well, I haven't stopped by this blog in a few weeks, which have been quite busy.

I somehow have gotten involved with:

-producing the website for a student research conference being held at my school in March,
-work-study job for the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project, which is awesome
-writing article(s) for Balance, the Tufts Daily's wwhealth and nutrition supplement
-working on the 2007 Symposium of my school's lone student group, brilliantly titled "FOOD"

and a bunch of other stuff, which, when combined with my new addiction to watching Grey's Anatomy and ER and my hebrew school job, have left me running raggedly to finish my assignments on time.

Also, this past week I attended the American Public Health Association's Annual Meeting, which happened to be in Boston this year, at the mega-sized Boston Convention Center. This was a wondeful experience, which I hope to blog further about one day, but the two best sessions I went to were about a) linking Public Health to Agriculture Policy (which is basically what I want to do with the rest of my life, to a degree) and b) different methods for mapping food acces.
So when Parke Wilde, the now oft-cited-on-this-blog Prof. at my school, posted this on his blog, I've become very excited. I sat through multiple presentations on Tuesday about using GIS to map food access in different ways in difference parts of the U.S., two of which were focused on NYC. If you click on "Explore and Interactive Map," you can see a number of indeces of food access mapped on to economic and other data for all of the city, in an enticing visual format (aka a "map". The fact that this data is now publicly accessible from the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, is amazing, if it is actually utilized. I may try to write something for Gothamist or City Limits about it, because they have focused on food issues a bunch in the past. Maybe someone beat me to it.

GOTV with moveon

Statement on R.J. Reynold's Agreement to Stop the Sale of Candy-flavored Cigarettes, press release of Thursday, October 05, 2006, Harvard School of Pu

Check it out:

Statement on R.J. Reynold's Agreement to Stop the Sale of Candy-flavored Cigarettes, press release of Thursday, October 05, 2006, Harvard School of Public Health

indigo girls 10.16

here are a few pictures from the amazing Indigo Girls concert I attended on Monday night near Park St in Boston. I haven't seen them since freshman year of college, when Darya, Faye, and a few of Darya's friends all went to Carmine's beforehand. This crowd was a little bit less noticably butch, but that's probably just because I've grown more accustomed to butches since then :)

This time, Lauren Herman and I and two of Lauren's friends from Cornell went, and stopped by the Beantown Pub beforehand, and it was equally exciting.

See this for the setlist. They played a lot of songs from their new album Despite Our Differences, but also a bunch of older songs that I knew and some that I didn't. Little Perennials is a great new song, as is Trouble a great older song, (although not that old). This reminds me that I really need to get/copy/download more of their older stuff.

this is what i would do if i won the lottery

this is what i would do: go to South Africa with my two favorite people ever: Ruth Messinger and Tony Kushner

wow- that is unbelievably amazing.
in other news, i am excited about grameen bank winning the Nobel Peace Prize. I first heard of Grameen when I read about it in the book Hope's Edge, by my other two favorite people: Frances Moore Lappe and Anna Lappe.

Labor camps kept workers in servitude with crack cocaine | naplesnews.com | Naples Daily News

This really tops the latest list of things it's not possible to believe humans have actually constructed. The Naples Daily News reports that Ron Evans Sr. was operating several labor camps in Northern Florida and North Carolina, recruiting homeless people from Miami and NOLA by luring them with crack cocaine, in exchange for working off the drug payments on their labor camp. I don't even know if Abraham could plead for pity on behalf of these guys...

In the realm of Florida labor issues, I never realized just how close Immokalee, FL is to all my relatives living in the fancy, shmancy splendor of Weston, FL, a town which was plopped down a few years ago on what used to be the Everglades. Google Maps says it's about a two-hour drive. Straight form the Connecticut-in-the-summer country clubs and shopping malls to the tomato pickers fighting for UN CENTAVO MAS. Well, they got it from Taco Bell, at least in theory--we'll see how that goes.
Check out the Alliance for Fair Food to see the work that's being done in a similar vein for McDonald's suppliers.

How ironic (and reflective of the complexity of our food system's problems): The CIW wants to include a community garden in the community center they are trying to bring to Immokalee.



