Comments Valentine has made

  • state fairs

    Ok, so I know it's not a contest (well, maybe it is), but Minnesota State Fair this year = 1,693,533! (I know, you were there, too) -- but coming from the Northeast, this scale is really remarkable (The most hard core ag fairs like MOFGA's Common Ground = ~60,000, although to be fair, the Big-E got 1,227,889 last year, although that is all the NE states together.)

    And the corn! Yes corn dogs (and presumably in the rest of the fried food?), but show corn, and how much of that 500 lbs of butter is really, at the end of the day, corn? Yes, this is a preoccupation of the Midwest, and a major difference with the Northeast. And yes, mostly straightforward big ag here, but with this many visitors already, there's a lot of room to cultivate engagement with progressive ag. (The eco-experience, Minnesota cooks, the great farmer trading cars -- and farmer playing cards, even!)On What I saw at the Iowa State Fair, the nation's most popular annual food event posted 1 year, 2 months ago 7 Responses

  • Understanding problems can help us address them

    Important observations, Stephanie -- what if we pick up this theme you mention of "lifestyle choice" and consider it in light of fair livelihood? The comments keep coming back to this question of adequate livelihood, associated either with agriculture or with other forms of work; considering "lifestyle choice" as a larger category may be useful here, because it encourages us to consider how "making enough money" and "satisfactory quality of life" could be reconciled, instead of antagonistic (as in the scenario you describe).

    Considering livelihood in this more integrated way also then includes considering the quality of life of those rural-to-urban migrants Jonas mentions; I won't deny widespread rural poverty (or the role of bourgeois lifestyles in exacerbating it), but I also don't agree that we can dismiss agrarian & rural ways of life out of hand so quickly; for one thing, the post-migration quality of life of many of these migrants is pretty questionable, and the employment situation when they reach growing (often mega-)cities (especially after they pass through the desirable young-quick worker demographic) is far from win-win. (How many people dispossessed from their farmland, for example, become "wealthy people, who have few children, and enough money to invest in luxury ideas like organic farming"?)

    When the political economy Stephanie describes (and Jonas kind of lampoons) seems overwhelming, it may be useful to remember why the food movement has been so attractive to so many people: by providing us a view into these problems of the global food economy, the food system not only illuminates how the labor issues Stephanie describes in rural Colorado are linked to geopolitics and the ethics of more global social questions, but the same food system also provides entry points for activism and highlights the agency we do have in the face of these daunting problems, as Stephanie and Ariane have been demonstrating and documenting for us in their exploration of "the Fields."

    These explorations are helpful for the rest of us in figuring out what kind of aspirations we share -- and also in identifying differences of perspective (differences, I might suggest, that we consider with a bit more self-consciousness: many of us are aware that scientific opinion still differs on why organic farming may be valuable, and while the Society of Chemical Industry report you cite provides an interesting view on pesticides, it's not very focused on, say, micronutrients or long-term soil health, so probably not a large or legitimate enough study to be able to completely invalidate claims for the value of organics).

    Thanks for this valuable gift -- this gift economy of discourse would be one of those aspects of quality of life that's hard to account in the calculus of mere income.On Can sustainable farming provide a sustainable living? posted 1 year, 3 months ago 26 Responses