MotherPie

Fat is Huge: Lucien Freud's Record Setter

Cultural statement, might it be? Or economic? This week Lucien Freud's painting of a fat woman sleeping sold at Christie's contemporary art auction for $33.6 million, making Freud the world’s most valuable living artist. Judging from the $348.2 million sale, the art market is going strong.

A sign of our big times...

King Corn & Dying Farms...

Our farms are no longer living. My trip through Texas and Oklahoma, in retrospect, took me through the heart of our cultural and social changes. I've sone several major cross-country roadtrips across the heartland over the past 10 years going from East Coast to New Mexico. What used to be our lifeways have radically altered, like the old farms crumpling and overtaken by monoculture and agribusiness and all human life absent from the picture. Funny thing, isn't it, how your expectations of things never include all the twists and paths.  Now I'm on the road of realizing and ranting that we are at a critical point, beyond the theoretical and into the actual.  Our tomorrow is suddenly, scarily, today.  We can no longer be passive if things are to change.  As a mom with a conscience, I must act.  I hope you find ways to do so, too.

Legislation has deliberately reduced the number of farms producing food and increased the size of those that remained in business; this farm in north Texas I passed in April says it all, doesn't it? Yesterday's ways are crumbling away under the crushing policies of modern agribusiness. Dow, Monsanto and other large corporations that feed off the current sick agricultural system need to be challenged. Can or will Congress back track and remove the kind of legislation that deliberately puts the small farmer out of business and subsidizes/supports the petroleum based agribusiness? Subsidies to farmers to not produce crops must be removed.  Social disruptions and chaos --like rice riots in Haiti and bread shortages in Egypt -- will not stop.  Starving people will immigrate to seek sustenance.  Our farm policies (like dumping cheap corn in Mexico) send farmers/people who can't compete to cross into our country.

Today figures are out showing food prices up 0.9%, the highest monthly increase in 18 years. Jill also has a post on food prices and how maybe stocking up on food is a better investment (via the WSJ).Food inflation is running at 4.5% a year, with food prices already rising much faster than the returns you are likely to get from keeping your money in a bank or money-market fund.  Prices will rise a lot faster now with oil topping $120/barrel.  "The latest data show cereal prices rising by more than 8% a year. Both flour and rice are up more than 13%. Milk, cheese, bananas and even peanut butter: They're all up by more than 10%. Eggs have rocketed up 30% in a year. Ground beef prices are up 4.8% and chicken by 5.4%,"  Jill notes.

NYTimes has a graph on consumer spending.  We spend 15% on food and beverages with the largest chunk being spent on fast food and full-service restaurant meals.   An article this week in the NYTimes writes: If financially pinched Americans opt for the cheapest (and the least healthful) foods rather than cook their own, the food industry will continue to reach for the lowest common denominator.

But it is possible to nudge the revolution along — for instance, by changing how we measure the value of food. If we stop calculating the cost per quantity and begin considering the cost per nutrient value, the demand for higher-quality food would rise.

 

King Corn is a 20-minute film produced by two recent college grads who are concerned about the drastic changes in the last 20 years in agriculture. They discover where America's food comes from when they plant a single acre of corn and follow it from the seed to the dinner plate.  With the help of government subsidies, genetically modified seeds, and powerful herbicides, America's most-subsidized crop becomes the staple of its cheapest - and most troubling - foods.  It is just out on YouTube and worth the watch.

I'm concerned. Are you?

As They Say in Texas: Oil is King...

Maybe people other places are suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous economies, but in some places it is all about the oil (over $121/barrel), or natural gas. Pronounced by old-timers like my dad and uncle, who grew up in the business: awl and gas.

Fort Worth, Texas, part of the D/FW Metroplex, our nation's fourth-largest metro area, is a new boom town, sitting on top of the Barnett Shale natural gas field. 

The current issue of Fortune has this by editor-at-large Peter Elkind, a  native of Fort Worth:

"Once-struggling oilmen and big landowners are suddenly flush with gas money, while thousands of average homeowners are now collecting modest monthly royalty checks. According to an industry-funded study, an estimated 84,000 jobs have been created throughout the region by the drilling boom. "It's created a new wealth in our city," declares Fort Worth Mayor Mike Moncrief. "It's inoculated our economy. We find ourselves being an island in a sea of recession around us."

Houston was booming.  Dallas is flush and growing.  Oklahoma City is like a boom town all over again, Borger, Texas has new motels to accommodate the business coming in to refine all the sandy shale oil being drilled in Canada and Fort Worth is raking it in in royalties with cranes and developments going up all over the place.

Raising Cattle...

