I went into the reading of this book already having a firm grasp on Pollan’s message and so my notes ended up focusing on questions that I felt he left unanswered, or on subjects that I felt needed more attention.

“A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency at any cost and the moral imperatives of culture, which historically have served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market. This is another example of the cultural contradictions of capitalism – the tendency over time for the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society. Mercy toward animals in our care is one such casualty.”

This could be the most important quote I have ever read on the subject of our relationship to animals. Pollan continues by pointing out that in the factory farms, where the most heinous animal abuses occur, the workers receive similar treatment as the animals, that is, with very little regard for their comfort or well-being (This quote points directly at the root of the problem, yet Pollan unfortunately mentions this only briefly and then moves on to another topic). The problem with our relationship to our food is that we do not have a relationship with our food. The underpinnings of the capitalist system and its focus on efficiency of production have destroyed any sense of connection that we may have had prior to the Green Revolution of the 20^th Century. It is not just our meat, but dairy and vegetables also. In one episode of the popular celebrity chef’s television program, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, Oliver takes a basket of produce into a classroom and the kids cannot name a single fruit or vegetable, including a potato – but the kids recognize a basket of McDonald’s French fries with almost feral excitement.

What we teach our children about food may be more important than any one piece in the equation, yet they are the ones who suffer the most from a lack of proper nutrition education. They are the ones most targeted by ad campaigns from big food-substance companies. Products like Dino-bites that are chicken nuggets in dinosaur shapes serve to remove any familiarity from food and even propel it into a fantasy world where kids can even pretend they are eating long extinct animals. The problem of nutrition illiteracy is the front line of the food revolution and if we are going to make any serious headway toward healthier communities, we must start with education.

“The grain that the vegan eats is harvested with a combine that shreds field mice, while the farmer’s tractor wheel crushes woodchucks in their burrows and his pesticides drop songbirds from the sky; after harvest whatever animals that would eat our crops we exterminate. Killing animals is probably unavoidable no matter what we eat.”

“If our concern is for the health of nature – rather than, say, the internal consistency of our moral code or the condition of our souls – then eating animals may sometimes be the most ethical thing to do.”

One thing that Pollan does well is confronting hard-line vegetarians and vegans with a measured and reasonable argument focused on the true conditions around the food that they consume and the effects a sea-change shift to veganism would have on ecosystems. As the first quote highlights, there are animals killed in the production of vegan foods, actually in just about every step of the process. The ecological impacts associated with shipping vegan food products to regions that do not naturally produce them, in terms of fuel prices and environmental impact, are also rarely considered. Neither are the destroyed ecosystems, such as South American rainforests, which are the result of soybean farms.

Ultimately, there is no simple solution, and we have to be radical in the purest form of the word – we have to grasp the problem by its roots. Our entire food system – whether you are omnivorous, vegetarian or vegan – contains inefficiencies that would be addressed by the institution of sustainable business practices in order to eliminate social, economic, and environmental externalities. In other words, it is not what we eat, but how we eat that is important.

Closer to the context of the book, animals are absent referents because the way we package our meat completely distracts us from the fact that it was at one point a living, breathing animal. Adams makes the case, rightly, that this is the same relationship that we have with the females of our own species. We too often objectify, making it easier to excuse and justify our inherent and systemic sexism, which we all perpetuate to varying degrees.

Adams spends much of her book exploring the systemic patriarchy that plagues our food production and consumption, and I definitely agree with her analysis of our system’s conditions. Her view is still correct 20 years later, and one could argue that the ever-increasing corporatization of our food production system has made conditions worse. In the last few years, efforts by the likes of Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, Jamie Oliver, and a few other now-celebrity foodies have begun the conversation about what we eat, where it comes from, and how we treat the animals we raise, but not in a way that really addresses Adams’ concerns.

The frustration began to set in for me about halfway through the book. This was the point when I realized that Adams’ solution to her stated problem consisted of what I consider simply ignoring the problem. She argues that none of us should eat meat or dairy because it is morally wrong to do so because of the poor treatment of animals in our food production system. She does not address the reality that the majority of people in the world simply will not as a matter of taste and in many cases cannot afford to become vegan. One trip to the Food Coop to price out a three-course vegan meal compared to a similar meal purchased at Safeway and including meat and dairy products gives us a clue as to the economic barrier that veganism presents.

It pains me to criticize Adams so deeply because I completely agree with her on the sexuality side of her arguments, and from a social and philosophical standpoint I think she is right on. I think she fails in her attempt to solve the problem, and fails by taking what I believe is the easy way out. She seems to absolve herself, and her fellow vegans, of any complicity in the dubious practices of the system by simply clinging to her vegan moral high ground. This is high ground made of sand, in my opinion.

