Today's Ramblings

Ready for my ramblings today? Well...here they are (just as disconnected as always)...

1. Bulgaria celebrates International Women's Day on March 8. On this day, every woman is treated like a queen and pampered.

2. This is interesting because feminism, the way we think of it in the States, does not really exist in Bulgaria (according to a Bulgarian friend I had a conversation with about this yesterday). He was telling me how the US is obsessed with talking about feminism but he doesn't feel that we are ready for a female president because of the way we view women. I told him that I thought the idea of an African-American president was more radical, but that is neither here nor there. Anyway, in our conversation, I said something about how feminists were always trying to prove to the world blah blah blah. He quickly pointed out to me that I had made the very common American mistake of referring to the United States as the world. He was quick to point out that things that were non-issues in his world, like feminism, couldn't be generalized by me to be important to the entire world.

3. Found some cool fashion: oversized zippers. I hope this come to the US but I am decidedly not hip enough to rock one. Still, they are really, really cool.

4. Met Bulgarian Joe Pesci. Looked and sounded exactly like him--except, you know, he spoke Bulgarian.

5. Delicious lunch today with the Provost and Dean of Students. It is so odd to go from being a big deal, super involved, orientation intern engaged to a RA student to a visitor not really involved in anything or consulted about the inner-workings of the school. Anyway. Lunch was great and we got to talk about the fun adventures we've had so far in the BG (including our madcap hijinks to get visas).

6. Yesterday, in one day and two sittings, read The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. Awesome and very thought-provoking book. Go read it. Be prepared for his discussions of evolution that make it seem like plants can think however. It is a major pet peeve of mine when people discuss evolution in incorrect ways, but if you can get over that then what he has to say is very interesting. He writes a scathing critique of the industrial food we eat every day in the United States. He critiques the industrial organic industry and really challenges us to eat locally and stop screwing around with natural processes. It inspired me to pledge that I will only eat local dairy and eggs from humane, natural-process farms from now on. I hope that if you read it then you will feel the same. What's great about the book is that he doesn't suggest we can the categories of food we eat (meat-eating is still a-okay), but rather change the way we think about the processes our food goes through. He discusses how much of our nation's oil consumption (one-fifth) is based on factory-farming and in my favorite section he talks about the dehumanization of factory-farm employees because they are asked to slaughter 400 animals an hour, 8 hours a day. One of the local farmers he interviews makes the excellent point that Old Testament laws about priests drawing lots for slaughter duty was that no person should do that repeatedly, for their own emotional, mental and spiritual well-being. Anyway, I'd love to chat with you about the book or you can read it. To whet your appetite, here are a few of my favorite quotes:

On the problems of industrial organics (like Whole Foods):
"Yet the organic label itself--like every other such label in the supermarket--is really just an imperfect substitute for direct observation of how a food is produced, a concession to the reality that most people in an industrial society haven't the time or the inclination to follow their food back to the farm, a farm which today is apt to be, on average, fifteen hundred miles away." page 137

On the connection between factory farming and global warming:
"If the 16 million acres now being used to grow corn to feed cows in the United States became well-managed pasture, that would remove 14 billion pounds of carbon from the atmosphere each year--the equivalent of taking 4 million cars off the road." page 198

Here, I should note that well-managed pasture still yields lots of meat. Granted, not as much as we have now, but still enough the Americans would be able to eat far more than the global average of meat (like we do now). The well-managed pasture simply means that animals would get to live outside and we wouldn't be decimating our land through monoculture of corn.

I should also add that the book is not dry, but very engaging. He writes the stories of four meals as a personal narrative. Facts and figures are simply sprinkled in.

Do I think this book is the end-all, be-all on food production and consumption in the US? No, but it is very thought-provoking, so read it and let me know what you think.