former bookstore owners on the streets

I wrote a post a few months ago lamenting the demise of 23rd Street books, which was evicted from its storefront for nonpayment of rent.  Well, it turns out the owner has been evicted from her apartment too, and is now living on the streets, sitting with one of those “will work for food” signs in front of her (vacant) former store.

There may be more to this story than meets the eye.  As bad as a business bankruptcy is, it seems hard to believe this educated person had no fallback to homelessness–relatives, friends, food stamps, selling her furniture, flipping burgers,whatever.  However, her personal tragedy illustrates what a wrong road we continue to travel as a country and as a culture.

First of all, a neighborhood bookstore should not go out of business.  Sure, we have Powell’s, but a small neighborhood store serves vital purposes, too, as I outlined in my previous blog.  We need more books for sale, not less, especially an outlet for small local presses.  Lots of authors gave readings at the store, and like Music Millenium it served as a community center, a reason for people to walk down to 23rd Ave and maybe go out for a snack afterwards.

Secondly, and more globally, despite our allegedly capitalist economic structure, our society does absolutely nothing to support small business owners and self employed people, be they artists, writers, tradespeople, or anyone else with an entrepreneurial, independent spirit and a skill/product to offer.  Health insurance comes through employers, and the bigger the corporate employer (or labor union) the better the policy.  Self-employed people cannot get unemployment benefits should their business go under.   The tax code is slanted against small business owners and the self employed, who pay a disproportionate amount of workmens comp taxes etc and receive less deductions.

If Portland can even consider spending sixty million dollars to support a millionaire’s dream of major league soccer, can’t they provide microloans for people running their own businesses? Sort of an industrialized world’s version of Heifer International’s buying Third World families a goat?  (come to think of it, they could provide loans for goats, too, and urban farms)?  Couldn’t they provide rent relief for businesses struggling to survive in a recessionary environment?  Big corporations certainly get their tax breaks and TARP funds. Can’t the government provide basic safety net benefits to EVERYONE, regardless of their employer?

Republicans and far too many Democrats protect the interests of big corporations.  Left-leaning Democrats think of the government as big mommy, saving us from our lower impulses, whether it be spending money we don’t have or eating too much fatty food.  Nobody rewards the self-reliant individual, when THESE ARE THE PEOPLE WHO BUILT THIS COUNTRY and continue to provide most of its energy and creativity.

wendy’s recipe file: wendy’s coleslaw

I wanted to pass on the website for Harriet Fasenfest’s “Preserve”, which I referenced in my post “Urban HOmesteader Before her Time” .  Harriet offers food preservation classes and her website offers a lot of interesting links relating to urban homesteading.

On that theme, I offer this recipe for coleslaw.  An amazing amount of people think coleslaw is a complicated production that must be bought at the deli counter.  Actually, if you’ve got a food processor, you can make it in five minutes for a lot less money, and generally speaking, a better taste.

WENDY’S COLESLAW

1 head green cabbage

3 carrots, peeled

one-half to one cup mayonnaise, to taste

2 T cider vinegar

1 T celery seed

salt and pepper to taste ( I like white pepper for this)

1)  Grate cabbage and carrots with appropriate attachment on the food processor (you can also grate them by hand but it’s a longer process)

2) Combine with mayonnaise, cider vinegar, and celery seed in a large bowl.  Add salt and pepper to taste.

wendy’s recipe file: middle eastern bread salad

Come warm weather, I’m a big fan of carb salads–potato salad is delicious, but there are so many more.  This bread salad is a middle eastern take off on the Italian panzanella salad.  While you can toast the pita breads you can also use leftover pitas that are past their prime.  I got this recipe from my friend Jan Heasley.

4 pita breads, torn into two inch pieces

2 cucumbers, peeled and diced

2 tomatoes, diced

two-thirds cup chick peas (canned and drained, or cooked from scratch)

one-half cup fresh lemon juice

one-half cup mint leaves, chopped

one-half cup cilantro, minced

one-half cup dill, minced

one-third cup extra virgin olive oil

one-half cup kalamata olives, pitted and halved

six romaine lettuce leaves, torn in thin shreds

3 scallions, diced

3 garlic cloves, minced

1 tsp salt

two-thirds cup plain yogurt (I reccomend the Greek variety)

1) Preheat oven to 400 F.  Place torn pita bread on baking sheet and bake until lightly toasted, about 5-10 minutes.  Transfer to large bowl and cool.

2) Mix all remaining ingredients together in a bowl then toss with bread.

3) Serve salad with a dollop of yogurt.

friends in strange places

Usually oped columns are as formulaic as a Hollywood blockbuster.  Either the writer agrees with my predetermined opinions or they do not.  If they agree with me then I can bask in their pleasant reassurances of my worldview.  If they disagree then I can count on them to raise my blood pressure and fill me up with righteous indignant energy.

That’s why David Brooks stands out.  While theoretically a “conservative” columnist, I can never predict what he might say on a given subject and how I might respond.  He’s actually thought-provoking.

Probably the main reason for this is that he covers topics generally ignored by a reactive and lazy press.  In the past month, he’s noted that Obama’s economic stimulus package does little to promote “new urbanism”–urban infill, multiuse buildings, proximity of workplace to home, etc. While I generally associate these concerns with the liberal end of the spectrum, most liberals have been jumping out of their skins with joy at the thought of some New Deal style government work program putting people to work building new bridges and superhighways.  Never mind that all the interstate highways and dams built in the last century, while they may have provided employment and fueled economic growth, have led to environmental disaster and social disruption.

Brooks also wrote a column where he discussed a study indicating that hard work usually trumps genius.   A person of average musical ability who practices piano diligently will probably play better than an unusually talented person who goofs off.  A person of decent verbal ability and good imagination who decides she wants to be a writer and writes every day and keeps sending off her articles or stories to magazines, will one day be a published writer.  Nothing magical about it.  As a person of average musical ability who practices piano diligently and a person of above average verbal ability and imagination who keeps sending off my creations to the larger universe, I take heart in this.

Today Brooks wrote about happiness, how as we all know, money or talent or looks doesn’t buy happiness and we don’t know exactly what does.  He acknowledges that there are mysteries of the human soul we still know nothing about.

These topics might support some traditionally liberal programs–universal music education or bike paths.  They also advocate individual responsibility, which somehow has become (at least theoretically) a cornerstone of conservatism. But Brooks does not propose or denigrate any specific policy initiatives in these columns.  He simply throws the issues out there, suggesting one can deal with them in a multitude of ways and still not fully  understand them.

Finding what works—isn’t that what the Obama administration is supposed to be about?

wendy’s recipe file: little league chicken zucchini bulgur casserole

I whipped up this casserole this afternoon while waiting to see if this afternoon’s Little League game would be cancelled (it wasn’t).  By the time we get home from games it’s 7:30 in the evening and the whole family is hungry, especially the Little League player. This took a half hour to make at most, was very healthy, and pleased everyone.  My older son popped it in the oven about fifteen minutes before we got home.  This can be a one-dish meal but goes nicely with a side dish of sliced cucumbers mixed with Greek yogurt, 1 T dill and a dash of sea salt.

1 lb. ground chicken (ground turkey would work too)

1 cup bulgur

6 small zucchini, sliced fairly thinly

one-half large onion or one small, diced

1 small jar marinated sun dried tomatoes

1 small jar artichoke hearts, drained

2 T olive oil

1 tsp marjoram

1 tsp dried basil or 3 T fresh, minced

1 tsp dried oregano

sea salt and black pepper to taste

1) Cook the bulgur in two and a half cups boiling water.  The bulgur will absorb all the water surprisingly fast; keep an eye on it.

2) Put olive oil in a large saucepan.  Saute onion until transparent.  Add ground chicken and zucchini; saute until meat is cooked through and zucchini is crisp tender.  Add spices, sun dried tomatoes and artichoke hearts.  Remove from heat and mix in bulgur.

3) Bake at 350 until heated through, approximately 15 minutes.

urban homesteader before her time

My apologies for having been away from my blog–life intervenes, and like going to the gym, once you get out of a habit it takes energy to overcome inertia and get back in the habit.  So, time to get back in the habit of blogging.

For the past month, I’ve had an article sitting on my desk about a woman named Harriet Fasenfest, who owns a business called Preserve in her Northeast Portland home, teaching classes in such topics as garden planning, canning, pickling, cheese making, and “ordering meat directly from farmers”. The recession has made all these old fashioned skills trendy. 

I’ve always been interested in these things.  I remember skipping down the halls of my junior high because my twelve week session of home ec class was about to begin, a rare pleasure point in a dismal day.  At the age of 11 we were expected to master such tasks as making a basic white sauce and sewing a machine-smocked apron.  When I got to high school, I asked my counselor about continuing in the advanced home ec program, which included such classes as gourmet cooking.  “Oh, no, that’s not for students like you!” she exclaimed (ie smart, college-bound). Home ec classes would soon disappear, a casualty first of the feminist movement and then of budget cuts.

When I met my future husband (at age 17) I told him about my very untrendy dream of having six children, cooking all the family’s food from scratch and sewing everyone’s clothes.  We’ve had four children and I do cook all our food from scratch; fortunately for them I do not sew their clothes(though I do knit and sew the occasional household item). Until now all this has earned in the outside world is curiosity.  What earns money and prestige (especially if you’re smart and college bound) is trafficking in abstractions.  A successful woman works ten hour days at her law firm so she can rush by the yuppie deli and buy dinner prepared by more lowly folks.  If I write about the vitamin A content of leafy greens–now that’s work–if I grow my own leafy greens and make them into a salad with homemade dressing–that’s an affectation to pursue in my leisure time.

I even found that stay-at-home moms got caught up in the same mentality, rushing about and processing their children through countless scheduled activities as if they headed up a family corporation, rather than staying at home and , God forbid, “homemaking”.  To chauffeur your child to cookie-baking class is a a valuable use of your time; to stay at home with that same child baking cookies is mindless drudgery.  When I lived on Long Island, I had to drive a half hour (to a less affluent area) to buy so much as a spool of thread.  When I mowed our postage stamp lawn with a power mower, people came up to me asking a) what it was and b) had my husband lost his job because we obviously couldn’t afford to hire a gardener.  Sometimes I entertained a fantasy:  if some apocalyptic collapse of industrial civilization happened, what would all these ladies with mile long nails, and their husbands, also with manicured hands, do?  When we moved to Portland we met far more like-minded people, but generally speaking, the culture of frenzy still prevailed.

No wonder our society completely lost touch with where their food and other goods (clothes, furniture, toys) come from as all these necessities of life appeared magically on a store shelf.  As I noted in a previous post, even the “resource economy” was dismissed as a thing of the past.  Now progressive people lived in the age of the “information economy”.  They went to college so they would never get their hands dirty.  Trouble is, we don’t eat computer chips. Plus all this abstracted frenzy rarely leads to the same primal satisfaction one gets from creating something tangible that is clearly linked to meeting basic needs.

 

Now a whole generation (or two) are going to learn this lesson the hard way and pickling home grown cucumbers is suddenly chic. Fasenfest makes a very incisive comment when she notes that we should think of ourselves not so much as consumers, but as producers.  I’ve always hated the word consumer, the way it reduces human beings to a greedy carnivorous maw, the way it defines us only by what we buy, what we use up and throw away. Sure, we all consume things, but all of us should produce things too.  The economic exchange should be one based on trade.

I still like making things. I still feel startlingly ignorant of most of the substances and devices I rely on each day.  I’d like to learn how to make more things, or at least understand how they work.  I must say, though, that if I wanted to order meat from a farmer I’d simply call up and do so, and I wish I trafficked enough in abstractions to be the first one to think that people would actually want to take a class about it.

ambiguity is all

My husband told me yesterday that I see things in shades of gray when most people see things in black and white.  Perhaps.  The Bush administration paraded around their lack of nuanced consideration with pride (“you’re with us or against us!”) and even now both liberals and conservatives express impatience with Obama’s relentless bipartisanship and compromise. I see the need for black and white very clearly in my nutrition work.  For instance, dairy is the enemy of our time.  Arthritic?  Cut out dairy.  Depressed? Cut out dairy.  Have a pimple on your left toenail?  Cut out dairy.  Maybe if no one ate dairy anymore we could finally achieve world peace and prosperity.

Granted, the majority of the world’s peoples can’t tolerate lactose (milk sugar) past childhood.  Granted, cow’s milk protein (casein) forms a hard curd not designed for human stomachs and can cause digestive difficulties.  Granted, lots of dairy products are high in saturated fat , cholesterol, and calories and the average American eats too many of them.

None of this makes the all inclusive category of “dairy” the root of all evil.

While whole cows milk is probably only beneficial to infants under two (and even they are way better off with breast milk) lots of fermented milk products have been eaten by humans for millenia and are highly nutritious and much easier to digest.  Yogurt, hard low fat cheeses like parmesan, goat cheeses and sheep cheeses like feta are good examples.  Higher fat fermented and aged cheeses like cheddar and blue are okay in moderation. These foods wouldn’t have become established in so many cultures around the world if they weren’t tolerated by the majority of people.  What isn’t good for you is a steady diet of mac and cheese, nachos and pizza, or nightly platters of cheese and crackers, or the processed glue that passes for “American cheese” (or “fat-free cheese” for that matter).

