Spam and How It Gets That Way

Mother Jones has a pretty awful article about the inner workings at the Spam factory in Austin, Minnesota. It’s awful both in what you learn about how Spam gets that way, but also for how little Hormel cares about the undocumented workers who get sick making it. Of course, being undocumented, they don’t count for much.

My vegan friends & family say, “What did you expect?” But I sincerely hope that the farms that breed my grass-fed beef and “natural” pork, and Chipotle’s pork “with integrity,” are better than this.

Temporarily off the grid

A storm blew through here Friday that didn’t seem as bad as some this Spring but apparently packed some 80 mph winds. Driving into the neighborhood on the way home there were 8-foot tree branches in the road, and later, after dinner, our power went out.

Previously I’ve thought how woefully unprepared we are for being temporarily off the grid, particularly in winter. We don’t have a wood-burning anything inside the house and the gas fireplace turns on with a switch. But we did just fine for summer. Within minutes we had a variety of candles going in the windowless bathroom where my son was in the bath. And tea lights and candles in the kitchen and sun porch. We read bedtime stories by flashlight, but mostly the outage made us sit in our sun porch and watch the storm and clouds pass over.

An old friend of mine and I have a standing joke about weather. He was moving back to California from Washington and Boston because he was tired of the weather interfering with his planned activities. And I was moving away — first to Tucson, then Denver, now here — for the opposite reason. I typically close notes to him with “I hope the weather isn’t interfering with your plans,” and he typically writes to me that he hopes it will. Friday and Saturday, for 21 hours, we got that wish.

Make friends with a farmer, eat more kale

Nice to see a front-page feature on the growth of community-supported agriculture in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune this week. The Strib story says that 11,000 Minnesotans are now receiving food through CSAs, which puts us a little behind the national trend (US estimate is about 270,000 households), but still great growth. (And, for full disclosure, much as I’m a huge fan of CSA, I have yet to get things organized and sign up for a share in the springtime. I suck. One does have to be a little intentional about this, although the internet has made it a lot easier to get connected, with sites such as Local Harvest.)

Favorite quote from the Strib story about why this is important, beyond just providing good support for farmers – you end up eating healthier.

“We’ve learned to eat things we never would have tried,” said Judy Goebel of Richfield, a member of Philadelphia Community Farm for more than 15 years. “Like arugula. The first few times, I wasn’t so sure. Now I’m crazy about the stuff.”

Amberson said she tried kale for the first time last year after finding it in her CSA box. “It’s a great way to introduce new vegetables into our lives,” she said. Her household is eating healthier since joining a CSA, in part because “I hate to waste anything. Last year, we’d have two or three vegetable servings at dinner when normally we’d have one.”

CSAs are also great for linking the consumer to the farmer’s world. You end up following the weather and rooting for the crops to grow. Even though we haven’t yet signed up for a CSA, my children and I do pick berries all summer. We’ve had a cold and wet spring here and we’ve been sad about the late and meager pickings for strawberries, just like our local farmers. Those of us up here in Minnesota can get pretty boring talking about the weather all the time. This at least gives us a good reason to do it.

Six Reasons to Love the Prairie Region

Yahoo published a list of the 10 most affordable cities in the US, balancing the cost of housing against income. These are places where you can live affordably and at least theoretically spend more of your money on living and less on living quarters. Six of the ten are from the prairie regions, stretching from southeastern Minnesota and Iowa down to Oklahoma. Cass County, ND (home of Fargo) and Brown County, SD (home of Aberdeen) were #1 and #2 respectively.

It shouldn’t be totally surprising: today in the midday open thread of a blog in which I regularly participate, one commenter asked another why he would move from the coast to Des Moines, IA. (The commenter noted that his preference was to live on the coasts.) I nearly piped in that I had once clung to the coasts with similar fear, but since I had moved steadily toward the country’s center (from Oakland to Tucson to Denver to Minnesota), life has gotten better.

Then again, there’s no arguing that one. Most people look at the prairie and its lack of trees fills them with fear of dread. (Even before the wind starts blowing.) And maybe that’s all for the best. We often joke that were it not for its legendary winters, Minnesota would probably be overrun for its glorious summers. It’s our protection against becoming the next boom state. And why it’s so cheap.