Right off the bat, the notion that American farmers have ever “operated in a free market” leaves me scratching my head. Before 1906, that statement could only refer to property rights, as there was little in the way of a “market” outside of one’s own community.

The establishment of the Food Safety and Inspection Service had nothing to do with farmers. It was passed to protect the public from “…the manufacture, sale, or transportation of adulterated or misbranded or poisonous or deleterious foods, drugs, medicines, and liquors, and for regulating traffic therein, and for other purposes.” In brief, it reacted to the widespread commercial adulteration of foods such as the addition of water to milk or the infamous “Bread Spread” which contained no fruit and was made using coal tar, artificial pectin, flavorings and grass seed and was sold as strawberry jam. Ironically, the initial push for federal action came from farmers and manufacturers concerned with competition from inferior or low quality products.

If this is the “free market” period that Mr. Salatin celebrates as Halcyon days, he would still be incorrect concerning the life, and more often the plight, of the American farmer at the turn of the century.

The modern image of the Family Farm that we carry with us is, for the most part, an invention of Hollywood. The farm as independent, self-sustaining and self-sufficient is an image that ignores the realities of community and the basic human desire for a better life for our children. In reality the life of a small holder was often a life filled with uncertainty, punctuated with bouts of poverty held together with the hope of a better future. This is evidenced by the rapid adoption of labor saving technologies and the ready abandonment of farming in the face of outside economic opportunities such as jobs in mills and factories – a dynamic that can still be seen today around the world in developing countries.

When the subject of Martha Boneta is folded into this discussion it becomes even more apparent that what is actually being spoken of here is property not farming. To be more precise in her case the subject is contract law. Ms. Boneta purchased her land (64 ac) directly from the Piedmont Environmental Council in 2006 at which time the easements and codicils were firmly in place on 1232 contiguous acres. She paid a below market price due to the restrictions placed on it and agreed to be bound by those terms.

The fact that she began to move outside these restrictions has nothing to do with “free markets” and everything to do with contract disputes. The laws that were passed as a result of her actions/protestations serve merely to create a mediating body for future disputes among those involved in these types of easements.

Mr. Salatin and Ms. Boneta are commercial players in a commercial landscape and should be treated as any other commercial enterprise

Talk about the Science.
Talk about property, patents and licensing.
Talk about food and agriculture policies.

Only talk about one topic at a time.

Obviously these issues are interrelated but before they can be integrated effectively they need to be clearly defined. Even if only during conversation.

If you are paying any attention to popular media the message is unavoidable. We must help poor farmers around the world to preserve their traditional ways of life. Their ways of life are crucial to the maintenance of their culture and therefore must be maintained.

But why? Is this really the life we think these people should be living? Is this really the life we think any people want or aspire to? Subsistence is just that, subsistence.

Rather than preserving the language of economic stasis we should be using language that empowers people to change their lot. More to the point, doing so without the presumption that we in the more developed world should be in a position to grant them the moral permission to better their lives.

I remember walking on Santa Monica beach in 1969 and being introduced to the concepts of both offshore oil drilling and offshore oil spills (Union Oil’s Platform A) by stepping on a glob of crude mixed with sand. In the following days I watched the clean up on the television and it seems I have been watching the same process play out ever since! (Argo Merchant in 1976, Ixtoc1 1979, Exxon Valdez 1989 etc.). The same booms, the same oil covered birds the same skimmers and the same wild, desperately vacant looks on the faces of the oil executives and attendant government officials.
While the oil spill plays out in the news it is also important to notice the disappearance of the Haitian earthquake from the front page, as well as the quakes in Chile and China.

My interest in these matters is not focused on the disasters but rather the response (or lack there of) that we have generated.

In the period since the Santa Barbara spill we have put people on the moon, robots on Mars, mapped DNA and transplanted human faces but our response to disasters has not changed in any appreciable manner. More importantly our responses are the same in spite of available technologies. It is as if those responsible don’t read popular mechanics or watch the Discovery Chanel!

For example: In response to the Exxon Valdez actor Kevin Costner spent millions to develop a ship mounted water oil separator. The technology was never picked up by people who clean things up but it apparently worked well enough to be used to extract oil by producers. Have we seen any of these in use? No, Kevin lost 20 million dollars.

Universal Remediation has developed Petroleum Remediation Product (PRP) which can be used for various oil, fuel and other liquid petroleum hydrocarbon cleanup applications such as fuel or oil spilled on land or ground, oil spills on shorelines, waterways or marinas, hydraulic fluid spilled in industrial plants. Micro beads made from bee’s wax using technology licensed from NASA capture and bind to oil where the naturally occurring bacteria eat all the oil, once applied to a spill it does not need to be removed as the product and the resulting byproducts are nontoxic. I made a call to them last week and was told that they had not shipped any special quantities to the gulf. They were recently contacted by “Government agencies”. I won’t hold my breath but I wish them luck.

In my last post I described a strategy for emergency housing in Haiti – since the earthquake and the writing I have not seen any evidence of this or any other similar response.  As a matter of fact many of the people who were camping in the area across from the capital have been moved to a new tent city miles out of town. Now, they are not only still in tents but are so far removed from the areas of commerce that they are unable to work or buy food! Good move, well thought out.

There are approximately 17 million TEU of containers in the world’s current shipping inventory. Twenty foot Equivalent Units are the industry standard 8′ x 8′ x 20′ steel container – a  40′ container is two TEU’s. 700 thousand of these  lay unused in US ports alone (it is estimated that over 10,000 containers are lost at sea each year). And, as they also take as much energy to recycle as to make new,  they tend to stack up.

These shipping containers are:

• Built from heavy gauge steel with a carrying capacity of 60,000 lbs.
• Fully loaded they can be stacked 7 high.
• Standard containers are 20ft or 40ft and weigh 4800lbs and 8030lbs respectively.
• Cross sectional dimensions are ; standard – 8ft wide x 8ft tall and high cube – 8ft wide x 9.5ft and 10.5 ft tall giving a floor space of 160 sq ft and 320 sq ft.
• Since the US is a net importer, these containers accumulate and are available for sale for $900 to $1400 depending on quantity, condition and modifications.

The Hopeful

Areas affected by disaster are generally left without locally derivable resources for infrastructure construction / re-construction. While food, water and medical aid can be quickly transported and distributed, shelter is often handled in an ad hock and temporary manner that often takes on a permanence that exacerbates and prolongs the effects of the disaster and hampers efforts to establish normalcy and longer term reconstruction.

Examples of this dynamic can be seen with the standard tent city established after an emergency:

• Tent encampments require large areas of open ground.
• Tents are susceptible to damage from the environment – this propensity increases with the tent’s continued exposure to the elements.
• The populations requiring shelter often outstrip the capacity and number of tents – this leads to substandard shelters being constructed with locally available scrap and, if available, looted materials.
• Because tent cities are densely populated, fire and disease outbreaks are a constant concern.

The Treasure

The use of containers as the basic building blocks of reconstruction in devastated areas can start with the most basic kit deployed at the start of an emergency. Once in place, the modules can provide an almost endless variety of permanent and mobile housing for a reorganizing population. With 17 million containers currently in use the number of available building units will only grow as the current inventory ages and is replaced. The opportunity to benefit from this cheap, durable and easily modified resource is equal only to the demands of emergency recovery and third world redevelopment.

My new favorite place in Richmond

The long awaited Home Show had arrived and the stress of going and setting up our booth was pressing down on all those involved. It’s at times like these that fate can find an opportunity to smile on the oppressed. In this instance it came in the form of an accidental meal found at the last minute.

Let me explain. It’s a long drive from Charlottesville to Richmond and the road goes from bad to worse the closer one gets to the Convention Center (you wouldn’t want people to congregate easily apparently, and the irony IS lost on the local Gov.). Anyway, the trip fueled by much coffee -and little else – was followed by wandering around and around trying to find the right set of loading docks and entrances. When we finally found the right place to be and had been ushered to the proper unloading point we were told that we had a very short window in which to deploy our gear and move our vehicle out of the way.
We then proceeded to erect a collection of spars, struts and other protuberances, Velcro and magnet backed vinyl and foam panels into what we had a vague idea was our booth.

This of course took far longer than we had anticipated and by the time we were done, lunch time had come and gone and Calorie Deficit had profoundly set in.

My brother Bjorn and I decided we would stop somewhere / anywhere on the way out of town and fuel up. Now it happens that Broad St. at this time of day is crowded and – for a couple of hungry guys from out of town -a bit intimidating so finding a restaurant, near a legal parking space, not fast food and not pizza or Chinese was no easy task.

That’s when fate intervened. An open space on the street and three venues to choose from. As we got out of the car the smallest place caught our eye and our interest – The Jerk Pit. We figured we would go in and if  it was too sketchy we would go next door. Instead what greeted us was the wonderful smells of Jamaican spices overlaying hints of pork, chicken and plantains. The menu had all these as well as red beans and rice, ox tails, glazed ribs and fried red snapper.

