On cherries and paychecks - Part 1

Some of you may have watched some of the mini-lectures the Royal Society of Arts has published recently. They are particularly palatable to the modern attention span as they are short and are accompanied by an amusing animator, who draws or writes everything the narrator says as he speaks.

This incredibly entertaining narrated animation points out that incentives for non-menial tasks aren't as simple as economists have long assumed. I recommend you watch it, but if you don't have the 11 minutes to spare, I'll summarize it below:



While motivation for simple tasks follows a straightforward compensation-results pattern, it is impossible to motivate someone to do complex work - work that requires moderate to high levels of creative thinking - simply by adding 0's to their paychecks. In fact, once their financial needs are met, paying them more can result in worse results. If we want to see innovative and quality work from employees, they must have the freedom to pursue mastery in what seems to them a purposeful direction.

Now, you may wonder what this has to do with you; most of us aren't managers employing technically sophisticated, highly skilled employees.

Truth is, though, that we're all employers. Our employees? Among others, farmers.

"How's that? I don't write paychecks for any fruit pickers! I don't spray fertilizer or choose crops."

As a matter of fact, yes, you do.

Few industries have become as market driven in America as agriculture has. I've seen a farmer tear out a mature, productive avocado orchard simply because the market couldn't support his avocados anymore, since cheaper fruit was available from Mexico. I've seen the same happen citrus in Camarillo. To prunes in Woodland. Thousands of healthy fruit trees, orchards that took years of time and thousands of dollars of investment to establish, ripped out in their prime because the market, because we, demanded something else. Blueberries instead of avocados. Walnuts instead of prunes.

Plant hedgerows because consumers care for the environment.[1]

Tear them out again, because consumers are scared of Salmonella.[2]

Farmers are market driven and we, the consumers, control the market. Though we don't often give them a thought, we employ farmers. You. Me.

What we want from our farmers:
Many of you are already aware of how critical a part of our lives our food system is. Not only are we dependent on food for sustenance, but science is increasingly showing that, as the 3rd world development slogan has it, "good food is good medicine." Our bodies are affected not only by our food choices, but by the actual ingredients in our meals. Cultures that eat unprocessed foods that were grown organically have less cancer, fewer cavities, and better health.

Furthermore, agriculture is perhaps the most fundamental nexus of our communities with our environment. A full 40% of the earth's land area is devoted to crops or pasture. An unhealthy relationship with that land results in a sick planet. And a planet made sick under our stewardship is not only a travesty, but means giving up gifts we enjoy every day, like clean water, clean air, songbirds, and a ready food supply for us and our children.

Not only should the agricultural industry be important to you because of your health and the planet's, but because it is our farmers, and their ability to innovate, on which our ability to feed our growing global population in the coming decades hangs. Global food demands have tripled in the past 70 years. So far, we've more-or-less kept up with a growing population,[3] but we've had to cash in a lot of our fossil fuel supply and topsoil to do so. Sustainable food supply growth will require extraordinary drive and innovation from our farmers.

So here's a challenge: We employ men and women and expect them to guard our health, our children's food supply and our environment. We want, we need, we demand innovation, creativity, and responsibility. But what incentives do we offer?

Its not a hard question. When was the last time you talked to your farmers? Shoot, when was the last time you even thought about a farmer? I study food systems, and even I don't know more than a handful of farmers. The fact is, the only tool most of us use to communicate with farmers is our wallet in the grocery store. And the message we're sending isn't pretty.

Think back to the avocado farmer I mentioned earlier. Nobody told him "We recognize and value your mastery and experience. Your trees are healthy and you're using your land well." Nobody said "We like your farming philosophy." In fact, the only message he got was the one we sent by way of the market, and that one was loud and clear: "We won't buy your avocados - the ones coming from Mexico are cheaper. Produce something big and colorful and sell it for less than your neighbor or someone in China will, or cash in your family's land to a developer." And so this farmer did what he had to - he bulldozed his avocado trees and planted blueberries. In southern California. Not blueberry country, but at current market prices he might be able to float it.

By speaking only through the market, and by speaking only about price, size, and color, we are stripping farmers of not only the incentive, but even the freedom to pursue things they believe in, to innovate, to be creative.[4] We are stripping them of the ability to do the very things we expect of them - produce delicious, healthy food in sustainable, environmentally positive ways. Instead, we encourage them to grow nasty, plastic tomatoes and erode our topsoil, simply by refusing to give them the financial freedom to do anything else. The profit margins that farmers receive are so slim that spraying pesticides or using GMOs is no longer a choice the farmer gets to makes; if its economical, its a choice he has to make.

So how can we do things differently? How can you and I change our habits to better incentivise our employees?

The answers are not easy. So far, I have found them difficult to derive and even harder to implement. Most of them require paradigm-level changes, uncomfortable adjustments in how I view and interact with my food supply. I've thought about this subject a lot, and written up some of my ideas in a post for next week. But first, I'd love to hear what your thoughts are. What is your relationship with your food supply? Would you like to see changes in farming techniques in your local area and if so, how do you see yourself incentivising farmers to change?

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[1] Hedgerows increase biodiversity, provide habitat for native fauna and beneficial insects, and reduce erosion, among other benefits.
[2] Hedgerows provide habitat for animals such as raccoons and coyotes, which can be potential carriers of Salmonella. The chance of actual contamination from such a source is minimal; as far as I know most of the recent scares have been anthropogenic, such as improper handling of harvest equipment. Nevertheless, buyers are leery and many farmers have had to reverse decades of environmental progress or risk losing an entire crop of spinach because of a single paw print in a drainage ditch next to their field.
[3] I say "more-or-less" because our food abundance has not been regionally homogeneous. 25,000 people a day still die from starvation or starvation-related diseases, but this number is partly due to political instability, poor market access, and poverty.
[4] Yes, the avocado-turned-blueberry farmer was creative. He innovated. But he innovated because he had to. In agricultural sociology, this is called the technology treadmill. The early innovators succeed, the late innovators fail, and as soon as everyone is on the treadmill the field is level again and everyone has to look for new innovations to get ahead. This form of competition eventually leads to fewer, larger farms and an inescapable servanthood to technology.

Clothes for an active lifestyle - quality of quantity?

I've never spent more than $5 for a pair of pants. My parents have bought me a few pairs for birthdays that probably hit $20, but in general, there wasn't much point in spending that much - what I didn't outgrow, I usually outlived.

I wear through clothes like a diarrhetic porcupine through a roll of TP. Some might apply the verb "trash" to my clothes usage, and it wouldn't be a big stretch. I've been aware of this for a while, so when I shop thrift stores I always look for the most rugged, durable-looking jeans in my size range... but they still wear out! And its not like I'm usually even doing anything crazy like sliding down rough granite or wrestling wolverines. The last pair of jeans I broke tore on a beach! The one before? Swing dancing!

Anyways, I'm in the process of sorting through all my personal belonging in preparation for my move to Florida, and I've come across a dilemma. Yesterday I sorted and packed all my "stuff", today comes my wardrobe. Fortunately, I've been planning for a transient early-adulthood lifestyle for a while now, so I don't have too much to work through in either category. I've realized, however, that I need to make some adjustments to my selection of trousers. The internship description for the farm I'll be working at starting in July recommends bringing "lightweight work clothes," "modest shorts," khakis for giving tours and some "nice clothes" for attending churches or conferences. As most of my pants currently are of the $5 don't-quite-fit-cause-I-bought-them-at-a-thrift-store variety, and none of them could be considered "lightweight" (important in FL's humid summers), its time for some exchanges. I can think of several options:

1. Keep the pants I have that are comfy or in good shape, and augment them with further thrift store purchases as these wear out. (We'll call this the 20x$5 option)
2. Invest in several pairs of decent pants that won't last much longer than thrift store pants, but at least will fit well and be of a lightweight material. (5x$20)
3. Research heavily and choose just one or two "ideal" pairs of pants, ones that are convertible, ultra-rugged, fit well, dry quickly, and look good. (something along the lines of this) (1x$100)

The advantage of options 1 and 2 is that I have a certain degree of flexibility in choosing a pair of pants in the morning. On the other hand, with option 3 some degree of flexibility is built in, and I have 4-96 less pairs of pants to shop for and cart around. There is a certain risk you run by putting all your money in one pot though, so perhaps option 2 is a good compromise.

In general, I prefer 1 of something that does the job well to 3 of something that do the job less well. It costs fewer resources (though not always money) and simplifies moving, cleaning, and organizing. But with my track record with clothes and everyone else's preference that the color of my pants doesn't clash with my T-shirts, is it worth it here? Thoughts?

Another post about food

I remember eating fennel from the garden occasionally as a kid - we would place entire fennel bulbs in a casserole dish and bake them in the oven with cheese. If you've never eaten cooked fennel before, you might expect it to to have an overpowering anise flavor, but this ends up being very faint; overall, the flavor is actually pleasantly sweet and mild.

Before our oven broke down in the fall, someone had planted fennel in the front yard. This may have actually been a year or more ago - by last week, the largest plant had a base nearly the size of my head, and many new pups had sprouted up nearby. Unfortunately, since we don't have a functioning oven and had only ever baked them before, we were at a slight loss of how to process it in quantity: I think the last harvest in December got turned into a pasta dish:


Well, as the fennel was flowering and threatening to seed out (never a good idea with this species, it tends to get invasive), we decided to tear the remaining plants out this week. I'm never a fan of throwing food out, so it was time to find some new stove-top fennel recipes!



I found a simple recipe on allrecipes.com that looked good, and it turned out great! The fennel is cooked in white wine and broth with a little honey and mustard. Here are the smaller bulbs (I cooked the large one as a separate meal) trimmed down and cleaned:



I followed the recipe pretty closely (I didn't have mustard seeds so I substituted ground mustard), and served it with spanish rice:



The result isn't particularly eye catching, but the tongue reacts differently! I would highly recommend fennel as a super easy vegetable to grow, and a great alternative if you find yourself tiring of the same old green beans every night.