Coming soon: a few photos from the fab Indigo Girls concert last night at the Orpheum Theater, Boston, MA.

praying for the courage to live

When I was a little kid, my family used to make fun of me because I would randomly come up with all these tidbits of information and when asked how I knew, I would inevitably be known to have "overheard" them from people around me, oftentimes strangers.

I think I've always prided myself on my ability to "overhear" information, whether it is aurally or by "stalking" people, organizations, institutions, etc online or via reading signs on bulletin boards that nobody else reads. Sometimes this is helpful; sometimes it leads to a paralysis and lack of action in the face of information overload.

As anyone who has lived with me knows, I constantly find myself distracted by the sudden need to search online for any number of random questions or thoughts that pop into my head at all hours of the day, and many of the night. My new roommate, who I have known for all of about 5 weeks already remarked to a friend of hers that I'm like her personal web-searcher, and I must spend all my time "surfing the web" (a phrase I would never use) while she's doing her homework. Sadly, that's closer to the truth than you could possibly imagine.

I don't know why I constantly feel compelled to do this. But it's really become and addiction and I'm constantly fighting with it in order to get ANYTHING done, including eating, going to the bathroom, going to sleep, getting any homework done, and going outside so I don't become a hermit lacking in Vitamin D. It often makes me wish the internet/computers had never been invented (or so widespread and accessible).

I'm not sure why I'm writing about this, except that in terms of my constant stalking/searching about people, I think it stems from a strong fear of interaction with people in real life. I somehow subconsciously spend so much time searchign about people online, that it often prevents me from ever having to go about real life.

This afternoon I found myself sitting on our backporch, which faces into a leafy courtyard, trying to get some homework done. Although I was fairly interested in what I was reading, I was constantly drawn to listening/watching two people across the courtyard, whose porch also looks into their kitchen, who were preparing and then eating dinner, talking all the while.
Then I got as excited as a light clicked in a room in another apt, where a man sat down at a bunch of music mixing equipment.

I think the "overhearing" was the beginning of this need to constantly look into other people's lives and enviously wish I had [elements of or] their lives. I think this is a common behavior for adolescents, but maybe because I was doing it way before then, I never got over it and it often creates a lot of negative energy and wasted time in my life.

On both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Rabbis at both my parents' shul and the shul I went to here in Cambridge spent a lot of time talking about overcoming our own negative habits that prevent us from living, as Oprah would call it "our best life." On RH, the Rabbi used the metaphor of smashing our own personal idols, based on the Midrash of Abraham and the idols; on YK, the Rabbi dwelled particularly on a piece of the Avodah service, the prayer of the Kohen Gadol, in which we, in the tradition of the Israelites in the Temple, prayed for the residents of the Sharon valley ( a part of Israel), that "their homes not become their graves." In the prayer it refers specifically to the fact that those people lived (and presumably still do) on a fault line and constantly lived "in fear of sudden earthquakes." (My roommate, a native of California, took great issue with the repetitiveness of saying "sudden earthquakes," as all earthquakes are ostensibly sudden.) The Rabbi then made reference to an extended metaphor about how our own negative habits and inertia to not live the life we want to be living causes "our homes to become our graves," a metaphor which, though profoundly depressing, makes a lot of sense to me.

This slightly related post by ZT almost brought me to tears and helped bring the point of the 2 sermons home as well.

Every time I think about these ideas, portrays the imagery of the Neilah service of YK, that the "gates are closing" every second of every day, and it exponentially increases the importance of each action and each day, ideally changing the way I look at life. The question is if it actually is effective enough to actually change the way I live my life.

I hope so. This is a problem I have tried to deal with multiple times, with minimal progress each time. I hope I have the courage to spend less time peering into the mundanities of other people's lives and actually live the life I want to be living. A very simple concept but one that seems drastically different from my usual mode of operation. and I imagine many other people's as well.

concord grapes

Despite missing most of Kabbalat Shabbat, I had a lovely [albeit shivery] time at a potluck last night in, and around, a local couple's beautifully decorated Sukkah. I wish I had more time to truly draw out the links between Sukkot and agriculture, historically and in the present. I think it would be a great topic for future resarch/a book.

