smh...

I still haven't figured out if that means "shaking my head" or "so much hate," but either way...
Fed up by my own continuing anger and frustration that is further exacerbated by all the social media commentary responding to the response to the Zimmerman verdict, I've reinitiated my facebook deactivation and am beginning a 20 day social media vacation.

All I can say is captured by part of my January post, so I'm reposting it here:

 During the eulogy at Medgar Evers' funeral, Roy Wilkins declared:

"The lurking assassin at midnight June 11 and 12 pulled the trigger, but in all wars the men who do the shooting are trained and indoctrinated and keyed to action by men and by forces which which prod them to act. And I say to you that the southern political system put that man behind the rifle. The lily white southern governments, local and state, the senators, the governors, the state legislators, the mayors, the judges, the sheriffs, the chiefs of police, the commissioners and all the rest. And not content with mere disenfranchisement, the office holders have used unbridled political power to fabricate a maze of laws and customs and economic practices which have imprisoned the negro...In far away Washington, the Southern system has its outpost in the congress of the U.S. and by their deals and maneuvers, they helped to put the man behind that deadly rifle this week. The killer must have felt that he had, if not an immunity, than certainly a protection for whatever he chose to do, no matter how dastardly." 

For those of us working towards a vision of racial justice in our communities and nationally, this quote sends shivers down our spines. It's nearly impossible to look at the facts, the interactions of laws, media and racially disparate outcomes, and say that this is no longer a reality. And what is so compelling about Wilkins' eulogy is that is speaks directly to the work that remains to be done, the work that the Rev. Dr. MLK Jr was working towards when he was similarly gunned down by a white man. Like the reality of the men who sat in my training challenging basic facts, our current debate about gun control and gun ownership rights, populated primarily by white men, exists in a vacuum that separates it from these structures and systems, making it nearly impossible to engage in a conversation where the dual realities experienced by whites and blacks are equally represented.

If you look at the song Only a Pawn in their Game, written by Bob Dylan in response to Evers' murder, we see the white shooter as protagonist, similarly to the premise of Wilkins's eulogy. While one might that think that this song is considering Evers' death "from the less obvious point of view," that of the shooter, this is where we must begin in picking up from where MLK (and many others) left off when he was murdered, examining the role of poverty, fear and intentionally divisive promotion of ignorance that put the gun in the shooter's hand in the first place. Dylan's song teaches us who the real enemy is- not the shooter, but the "the politicians, the police and the other branches of government, who's life blood is sustained by the status quo, a status quo that thrives on hatred and violence between the races" (Prial D,  The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music)

Though the national narrative has drastically changed since 1963 when a 22 year old Dylan, wrote the song, perhaps it's possible to transform the current white distrust for large institutions and systems into one in which the less enfranchised and less powerful of all races can critique the ignorance we are spoonfed by moneyed elites 365 days a year and move from a world in which we talk about the shooter himself as the protagonist, and peal back the layers of how this scene is being set in the first place. Because it's a scene that we see set every time there is a shooter, whether that shooter is an isolated young white male in suburban Connecticut,  a traumatized, invisible young black male in urban Connecticut or rural Mississippi. 

In service of racial justice, we must move from picking up the pieces of life and calling it a travesty and a shame when men like Medgar or Treyvon are murdered, and think about in whose name the shooters are acting. If the narrative tells them to act in the name of protecting the safety and rights of whites everywhere, or somewhere, maybe we need to think about the names of those whites. Maybe we need to think about what they have been taught to think when they see a woman like Myrlie Evers-Williams on TV and when they see her next to them on an airplane or in a courthouse.

If there's one message I hope my colleagues received in our training, it's that we are all responsible, regardless of the ways in which we've benefitted or been harmed, because as the Newtown massacre showed us, when we promote a world when shooting anyone is okay, we promote a world in which shooting anyone is okay.

Why Everyone Hates the Farm Bill (Except Not Really)

Well, Facebook is down and that apparently makes me a 100% more prolific blogger.

