This post is not for my readers who have enthusiastically embraced the agrarian lifestyle, whether city farmers and suburban permaculturists or outright farmers or wanna-be farmers. This post is for your loved ones - your husband, wife, girlfriend, lover, parents, children and siblings...whoever you are hitched to, the people who have tied their lives to yours, and who are now wondering what on earth happened to their yoked partner? In some cases, they may be whether to unhitch and run in the opposite direction, since their beloved child/partner/sibling/best friend/whatever has gone completely 'round the bend and is talking about farms.

Now I realize that some of you will look at any advice of mine on this subject with skepticism - after all, you may even blame me (quite correctly, perhaps), for your loved one's going bonkers and talking about sheep and nut trees all the time. And yet, I do feel your pain. Or rather, my husband does, and he's happy to tell me all about what it is like to look over at the person you love and wonder why on earth she's babbling about soil.

Eric got rather a shock around the time of our wedding - you see, he'd met this woman (me) who seemed to be a good match for his goals - both of us working towards academic careers, both of us happily living in the city, both of us planning an intellectual, urban life, complete with cats, futon and travel. And somewhere between the wedding and the honeymoon, his wife went a little insane.

From my perspective, I can't really remember what caused it. I'd had a garden everywhere I lived all through college - it was hugely important to me, and on balconies and in backyards, I always planted some things. We were living in Somerville Massachusetts, across the street from a major subway/commuter rail station. You could hear the trains rumbling under the building from our third floor apartment. And the balcony was covered with food and flowers - alpine strawberries in window boxes, herbs, letuce, peppers, even a few tomatoes, morning glories and moonflowers twining up the balcony. Every bit of dirt had been hauled up three flights of stairs, but it was beautiful. I occasionally mentioned how nice it would be to have some dirt on the ground somewhere, but that was really all. I liked my balcony. And yes, I liked animals, but hey, I had pet cats.

The first thing I remember was a book - Paul Heiney's beautiful British coffee table farm book _Country Life: A Handbook for Realists and Dreamers_ - I have no idea what led me to buy it, or even where I found it, but there I was in my apartment, staring at this book and thinking about chickens, to my new husband's complete and utter disbelief.

And unfortunately, I'm not the only one. Consider this excerpt from the very funny book _Hit by a Farm_ by Catherine Friend - she writes about her partner Melissa's sudden shift into "wanna farm" mode:

"I should have realzied what the future held the day I looked up and caught her giving me a dreamy look from across the kitchen table. Touched, I reached over and took her hand in mine. She squeezed it gently, and said, 'God, I love chickens.'
But I still didn't see it coming."

And just as I'm still a little mystified by my own sudden urge to farm, other wanna-bes can't really explain it all very well themselves. Christopher Losee, coauthor with his wife Kimberly Schaye of _Stronger than Dirt_ writes,

"It wasn't that I'd ever fantasized about being a farmer. That thought was about as, say, becoming proficient in Chinese and leading tour groups to see the Great Wall. But between July and October 1994, I somehow became convinced that this was what I wanted to do and this was what I would do."

The farm dream hits someone, and in many cases, becomes intractable - and bloody annoying for the person not suffering from this weird disease. And it is a dis-ease - that is, all of a sudden you are dissatisfied with the life you've built. I think of it rather like (benign) malarial parasites - the infection could have come from anywhere, and once they build in your bloodstream, well, there's not much you can do about it. They are always with you.

In our case, my husband thought it would go away. I thought it would too - we talked about it, and agreed that eventually, someday, maybe we'd get some land. So a few months before Eli was born, early in our second year of marriage, we bought an apartment in a very, very urban place - Lowell Massachusetts, a wonderful city of immigrants, with an amazingly diverse culture, a long history and everything we thought we wanted. We had originally been shopping with a friend for a duplex, but he backed out, and then we purchased an apartment in an old mill building. It was a great apartment, a wonderful building, filled with wonderful people, a great neighborhood, we could walk to synagogue, it had everything we wanted, except one thing - no outdoor space. And about two months after we'd moved in, I realize that we'd made a terrible, terrible mistake - much as I loved everything else about the place, the lack of dirt was almost physically painful. The brain-altering parasites had reached critical mass, and now, nothing looked the same - it was all seen through the lens of the farm I didn't have.

Now Eric doesn't like to move. In fact, he doesn't like change at all. We joke that now (we've been together almost 13 years), if we left it to him, we might (might, I'm not sure I believe it) be engaged by now. I, on the other hand, like change - I get bored easily, and like a constant diet of new things. Eric's job in our marriage is to try and get me to slow down. Mine is to drag him kicking and screaming on to the next things . It was painful for him to give up the apartment he'd been living in for almost 7 years and move to Lowell. Having done it, he planned to spend at least a decade there. And here was his crazy wife again, talking farms.

He tried to pacify me - we looked into community garden plots - there was a two year waiting list. We looked into taking over some small part of the Mill building's public space - management was not thrilled by the idea of eggplant instead of impatiens. If I knew then what I know now about urban farming and agriculture, I might have pushed harder or found other solutions. At the time, all I could think of was getting out to someplace where I could have poultry and a garden.

My husband thought this was nuts. We didn't know anything about chickens. How would we grow our own food - strawberries and basil were a lot different than a huge garden, wheren't they? Wouldn't it be too much work? What if he didn't want to do any of it? Would it be weird? Would it be different? What if we screwed up? No, asking for a farm was too much, pushing him too far.

And quite honestly, he was right. We would screw up. It would be weird. It would be more work than we understood. He would end up doing things he'd rather have skipped, frankly.

Catherine Friend observes about the way the farm pushed her limits,

"It turns out that, at age thirty-eight, I knew myself about as well as I knew the breeding habits of the Pygmy Butterfly, which is to say, not at all. So when I answered Melissa's request to help her start the farm with a hearty yes, I might as well have stood on the center line of a four-lane highway and opened my arms. I would witness chicken sex. I would witness duck sex. I would even get frightfully involved in sex between two goats, something no feminist should ever have to face....Boundaries are good things; they're the signposts we use during our lives to measure just how far we'll go. My boundaries have always served me well. No touching worms or spiders or anything gross. No touching wild animals because they could be dangerous. No touching feces, urine, blood or any other bodily fluid. Definitely no stocking my hand up inside an animal's body, or touching it anywhere I wouldn't want to be touched myself."

Eric is no where near as squeamish as Friend, but he didn't feel any particular need to ever, say shine a flashlight on a goat's genitals to detect whether she's in heat. Nor have any of his prior job choices involved nearly as much shit shoveling as agriculture (in teaching astronomy, the manure is mostly metaphorical ). And I think it is safe to say that most Americans would regard this lack of interest in these subjects as completely normal, perhaps even a sign of good mental health.

But the thing about the farm-obsessed is that they manage, if they are even remotely persuasive, to make it seem completely normal that one would want to take on a life that involves early morning wakeups, picking vegetables on 100 degree days, more than ample manure, flies and blood, and examing goat pussy. Indeed, perhaps the most bizarre element of this is that the farm obsessed begin to try and make you feel weird for not wanting to live the agrarian life. This is a neurological symptom of the farm-thing.

And, of course, they emphasize the benefits. "Think about all the delicious vegetables." "The country life is so great for kids." "It will be beautiful." "The farm will pay for itself." "You'll hardly have to do anything." Even I have to admit that the latter two of these points (which I used on my husband) are outright lies. The middle one is probably true, for a particular variation on "beautiful" - that is, real working homesteads and farms don't usually make it house and garden unless there's money enough to hire a lot of labor. It is beautiful - but you have to be the sort of person who can look past the clutter, the unmowed grass, the weeds, the manure and see the inner farm. The first two points are true, but it is worth noting that even the delicious vegetables don't come without effort, and older kids, attached to their lives, may be less than enthusiastic when presented with "Here's a creek, now you can play in it every day - no more wii, isn't that great!" It is quite possible that some of you are the teenaged children of parents who have gone mad, and wondering what can be done about it.

And that brings us to the central point. What can be done about it? Well, if your loved one has a mild case of the farm dream, there's hope. One possibility is to simply draw the line "Me or the farm." In some cases, you may actually stay together. The difficulty with this is twofold. First, it is easy to understate how compelling the farm dream actually is - you can't make brain-parasites go away easily. Once the farm dream penetrates into someone's inner life, it truly becomes their *dream* - and one stands in the way of a loved one's dream at their peril. Maybe you have a dream or two also, and you know how fundamentally losing a dream can alter your life - there's the horrible chance that they might decide that they pick the farm. And if you do win, your partner may end up behaving like someone who has seen his dream killed - and if you have a good marriage, you may find that's not so desirable either.

The next possibility is compromise - this will require you to actually get involved to some degree with the farm dream, because you are going to reshape it. Mom is dreaming of 50 acres and cows? Your job is to research urban farming, and bring her back to earth, convincing her that you could have a garden and chickens here, or that perhaps a 3 acre lot and 1 cow is sufficient. Here's where the magic of the internet and the library come to your aid - "Honey, that's a great idea, I'd love a farm (yes, it is permissable to lie through your teeth here)...but my dream is not to actually ever help birth a cow, plus to keep my job here - how can we both make it work? Have you seen this cool stuff on urban permaculture?"