Anyway, the folks had a whole bunch of concord grape vines, for which I have a particularly strong penchant, and one ofthe potluck attendees, who I think had also led services, was remarking about how they might not be kosher if they don't know who originally planted/harvested the vines, bc they were there before the current folks moved in.
is there any sort of written rule/precedent for this?

Afterwards we headed over to TBS and got a taste of some 1-yr aged etrog vodka...

Incidentally, I just discovered there was an article this summer in Tikkun about Omivore's Dilemma, my favorite book that I never finished reading.

sukkot and water

I really should be studying for my nutrition exam right now, but I'm too inspired by the connections in my life to put off sharing this with others. In my agriculture science and policy class we just begin studying "water" as it relates to soils and other issues in agriculture. I must admit, it's been a little hard, as someone who has never spent a day working on a farm (Gustavo Esteva's compost garden in Oaxaca notwithstanding) to conceptualize, let alone memorize, many of the detailed scientific characteristics and irrigation strategies I am learning about.

After class I helped a few other students put together a pre-fab Sukkah outside of my school building, the Jaharis Center. It was a lot more down-to-earth than other sukkah-building I've done, becuase there were really just a few of us, scattered from my school (the Friedman school of Nutrition), and the medical school across the street, and even one staff member; and you could tell how genuinely touched each of was that it was really coming together, and we'd really have a little sukkah to spend time in throughout the coming week, in planned programs (as of yet unplanned, but still...) and quiet individual moments, eating, studying, shivering...

While looking for resources to prompt a lunchtime discussion in the Sukkah next week about connections between Judaism, food and agriculture, I also just read about a [relatively] new organization called Canfei Nesharim to encourage environmental awareness and conservation in the Orthodox community, an organization which has put together a number of resources and activities around the upcoming holidays, and also specifically to celebrate Simchas Beis Ha-shoeva (ashkenazi emphasis NOT mine), the "Water-Drawing Ceremony," about which I previously knew nothing.

Subsequently I saw that a college friend of mine now works for COEJL, and stumbled upon this wonderful d'rash for Sukkot by the illustrious Frances Kreimer's mom...

I think when my friends and I sit around and bitch and moan about how spending time with the Jewish community is frustrating because of all the--what someone I recently met termed them--"Princeton i-banker types," we tend to feel like we are alone in this frustration and are on the constant path of existential crisis.. So it's nice to read that Mordechai Kaplan

"agonized over his rabbinic role serving wealthy capitalist Jews in a synagogue in New York City, when his heart was with the workers."

Wow. Rabbi Fuchs-Kreimer just keeps hitting on all the insightful points in this piece, tying together both the social justice and "socially-conscious living/back-to-nature" being reclaimed by young Jews these days. She also writes, of Kaplan:

In a relatively rare mood of contentment, after a morning of teaching sermon-writing followed by a brisk two mile walk home, he wrote: "The lunch I found at home was the ideal one for the appetite I had worked up on [my] walk, oatmeal…asparagus tips on toast in an ocean of cream sauce and a cup of coffee with the dried crumbs of chocolate cake…I gave the world three hours of homiletics and the world gave me back a nourishing lunch. I can never cease marveling at the miracle of the exchange of goods and services… It is for this marvel of marvels that I thank God whenever I say grace [after meals], and I say it quite often with cap on or without a cap."

mmm....too bad it's not asparagus season right now. I think now I can get to studying with a clean conscience and stop agonizing over the fact that I missed participating in my program's local food week.....you know, it was Yom Kippur and then I suddenly had to catch up on work....I think this coming week should be the real local food week...I can't imagine a better way to honor the earth, and all those who tire to conserve it, improve it and bring us tasty, nutritious foods, then to celebrate them and think about the ways Judaism provides me with these perfect opportunities to integrate my studies into my life. Here's to Mordechai Kaplan! Maybe his blessed memory can give me the strength and inspiration to conjure a Simchat Ha-Shoeva ceremony in the Tufts Medical Campus Sukkah next week! After all, according to Canfei Nesharim, the Mishnah (Sukkah 51a) says that anyone who has not participated in it has not known true joy.

