PP showed us this amazing video tonight, about what economics is about and what it should be about:
It is very interesting and great, watch it!
It questions our current society's focus on money, natural resources, lack of sharing and giving... I want that Gift Economy that he is talking about. Maybe, just like Paying it forward, we should be Giving it forward more in our lives.
A great piece about why realism is better than overly positive thinking:
A few months ago I picked up an old Swedish book given to me by a friend, who I have long forgotten, but it was a book I had wanted to read for a long time: Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia. I think my copy might be the first edition from 1981 in Swedish. I dug in and started to read, with high expectations, because this was a 'real travel writer'!. As you might know, I mostly read right before I fall asleep, maybe half an hour a day, at the most.
Bruce Chatwin leaves work and travels to Patagonia, seemingly unplanned, a place he has always wanted to visit. His travel diary is not a diary in the regular sense, more broken pieces and fragments of text from his experiences in Patagonia with inserts of history, commentary, and cultural reflections.
And here is the main problem. Bruce stands outside the whole travel experience. He reports like a objective journalist, not a person present in the moment. And he even fails at being objective, because many times you can clearly feel the aversion he has to the people he meets. It is not a boring book, and the text is excellently written, beautiful in fact, but it is not a good book. You don't get a feel for the place, and it is too fragmented.
The detachedness of Bruce Chatwin is disturbing. I can't remember any of the persons he describes in such detail, no stories, no places, no names or characters. No recollection. There is no focus at all. How can that be? It was like nothing as memorable. I know that this is considered one of the best travel books ever written, but I will have to disagree, strongly. So I gave up, 10-20 pages from the end.
A few weeks later I needed a book with me when I had to wait for my daughter at the dentists. I looked in our bookshelf and found "The Old Patagonian Express" by Paul Theroux! I remember buying this book for my husband, but none of us had read it yet. I brought it with me, read a few pages at the dentist, and was hooked. And last night, I finished it. What a difference. What joy. I envy people that haven't read this book, they have such a good read in front of them.
Paul Theroux's book was published a year (1979) after Bruce Chatwin's book and they were friends. The books are like night and day in difference. While Bruce Chatwin talks about Patagonia, he never explains how he got there, and his book has not one structured path in it. Paul Theroux, on the other hand, has a plan, and he loves travel, which for him means to GET TO another place, not BE IN another place. And I think he is right. True travel is the transportation phase, the active movement through places, not being dumped in a place and staying there.
The way Paul Theroux traveled to Patagonia is the focus, the structure, of the whole book. He gets on the subway and then commuter train in Boston in a snowstorm, and then takes local train after local train down to Mexico, through Central America, along the Andes, through long Argentina, and then eventually ends up on The Old Patagonian Express, the narrowgauge steam train that goes to Esquel. And then the book is over.
This book is not about Patagonia, this book is about human nature, nature and humans. Culture, politics, some natural history, pestering travel companions, good and bad hotel rooms, dusty old railroad cars, giant steaks in dining cars, delays, landslides, revolts, and rats chewing holes in the ceiling above your bed. It also has great interactions between Paul Theroux and the people he meets, from street urchins in Colombia to impossible Mr Thornberry in Costa Rica and the Argentinians need to be superior while having the right to complain about anything in their own country (and nobody else should).
It is a fantastic story, a meandering travel path through not only North and Latin American geography, but also classic literature (Paul Theroux discusses the books he reads during the trip), and it feels real and human. He is not trying to be some übermensch, not someone that stands above or besides his co-travelers or people he meets. He just is. Now I have to read his other travel books! Wow, what a read! Yes, A+ and five stars of course.
There are a lot of great passages in The Old Patagonian Express, and here is one that I think fits this review pretty well:
Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.
Here are some recent news and reflections on current events in Sweden from my trip here:
There is a new law in Sweden that all businesses have to pay all invoices within 30 days. No exceptions. Nice.
It has been so cold that soon the whole sea between Sweden and Finland is frozen across the narrowest part where the island Aland is, right north of Stockholm. That doesn't happen every winter, and I love the thought that the ocean is freezing over. Instead of boats they then use hover crafts to get out to the villages in the archipelagoes. They use special ships to break the ice on the route between Sweden and Finland too.
The mistletoe plants, parasitic bundles of green that you can see in the tops of naked trees in the winter, are spreading rapidly in Eskilstuna. When I grew up there were none here, and now they are abundant. They have berries that are eaten and spread by the Bohemian waxwings. Changing biodiversity!
Swedish food stores are strange. They have lots of ecological and sometimes local food, but then the produce looks substandard or simply isn't there. Regular cauliflower looks like it went through the laundry dryer. Leeks are limp. Potatoes, a staple in this country, are in a giant bin, and you have to pick through them to get the ones that don't have blemishes. Lettuces are half as big as in the US. And chicken is a lot more expensive that beef and pork, even the most regular cuts. Chicken breasts (regular mass produced, nothing special) on sale is $5 a pound, while beef roast on sale is down to $4/lbs. So maybe it is the red meat that is cheap... I have to investigate this some more and will try to get some photos to illustrate this. This is very surprising to me.
There is a suggestion that Swedes would have a special meat tax since red meat is worse for the environment and the climate than chicken and vegetarian fare. The Swedes don't like that at all.
New Jersey snow plow drivers are much better at removing snow than the Swedish ones. This really surprised me. Here they don't plow all the way to the curb. Or on the left side of a highway, making a 4-lane highway turning into 3 lanes, 2 full ones and then two middle lanes that are only half-plowed. Dangerous.
The sun gets up around 8.30-9 and by 4 PM it is dark.
There is a Swedish phenomenon called 'fredagsmys'. Fredag is Friday, and 'mys' is kind of 'hang out and have a great time, but without alcohol, in a cutesy setting'. This started after I left Sweden, and it is just a way for the stores to sell more chips, dip, ready-made junk food, soda and candy for Friday nights. A TV program with funny jokes, music and such on Friday evenings for family get togethers (parents, friends, little kids, etc.) helped too. But really, it is just a giant marketing thing that has fooled most of the Swedes. Fredagsmys is now a word in the dictionary and every kid knows the word and want it. Can't families do things together without having to have an imposed fake 'get together' time in front of the TV? I think this is a great example of an artifical need that has been created by food and candy companies, and the Swedes just went all along....
What do you think? How will we remember 2012, this year of extremes...?
Will we remember hurricane Sandy? (Answer: yes, definitely.)
Will we remember the nor'easter named Athena, that arrived a few days after Sandy? (Answer: probably not, we have a lot of early snowstorms these days...)
Will we remember the crazy election with Romney vs. Obama, and all the money that was wasted on political ads instead of putting to good use for a better world?
Will I remember the year I started growing weeds on purpose? (Maybe not, but others might.)
My Agent Orange Hot Sauce with habaneros and carrots? Yes, that is among the best ever made in this house. A memory that has to be repeated next year, and this is probably the spiciest hot sauce I have made.
I do know what I will remember:
The robin chicks in our garden:
The poison hemlock that decided to grow in my raised bed (which is pretty funny since I just decided to learn more about weeds):
Seeing the original fossil of Tiktaalik, the missing link between lake-living amphibians and terrestrial tetrapods:
Feeling strangely 'at home' in a tiny town in Vermont, a place that reminded me so much of the good parts of rural Sweden.
I also think this was the year when the climate change opinion changed; I can feel it in the air, in the media, among my neighbors. Nobody is arguing about the weather becoming wetter, windier, drier, stranger anymore. Not here. Not after blooming flowers in January, snowstorms in April, drought and 'the-sky-just-opened'-rain showers in August, the superstorm/hurricane Sandy and then the snowstorms after that. The weather just is crazy, and you can see it with your own eyes.
Time to face the facts and do something about it, people. And don't rebuild where it will flood again... Do you think the stone age people rebuilt when the land rise changed the coastlines? No, they were smart, they moved. It doesn't work to be stubborn when nature's forces are against you. How will we adapt? (And for the record, all but 0.17% of scientific reports agree, the current climate change is caused by the human species. That debate is over. Now it is time to decide what do to.)
So, taking a census of the year, what were the highlights?
Well, I saw a lot of things that was interesting: Ground Zero, the abandoned railroad terminal at Liberty State Park, Washington Monument, Edison Labs, the green mountains of Vermont (injured after hurricane Irene), shapes at Grounds of Sculpture, a rare pink gentian, Ken Hamilton's models, crocodiles and leafcutter ants in Costa Rica, the rescued SAAB museum, and Ai Wei Wei's exhibit in Stockholm. I also made some things I am proud of, like this scarf and about 70 jars of canned food.
But the highlights must have been all the good food we made from mostly locally grown meat and vegetables, eating fresh tomatoes from the reinvigorated and redesigned kitchen garden with blue highlights, teaching fun classes with great students and co-teachers on really interesting subjects (evolution can never be a boring subject), seeing my relatives in Sweden, learning about weeds that are beautiful and neglected, getting an art quilt by Erin Wilson, that the cats survived another year outside (even during Sandy), and getting AREA off to art college.
2012 was also the year where I gave in and got an iPhone, despite my severe reservations and horror at other people's addiction to this piece of technology. Honestly, I think it can be a good thing, but you have to learn to turn it off, and set all signals and notifications but the phone calls to silent. There is nothing more annoying than someone that has a phone on vibrate or buzz while doing other things so they and you (and the people around you) get interrupted all the time. And don't take it to bed (as if I ever would do that... my phone lives in another room.) I wanted the GPS and a way to get news during the next storm that hits us, since all power and internet will be out again then for days, I am sure. Another day I will rant about Facebook etc., don't you worry. As my brother says about me, 'you are certainly not an early adopter'. :)
And the people, art, and books this year that have had the most influence on how I think and what I do, are probably the author Cheryl Strayed (book reviews will come!), Anu Tuominen's art (the blogpost about her is here), and the book The War of Art (half of which is good about procrastination and getting things done, while the rest is mumbo-jumbo about spiritual inspiration).
And with that - Happy New Year, Happy 2013!, with a photo taken exactly a year ago in the forests around here. This is the fruit of a tulip tree, Liriodendron tulipifera.
In May this year I had to travel to Washington DC for a conference and took a few hours to see the sights:
The Washington Monument. Impressive.
The White House. I wonder how many spy cameras that are in the flower beds.
I wonder if the President ever sends out Secret Service to get him a Polish dog? This cart was right next to the White House.
This anti-war tent vigil has been going on for three decades, every day, every hour, every minute. It is right in front of the White House, and is more of a statement than a disturbance. I wish we lived in a world with more peace.
Outside the US Department of Agriculture they had planted parsley in the flower beds, and it was flowering nicely and greenly. So appropriate and unusual.
Inside the USDA was a small museum about food history, which included this great quote:
"...the most valuable of all arts will be the art of deriving a comfortable subsistence from the smallest area of soil." Abraham LincolnThey also had a lot of old posters from World War I and II.
Fossil discovery: Giant fleas from the Jurassic, that might have sucked blooded from dinosaurs (NY Times). How about meeting some of these 2 cm long creatures on the inside of your wool sweater?
Some of the Republican presidential contenders appear to want to live in a different century. Like the 1800's or something. This is both sad and upsetting. (NY Times opinion piece by Charles Blow)
Did you know cashmere comes from goats? And angora from rabbits? So, why are people OK with wearing the hairs from goats and rabbits, but not eating them? Eating the meat, not the hairs, I mean.
Itchy poison ivy doesn't let a simple fence stop it. In fact, it enforces it and makes it its own fence.
So, what are you readers itching about?
It is a well-known fact that there are many kids that won't eat anything green, spicy, or 'weird'. This might be based on their genetics, such as that they have specific alleles for tasting bitterness that some people don't have. With age, we get used to it and the genes matter less.
However, I think most kids today stick to bland, mass-produced factory food because their parents feed them that kind of food, out of convenience and influenced by advertising. McDonald's burgers (with no lettuce and tomatoes on the kid burgers, mind you!), french fries, chicken nuggets in a heat up plastic box, poptarts from aluminium foil packets, neon-colored 'cereal' with marshmallows, all soaked and dusted with fat, salt and sugar, oh the compounds we humans love!
And, it certainly doesn't help that most parents eat such food too, so they are not providing a home environment with real cooked food and a variety of ingredients. Many parents just take the easy way out - why force Bill to eat broccoli and have a scene at the dinner table? "Frozen pizza is so great, lets have it for dinner", again.
So, it is absolutely no surprise to me that a big food experiment with school lunches in Los Angeles failed. (read the news story here) They changed the menus to include more vegetables and healthy food, such as new dishes such as veggie curry, jambalaya, and pad thai (Mmm...). Now, my kids love those three things, but I don't think most kids do. Actually, I know most kids don't. In the test program, the schools got rid of chicken nuggets, nachos, chocolate milk, and other fast food calorie-bombs. The kids hated the change, many refused to eat the new food and just threw the food in the garbage. Undercover food snack deliveries started, and it was just a giant flop.
I am not surprised at all. First, these kids probably never or rarely had healthy food at home, at school, at restaurants or anywhere else. They are brought up on the bad stuff, and their parents eat the same thing. Unless you get the parents with you, and start this early on it will not work. I guess the only exception are those weight-loss boot camps where there is no alternative, "either you eat this or nothing, and there is just desert around here so you better eat here".
Second, if you are in middle and high school, there is giant psychological tension at all time, and especially in the cafeteria. Eating something weird, or not eating something, can easily turn into a trend, a thing to be teased over, or just something you don't want to deal with. Cliques of popular kids can very likely influence loads of kids not to eat something strange.
Third, in the schools, why was the left-over food thrown away? Give it to some pigs if it is leftovers from kids' plates. Keep the pigs outside the cafeteria, and tell the kids where bacon comes from! If there are left-over food from the kitchen, pack it up and give it to soup kitchens, hungry Occupyers, disabled vets, or anybody else that needs some great, fresh food. (This idea came from VFK when we talked about this.) If the food could be thrown away like that, then they also have a bad recycling system at the schools.
Fourth, if you really want people to change giant habits like this you to have to make it relevant to them. It has to be personal, not imposed by Big Brother, and it has to feel like an option, not a must and something a teenager has to rebel against. Use it as a teaching moment, without them realizing it is educational. Have cooking classes with parents plus kids. Do survival courses without any cooked food, with foraging from basic ingredients only. Grow the food on the school yard, plow up all that useless grass. Make the football team dig potatoes by hand for exercise. Keep bunnies, chickens, and pigs. Eat weeds. Cook cultural dishes from around the world, and cook ethnic 'fast-food' like dishes. Spaghetti with sauce, tacos, hamburgers - these can be great and good!
If I could decide, certain foods would be outlawed, and there would be no food advertising in TV (or anywhere else) for kids under 10. And no fake infomercials either. Everything would have 50% less sugar in it (if it had any to begin with), and no cereal would have food coloring. Everybody would have to intern at least 2 months on a farm, in a bakery, slaughterhouse, kitchen, or something like that before they end high school, to understand where food comes from and how it is made. (Actually, interning at a hamburger patty factory might not be bad. Might turn you off hamburgers forever. ) And kids should visit farms all the time, from the time they can put their fingers in their mouths and say gaga over sheep and apples. Chicken nuggets and other super-processed machine-made food should have giant warning labels on them, saying "NON-FOOD FACTORY PRODUCT".
In the end, I think this is of course a societal problem, but it really comes down to the parents. If the parents don't care about food, and the food for their children, then the kids will not care. If parents give in and are laissez-faire parents (=letting any little kid decide for themselves all the time), then you get kids that are whiny, picky, irresponsible, selfish, and won't eat any anything real and interesting. And who wants to live with such a person when they are adults?
Of course processed fast-food taste good, it is made to make us love it - it is all part of the commercial plans to sell more and to earn more money for the companies. But you don't have to buy into it. As a parent, stay strong, and if you slip now and then, that is OK. I have given my kids Hungry Man TV dinners, mac and cheese from a box, Spaghettios from a can, and so on. At the time, it was what I could handle, because of other circumstances. But now they eat nearly everything (well, one is a vegetarian that eats fish, and neither eats beets, which is perfectly fine).
It is never too late to change, to try something new. But to dare to try, I don't think you should be in a giant high school cafeteria and be served lukewarm sticky jambalaya surrounded by other teenagers that tell you it looks like "you-know-what"... I think this whole food movement would work better if people knew how to cook better, so maybe that is where things should start. With a knife, a pot and a cutting board. Maybe we should have survival courses in the kitchen. "How to cook from scratch during 5 days without electricity and a functioning fridge", hehe... Well, we don't have to be that drastic to begin with. How about "How to cook from ingredients that come in boxes with less than 3 ingredients listed on each box"?
(And a caveat - there are exceptions of course, but I think everybody can eat better. Being 3 years old is no excuse to live on only 4 types of food.)
After a long stretch of semi-interesting to really bad books (see this, for example), I opened up this book and just loved it. I don't want to write a long review, because the book has to be experienced, be loved, and be enjoyed on its own terms, because this is what it deserves. The Help by Kathryn Stockett is about the black maids in southern US in the 1960s, their lives, loves, and despair, and about the white women that hire them, use them, depend on them, and sometimes, respect them. I insisted on reading it before I watched the newly made movie based on it, so now I am ready. If you have read the book, the movie is never better than the book, I think. But this book gets a 9 out of a 10, so I am not worried about the movie being really bad. I heard some had complained that a white woman shouldn't write a book about black women, but come on, that is the stupidiest thing I have heard. If that is so, then women can't write about men, Swedes can't write about Norwegians, and black men can't write about white men. We are foremost people, humans, and not our color, citizenship, or gender. Compassion and understanding is deeper than skin color or culture, at least it ought to be. So, if you want a great read, a good story, and deep thought mixed with fun stories, this is the book. It is just like life is. Just read it. A++
In today's New York Times, opinionator Thomas L. Friedman is writing about the unrest in the world, from burning London, arabic uprisings, Tea Party craziness, to unhappy people. What is going on here, really? He writes:
Here are some thoughts I wrote down while flying on a plane recently just after reading about the last ever NASA shuttle mission taking off... (Update and clarification - the quoted text is what I wrote myself that day on a scrap of paper, so I am quoting myself.)
A great article about guerilla gardening in Tokyo, including planting broccoli outside major banks... It is also about design, food politics, and life philosophy, in the words of David Duval Smith.
Growing up in Sweden and then living in America (= here USA) subjects you to some interesting cultural contradictions. American culture is vast, both geographically, but also culturally, ethnically, and socially. One of the things that have bothered and surprised me most is how some people, many of them politicians, despise knowledge and scientific facts.
For these people, I always wonder what they would say if they came to a hospital and the doctors there wouldn't know the latest and best treatments or use the most modern technology. Oh no, they want the latest and the best science, but only when it comes to medicine it seems. Not when it comes to the environment, climate, international politics, or making society work so it functions the best for all. In these latter cases, science should be miscredited and seen as elitist and the opposite of 'common sense'.
I think it has to do with the mega-obsession in the American culture of the individual, the egocentric way of thinking "me" and "I" about most things. Strangely enough it is often based on a Christian foundation, which to me should mean sharing, fairness, and equality, but oh no, here it is much more of 'I deserve this' and 'you don't deserve that' here in the US.
I am overgeneralizing here, because there are many people and community groups that are not at all like this, but there is a general, historic, and very bothersome trend to only care about yourself and your family in this country. That is why USA is 40 years behind Europe in environmentally friendly policies and systems, have no good affordable daycare systems, and a large proportion of the citizens have no health insurance at all. This is a country of egoists, indeed, speaking in general terms. [A caveat here too, some of the most generous and friendly people I have ever met have been Americans.]
I was reminded about all this when I read a very good article in a recent issue of the magazine Academe: A Brief History of Anti-intellectualism in American Media by Dane S. Claussen. Here is her summary of the three types of anti-intellectualism that were proposed in the 1950s, and I think they still stand, unfortunately.
