Tag: Dallas

Eat meat?

eggs & pitcher copy — ‘Eggs & Pitcher’ Oil on canvas © J.Hart ’16

Our relationship to the foods that we eat is probably the most intimate and immediate choice that we can make to help heal the planet. And the question of whether to eat meat or not can be, in our society, a major moral and ecological decision.

As in everything driven by the late stage hypercapitalism in which we live, corporations work hard to convince us that convenience and price override every other consideration. Nowhere is this clearer than in the foods we buy and eat, especially animal products.

I think of eating meat or not as on a continuum. On the far end is the daily (and sometimes three times a day!) habit in the United States of eating industrially raised meat. This is meat available in fast foods, processed foods, and in large supermarkets for just a couple of dollars a pound. How meat could be sold so cheaply is explained by government subsidies (our tax dollars at work!) and a monstrously large scaled farming system that can mechanically spew out tremendous quantities of inexpensive, imperfectly inspected meat to feed millions of people.

The horror of sentient beings (cows, pigs, and chickens) treated as nothing more than factory material to be imprisoned, tortured, and killed to provide us with their flesh should be a good enough reason to abjure eating corporate food products. But there is another important reason to give up meat and that is the destruction that this method of farming causes to the environment (and by environment I include each person’s individual body).

The methane that the animals, especially cows, expel is a major contributor to global warming. (https://timeforchange.org/are-cows-cause-of-global-warming-meat-methane-CO2)

The feces that the animals(especially pigs) excrete are stored in vast lakes that pollute the local environment and sicken nearby (usually poor) inhabitants. (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/24/pig-farm-agriculture-its-wrong-to-stink-up-other-peoples-lives-fighting-the-manure-lagoons-of-north-carolina)

And finally, the hormones and antibiotics that are given to these poor creatures to ensure the fastest production of eatable meat and eggs and to keep these animals alive while living under truly inhumane conditions are ending up in both our bodies and the water supply. This profligate use of antibiotics will be responsible for creating the antibiotic-resistant superbugs that await us in the near future. (http://time.com/4590391/animals-meat-antibiotics-antibiotic-resistance/)

Are there any other choices besides the complete refusal to eat meat? We can substitute fish and seafood for meat; but as the latest predictions are that fish will be unavailable by 2048 as we are overshooting the ability for fish to reproduce and replenish their species, and the industrially raised fish have the same issues with hormones and antibiotic use as meat!

For me the immediate solution is to eat less meat (once or twice a week only) but buy local raised, humanely farmed, and higher quality meat. Joel Salatin and other organic small scale regenerative farmers, use chickens and cattle to free range across their fields thereby naturally fertilizing their pastures. In Dallas, free range beef, chicken, and eggs are easily available, though more expensive than industrially raised meat and eggs. However, if you cut down the amount of meat and eggs you eat and up the quality, the price becomes manageable. Also, the recent studies suggest that your all-over health will improve with less meat, and therein lies a savings in doctor bills and prescription medicine costs!

A vegetarian diet which still uses eggs, and diary products like butter and cheese, is at the further end of the continuum. As with everything we eat, the closer the fruits and vegetables are grown to where we live (and raised in our backyard is best of all!), and the more organically grown, the better.

At the far end of the no meat argument are the vegans who eschew all meat usually on moral grounds that it is immoral to enslave and eat another sentient. For me, it is a very refined and noble sentiment, but I am not sure that it realistically reflects how Nature operates. Personally I expect one day to provide a very high quality feast to the beetles, maggots, and worms when my body goes in the ground!

Meanwhile, I am making the choice to slowly but consistently move toward eating less meat and treating that pasture-raised sirloin as a once a month luxury!

Grow for Flavor!

It is the beginning of the growing season here in Dallas, Texas. Be still my heart!! I have lived for the past 20 years in a place with a 10 week growing season, so this is pretty amazing! Having found a community garden where I can help with the gardening (more information to come on that in a future post), I have started to research what to plant here in the South (again, very different cultivars than what I am used to); and I found a terrific book at the library that I want to share.

It is James Wong’s Grow for Flavor, published by Firefly Books, 2016. I loved this book so much that I purchased it on Kindle. James Wong is a self-described botanical geek and serious foodie, and the information he supplies in this book is very different from what one usually finds in gardening books, even organic or sustainable ones.

The main focus, as the title tells us, is on flavor. Now, that seems like a given, especially for home gardens, but when James read the U.S. Department of Agriculture 2014 action plan for crop breeding, he found that not once was “flavor” or “taste” mentioned, and surprisingly, that the cultivars promoted for the home gardener are the same as those used in large farms! Happily, as James read through thousands of new studies, he found that there is a shift going on to, not only better flavor, but to better nutrition (and they are connected chemically!) in the new plants being developed.

So, James Wong focusses on flavor and, its partner, nutrition as the goals for your garden, and dismisses advertisers’ hype promoting large sized photogenic fruits (usually bland) and huge yields (unnecessary in a personal garden) to which we have become habituated. Instead, think small but intensely flavored blueberries, cherries, strawberries; carrots of all colors from deepest purple through orange to cream; and salad greens from sweet to fiery including what we mistake for weeds. Wong provides great suggestions of the names of the best cultivars and descriptions of what they taste like as well as super suggestions on how to grow them.