MANA

wow. apparently, MANA was in New York in August and I missed them! I had been periodically checking if there was anything new on the radar with them and somehow I fell off the wagon at the worst time! They now have a new album out that was #4 on Billboard 200 in August, they had an autograph signing at the Virgin Megastore @ Times Sq where they were mobbed....
boo :(

Also, I need to fix my camera. One of the reasons I haven't blogged in ages is that my camera's been slowly dying since March when I had it out in the rain during the mural tour in San Francisco and dropped it several times in the rain.

And now I'm a student!

U.S. Food Policy: Who is Kevin J. Martin?

Parke Wilde, a professor in the FPAN program at my school has a great blog about U.S. Food Policy, which he updates regularly.
U.S. Food Policy: Who is Kevin J. Martin? links to a speech made by the chairman of the FCC about a new commission Sen Sam Brownback (R-KA?) and others have sponsored which will study the relationship between TV "food" advertising and childhood obesity in the U.S.

I was ecstatic upon hearing about this commission, and still think it has great potential, but my excitement was downgraded when I explored further, found Brownback's office's press statement which cites the Beverly LaHaye Institute as one of the task force members...this is the same Beverly LaHaye Institute which includes, among many other predominantly anti-feminist polemics, a report on its main page bashing the UN Millenium Development Goals as leftist propaganda, preferring that the problem of world poverty be solved through Christian charity...hmmm...

I know that many of the folks most interested in media regulation issues tend to be extreme conservatives, and I recognize that the task force does need to be bi-partisan, but somehow I don't think this group (and others who are also probalby going to be involved) could actually come down in any forceful way against corporate influence. I guess that's what happens when you get a task force sponsored by Republican senators disguised by its connections with Sesame Street...

"the hungry of today are the growers of food"- vandana shiva

update

so i haven't posted to this blog in quite a while. i'm not sure that much has happened to update about...all though, that's totally bullshit- stuff has happened, i just can't think of what to write right now....but to sum up, my job has ended and i'm now looking for summer jobs before going to grad school in the fall. i've been up to all sorts of stuff which i should have blogged about at the time, but now i feel like it's too late...

Life Imitates Art

Whoa....this is literally right out of The West Wing Pilot, just re-aired on NBC immediately preceding the series finale about a month ago, a day on which I was very sad.

A congressman from Georgia was featured on The Colbert Report, who among many other funny/idiotic things, said that the best possible building he could think of to hang the Ten Commanments is a courhouse or judicial building...but then could not name more than three of the said commandments!

[And then Jed Bartlet walked in saying "I am the Lord your God; you shall worship no other Gods before me".......]

zora neale hurston

--**Tribute to Zora Neale Hurston**--

this is definitely one of my favorite quotes:

"Dey gointuh make 'miration 'cause mah love didn't work lak they love, if dey every had any. Then you must tell 'em dat love ain't somethin' lak uh grindstone dat's de same thing everywhere and do de same thing tuh everything it touch. Love is lak de sea. It's uh movin' thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it's different with every shore."
--from Their Eyes Were Watching God

and:

Darya inadvertently poses as Z.N. Hurston

life in south dakota

[backstory: i just took a trip to san francisco, which i will expound upon and image-ify one of these days, but it may not be until next week because i have a ridiculous lack of time in my apt in the next 5 days and may not get to post picture. until then.....]

so i was supposed to take the red-eye back from san fran and arrive in new york at a red-eyed 5:25 AM this morning, but i decided to go standby on an earlier flight leaving oakland at 1:30 pm so i could actually get some sleep last night and remain a normal person. overall, it was a good ending to what had been a bad plan (the red-eye). the new flight was wonderful, sunny, bump-less, full of great tv and snacks which would have gone unappreciated at 3 AM when i would have been trying to sleep. also included in the new flight was me watching the JetBlue flight-tracking screen in front of me, to see us fly over wyoming and south dakota, two states the prospect of life in which, scares me very much.

free association in my mind: "wyoming........dick cheney...hunting...killing people. the screen says laramie....laramie project...killing gay people. south dakota....abortion ban NOW people!!!!"

i had just seen the SD governor's signing of the abortion ban on JetBlue's lovely choices of MSNBC and FoxNews, and it actually freaked me out to be flying at our cruising altitude of x thousand feet (see if i was actually a quality blogger i would have looked up the actual number of feet that we were likely at, but alas...) over South Dakota. I mean, what if we crashed? What if we crashed and I was somehow accidentally impregnated in the ensuing chaos?? Or what if I actually lived there? THAT was really somethign I could not imagine, which is probably why the red-stater's hate us. I mean, I've lived my ENTIRE life in the state of new york. when i venture upstate, it's still to the liberal bastion of ithaca. I take my first actual vacation as a working gal and where do I go? San Francisco!
I mean, how liberally closed-minded am I!