You might even find that there's an element of this project that can hook into your dreams. Ok, you really don't want a llama, not even a llama that your daughter thinks is super-cute. But you've always wanted a big workshop, with all the tools, or some justification for buying more quilt fabric - so perhaps, just perhaps, there's a portion of this "let's go live the self-sufficient life like freakin' Thoreau" that might be turned to your own purposes. Think self-interest here.

The next possibility for dealing with the farm dream is to accomodate, but draw firm lines about what belongs to whom. "Yes, honey, we can have a farm. It will be all yours. I'm going to keep on commuting, doing my stuff, etc... the farm is yours, and this is mine." Inwardly, you think "He can have pig shit on him, but that's not going to happen to me." This is an excellent plan, one that balances your needs against your crazy loved-one's. I commend you for your being accomodating, and your loved one for his/her willingness to divide the labor. All I can say to this, however, is that you are kidding yourself if you think that's actually going to happen. Ok, I know a couple of couples where the farm is mostly one person's job - but even when they manage to keep those boundaries, the farm tends to leak into daily life.

You see, farms suck up your life, whether little or big. There are a lot of jobs that can't really be done easily by one person, particularly, most importantly, by one totally inexperienced person. So unless your loved one grew up on a farm and already knows how to castrate pigs, you will be drafted into helping. Welcome to pig shit central.

You know those "honey-do" lists? Well, new and strange things are going to start appearing on them. It is only a matter of time until you are off to the Ag-way with a list of soil amendments to purchase, as you try to pretend that you have the faintest idea what greensand is, or why you would care about the color of your sand. The money you'd definitely planned to spend on a weekend meditation retreat is mysteriously gone - replaced by a big pile of stock fencing and orders to go pick up the gas powered augur, whatever that is. One day, Sweetie-pie comes wandering in, not with a small bag of peaches, but with three bushels, and expects you to help her do something with them. You can say "wait, this wasn't in the deal" - good luck with that.

Eric's advice to all of you, if you have a spouse with a serious case of the farm dream, is simply "let go, complain a lot (so that he/she appreciates properly how much you are suffering, and feels guilty enough to be accomodating of *your* dreams and pleasures), but go with it - it really isn't that bad." Now this is perhaps a little self-serving of me (me, self-serving? ) to quote, but that's his genuine take on it - that if the farm dream has penetrated too deep to be removed, you are about to begin a long, strange trip. And it is a lot more fun if you just try and enjoy it.

And the funny thing is, it can be fun, and not just for the one with the dream. There's something about learning new stuff, about building, making, growing and tending your own that is...well...neat. And neat not just to the person deeply infected by the crazy-agrarian-brain-parasite, but often, to the least likely people. Here's Catherine Friend again,

"One evening I watched one of my favorite movies, The Hunt for Red October. The submarine commander, played by Sean Connery, used a fascinating battle tactic: he turned his submarine toward the torpedo racing at him through the water. The sub and the torpedo met before the torpedo had armed itself, so it bounced harmlessly off the sub's hull.

That would have been the perfect opportunity to utter one simple word. 'Okay.' But my response surprised us both. 'This is my farm too, and I'm going to do chores.'"

Kimberly Schaye, initially the reluctant partner to her husband's flower farm dream eventually begins giving other people lessons in the dream and its realities - and of course, what's funny about all of them is that most of them applied to her just a few years before:

"I had developed a handy quiz to identify people who should think twice before they start looking for lad. Tehse are the people who would say any of the following:

...'How do I tell my friends about my workday and make it sound like I did something?' - What you mean you don't think 'I kneeled in the dirt for eight hours and pulled tiny weeds out of a hole in the ground sounds like anything?'

Not everyone learns to, as Friend puts it, "stop worrying and love the barn" but it seems surprisingly common. Every time I go out among agrarians, I find that most couples or families are made up of people who are truly dedicated to farming, and their other relatives, lovers, partners, etc... who, well, weren't. Maybe your spouse was raised on a farm, and the parasites lay dormant for a while. Maybe you just married a farmgirl or farmboy, and knew going into this meant "love me, love my muck-covered bottomland." Maybe the parasites somehow infected your otherwise perfectly normal spouse or partner, Mom or roommate, and you keep thinking "I didn't sign up for this."

My Mom is the perfect example of someone who got caught in someone else's farm dream. First there was mine, but hey, she could be supportive, since she no longer had to live with me. What she didn't realize was that the parasites were indeed contagious, and would infect her partner of nearly 30 years. Soon, there was the garden plot, the chickens, and the talk, after they retire, of "the baby farm." My mother didn't like bugs or worms. She liked her food properly encased in plastic. She thought chickens were weird, and didn't really want to get to know her neighbors better, particularly around the subject of poultry. Fast forward a couple of years - my Mom has a community garden plot, three hens in the backyard, two chicks living in her kitchen and worms in the basement. She helps run open houses for future chicken owners. So far, she's holding the line against goats on their 1/8 acre city lot, but even she admits that she no longer says "never" about much of anything. The funny thing is, she likes most of it, and everyone is happier now.

So can't blame you for trying to get out of it, or complaining, but it is important to know that real people do adapt all the time. Moreover, the brain parasites are contagious - it is surprisingly common for reluctant farmers to wake up one morning, go out into the dirt and think "Wait, I this doesn't seem quite so insane." The good food, the fresh air, the physical activity, the sense accomplishment - whether you've made your farm on your old lot or moved - these things suck people in, and soon, you can't understand why your Mom thinks goat manure is so gross, and you are laughing at your Brother in Law, who swears he'd never actually eat eggs that came straight from a chicken's butt.

The thing is, farming, on any scale, really isn't just a job - it is a way of life. Even if you keep your job as a mechanic, waiter, college professor or lawyer, there's something oddly real about the time you spend in the woods securing your winter's heat, or about the brush of feathers, or the taste of warm tomato - more real, many times, than the other work you do. And the realness is addictive - even to people who thought it couldn't possibly be.

If you can't find a compromise position, if the tractor is coming straight at you, the best way is to climb on up and enjoy the ride. Here are some suggestions for doing so, while also maintaining what's left of your sanity:

1. Do not believe anything your agriculturally besotted partner claims will "pay for itself" until you see actual numbers, and have actually done it. Assume upfront that everything will cost more than you think. Also, when your partner makes to-do lists, cut them in half, then in half again. Halve one more time if you have young children or a full time job. Then, you have a real shot at getting the stuff on your list accomplished...mostly.

2. Your definition of "gross" will change pretty rapidly. If it started out as "poop of any kind" it will now be "five acre chem-lawn lots that grow only grass that nothing eats." If it started out as "Getting filthy and sweaty anywhere but the gym" it will now be "wearing your barn clothes more than two consecutive weeks or after they get sheep placenta on them." If it started out as "the idea of eating some animal you once met" it will now be "the idea of eating factory farmed meat delivered on a styrofoam tray."

3. You will do things you would have been willing to swear not that long ago, that you would never do. Absolutely, positive sure you'd never kill an animal? Wait until you have either a sick one that desperately needs to be put down, or some animal so obnoxious and unpleasant that the thought of eating them is actually kind of appealing (my three year old still announces, with some satisfaction "We ate Corey" - the mean rooster who kept attacking him.) Absolutely, positively sure you'll never get a cow/pig/horse/tractor/business plan/worm bin/bees/truckload of manure/post hole digger/adze/quilting frame/orchard/llama/butter churn/chicken plucker/milking machine? Don't speak quite so soon. The amazing thing is that you'll end up feeling pretty good about it in a lot of ways - the funny thing is that when you finally fix that tractor, or when you actually do barn the hay or raise the turkeys - not only do you get the sense of accomplishment, but there's an underlying "hey, I'm pretty cool to be able to do this."

That said, however, expect a steep learning curve, and plenty of screw ups. Try very hard to be good at laughing at yourself. Try very hard to remember that it is not always wise to laugh at your spouse, no matter how funny he looks with the raw egg dripping out of his pants pocket or covered in mud and G-d knows what else.

4. You may both find (assuming your relationship is a romantic one) agriculture strangely sexy. You wouldn't think your partner would look especially handsome covered with little bits of hay, or holding a scythe, death style, but oddly, he seems to. Your wife, it turns out, looks really, really good with a sledgehammer, or perhaps less strangely, while holding a basket of ripe eggplants or a baby lamb. Country folk are, well, earthy, and there's a good bit of sex in that. Admittedly, chicken sex is repulsive. But all those bees and flowers and rich fertility have their influence too - make sure you make time for love.

5. Your job is to say no. Even if you've been infected by the parasites, yours is probably still the voice of reason (scary thought, eh?). So no matter how much it makes perfect sense, you couldn't have planned it better, and is such a great deal, it may not be the time to add 40 more sheep to your flock, to expand the CSA to 70 members (up from 12), to begin breeding Great Pyrenees dogs or to take down that old barn and rebuild it. Someone has to have a sense of perspective, and you are designated. At the very least, you should offer some resistance, a downpayment on the next crazy idea.

