MotherPie

Removed from Our Food...

Something happened about the time I became a mother.  I've been concerned about it ever since.  Cooking from scratch started to disappear.  It became harder and harder to serve healthy meals.  Shortcuts, fast food and processed and precooked meals have removed us from our heritage of diversity.  We're losing our food roots, our diversity, our varied seed stocks along with the family farms.

At the same time that the time squeeze began, as sports became more demanding outside of school, as seasons stretched, as competition became more deluxe, as the advertising to kids for processed and junk foods ramped up, family farms were dying. 

I'm concerned about heirloom seed stocks, massive agribusiness and commercialized food. Amber Fields of Bland, by Dan Barber (NYTimes behind the subsriber Select wall), appeared on January 14.  He writes of farm bills and policy from the viewpoint of a chef,  saying that "70% of our nation's farms have been lost to bankruptcy or consolidation."  He writes, "...the food that we grow on 200 million acres of harvested cropland is inedible. Stand in the middle of our farm belt and you'll see cornfields extending to the horizon, but the harvest won't be dinner, not until it's milled and processed into flours or starches, or used to fatten our animals on feedlots. Just four crops -- corn, rice, soybeans and wheat -- account for the vast majority of our harvested acreage. Not surprising, given that these same crops account for 70 percent of the total subsidies allotted to farmers. No one wants farmers to suffer, especially chefs. But if we're spending $20 billion or so a year on farm subsidies, we ought to invest in the foods we eat."

Another NYTimes article by Michael Pollen, Unhappy Meals, writes about the confusion since the 1980s about nutrition and how we came to regard food products as food.  "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."  That is his opening sentence and his article is a good one on why, as consumers, we're boondoggled by the food industry, journalists and nutritionists.

Ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan  has written about our connections to food, our roots in nutrition and culture and the importance of food diversity.  I've been reading his books since the early 1990s.  They are delicious to read and eye-opening in conceptual thinking.

In our busy lives, I am guilty of attending to other things.  I'm removed from the growth of the foods we eat.  I'm rushed by pressures to take shortcuts in feeding my family.  I'm guilty, through my actions of shopping, buying and eating, of encouraging the trends through lifestyle choices.

This is an important issue that deserves more attention and action.   As mothers, responsible for the health of our families, we are overlooking something that seems to be out of sight and out of mind.

photo: Broccoli by Fir0002

Politics: The Mom Factor...

Motherhood in politics has moved beyond The Soccer Mom.  The NYTimes wrote yesterday, "motherhood and a focus on children can become one more political asset to be showcased — a way of humanizing a candidate and connecting with voters, especially other women."

Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton have hit full stride and neither is toting a child on the hip but each is using the mother brand.  How motherhood is used to attract voters will be interesting. 

Suddenly motherhood packs power.  How is that power understood?  I think it is still evolving.  There used to be nothing more American than a politician with a family gathered around him on the podium.  How will political women define their familial authority? 

Hillary Clinton wore the pants to the Senate Floor and in so doing, she broke the dress code.   But why is this Hillary-as-Rosie -the-Riveter image on the Hillary-For-President campaign store product site (advertising union-made products) touting (potential) President-as-worker?

How will moms be wooed?  How will motherhood be branded?  How will the work of mothers be defined?

The platform has cultural as well as political power.    MotherPie and Applehood.

Clinton the Politician: Unscripted and Real?

"We're in it to win it"...what a nice sound bite. "Let's have a conversation, just you and me" -- doesn't that sound refreshing and real?  That's what Hillary Clinton is saying for her presidential run.  We think Hillary and we think "win".  Word association, semantics, linguistics.  Just like War = Terror.  But.... Oh, say, does she sing?

So it was hysterical to witness a real moment.  Reality politics that happened in spite of the scripting.

Paying close attention to how images are being unfurled and created for the presidential race (the p.r./spin/political communications aspect of branding and selling) I was tuned in to watching Mrs. C.  introduce herself to the important state of Iowa on cable last Saturday.

What a hoot to hear this funny, tinny, off tune voice singing to the national anthem.  Is that Hillary, I wondered?

Sure enough.  An unscripted, natural  moment. You couldn't have operatives even think of this.  In that one moment she might have revealed more of her natural self and won more political points just for revealing the real in a time when we all are so used to such theatrical creations that are made to seem real. 

Thanks to You Tube, you can hear her for yourself on the flip.  Take heart crummy singers (like me).  We have a team member that might want to mouth the words from here on out.

A Snappy Rodeo Appeal...

This is the poster ad for the Ft. Worth Rodeo and Stock Show (which goes through February 4).  The same month this poster ran, American Cowboy magazine's Jan/Feb issue has as its cover article a feature on John Wayne.