In Texas I passed this grassless small cattle feed lot on my spring road trip.  Believe me, this was so much less stinky than the huge feedlots west of Amarillo where the cattle can hardly move as they are fattened for market.  They are fed corn, a substance not natural to them, and most get antibiotics (70% of antibiotics are used on animals) because their health suffers in non-natural surroundings and under such stress.

The U.S. livestock industry—a large and vital part of agriculture in this country—has been undergoing a drastic change over the past several decades. Huge CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) have become the predominant method of raising livestock and every year taxpayers shell out between $7.1 billion and $8.2 billion to subsidize or clean up after our nation’s 9,900 confined animal feeding operations, according to a new report, and these factory operations spew odor and flies (and leak manure and smell to high heaven of ammonia), have reduced rural property values by an estimated astronomical total of $26 billion.(links and information for these CAFO stats and facts via the Ethicurian). Plus,the USDA’s current system of grading is set up so that the more fat marbling, the higher the grading — which shuts out grass-fed meat, writes the Ethicurian in another post.  We try to get grass-fed meat from small local producers and it has less fat and is more healthy for you -- something I learned from the cattle ranchers bringing their meat to the local farmer's market and direct-to-consumer venues here in Santa Fe.

We had cattle, hormone-free, antibiotic free, ranging on our non-fertilized ranch in Texas in the 1990s, before we sold the place and moved to Atlanta, but the meat couldn't be marketed other than to friends and family because it didn't pass through federal meat inspection and it was too small for middle-men to mess with.  Mass production (better profits) is what gets most meat to market. I promise you our way was the healthiest way to eat meat. Those cows were happy cows and it was friend-to-friend meat marketing, outside of normal channels, that made this healthy meat available.  The guy who ran the cattle for free on our land could hardly survive and he turned to all-natural because he felt his wife, dying of cancer, was worth his struggle as he believed agriculture with chemical spraying was the wrong way to go. We concurred and supported the process.  The way we worked with this cattle producer is not how agribusiness is done these days.

We can act to help change policy.  Please go to Ethicurian's post and do more than try to chew the right thing and read more and click their links to be an activist in this area.  It is important that we not sit back and let these unhealthy trends persist.

Someday You'll Know...

Mother drove the car and checked her face in the rearview mirror.  She smiled.  "You have to be careful to have your face lines be happy lines," she said.  "Someday you'll know."

Mother put her car into reverse in the driveway at her parents' home and watched her parents walk across their porch.  "They look suddenly old to me," she said to me in the seat beside her.  "Someday you'll suddenly think that of me, and you'll know what I mean," she said.  I watch her vitality, energy and strength from her exercise routine and wonder what defines old?  Will I know?

Mother was exasperated with me, the stubborn teenager that I was.  "You'll never know the patience it takes," she said.  "Someday you'll know." 

Don't you miss me, I asked my mom, when I went away to college.  "It is good to see you launched," she said.  "Someday you'll know."

As I drove out from my mother's house, she said how much she appreciated this extended one-on-one time with me now that my own children are out of the house, and said she savors every moment with me.  "Someday you'll know," she said.

Once, I don't remember when, she said that I wouldn't understand until I became a mother myself.  "Someday you'll know."

Someday is today.  Happy Mother's Day!!!

Obama Winning by Graphic Iconic Iterations...

Obama is visually viral. When driving to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, I passed this iteration of the Obama poster, left, painted on the side of a building. I'm just now getting to post this as I work through things after being gone from Santa Fe for days and days.  While I was in Texas, the tv had the pope on everywhere that day I spotted Obama painted on the yellow bricks and a parody of the pope, right, in the style of Shepard Fairey's now famous Obama Poster was circulating.

Looking at political communications, visually, in with media studies this week, the visuals that stand out among the loud blabbering on cable and in the blogosphere during this pivotal  and perhaps most decisive political week are most indicative of all.

I've pulled these Obama Poster parody iterations to show how the fight was playing out with reiterations of Fairey's graphic.  The poster in print has gone viral, as I knew it would when I wrote Political Art and the Power of Visual Images.

One of my favorite recent political quotes early on in the week (just so we're not totally visual) is by James Carville, commenting on Hillary and Obama: "If she gave one of her cajones to him, they'd both have two." ha.ha. Seriously, I am highly entertained by the visuals by artists and photographers rather than the comments of the punditry.  Soundbites and snippets are what we're about, socially and culturally.

The visuals tell the story so I will give you the two oppositional favorites of mine from this week with the leading Hillary graphic on 5/8 from The Drudge Report, right,  which ran just above a headline, "No Way" juxtaposed with this week's Time magazine, just out, with the relaxed smiling Obama with the huge headlline, "And The Winner* Is..."

Back in September 07, I thought Hillary had the edge, as I wrote in Hillary Pop Iconic: Leading by Visual Image.

The tide shifted w/ the Obama poster. If you look at graphic imagery as produced, reiterated and shared online, Obama's fans are winning creatively.  This shift occurred in early April.  I found the Mamas for Obama graphic for sale on a t-shirt you can buy on Zazzle.com.  Me, I'm just following the art and media for political communications interests and digging deep on issues in order to make up my mind.

On another media note, Webby Awards have been announced and CyberJournalist reports results (and, no surprise, WashingtonPost is sliding online, and my once very online with it local paper, The Santa Fe New Mexican, is falling way behind w/ online trends):

*Multiple winners such as: NYTimes.com (8); The Onion (7); National Geographic (4); FactCheck.org (3); BBC (3); TESPN.com (3); and CondeNet (3).

* 27 sites won both a Webby Award and a People’s Voice Award including: Huffington Post (Blog-Political), PostSecret (Blog-Cultural), FT.com Alphaville (Blog-Business), National Geographic (Magazine), NYTimes.com (Newspaper), FactCheck.org (Politics).

 

Political Marketing to Women: Bill Clinton's Personal Appeal...

Junk mail and spam and all that noise and clutter. It is hard for marketers to get through to women with the political message.

Oh my. I've just written a huge rant.  I just hate it when I get so verbose and go on and on and on. Is this what happens when women get to be my age? So, I'm putting my verbosious (rhymes with halitosis) rant on the flip. If you care.

Our World of Agribusiness...

This abandoned farmhouse house on the High Texas Plains touches a sad cord and I share this memento from my trip through the area this spring. I want to paint Andrew Wyeth's yearning girl in the foreground to give it deeper meaning, an idea that speaks of what we face, what we've done with our present, what hopes we have for our future. There is more here than just emptiness and neglect. It represents our monoculture, our separation from land and connectedness.  Every bit of land is plowed for... corn? Probably.  Now I've posted below my surreal parody of Wyeth's Christina's World.  I'll call it Christina's (PostModern) World.  There.  I feel better already. Not. 

What was once there, really?  A circle of intertwined life in co-existence.  Not now.

We've lost our total connection to the land and in doing so, we're losing our knowledge of life, growth and sustenance and in the process, we're losing ourselves and our future.

Now living in McMansions with ugly pastic playtoys in empty fertilized yards with high fences, eating corn-fed feedlot beef with tomatoes grown in Brazil, strawberries in winter, sipping Chilean wine, dining on Asian rice, spending 10 calories of fossil fuel for every calorie we consume,  and bemoaning food price increases with farmers paid not to raise crops, we wonder how we got here and how to change it. 

Perhaps we need to think about planting our own gardens, growing some of our own food and making our gardening a sustaining venture.  Food shipped around the world has extremely environmental costs, the subject of a NYTimes article. Michael Pollan's books sit next to my bed, both half read.  His recent article in the NYTimes, Why Bother, suggests we act in hopes our actions become viral.  Victory gardens once supplied 40% of the food in WWII.  Since then, we've lost our hold on our own dirt and its potential in our cycle of life.

Ramble: Eating & Living Differently...

Rambling about food and gardens and health and getting past the industrialization of our food, there are a couple of things to highlight as I amble here.  We need a new kind of home economics. When my husband retired, one of our Texas friends who ranches lands very near the Mexican border, said, "just gitchew a tractor and go ride the land."  They come with UV filtered windows, sound systems and the idea is you can ride the land in your own little world. I think maybe I should have put my children in our garden more and toted them to structured activities less. I want to think of more native and natural things, rather than isolation and try to overcome succumbing to our culture/consumerism/society.  So here are my thoughts for today's ramble:

• American Indians believe in making decisions based on projecting the consequences out seven generations.  If we conducted ourselves with the idea of perpetuity for our actions, we might be more responsible for ourselves, our children and our world. 
• The use of native and drought-resistent plants as a substitute for grass will be a major design trend of 2008. One big trend in landscaping: letting lawns go to moss  and according to the NYTimes article,  "Moss, which grows fast and hugs the ground, prevents soil erosion. Its density repels weeds. Deer do not snack on it. It can be walked on. Even when it looks dead, a splash of water can restore it to emerald health within minutes. It doesn’t need fertilizer (lacking a root system, it takes nutrients from water and air). All it needs, in fact, are shade, moisture — though not large amounts of water — and what most gardeners would regard as poor-quality soil."
• Integrated gardening: Susie J has a post on planting combinations together, like planting chives around roses to keep the roses from getting diseases. These are things we used to know and those who work to do this and share it might help us virally change our ways. Let's hope. Now our society is doing only monculture. The typical calorie of food energy in your diet requires about 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce.  Can you imagine growing some of your own food?
• More on non-monocultural gardening: Miss Cellania was working in her garden - literally and as a topic for her blog,  and she had a link on native american trios...  why a "Three Sisters Garden" works -- three plant partners benefit each other.  "Beans, like other legumes, have bacteria living on their roots that help them absorb nitrogen from the air and convert it to a form that plants can use. (Corn, which requires a lot of nitrogen to grow, benefits most.) The large, prickly squash leaves shade the soil, preventing weed growth, and deter animal pests. The three sisters also complement each other nutritionally.
• Perhaps if we got into our gardens more we'd benefit from the Vitamin D. Jill has a link about the importance of Vitamin D and scientists who say it could prevent diseases including cancer, and thwart autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, rhematoid arthritis and juvenile diabetes.  She writes: "In the wake of emerging positive results, the National Cancer Institute gathered scientists to review the nutrient's ability to reduce cancer risk, particularly of the breast, colon, prostate and lung. And last fall, the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality issued an evidence-based review of Vitamin D that found it to be key for bone health at all ages, including in the prevention of falls in the elderly."  Also included is this: "There are a lot of benefits to Vitamin D that have surfaced in the last 20 years," notes Hector DeLuca, a University of Wisconsin biochemist who has been a pioneer in Vitamin D research.  My mother, grandfather, my children and myself I felt have always benefited from sun at non-intense hours of the day but with light skin and seven years of lifeguarding, I'm so careful about skin damage and I, myself, take supplements.  Jill (or the article she quotes from) suggests that the next time you go to the doctor, get your vitamin D level checked.  You may be surprised to learn that you too are deficient as are most adults in the U.S.
• Learning how to return to simplicity and learn a different kind of home economics is a trend.  NYTimes has an article of one woman conducting classes to moms in the grocery aisles.Sandi has a link to this video of a young woman who is reaching out to teach healthy cooking to teens.  These things are new things and maybe high prices, driven up by oil going over $123/barrel this week (can you even believe????), will make us start changing our choices.

Most important: Years ago I was introduced to the work of ethno-botanist Gary Paul Nabhan and I'm a supremely wild fan of his work and writings and have read most all of what he has written.  When I saw him in Houston at his niece's wedding, he told me about the old orchards at Bishop's Lodge here in Santa Fe and their threatened status (being yanked up for modern landscape - lifeless waterfalls and such). This week at Ethicurian I came across an article on Nabhan  - Gary Nabhan Wants You To Go Native for Sole Food and the latest book he's edited, Renewing America's Food Traditions.  "Nabhan, a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient who spoke this week in Lawrence, Kansas, thinks we are at a critical moment where both knowledge of native foodstuffs and losses of those species are high. He and others assert that taking advantage of those foods would address numerous ills, from the reliance of petroleum-based agriculture to the explosion of diabetes among Americans, particularly those of color, to loss of cultural identities."

Not much edible can I grow in the High Desert yard we have in Santa Fe, but I can try to propagate cactus.  Later I'll share with you (when I can dig it out) a recipe for prickley pear cactus that Gary Paul Nabhan gave me when he visited our home in Houston back in the mid-1990s.

Thinking, Eating, Living Cheers!

Ramble: Tech and Typing...

Texting is what I've had to do mainly when on the road since I've not been able to have much computer access.  My rambles have been on highways and backroads, towns and cities with my digital camera being my biggest toy along the way.  It has been a strong reminder of then versus now...

The world wide web is 15 years old.  Can you imagine any other invention that has changed our world as much as this one has?  Tim Berners-Lee, inventer of the web, says, "The future is always in the past and for the web particularly. In a hundred years, 15 years will seem to be just the infancy of the web..." Tim O'Reilly says, "It's the most profound change since the advent of literacy. And it's bigger than the industrial revolution." 

Hunt and Peck? Those are the big texters! In 6th grade my class undertook an experiment, giving up study hall for a year in order to master typing fundamentals on IBM Selectrics.  The ability to write faster, to be able to write at the speed of thinking, was supposed to enhance our creativity in English.  I think it did, but it was the use of the correcting tab that made it easy for me.  Regardless, working at a keyboard ever since, you'd think I'd have an advantage in typing speed.  Nooooooo. How fast do you type?  Go see how you do at this online test.

Look at that Google and Apple stock. (Hurray). Apple's new iPhone comes out in June, scheduled to sell for $199 and I bet that this will be the edge needed to pull in BlackBerry users.  I'll make my switch then. Apple posts more than $1 billion in profit; Mac sales are booming, up 51%.  Steve Jobs invented the PC in 1977 and one expert wonders if the iPhone will be the end of the internet.

I've captured our crumbling world in photos and will be posting those once I get them sorted out at home...
Roadway  Ramblin' Cheers!