Yes, I just said that Facebook is down. Ok, don't go check--the truth is that it was only down for 5 minutest earlier this evening.

But nothing like the Farm Bill to bring a girl back to blogging. You can take the girl out of AFE, but you can't take the AFE out of the girl. Ya hear that @katmerrigan and @ashleyrdtx?
The House is expected to take up the Farm Bill tomorrow, or more accurately to take up "its" farm bill, which is different than the one the Senate passed earlier this month.

Most folks have probably heard about the major SNAP (formerly known as food stamps) cuts in the House bill, which are way bigger than the substantial SNAP cuts passed in the Senate bill, and amount to $20 billion which is equivalent to half of the total amount the federal government pays towards food banks and food charities, according to Bittman.

But did you know that nobody, and absolutely nobody likes the House Farm Bill? Well, according to the NYTimes, at least. Not the liberals (which I can validate from what I've been reading on my email feed and hearing in the halls of my office), not the conservatives, not the agricultural economists. And judging by the fact that the President issued a Statement of Administrative Policy (SAP) threatening to veto it, not the centrists either.

So, you might wonder, how could a bill dreadful enough to be panned by Agriculture Economists round the country (that's a joke, people. Ag Economists notoriously hate most policy proposals that have a shred of political viability) have enough of a chance of passing that the Speaker would dare put it on the House floor?

Any student of Farm Bill history could answer that one. Pork. And lots of it. And by pork I mean, catfish, temperate japonica rice (aka sushi), christmas trees, alfalfa, marble, and a whole lotta crop insurance. And not to imply that my side is immune to said pork, you'd also get incentives for the consumption of fruits and vegetables by low-income individuals, efforts to increase participation of small scale farmers in federal nutrition programs, and a review of the public health benefits of white potatoes on low-income Americans (actually, I'm not sure who that last one is to appease-- the "potato" people or the "low-income Americans" people).

And just to make you feel like you live in an even saner country, when the House debated this afternoon on the "rule" for how the Farm Bill will be considered when it comes to the floor--meaning how open the debate and allowances for amendments will be--it simultaneously was considering a bill "to protect pain-capable unborn children in the District of Columbia, and for other purposes."

MLK and Gun Violence: Reflections on racial justice and what can we learn from Medgar Evers' widow

This year as Martin Luther King Day approached, I relished the many recent opportunities in my personal and professional to reflect on what the legacy of Reverend MLK Jr's vision for racial justice means for white Americans today. In particular, 2 weeks ago I co-facilitated a training on racial justice for a multi-racial group of colleagues, a segment of whom, a group of mostly white males embedded in the public safety and military worlds, were deeply resentful of the challenge that recognizing the persistence of structural racism and white privilege meant for them. By the end of the training, most of the small group of nay-sayers was willing, perhaps if only to please us, to admit that some element of structural racism does still exist--that, in their words, "personal responsibility isn't always enough," though reluctant to utter this sentence without appending that "it should be [enough]."

While the experience of hostility in the training was deeply draining and certainly took an emotional toll on both the facilitators and the others in the group, it felt like a rare opportunity to present a new framework to folks who weren't already at least on the precipice of adopting it on their own anyway. In other words, in our polarized society, this seemed like the unusual experience of not preaching the choir, and opportunity that I cherish.

While the training strives to move people through several parts of a pathway to understand the multiple realities of race that exist and have historically existed in America, what we hope to ultimately drive participants to, is the essence of MLK's later work, in which low income and struggling people of all races could come together and recognize their common humanity, and common needs which are not already prioritized by the prevailing economic and political systems in the US, clearly still true today. 

This year's MLK day represents something of a nexxus in which the re-election of our first black president will be feted on the national observation of our most celebrated racial justice leader; so President Obama's choice of Myrlie Evers-Williams to give the invocation at his 2nd and final public inauguration. Evers-Williams is most famous as the widow of Medgar Evers, who was NAACP secretary for the state of Mississippi, when he was murdered in 1963 by Byron De Beckwith, a member of the White Citizens Council, who lived freely for nearly three decades until he was finally convicted of the crime in 1994. Notably, prior to surviving her husband's murder and lack of any kind of prompt justice, she had survived their home being firebombed in 1962, multiple death threats from the KKK, and went on to be a leading national civil rights advocate to this day, including continuing the fight to bring De Beckwith to justice and later becoming the national NAACP chair.