In 1979, the year John Wayne died, the National Finals Rodeo was in Oklahoma City and the Cowboy Hall of Fame was eeking by.  Rodeo was far from ritzy, rough not glitzy, and not a thing for city slickers and young sophisticates. Fort Worth hung on and clung to the culture of the west while Oklahoma tried hard to shed the Okie moniker bestowed by John Steinbeck.  Fort Worth continues to contain and shape the cowboy culture, the story and the life as it threads from yesterday through today.

There was a period of time when the West went out of style.  It became too cliche, too costumy, too soupy with myth and loose with facts.   It neglected to tell the other side.  Tonto  lacked depth.  The National Finals Rodeo traded its Oklahoma City home for Las Vegas show and glitter.  Something shallow then took hold.  Country music stars held the loose strings of tradition and real cowboys continued to compete in little rodeos in the outback arenas.

The Chief of the Cheyenne and Arapahoes in Oklahoma in the mid-1990s called it a holocaust, what happened to the Amerindians. His technology was a manual typewriter.  His issues were the health of his tribe. The Battle of the Washita was just then being told in a new way.

Sometime stories take a long time to bear to fruition, to boil up into meaning. 

This year Oklahoma celebrates its 100th year of statehood.  Frederick Jackson Turner wrote about the closing of the West  in 1898.  My grandfather tells of herding cattle in cavalry boots (his mother an educated Yankee born in upstate New York with a degree from Johns Hopkins) and having his best friend's mother blow bullets in her apron pocket from getting too close to the iron.

Where you lived was important and determined by the direction of the wind, if you were white.  One didn't live where the smelling stinky breezes of the Armour meat packing plants and stockyards blew. That was in Oklahoma City in the early days of statehood.  The Native Americans were getting by, then, just barely.  They still suffer poverty, ill-health and high rates of alcoholism.

The West.  It is still alive, still something mythical and yet real, still full of stories untold.  It is tangled, still,  and ruggedly real.

Those Old Things...

Trash or treasure? Not much trash was around at the Winter Antique Show.  But what is one person's trash could be another's treasure.  Our things contain stories.

Last year I went by myself to the Antique Show and saw Staffordshire dogs for sale for $7,000 that looked just like the pair I sold in the garage sale before we moved to NYC.  I gave them away for $100 for the pair.  They had a certain appeal to me but the family said: those things are too ugly.  Toss 'em, don't take 'em.  Of course I had bought them at a real bargain in the first place but still... to think I could have nicely profited and to think I might have thought something rather quirky and tacky had more value than I thought was jarring.  Moving is about letting go.

One Texas friend hid her new old treasures under her couches and chairs.  She secretly bought antique blue platters and antique fans, buying them with cash.   She finally built a house and put them on display.  She closeted the cost of her finds like NYC fashionistas hide the cost of their designer purses. Everytime I see a pheasant on an antique faded blue platter, I think of my friend.

My NYC friend told me her Winter Antique Show game - pretend you have $250,000 dollars to spare and see how long it takes to spend it.  When I went this week I would have spent it all in a snap on textiles created by women in the past.  It is a lost art form and I wonder what we are missing.

My sisters-in-law tell a gripping story of coming across items in an antique shop in Dallas that reminded them of their grandmother who had recently died.  It slowly began to dawn on them as they kept coming across items full of such memories that these things WERE grandmother's and had been sold in the process of clearing out her house.  It was one thing not to want them but quite another to see them offered up for strangers to buy.

My treasures may be my daughters' trash someday. Unless I sell them off on eBay first. 

Those (Older) (Cover) Girls...

A Triple Whammy!  Three mature women in the media spotlight, here on the cover (whoot! a rare thing and three, at that) of Entertainment magazine.

I was stunned.  I was surprised.  These are three women who are amazingly talented.  It is about time that we not be shocked (yes, shocked!!!) to see any women other than young ones on the covers of magazines.  There should be many more roles for women elders in their prime (which can last until old age -- old is a cultural construct).  There's more to mine than movies along the lines of Driving Miss Daisy.

Classy Cover Ladies. Classic talent that is lasting.

Mothers: The Trees of Life...

If mothers could be visualized, I'd like to think of them as live oak trees, ever green, ever strong, ever dominant, always interesting, with the ability to draw in, beckon and provide shade to comfort and a strong trunk to rest against with power accruing with age.  Motherhood is a tree of life but sometimes it can be more complicated and confusing.

Why do we hold mothers to such high expectations? Do we forget the power of grandmothers and older mothers?  What is the role of nurture and nature -- don't you wonder?