So if a doctor, naturopath or your next door neighbor suggests you cut out dairy, unless you are experiencing severe digestive problems, you would probably do just fine eating less dairy, and the right kinds.  But I’ve discovered most people don’t want to hear that kind of moderate, nuanced advice.  They prefer the deprivation of “cutting out dairy” and then putting their energy towards searching out complicated substitutes made with soy or rice and a ton of guar gum. 

Go figure.

It’s in the study of science that I first learned to appreciate endemic ambiguity.  What was I was taught in introductory courses as cold hard facts I learned in more advanced courses was mere speculation.  You can’t see the subatomic level where most biological reactions take place–you merely speculate.  And the presence of an observer inevitably changes the action of the observed.  At the quantum level, no one can precisely designate the location of any particular particle and any particular time.  What we take for scientific dogma is merely the best guesses of our fellow human beings at this particular point in history.

I could ignore those shades of gray out there and live in a fantasy of black and white but then I’d be lying to myself.  And–no ambiguity here–that’s just plain wrong.

economic disconnect

We’re all aware by now that Wall Street firms and major banks and insurance companies have been stealing the country blind trading in abstractions built on nothing.  People have finally realized the emperor has no clothes and the whole airy enterprise is collapsing like a loaf of Wonder Bread.  But what I don’t think is obvious enough yet is how divorced the “economy” has become from the tangible marketplace. I read the Wall Street Journal everyday and see terms like GDP or consumer confidence bandied about as if they were actual facts, like someone’s blood sugar level.  I mean what exactly is being “produced”?  Can all production be quantified?  Is continuous increasing production a sustainable enterprise?  What are consumers confident about?  You get the idea.

The tangible marketplace exists organically.  People need food, clothes, and shelter.  Their wants are pretty consistent, too:  entertainment, artistic pleasure, socialization.  They need education, child care, medical care, haircuts, plumbing repairs.  They need transportation, whether via private cars, planes, trains, busses, or bicycles.  The number of people in the world keeps increasing.  Surely there must be valuable work for everyone to do!  I’m not surprised to hear of unemployed mortgage brokers or advertising executives, but when I see teachers, nurses, and architects looking for work, something is askew with the system.  When I see my three talented and capable adult children, along with many of their talented and capable friends, unemployed or woefully underemployed something’s wrong with the system.  And then at the same time, classrooms overflow due to lack of teachers, patients go untreated due to lack of nurses…someone must making money here, but I bet they aren’t people providing actual goods and services.  The companies traded about on the stock exchange have little to do with the actual provision of these services. 

Frankly provision of actual services hasn’t been what’s valued in our society.  Even the profession of medicine, every Jewish mother’s dream, has been devalued in relationship to health maintenance organization administrators and insurers who can’t so much as take a blood pressure.  College professors, artists, plumbers, farmers, cooks, child care workers…everyone takes a back seat to people who trade in abstractions.  Now that those abstractions are collapsing,  it’s high time to connect economic exchange to tangible goods and services.  If the economy is built on sturdier pillars, it won’t be nearly as vulnerable to recessions, depressions, or implosions.

How to go about this is a long and very complicated process but breaking economic units down to smaller, more localized businesse would help.  It’s very hard to promote accountability in huge multinational corporations.  We may not need to get rid of the stock exchange, but we could certainly regulate its actions much more closely and not insist that companies meet Street-defined “expectations”, sacrifice long value for short term gains, or for that matter, continue to grow, like cancerous cells. We could let medical professionals run medical care (see Wendy’s healthcare plan).  We could promote small businesses (see Wendy’s bailout plan).  As a society we could value people who create real things and care for real people.  We could value beauty and craftsmanship over blind efficiency and planned obsolescence.   

It might be wise if we make those choices now, in a controlled manner, before this entire puffed up enterprise completely collapses.

wendy’s recipe file: red pepper beef goulash

Fans of my lamb stew with fennel:  this winter comfort food may be even better!  I developed this recipe (adapted from The New Basics Cookbook, by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins) while planning a meal to entertain some Romanian friends.   It’s Hungarian, but whatever.  Serve with pappardelle noodles.

RED PEPPER BEEF GOULASH

2 T p;ove po;

2 pounds boneless beef stew meat

1 large onion, chopped

1 orange and 1 yellow bell pepper, seeded and chopped

About 8 oz roasted red peppers (I used peppers that I roasted and froze last summer.  You can substitute a jar of roasted peppers, though it will not have the same rich taste)

2 cloves garlic, minced

2 T caraway seeds

2 T smoky paprika (don’t substitute cheap flavorless red powder for the real thing!)

2-3 cups beef broth (homemade or Imagine brand aseptic)

one-third cup tomato paste (again, I used tomato jam that I made during the summer.  To replicate, you could use good quality tomato paste with a dash of cinnamon, a dash of hot pepper, and a pinch of brown sugar)

one-third cup heavy cream

one-third cup sour cream (I like Nancy’s)

1) Heat the oil in a Dutch oven.  Brown the beef over medium high heat, in batches if necessary.  Using a slotted spoon, transfer the beef to a bowl and set aside.