6. One of you should keep your job. I'm all for farming, however, if you are a beginner, the odds are very good that you are not going to fully support your family immediately - and maybe not at all. Some of you will simply be looking to grow a little food and have a garden, some to make a little money on the side - to get the chickens to pay for their feed, make enough money from the produce sales to take a vacation, or offset the vet bills with your handspun yarn. But some of you will be looking to be FARMERS - the serious version of this. This is great. Farming is great. But it doesn't come with health insurance, and it is not a reliable income stream at first for most people. Yeah, have a business plan and get started. But one of you keep the day job - you can always quit later when you are making money hand over fist. Ha!

7. The first step is probably not the last one. That is, just because you've let go and said "ok, we can have vegetables in the back yard, where none of the neighbors can see them, and maybe two chickens" do not think you are done. At a minimum, your pride and joy front yard perennial plantings are probably going to be replaced by hazelnuts and blueberries, and I'll lay you good odds that there are a few more chickens, and maybe some bunnies in your future.

8. Once you eat the food, you are stuck for life. We all rhapsodize about the food - I mean, this is food money literally cannot buy. Unless you are rich enough to have your own private gardener rushing the asparagus from the ground, and bringing the heirloom tomatoes in warm from the garden, you will never quite get the perfection of taste. You can get close at the farmer's market, but the best stuff comes straight off the plant, and is eaten within seconds of harvest. But now you are spoiled for life - your kids will never eat store jam again, after they've eaten Dad's raspberry-blackberry. You will never be able to eat a grocery store tomato, or a salad of iceberg lettuce again. Even the lowly potato will be dead to you, if it comes from far away.

9. Your crazy loved-one will start out wanting to do everything - but will probably begin eventually to specialize. This is a process - expect it to take a while to shake out what your things are. That is, most of us come to this wanting to do it all - we're going to have the chickens for eggs, the cows for milk, the huge garden, the... you get it.

After a while, we find that there are some projects we do better than others and some we like better than others. I know some people who do it all - who produce nearly everything they eat or use. But most of us eventually settle down a little, and find that we're happiest focusing on the things we like - the issue, of course, is that we don't always know what we like until we try it, how much it costs, how much time it takes. That is, they find out whether they are a sheep person or a goat person by having sheep and goats. They find out whether they really want to cut hay or log with horses by working with horses. They find out if you like to sew their own clothing or build their own barn by trying these things out.

Sometimes, they (or you) find out they are losing money, failing miserably or that they really don't like coppicing trees nearly as much as you thought - they forgot they are afraid of heights. Ok, that's fine, no need to make yourself crazy - they do like growing watermelons and making pickles. So just remember, if it sounds like you are being dragged every which way, you are, but it probably won't last forever - sooner or later, you'll only be dragged six or seven ways, and you'll have time to get good at most of them.

10. There are a couple of ways you can come to share a dream. First, you can find a part of the farm that you love, too. Maybe you'll never really be crazy about all those plants, but the chickens, now, those you do like. Or maybe you've always loved building and fixing things, or cooking and preserving - and that part is enough to make up for the parts you don't always love.

Or maybe you can find a way to integrate your dreams with one another, or simply to be happy that she's happy, or he's happy. That is, you love your daughter, and even if, left to yourself, you'd prefer to winter in Florida, not Ohio, and spend your retirement playing golf, rather than growing pecans, well, maybe it doesn't matter - assuming that she too wants you to be happy, and is willing to give way on the things that really do matter most to you - say, making sure you have your shed to putter in or your books to read.

Or maybe, just maybe, the little brain parasites will work their way up your bloodstream, until you no longer remember what it was like to live without a farm. Gradually the process of forgetting becomes so acute that you think a life without manure on your boots and the crow of a rooster, or the swoop of the barn swallows wouldn't be worth living. You start looking forward to haying, or to going out the barn in winter to check on the rabbits. You start dreaming of the day you'll retire, and can spend all day farming, or the day you can pick up your first beehives. I know that sounds crazy now, but sometimes you look up, and your dreams have changed, and that's ok, even good. Sometimes there's nothing more to dream of than being yoked together in the same harness, on the same land and doing the same good work for all the days of your life.

He writes:

Daniel Dennett has advanced the opinion that the evolutionary purpose of the cuteness response in humans is to make us respond positively to babies. This does seem plausible. Babies are pretty cute, after all. It's a tempting explanation.

If "awwww" is a response designed to make me love human babies and everything else that makes me go "awwww" is a mere side effect of that engineered reaction, it is drastically misaimed. Other responses for which we have similar evolutionary psychology explanations don't seem badly targeted in this way. If they miss their supposed objects at all, at least it's not in most people. (Furries, for instance, exist, but they're not a common variation on human sexual interest - the most generally applicable superstimuli for sexiness look like at-least-superficially healthy, mature humans with prominent human sexual characteristics.) We've invested enough energy into transforming our food landscape that we can happily eat virtual poison, but that's a departure from the ancestral environment - bunnies? All natural, every whisker.1

Why pick on evolutionary psychology? Well, because I think it gets used to justify a lot of human actions. We are told regularly that humans do X because of Y bit of evolutionary psychology, and thus, we cannot expect them to change. We tend to enjoy the process of reading backwards, but it is appropriate to be critical of how much we can know about ourselves this way. Plus, I liked the article.

Definitely read the whole thing! Does it make me a bad Mom to think that little bunnies were cuter than even my adorable children?

Sharon

And there are books. We're in a particularly good period of reading chapter books - Asher at four is ready and interested in sustained narratives, which means that all four kids are old enough for lengthy read alouds. And everyone has a chapter book - or often two, one with Mom and one with Dad - going at any given time.

I'm on my fourth rotation through Winnie the Pooh with Asher - and the older boys are finding it funnier than they ever did before, now that they are old enough to get the jokes. Asher just likes going into the Hundred Acre Woods with his animal friends in the story - Simon and Isaiah love the plays on words.

Isaiah is reading Roald Dahl's _Danny, Champion of the World_ with Eric, and Simon is enjoying a second trip through this one. Meanwhile, I'm reading the Little House Books to Isaiah - I'd tried to catch his interest with them before, but this time he's into it - and Eli and Simon and Asher all listen along. Eli for the third time, Simon for the second and Asher, who is usually nearly asleep by the time we get to our chapter, murmurs that next time will be for him.

Simon is obsessed with the American Girl series of books, laying to rest, I hope, the calumny that boys won't read books with female heroes. He's enjoying reading chapters in various history books about the periods they are living at. We're also just starting Louise Ehrdich's _The Birchbark House_ which some people have called the "Native American Little House" - although we talk about the role of Laura Ingalls and her family in displacing Native peoples, I think compelling alternate stories are needed - I don't want my kids to get the Native American story through a series of boring talks rather than engaging stories.

Eli loves poetry, so we alternate some of his favorites with the Blue and Green Fairy Books, and a collection of Russian Fairy Tales. I admit, I was pretty terrified of Baba Yaga and her child-eating house when I was a kid, so I wait until after Asher falls asleep to read the darker stories.

As much as I love reading stories to my kids for the first time, I also love reading them again. Isaiah, Simon and Eli have already been through _The Hobbit_ but I think a re-reading will be in order shortly. Isaiah who loves adventures stories sat through all of the Howard Pyle Robin Hood, but will get more of it on the next iteration. Asher will soon be ready for _Understood Betsy_ which we completed on a long car journey one year. Friends of our just read James Herriot's books with their kids, and they go on the list, along with Swallows and Amazons, The Five Little Peppers, and The Three Muskateers.

The grownups have their stacks as well - I'm on a Christopher Buckley kick - I love comic novels that don't demand too much of me intellectually when I'm trying to finish a book. I'm also auditioning a few for the soon-to-restart post-apocalyptic novel reading club, but they aren't nearly as funny as _Boomsday_. Eric is neck deep in books about mathematics, but comes up occasionally to read the fifth Diana Gabaldon.

I anticipate a week of intense reading - and as much pleasure to the adults as to the children. We'll by natural sunlight, by kerosene lamp and by flashlight, snuggled under the covers in the dark. I'm kind of looking forward to it, actually.

What will you be reading for pleasure?

Sharon

BTW, several commenters correctly pointed out that I made an error in my original post - make sure you read their comments and corrections for clarification.

Sharon

Well, I should have realized that hubris is always properly rewarded - we're expecting to get 26 inches of snow, a couple of ice, some rain, some sleet, wind gusts up to 60mph and etcetera and etcetera over the next four or five days.

My kids are ecstatic - sledding! Eric is not so ecstatic, since SUNY Albany almost never closes and getting there is likely to be an adventure. Me, I figure that I waved my fist at the sky and demanded to be struck by lightning (well, snow) and I'm getting my just desserts. Sorry to the millions of others who will be punished by the snow fairies along with me ;-).

This, of course, means that the odds are that several of those days will be without power. The reality of living out in the country is that outages in weather (and occasionally for no apparent reason) are normal. So we're hauling in wood, filling the water containers, pulling in hay and getting ready to keep all cozy without the grid. I hope the rest of you are staying warm as well! And a piece of advice - never anger the snow fairies!