If we treat women the same way we treat our food, I would say that we treat our natural environment the same as we treat them as well. Veganism is not without its consequences. The amount of energy it takes to deliver vegan products or organic vegetables to our stores is not a factor in Adams’ argument. The question that this book leaves me with is who has the better ethical stance, the person whose organic broccoli comes from Peru, or the person who eats beef that is locally and sustainably raised? Personally, I choose local foods whenever I can, and I also do not pretend that I am ethically superior because of that choice.

Downtown Olympia, WA News || Everyday Olympia.

I grew up in a working class family of dockworkers with French, and some Irish, heritage. My family fought in every war since WWII, and in every theater of those wars. At my core are the strong union values and love of country that were passed on to me. The phrase, ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’ is etched into my very being, and serves as a kind of personal mission statement that I carry with me.

As a teenager, it was just my mother (born Anne Marie DeVilliers) and I, she had left a controlling and abusive marriage, and my biological father had disappeared from my life. She worked up to three jobs at different times, and was still forced to, begrudgingly and only out of necessity, get on food stamps. This was back in the days when food stamps came in books containing brightly colored monopoly money-like slips and there was no way for a very proud woman like my mother to hide the fact that she was using them. Most mornings she would be up and gone to work before I got up for school, and she would often not get home until 8:30 or so at night, but always made sure I had a dinner.

Because my mother was out working to make just enough to keep us fed and housed and clothed, I was in many ways a product of the amazing social programs in our country. I mentioned food stamps, but in addition to that, I took part in school lunch programs (which, like food stamps came in the form of different-colored cards that stood out from the ones the other kids had), after-school programs, youth employment programs, and we frequented our local community clinic for the free or cheap health care it provided. There is really no telling where I would be at this point in my life without those programs to keep me at least a little bit on track and out of too much trouble.

These experiences have been ones that I look back on often, and inform my opinions and choices nearly every day. The anecdotes you hear about being “a paycheck away” from homelessness? The stories of the struggling single mom without health care? Those are my memories. That was my normal.

Arguments I hear from the left against Health Care Reform make me shudder. It seems that all of the great things this bill does (funding for community clinics, prescription drugs for seniors, elimination of preexisting condition denials, access to health care for 30 million uninsured poor people, and on and on) somehow isn’t enough and that means we should scrap it until we can institute a single payer plan. This is offensive to me, and I think it’s a slap to the face of all of the Anne-Marie DeVilliers’ of the world who are raising their children alone and without the security that health care brings, living with the fear that one injury or illness could force them into a shelter and a soup kitchen.

I would ask my friends on the left who oppose this Health Care Reform to put away their politics for a moment and think about the huge step that we have taken this week toward meeting basic needs in our country. Just as I would have been 10 times more likely to fall into drugs and crime had I not had the social programs (now largely and sadly defunded) of my youth, our present generation, in the midst of one of the worst economic crises in history, is at risk as well. I would ask that we put away our grand theories for a moment, put the least among us in the middle of the table, and honor and serve them in every conversation we have about this issue and all of the other vitally important issues of our time.

Earlier this week, Robert Jenson wrote an article on Alternet called ‘Why We Shouldn’t Celebrate Thanksgiving’.  The nut of his article is rooted in this quote:

“The argument that we can ignore the collective cultural definition of Thanksgiving and create our own meaning in private has always struck me as odd.”

It’s odd to me also, and I simply can’t reconcile the Thanksgiving holiday. I spend most Thanksgivings, or at least the following days, feeling guilty about having such a good time, overeating, and leaving so many leftovers that they spoil before they can be eaten, while all in the shadow of a day commemorating the beginning of perhaps the largest genocide ever carried out in the history of our world.

A lot of people will probably react with, “Oh, lighten up.”, or, the argument that I have personally heard many times, and that Jenson writes about, which comes from our more liberal friends, which is, essentially, that we have to take the day back.  We have to, as Jensen writes, “reject the culture’s self-congratulatory attempts to rewrite history… and come together on Thanksgiving to celebrate the love and connections among family and friends.”

Jensen’s response to this:

“This commitment to Thanksgiving puts these left/radical critics in the position of internalizing one of the central messages promoted by the ideologues of capitalism — that individual behavior in private is more important than collective action in public. The claim that through private action we can create our own reality is one of the key tenets of a predatory corporate capitalism that naturalizes unjust hierarchy, a part of the overall project of discouraging political struggle and encouraging us to retreat into a private realm where life is defined by consumption.”

I find this to be a reasonable response, and I agree with Jensen here wholeheartedly. I don’t think this is an argument worth having on Thanksgiving Day however, and I think there is a lot of work we need to do before we’re ready for that conversation.  So I’m not going to spend a lot of time propping up this argument. I must note that I was also turned off by Jensen resorting to a NAZI analogy to prove his point, which he defends by pointing out that, “Comparisons to the Nazis are routinely overused and typically hyperbolic, but this is directly analogous.” Of course it is, it always is to the person who says it is.

