Gluttony and Temperance

Absorbing it all so that there's none left.

That's gluttony in the short. And that's what the United States of America - a country that comprises 5% of the human population yet consumes a full 20% of its non-renewable resources - is. We are the very definition of gluttony.

Read that again with me, please.

My country makes up 1/20th of the people in the whole world.

But we take in 1/5th of its resources.

The non-renewable kind.

Consumed. Complete. Swallowed. Done. Finished. Taken in and not-replaced.

That is, we take in four times per person, on average, what everybody else in the entire world does. This includes food. And clothing. Electronics. Cars. Gas. Oil. Electricity. Water.

These are resources that others can't use.

This leads to malnourishment, starvation, disease.

Death.

Because we can't be temperate in our insatiable appetites?

How do we avoid this trap of selfishness? How can  we still live well and assure that others do as well? That's a serious question that we need to wrap our minds around.

Seriously.

Rethink, Renew, Refocus

I want to challenge everyone who is reading this right now to watch this TEDx presentation sometime before we go back to work this upcoming week, or within this first week of the New Year. And if you're further interested/intrigued/infuriated, I'm going to highly, highly recommend watching the full documentary, Economics of Happiness. I'd like to discuss its points here and elsewhere. I'd love to share what I've seen here, and group up and imagine with others from a wide variety of viewpoints and backgrounds. And then, if you feel it is a worthy idea/concept, may you also share.

I guarantee that what Food, Inc., did to make us reconsider our relationship with our food and its production, this film will help us evaluate and re-imagine our relationship to our resources, our neighbors, the so-called emerging (maybe "submerging" would be a better word for it) and the multinational corporations who have effectively rigged the system to their profit.

Please watch. It may anger you, but it will most likely also inspire you.

Funny Money

Isn't all money "Funny Money"? Money has no intrinsic value. It's paper. With a face on it. You can't feed or clothe yourself with it. You can only enter into an agreement with others about its usage. And though we're made to feel that we control the agreement, we don't.

The worth of our money - such as it is - is determined by outside factors. We have an infinitely small control over such factors. We can haggle over our wages, but only a fraction of it. We can comparison shop to save ourselves a few loose dollars. But there is hardly any control over the cost or price of living for the majority of people in the world.



Is it any wonder that those who make the most money in the world are those who help control and regulate the value of it?

We need more direct, more decentralized control of our economy. We need an economy that is directly linked to our needs, our values, our worth as human beings. We need an economy that is beneficial for our ecology. That works for more than just a fraction of a percentage point of the people in the world.

We need to regain control of our goods and services, rather than alllowing them to be set and manipulated by bankers and financiers.

We need an economy where people can agree on what their material, items, work, and worth is worth. Think of it as a truly democratic economy. Or, as a participatory economy. Of which parecon is one such model.

Please see other articles in the Local Sustainability topic for more introductory ideas along the same lines.

posted from Bloggeroid

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

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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)

Fat Dinosaurs on Wall St

This is what we need to fight. This idea that we need what they're selling us.

This is why I believe that sustainable localism is so important. This is why we need to go beyond just business as usual, rhetoric as usual (no matter how smartly dressed), and currency as usual. Too many families and people are dispossessed of any power over their very own lives.

And we're supposed to be grateful? The system needs a shut-down.

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.