A salad we didn't plant

Well, this blog has been mostly dormant since its inception, but I've decided to make a stab at posting regularly. So here goes a quick entry to start things off, and I have some further posts in the pipes that will hopefully show up here soon as well.

My parents bought the house we currently live a few years ago. At the time, the soil was fairly degraded, and apart from a lawn in need a good dethatching and your usual smörgåsbord of overutilized shrubs and trees, the flora consisted primarily of invasive European grasses, annuals, and a particularly obnoxious species of sorrel (Oxalis pes-caprae). Since then, the yard has been divided into several zones marked by various phases of ecological warfare. Our eventual goal is to have a rain-fed, low-maintenance garden that supports native wildlife
^[1] and produces food. Toward that goal, we have begun an aggressive but organic campaign of weed suppression and soil improvement. In the photo below you can see a stand of "green manure" in our side yard.

These plants, which include nitrogen-fixing fava beans (Vicia faba) and vetches (Vicia sp.), are then dug into the ground before setting seed, adding valuable organic matter to the soil. We then cover the soil in a thick layer of straw (foreground in picture), which helps suppress weeds until we are ready to landscape.^[2]

Anyway, today I was scything^[3] the patch of green manure in the photo above, and realized I was mowing a fair amount of miner's lettuce (Claytonia perfoliata) that was growing in the understory of the larger plants. My brother John had planted this California native from seed less than two years ago in a nearby bed, and it had spread prolifically.



Well, as the name implies, miner's lettuce happens to be one of the ~1000 California native plants that are edible. Without much trouble, I harvested enough plants from 3 square feet to make several salads over. For dinner we chopped up a portion of this, and added greens or flowers from four other weedy non-natives: Common chickweed (Stellaria media) tastes much like the Claytonia, Oxalis leaves add a tart zing, and borage (Borago officinalis) and nasturtium (Tropaeolum sp.) flowers add color:



All around a great crispy and refreshing salad, and all of it from naturalized plants!

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[1] In our case, we live half a mile from the nearest extant native habitat, so local wildlife means mostly birds and microfauna such as insects.
[2] Since we are currently also beginning a renovation of the house, we are holding off installing much of our permanent landscaping, to avoid having transplants crushed by contractors.
[3] Yup, my mother owns a honest-to-goodness scythe. Not only is it the most efficient and quiet weed-mowing tool I've ever used, it is by far the most fun!!

Where the Wild Things Are

Where the Wild Things Are is a children's movie. If I had three tickets and 4 children aged 3, 5, 8 and 12, I would probably take the bookend kids.

TTWTA is a feature length dramatization of a 10 sentence long children's picture book in which a child by the name of Max gets sent to his room after "making mischief" in his wolf costume, only to find his room transformed into a wonderful world where he becomes king of some scary looking Wild Things. In the end of the book he gets lonely and returns home. Most of you have probably read the book, and if you haven't, you missed out.

Little from the book was missing in the movie. It captured with startling candor the feelings of an imaginative child who feels ignored by the world, and the frustrations of trying to constructively interact with that world. At the same time, the film reveled in the joys of romping through the woods, sailing the high seas and making friends with Wild Things.

Most of the story, though, is a morality tale; the cast are the Wild Things and Max himself, Each one is an archetype of some behavior dysfunction, and each one exists so that our hero can observe the consequences of various social behavior. However, most of these dysfunctions aren't fully resolved. Rather, they are merely grappled with, played out long enough that somebody gets hurt but not long enough for the story to lead to real repentance or redemption. This underscores one of the frustrations of childhood - relationships are often just as complex as they are for adults, but you have far fewer tools with which to understand them. Why does that friend want to be alone? Does he not like me? What can I do about it? Starting a dirt clod fight sometimes helps... will it work here?

One of the wonderful things about this story is that each character longs deeply for community, for real and total co-acceptance. They yearn to be one of the gang, to be loved, to fall asleep in a giant pile of fur and feathers. Recognizing their own dysfunction, they wait for a true king, one who will save the world and fix the brokenness. Carol, the Wild Thing whose personality most closely mirrors Max's own, has a real child-like mix of raw hope and a raw fear, a hope that lets him embrace Max as a king, and a fear that throws him into rage as that dream crumbles. If this were a story that had supported that hope and quenched that fear, it would be a great children's story. But its not.

In fact, Carol's hope is the only one that can be described as child-like. For most, the yearning for community is buried in layers of despair or, worse yet, cynicism. And this, unfortunately, is the viewpoint that is supported in the end. While there are flickers of forgiveness and love between individuals, there is no grand redemption, no salvation. WTWTA is, at its core, an atheistic movie. Max does not represent merely an unworthy, phony, or incapable king. He represents a fairy tale, a false hope. "There is no such thing as a king," Carol is told. No king and no salvation, no family head or higher good. Any hope of community and family is left a leaderless mess.

Did I enjoy the movie? Absolutely. If you want to explore the mind of children dealing with loneliness, social frustration and anger, you should see this movie too. But unless you want to introduce your kids to a morality that is, at best, functionalist ethics set in a dysfunctional world, hire a sitter. (Or better yet, take your kids and talk with them afterwards!)

3.5/5