Long story short, I’m not celebrating Thanksgiving today.  No traditional food, no gathering with lots of people, just a quiet day in my apartment.

Unlike Jensen, I’m not doing this out of protest, and I’m not going to go for any long soul searching walks to contemplate how to resist the chains of capitalism, and our violent history. In previous years, I’ve attended anti-Thanksgiving meals and gatherings where we “took back the day” and “made it our own” (and didn’t speak once of the real history).  Those celebrations were just as awkward for me as the real Thanksgiving celebrations I’ve been to.  Instead of sort of blindly going about the day not thinking about the real history, we sort of blindly went about the day imagining that by actively not celebrating the way mainstream society does, we were now absolved of any complicity or guilt we felt about that dark history. Instead of owning that it indeed was our collective history as Americans, we were pushing the blame away from ourselves, and onto… I guess onto the people that were celebrating Thanksgiving.

This IS our collective history, however, no matter when your particular ancestors arrived, no matter who they were or what they did. We are all in this together, and we can’t continue to pretend that We didn’t slaughter nearly an entire race of people, or that We didn’t own slaves, or the We didn’t lynch black people, or that We didn’t consider women property that was owned by the husband.  All of these things happened.

I also want to make the point that I don’t think that we as individuals should walk around feeling guilty about these things either.  Neither myself or anyone I know had anything directly to do with human and civil rights abuses, or genocide, or slavery.  I think the guilt we feel makes us uncomfortable and that is why we either gloss it over, or push it away. I say bring it out, talk about it, make it comfortable. Until we are able to talk about it without guilt or blame, we can’t heal, and we can’t move past it until we do.

So this year, for me, today is just  a day off, and I’m going to relax and watch some movies and cook myself some food, just like I might on any other day off.

Top 5 TV Shows of the Oughts:

1. The Wire

2. Arrested Development

3. The Office (UK)

4. Deadwood

5. It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia

avclub.com weighs in here with a top ten:

The best TV series of the ’00s | Best Of The Decade | The A.V. Club.

In times of recession or depression, is it better for government (local and federal) to focus on giving money to services (i.e. non-profits) in order to meet immediate needs, or to focus on economic development, such as job creation through infrastructure projects, in order to spur the kind of recovery that will then positively effect service providers through increased private giving and decreased need for services?

It seems to me that the most important function of government, right now, should be to promote projects that create local jobs. One person in a household with a decent full time job makes that household exponentially more secure and less likely to be reliant on services.

I would even go as far as to challenge the federal government to set a 100% employment goal, at least until the economy recovers.  In the last great economic decline, one of the things that pulled us out was the creation of our beautiful and great infrastructure and park lands.  Sadly, we’ve done little to maintain and modernize our infrastructure over the years, and especially during our recent Age of Prosperity.  Instead of Senators and Representatives pushing for infrastructure projects in their districts they have settled for pork barrel projects, many of which have never broken earth, yet scored huge political points (and donations) for the politicians involved.

If I were in a position to weigh in at the City of Olympia, for instance, I would suggest that the city, during the next few years, act as an incubator for housing and other construction projects with the condition that 90% of the jobs created by each project be local hires. I think this would go a lot farther than a shotgun distribution of limited funds to random non-profit organizations, because it would address joblessness, which is a root cause of poverty, as opposed to treating symptoms of poverty such as hunger and homelessness.

So this is my take on the question, I look forward to hearing from others.

The general feeling I get is that this was a good decision made for the right reasons.  Joe Hyer talked about other developments, Colpitts’ for example, that are having trouble putting all of the pieces together to secure project funding.  Colpitts has their long term funding secure, and is looking for startup money.

The major case against a parking garage right now is of course, the economy.  Another might be a question of capacity.  We already have over 600,000 square feet of ground level parking downtown, so, some wonder, why build a garage?  The answer to that is that we have to build up on that street level parking and when we do, perhaps not yet, but within the next ten years, we’re going to need a parking structure to accommodate increased population downtown.

I don’t think it’s worth having a big fight over, because I think a parking garage is an eventuality, meaning there’s really not much to be done to stop it. Someday a developer is going to make a garage pencil out, and then they will build it, and there will be nothing, beyond design review, that we will be able to do about it.

This is why it’s important that we get involved in the Comprehensive Plan process over the next two years. Through that process we can come up with measured goals around growth and development and get ourselves out of this collective pendulous state we’ve found ourselves stuck in, ultimately getting us no where toward our goals.

Olympia drops plan for garage – South Sound – The Olympian – Olympia, Washington.

My friend Nicole is building up her doula business, Red Raspberry Doula.  She studied to become a doula at Evergreen, and is one of the most caring and compassionate people I know.  Tell your friends!

Nicole Heye

Red Raspberry Doula.