because the chicken has evolved and can handle all the extra weight. In fact, if you've watched any of those movies, you know that they can't. They can't stand up or move around. Their breasts are too heavy for their own body to support. So they're immobile. Which means that they are not healthy. And they get diseases. And those diseases are treated with all sorts of vaccines which is not helping to protect us from super-bugs - and putting more poison in our and our children's bloodstream.

Add to this that the blood and waste from dying (or slaughtered) and rotting chickens, pigs, cows, etc. is going directly to our water streams and affecting the down-hill vegetation, including spinach, peanuts, soy, oats... (Do any of these food groups sound familiar? What if we add in the word "salmonella"?)

And then there's that extra crap that goes into our food when it's being processed. The flavor of our natural orange juice - the ones that come in that carton which we associate with milk and farms and innocent childhoods, for example, is completely artificial - the work of chemists. Filler is made from wood chips. Pesticides were designed from as methods of warfare. Genetic modification means that - at the least - companies are owning copyrights on shared grains.

Steroids are killing cows and causing our children to develop too fast. Carcinogens can be traced back from rain water, pesticides, genetic modifications, bleachings and other treatments, storage, shipment, transportation, manufacturing, and processing.

Add to these factors the fact that those who sow, reap, pluck, gather our foods often, ironically, go hungry themselves as they work for nearly slave wages and are themselves distanced from the very bountiful harvest their hands touch... Those who pull roots from the ground cannot keep enough potatoes on their tables.

Our disconnect from our food reaps violence. Because we've so centralized our food system, only those with money have true access to the best of foods (and water). Most of us are stuck with modified, highly processed, bleached/frozen/de-nutritioned foods. That is, if we have access at all...

What we need is regain control, to establish a food democracy.

Photo from Interesting Green

As we noted last week, we cannot afford to maintain flying apples around the world from their place of origin, to a factory to be wrapped up in prettifying plastic, to the stores where they will be consumed. We must grow our own.

We cannot afford to remain in the left-right paradigm. We cannot afford to grow and consume and exploit at the rates we are.

I propose that we begin a new way of living. Let us call it: Radical Progressive Conservativism.

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The movement toward localism - in any of its forms, really - seems to me to be a long one. One that must be grassroots and organic. One that must start with a few and one that must release from the cold, iron grips of oppression over a generation or even more before being realized. Although there are signs of progress (the World Bank and IMF have been pushed out of South America and much of Asia), there are still troubling signs that the powerful elite will not go without a few bloody fights, without gasping their last.

What, in the meantime, can we do to begin to live out the existence of this free and localized manner. How do we break the bonds of slavery to the large banks - as we are being asked to do by our brothers and sisters suffering for the struggle in New York and Greece right now?

I will take your suggestions and add them to mine come Wednesday. Practical ways to begin living local even as we dream of much larger ways of restructuring society.

The Poor and the Fat and Our Responsibility

This bit of news may not shock most aware people, but poor people are fat.

This, of course, has more to do with poor communities large having grocery store deserts, or the pricing of healthy v. cheap foods as well as education and lifestyle choices, than with any perceived laziness of the poor.

I wish there were easy solutions, but I think Jamie Oliver and his Slow Cooking Revolution may be on to something (and now he's talking to the fattest of Christian denominations, the Southern Baptists). In any case, it's going to be more costly - both in the long run but also immediately - to continue doing what we're doing now than to actually address and fix these problems now.

Obesity, heart and health problems, sluggishness, children with diabetes: These things are more costly than making sure children and adults eat at least one healthy meal a day.

Chicago Tuesdays - Co-op Review, Shadow Budget and Pursed Lips

• First off, I finally made it to my friendly neighborhood Co-op, the Dill Pickle (blog here). My take: It's a local haven for people who crave a nearby Whole Foods, yet want more community involvement, ownership, and less of the SUV set.

It has many elements that we are currently looking for: It's almost completely organic and/or local (or some variant thereof. To register as 'organic' can be costly and time-consuming. But, say that your cows are grass-fed, free-range, free of antibiotics and steroids, etc, etc. That's the important stuff to me); it's definitely community-based, with community ownership (community members are asked to buy shares into the market) and volunteers staffing the store; they carry products from the weekly farmer's market and from local bakers; and it's got yummies (organic chocolate chips and some sublime apple granola in the big dispensers along with various seeds, grains and trail mix). It also has many of the same products I find when I go to Trader Joes - but at a significantly higher price.

Which brings me to the sad reality: This stuff is expensive. It's already nearly impossible for working class and even lower-middle class cats to eat healthily, especially if they're not

convinced that it amounts to too much just yet. Food, Inc. has made it clear to me that the cost of food is truly hidden, that we are paying in visits to the doctor, in bad health, in sluggishness, and in taxes for this cheap, highly-processed, twice-frozen, corn-fed, diseased, steroid-injected, yadda, yadda, yadda food. So, who gets hurt worse than the poor, who can't afford anything but such food? My hope is that as more people buy organic and pressure the government to subsidize less corn and more small, organic farms (rather than the big businesses that they are. I'm looking at you, Monsanto...), then the prices will drop and healthier options will be available for all.

So, as a result, I think I'm going to lift the budget for food by fifty bucks and buy most of our food as organic, local or at least as fresh produce (which is a spin from nine months ago where I budgeted in 2/5's for same. Now it's more like 5/6's).

Video on the grand opening (including a Pickle Parade. Crazy Hippies) viewable here:

• If you live in Chicago and have yet to read Ben Jarovsky and Mick Dumke's take on TIF's, please do yourself a favor and read, oh read Shedding Light on the TIF Budget.

• 

This chart, for example, helps to illustrate the point that the areas should receive the most TIF funds - as the original intent of the Tax Increment Funding is to help blighted areas redevelop businesses - receive the least amount.

However, as the article notes, the mayor has too much power to lose if people would understand how this all works out for his - and the Chicago Machine's - benefit.

In the case of the market, the City Council, at Daley's urging, voted in 2006 to spend a total of $12 million in taxpayer money on construction of a new shopping area in the Ogilvie Transportation Center; $8 million of that sum went to the French Market. The project happens to be headed by a well-to-do, politically connected developer who's contributed thousands of dollars to the mayor's campaign coffers. And the city plans to spend another $23 million in the River West TIF district through 2011.

The more TIF districts are created, the more money goes into the TIF accounts and the more powerful the mayor becomes.

Back in the 1980s, in the early days of Chicago's TIF program, Mayor Harold Washington said he would limit TIF districts to paying for specific projects in blighted communities that truly needed them. But the program has expanded over the years, and the administration and City Council have held almost no discussion of its evolving goals; now virtually any project in any community can qualify for subsidies. According to a TIF primer city officials distributed to aldermen this fall, TIF money can be used for program administration costs, property acquisition, rehabs of existing public or private buildings, construction of "public works or improvements," job training, business relocation and financing subsidies, planning studies, marketing, building demolition, and the services of architects, engineers, lawyers, and financial planners...

As we like to say here at LeftCheekopia, and further, etcetera, etal...

• Another point of interest for me, at least, is the Reader's story on the seemingly secretive CPS press agency. Yeah, if the last eight or so years have taught us anything, being opaque and secretive is the way to destroy your credibility and government.