Q: How many Soul Strutters does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: 103. One to bitch about the cost of shipping the new bulb, one to shout "No homo" while screwing in the bulb, one to call out the lightbulb's whiteness, and 100 lurkers to hurriedly scribble down "screwing in a lightbulb" on their wants list.[/b]
i work with teens trying to get them to think about their diets. i dont expect any immediate results. we just discuss food, cook food (meat too) put it in social.political,economic context and try to develop appreciation for thousands of years of human food culture. down the line, diets will improve.
food is the key to changing the world for better or worse
Yes.
How does this work - do you work at one school or go from school to school?
groundnut stew with a history class...looks whack, tasted good
Q: How many Soul Strutters does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: 103. One to bitch about the cost of shipping the new bulb, one to shout "No homo" while screwing in the bulb, one to call out the lightbulb's whiteness, and 100 lurkers to hurriedly scribble down "screwing in a lightbulb" on their wants list.[/b]
But here's the misconception I have been railing against throughout this thread. The conception of any type of farming other than organic is hostile corporate farming. The posts in this thread prove just that. As soon as I questioned organic farming, people trotted out the old corporate boogieman and it became corporate farming vs. the organic ethos. I didn't see any mention of responsible family farms as a reasonable alternative. People are now conflating corporate farming with responsible family farms that don't practice the organic philosophy. I'm revealing the source of my bias by stating that I come from a family of farmers: My great-great grandparents down to my grandparents were farmers. My mother was raised by farmers. Some of my extended family still maintain farms. I hate to see them get lumped in with irresponsible corporations because they are far, far, far from it. They are not cruel to their livestock and they do not fuck up the ecosystem. There are countless farms similar to my family's.
Your right. There's a gang of responsible farmer who dont choose the be "Labelled" or join the USDA's code.They'd prefer to maintain their own responsible practices. That's cool w/ me.
But here's the misconception I have been railing against throughout this thread. The conception of any type of farming other than organic is hostile corporate farming. The posts in this thread prove just that. As soon as I questioned organic farming, people trotted out the old corporate boogieman and it became corporate farming vs. the organic ethos. I didn't see any mention of responsible family farms as a reasonable alternative. People are now conflating corporate farming with responsible family farms that don't practice the organic philosophy. I'm revealing the source of my bias by stating that I come from a family of farmers: My great-great grandparents down to my grandparents were farmers. My mother was raised by farmers. Some of my extended family still maintain farms. I hate to see them get lumped in with irresponsible corporations because they are far, far, far from it. They are not cruel to their livestock and they do not fuck up the ecosystem. There are countless farms similar to my family's.
Your right. There's a gang of responsible farmer who dont choose the be "Labelled" or join the USDA's code.They'd prefer to maintain their own responsible practices. That's cool w/ me.
right. the advantage of local is you can ask the farmers yourself, meet them, check their farm out if you need to. a lot of farmers in philly label their stuff "chem free" or even "low spray". organic certification is tough to get, financially and process...our school garden is organic, but its a half acre, so we are not about to certify it.
bassie.theres a lot of money for nutrition programs right now. most philly public schools have subcontractors providing nutrition ed. Most just drop off packets of worksheets for teachers to do with their classes. my org does that to some extent, but i have been able to avoid that route. so i stay in one school, where we haev been for over 8 years in different capacities (ive been there 4). i partner with teachers of all subjects...doing inclass lessons and then bringing the classes to my room to cook. i used to have my own class, "food and culture" with an english teacher.we have student run fruit and smoothie stands. and afterschool i have paid youthworkers who i train to teach cooking lessons in the community.we also have youthworkers who cultivate the garden and run farmers markets and a construction crew that builds shit for both programs. lot of other shit, but thats the basics.
i'll try to get you that recipe later on. basically tomato, peanutbutter, some kind of hot pepper, a couple veggies (like okra or plantains), cilantro. can be eaten like a stew or served on top of a grain. pretty damn good. we usually do much more accessible/familiar stuff, but once in a while, especially with history classes, we get into some stuff.
bassie.theres a lot of money for nutrition programs right now. most philly public schools have subcontractors providing nutrition ed. Most just drop off packets of worksheets for teachers to do with their classes. my org does that to some extent, but i have been able to avoid that route. so i stay in one school, where we haev been for over 8 years in different capacities (ive been there 4). i partner with teachers of all subjects...doing inclass lessons and then bringing the classes to my room to cook. i used to have my own class, "food and culture" with an english teacher.we have student run fruit and smoothie stands. and afterschool i have paid youthworkers who i train to teach cooking lessons in the community.we also have youthworkers who cultivate the garden and run farmers markets and a construction crew that builds shit for both programs. lot of other shit, but thats the basics.
that sounds amazing...and comprehensive. it's great that it covers more ground than just 'healthy cooking'.
i'll try to get you that recipe later on. basically tomato, peanutbutter, some kind of hot pepper[/b], a couple veggies (like okra[/b] or plantains), cilantro[/b]. can be eaten like a stew or served on top of a grain. pretty damn good. we usually do much more accessible/familiar stuff, but once in a while, especially with history classes, we get into some stuff.
this also sounds amazing - already three of my favourite ingredients are in there! thanks.