Sharon

I've finally also figured out how to divvy up the posts between ye olde blogge and here, which will be important when Gleanings Farm (our farm) takes up more of my time, as it will after the book marathon is over.

Sharon

Since this fashion week, despite its sponsorship by the Mercedes Benz company, is supposed to be "green" people want to know what I think of the green fashion movement. And the answer to that is that I think it is all very interesting, and I'm delighted that people are trying to deal with the enormous impact of our clothing - and that reminds me to go hit my local Goodwill for some more second-hand t shirts to go with my sweats. Meanwhile, here's a lightly revised version of the original article which appeared first at Groovy Green Magazine in 2006.

In conversations about social justice, energy, and our environment clothing doesn't get a lot of attention. This is in part because individually, clothing items don't carry that big an embodied energy cost. Another reason is that shirts aren't as spectacular as cars, or houses or even dinner. It is also kind of a girl thing - although male clothing is just as expensive, men, on average, shop less often and buy less when they do. Women tend to buy the household's clothing as well as their own, and to engage in recreational clothing shopping. Clothing the household has been women's work from time immemorial. And because the clothes we wear are tied intimately into how we feel about ourselves, and how others view us, clothing as a subject is somewhat fraught.

And yet, I think there are a number of really good reasons to find and learn ways to make clothing, to prioritize homemade, or locally made clothing (including learning to find it beautiful), and perhaps to create a "Slow Clothing" or "Slow Fashion" movement rather like the "Slow Food" movement currently picking up speed. Maybe it's as simple as creating a campaign in which each of us would have at least one daily wearable outfit that we've made ourselves, a kind of democratic fashion statement that acknowledges that our clothing comes with human and environmental costs.

Because while most adults may never urgently need to make clothing (there is enough clothing in the average American adult's closet to last them their entire lives), except perhaps small items that wear out easily, like underwear, socks and gloves, breaking our dependency on the clothing industry may be at least as important - and powerful - as breaking our dependency on industrial food.

Before the invention of mass production on a large scale, the average American or European had two outfits - an everyday one, which was washed weekly and permitted to get dirty, stained, worn, etc... and a "best" outfit that was kept for Sabbaths and special occasions, and was kept clean at all costs. They might also have warm outwear, knitted stockings, or additional items, depending on their wealth and the climate. The poor often had only rags - one of the gifts of industrial clothing production has been such a large surplus that even the poor can clothe themselves reasonably well through donations, thrift shops and yard sales. But that benefit has come with a price as well.

Because each pre-industrial item of clothing was home produced, it was terribly labor intensive to keep a family clothed. The work included cleaning and carding wool, flax and cotton, spinning yarn, weaving cloth, cutting and sewing it, knitting stockings and outerwear, embellishment techniques such as embroidering, lacemaking, etc..., and the work consumed a good part of the time of all the female members of the household (with some help from young boys and elderly men). In fact, in human culture, clothing production, along with food preparation, has been the central work of women in most societies for most of human history.

Industrial cloth production liberated wealthy women (and poor first world women, most of whom are quite rich by world standards) from the labor intensive work of cloth production, made it possible for them to have more and more varied clothing, and made clothing cheap for those who were poor. But it would be a mistake to believe that all women were similarly freed.

Industrialization has never been able to fully eliminate the enormous quantity of (female, often child) labor required to produce clothing - it has never found a machine that can do all the sewing, for example in a t-shirt. It has reduced that labor somewhat, but in yet another form of Jeavons' paradox, that reduction in labor per-outfit has come with an enormous growth the sheer quantity of clothing we wear. Thus, poor people, usually poor women and children, are being virtually (and sometimes literally) enslaved to produce what we wear. Even clothing factories that don't employ sweatshop labor often get their cloth from places where the cloth is manufactured by slave labor running large industrial machines. We have not eliminated the work of making our clothing - we have merely moved the labor offshore, reduced our own skill levels, and impoverished other people so we could have a lot of t-shirts

It is no accident that clothing manufacture on an industrial scale has always been oppressive work, one in which people have been terribly exploited. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, or the appalling conditions of the Lowell mills of the 19th century are not aberrations, any more than the room full of 12 year old Philippine slaves is now. Every step of industrial clothing production is inhumane and unjust in most circumstances, from the growing of cotton (which was once the product of American slave labor, and is now the most toxic crop produced in the US, putting more pesticides into the ground and water than any other), to the production of silk in India, to the sewing of dresses in factories all over the world. There are exceptions, but just as industrial food production is fundamentally and essentially inhumane in ways that cannot simply be resolved by a little tinkering, there seems little contrary evidence to the claim that industrial cloth production is equally morally problematic.

Cloth production has always been tied up with colonialism, slavery, and power. Thus, it is no accident that many of the most successful revolutionary movements in history framed their revolutions in part on the rejection of the clothing of their oppressors. Around the time of the American Revolution, for example, poorer women had always worn homespun, but in refusing to buy British cloth imports, women had their own Boston tea party. Urban and upper and middle class women accustomed to buying cloth or clothing imported from Britain proudly wore only homespun, and clothed their family entirely in their own production.

During and before the Civil War, people in the North refused to wear clothing that came from the South, because it was a product of slave labor. Women spun, wove and knitted their own wool and linen clothing, in an attempt to undermine the southern slave economy.

And Mahatma Gandhi, of course, in his famous swadeshi movement called for a boycott of all British cloth, and for women and men both to work daily at the production of khadi, or homespun cotton cloth, spun on an indigenous spinning wheel called a charka.

In each of these cases, the clothing revolution was a revolution of women, of people who had historically been left out of revolutionary planning. In India, the khadi revolution was the first call for women to be full enfranchised. In America, particularly during the civil war, women took their economic power to boycott quite seriously, and it led to women take new public roles in the anti-slavery movement.

At present, clothing is a powerful, multibillion dollar industry that encourages the exploitation of poor people all over the world, the majority of them women and children. It supports industrial agriculture, toxic pesticide use and the inhumane treatment of animals (industrial wool production is extremely problematic). It absorbs millions of barrels of oil every year for things like the creation of polyester cloth, the running of industrial machinery, and the transport of clothing made in Vietnam to stores in New Jersey. And it is an industry that is the lifeblood of places like Walmart and other mega-corporations, who make an enormous part of their profits off of our insatiable desire for more and different clothing.

So I would like to propose a "Slow Clothing" movement, one that makes economic and aesthetic and personal inroads in reducing the exploitativeness of the clothing industry. It won't solve all of the problems of industrial clothing - but a shift in our relationship to our t-shirts will make an enormous ecological difference.

Ideally, I would suggest that each household strive to create a single outfit for every man, woman and child that is entirely homemade. Now homemade might vary - ideally, of course, we would raise the sheep, spin the yarn and weave the cloth. And this can be done. But even if you buy your cloth (preferring, of course, organic cotton or sustainably produced wool or whatever), and simply sew your clothing, or repurpose old clothing, buy your yarn and knit your socks and sweater, each of us should strive to do some portion of the work of wardrobe production. This is a symbolic gesture, of course - it doesn't resolve the problem, but it also gives people some grasp of what goes into their clothing. Just as Michael Pollan gave millions of Americans a sense of what goes into their food, now it is time to fully grasp what a truly honest outfit would take from us.

For those of us who are adults, there are only a few items of clothing that we should need to purchase, if we use what is in our existing wardrobes carefully and wisely. Work clothing will need replacing, but dressy or nice clothes not used for work should last a whole lifetime or at least a very long time. Since the average American has 9 pairs of jeans in their wardrobe, purchasing even hard-wearing leisure clothing can be reduced dramatically simply by wearing the same pairs more often and long, patching and mending, line drying (dryers remove fibers from clothing), and the use of coverups, aprons, etc... Women will need maternity items, but these can be widely shared in a community. We can reduce our consumption by trying carefully to maintain our weight, or to lose weight and keep it off, so that we need not carry multiple sizes of clothing. We will need socks and underwear, but these are among the easier items to make - doing the work of handknitting or sewing small items is both satisfying and results in clothes of greater quality.

Children do need more clothes, more often because they change sizes rapidly. But again, we can reduce our needs by making some of these clothes, by engaging in good practice (ie, having children take off school or church clothing immediately and replace it with playclothes), by making repairs (by the age of 10, most children should be able to do their own clothing repairs), and by accepting lower standards for play clothes, which need not be perfect.

When we do purchase clothing, we should send a strong message to manufacturers by buying things that are not sweatshop made, ideally made locally or within our own country, and made both sustainably (ie, organically, and of natural materials) and of high quality. If we can radically reduce our clothing purchases, there will be no reason to buy cheaply made, imported, sweatshop clothing at Walmart - those with cash to spare will be able to afford to purchase high quality, environmentally sound clothing, including maybe investing in single pieces from environmentally conscious designers who make really cool stuff.

(The amazing Crunchy Chicken in her dress made of recycled neckties at the premier of her new tv show)

Used clothing can offer higher quality than we can afford new, and makes sure that clothes don't go into landfills. If we buy locally and nationally made clothing, we can reignite our national clothing manufacturing industry, whose offshoring has done so much economic harm to us.

