Racializing

Though I wasn't in the US when it happened, and didn't follow the news commentary that followed and surrounded it, I do have my own take on the Trayvon Martin shooting, based on the straight reporting of the facts of the case that I've been able to access.  As I understand, an unarmed teenager was accosted by an armed vigilante with an extensive history both of crime and of neurotic, pathological playing policeman.  The vigilante trailed the kid in a car, got out of his car, a struggle ensued including a pleading of the teenager for his life, and the vigilante finally shot and killed him.  We don't know many more facts of the case, and even these that we know are murky, but I don't see how any aspect of what we know could cast doubt on the fact that there was one armed vigilante and one unarmed teenager, and the latter was killed by the former's close-range gunfire.  What we have now is much like the situation of a hit-and-run car accident with no witnesses in which the perpetrator is known by all but protected by a ridiculous claim that he was somehow justified in killing the victim.

I don't see or care much about what race has to do with this particular incident.  Obviously Martin was a black kid living in what used to be one of the most racist, murderous, awful places for blacks to live in the US (central Florida).  But the tragedy for me is that a kid was murdered, and that the state of Florida has a law on the books that would allow a vigilante psychopath to kill someone and run.  Race doesn't enter into my understanding or interpretation of this particular situation.

A few months ago I read this piece from James Howard Kunstler about race in the wake of the Trayvon Martin murder.  Basically he uses the shooting as an occasion to voice his opinion on what he describes as a generalized black failure to thrive in the US.  I guess I appreciate hearing his reflections on the root causes of economic and social poverty and pathology.  And it seems his blog post is a response to what he must have seen as an excessive deluge of racial discourse surrounding the Martin killing.  That said, I don't see how the murder of an unarmed kid is a very appropriate occasion to take advantage of to voice your opinion on much of anything, especially when your thoughts seem to cast blame on that shooting victim and his entire ethnic group not just for their economic straits but even for getting murdered.  In particular the ending line of "people don't get shot for nothing" seems to me a very ugly and sinister thing to say.

At any rate, Kunstler's post seems to me indicative of a common thing we do in the US, which is see everything in racial terms.  How else could you explain the focus on race from so many commentators on the Martin murder, and especially the tone of people like Kunstler who see black failure and laziness even in the shooting of an innocent kid?

I am currently in the US, in my hometown of Chicago which, among its few flaws, is obsessed with race.  We are consistently rated the most segregated city in the US, and in my few days here this time I have already been reminded multiple times of the white working-class ritual of peppering their conversations with scorn for black people.  In the same breath I have had close friends imply that blacks are lazy and shiftless, and then heap scorn on preteen black kids that come up to my neighborhood to play buckets like drums to get money from Cubs fans.  I mean, if you don't want someone to be lazy, how can you then fault a kid for having the initiative to make some extra money by working hard?  It's a clear demonstration of how incoherent and stupid racism is, that stereotypes can simultaneously affirm a thing and its very opposite of a racial group and its members.

Anyway, this trip our sightseeing has taken us to the city's South Side, which in the areas I have reason to go to is mainly black in population.  We've gone to Rainbow Beach, different museums, and today an amazing, uplifting Catholic Mass at St. Sabina's Church at 79th and Racine.  I would highly recommend this latter sight, which my wife said was the most exciting and enjoyable and least boring Mass she'd ever been to.

What has most jumped out at me in these few visits to black Chicago is that, contrary to what many white Chicagoans might think, the black side of town and the people in it are not that different from whites or any other group in Chicago.  At the beach they mainly do beach things, at the church they do church things, at restaurants they do restaurant things, and on the street they do street things (I mean "street things" in the sense of walking and talking and sweating more than the sense of illegal, violent things, though of course there's plenty of that too in some black Chicago neighborhoods).  They may do them with a different accent or while listening to different music, but the idea that many whites entertain of a different, weird, almost scary way of living and doing things in black neighborhoods is silly.  The flipside of this is explored very well by Eddie Murphy's ridiculous, funny imagining of how white folks act when black people aren't around.

Another point that follows from this is that black people in a big city don't mind white people too much, any more than anyone in a big city pays much attention to strangers of any color.  I think white Chicagoans avoid going to places with mainly blacks in part because they imagine they'll stand out, or everyone will point at them, or rob them, or something like that.  Racial neuroses reduce adults to the level of self-centered teenagers that think everyone is looking at their zit!  As it so happens, my wife and kid and mother and I have indeed stood out in the recent all-black venues we've visited, but no one seemed to care very much that we were there.  I imagine it's like when I or someone from my neighborhood sees four or five blacks in a crowd of a hundred people.  We notice them, but we don't give them much thought, hostile or otherwise.  When people did take notice of us (especially in Mass), they were if anything welcoming and warm and happy to share with us. 

