but the things you do for love

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F’ing awesome surprise Cocorosie show at Deitch Projects
Beautiful night-walk in SoHo
Quality time with my favorite sister and her cute friends
Inspiring day at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition
Finally meeting my nine awesome student counselees
Sweet Indie-Folk show at Southpaw
Lovely Sunday rendezvous with my cool family

I was in New York last weekend for an advanced studies program I’m doing with the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. I had an incredible visit, and left the city feeling connected and healthy, inspired and energized. This is me we’re talking about, and anyone who knows me well would immediately ask: “Where did you eat? Did you go to Babycakes? Angelica’s? Counter?? What was your favorite meal?”

The truth is, aside from a lovely family brunch on Sunday, I ate corn flakes and hummus all weekend. No really, EVERY day. And the I ate them (separately, not together) in the worst way at the worst times - while running out the door, while talking on the phone, while standing on the street in the wee hours of morning. Now this is a bit extreme, I’ll grant you, particularly for a girl (a health counselor, mind you) who spends half of her life either oggling, shopping for, cooking, recommending or talking about food. But I’m telling you, it felt great. I felt great. Really.

Ok, before you read this as an endorsement for the Standing Corn Flakes and Hummus diet (I’ll make MILLIONS!), hear me out.

Usually eating delicious, healthy food is a big priority for me. I strategically plan my restaurant visits days in advance (so that I can be sure to hit up all my favorites while I’m in town), stock up at Whole Foods once I arrive and pack cute little tupperware plane food for my travels. I love healthy food, and New York is like hog’s (err…um….) heaven for me.

Not by design, but last weekend eating just didn’t get its usual attention. I was staying with my sister, who had very little food in her house, and I brought nothing with me save a box of organic corn flakes and soy milk I picked up at the market down the street. From sun up to long past sun down, from Friday to Sunday, I was out and on the run and about the town. The sun and the moon were shining, I heard amazing music, connected with kindred spirits and laughed hard and often. I felt very much alive and well, inspired and engaged - like anything could and should and would happen. It’s not that eating slipped my mind entirely - it just didn’t seem important.

As I reflected on the weekend (tummy rumbling) on my plane ride back to San Francisco, I realized that my experience had been a perfect reminder of something I teach my clients: that the sheer joy and excitement of daily life has the power to feed us so that food becomes secondary. An inspiring career, great relationships, adventure, music, travel, connection, fresh air, an intense yoga class, a good hike, a great read: these things feed us, but they don’t come on a plate. The more we engage joyfully and fully in the world, feeding our lives, the more secondary food becomes.

Now, of course, I’m back to delicious mountains of kale and tempeh, big fresh farmer’s market salads and crispy roasted yams. I mean, come on - life may be good, but a girl can’t survive on cornflakes and hummus alone.

I was looking around this morning for a reading to share at a friend’s wedding, just to see if anything would strike me. I rediscovered this Rilke poem, which I love. I don’t think it’s appropriate for my friend’s ceremony (maybe my own some day), but thought I would share it below.

LETTERS
By Rainer Maria Rilke

Marriage is in many ways a simplification of life, and it naturally combines the strengths and wills of two young people so that, together, they seem to reach farther into the future than they did before. Above all, marriage is a new task and a new seriousness, - a new demand on the strength and generosity of each partner, and a great new danger for both.

The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of their solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side by side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.

That is why this too must be the criterion for rejection or choice: whether you are willing to stand guard over someone else’s solitude, and whether you are able to set this same person at the gate of your own depths, which he learns of only through what steps forth, in holiday clothing, out of the great darkness.

Life is self-transformation, and human relationships, which are an extract of life, are the most changeable of all, they rise and fall from minute to minute, and lovers are those for whom no moment is like any another. People between whom nothing habitual ever takes place, nothing that has already existed, but just what is new, unexpected, unprecedented. There are such connections, which must be a very great, an almost unbearable happiness, but they can occur only between very rich beings, between those who have become, each for his own sake, rich, calm, and concentrated; only if two worlds are wide and deep and individual can they be combined….

…For the more we are, the richer everything we experience is. And those who want to have a deep love in their lives must collect and save for it, and gather honey.