My own family of six is kept well dressed by Goodwill and the Salvation Army, by yard sale finds and careful mending - and sometimes with a little creative sewing. It is amazing how often things can be repurposed - my kids wear mittens sewn made from old sweaters that went through a hot wash (I get these free from a thrift shop that has no other use for them), I sometimes unravel and reknit old sweaters, and I have several long work skirts that were once jeans - and I'm not seamstress.

There's so much emphasis in our culture on the new and latest thing - shifting to an aesthetic of the homemade, the remade, the used and classic, the sustainably grown and the local is a long process - and a major psychological change. But I'm thrilled that it seems to be happening all the same!

We are getting ready for Purim at our house. Someone or other once pointed out that pretty much all Jewish festivals can be summed as "They tried to destroy the Jewish people, they were foiled, let's eat." And so it is - Purim celebrates the story of Esther, and the preservation of the Jewish people. It is a lot of fun - people wear costumes, drink, dance, make noise and are silly. And we are commanded to (twice!) rehear the story that explains all this revelry.

The "hearing" is not very sedate - don't think "Bible reading" think "Rocky Horror show" - it is acted out in comic plays, the text is read aloud but half the time you can't hear it because when Haman's name is mentioned everyone yells and rattles noisemakers to block out his memory. Still, if you'll forgive me for making something serious out of something silly, there's a story in there worth hearing.

Esther didn't particularly want to be a heroine. She was pleased to get to be queen (the queen of a rather sleazy king, who had dumped his previous wife, Vashti because she refused to come display himself for his male friends), and there is no real indication in the story that she is at all displeased to have assimilated into non-Jewish culture. She conceals that she is a Jew because her uncle fears that king will not take her as a wife, not out of any particularly noble motive, and she doesn't seem much troubled by it.

Megilla Esther is first and foremost the story of acceptance by and of the dominant culture, of not making too many waves, of assimilation. But what separates Esther is her refusal (and Mordechai's) to allow her commitment to and investment in the dominant culture to shape her moral thinking.

When Haman calls for the people of Ahasauerus's realm to murder all the Jews within it and plunder their goods, Mordechai calls upon Esther to plead with the king to preserve the Jews. Esther is understandably frightened both to reveal herself as a Jew and also to go before the king without his summoning her, since the penalty for that is death. She tells Mordechai if he tries to speak to the king, she will die. And Mordechai's answer is decidedly un-avuncular, essentially "So what?":

"Do not imagine that you, of all the Jews, will excape with your life by being in the king's palace. On the contrary, if you keep silent in this crisis, relief and deliverance will come to the Jews from another quarter, while you and your father's house will perish. And who knows, perhaps you have attained to your position for just such a crisis."

Mordechai has raised Esther as a daughter, but he does not fail to speak harshly to her of her duty. And so she risks death twice, first by going to the king, and then by asking that he spare his queen and her people. And, of course (or we would not be celebrating) Ahasaueros does - the bad guy gets the gallows, the good guy wins, like all such stories. Esther ends up right at the end, of course, but she does so by recognizing that if she came to power in the dominant culture, it does not absolve her of moral responsibility, but heightens her obligation.

Peter Parker said it too, "With great power comes great responsibility." I think most of us have no idea how powerful we are, and thus, how responsible we are. Virtually all Americans command power and wealth unimaginable to most of the people in the world. Virtually all Americans are wealthier than 90% of the world's population. Most of us have more education - even if we graduated only from high school - than a majority of the world's population. It doesn't feel that way, when you are in debt and struggling economically, but most Americans are richer and more priveleged than Kings in most of history.

Because we do not see ourselves as powerful and rich - we view ourselves mostly in comparison to our neighbors who are similarly powerful and rich, and we are all caught up (me too) in our struggles. We do not tend to think that *we* are the people who have great responsibility in the world, that we are responsible to act. Other people are powerful, not us - and there's some truth in that - but only some. Other people can change things, not us - and again, there's some truth here, but only some. We have a thousand good reasons not to act - we are merely getting along, we do not have time, we do not have energy, we do not have money enough to spare.

But if we do not, who on earth has the time and the money, the energy and the power to change the world, to make things better, to prepare us for what's coming? Who will you ask to do it for you? Someone poorer and weaker and less priveleged? Someone who has had less good fortune?

In many cases they *are* doing that work - all over the world, the poor have spoken up about climate change and resource use, land reform and sustainability. I have read analyses of global warming and the WTO written by 12 year olds from Nicaraugua and India that put the writing of professional adults to shame. The world is full of people who work harder than you and I, who have harder lives, fewer and whose very lives are set at stake by the changes in our world, and who still have time to stand up and speak out.

I have written this elsewhere, but I repeat it, and will keep repeating it as long as necessary: almost all that is good in human history over the last three centuries is that oppressed and frightened, impoverished and angry people have stood up to those that did them harm, that mortgaged their future and endangered their lives and said "No More." This was never simple, it was never easy, but surprisingly often, they succeeded in winning, despite lack of things you and I have plentifully - power, money, education, comfort. Our own national history includes, along with its dark side, a remarkable and courageous tradition of not counting the cost to do what is right. And virtually every single person who has ever stood up in resistance has been less well educated, less wealthy, less priveleged, less safe, less comfortable than you and I are today. How is it that we keep finding reasons to do less than they?

Most of us are not living up to our moral responsibilities, or using our privelege and wealth to create justice. We, like Esther, are afraid, although our stakes aren't as high as hers. We are afraid we will lose our comfort, some of our wealth and our privelege. We are afraid to take full responsibility for the changes that have to come - we would rather put them off on future generations. The thought that we might have to give upthings we are accustomed to and change to something entirely new is frightening. So mostly, we are a silent.

But Mordechai's words "Perhaps you have attained your position for just such a crisis," should speak to us all. Whether you believe in G-d or good fortune, in the randomness of all things or in some sort of intentionality, perhaps if we are very lucky, it is because we are supposed to, or perhaps simply morally obligated to, use what power we have transformatively. Perhaps we are meant to lead, no matter how little we like the work, how frightened we are of the consequences, or how comfortable we are ensconced in the dominant culture.

We are like Esther. We are afraid of what it would mean to stand forth from the culture and demand that it change. We are comfortable in our palaces, and happy with our embroidered robes. And we, like Esther, are tempted only to act if we can forsee happy consequences for ourselves. But as Mordechai rightly points out, sometimes what happens to us isn't really the point - sometimes what matters is that we, in our power, have done the right thing, without counting the cost to ourselves. It takes courage. And that is not in over-great supply. But I suspect there is more of it out there than we like to admit, even to ourselves.

Chag Sameach! A happy Purim to all!

This often then morphs into the assumption that all of us should be able to grow all of our food, or a vast majority of it - that sustainability means the country life for everyone. You might think that because I do produce a vast majority of my food, and because I wrote a book advocating for millions of additional farmers, I might fall into this category. In fact, I don't. At least in the short term, I think those farmers will mostly be amateurs, farming very small plots indeed, often land they don't own, rather than full-time professionals.

I think there will be no substitute for being involved with your food and your food system, and I think that for many people, food growing provides a measure of security not available even through sustainable purchasing from local farmers, but I don't believe that means that all of us are going, as the song goes, "Get behind the mule in the morning and plow." Indeed, I think the majority of local food production will probably occur on small scales in urban and suburban areas, by people who either previously owned their land, before the present crisis, or by those who do not own land. The "move to the country and buy land' model is unlikely to dominate the future.

(John Hammond Gets Behind the Mule, Awesomely)

Does that mean that I agree with Toby Hemenway that food is "the last thing to worry about?" I know Hemenway isn't trying to discourage gardening (after all, he's the author of _Gaia's Garden_, one of the single best gardening books ever written) , but attempting to add a degree of balance to what is often an overheated debate. I tend to agree with him that people respond to gardening and backyard small livestock by thinking "I can do that!" and thus tend to focus on this, often to the exclusion of things that need just as much attention, like health care or finance. I think this larger point is absolutely on target. Hemenway writes:

Yet in the developed world, especially the breadbasket nations such as the US, Canada, and other food-exporting countries, the food network may be one of the last systems to fail during energy descent. In developing a wise post-Peak strategy, assessing relative risks is critical. Devoting large amounts of time and resources to events that are less likely leaves us unprepared for more probable difficulties. I don't want to discourage anyone from growing food--I'm a serious gardener myself and could list dozens of excellent reasons for doing it. But I think there are many reasons not to be focusing primarily on food as the system most likely to fail. This isn't to say that industrial, oil-based agriculture is invulnerable, let alone sustainable. And we may see temporary shortages of specific foods. But there are many reasons why our fears of a food collapse--particularly when they lead us to a go-it-alone, grow-your-own response--may be distracting us from focusing on more immediate and likely risks.

Food gets a lot of attention in part because we need it to survive, but also because one solution to a food crisis--growing your own--seems doable. I suspect we focus on food in part because providing it appears much more possible than, say, keeping the financial, health care, or automotive industries running.