I am not saying that race doesn't exist, or that it isn't an important factor in many social realities.  But I think we'd all do well to sort of get over ourselves and our dear ideas of how big a deal race is.  Sociologists say race is a social construct, which is probably true but is a very abstract idea.  My wife made it more concrete for me.  Because she comes from a mestizo and mulatto society outside the US, it is difficult for her to distinguish who is actually considered black in our culture, and certainly to understand how much we obsess over color.  My wife felt that most of the people in the black church we went to would be considered white in Colombia, because they don't have dark skin and unquestionably, exclusively "African" features.  Blacks in the US come in many colors, with different noses and eyes and ears and even hair than what you'd see in an African country.  If it weren't for her knowing that we were in a black church, singing black songs with black accents, my wife might not have determined clearly that these were all black people and not simply white folks with varying levels of tan.

Things that make us fat

My wife and I are currently visiting family and friends in Chicago, and I have been compiling a little mental list of certain traits in our modern US society that promote the obesity that afflicts so many of us.  Of course by now everyone knows about an excessively car-based culture, lack of exercise, and too much pop and fast food.  But I thought I'd note these other little quirky things that seem to me to favor weight gain, and that I would never have noticed if I hadn't spent some time outside of the US and then come back as a semi-outsider.  So here goes:

Portion sizes.  I'm of course not the first to say this, but portion sizes in US restaurants are often just huge.  Really about twice the size of what I'd expect in a Colombian restaurant.  Same thing with juice in bottles, which is often like three times what any normal human being would want to drink in one sitting.

Eating out a lot.  These large portions wouldn't be such a problem if we were smart and took the excess half home in a doggy bag.  Then we'd get two meals for the price and calories of one.  Even if you were to eat an entire excessive restaurant portion once a week or once a month, it wouldn't be a big deal.  But if it's an almost everyday occurrence, you're sure to get fat.  If you eat out all the time, you'll never take home doggy bags, and never use them even if you do.  So you fall into the trap of constantly eating much more than you should. 

Concentrated calories.  In Colombia you sometimes do get a huge portion of food at a meat grill place, but even this seems less obesity-promoting than in the US.  You see, in Colombia a big part of any obscenely sized plate is plantain, potato, and cassava, mostly boiled and seasoned.  These foods are mainly water by weight, with a lot of fiber, so they fill you up with water and bulk in addition to the starch.  Conversely, many restaurant foods in the US aren't even that big physically (a burger and fries doesn't take up much space on the plate or in the belly), but there's little water and fiber in them.  In the case of fries, the water has been entirely replaced by calorie-filled oil.  So a lot of US fast food or comfort food has really concentrated calories. 

Buying prepared food.  This last point of concentrated calories brings up the larger issue of eating fresh food vs. eating food that comes to you already processed in some way.  I think most people are aware by now that heavily processed foods like cheetos or pop are bad for you.  But I'm going even further to say that even light processing can be dangerous if it happens out of your sight.  For instance, when we make juice in Colombia, we take fresh fruit that we've selected and bought at the market, we blend that fruit with water, we strain out the seeds and some of the pulp, and we mix it with unprocessed molasses to sweeten it.  This is almost unheard of in the States, in part because fresh fruit can be so pricey that it would be a waste to just blend it up.  At any rate, the result is that when you get juice in the US, usually it has had all the fiber taken out, and an amount of sugar that you didn't control.  In other words, what isn't normally a calorie-concentrated food becomes one.  The same applies to potatoes you've cooked versus pre-fried potatoes, or ground beef you watched get ground vs. some mixed ground beef with filler you got in styrofoam at the supermarket.  When you don't use fresh ingredients in their original state, you don't know what has been taken out of them or added, and as such you are prone to obesity-causing factors.  I've found that even when I eat Chinese fast food with a lot of vegetables, my body doesn't feel as it normally would when I eat fiber and veggies.  Could it be that some part of their storage and cooking process takes a lot of the "vegetable" out of vegetables?

Lack of stairs.  We had to stay a night at a Florida hotel this trip, and when I had to get some stuff from the lobby, I was amazed to find that the stairs were almost impossible to use.  They were hidden, and you could only get in from certain entrances to go up.  So even if someone had wanted to get some exercise, he'd find it nigh impossible.  The stairs in one hotel obviously aren't going to make or break our obesity epidemic, but if you add up all these kinds of supposedly labor-saving measures in public places that are forced upon us, you get a society in which you can't make healthy choices (eating well, exerting yourself physically in everyday activities, etc.) even if you want to.

Salty food.  This was a surprise to me, because excessive salt causes a lot of other health problems, but it obviously has no calories to make you fat directly.  I've found that the excessive salt that many restaurants put in their food causes a thirst in me that is not easily quenched by plain water.  I believe that sometimes if you've consumed a lot of salt, your body sends you signals not only for water but for potassium to balance out the salt's sodium.  That's what it feels like in my body, anyway,  This cry for potassium takes the form of a craving for fruit, ie for something sweet.  In Colombia, when I feel this way I drink some fruit juice or lemonade, and it's even more quenching than straight water.  But in the US, I've had to try to sate this urge with pop or artificial fruit juice.  These drinks are indeed sweet, but they don't successfully give me the potassium my body needs, so I end up drinking a lot of them.  This of course means I'm drinking a lot of sugar, read calories, all because my food was too salty.

Sugary food.  We all know that too many sweets are bad for you.  But in my two recent forays to the US, I've been surprised to find a palpable difference in the sugar content of many foods.  Muffins, yogurt, cereals, box juices.  The US incarnation of these things all taste cloyingly sweet to me when compared with their Colombian counterparts.  It's not as if these processed products are sugar-free in Colombia.  It just seemed to me as if they had more sugar in the US.  It would make sense if this were true.  After more than half a century of processed sugary food in our culture, I have to believe that there would be some one-upmanship among manufacturers, such that the consumer demand for sweetness, and hence the minimum bar of what's considered normally sweet, would constantly be rising.

Alcohol.  I don't know if this is exclusively a Midwestern thing, but it's certainly a big deal here.  People drink a lot.  They drink beer and wine for many meals, especially dinner.  Aside from the devastating effects alcoholism has on people and families, it makes you really fat over time.  Especially beer has a lot of calories, and its consumption is favored by the salty food that makes us crave quenching.  My wife has been amazed at how much alcohol people here are able to put away in one sitting.  In Colombia, excess alcohol consumption is something kids do for a period, and only when they go out and party.  It's not such a night-in, night-out affair.

Credit cards.  Okay, this one isn't really about obesity, but it's another thing I think we need to be alert about.  When we got into the US this time with no cash and no working ATM cards, I was pleasantly surprised that I could conduct most of my transactions by credit card.  It saved us a night sleeping in the airport.  But I also became aware in these twelve hours or so of spending without cash left me discombobulated.  I felt as if I hadn't spent anything, because I hadn't had to open my wallet and fork out cash.  If this is the case for me, who always keeps a nightly diary of what I've spent in the day, how dangerous could this sensation of getting without spending be for most people?  I guess the answer lies in the massive credit and debt problems we've been facing as a nation.



So those are my little outsider observations about some insidious contributors to our obesity problems.  In my time here in my mother's middle-class neighborhood in Chicago, I must say that many of these factors haven't been very present.  There's a lot more fresh food at restaurants, smaller portions, less salt, and more natural juice.  Most importantly, we mainly eat at home, not out at restaurants.  And I also notice that the well-heeled young people in this neighborhood aren't so fat (though my wife notes a bit of beer belly presence in 20-somethings).  On the other hand, on my recent sojourns into remote, lower-income exurbs, I have noticed all these obesity-causing factors, and their obese victims, in full effect.  So while it's heartening to see that not all of us are being affected by the obesity epidemic, it is sad to see obesity as yet another indicator of the brutal, yawning breach between rich and poor in our country.

What's wrong with America, according to a blogger

This is a blog by a guy named Mark Manson, a US expatriate who apparently lives in Colombia, as I do.  He sets out ten ostensibly "hard truths" that he deems it his responsibility to break to his compatriots in the US, I guess in the hopes that they change their ways.  While I can't argue factually with many of his ten statements, I didn't like his tone.  If I understand him well, he is trying to set straight the entire population of the US as if it were an alcoholic brother that needed a serious talking to.  The problem is that that's not how widespread social problems are solved.  Our dilapidated healthcare system, our generally uneducated populace, the obscene economic inequality that plagues us--these are not simple failures of individual or collective effort or willpower.  They are complex social issues that need complex solutions, and I don't think that scoldings or scorn from condescending expats are going to figure very heavily in these solutions.  In that respect, if Manson is really concerned about these problems he has identified, I think the nation could use his presence and his help to right its ways.  If on the other hand he limits himself to commenting snarkily from the sidelines, then he might as well keep his thoughts to himself, because I don't see how his detached critiques help anyone very much.

This may seem an odd position coming from me.  A friend of mine recently rebuked me for what she saw as my own condescending, mean-spirited tone in this blog.  If that is how I come off, then it is surely in part because I have long felt, somewhat unconsciously, that the US failed me in terms of providing me an opportunity to perform honest, respectable work in exchange for a decent standard of living.  I got out of college some 8 years ago and was not able to involve myself in anything that would allow me to maintain myself even humbly, except at the expense of other people (ie jobs at agricultural commodity oligopolies, ag input suppliers that try to squeeze farmers for all they're worth, or the general financial fraud circus that characterized the early 2000s US economy).  So maybe I've felt spurned and burnt by US society, but I'm getting over that.  At any rate, I don't intend on this blog to come off as a condescending asshole rebuking the US with no intention of doing anything concrete about its problems.  If I comment on negative developments in our culture or our body politic, it is with the intent of pointing out and helping to change these trends.  And on that note, I am more and more looking forward to returning with my family to the US in the next year or so, and hopefully contributing something to our society, to the resolution of these intractable problems that we all know we must act on (obesity, hunger, apathy, consumerism, and above all lack of honorable jobs).

Afro-American Gardens

Here is a cool article from the New York Times that my cousin sent me.  It is about efforts by different people in a corner of Louisiana to revive black cultural practices of gardening and cooking, in part by inviting young kids to demonstration gardens of heirloom crops.  Such projects have a lot in common with the Muisca Garden project I help coordinate, where we try to recover ancestral seeds and farming practices in our region of the Andes.  I wish these Louisianians luck, especially because the US today has far too many people, black and white, who would improve their lives greatly by becoming more autonomous in their food production, but who would never consider gardening or moving to the country because of silly, counter-productive cultural stigmas attached to farming.  In a future of increasing scarcity and hardship, it would behoove us all to drop this stupid reluctance to work with our hands and grow our own food.

Enter The Matrix

A few months ago my wife and I saw "The Matrix", in my case for the first time in over ten years.  Last night we watched the sequel, which neither of us had seen before.

When I first saw "The Matrix" I was 17 years old, and in fact I didn't see it in a theater.  Even then my contrarian nature discouraged me from participating in the type of big "cultural event" that the film had become.  My policy then was that if Time Magazine featured something on its cover, that thing was probably shallow bullshit.  So I ended up seeing the film on video (perhaps it was even a new technology DVD as opposed to VHS) in a middle-class house in Hamburg.  I was in Hamburg on an exchange trip that Chicago Public Schools organized with a German high school there, and I didn't want to seem antisocial by not taking up an invitation a few kids had made to our group to go to that house and watch a movie.  That said, I arrived fashionably late and didn't catch the first part of the movie.

I don't remember my first impressions of "The Matrix" from 12 years ago.  I probably thought it was entertaining and raised some interesting questions, insofar as a blockbuster movie can actually raise interesting questions.  But beyond that I didn't give it much thought, and I didn't bother to see the sequels.

This year I decided to watch it again with my wife.  My father-in-law has an extensive film collection, with everything from obscure art films from Kurosawa and Bergman to silly mainstream flicks like "You've got Mail".  "The Matrix" trilogy had been sitting there beckoning to me for the months I lived at his house while my own house was under rehab, and it seemed to me that my earlier attitude of divorcing myself from these major cultural trends was mere hubris (though very few people even talk much about that trilogy these days, so maybe its cultural impact was more wide-reaching than profound), so one weekend I convinced my wife to watch the film with me.

On that second watching I was nonplussed by "The Matrix".  The premise was mildly interesting, in a sixth-grader-thinking-up-revolutionary-sci-fi kind of way, but to me the slick visuals and weak character development were a real turnoff.  All the actors are so busy looking cool, and the directors so busy making them look cool, that there is little humanity or reality to draw one in.  The film follows a budding romance between two of the main characters, Neo and Trinity, but given that their lines are all one-liners or expository monologues, and the "chemistry" shown between them consists mainly in their getting mutually horny in a bar once in an imaginary virtual reality world, I didn't find the romance at all believable, and certainly not interesting.  In a past blog post I even lumped in "The Matrix" with such tripe as "The Fifth Element" as breathless, vapid techno-orgies.

But recently I was thinking more about the film, and I have a more positive, charitable interpretation of it, which has been reinforced by watching the second film in the series.  Basically "The Matrix" is a critique and a warning of becoming too absorbed in the artificial online, in-cloud world.  It posits this matrix as unreal, a distraction that keeps humans in thrall to machines that suck our energy (which is improbable in terms of thermodynamics in a sunless world, but is a nice metaphor for the soulless companies that rule humanity by promoting mindless consumerism).  On the other hand, the real, off-matrix world shown in the film is grey and stark.  The unkempt, unbathed characters clad in dirty, rough-spun cotton rags are a far-cry from the sleek black S & M aesthetic they have when they plug into the matrix.  But the running message is that this outside world, while drab and bleak, is preferable to the stunning, cool world of the matrix, because knowing and living in reality is true freedom, and the matrix represents an no more than an enthralled, visually beautiful slavery.  This is a message I can really get on board with, and it's all the more impressive because the film creators were operating before the Internet had become widespread, before Blackberries and Kindles and cloud computing and constantly on-line people.  Amidst all this there is a constant vindication of humanity, of human feelings and qualities like hope and creativity, and especially of love (albeit through the clumsy, unrealistic "romance" of Neo and Trinity). 

At the same time as "The Matrix" is a damning critique of living in thrall to technology and a false, high-gloss world, it is ensconced in the aesthetic and attitudes of late-90s techno-fetishism.  There is lots of use of CGI graphics, lots of action, martial arts, gunfights, uber-cool costumes, and characters defined less by who they are than by how they look and move.  In the second film the directors even envision human religious celebrations of the future looking a lot like a late-90s warehouse rave, with people jumping around and sweating and orgasming on each other.  This envisioning of the future as a higher-tech version of the present is common to most science fiction, and in this case I see it not as a shortcoming but as a strength of the film, not in terms of cinematography but rather as a vehicle for disseminating an important message.  In other words, "The Matrix" condemns thoughtless, glossy, techno-dependent living in the same glossy vernacular of those who are most ensconced in it and most need to hear the message.  It uses the language of early-21st-century society to point out some of the gravest problems of that society.

If I look at it in this light, I can forgive the film and its sequel (I have yet to watch the final chapter) their weak character development, their alternating between endless sequences of martial arts and gunfights followed by stilted philosophical monologues on topics like choice, freedom, control, and destiny.  While watching the long action sequences my wife and I get bored, because we don't care much about the characters, plus we know that even within the films' own terms what is happening is not real but rather a simulation in the matrix.  And to us the spoken sequences in the films are boring and forced, with little dialogue and lots of St. Augustine-style pontificating.  Indeed, the whole premise of representing programs and computer functioning as personified characters seems a bit quaint and silly, like a redux of "Tron".  But we aren't the films' target audience, and I have to believe that the aspiration of the filmmakers was to draw in the vapid techno-oggling masses in order to transmit to them the valuable messages of the long monologue segments.

One last thing I like in the movies is the prevalence of black characters.  I would say that almost half of the cast is black.  Why the post-apocalyptic world would have more black people than does the present-day US (and for that matter, why most of the survivors in that world would talk and act like people from the US when our country only comprises some 6% of the world populace today) is never explained, and doesn't matter.  I just think it's cool that in an environment in which most films with more than 3 or 4 black characters are automatically relegated to the class of niche, "black movies", "The Matrix" can include a lot of black actors without making a big deal of it, and not dwelling too much on their blackness.  They're just part of the cast, no questions asked.

So my final verdict is that while I don't much enjoy watching it, I give "The Matrix" series props in terms of what it tries to do and how it does it.

The middle class and dependency theory

Binyavanga Wainaina has written sharply and sarcastically on the image that non-Africans hold of Africa, and in particular how journalists report on Africa.  I think much of what he says is dead-on.  However, while his vindication of a comfortable, middle-class, up-and-coming Africa is a welcome counterweight to the common perceptions of helpless, impoverished, hopeless lands and people, I think it should remain a part of a more complex depiction, and not the only image we receive.  That is to say that I can appreciate that not all of Africa is poor and hopeless, but at the same time I know not all of it consists in mover-and-shaker businessmen and snarky intellectuals, either.  It is incorrect and unfair to suppress either of these two extremes of what society is in Africa or in any other continent.  For instance, in this bit Wainaina at once dispels outside biases about Africa and inspires with images of a young continent with a bright future.  But he also ventures perilously close to endorsing the dogmatic vision that a democratic, neoliberal government and urbanizing society will improve life for everyone.  This is untrue.


I face a similar situation when people ask me about Colombia, or when I hear others inside of and outside of Colombia comment on my adopted country.  On the one hand, I want to tell people that Colombia is not all druglords and civil war and displaced people and massacres.  It really isn't, and in my day-to-day life I have very little contact with these ugly sides of our society.  But on the other hand, it is unfair and downright sinful to go about our daily life in any part of Colombia without bearing in mind that certain sectors of our society are suffering from war and inequality and injustice and poverty.  We are after all in the middle of a civil war that has lasted for over 60 years now.  In fact, something my wife and I are often appalled at, especially after she has come back from a work trip in some war-torn, desperate corner of Colombia, is to see the bourgeoisie of Bogota living materialistic, self-absorbed lives.  Many people in Colombia are oblivious to the fact that they live in a country with some fundamental problems, problems in which they play a part whether they know it or not, whether they acknowledge it or not.  So when people ask me about Colombia, I try to downplay the awful image many have of our country, but I don't want to dismiss the very real challenges we face as a society.

Hence I applaud Wainaina in his dispelling certain cliches of reporting on Africa, but I would also warn him not to be too complacent, not to ignore the real problems that might exist in his native Kenya or any other country.  Whether or not outsiders unfairly focus on these problems, they do exist and should be a major preoccupation of anyone living in or throwing their lot in with Africa.

I think this article on dependency theory is very appropriate to this issue of downplaying or ignoring the have-nots of modern society.  In fact, the article quips, "'Everyone is doing better,' say the people who are doing better," and warns of "rich countries full of poor people".

Dependency theory is essentially the idea that wealthy countries are wealthy precisely because of (read: thanks to) their exploitation of poor countries, and vice versa.  That is to say that it questions Smith's idea of a rising tide lifting all boats, and slants more towards a zero-sum vision of economic winners and losers.  The author argues that while dependency theory hasn't entirely held water to describe differences in wealth and development between countries (because many formerly poor countries have become wealthy), it might be very pertinent for describing the differences between the rich and the poor within countries.  (The author also hints that improvements in living standards are probably due more to advances in medicine and technology, which I would add are both largely dependent on our disposing of a large amount of "free" fossil energy, than to market liberalization, but that is a story for another blog post).  Are the respective conditions of the mega-rich and the mega-poor in a given country mutually dependent?  Are the rich only that way because they exploit the poor?

I would argue in the positive, especially in light of the fact that much of the modern economy, at least in wealthy countries, seems to consist in zero-sum Ponzi schemes.  Market speculation, credit scams, even the market for unnecessary consumer goods (a la Home Shopping Network), look more and more as if value is not being created but rather transferred from many people to a few.  A market speculator who makes good does so only at the expense of someone else who loses precisely the amount that the speculator gains.  Likewise, in a super-streamlined business like Amazon or Walmart, any gains (profit for the company or savings for consumers) are directly linked to losses for suppliers and workers.  There's little wiggle room to create a win-win situation.  I don't think this exploitative nature is inherent to all market economies, but perhaps it is a defining part of mature economies in which basic needs have been met and business cost structures have been super-streamlined.  At any rate, it is one more reason for us in the developing world not to be too complacent with our rising collective (but ill-distributed) prosperity.  Colombians and Kenyans, take note.

The ideas for this blog post and many of the articles I link to come from the excellent weekly feature "links expat aid workers like".

Teens farming in Milwaukee

This is an article my cousin sent me about an urban gardening program in Milwaukee.  Teens tend a garden plot all summer, and maintain relationships with market clients.  They also write about their experience and talk about larger issues in the food system.  A few years ago I coordinated an urban teen garden in the Altgeld Gardens neighborhood in Chicago.  Coincidentally, it was in the summer of 2005, I believe Chicago's hottest, driest summer until this present one.  I aspired to have my program work something like the one profiled in this article.  I didn't do a very good job at it, but it's nice to see that other people are.