What the rationale is behind the President's choice of Evers-Williams is an interesting question- he could be playing into the popular American narrative in which we celebrate and mourn those heroes who gave their time and in some cases their lives to the cause of becoming a "more perfect nation," accepting the parallel narrative in which we have supposedly reached or come close to achieving a post-racial society. However, given what Obama chose to say in his first campaign's one famous "race" speech (oh, what some of us would give for the version of him that uttered that speech to resurface), I would postulate that he is making a different claim, which perhaps we will hear reference to in her invocation.

In this claim, the questions of race and racism embedded deep within our systems and psyches are still very real and present, all the more important that we hear from someone like Evers-Williams on a national stage before it is too late. Someone who experienced a judicial system which did not convict the person who was well known to have killed her husband into the mid 90's, a time by which the prevailing narrative insists racism had ceased to hold any power. Whereas the latent racism has sprung up in the form of personal attacks on President Obama, very thinly veiled in coded language (sometimes) free of explicit reference to race, the real narrative understands that the root causes and solutions, the "real" racism, does not begin or end with one man, but with the structures and systems that shape our lives, white, black, and all shades of brown.

 During the eulogy at Medgar Evers' funeral, Roy Wilkins declared:

"The lurking assassin at midnight June 11 and 12 pulled the trigger, but in all wars the men who do the shooting are trained and indoctrinated and keyed to action by men and by forces which which prod them to act. And I say to you that the southern political system put that man behind the rifle. The lily white southern governments, local and state, the senators, the governors, the state legislators, the mayors, the judges, the sheriffs, the chiefs of police, the commissioners and all the rest. And not content with mere disenfranchisement, the office holders have used unbridled political power to fabricate a maze of laws and customs and economic practices which have imprisoned the negro...In far away Washington, the Southern system has its outpost in the congress of the U.S. and by their deals and maneuvers, they helped to put the man behind that deadly rifle this week. The killer must have felt that he had, if not an immunity, than certainly a protection for whatever he chose to do, no matter how dastardly." 

For those of us working towards a vision of racial justice in our communities and nationally, this quote sends shivers down our spines. It's nearly impossible to look at the facts, the interactions of laws, media and racially disparate outcomes, and say that this is no longer a reality. And what is so compelling about Wilkins' eulogy is that is speaks directly to the work that remains to be done, the work that the Rev. Dr. MLK Jr was working towards when he was similarly gunned down by a white man. Like the reality of the men who sat in my training challenging basic facts, our current debate about gun control and gun ownership rights, populated primarily by white men, exists in a vacuum that separates it from these structures and systems, making it nearly impossible to engage in a conversation where the dual realities experienced by whites and blacks are equally represented.

If you look at the song Only a Pawn in their Game, written by Bob Dylan in response to Evers' murder, we see the white shooter as protagonist, similarly to the premise of Wilkins's eulogy. While one might that think that this song is considering Evers' death "from the less obvious point of view," that of the shooter, this is where we must begin in picking up from where MLK (and many others) left off when he was murdered, examining the role of poverty, fear and intentionally divisive promotion of ignorance that put the gun in the shooter's hand in the first place. Dylan's song teaches us who the real enemy is- not the shooter, but the "the politicians, the police and the other branches of government, who's life blood is sustained by the status quo, a status quo that thrives on hatred and violence between the races" (Prial D,  The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music)

Though the national narrative has drastically changed since 1963 when a 22 year old Dylan, wrote the song, perhaps it's possible to transform the current white distrust for large institutions and systems into one in which the less enfranchised and less powerful of all races can critique the ignorance we are spoonfed by moneyed elites 365 days a year and move from a world in which we talk about the shooter himself as the protagonist, and peal back the layers of how this scene is being set in the first place. Because it's a scene that we see set every time there is a shooter, whether that shooter is an isolated young white male in suburban Connecticut,  a traumatized, invisible young black male in urban Connecticut or rural Mississippi.

In service of racial justice, we must move from picking up the pieces of life and calling it a travesty and a shame when men like Medgar or Treyvon are murdered, and think about in whose name the shooters are acting. If the narrative tells them to act in the name of protecting the safety and rights of whites everywhere, or somewhere, maybe we need to think about the names of those whites. Maybe we need to think about what they have been taught to think when they see a woman like Myrlie Evers-Williams on TV and when they see her next to them on an airplane or in a courthouse.

If there's one message I hope my colleagues received in our training, it's that we are all responsible, regardless of the ways in which we've benefitted or been harmed, because as the Newtown massacre showed us, when we promote a world when shooting anyone is okay, we promote a world in which shooting anyone is okay.

settling for unfair food for a fair price? a tale of two grocery stores

I go to sleep tonight feeling very conflicted and pained about the meeting I just attended, about the recent lease to Whole Foods of the 47-year Jamaica Plain landmark Hi-Lo foods, a medium sized, affordably priced grocery store, which sold a variety of Latino and Caribbean foods. After news of the lease slowly leaked through Hi-Lo’s employees to community leaders and the press in the past few weeks, it became the talk of the neighborhood, and much of Boston; community organizations planned tonight’s meeting, which was an opportunity for JP residents to speak out about how they were feeling about the loss of Hi-Lo, and the impending presence of Whole Foods in the community.

When I initially heard about the lease, I was extremely upset, in part because living a few blocks from the Hi-Lo was one of the things I was most excited about when I moved here 18 months ago, yet I felt conflicted because I had not made this store the primary focus of my grocery shopping since living here, as I wrote about in this prior post. I have had myriad conversations about the issue over the past few weeks and had been reading the press coverage voraciously, yet I was apparently unprepared for many of the concerns and feelings that tonight’s remarks brought up for me.

The primary arguments many of us in the community seem to have with this change, is that Hi-Lo represented a bastion of the Latino cultural heritage of JP, as well as the best source of affordable food in the neighborhood, much of which was quite healthy. Combine that with the gentrification, corporatization, globalization and disrespect for labor symbolized by Whole Foods, and you start to get the picture of the anger and disillusionment present in the room this evening. Although I am quite devastated by Hi-Lo’s closing and not happy about it being replaced by Whole Foods, I found myself surprisingly sympathetic to Whole Foods after I heard the remarks tonight, or rather, sympathetic to the segment of the market which Whole Foods products serves. I recognize that in fact, Whole Foods’ preference for supposedly “healthier” products may have a net negative impact on the health of JP residents, since those former Hi-Lo shoppers whose price points for fruits, vegetables and other healthy foods are below the prices at Whole Foods, may end up buying less healthy food and more unhealthy food at other stores. For all the complaining about the quality of Hi-Lo’s produce done by people who could afford to shop elsewhere, the truth is that the store had a variety of fruits and vegetables at an affordable price, in a convenient environment when people were buying other foods there as well.

Yet when one of the meeting’s organizing groups talked about the price survey they had recently done comparing the prices of staple foods at Whole Foods and at Hi-Lo, I felt like I was being forced to dump half of my core values in support of the other half. For we know that in fact, the eggs sold at Whole Foods, are not the same eggs sold at Hi-Lo. While I am upset about the loss of this affordable, culturally diverse and healthy grocery option, I don’t think that the prices of Whole Foods products are actually the problem. As we know, the price of food in this country is way too cheap, and the reason why a growing percentage of our population cannot afford nutritious food (to which they may not have convenient access) is not actually that the food is to expensive, but rather is due to our nation’s rapidly increasing income inequality and lack of value on ensuring adequate incomes or a seamless safety net. So my true hope would be that everyone could afford the food at Whole Foods. Not because I want Whole Foods to expand or because I think they are a great company. To the contrary- one of the highlights of the evening was when a friend of mine spoke about her struggles as a Whole Foods employee in Madison, WI among a group from the only Whole Foods store to ever try to organize--an effort which was quashed by the store.

I am not a a Whole Foods apologist. What I am, is a "good food" or "fair food" apologist. While the store may represent a series of elitist qualities antithetical to JP, much of the food sold at Whole Foods is consistent with my values and those of many of my neighbors, and I don’t think we can lose sight of that. What will become a daily life issue for the residents of JP and beyond who will not be able to buy the affordable eggs they bought at Hi-Lo, is also a daily life issue for the thousands of small farmers who have been driven out of their livelihoods by the corporate production of cheap eggs for stores like Hi-Lo, not to mention the lives of the people who will die because of the irresponsible use of antibiotics and hormones fed to egg laying hens.

And although this fight seems to be primarily about what Whole Foods represents for the gentrification of the neighborhood and the lack of transparency or public process that has happened during this business transaction, the remarks nevertheless frequently demonized both the people who shop at Whole Foods and the products sold there, which has led to my fundamental tension with the arguments. Can we at least try to raise up the values of cultural heritage and tradition inherent in Hi-Lo's food without demonizing the values in many of Whole Foods' products?

I don’t see how we can talk about the bread and butter issues of food prices in our communities and exclude from the conversation the entire chain of people and communities impacted by the path that food has taken to get to our stores. I’m not saying Whole Foods is the answer, but they are a major player in the market and represent a significant buyer of many of the small-scale, just and sustainable producers that are the only answer we have to our inequitable food system. And many of these producers hate Whole Foods and do everything in their power to avoid selling to them, but we haven’t created enough other options yet--what represents bourgeousie self-indulgence to many JP residents represents the difference between debt and greater debt, health insurance or college tuition for many small farmers.

The fact that we are taught by the mainstream media and our society that only the children of privilege can be conscious of the lives impacted by the foods they purchase is unacceptable. We must reunite consumers of all classes, races and regions to the movements for just food, and cease trying to create divisions based on our differences, whether they are based in place or class, race or type of community.

blog roll for a snowy sick day

what's better than a sick day that is pre-empted by a snow day?
what did you say? it's also groundhog day? why i can't think of anything quite as lovely!

here are a few wonkerific food policy blog posts to read on a snow day, a sick day or both:

• First up, a bit more detail about why I'm always railing against Trader Joe's- their private label shenanigans. I do shop there myself, but don't appreciate the groupthink around TJ's being god's gift to the (sub)urban grocery shopper. they have some good stuff, some of it at good prices, but they also have a lot of processed crap that you don't really need to buy.

• Marion Nestle's more in-depth second peek at the new 2010 Dietary Guidelines.

• A pretty neat new "crowd-sourcing" project called 20ate from Roger Doiron, who brought us Kitchen Gardeners International and the White House Organic Gardening Project. To counteract the snack food industry's bullshit new "national snack month," it asks us to use social media to sign on to promote a healthy snack for each of the 28 days of February, to replace the processed ones they are pushing. This is definitely something I can get behind, having developed a decent arsenal of fairly healthy homemade snacks over the past few years, most of which are baked in the oven or the stove. Here's to hoping I'll keep posting about them all month! #20ate

And drumroll please.....
Today's favorite. Not sure if this is the inaugural edition of Mark Bittman's revamped NYTimes gig or just a special number, but it's just as lovely as today is. Most people heart Mark Bittman's recipes. I heart his succinct way of writing the nuanced messages about food and society that are so desperately needed in the blogosphere and the public sphere. Keep it up, Mark! Maybe you should testify at a Congressional hearing like Stephen Colbert did!

Gentrifier's Lament

Wow. I just signed on to facebook to some terrible news that Hi-Lo, the mid-sized, locally-owned Latino grocery store that is a couple blocks from my house is closing in a few weeks and is being replaced by Whole Foods.

I used to live across the river in a city starting with "C" about 2 blocks from Whole Foods, which I walked past every day on my way home from the bus or train. One of the reasons I moved to this particular neighborhood was the Hi-Lo, or rather it was one of the things I was most excited about when I decided to move to this neighborhood.