The combination of choices and smells working on our palpable hunger made making a decision almost impossible. I opted for the jerk pork, red beans and rice, fried plantain and steamed veg dinner knowing that I would be coming back that way the next day. Bjorn decided on the jerk chicken version (so he could stop thinking about it ) and at the last minute I added a cup of the multi-bean soup.

We got our sodas and sat down. Several minutes later we were called to get our foam boxes of food.

Opening the boxes generated a whole array of emotions:

1. We scored!!
2. Wow! that’s a lot of food.
3. Does it taste as good as it smells?
4. I wonder what his tastes like?
5. I’m coming back here tomorrow.

This all took place in the time it took to unwrap my plastic fork and deploy same as intended. Were my expectations met? I went back the next day for the ox tails and a Jamaican soda and I’ll be back on Sunday when we tear down the show.

For instance, what should we to think about the introduction of a plethora of new smart phones able to find me a hat shop in Zaire while simple seeming applications for my PC seem to perform better in the box they came in than installed in the box they were designed for.

Or maybe the never ending coverage of the financial decay of the American dream while my business and others like it continue to provide materials for luxury homes and second luxury homes, purchased by clients in new cars and trucks.

OK perhaps not tech or finance, perhaps we could examine something closer still – food, the food we buy, the food we sell, grow, waste, eat, cook. The food we give, the food we withhold, the pleasure of it, the guilt.

Well you see my point. I find that the only recourse for clarity and sanity is to begin the year (and indeed the decade) with a resolution to focus. Not in the exclusionary sense where the act of choosing makes the final picture smaller, but rather in a way that creates a richer experience by briging together well examined ingredients. In the future rather than choosing from the above to the exclusion of the rest, I will examine the places where they overlap (the more I think of it that’s where the really interesting things are going on).

Happy New Year

For instance, what should we to think about the introduction of a plethora of new smart phones able to find me a hat shop in Zaire while simple seeming applications for my PC seem to perform better in the box they came in than installed in the box they were designed for.

I recently saw a version of a presentation called Did You Know? in which the writers illustrate the exponential growth in data generation and assimilation, past, present, and future.

Information on the web was once only available through either commercial portals like CompuServe and America Online – who managed access and organized data into safe, predictable flavors – or bulletin boards.

As the ability to create web pages and independent content exploded, Google had to be invented to make some sense out of the growing Information Cloud.Now the data explosion has turned the cloud into the London fog.

The fog of data as represented by the growth of the Google index (an estimated 25.32 billion pages as of this writing) has reached, in my opinion, the point at which the index requires an index.

Rather than Google 2.0 the environment has created Blogs with their beginning as ego/social soapboxes, blogs were seen as fringe distractions, however it has become more and more apparent that bloggers are becoming the new ‘index’.

Because bloggers are people writing about what they are interested in and good bloggers are interested in a wide variety of things that they can effectively communicate they attract an audience of the like-minded.

When you want to know the date of something or ‘how high is up’, go to Google. If you want to know about cooking, go to Emeril’s blog.

On the radio, I heard a woman talking about the maximum amount of bytes individuals able to consume in their lifetimes, and the importance of choosing the right bytes rather than attempting to consume all bytes. People we trust help us index what is relevant and useful, much like the daily newspaper we followed in the past.

The print news may be dying, but the voice of the trusted correspondent is alive and well and living in a blog near you. People give meaning to data, not the other way around, and in the exchange of meaning we create value.

Without this communal index we are lost in the fog.

While I have always loved the whole subject of food and cooking I have discovered a fresh point of view in Pollan’s work. I have been chastened, educated, and inspired all at the same time. More than ever I am convinced that how we eat what we eat and where it comes from is as important as what we eat and how much we eat.

Raising 3 children really puts a sharp focus on what passes for food these days. Having the good luck to be raised with an appreciation for real food myself, I am appalled by the kinds of things we eat on regular basis. We actually have convinced our selves that “food” should last on a supermarket shelf indefinitely, and that indefinite food can still be good for us. Couple that with a general break down of the definition of cooking which has become heating, or just as likely re-heating, and its no wonder we have so many hangups and angst about food and diet.

There are a great many things we can and should do to regain our dietary footing (the effort could be the driver that serves to save the planet) and while the long list can be daunting I would suggest an easy starting point – grow some food. In the back yard, on the front stoop, a window box or a plant hanger. I guarantee you that the tomato or parsley or chives will be the best you’ve ever had.

Eat your view – KRAS