As far as Odub's question about the importance of class in the choice to be vegan (and ability to maintain the diet), it is an important issue. Undoubtedly, the resources and information people have readily available to them greatly impact the choices they make. Moreover, people don't know what they don't know. If I believed that continuing to eat animal-derived products was an absolute necessity for my survival and had no reason to believe otherwise I'd view animal consumption/exploitation as something perhaps lamentable but a requirement to live.
Provided access to appliances, however, I've found being vegan to be more expensive only if a person eats primarily the prepackaged "meat and dairy substitute" products. In general, vegan staple foods tend to be among the cheapest items in the grocery store. Think about the cost of a box of semolina pasta and a can of beans, a loaf of bread, etc. This is likely to be even more pronounced in short order. It's projected that the increased reliance on/popularity of ethanol as a fuel source is going to have the ripple effect of making a lot of grocery items more expensive because corn is a primary foodsource for bred captive animals. The greater demand on the crop for fueling imposes a scarcity. Now, one of the ironies of this is that if there were less of a demand for animal derived products, the increased demand for corn as part of an alternative fuel source wouldn't so greatly inflate the costs of those items.
As far as organic vs "standard" produce goes, I rarely go out of my way to buy organic items at the grocery store. When I became vegan, it was definitely for ethical reasons and it was important for me to be able to illustrate to other people that being vegan can be a financially viable way to live. I've had the good fortune of meeting a lot of great people whose financial and living situations were far more tenuous than my own but who remain vegan. I've also met a lot of people who were gung ho until they decided that they really liked this pair of leather kicks. Someone kinda alluded to ethical vegans who hold shaky politics-- and there is no shortage of such folks, but at the same time I think its important to take a step back and ask those people questions about what may appear to be their inconsistancies. Numerous things we have to do to simply live in this industrialized society have implications of nonhuman and hunman animal abuse/exploitation, negative environmental impacts, etc. So being vegan, at best, seems an effort to greatly reduce these negative impacts. It's not possible for one person to really eliminate them totally. People who care often have to make a personal appraisal of what is the best or a morally reasonable choice out of a set of suboptimal choises. So wearing leather shoes doesn't necessarily mean someone's faking the funk. There's a pair of leather boots that I've had for a bit over 10 years now that I use for working, yardwork, etc. I don't go out of my way to make them look nice so as not to advertise. But I also have shoes that are synthetic, but could be mistaken for being leather. I have to weigh the pros and cons of these things.
Being vegan certainly isn't the magic bullet that will solve any and every problem that exists and I hate to hear vegans make specious, natural order, "we weren't meant to . . ." claims as much as (if not more than) I hate to hear omnivores make them. I routinely hear people from both camps make these sort of quasi-religious arguments they can't substantiate and fall victim to "natural fallacies" left and right
. . . Which brings me (back) to the organic discussion: The crux of intelligent arguments in favor of organic and opposed to genetically modified foods isn't so much that there will be immediately appreciable adverse health effects for eating these things, but that on a global scale, the sorts of argricultural technologies being employed are (1) unsustainable as pertains to human and nonhuman animal life and (2) these technologies are "altering"-- a better word is impacting-- the biome in ways that could prove catastropic. Examples would be Monsanto's terminator seeds spreading beyond target areas and overtaking non-engineered plantlife or the changing of the DNA of certain types of fish resulting in their unexpected proliferation. Certainly, dramatic and catastrophic environmental changes can be induced without genetic experimentation as well. And the point was brought up that a lot of times people rant and rave in favor of organic products not recognizing that they are being market by the same companies they're opposing-- This is defintely true and instead of presenting an outright defeater to the organic argument, it suggests that people need to tackle the problems of "greenwashing" and reducing organic to a sort of niche market/issue.
As far as Odub's question about the importance of class in the choice to be vegan (and ability to maintain the diet), it is an important issue. Undoubtedly, the resources and information people have readily available to them greatly impact the choices they make. Moreover, people don't know what they don't know. If I believed that continuing to eat animal-derived products was an absolute necessity for my survival and had no reason to believe otherwise I'd view animal consumption/exploitation as something perhaps lamentable but a requirement to live.
Provided access to appliances, however, I've found being vegan to be more expensive only if a person eats primarily the prepackaged "meat and dairy substitute" products. In general, vegan staple foods tend to be among the cheapest items in the grocery store. Think about the cost of a box of semolina pasta and a can of beans, a loaf of bread, etc. This is likely to be even more pronounced in short order. It's projected that the increased reliance on/popularity of ethanol as a fuel source is going to have the ripple effect of making a lot of grocery items more expensive because corn is a primary foodsource for bred captive animals. The greater demand on the crop for fueling imposes a scarcity. Now, one of the ironies of this is that if there were less of a demand for animal derived products, the increased demand for corn as part of an alternative fuel source wouldn't so greatly inflate the costs of those items.
As far as organic vs "standard" produce goes, I rarely go out of my way to buy organic items at the grocery store. When I became vegan, it was definitely for ethical reasons and it was important for me to be able to illustrate to other people that being vegan can be a financially viable way to live. I've had the good fortune of meeting a lot of great people whose financial and living situations were far more tenuous than my own but who remain vegan. I've also met a lot of people who were gung ho until they decided that they really liked this pair of leather kicks. Someone kinda alluded to ethical vegans who hold shaky politics-- and there is no shortage of such folks, but at the same time I think its important to take a step back and ask those people questions about what may appear to be their inconsistancies. Numerous things we have to do to simply live in this industrialized society have implications of nonhuman and hunman animal abuse/exploitation, negative environmental impacts, etc. So being vegan, at best, seems an effort to greatly reduce these negative impacts. It's not possible for one person to really eliminate them totally. People who care often have to make a personal appraisal of what is the best or a morally reasonable choice out of a set of suboptimal choises. So wearing leather shoes doesn't necessarily mean someone's faking the funk. There's a pair of leather boots that I've had for a bit over 10 years now that I use for working, yardwork, etc. I don't go out of my way to make them look nice so as not to advertise. But I also have shoes that are synthetic, but could be mistaken for being leather. I have to weigh the pros and cons of these things.
Being vegan certainly isn't the magic bullet that will solve any and every problem that exists and I hate to hear vegans make specious, natural order, "we weren't meant to . . ." claims as much as (if not more than) I hate to hear omnivores make them. I routinely hear people from both camps make these sort of quasi-religious arguments they can't substantiate and fall victim to "natural fallacies" left and right
. . . Which brings me (back) to the organic discussion: The crux of intelligent arguments in favor of organic and opposed to genetically modified foods isn't so much that there will be immediately appreciable adverse health effects for eating these things, but that on a global scale, the sorts of argricultural technologies being employed are (1) unsustainable as pertains to human and nonhuman animal life and (2) these technologies are "altering"-- a better word is impacting-- the biome in ways that could prove catastropic. Examples would be Monsanto's terminator seeds spreading beyond target areas and overtaking non-engineered plantlife or the changing of the DNA of certain types of fish resulting in their unexpected proliferation. Certainly, dramatic and catastrophic environmental changes can be induced without genetic experimentation as well. And the point was brought up that a lot of times people rant and rave in favor of organic products not recognizing that they are being market by the same companies they're opposing-- This is defintely true and instead of presenting an outright defeater to the organic argument, it suggests that people need to tackle the problems of "greenwashing" and reducing organic to a sort of niche market/issue.
Comments
One: But it will take a few days because he'll have to post a 'how to' question on the internet and then have a multi hour discussion on the topic.
You guys are killing me.
Yes.
How does this work - do you work at one school or go from school to school?
Recipe please.
Your right. There's a gang of responsible farmer who dont choose the be "Labelled" or join the USDA's code.They'd prefer to maintain their own responsible practices. That's cool w/ me.
right. the advantage of local is you can ask the farmers yourself, meet them, check their farm out if you need to. a lot of farmers in philly label their stuff "chem free" or even "low spray". organic certification is tough to get, financially and process...our school garden is organic, but its a half acre, so we are not about to certify it.
bassie.theres a lot of money for nutrition programs right now. most philly public schools have subcontractors providing nutrition ed. Most just drop off packets of worksheets for teachers to do with their classes. my org does that to some extent, but i have been able to avoid that route. so i stay in one school, where we haev been for over 8 years in different capacities (ive been there 4). i partner with teachers of all subjects...doing inclass lessons and then bringing the classes to my room to cook. i used to have my own class, "food and culture" with an english teacher.we have student run fruit and smoothie stands. and afterschool i have paid youthworkers who i train to teach cooking lessons in the community.we also have youthworkers who cultivate the garden and run farmers markets and a construction crew that builds shit for both programs. lot of other shit, but thats the basics.
i'll try to get you that recipe later on. basically tomato, peanutbutter, some kind of hot pepper, a couple veggies (like okra or plantains), cilantro. can be eaten like a stew or served on top of a grain. pretty damn good. we usually do much more accessible/familiar stuff, but once in a while, especially with history classes, we get into some stuff.
that sounds amazing...and comprehensive. it's great that it covers more ground than just 'healthy cooking'.
this also sounds amazing - already three of my favourite ingredients are in there! thanks.
As far as Odub's question about the importance of class in the choice to be vegan (and ability to maintain the diet), it is an important issue. Undoubtedly, the resources and information people have readily available to them greatly impact the choices they make. Moreover, people don't know what they don't know. If I believed that continuing to eat animal-derived products was an absolute necessity for my survival and had no reason to believe otherwise I'd view animal consumption/exploitation as something perhaps lamentable but a requirement to live.
Provided access to appliances, however, I've found being vegan to be more expensive only if a person eats primarily the prepackaged "meat and dairy substitute" products. In general, vegan staple foods tend to be among the cheapest items in the grocery store. Think about the cost of a box of semolina pasta and a can of beans, a loaf of bread, etc. This is likely to be even more pronounced in short order. It's projected that the increased reliance on/popularity of ethanol as a fuel source is going to have the ripple effect of making a lot of grocery items more expensive because corn is a primary foodsource for bred captive animals. The greater demand on the crop for fueling imposes a scarcity. Now, one of the ironies of this is that if there were less of a demand for animal derived products, the increased demand for corn as part of an alternative fuel source wouldn't so greatly inflate the costs of those items.
As far as organic vs "standard" produce goes, I rarely go out of my way to buy organic items at the grocery store. When I became vegan, it was definitely for ethical reasons and it was important for me to be able to illustrate to other people that being vegan can be a financially viable way to live. I've had the good fortune of meeting a lot of great people whose financial and living situations were far more tenuous than my own but who remain vegan. I've also met a lot of people who were gung ho until they decided that they really liked this pair of leather kicks. Someone kinda alluded to ethical vegans who hold shaky politics-- and there is no shortage of such folks, but at the same time I think its important to take a step back and ask those people questions about what may appear to be their inconsistancies. Numerous things we have to do to simply live in this industrialized society have implications of nonhuman and hunman animal abuse/exploitation, negative environmental impacts, etc. So being vegan, at best, seems an effort to greatly reduce these negative impacts. It's not possible for one person to really eliminate them totally. People who care often have to make a personal appraisal of what is the best or a morally reasonable choice out of a set of suboptimal choises. So wearing leather shoes doesn't necessarily mean someone's faking the funk. There's a pair of leather boots that I've had for a bit over 10 years now that I use for working, yardwork, etc. I don't go out of my way to make them look nice so as not to advertise. But I also have shoes that are synthetic, but could be mistaken for being leather. I have to weigh the pros and cons of these things.
Being vegan certainly isn't the magic bullet that will solve any and every problem that exists and I hate to hear vegans make specious, natural order, "we weren't meant to . . ." claims as much as (if not more than) I hate to hear omnivores make them. I routinely hear people from both camps make these sort of quasi-religious arguments they can't substantiate and fall victim to "natural fallacies" left and right
. . . Which brings me (back) to the organic discussion: The crux of intelligent arguments in favor of organic and opposed to genetically modified foods isn't so much that there will be immediately appreciable adverse health effects for eating these things, but that on a global scale, the sorts of argricultural technologies being employed are (1) unsustainable as pertains to human and nonhuman animal life and (2) these technologies are "altering"-- a better word is impacting-- the biome in ways that could prove catastropic. Examples would be Monsanto's terminator seeds spreading beyond target areas and overtaking non-engineered plantlife or the changing of the DNA of certain types of fish resulting in their unexpected proliferation. Certainly, dramatic and catastrophic environmental changes can be induced without genetic experimentation as well. And the point was brought up that a lot of times people rant and rave in favor of organic products not recognizing that they are being market by the same companies they're opposing-- This is defintely true and instead of presenting an outright defeater to the organic argument, it suggests that people need to tackle the problems of "greenwashing" and reducing organic to a sort of niche market/issue.
Please elaborate.