That said, I have some disagreements about how Hemenway frames the discussion - I think his focus on "food collapse" as the reasoning behind growing food misses the central point - that most hunger doesn't occur because of a food collapse, it occurs because people can't afford to buy food. This is an easy one to miss - many people, learning about peak oil and climate change become fixated on the idea of transportatioin or other system disruptions that cut food supplies. And this is possible - indeed, when food and gas costs rose to their highest point in 2008, end-of-supply-line regions like Alaskan Native Villages found themselves struggling to get supplies in. But the vast majority of the world's hungry live in places where there is sufficient food - but they can't buy it. It is credible, then, to assume that at least in the shorter term, our collective crisis is likely to play out as it has in the past - with more and more people unable to keep food on the table.

Just as I've argued for some years that the most likely reason for any of my readers to have to live without heat or utilities is because growing poverty makes it impossible for them to pay utility bills, and thus, they get shut off or because they become homeless, the most likely reason for anyone reading this to encounter a food crisis is because of a growing poverty. And in both the Global North and South, this is the norm of hunger. As Amartya Sen has documented, most hunger and starvation worldwide occur in nations with adequate food tor their populations - the central problems are of equity and distribution.

This is obviously the pattern occurring in the United States. We are seeing a steady rise in hunger - how much is hard to establish. We know that food stamps are at their highest level of use ever - that one in nine American households, and one in four American children now needs food stamps. But that doesn't tell the whole story - food stamps are a fairly good measure of food insecurity, in which people don't know whether there will always be food or not, but not of hunger. But statistics on hunger are hard to collect. We know that it is rising rapidly - that food pantries in regions are seeing tripling and quadrupling of needs. We know the situations are more dire, and more acute. But again, this can't tell the whole story - there are families in crisis who do receive food stamps. Many agencies don't track information about demand or recipients, because they either lack the capacity or fear to drive them away.

Moreover, as Professors Sharon Panter and Karl Smith write in the News and Observer, measuring recipients of food aid the US doesn't give you an accurate picture of the need for food aid:

We have been tracking the history of food assistance in central and Eastern North Carolina. After five years of research, it is clear that nonprofit food assistance is a supply-driven good. That is, usage has increased primarily as a function of capacity of supply, not of increases in demand.

Like many small community nonprofits, food pantries have been constrained by lack of trained staff, computers, space and equipment, but they are facing a much larger problem: lack of product. They are running out of food to give away, on a national scale.

The rise of hunger in the US in the last few years is astonishing - and it is occurring in times of wild food surplus. There are no shortages in the US, and yet, people are going hungry. As seen in the previous article, food stamps are not a simple solution - with the gutting of other social welfare programs, food stamps are often the only source of supplemental income the very poor have, and often don't go for food. Many of the working poor don't get food stamps, or receive them minimally.

Americans spend less on food than almost any other national population in the world, so hunger in the US often doesn't make sense to people - why aren't we at least buying food? The answer is that food is generally a somewhat fungible expense for people, while things like housing, medications and transportation are not always. Consider a working-poor single parent household with a job. They live in one area, and the job is 45 minutes away by car, in an area where there is no public transportation (the norm). The job has no standard shifts, like much low paying employment, which makes it nearly impossible to provide stable childcare - if you have to be at work at 4 am one day and until 10pm the next this is impossible.

The largest fixed expenses are housing and transportation - usually a car loan and disproportionately high rent or mortgage. It would be easy to say that people should abandon their car and get a job somewhere else - but this is often not viable. It would be easy to say they should move to a lower cost area, but they are often pinned by family obligations, employment, or even the inability to produce first months and last months rent. Incomes are often unstable, and depend on whether overtime is offered or not. Most of the jobs have no benefits, so a single illness or a car breakdown and a sudden expense is enough to force families to move into the few areas of their lives that are fungible - and food is the big fungible expense.

Now I realize that some of my readers will point out that the poor often make poor choices - this is absolutely true. The rich do too - but they are not penalized for their inability to cook or their deciding to buy a luxury item before they realized that there would be no overtime that month. Moreover, I think it is safe to say that as more of us become poor, more or us will make some bad choices too. Many of us have already, and may be asked to pay a high price for them. In fact, in the case of the poor, those paying the biggest prices are generally those who have choices at all - children.

I think it is fair to say, however, that we can expect patterns of increasing hunger and food insecurity to increase even among people in net-food-exporting nations that would never have thought they too could be hungry. We can say this because it has been happening - and occurring quite dramatically. Those most immediately affected will be those who have always lived closest to the margins of food insecurity, or who were already food insecure - the rural, urban and suburban (there are now more poor people living in the suburbs than in cities in the US) poor and working class.

These people will not, generally speaking, be "getting land" - credit has already tightened dramatically for low income people, and they also rely heavily on the informal economy to support them already - including community networks and existing family and social structures. Most of the poor can't afford a mortgage, they can't afford first and last and security to move, they can't move away from their sister who watches the kids while they work third shift, they can't move to a new city where they don't know anyone who can help translate, they can't afford to move to a place where there are no bus lines.... Some may be pushed into rural areas because of low cost of living, and a few will choose to relocate there, but most of the US poor have fairly limited mobility, and won't be buying land to grow all their food anytime soon.

Meanwhile, for those of us in the middle class, there is likely to be a gradual decline in wealth and security - a slide from two incomes to one plus unemployment, then one plus nothing, the erosion of benefits, pay cuts (in the Great Depression real earnings fell by more than 40%, so that even the 75% of the working population that still had a job was earning dramatically less), etc... Some will join the abjectly poor, but that's likely to be a more gradual process. What we will see is a great deal more instability.

If the US were to shift its focus from bailing out the financial community to providing for the basic needs of the most vulnerable, and if programs like food stamps and unemployment benefit extensions could continue expanding indefinitely, we would still see real and serious hunger in the US. The odds are, however, that they will not. Most American state unemployment funds are functionally bankrupt, relying on federal subsidies to keep them paying out. States are already slashing aid to education, social welfare programs and support programs for children, the elderly and the disabled.

The question becomes how much can and will the federal government do? It is certainly in the interest of the US government to keep food riots down - but we've seen in recent posts the way that American attitudes towards the poor pit them against one another, and naturalize a hatred and fear of the poor - in order for there to be riots, large numbers of hungry Americans would have to achieve some kind of solidarity with one another. With plenty of affluent people testing to see how well a rich person with a car, house and plenty of person hygeine items and gas in the tank can survive on programs like food stamps reassuring us that the food stamps budget is more than plenty for the poor, it seems like there's more fuel for this fire. If we view the present as an experiment in how many people can go hungry or food insecure before anyone recognizes a fundamental social failure, the answer seems to be "a lot."

What we do know is that the subsidies are insufficient for a majority of people who live on them. The high costs of housing and health care mean that even those receiving maximum subsidies are often struggling just to get along.

Moreover, there are real questions about how long governments in the Global North will be able to keep up their subsidies. We know that tax revenues have declined substantially, and that local and state governments are increasingly overwhelmed - and turning to the Federal Government. We know there are signs, like the announcement that Britain is in as shaky financial a situation as Greece, that governments in the North are having a tough time holding on. The structure of neo-liberal capitalist economies has been to focus on "growing the economy" rather than providing supports for its people - that pattern seems unlikely to change in the short term without a great shift in social values.

All of which leads us to this conclusion - that the places where hunger is likely to be most prevalent in the near term, where people most need more food, and better nutrition, are among people least able to go out and buy land and move to the country. This pretty much supports what I've been saying for many years, that "we most need to grow food where people already are." For rural dwellers, many of whom are land rich but poor in most other respects (although not all own land), the answer is a new way of viewing the land they own - after decades of farming not paying, it may start - not well, but enough to keep people off the margins.

We're often dismissive, however, of suburban and urban agriculture. How can someone's windowbox, their community garden plot, their rooftop garden or their 30x20 backyard really make a difference in food security? But in fact, we know that in much of the world, urban and suburban food growing makes an enormous difference in food security. For people in cities and the suburbs, the answer is not "get land" but "make the best possible use of what you have." The aggregate of urban and suburban systems that integrate food production into local systems is potentially substantial - no, they will not entirely feed themselves. But at least at present, that's not what's required - what's required is that we make a critical difference in household food security - and city and suburban gardens can do that.

How do we know? Because growing food has been doing that for poor people for a very long time. In Lusaka, among poor and landless households, as A.W. Drescher shows in his article "Urban agriculture in the Seasonal Tropics", households that garden, usually on land they do not own, often by squatting, show substantially better nutrition by every measure, while also producing more food per acre, and using water more sparingly than agricultural production in the surrounding countryside. In Moscow, during the collapse of the Soviet Union, 65 percent of economically struggling households grew food. In Kampala, a UN report on urban agriculture found that children in families that grew food crops were as healthy as far wealthier families, according to _Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs, Sustainable Cities_ by Jac Smit, Annu Ratta and Joe Nasr.

Ninety percent of produce grown in China in the early 1990s was grown within cities. In much of sub-Saharan Africa, up to 20% of all calories consumed are produced in cities. in 1981, Hong Kong had 5 million people and 1,060 km2, and was using 10% of that land to produce 45% of the fresh vegetables, 15% of the pigs and 68% of the live chickens eaten in the city, according to I. Wade's essay "Fertile Cities." In 2002, the city had 6.3 million people in it, and had seen much of its good land developed (for example, between 1981 and 2000, all rice farming, even on the outer islands, ceased) but they were still producing 33% of the produce, 14% of the pigs, 36% of the chickens and farming 20% of the fish consumed within the city. The animals were raised for the most part on 160,000 *tons* annually of food waste were being recycled into meat and egg production.

We know that small scale gardening can make a critical difference for the poor - both the chronically poor and the newly-becoming poor. The difference is not that it magically provides all food, but that it provides access to high value, high protein and high nutrition food stuffs that are expensive or hard to access in rural and urban "food deserts." They allow poor people to turn low-cost resources like seeds into high cost items like healthy food. They also allow people to turn food wastes into high quality protein, if combined with small scale animal husbandry. Because gardening can often be done almost entirely outside the cash economy, it is particularly valuable for those with minimal or tied up cash incomes, who have little leeway.

Just as importantly, community gardens and other local food production exercises have political implications as well - they tie communities together in ways that other activities don't seem to. In a fascinating study by SUNY Albany Professor Donna Armstrong, she finds,

The most commonly expressed reasons for participating in gardens were access to fresh foods, to enjoy nature, and health benefits. Gardens in low-income neighborhoods (46%) were four times as likely as non low-income gardens to lead to other issues in the neighborhood being addressed; reportedly due to organizing facilitated through the community gardens

This mirrors what urban dwellers in places as diverse as Zimbabwe, Russia and China report - that the value of gardening is that it is never a wholly private activity, but one with profound communal, political and social implications.

It would be easily to trivialize the impact of small gardens in suburbs and cities - but their aggregate is enormous. As Michael W. Hamm and Monique Baron write in their case study "Developing an Integrated, Sustainable, Urban Food System: The Case of New Jersey, United States" published in _For Hunger-Proof Cities_ ed. Koc, MacRae, Mugeot and Welsh, the entire produce needs of residents of New Jersey could be met by large numbers of small household gardens or by new acreage brought into production, but given the high level of development, the small household garden model might be more feasible.

There may come a time when we face immediate, pressing and absolute shortages of food, but we aren't there yet, and that doesn't seem to be the most pressing reality for most of us. What's more likely is that we will struggle economically to buy food, be pressed into purchasing it at unaffordable prices due to lack of good access, and be forced to take money out of our food budgets and put it to meeting other needs. What's most likely is that hunger will begin for many of us (has begun for many of us) as a slow grind, wearing us down, and as safety net after safety net begins to slip, we will find ourselves more and more in need of our gardens - and every other mechanism we have to support ourselves.

Do you have to grow food? No, and some people never will, from lack of ability or because they are doing other, equally important work. But for most us, the world is no respecter of persons or importance. I would say you do not have to grow food as long as you have faith that you yourself will never become poor - will never lose your job, never struggle to make ends meet, never through the increasingly shaky safety nets. But that is, of course, precisely the most likely thing to happen to all of us in the near term of our ecological crisis. Most of us fear that outcome, often fear it so much that we deny that it could happen to us - and thus deny ourselves a chance to learn useful lessons from the 85% of the world population who has already navigated this territory before us, who have already shown us the deep urgency of growing what we can.

Sharon

In March 2009, in the midst of the worst job crisis in at least a generation, Eva opened the last welfare check she will ever receive. She is one of a growing number of people in the United States who can't find work in this recession but don't qualify for government cash assistance, no matter how poor they are or how bad the economy gets.

On the first day of each month, when her food stamps arrive, she walks to the convenience store up the street, buys food for her family with her food stamp card and uses it to pay off the debt she accumulated the previous month after she ran out of money. She then trades in the remaining balance for cash. Although the bodega is more expensive than larger chain grocery stores nearby, she's locked into shopping here because places like Wal-Mart won't let her keep a tab--or exchange her food stamps for desperately needed cash.

You absolutely want to read the whole thing. It would, of course, be easy for people with internet access and enough food in the pantry to sit in judgement of someone who lost her job because she took her kid to the emergency room, and is taking care of her mother with cancer and her children. Easy, but cheap.

We know, intellectually, that if the only income you have is food stamps that you must be trading them for cash - no one gets free housing, childcare, detergent, toilet paper, birth control, medications, transportation. This is why I tend to think poorly of those exercises in living on a "food stamp budget" sometimes taken by the well meaning - they usually exempt themselves from the realities of the poor. They provide themselves with the maximum, which most households don't get, and assume that they don't have to consider the real questions of whether they could maintain qualifications and meet basic needs. Of course a person with a job and a car and supply of tampons and advil can get by on the food stamp maximum - that's not really the point, is it?

We are teetering on a basic question, I think - what is government for? In the present situation, we don't have the luxury of doing everything we'd like - of funding every project, of engaging in every kind of research or investing in every area of life that we'd like. We have to make choices. So we come to the question - as more and more citizens are impoverished and desperate, and we invest more and more money in propping up an economy that is still failing, still falling, what should governments do? What choices should we make? Is the mission of our society to preserve an economy at all costs? To preserve an imperialist enterprise? Or to preserve the people?

In the US, these questions are often framed in poor ways - it is implied that the only choices are socialism vs. neo-liberal capitalism. But of course, those aren't the only choices - and things that serve us when we are growing don't always serve us as we are falling.

Sharon

What we can tell you is that we are planning to donate the profits from our next enterprise to an enviromental charity, but we're having some trouble picking our favorite. So I thought I'd ask you - what environmental charity do you like best? We're taking suggestions!

Cheers,

Sharon

Most of us probably don't realize that the "average farmer" on a world scale looks rather different. Here's an approximate of what the average farmer looks like:

Or maybe she looks more like this:

Women feed the world, and I mean that quite literally. Worldwide, according to the UN FAO, more than 50% of all the food grown worldwide is produced by women, who constitute close to 60% of the world's farmers - and more than 70% of the world's small farmers. More than 80% of all food processing and preparation worldwide is done by women - everything from grain grinding to dinner cooking.

85% of the world's farms are small farms, producing half the world's calories. In many parts of the world, they produce the vast majority, including grain staples. 80% of African farms are small farms and almost 90% are farmed by women. In Asia, the majority of all the world's rice is grown on small farms with less than 2 hectares in production - often by women.

in the US, women are the single-fastest growing demographic group - while women own only 7% of all farms, their numbers doubled from 2000 to 2007. As in the world as a whole, US women farmers are vastly less likely to own their land than male farmers - less than 1% of all agricultural land worldwide is actually owned by women. In many cases, land titles are held by males and their families, while women actually work the land, and that land can be sold out from under them.

Everywhere in the world, women farmers face astonishing barriers. In the US, for example, American women farmers are currently suing the Department of Agriculture (Love v. Vilsack) for discrimination in agricultural loans. In much of Africa, for decades well meaning social agencies directed farm aid at men - rather than the people who actually grew the food. And yet, they keep on growing. And they are feeding us. African women farmers grow your coffee. Mexican women farmers grow your lettuce. Malaysian women farmers grow your tea.

When we talk about the future of agriculture, whether we can feed the world, etc... I think it is important to have a fairly accurate mental picture of what we are describing - we tend to assume that large grain producers in the Global North produce most of the world's food, but this is not true. We tend to assume that all we have to do is improve technologies, develop just the right seeds and what else is there? But often the right seeds aren't quite the point. For example, the UN FAO observes that 25% of African women farmers are using only primitive hand-made tools. 1.4 billion people rely on seeds they save themselves and could not afford to purchase seed, no matter how productive.

This is only a tiny snapshot of the world agricultural picture, but I point it out because while many of us are beginning to know something about our food, most of us still have a great deal to learn about what the world food picture looks like - and where we need to begin to make sure that people go on eating.

Sharon

New gardeners generally start out by buying their seedling, and depending on where you are getting them, this can be a problem. The destructive wave of Late Blight that hit the tomato crop across the eastern half of the US was derived from seedlings purchased at big-box garden centers. Because the spores are windborne, it spread all over the country, killing tomatoes indiscriminately among those who grew their own and those who purchased. Moreover, if you are concerned about chemical use in agriculture, many of the seedlings you will buy at garden centers will be heavily sprayed.

That's not to say that people shouldn't buy plants and seedlings - I'd be a bit of a hypocrite to say so, since I sell plants and seedlings. If you are starting up with gardening and don't want to begin with seeds for plants that need an early start or don't have time or space to start seeds, buying from someone who grows them locally is a good idea. But a packet of 20 tomato seeds from, say, Pinetree Gardens can cost under $2, whereas you'll generally pay 4-6 for just six plants. Moreover, you are limited by what's available - my local garden center offers 3 kinds of hot peppers - my own seed collection includes 30.

The first things people are likely to start from seed are common annual heat-loving vegetables. In most climates in the US, either because it is too cold early, or because it is too hot at summer's peak, it is necessary to start tomatoes, peppers and eggplants from seed indoors to get a reliable crop. And in some places, you'll want your tomatoes earlier, even if they could germinate from direct sowing. In my climate, I can get only small varieties of tomato to mature from direct sowing, and peppers and eggplant never get there at all. Many other vegetables do better if they are started indoors and transplanted, rather than direct seeded, and some cool season vegetables will produce a lot earlier if started from seed - broccoli, cabbage and brussels sprouts are generally started from seed as well.

Those are the most commonly started seeds, but there are literally hundreds of other things you could start from seed - many herbs (especially basil) and flowers, as well as the perennial I mentioned in the two other posts. If you are a beginner, though, I would keep it simple. You can get very complex with timing and succession sowing, but let's focus on the basics.

The most common garden vegetables started early from seed indoors are:

Tomatoes, Peppers, Eggplant, Basil, Parsley, Onions, Broccoli, Cabbage, Brussels Sprouts.

Plants usually sown directly into the garden:

Peas, beans, beets, carrots, dill, cilantro, melons, squash, cucumbers, spinach, parsnips, asian greens, mustard

Some plants, like lettuce can either be given a head start or planted out directly. A few, like melons and okra can be started indoors to give them a head start in cold climates, but should be planted into newspaper pots or other decomposable mediums, because they don't like having their roots disturbed and suffer from transplant shock if you try and put them in a regular flat.

To start plants indoors, you need containers - these can be recycled from egg cartons, yogurt containers, etc... or you can acquire flats specifically for this purpose. I like plastic egg cartons, personally. Make sure, however, that you cut drainage holes in any container.

You can purchase a seed starting medium at a garden center, or you can start seeds in sifted compost if you've got it. Garden soil itself isn't a great medium - it is too heavy. But light soil mixed 1-1 with compost will do. The conventional advice is that if you use soil or compost, you should bake it at 250 degrees to kill bacteria that might infect your plants. My own observation is twofold. First of all, baking compost or soil stinks to high heaven. The second is that it doesn't seem to be necessary, at least for me - several studies have suggested plants actually germinate and grow better in compost, and I've had less damping off in 1-1 compost and soil mixes than with purchased potting mixes, but YMMV.

Fill your containers with soil, and insert seeds. In general, good seed companies will include instructions on the package, but you might also want a reference book for the specific conditions that will ensure best germination. I like Nancy Bubel's _The New Seed Starter's Handbook_ and Suzanne Ashworth's marvellous _Seed to Seed_. These are useful for reminding us when, say, a seed needs some light to germinate, or what temperatures it germinates best at.

If you keep a cool house, finding a way to germinate heat lovers like peppers and eggplant is challenging - with temps in the 50s and low 60s, they can take more than a month to germinate. Some people use heat mats that provide consistent bottom heat, but these are expensive and energy intensive - I also know people who use the top of their fridge, the top of the dryer, back of the woodstove. Cool season plants like broccoli and cabbage don't need the warmest spots, so put them over by the window.

Keep the soil evenly moist and the environment as humid as possible - purchased flats usually come with a plastic dome, or you can put the plants in a plastic bag until germination, or just leave them in an area where you also keep a bowl of water to evaporate. Don't forget to check them regularly though, or your seedlings may end up leggy and stretched out as they reach desperately for light.

Once they do, a sunny windowsill will do great for your seedlings - if the light isn't good, it can help to put old foil on a piece of cardboard or a mirror behind your seedlings for reflective purposes. Keep them evenly moist, but not too wet - a little fuzzy-white mold doesn't matter much, but probably indicates too much moisture. Water from the bottom, not the top, or with a mister to avoid disturbing seedlings. Other people use flourescent lights - if you do this, you'll want one warm and one cool light spectrum bulb.

After the first week or so, you can fertilize lightly with kelp or fish fertilizer or compost tea. Nearly everything you can use that isn't Miracle-gro stinks a little - and Miracle-Gro stinks, but in another sense. Honestly, the least stinky and best option I've found is diluted human urine - dilute 1-10 and use to water seedlings. At that dilution, it doesn't smell, provides a balanced fertilizer and doesn't help deplete the oceans. I know that instinctively sounds weird to people, but urine is an excellent fertilizer, and unlike human feces, is not a major disease vector, unless you have tularemia, in which case you've got bigger problems than what to feed your seedlings. If you stop fertilizing with urine for two weeks before you harvest any plants, there's not even the most distant gross-out factor. But if you prefer pureed Menhaden, you can get that too - even though that seems more troubling than pee to me.

The major problem people have with seedlings comes from damping off disease, which is caused by lack of good air circulation and too much moisture. It is a fungus, and it is pretty easy to control - open a window now and again, or run a fan, and don't overwater. You can also water occasionally with dilute chamomile tea. But if you keep the soil from being soggy, you shouldn't have a major problem.

Keep your seedlings happy with food, water and sun, and then when you are ready to plant out, comes one of the most critical and neglected pieces - hardening off. If you take your plants out of your sunny window and bring them out on the first warm, sunny day and stick them in the ground, I promise I can tell you what will happen. A large portion of them will turn whitish, and drop dead. This is because of transplant shock, caused by going from an incredibly protected environment to a very unprotected one. So you need to harden off your seedlings.

What does that mean? Well, it means they should go outside gradually. Put them out one afternoon, late in the day, on an overcast, not too windy day. Leave them out for only a couple of hours, and then bring them back in. The next day leave them out a little longer, and give them some direct sun - but only a little. At the first sign of whitening of the leaves, bring them back in. After a week of gradual transitioning, they can live outside.

When to plant out depends on the plant - cold lovers like broccoli and cabbage can go out as soon as the weather is settled into spring and it is dry enough to plant. Tomatoes should wait until after your last frost date. Real heat lovers, like peppers, should probably go in a week or two later, when the nights are consistently warm.

That's about all there is to it - honestly, I can't imagine life without seeds to start - what would I do in February if I couldn't get arm-deep in the compost?

Sharon

"At a time when Haiti is facing a major food crisis we are alarmed at the lack of support to the agricultural component of the Flash Appeal," UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Director-General Jacques Diouf told a high-level meeting in Rome to coordinate UN efforts for the medium- and long-term recovery of the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

"The immediate priority is support for the farm season that begins in March and accounts for more than 60 per cent of the country's food production," he added, noting that FAO has already started to distribute seeds, fertilizer and tools to enable farmers to plant for the next harvest.

The idea that we can draw away again, abandon Haiti (and not for the first time) at the point of actually dealing with their chronic hunger is an enormous betrayal. Time to remind our governments that our involvement cannot stop here! And while you are contacting your fearless leaders, remind them that the US could lead the toward the cancellation of Haiti's enormous burden of debt.

Sharon

(Note, there was originally a link and short quote from a website about the subject, but the owner of the site apparently took offense because I attempted to drive traffic to her, so I strongly recommend you avoid her site, to avoid offending her. I will go out of my way never to mention it or any of her work again. ;-))

The plants I was planting were stratified - that is, they require or tolerate a period of cold before germination. Some plants won't germinate at all without a cold period, others will take as long as years. Others will germinate just as well. How do you know which plants will do well with winter sowing?

Anything that tells you in its germination requirements that it needs stratification or a period of cold. And anything that says "self sows" - these are all plants who seeds will tolerate or even require cold periods, gradually warming to grow. Plants native to temperate climates - anything that indicates this in its name, for example. This includes an awful lot of cold-hardy perennials, and a surprising number of garden annuals as well. Most temperate climate plants form seed in summer or autumn, and the plants have a much better chance of surviving in most cases if they don't germinate right before winter - so a natural period of embryonic dormancy makes perfect sense for plants. Mimicking those conditions improves germination rates of many seeds, and it allows us to plant at earlier periods, less busy ones, than we might otherwise.

Now the conventional advice for stratification is to put the plants into the fridge - but I don't have a conventional fridge, so that's not a good choice for me. Moreover, even if I did have one, I grow a lot of plants, and would begrudge the space taken up by an awful lot of jars of seeds. And nature does a terrific job in my climate of providing adequately cold temperatures.

I do some of my seeds in trays and pans like shown in at the Wintersown site linked above, but I also start some of my plants in the fall, in nursery beds. These are garden beds that I'm done using for the year, that have good soil and a protected location - I plant elderberry, apple, quince, peach and pear seeds here, as well as juniper, black cap and cranberry bush viburnum. The plants will spend the season in this bed, or be dug out and potted up, before a final plant out.

Some plants that you wouldn't think required stratification do considerably better with it - for example, parsley seeds, which take forever to germinate under traditional greenhouse/indoor conditions germinate very rapidly after a week of cold treatment. Tomatoes actually respond to cold treatment pretty well, although they produce later than early tomatoes will. In my climate, only cherries produce really well when grown this way, but it is an excellent way to get late tomatoes - say, if you don't want to be standing over a canning kettle in August or if you are planting tomatoes for pots to be brought in for overwintering.

Most experienced gardeners know a little about stratification, but I think few of us have fully plumbed its possibilities - for improving germination, extending our garden season and also balancing the workload which goes with the garden.

It is too late for many southern gardeners to winter sow without recourse to the fridge, but for those of us in northern places aching to get some seeds in the dirt, now is the time!

Sharon