Saturday, November 2, 2013
Jane Jacobs
[ed. I've been thinking about Jane Jacobs today. The problems she identified re: urban planning aren't exclusive to big cities. Small towns suffer from a lack of cultural, economic, generational, and transportation diversity too. Finding just the right mix is the key to creating vibrant and sustainable communities.]
Born in 1916 and raised in the coal-mining town of Scranton, Pennsylvania, Jacobs moved to New York in the mid-1930s and soon found her way to Greenwich Village. Untrained as a city planner, she rose to prominence in New York politics through her work as a neighborhood organizer, most famously opposing über-planner Robert Moses, who wanted to run a ten-lane expressway through lower Manhattan, a travesty of a project which, had it been built, would have leveled great swaths of Little Italy and Soho.
Moses, the Machiavellian central figure of Robert Caro’s biography The Power Broker, earns only passing mentions in The Death and Life and The Economy of Cities, but the books are in many ways an extended polemic against Moses and his vision for a 20th century New York. Moses and like-minded architects such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier sought to clear cities of squalor by replacing tenement slums with vast housing complexes surrounded by parkland and ribbons of highway. In practice, this meant razing entire neighborhoods and stuffing thousands of poor people into high-rise “projects” that soon devolved into crime-ridden towers of drug addiction and despair.
Jacobs’ first great insight was to see cities not as machines for living, but instead as living, breathing organisms. Future planners, she says in The Death and Life, must “think of cities as problems in organized complexity – organisms that are replete with unexamined, but obviously intricately interconnected, and surely understandable, relationships.” But if a city is a living thing, then it can die, and Jacobs’ second great insight was that cities are a self-propagating species. To dump money indiscriminately on a city from outside, in her view, is like sticking a feeding tube down a patient’s throat: it might keep the patient from dying, but it’s not likely to help him get out of bed. The best way to grow a city’s economy is clear away the impediments, architectural, governmental, and economic, that stand in the way of individuals working together to make things for themselves.
Jacobs begins her study of how cities function at the atomic level of a single block, using her own stretch of Hudson Street as her test tube. With a sharp eye and great good sense, she describes how a successful block attracts a diverse set of users, not just residents, but local shopkeepers and visitors from other areas of the city who, without really being aware they are doing so, look out for one another. When it works, she writes, a successful block is the setting for:
an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of a good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.Jacobs builds upon this image of a “sidewalk ballet” to tackle the knotty problem of how to create a city full of successful blocks. Streets should be short, with wide sidewalks, a good mix of old and new buildings, and a broad range of businesses likely to attract a true diversity of residents and business owners.
by Michael Bourne, The Millions | Read more:
American Beauty
Stranger in a Strange Land
The star you won't see associated with the film in any meaningful way is the book's author. Card, one of the modern-day giants of science fiction, has been invisible in the marketing lead-up to the film's release. This is both profoundly sad and completely understandable: Card has been an outspoken opponent of gay rights for many years, arguing vociferously against same-sex marriage and serving until recently on the board of the National Organization for Marriage.
In 2013, a person neither can nor should expect previous statements such as "laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books" to be overlooked without consequence. And there have been consequences. DC Comics put Card's Adventures of Superman anthology contribution on hold after fierce public reaction led the comic's artist to drop out of the project; the LGBT group Geeks OUT is organizing "Skip Ender's Game" protests; those associated with the movie, from Ford to director Gavin Hood to Lionsgate, have done the requisite dance, distancing themselves from Card's homophobic views while arguing that the author's bigotry should not detract from the movie's themes of inclusiveness and tolerance.
The movie's themes of inclusiveness and tolerance stem from the book's themes of inclusiveness and tolerance, which is what makes this entire episode so depressing. The book became an instant classic upon its release in 1985, winning both the Hugo and Nebula awards, science fiction's two highest honors. It also quickly won over millions of readers.
Including me. (...)
We all feel alienated at some point, but the book's message resonates even deeper with those who really stick out from the crowd. The empathy extends to the reader. There are no gay characters, but that is presumably because most of the characters are prepubescent children. (Ender is essentially asexual.) But there are girls at Battle School who play important roles; there are characters who are dismissed by other kids because they're too short; there are Jewish kids who get mocked for the size of their noses.
I am neither gay, nor a girl, nor short. I am, however, a Muslim who grew up in Kansas in the 1980s, and I struggle to think of a more perfect recipe for creating a sense of isolation in an American teenager. I literally did not know another practicing Muslim family in Wichita at the time. My best friend who recommended Ender's Game lived in Appleton, Wisconsin. I saw him once or twice a year, but because his dad and my dad emigrated from the Old Country together, I had more in common with him than with my next-door neighbor.
It was in the context of trying to find my place in the world, of struggling to reconcile my faith with my country when I had no role models to show me the way, that I encountered the following passage about Ender and his Battle School classmate Alai. It stopped me cold:
"I don't want to go," he said.
Alai hugged him back. "I understand them, Ender. You are the best of us. Maybe they're in a hurry to teach you everything."
"They don't want to teach me everything," Ender said. "I wanted to learn what it was like to have a friend."
Alai nodded soberly. "Always my friend, always the best of my friends," he said. Then he grinned. "Go slice up the buggers."
"Yeah." Ender smiled back. Alai suddenly kissed Ender on the cheek and whispered in his ear, "Salaam." Then, red-faced, he turned away and walked to his own bed at the back of the barracks. Ender guessed that the kiss and the word were somehow forbidden. A suppressed religion, perhaps. Or maybe the word had some private and powerful meaning for Alai alone. Whatever it meant to Alai, Ender knew that it was sacred; that he had uncovered himself for Ender, as once Ender's mother had done, when he was very young, before they put the monitor in his neck, and she had put her hands on his head when she thought he was asleep, and prayed over him. Ender had never spoken of that to anyone, not even to Mother, but had kept it as a memory of holiness, of how his mother loved him when she thought that no one, not even he, could see or hear. That was what Alai had given him; a gift so sacred that even Ender could not be allowed to understand what it meant.If you don't see the importance of this passage, I envy you. Alai is clearly a Muslim, and in the 1980s, Muslims were portrayed in American popular culture as one of three categories, if they were portrayed at all: crazy ayatollahs, greasy lecherous oil sheikhs, or bomb-wielding hijackers. Ender's Game was literally the first time I had encountered a positive portrayal of a Muslim character in American fiction. It floored me. I finally saw a positive image of myself in print, and it came not from a fellow Muslim but from a wildly popular Christian author who could trace his American lineage for generations.
I learned that I had more in common with Card than I had thought. Card is a Mormon; that lineage of his traces back to Brigham Young himself. Card and I were both devout believers in religions that were shrouded in stereotypes and inaccuracies. As white guys we were members of the racial majority, but we were also part of the religious minority, giving us the weird and vaguely uncomfortable ability to define ourselves depending on the needs of the moment.
Card's community had a far greater toehold in America, of course. Mormonism is an American religion at its fundamental core, while Islam was beaten out of the African slaves who practiced it centuries ago and wasn't revived in the African American community until the 20th century. Only after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 did America's shores open to immigrants from the Muslim world. There were no writers from the Muslim world to whom I could turn in the 1980s, no Khaled Hosseinis or Reza Aslans who had mastered the rhetoric of American culture and could present the Muslim community to their countrymen in a native tongue.
As far as I was concerned, Card was carrying the torch that my own community was too young and inexperienced to hold. And as a Mormon, he was no doubt familiar with receiving prejudice from fellow Americans who held bigoted and misinformed views on his faith. Certainly this was someone who appreciated the value of tolerance, of trying to understand other views even when you don't agree with them.
by Rany Jazayerli, Grantland | Read more:
Image: AP Photo/Summit Entertainment
Card's community had a far greater toehold in America, of course. Mormonism is an American religion at its fundamental core, while Islam was beaten out of the African slaves who practiced it centuries ago and wasn't revived in the African American community until the 20th century. Only after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 did America's shores open to immigrants from the Muslim world. There were no writers from the Muslim world to whom I could turn in the 1980s, no Khaled Hosseinis or Reza Aslans who had mastered the rhetoric of American culture and could present the Muslim community to their countrymen in a native tongue.
As far as I was concerned, Card was carrying the torch that my own community was too young and inexperienced to hold. And as a Mormon, he was no doubt familiar with receiving prejudice from fellow Americans who held bigoted and misinformed views on his faith. Certainly this was someone who appreciated the value of tolerance, of trying to understand other views even when you don't agree with them.
by Rany Jazayerli, Grantland | Read more:
Image: AP Photo/Summit Entertainment
Stripping on the Side
Whereas other clubs I’d worked in would hire girls of all sizes and descriptions, the girls who worked as Flashdancers had a certain look. Everyone was tan with long hair, long nails and drag-queen makeup. Most girls were tall, with big tits and small waists. No imperfections—no scars, no stretch marks, no body fat. With a little work, I fit the bill. Without it, I was a normal-looking girl with a normal woman’s body. Good enough, I remember thinking often, but not good enough for Flash.
The girls who worked at Flash were professionals. I was competing with women five inches taller than I was. Ten pounds lighter. Girls with advanced degrees. Girls from places where people only dreamt of making the kind of money a girl could make at Flash. At Flash, a girl could make as much as a thousand dollars a night. After our house fee and the requisite tipping—d.j., floor staff and house moms (the women in the dressing room who watched our stuff and did our makeup)—we kept whatever we made: twenty dollars per lap dance, plus whatever tips we were given while onstage.
When I arrived, the dressing room was packed. It was house policy that dancers not have tattoos, so we girls who had them—nearly all of us—had to cover them with makeup. I had five by then, all butterflies, zigzagging up my left side. I got my tattoos covered, tipped the house mom a twenty, and got in line.
The d.j. called Flashdancers “The United Nations of Strip Clubs.” At the beginning of the shift, we’d do the parade. Nearly one hundred girls from all over the world walked across the stage in a line as the d.j. rattled off our names in alphabetical order: Alex, Alexandria, Alexis, Amanda, Anna, Anita—the list went on and on.
After the parade, we congregated to the right side of the stage. Most nights, I sat down at a table with two Russian girls and a black girl named Snow. I started each shift with a cup of black coffee and a handful of Xenadrine. A month after I’d started taking them, I was up to four pills at a time—double the recommended dose. The effect was something like the revving of an engine or the booting up of a computer. When a group of guys walked in, Snow and I wasted no time.
by Melissa Petro, Narratively | Read more:
Image: Almaz Wilson
Mindfulness: Getting Its Share of Attention
[ed. Hey, it's California. By the way, does anyone remember Serial? I miss Martin Mull.]
As Soren Gordhamer patiently quieted a packed Wisdom 2.0 event in San Francisco in September for a guided meditation, a few in the communal meeting space known as the Hub couldn’t resist thumbing another message or two before pocketing their sacred devices. A willowy young brunette in a black T-shirt shot video of the crowd with her iPad from her front-row seat. Even after Mr. Gordhamer, who is tall with a sculptural face and Errol Flynn hair, urged the group to “come into presence,” his voice rising in emphasis, someone’s phone was buzzing like a dragonfly.
Mr. Gordhamer started Wisdom 2.0 in 2009 to examine how we can live with technology without it swallowing us whole. The wait lists for his panel talks and conferences now run into the hundreds.
The “Disconnect to Connect” meet-up was typical. The audience was mostly young, mostly from the Silicon Valley tech scene and entirely fed up with taking orders from Siri. “There was a time when phones didn’t tell you to do everything,” said Mr. Gordhamer, 45, as the conversation got rolling. “What’s work, what’s not work, it’s all become blurred.”
And yet, the problem may offer a solution. Loïc Le Meur, a French blogger and entrepreneur and the evening’s guest speaker, recommended a meditation app called Get Some Headspace. The program bills itself as the world’s first gym membership for the mind. “It’s a way to have a meditation practice without feeling weird about it,” said Mr. Le Meur. He was wearing Google Glass with only a hint of irony. “You don’t have to sit in a lotus position. You just press ‘play’ and chill out.”
Earlier that morning at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., Chade-Meng Tan, a veteran engineer, was laughing about the demand for an in-house course he created called “Search Inside Yourself.” The seven-week class teaches mindfulness, a loose term that covers an array of attention-training practices. It may mean spending 10 minutes with eyes closed on a gold-threaded pillow every morning or truly listening to your mother-in-law for once. Google naturally sees it as another utility widget for staying ahead. “Whenever we put the class online, it sells out in 30 seconds,” Mr. Tan said. (...)
Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist leader who introduced mindfulness to Westerners (Google got first dibs on him as a guest speaker), once said, “The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention.” Yet for the majority of sentient beings today, simply getting through an episode of “The Big Bang Theory” without tending multiple screens is a quasi-mystical triumph. Naturally, the architects of our electronic age approach the situation as if it were an engineering problem.
“This isn’t the old San Francisco hippie fluff,” said Mr. Tan, who started the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute as an extracurricular program in 2007. More than a thousand Googlers have gone through the course, which uses scientific research and the profit motive to entice coders and programmers to be here now.
Hundreds of peer-reviewed studies verify the benefits of mindfulness training, and Mr. Tan appeared familiar with all of them. Meditation thickens the brain’s cortex, it lowers blood pressure, it can heal psoriasis and “it can help you get a promotion,” he said. Companies like Goldman Sachs and Farmers Insurance also hire Mr. Tan and his team to teach techniques like pausing before sending important emails and silently wishing happiness upon difficult co-workers.
Mr. Tan’s official Google title is Jolly Good Fellow, which nobody can deny. During the interview, he sat cross-legged and barefoot at a conference table inside the Googleplex, and was never far from an enlightened one-liner. “People come to me with profound concerns like how do you get through 211 items on your to-do list,” he said. “I tell them, one item at a time, duh.”
It is easy for Mr. Tan to joke. With the financial benefits that come from being Google employee No. 107, he works only three days a week and concentrates more on giving away his wealth than growing it. “I don’t have much sympathy for miserable rich people because sharing money is the key to happiness,” he said. “For me, becoming rich was a wonderful experience, but then the thought became, now what?”
That’s a question Evan Williams said he asks himself frequently. The billionaire-to-be co-founder of Twitter is a regular at Wisdom 2.0 events and began meditating just over a year ago. His practice has made an impact in ways both profound and less so. Last month as Twitter was finalizing its paperwork to go public, Mr. Williams did the unthinkable for someone in his position. He took a 20-minute walk through San Francisco without his phone. “I was able actually to look around and think about things for most of that period,” he said. “I would have had many more fleeting anxieties doing that a year ago, but I’m better with those silences now.”
by David Hochman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Roman Muradov
Friday, November 1, 2013
The Secret Life of Everything: Where Your Stuff Comes From
At this stage of the early 21st century, when transparency has evolved from buzzword to business principle, when it’s possible to track anything just about anywhere, you might think it would be a simple matter to choose some everyday product—a cup of coffee, say, or a pen—and trace the paths taken by its parts and ingredients, from raw material extraction to assembly and their final delivery to you.
I thought so, and I was wrong, though instructively so. (...)
Sure, I knew that the stuff of our product-saturated world comes from somewhere else, typically not in my own United States. And I knew, though I hadn’t thought much about, how stuff going into the stuff comes from somewhere else, too, that a pair of Nikes made at a Vietnamese factory contains materials from all over the world.
But I hadn’t even considered what makes this possible: the inconceivably vast web of supply-chained relationships, intricate as any ecosystem, synchronized like the movements of so many mechanical watches. These supply chains, the ingenuity and industry they embody, are truly marvelous. They’re also quite opaque.
It’s easy to find out how things move—in the air, on the ground, across the seas. It’s far harder, if not downright impossible, to find the source. This is what I learned: At this stage of the early 21st century, we know where everything goes to, but not where it comes from.
After receiving the assignment, I tried to think of common products that would make for a good narrative. First to mind was Bit-o-Honey candy, at once folksy and agro-industrial artificial. I imagined buying some at a Brooklyn corner store, finding out who delivered it, figuring out who delivered to them, tracking the shipments back to a single factory and then digging back into the ingredients, finishing in some Iowa cornfield where the “honey” comes from.
Nestlé USA’s brand affairs didn’t want to talk about it, though. Neither was Starbucks inclined to shares the details of their lattés, or Kellogg’s their breakfast cereals. In the meantime, I dug into academic literature on supply chains and life-cycle analyses, figuring that someone must have done my work already—a Harvard Business Review case study, maybe, a white paper somewhere on a single well-documented product.
I couldn’t find any, nor could any supply chain experts I contacted think of one. The literature dealt with flows, not sources. It said stuff like, “GSCM is a large mixed-integer linear program that incorporates a global, multi-product bill of materials for supply chains with arbitrary echelon structure and a comprehensive model of integrated global manufacturing and distribution decisions.” I did learn, though, that I didn’t really understand what supply chains are.
I’d thought of them mostly in terms of delivering Amazon orders and keeping Staples stocked. Those are just endpoints, the final few steps of a waiter carrying a meal on a tray. And what I really didn’t get was that supply chains don’t just carry components and ingredients, but synchronize their movements. Shipping a box of pens to Staples is the obvious part. Coordinating the arrival of barrels, caps, boxes, ink cartridges, and nibs (through which ink flows) at the pen factory—and also metal to the nib factory, oil to the plastics-maker, and so on—is the bulk of what supply chains do, and in the most efficient manner possible, with algorithms optimizing everything from shipping networks to the path of pallets through warehouses, with an eye to what happens when one of these many moving parts goes invariably astray. (See the Nautilus story “The Box That Built the Modern World” to read how containers helped make the modern supply chain possible.)
If you’re a brilliant young mathematician, one of the things you might do, if you don’t feel like theorizing about quantum physics or engineering suspension bridges or figuring out how genomes work, is move boxes. It blew my mind. So did the idea that, from a certain perspective, the actual products almost matter less than the informational structure that guides them.
To some readers, this might be old hat. To me it was like learning of a shadow world. Vivek Sehgal, a product strategist at Manhattan Associates, which counts Wal-Mart and Adidas among its customers, introduced me to an important phrase: logistics cluster. As car manufacturers once gathered in Detroit, or Internet companies in Silicon Valley, logistics—supply chain managers, IT providers, warehouses, shippers and truckers and dispatchers, the myriad businesses that support them—now concentrates in places like Memphis, Tenn.; Zaragoza, Spain; and Rotterdam, Holland, which in a few decades might be considered archetypal 21st century cities, our new Detroits. Sehgal likened them to the Silk Road of antiquity.
Sehgal also shared a Wall Street Journal article on how an unexpected blip in the chip chain ricocheted through a just-in-time-reliant electronics industry in early 2009. In the span of a few months, the industry laid off 20 million factory workers. Economies contorted across Asia.
Perhaps, I thought, I could write about a cell phone or tablet—but no. Kenneth Kraemer and Greg Linden, co-authors of “The Distribution of Value in the Mobile Phone Supply Chain,” disabused me of that notion. It was unrealistic. “Capturing all the logistics linkages for a mobile phone would take years,” said Linden. Even focusing on one part, a single display or chip, would be a daunting: They’re too complicated, and the companies secretive and distant.
I thought so, and I was wrong, though instructively so. (...)Sure, I knew that the stuff of our product-saturated world comes from somewhere else, typically not in my own United States. And I knew, though I hadn’t thought much about, how stuff going into the stuff comes from somewhere else, too, that a pair of Nikes made at a Vietnamese factory contains materials from all over the world.
But I hadn’t even considered what makes this possible: the inconceivably vast web of supply-chained relationships, intricate as any ecosystem, synchronized like the movements of so many mechanical watches. These supply chains, the ingenuity and industry they embody, are truly marvelous. They’re also quite opaque.
It’s easy to find out how things move—in the air, on the ground, across the seas. It’s far harder, if not downright impossible, to find the source. This is what I learned: At this stage of the early 21st century, we know where everything goes to, but not where it comes from.
After receiving the assignment, I tried to think of common products that would make for a good narrative. First to mind was Bit-o-Honey candy, at once folksy and agro-industrial artificial. I imagined buying some at a Brooklyn corner store, finding out who delivered it, figuring out who delivered to them, tracking the shipments back to a single factory and then digging back into the ingredients, finishing in some Iowa cornfield where the “honey” comes from.
Nestlé USA’s brand affairs didn’t want to talk about it, though. Neither was Starbucks inclined to shares the details of their lattés, or Kellogg’s their breakfast cereals. In the meantime, I dug into academic literature on supply chains and life-cycle analyses, figuring that someone must have done my work already—a Harvard Business Review case study, maybe, a white paper somewhere on a single well-documented product.
I couldn’t find any, nor could any supply chain experts I contacted think of one. The literature dealt with flows, not sources. It said stuff like, “GSCM is a large mixed-integer linear program that incorporates a global, multi-product bill of materials for supply chains with arbitrary echelon structure and a comprehensive model of integrated global manufacturing and distribution decisions.” I did learn, though, that I didn’t really understand what supply chains are.
I’d thought of them mostly in terms of delivering Amazon orders and keeping Staples stocked. Those are just endpoints, the final few steps of a waiter carrying a meal on a tray. And what I really didn’t get was that supply chains don’t just carry components and ingredients, but synchronize their movements. Shipping a box of pens to Staples is the obvious part. Coordinating the arrival of barrels, caps, boxes, ink cartridges, and nibs (through which ink flows) at the pen factory—and also metal to the nib factory, oil to the plastics-maker, and so on—is the bulk of what supply chains do, and in the most efficient manner possible, with algorithms optimizing everything from shipping networks to the path of pallets through warehouses, with an eye to what happens when one of these many moving parts goes invariably astray. (See the Nautilus story “The Box That Built the Modern World” to read how containers helped make the modern supply chain possible.)
If you’re a brilliant young mathematician, one of the things you might do, if you don’t feel like theorizing about quantum physics or engineering suspension bridges or figuring out how genomes work, is move boxes. It blew my mind. So did the idea that, from a certain perspective, the actual products almost matter less than the informational structure that guides them.
To some readers, this might be old hat. To me it was like learning of a shadow world. Vivek Sehgal, a product strategist at Manhattan Associates, which counts Wal-Mart and Adidas among its customers, introduced me to an important phrase: logistics cluster. As car manufacturers once gathered in Detroit, or Internet companies in Silicon Valley, logistics—supply chain managers, IT providers, warehouses, shippers and truckers and dispatchers, the myriad businesses that support them—now concentrates in places like Memphis, Tenn.; Zaragoza, Spain; and Rotterdam, Holland, which in a few decades might be considered archetypal 21st century cities, our new Detroits. Sehgal likened them to the Silk Road of antiquity.
Sehgal also shared a Wall Street Journal article on how an unexpected blip in the chip chain ricocheted through a just-in-time-reliant electronics industry in early 2009. In the span of a few months, the industry laid off 20 million factory workers. Economies contorted across Asia.
Perhaps, I thought, I could write about a cell phone or tablet—but no. Kenneth Kraemer and Greg Linden, co-authors of “The Distribution of Value in the Mobile Phone Supply Chain,” disabused me of that notion. It was unrealistic. “Capturing all the logistics linkages for a mobile phone would take years,” said Linden. Even focusing on one part, a single display or chip, would be a daunting: They’re too complicated, and the companies secretive and distant.
by Brandon Keim, Nautilus | Read more:
Image: Glyn Lowe
Broccoli’s Extreme Makeover
In July, I traveled to upstate New York to meet Brian Reeves, a fourth-generation farmer with 1,500 acres, on part of which he grows a range of produce that he sells locally. As a general rule, Reeves said, he does not let visitors onto his farm before 10 a.m. during harvest season. The wisdom of that was made plain when I arrived. At 9 a.m., the place was a madhouse. Local grocers had placed orders for 12,000 pounds of tomatoes, blueberries and other produce to be delivered to 52 stores within 100 miles. But one of Reeves’s trucks had a flat. And a driver had loaded another truck with the wrong stuff, costing his crew a time-consuming reshuffle. On top of which, 117 boxes of squash were scheduled to be on the loading dock for delivery, but the golden zucchini was still in his fields, on the vines, being picked.“It’s like that T-shirt says: ‘It’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity,’ ” Reeves said when he, in turn, couldn’t remember the errand he wanted one of his drivers to run on the way back to the farm. And these were just the everyday glitches to contend with. Earlier this year, a freakish chill wiped out his entire crop of early cucumbers. Then his plans to pass on the running of the farm to his stepson, Jeffrey Reeves — home from Iraq and initially excited to become the fifth-generation Reeves to operate the farm — backfired when Jeffrey realized just how little time he would have for a social life. “Part of my reservation about being here is my happiness,” Jeffrey said, watching his stepfather work his way through the morning delivery, two phones and a clipboard in hand. “I can’t just be a machine.” (Not long after I visited the farm, Jeffrey left to get a degree in social work.)
It was perhaps not the best moment to be asking Reeves the question that brought me here: What would it take to get him to grow more? To till more land, buy more seed, run more irrigation lines, fight more pests, apply more fertilizer, endure more inspections, fix more old tractors, fill out more paperwork, miss more summer-leisure fun and generally wear himself further down in order to grow more produce so people could eat better.
The paradox of this last point was not lost on him. His own meals, especially during the summer months, were a wreck: coffee for breakfast, Mountain Dew for lunch, baked beans for dinner eaten straight from the can to save time for sleep — though he does get to snack on his crops. But Reeves is in many ways perfectly qualified to ponder the problems of increased production. The farm that he runs with his three brothers and one of their sons is an example of the kind of nonindustrial farm that’s necessary in a revamped vision of American food production and consumption. Last year, Reeves turned out 420,000 pounds of tomatoes, 65,000 pounds of strawberries and 2.4 million ears of sweet corn. And while they have a nice little farm stand just outside the small town of Baldwinsville, with a quaint patch of pick-your-own organic blueberries behind the sales shed, they mostly sell their crops to big grocers, including Tops, Price Chopper, Wegmans and, biggest of all, Walmart.
Reeves is particularly proud of being Walmart’s first farm supplier in the area, even if that adds significantly to his workload, from filling huge orders to enduring their painstaking food-safety audits. Only a fraction of his output is organic, but more would qualify with minor adjustments in his already-cautious use of pesticides and fertilizers. “I’m a personnel manager, bookkeeper, salesperson, computer guy, logistician and food-safety expert,” he said. “I didn’t sign up for that. I signed up for the sunshine, to grow crops and get my hands dirty. And that’s why I’m not as happy as I used to be. But I want this farm to be successful.”
What’s most telling about Reeves’s farm, though, when it comes to the question of produce supply and price structures, is that more than half of the land he owns, about 800 acres, is rented to farmers who grow soybeans and field corn, the type that’s used to make animal feed or corn syrup for soda and cookies or is turned into ethanol. The abundance of corn on Reeves’s land reflects its dominance nationwide. Ninety-seven million acres are planted with corn that goes toward syrup, cattle feed and ethanol, compared with the 240,000 acres planted for spinach, broccoli and cabbage.
by Michael Moss, NY Times | Read more:
The End of the Waffle House
Tap, tap, tap. Bud Powell’s aluminum cane led the way as he circled the floor of Bloomington’s Waffle House. His Waffle House.
That Wednesday in September, the owner didn’t know what to do with himself. The smell of frying oil, the same greasy perfume that had greeted customers for 46 years, wafted into his nose as he wandered past the vinyl booths. He sat down, then stood
up again.
Bud — everyone called him Bud — checked on the dwindling supply of breakfast sausage, peered into the nearly empty freezers, tried to explain to his regulars why it had to be this way.
“It’s time,” he said over and over.
At 79, Bud was tired. Except for Christmas, the restaurant was always open, day and night. Now a developer wanted to replace it with another apartment building for college kids. The offer was too good to pass up.
“Where are we gonna eat?” the old-timers kept asking.
“I don’t know,” Bud said. “Where am I gonna eat?”
This had been his place for 16,767 mornings. None ever felt like this.
The weariness showed in his eyes, behind the wire rim glasses and in the hunch of his shoulders. After the Waffle House was torn down, he knew that he wouldn’t see most of his customers again.
Tap, tap, tap. Bud plodded past the grill, where the last of the eggs sizzled. The ever-dependable waitresses whizzed by, balancing plates, like today was no different.
Most of the students had stopped visiting years ago. The smoking ban forced out the puffers. Many of the regulars grew so old that they died or went to nursing homes.
Once Bud decided to close, it all slipped away even faster. Some of his staff had taken other jobs. The gumballs emptied out of the shiny red machine. No one bothered to mark the white board with the daily special.
They would close at precisely 3 p.m. Bud checked his watch, ignoring the broken wall clock, its hands frozen for more years than he could remember, stuck in time.
It suited the place.
by Jessica Contrera, IDS | Read more:
Image: Anna Teeteri
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