2)  Add the onion, orange and yellow bell peppers, garlic, caraway, and paprika to the Dutch oven. Cook over low heat, stirring, until just tender (around 10 minutes)

3) Add the stock and tomato puree, deglazing the pan. Return the meat to the mixture. Cover and simmer until meat is fork-tender, around one and a half hours.  Season with salt and pepper if needed.  Add the roasted red peppers and cook, uncovered, another 10 minutes.  Meanwhile, combine heavy cream and sour cream in a small bowl.

4) Add creams to the goulash and serve.

danger to oneself and others

Well, we’ve had our own Columbine here in downtown Portland, and while there’s been lots of information about the promising young lives the shooter snuffed out or did irreperable damage to, there hasn’t been a whole lot of detail about him, save that he was a “student of concern” at his high school, had been “depressed and on medication” and was calm and provided proper documentation when buying his gun at a Tigard store.  And, as seems to be the case with most mass murderers, his neighbors didn’t know him very well and didn’t sense anything amiss.  He was “quiet”.  His former employers rated him highly although the woman in the neighboring cubicle found him “peculiar” and complained to no avail. 

No one accepts blame yet so many deserve it.

I can’t blame the owner of the gun shop–who, to his credit, admits feeling guilt–but I do blame the laws under which he operates. Gun ownership is legal in this country.  I admit the eight years of the Bush administration have weakened my opposition to the Second Amendment.  Should Cheney et al have staged a military coup, I would have regretted not owning a gun.  I couldn’t get it out of my mind that in prewar Germany Jews, unlike their Christian countrymen, did not own guns. Nevertheless, some degree of restriction is necessary for public safety.  To drive a car, a device with the capacity to be a lethal weapon, you need to take lessons, prove your capability to drive, have your vision tested, renew the license periodically with further testing, and present twenty zillion kinds of ID.  Surely to buying a gun, whose sole purpose is as a lethal weapon, should require a comparable degree of proof of responsibility? Not in this country.

Some say that these restrictions could be readily evaded by criminals, as evidenced by the saying “if guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns”.  That’s probably true.  I’m sure the Mafia would still manage to get the weapons they needed.  Drug dealers shouldn’t have any more trouble obtaining illegal weapons than they do illegal substances.  But it would be a lot harder for psychopaths to buy guns, and they’re a lot more likely to kill innocent people.

In Oregon–and this is a recent development–gun buyers are required to prove they haven’t been convicted of a felony or committed to a mental institution.  They don’t need to reveal whether they’ve ever been treated for mental illness.  That’s protected by “privacy laws”.  While privacy laws were enacted in response to legitimate abuse, and while a history of mental illness is irrelevant for many purposes–bank loans and most employment, to name a couple–it is relevant to the purchase of a gun. 

And as for the committment to a mental institution, business, forget it.  As anyone whose had contact with what passes for our mental health system knows, you can’t even commit yourself voluntarily to a mental ward unless you are a “danger to oneself and others”.  It doesn’t matter if you, or someone you love, are standing there in the emergency room babbling that God is telling you to murder the infidels.  You’ve got to literally shove that knife up to somebody’s throat.

I don’t know what the problem is.  I don’t know if health personnel are more afraid of legal liability than mad gunmen, or whether it runs even deeper than that and they are terrified of the personal risk and accountability they incur when they reach beyond the letter of the law and accept responsibility for another human being.  We are very protective, as Americans, of the right of people to destroy themselves.  That’s why troubled people are not enclosed within a circle of protection, why they are set adrift to live in anonymous apartments and play video games and work temp jobs and be “quiet”–until they’re not.  When people destroy themselves, they all too often take innocent others along with them.

I realize there is no specific person to blame. Our fascination with firearms is to blame.  Our atomized society is to blame.  Our reliance on law and regulation as a substitute for responsibility to the human community is to blame. All the people who encountered the troubled Erik Ayala and passed the buck can now breathe a sigh of relief that they are free of legal liability.  He’s proved beyond a doubt that he’s a danger to himself and others.   Too bad that he and the others are dead.