Not that I’ve personally eaten anything that resembles those little bacteria infested hockey pucks since middle school*, but this recent CNN article about saturday’s recall of millions of pounds of E Coli contaminated beef, brought to my attention by a client and dear friend last night, only serves to fan the flame of my growing dis-ease over the increasingly frequent cases of large scale contamination of our “food” supply. I’m not just being paranoid, either: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that our food supply now sickens 76 million Americans every year, putting more than 300,000 of them in the hospital, and killing 5,000.

Spinach made the news not long ago, and this most recent recall of 21.7 MILLION POUNDS of contaminated beef by Topps Meat Co. is not the first or even the largest recall in recent history (In 2002, Pilgrim’s Pride recalled more than 27 million pounds of poultry, and Hudson Foods recalled 25 million pounds of ground beef in 1997.) According to Sanford Miller, senior fellow at the University of Maryland Center for Food, Nutrition, and Agriculture Policy: “The amazing thing is not that we have events such as the spinach problem but rather that we don’t have many more. Nevertheless, as the nature of the food supply changes to include more prepackaged minimally processed foods, many of the traditional techniques, such as cooking, we use to protect our food are lost. It has been estimated that 81 million food related illnesses occur in the U.S. each year, most of which are unreported.”

We may think that those little bags of pre-packaged, pre-washed salad are awfully convenient, but the farther away we get from our farmers and farmers markets, the bigger the risk. Whereas 50 years ago (or today if you eat locally) lettuce or spinach or hamburger purchased in a grocery store would have come from one or two sources, today centralized processing plants combine produce from hundreds of industrial farms from all over the world to fill the bag of spinach or form a beef patty. All of that spinach is being washed and beef being ground and mixed in one or two giant vats - essentially giving microbes from a single field or farm an opportunity to contaminate a vast amount of food. One beef patty could contain parts from hundreds of cows, one bag of spinach leaves from many different farms (and microbes from even more). Any one of these sources could be contaminated by some of the more than a billion tons of manure every year produced by industrial animal agriculture, manure that, besides being full of nasty microbes like E. coli (not to mention high concentrations of the pharmaceuticals animals must receive so they can tolerate the feedlot lifestyle), often ends up in places it shouldn’t be.

Wendell Berry once wrote that when we took animals off farms and put them onto feedlots, we had, in effect, taken an old solution — the one where crops feed animals and animals’ waste feeds crops — and neatly divided it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm, and a pollution problem on the feedlot. For a rather elegant discussion of this topic, you can check out Michael Pollen’s 2006 article in The New York Times Magazine, entitled “The Vegetable-Industrial Complex”.

In my opinion, one of the most frightening examples of food contamination related illness is not even included in this discussion. Dr. Michael Greger, Director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture at the Humane Society of the United States, cites several studies detailing that as much as 12 percent of all senile dementia or Alzheimer’s cases diagnosed in North America these days may actually be cases of CJD. CJD, or Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, is the brain-wasting human variant of Mad Cow’s Disease (BSE), which is transmitted when animals are fed other animals or animal parts, especially brains and spinal cords. I won’t get into the gory details, but a chronology summarizing Mad Cow incidents and regulations in the US and Canada can be found here.

Listen people, I’m not telling you not to eat meat (though most experts agree that animal protein should be considered more of a garnish than a main course), but for pete’s sake, know where your dinner comes from! Eat local, free-range, grass-fed and organic as much as possible. It’s not so much a matter of aesthetics at this point – it could actually save your life.

*Relax, I’m not referring to ALL meat as “disease infested hockey pucks”. Though it’s true that I haven’t loaded up my bun since the early 90’s, as a Holistic Health and Nutrition Counselor, I really believe that each of us has our own unique nutritional needs. My beef is more with industrial animal and vegetable agriculture, the shortsighted practices of which I firmly believe aren’t doing any of us any good. Because under industrial capitalism it’s easier (and more profitable) to find a technological fix than to address the root cause of a problem, we’re more likely to irradiate beef and vegetables to kill pathogens than to address the system and conditions which create (and will continue to create with increased frequency) the problems in the first place. My eyes were first opened to the vast social, environmental and health related challenges of the “Vegetable-Industrial Complex” back in 2002, when I had the privilege of hearing Dr. Vandana Shiva (and others) speak on the topic at an event surrounding the release of the (amazing) book: The Fatal Harvest Reader. I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in this topic. For a more positive spin on how one amazing man chose to move forward, check out the film The Real Dirt on Farmer John. Have a potluck! Invite some friends…

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listening to: Tommy Becker, The Decemberists
reading: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver