Final Local Food Musings

The most tangible results of my personal project--preserving local food to eat throughout the semester--have been tasty indeed. Tonight I sat down to a bowl of spaghetti, with sauce containing locally grown tomatoes, zucchini, and onions from my freezer. Over the break I took some frozen Indiana pumpkin puree home to Alabama for Thanksgiving and included my family in my local food commitment by way of pumpkin pie (or not-so-local, considering we were about 650 miles away from the field of origin).


This project has allowed me to connect across generations through conversations with my grandfather, who grew up on a farm in Kansas and still cans tomato juice like he did with his mother when he was young. In fact, he laughed when I told him I was learning to can for a school project, and pointed out the irony of making an academic production from something that was common knowledge to pretty much everyone just a few generations ago. [As an aside, I'm willing to bet that my great-grandmother would think that it is a great blessing to be able to buy a can of tomatoes at the grocery rather than have to grow and can them herself.]

Four months ago I had not been to the Bloomington Farmers Market or set foot inside of Bloomingfoods or SaharaMart. I had never blanched a vegetable, I was scared of canning, and I also didn't know that people in Indiana grew peaches. Now I have been to each of those places (multiple times), blanched more vegetables than I care to recall, and have beautiful golden jars of Indiana peaches waiting to go into pies just as soon as finals are over. (And, ok, I'm still a little scared of canning.)

Barbara Kingsolver kept me informed (and chuckling) with tales of her local-food year interspersed with investigative journalism about the food industry and the benefits of eating local. Her writing also induced dreams of spring and sketches of garden layouts just waiting to be planted. Readings from Barry Rubin's Urban Economic Development class further added to the experience, highlighting the economic benefits of spending at locally-owned small businesses. Michael Pollan reminded me of what I learned years ago about King Corn and concentrated animal feeding operations, making me thankful that I rarely eat meat and ensuring that when I do, I'm going to be every bit as obnoxious as this couple in Portlandia (minus all the smoochy datey stuff).

My high school friend, Olivia, visited me last weekend, and after being shown around my apartment, she exclaimed, "You have lists of food everywhere!" Confused, I asked her what she meant. She pointed out my farmer's market purchase list on the refrigerator, an old list of "things to freeze, SOON" that was still on my desk, and some jotted recipes on a notepad in my room. This is visual proof of perhaps the most noteworthy impact of this personal project: my movement away from making eating choices based on convenience and price and toward a more strategic and intentional diet. I'm not perfect. I still buy plastic-wrapped bagels from the SPEA Cafe way more mornings than I want to admit. But my purchasing and consumption habits have changed, especially where produce is concerned.

Before this class, I was pretty complacent about what I ate. I knew I should do better--eat more locally and organically, and perhaps more importantly, be more informed about the effects of my consumption choices. But I was lazy, and I biked to school every day and minimized my electricity use and that was good enough, right? Through this project, I have realized with joy that I couldn't be more wrong, and that there is something incredibly fulfilling, spiritual even, about connecting with food and the community that grows it.

Although this stage of the project was only a semester long, it is something that I plan to build on as I move through life (hopefully to a place with a garden plot and more space for storing jars). I'm really excited about experimenting with heirloom varieties and being a part of their continued presence in our food supply. [Paraphrasing Kingsolver, eating an endangered whale doesn't keep if from extinction, but eating endangered food varieties does, by creating demand for increased cultivation and harvest.] With so many wonderful resources out there and delicious things to eat, there's no way I'm going to limit this adventure to just a semester!

Course Reflections

Wow...this semester went by fast! Throughout the course, I've been keeping a list of must-investigate books, online resources, and programs that have come up in readings, other students' blogs, or my own personal wanderings. I kept telling myself, "Soon! Soon you'll have time to sit down and soak it all in!" Unfortunately that hasn't happened yet, but the great thing about this course is that my list will still be relevant after the semester comes to a close. Because this sustainable community thing? It's about life, and our choices, and how they affect the world around us. And that doesn't change when finals week is over. How exciting, that we get to spend our careers making life better for people and the earth!

I consider myself to be fairly environmentally-minded and aware of the impacts of my actions. Before this class, I was well-versed in climate change and recycling and endangered species and biking and reduced consumption levels and all those other things we lump into the huge sustainability bubble. I incorporated that knowledge into my lifestyle, for the most part. Except that I still lived pretty comfortably in the mainstream world. This class has helped me to become disturbed again, which I count as a good thing. Without being a little uncomfortable, it's easy to fall into what's convenient because, you know, I'm just a graduate student with limited income, and big box stores and cheap food are pretty enticing. Until I am reminded to really think about it again and it becomes disgusting.

The overarching theme I'm taking away from this class is that of connections. That my actions and our societal paradigms, whether about food or transportation or economic growth, are interconnected and have social, economic, and environmental consequences. Additional connection--to methodologies, among students, between fields, across time, and to my own thoughts and passions--I elaborate on these below.

My other main takeaway is we need a better set of words to talk about this stuff. Vibrant, resilient, green, and of course, sustainable--all overused big time.

Ok, back to the more serious stuff. Main takeaways:

• Connections to methodologies: The community-based social marketing information we were exposed to was really valuable. And I can't wait to dive into this database of behavior literature!
• Connections among students: This course provided an excellent platform for flexible, creative expression. Reading what classmates had to share on their blogs and participating in class discussions enriched the course experience. I especially appreciated the diversity the business students brought to the classroom, and I'm excited about using the collective wisdom of the class to try my own vermiculture project, bee keeping, and winter gardening in the future!
• Connections between fields: Rubin's Seminar on Urban Economic Development dovetailed perfectly with this course. Both address methods to achieve vibrant, resilient communities (those words again!!), but come from very different places. In some ways it is as if this course provides the motivation and Rubin's course supplies the mechanics. Regardless, I've come to believe that both approaches are integral to bringing about the kind of world we want to see. I think the video below integrates them quite nicely.

• Connections across time: I really enjoyed the readings from the Sustainable Urban Development Reader. Since sustainability is such a new academic field, it sometimes feels as if it isn't anchored by much theory or knowledge. These readings changed my stance on that, and exposed me to some fabulous thinkers and writers of whom I look forward to reading more. 
• Connections to my own thoughts and passions: I love eating. The personal project required me to carve out time and energy to really think about what I was eating and why, as well as explore the effects of my eating choices on my community and the environment. Having this space for independent study and exploration allowed me to change my eating habits in ways that will last long after this semester is over. Much more on this in a blog post coming very soon...I'll just say here that this is the area where I experienced the most personal growth and expanded my sustainable lifestyle the most this semester.

I guess I'll close with the two goals I have for myself going forward:
1) To stay 'uncomfortable', and to tailor my lifestyle accordingly, and
2) To stay connected with sustainability literature--make time to read interesting books and websites because they are important, even if they aren't required for a class.

Wish me luck!

ICMA Conference in Phoenix/Maricopa County

I spent several days in October at the InternationalCity/County Management Association’s annual conference in Phoenix, Arizona. I attended as part of the local government management concentration here at SPEA. Looking at the session schedule ahead of time, I was excited to see that there were several sessions addressing sustainability in local government. Perfect!

After I got there and started attending sessions, however, I realized that environmental concerns were almost completely missing from sessions addressing sustainability. In individual conversations, city managers affirmed the necessity of planning for sustainability in its fullest form, and several presenters made brief mentions of initiatives going on in their cities. The ICMA has a Center for Sustainable Communities and devoted its June issue of Public Management wholly to sustainability. However, fiscal sustainability was on the mind much more than environmental or social sustainability, to my disappointment.

There were a few interesting “sustainable communities nuggets” that I brought home from Phoenix, though.

• I toured Civic Space Park near the Arizona State University campus in downtown Phoenix. Billed as "sustainable adaptive reuse," the site includes a historic structure that was renovated and now provides community meeting space and displays community art. Solar panels and public transit connectivity are other major sustainable features of the park, although it is perhaps best known for the public art piece that looks like a giant net in the daytime but is pretty cool when lit at night.

http://ifwtwa.org/2011/06/ifwtwagreater-phoenix-media-tour.html

• In one of the most interesting conference sessions, the city of Mesa, AZ discussed the crowd-sourcing tool iMesa they recently deployed to enhance public input and engagement. This is an excellent example of integrating available technology to enhance the social sustainability of a community. Citizens can submit ideas online, vote for projects they support, and even channel funding to implement certain ideas. A pdf of the presentation is available here, courtesy of ICMA. The most noteworthy thing to me about the tool is the ability to reach a much larger segment of the population and to give people a more powerful voice in the shapes of their communities. 

http://www.mesaaz.gov/imesa/

• Finally, I took advantage of my trip to Phoenix and spent the evening with some distant cousins who live on a small farm in suburban Phoenix. Most of you probably know that Phoenix is in the middle of the desert, presenting irrigation challenges. I was interested to learn that my cousin's property is part of Phoenix's flood irrigation system, by which some residents receive irrigation water from a canal along the back border of their property. As I understand it, a resident can call the utility company and schedule the canal water to be turned on at a certain time and date. They close the sluice gate at one end of the canal that runs along their property, causing the water to back up in the canal and flood the entire lawn. I haven't researched this method in-depth, but it strikes me that if you must irrigate in the desert, this is perhaps one of the more sustainable ways to do it--canal water is non-potable, and evaporation rates are lower than if sprinklers were used. Interesting concept!

All in all, I left Phoenix having learned a lot but saddened that environmental issues, sustainability (broadly defined), and climate change (Climate Action Plans, GHG inventories,...) were not a bigger part of the discussion at the conference. One potentially skewing factor is that the majority of the communities represented at the conference are small to mid-size, and may not yet have the resources or political focus for Offices of Sustainability like we see in larger cities. Regardless, we have a long way to go before these topics are integrated into the mainstream discussions of local governments. Good thing so many of us are so passionate about this sort of thing!