The mothering wisdom that comes with time is illustrated in these three quotes:

A mother with children not yet grown: From Louise Erdrich (The Painted Drum): It is difficult for a woman to admit that she gets along with her own mother -- somehow it seems a form of betrayal, at least, it used to be among women of my generation.  To join in the company of women, to be adults, we go through a period of proudly boasting of having survived our own mother's indifference, anger, overprotecting love, the burden of her pain, her tendency to drink or teetoal, her warmth or coldness, praise or criticism, sexual confusions or embarrassing clarity.  It isn't enough that she sweat, labored, bore her daughters howling or under total anesthesia or both.  No.  She must be responsible for our psychic weaknesses for the rest of her life.  It is all right to feel kinship with your father, to forgive.  We all know that.  But your mother is held to a standard so exacting that is has no principles.  She simply must be to blame." (note: Erdrich, a member of the Ojibwe Amerindian tribe writes so richly with a cultural depth - I have just finished this book and highly recommend it to mothers.  She is a master writer, with degrees from Dartmouth and Johns Hopkins).

A mother with grown children: From Anna Quindlen: "When (my children) were very small, I suppose I thought someday they would become who they were because of what I'd done. Now I suspect they simply grew into their true selves because they demanded in a thousand ways that I back off and let them be.The books said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes over the top. And look how it all turned out. I wound up with the three people I like best in the world, who have done more than anyone to excavate my essential humanity. That's what the books never told me. I was bound and determined to learn from the experts. It just took me a while to figure out who the experts were..."  (Thanks to my friend Kay for sending this to me!)

A grandmother who never knew her own grandparents: My NYC blog friend Naomi is discovering the joys of a grandchild in her own city -- "Those of us who identify as feminists have not done the work needed to conceputalize grandmotherhood as a particular role, one changed by the opportunities we've had beyond those of our own mothers, changed by lifestyle shifts."

My mother didn't know if she was a good mother, she said, until she knew her grandchildren.  She also told me it was healthy to accept oneself as a "good enough" mother.  The greatest blessing in my life was my relationship with my grandmother.

The wisdom of mothers, of all ages, is necessary to collectively nurture our children.  The gift of a grandmother's love and attention is one of the greatest strengths our culture is under appreciating.

Blogger Katkat shared some words of wisdom from Piglet about having patience if someone doesn't listen (perhaps they have fluff in their ear).  She also quoted Victor Hugo: To love another person is to see the face of God.

Or goddess?

Let's not get caught up with the fluff in our lives that we miss out on the important soul stuff. 

photo by J. Allen Brack

The Thrill to Reveal...

What is our pepper may be their salt, as far as the cultural spicing goes and how and what women choose to reveal. There is a salty element in the course preservation of intimacy and mystery in the traditional fashions where the eyes, the seat of the soul, become so extremely elevated.  The contrast between the harem girl who reveals and prances stands in stark opposition to the woman who is raised to beleive physical self revelation is a gift to be guarded and carefully given.

The U.S. fashion trend of porn girls gone mainstream by revealing undergarments (or no undergarments as Britney did recently), launched by Madonna a number of years ago and most recently the style of Heiress Paris, is entrenched in our raunch culture.  What may be frightening and threatening, mysterious and titillating to a culture that values modesty to the extreme illustrates how jolting minimal exposure can be.

Designer clothes that are worn under the black robes or abayas by women in the Middle East is a way of making statements, even though it is done much more privately.  Flush with oil money, women are spending on designer clothes and dressing in layers.

An article in the Middle East Online has this quote on Muslim women flashing designer fashions under their outer-wear:

"We buy these clothes for evenings and sometimes you wear your abaya open at the front so the outfit is visible," said Afra al-Muhairi, an Emirati attending a show in her abaya.

Local businesswoman Fatema al-Fahem was also delighted.

"I always come to these shows. I'm wearing Valentino right now," she said opening her abaya to reveal a white blouse.

photo: Middle East Online

Chills Out West...

Are we having unusual weather, or what.  First the hurricanes, now the El Nino weather patterns creating snow and ice storms.

This is from a relative of a street in McAlester, Oklahoma.   Power outtages sent grandma from Tulsa to the rescue of the grandkids.

No snow yet in Manhattan; a ton in the west and mid-west.

Today in NYC?  Sunny and 39 degrees.

NYC's Winter Antique Show...

It's the big mama of them all, the antique show held in the clubby Park Avenue Seventh Regiment Armory, the building that had belonged to the only military unit where men were not conscripted, but "invited" in (with the last few living men from the regiment now in their 80s).    

There is something so fun about shopping the past with girlfriends. If not bigger than the Theta Antique Show in Houston, it is certainly pricier.

"I'm freaking, I'm freaking, my mom's gone antiquing." That is a refrain my kids would sing periodically when the famous Round Top, Texas Antique Fair was in session (which was twice yearly).  So, off feeling a bit lonely about missing girl friends on a fun antique jaunt, what a surprise it was to have my sleeve tugged and to see the Texas camp best friend of my oldest daughter, working on her master's at Sotheby's.  Small world.  Even NYC can be a bitty place.

Women and antiques and decorating and tradition.  What I particularly have noted is the elevation of American decorative arts --folk art and the appeal of the textile arts.   I'll give you a few notes on what is hot on the flip, from a mom's point of view...