what is a locavore anyway?

our little community of people, with whom we have been meeting for 4 yrs now, was presented with an intriguing opportunity recently. we could purchase a cow. we could not only purchase this cow, but we could have said purchased cow slaughtered, butchered, and packaged for our consumption.

and so purchase a cow we did! just a couple of weeks ago some of our friends brought our portion of the cow to our house, and we have since been trying to figure out ways to eat dishes consisting of beef. our first dish was a delectable brown sugar meatloaf. what can i say, i am a sucker for down-home favorites.

the cow we purchased was not grain-fed or fattened. our cow was raised on grass, not too far from our house and slaughtered and processed locally as well. it was participation in what is called being a locavore (maybe just the light version, but you have to start somewhere right?). purchasing food from producers in close geographic radius to your home can have far reaching impact on the local economy -- not to mention the added bonus of knowing how your food was raised and grown.

all of this is basic stuff that can lead to bigger questions. what is the right balance of food production? how do you eat healthy and locally and maximize your impact on the local economy and food production with your limited budget (i assume none of my few loyal readers are extremely wealthy, and if you are i want to talk to you about other things!)? what are the ethical and moral impacts of these choices? it is more complicated than you probably think. and how should we go about getting our food?

let's explore food together.

the heathcare future: education

in response to my own posting about the healthcare debate in america, i inadvertently challenged myself. how you might ask? well, i might say, i don't like to simply leave things out there and not further ruminate on them. in short, i haven't stopped thinking about or reading about or, maybe to my own brain-drain detriment, watching coverage about the healthcare reform debate. so i decided recently that i would start a new series of posts concerning the healthcare issue. the title is above so no wasting space on that, but the post-colon space will denote what the subject of the post will be about.

today i tackle education.

americans tend to be terribly educated in my opinion. we educate ourselves based on our special interests, and this is owed largely in part, in my opinion, to our economic system of choice -- hyper-capitalism. hyper-capitalism demands that we all specialize in our niche of the economy in order to achieve maximum efficiency and output. by specializing we are creating more jobs, more job security, and in theory a greater product through emphasized knowledge, market adeptness, and an overall sense of satisfaction that we posses the greatest material goods, at the cheapest price, at questionable quality. as you can probably tell by some tongue in cheek wording here, i think our system breaks down at a point. this does not mean that i think there is some magical alternative out there that is better, simply acknowledging the limited nature of economic systems.

back to the original point -- our education is severely limited. we choose this gleefully in lieu of something more holistic most times. the holistic option takes time, effort, and brain power that we often find little efficiency for -- why in the world should i care about physics or natural science or manufacturing when i am a college administrator? the resulting, often tacit, answer of "you shouldn't. it doesn't get you any further in your professional field." is exactly the problem when it comes to healthcare reform.

in order for us to achieve something tenable in the future, we need better healthcare education. i am not even considering at this point insurance coverage, claim, and navigation education although that would be great! what i am advocating for is better education about what it means to claim healthcare for yourself. and because that was a foundationally circular argument, i will clarify. we need to be better educated about healthy living. it is my hope that through more holistic undertakings of educating ourselves about healthy lifestyles, our overall health as a nation will rise.

i long lived in one of the alternating "fattest cities in america" - dallas. i once read that where i lived in dallas, us75 and lovers ln. for those taking stocking...or stocking in general..., was the single most densely populated area in the country for restaurant to human population. so needless to say, i had all the options i could ever want, most of them with portions and food options no more healthy for me than eating ice cream every night for dinner...which isn't a bad choice every once in awhile. i lamented the fact that i was an active young adult often times in that city, and i felt city-conscious about our label. but while i can lament all i want, i also know that all those options didn't stop me from pursuing a healthy lifestyle. i ran, exercised, balanced my schedule as best i could, and created time for developing relationships with friends.

you see too many of the ways in which we run into healthcare problems for people seem to be totally preventable. we just care not to talk about those things and educate ourselves and others, because we are afraid to offend those who might be in the audience. as someone who worked in the church for three years and has preached from the pulpit a number of times, i know a thing or two of being warned not to offend people with the truth of our circumstance.

so i am calling for a holistic healthcare education that helps people make healthy choices in life. this means that all parts of life are affected. we must be willing to learn about what makes working healthy. we must be willing to learn about what makes relationships healthy. we must learn about why spirituality is a healthy outlet for people. we must also learn about un/healthy eating habits, un/healthy economic choices, and un/healthy material choices that adversely affect ourselves and most importantly others.

there is no magic bullet. there is no one plan of education that will change the way people think or interact with one another, but if we can begin to change the way we think about healthcare, mainly as a specialized field owned by doctors, researchers, and drug companies, we might be able to begin to grasp what possibilities there are for holistic healthcare education that makes a difference in the lives of those around us.

one tired, oft quoted, and unfortunately true cliche comes to mind that seems to exemplify the problem in america: europeans often criticize americans of "living to work instead of working to live". are we willing to sacrifice a slice of economic efficiency for more holistic and healthy lifestyles that benefit more than ourselves? i certainly hope so.

labels redux

there was a comment a couple of posts back on something that i made scant mention of, but knew the idea itself was at the very least intriguing. i mentioned that labels could perhaps have precipitated our current economic situation, in part. so before we all go off the deep end here, let's have some disclaimers:

1. i am no economist. i am armchair at best, really. so don't go looking for broad or sweepingly good economic theory here. i will simply put forth my ideas on what i believe led us to the current meltdown and rebuilding of our economy.
2. labels in my opinion were a small part in this, although i must admit -- the more i think about this, the more i become convinced our need to label things led to this in some way.
3. back to i am no economist -- let's remember that.
4. human nature will not be avoided and labels are apparent and necessary in our processing of the world, so i am not suggesting label nihilism.

disclaimers out of the way, let's start on this rabbit trail and see where it gets us!

first, i want to reiterate that labels are part of the way we make sense of the world around us. "tree" for example is a label. in an ancient philosophy class i took, my professor waxed very poetically about the label of the tree that was outside our classroom. the bottom line is this -- labels are categories that we construct in order to order the world. this is all fine and dandy until we run into the fact that some labels are destructive rather than constructive, and i am not suggesting this in a postmodern philosophical way. (believe me, we don't really want to go there). so while labels are necessary, they are not all ethical. if we can all agree on this minor point, ok it is major, then we can move on to the broader subject at hand. i am going to assume for my own well-humored sense of logic that if you keep reading, you agree. if you didn't you probably didn't just read that last sentence or this one.

second, what in the world did i mean when i said that labels in part led us to the current economic recession? recession -- a label mind you -- is the current word de jour. depression, down turn, crisis, idiocracy, greediness, and others are ones we have heard lately as well. in plain english let me say the following: our desire to label people led to financial decisions that seemed prudent to people who apparently graduated with business degrees but not degrees in risk assessment. so in non-vernacular let me restate that: the financial institutions in the mortgage, banking, and credit industries began to loan money to people who we would otherwise categorize as too risky for loans of the size they were receiving; or in other words, these supposed financial gurus who were running the companies such as AIG, Washington Mutual, etc. graduated with business undergrad degrees and MBA's but not with actuarial degrees, nor apparently did the people with the actuarial degrees think to actually asses the risk of giving people hundreds of thousands of dollars who could potentially go bankrupt today, tomorrow, or the next day despite that money.

third, so where do labels come into this anyway? i want to begin by saying that people seem to be labeled as financially secure or unsecure. we see this all the time with loans, credit applications, debt management, and interest rates. just go try to buy a car to figure this one out. without going too far down the subsequent rabbit trail, i think it suffices to say that banks and others decided that people who were heretofore labeled as financially unsecure, suddenly became secure in the wake of the advent of ARM's or adjustable rate mortgages or even worse -- balloon ARM's. this was a lending strategy that inflated the housing market and subsequently the credit market as well in order to consequently drive our economic "security" upwards. everyone seemed to profit...that is until the piper came to collect and well we all know what happened in the past, nearly, two years. so labels played a major role in my opinion of how we got to where we are.