This was the first time I'd been to the west coast of the U.S. and thus the first time I'd flown over south dakota, the closest i'd ever come. and x thousand feet was too close? i don't know.

But seriously, I sort of felt trapped in my inability to do something about the situation because I probably have so little in common with the people in favor of this decision that a conversation would be ridiculous. I usually think I'm a rather open-minded, listening, type of person who can usually relate to people of different sorts even if i don't agree with their politics. I mean barring that we discuss politics in that case....ho hum....I don't know, I just feel sort of useless and unengaged with real issues. Which really makes me not want to move to san fran or berkeley, where I'd be even less engaged with real issues. But that's another post.

the life before suicide

I was talking to my parents the other day about the movie Paradise Now, which I saw a number of weeks ago, shortly after it came out in theaters (maybe only in new york- i don't know). She seemed a bit shocked or dismayed that I had seen it and was asking me what it was about, even though she seemingly already had some idea, and right before she asked if it portrayed Israel in a negative light (of course she would ask that), she said "So, it's a day in the life of a suicide bomber?"

I responded "not exactly," and tried explaining the plot to her in brief, but later on realized just how much of an oxymoronic paradox her question in fact was, in light of the movie. Because really, there's no such thing as the life of a suicide bomber. Or at least that's what the movie makes you believe. Only the death of a suicide bomber. One doesn't become a suicide bomber until that particular act, at which point (s)he is no longer alive. So that's sort of an interesting idea, isn't it? That we jujdge and come to know these individuals purely based on the circumstances of their death, with little regard for how they lived their lives or anything occurred previous to that point in time.

I want this in writing. (does a blog count?) if i ever lose the ability to perform necessary functions on my own- if i need tube feeding (indefinitely), a respirator, etc., i don't want it. i just want to die and let nature take it's course. it's excessive, unnatural, unpleasant and an improper use of resources. at least that's my personal decision.
now i don't have to discuss it, because it's in writing for the whole world to see.
signed,
me

i love pbs

i love pbs and i love to read and i'm not going to be ashamed that sometimes, i'd rather be home reading or relaxing than out doing something more sexy.

as odd and possibly pretentious as this sounds, i'm finding a very strong personal parallel with the pbs program i'm currently watching focusing on what it was like for blacks to come out of slavery and try to establish themselves as free people.

i think that many of my problems over the past few years have stemmed from the fact that, as much as i've pretended not to, i'm always concerned about waht i'm supposed to do, what it seems like i should be doing, and reconciling the conflict of what that means to different people.

and most importantly, i've been floating. i feel like i haven't comprehended the reality of control over my own life; i haven't recognized how my every day reactions very directly relate to my happiness and fulfillment of what i've want.

the show, a remarkable one i've seen ads for and highly recommend (check local listings!!), was making the point about what it was like for slaves to go from being the labor, working on farms, to the point where they owned their own farms and were making the decisions and all involved with that, rather than just "doing" the farm. i really identify with that, and i don't think i've fully realized the degree to which i've been ignoring that, hiding behind things like guilt, past mistakes, and other things.

responsible credit cards

an update on my post from september regarding money, etc. i ended up going with the salmon nation card, which i've been enjoying for several months now, and maybe makes me feel just a little bit less guilty (appropriately or not) as the new york lifestyle of conspicuous consumption slowly envelopes me.

A December article from co-op america addresses the issues well, and basically accomplishes in one article what took me several weeks of research. And in fact they accomplish even more, because somehow I didnt' even figure out that Ithaca's Alternatives Federal Credit Union, which I obviously already knew about, also has a credit card and that even though I've left Ithaca, I can still join by doing online banking with them. Something to investigate.