Because the basis of this book is the latest trials, James also gives all sorts of neat tricks (scientifically tested!) for improving the health of the plants. Did you know that you can jump start your tricky-to-germinate seeds like parsley and corn by soaking them overnight in an aspirin and seaweed soak (pg.34)? Or that watering your tomatoes with a 2% solution of salt water twice a year will make your tomatoes taste better (pg.49)? Or that slowly and gently stroking seedlings once they are one inch high makes them stockier and more resilient (p.34)?! And finally, James suggests in his recipes (also included in this book!) that you can cook with tomato leaves (pg.52)?! I have been adding carrot greens to my soups for awhile now, but chefs are starting to add tomato leaves for that leafy smell!

One final note, before I send you out to get this book and I start researching where to get these great cultivars, Grow for Flavor has also a lot of information for us permaculture fans including how to plant trees, best ways to prune, and when to harvest. You can learn more about and from James Wong at http://www.jameswong.co.uk. Happy Gardening!

A Yankee travels Dallas

shadows at bus stop 2-18 watercolor web — At the bus stop: just me and the bus sign.

Some of the things I do here in Dallas, like walking, are seen as something only a Yankee would do, though I think that taking the bus is a very Southern tradition especially for working people-think of the Montgomery bus strike.

Certainly, my experience of using the bus system here in Dallas has been very different than using the bus and metro system in Montreal. One similarity (and a good one it is!) is that in both places I, as a senior (over sixty-five years old), can buy a monthly pass for $40 U.S. (49$ CAD, which is roughly the same price).

The big difference seems to be that the transit system in Dallas is not the first choice for getting around town. The buses are busy during the morning and evening rush hours, but are almost empty on the weekends. They also run on once an hour schedules during the weekends. Sometimes I have been the only person on the bus or the DART trains in the middle of a Saturday afternoon!

It is a peculiar sensation to wait for a bus or a train in a deserted station or all alone at a bus stop. In Montreal, there are always people in the trains, or getting out at my stop even if it is after midnight on a Friday or Saturday night! But here the preference for the young & hip is Uber.

The mass transit here is also, like the neighbourhoods, de facto segregated by income, race, and ethnicity. Almost all the passengers are people of color, either working folks or indigents. However, I have found the atmosphere on the buses very warm and welcoming, much of which is the result of engaged drivers and a Southern feeling for hospitality even to strangers.

The drivers too are, almost to a person, very considerate of their passengers. The buses have a ramp that can be let down to allow people in wheelchairs to roll up more easily into the bus. Then the drivers must get out of their seats to attach the wheelchairs to the bus. And when the disabled person needs to get off, the drivers have to disconnect the chairs again, and let down (and then take up) the ramps. This is a very important service that the Dallas transit offers their customers, but as there is no one on board to help the drivers with this job, the buses often run behind schedule!

So, once again, a better choice for transportation is in place, but the difficulty is getting people to opt for this choice, and by upping the ridership, create improvements to the service.

Artisans of the Common Good

old shoes 1 web — My walking shoes: L.L.Bean sneakers & Ecco leather ties. Pastel on watercolor wash.

I got a very interesting comment recently on my post about the difficulty of walking around Dallas, and I have been thinking about it since the New Year. My reader noted that the folks in Dallas love their cars, but also that they need the cars in order to commute in a spread out city during the summer months when the temperature is often in the triple digits.

Fair point, but why make the solution to commuting, during the four months when it is unhealthy to be outside walking most of the day, fit every day the rest of the year? (It has been -11 degrees F. recently where I come from in the North so you can only imagine how happy I am walking around Dallas in your delightfully comfortable 55 degrees F.!) What would Dallas look like, and what could some strategies for encouraging walking be, if we didn’t assume an easy one size fits all means of transportation?

Texas just got ranked one of the lowest states (34th) in the nation for good health with 33% of the population obese, so the question is not a trivial one! But for most of us, we use the infrastructure that is in place, and don’t really notice it unless we come from another society with alternate ways of getting around. We tend not to think about how our world would be different (and better!) if we, as individuals, make different choices.

And as we change our lives, the infrastructure would begin to change too. Right now in Dallas, the highways that connect parts of the city are in good repair, but the smaller local streets have been neglected as the city endeavours to save money. It makes sense to walk locally if only to spare your car the damage of negotiating streets with a lot of potholes! If more people walked to do the errands that are now done by car (grocery shopping with a pull cart, picking up dry cleaning, going to the library, etc.); and used walking to get some of the exercise that either they are not getting, or that they are relegating to the time at the gym, the routes between destinations would improve: better sidewalks, more time to cross busy larger streets, and perhaps most important, drivers being aware that there are going to be pedestrians sharing the streets with them!

As David Brooks wrote in his op-ed piece, for the New York Times, recently, on Pope Francis’ New Year’s Eve homily: “the people who have the most influence on society are actually the normal folks, through their normal, everyday gestures: being kind in public places, attentive to the elderly. The pope called such people, in a beautiful phrase, ‘the artisans of the common good.’ ” Choosing to walk, choosing to quite literally “step outside the box” makes you an artisan of the common good!