is this incredibly over-simplified? YES. do i think that it is too simplified to have real and appropriate meaning? NO.

we like to label a lot of things in our country. see for example: liberal/conservative/independent; pro-life/pro-choice; black/white/brown/other; educated/uneducated; rich/poor; and i could go on, but i think i have made the point at least sufficiently. our affinity for these labels is great in that it gives us a very strict order in which to live our lives divided off from people on the other side of those labels, but the problem is that those labels really tell us nothing of who that person is. take for example the label pro-life. this is one that hits pretty closely home for me. however our conception of pro-life is that i am anti-abortion. and while this is true, i also want people to know that i am anti-death penalty, for geriatric care, and for the ethical treatment of humans and animals in what i would more closely call a whole-life stance rather than pro-life. of course i simply relabeled things, however i hope it at least gets closer to who i really am. my point is this -- a label is often times misleading and doesn't tell the whole story. the rest of the story, as paul harvey would say (let me say that if i had something to poor out for the brother, i would have just now), is actually meeting with, talking to, and developing a relationship with that person, whoever they are, and loving them for all their perceived and labeled faults. it is too easy to go through life huddled up with people who believe the same things i do and care about the same things i do. in what might be a very poignant thought, i recently read that the beauty of our diversified belief in this country allows us to see ourselves in others (i apologize that i don't remember where i saw this -- and it is paraphrased to be sure).

but if i get back to the original point at hand it is this: just because we relabel someone who is really not financially secure, financially secure, it doesn't mean that they really are. furthermore, our house of cards that we build on top of that relabeling will eventually come crashing down, and well...it has already.

fourth, we think the people who are at the head of the major corporations in our country are both financially savvy and in way more stressful positions than we are. all of this may be true, but it is no substitute for ethical action on anyone's part. just because i believe someone is smart, does not mean that they will act smartly in all situations or that they get some kind of accountability free pass for stupid decisions. we have for too long decided that people who deal shadily in business are just playing politics and that the working joe or jane on the other end of the their shady dealing are the unsmart and less shrewd individuals (just see the case of Enron or more recently the Madoff scheme if you think i am kidding). the reality it seems to me is that we have decided those at the top of these decision making rackets are labeled as faulty but not really at fault. which excuse me, but how about the guy who perhaps makes the most prudent decision of selling drugs to support his family? we lock them up for years and demand restitution, but for those in the Enron scheme or Madoff himself, we think restitution is out of the question and will give him a slap on the wrist, but this is where the rich/poor label is most evident: our justice system. i won't go on about that, but it is worth thinking about, if only for the mental exercise, but hopefully for a change one day in how people are represented.

fifth, and finally, labels in washington, and i mean D.C. not the state, have prevented us at times from moving toward what i believe are real solutions to problems. i do not believe that a dichotomous solution of republican or democrat will ever really lead us to a true solution to those social or institutional ills of our society. i suggest that the third way, or that way that recognizes that we are not always politically "right" (not in the political spectrum kind of way) must win the day in order for us to begin to move that way. our representatives must be expected to do what is best for the totality of the people they serve not the interests they serve or the lobbyists they serve either...of course that was the idealistic vision of our representative democracy anyway. but in the real world, it means that we can be happy without being always right or always served. for whatever reason our needs seem to take precedence in matters of politics. and what i mean to say in that regard is this: that even though i may care about the poor, i must be comfortable first in order to care about the poor second, for example. we are at base self-preservationists, and this seems to operate most acutely in the world of politics.

so labels are necessary but they are not always ethical, and that is the short way of saying that in the five points above, i at least have some semblance of logic that suggests labels got us to the economic situation we are in. we will never escape labels, but i certainly hope we can begin to see through them just a little bit more.