But yet, I've found myself shopping there only on rare occassions over the past 16 months that I've lived here. The excuses I generally tell people are that it closes at 7 and is not directly on my way home from work, such that I can never get there except on the weekend. The first question I must ask myself is--why do I still find myself driving to Stop and Shop or other larger supermarket even when I do house grocery shops on the weekend?

But more fundamentally, if I talk so much talk about locally-owned businesses and affordable, culturally-appropriate, healthy food, why are my actions so inconsistent with my espoused values? What does this say about me, and secondly about my kind- the left-leaning do-gooder young white gentrifiers who have moved into this neighborhood with zeal? Is there anything we can do to address this situation and more importantly could we have prevented it?

Polls, the Media, Competitive Races and Urban Voter Turnout

A few weeks ago, I received a voicemail at work from a constituent who had been forwarded my work number in her efforts to find out the winners of last month's primary in Boston's urban districts. While I was not able to provide her with this information, I offered her where she could obtain it from the Secretary of State's office and we had a conversation which led me to understand why she was seeking the information. She was a longtime community activist who had worked at the polls during the primary but had never heard who won the local primary contests, and felt that the local media had been negligent at best, and intentionally biased at worst, in not reporting the results of the urban contest, choosing instead to focus on the results in several (primarily white), affluent suburban districts. My initial response was that this was less malicious and more a reflection of the traditional media bias towards drama and a fight-- the media focused on the elections that were most close and contentious, the contests for which even those "in the know" weren't sure who would win. However, I did admit that this did leave voters in many districts in the dark, once again furthering the idea that media chooses only to report on negative and often violent events in urban neighborhoods, neglecting important activities like civic responsibility and local leadership that are reflected in primary election contests. What better incentive for a poll worker to never repeat their civic duty than a media that chooses not to report or focus on the results of the contest that they enabled.

Fast forward to this afternoon-- as I sat on my Airtran flight to the Community Food Security Coalition conference in NOLA, the political dork within me was fascinated to find, on the free in-flight radio's CSPAN station, a broadcast of a debate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies--the host institution of the wonderful Place Matters Initiative, in which I have participated, about current election issues relating to the African-American community.

During the debate, a fascinating point was made about the relationship between various elections and urban voter turnout. One of the debaters highlighted the fact that many of the strongest members of the Congressional Black Caucus lack any or significant opposition in the current election, making it harder to turn out (assumedly Democratic) voters in their districts for the uber-important Senate and Gubenatorial races, whose outcomes will most likely depend on the degree to which the Democratic base can be turned out in cities. If Bobby Rush, in their example, had a real opponent, then more black folks in his district would turnout, increasing the chances the statewide Democratic candidates have of winning.

We have several races and ballot questions in Massachusetts that rely on this very same phenomenon, and for the first time, it makes me sad that so many of our strongest urban state legislators are unopposed. For the entire election season, I have been counting our collective Boston blessings for every ally in the legislator who is unopposed, given the fleeting voter interest in incumbents in Massachusetts. However, this report made me rethink the entire scenario, and also brings into play the comments of the constituent activist in last week's phone call.

If more of the Boston urban legislators were opposed, according to the Joint Center's theory, they would be forced to mobilize voters in their districts, who by all past and current voter models, would be likely to vote for Democratic statewide candidates and against the regressive measures we'll find on our ballots next month.

Further, by choosing to ignore the primary contests that did exist in Boston's neighborhoods, the media distracted attention from the general election contests that will be taking place there, both doing a disservice to urban readers and viewers, and further serving the interests of the "disenchanted" suburban voters, whose interests have been dominating the political circuit and the TV for the past year or more. By reporting more about these suburban "upset" races, where highly conservative Republicans and tea partiers are given a platform from which to speak, the media is tacitly endorsing Republican candidates and neglecting to give even GOTV impact to urban Democratic districts.

Any ideas for possible solutions to this problem?