Reading Rainbow: The Third Plate

Ever since I came back to the US, I've been pretty paranoid about what I eat. I have a pretty serious problem with the way America farms, raises, and grows its food. I think most of us are pretty familiar with a lot of those problems. But aside from pesticides, chemicals, and hormones, there's this other aspect which I've been worried about for a while.

Remember in elementary school science, when we learned about soil nutrients, crop rotation, and seven year cycles of fallow earth? (I do. Largely because I am frequently using it as a metaphor for creativity. Also because I regularly help a fourth grade boy with his homework.) 

The new book I'm reading talks about the future of food-- from the failures and missteps of the farm to table movement to how farmers and chefs can work together change the public image of certain foods. Foods can be and are just as trendy as anything else. Sometimes just to the benefit of big agri-business (like the terrible terrible soy trend. Processed soy jacks with your estrogen levels.) but also for real health. Did you eat kale three years ago? Or quinoa? Or ramps? No. You do now because chefs got creative and made delicious recipes with those ingredients. 

Dan Barber, author of the The Third Plate is the executive chef of Blue Hill in Manhattan. I haven't had the pleasure of eating there-- alas, the price tag is outrageous...more on that later-- but I've heard nothing but good things about the quality and flavor. 

From the book's review in The Wall Street Journal:

Yet after reading Mr. Barber's compelling book, "The Third Plate," I realize the problem may be with my conditioning: I associate value with top-of-the-food-chain proteins like tuna and beef. But the truth is, it takes 13 pounds of grain to produce 1 pound of beef, and the Bluefin tuna is almost depleted. Ours is a food culture based on the expectation of immoderate consumption, and that's just not sustainable. Mr. Barber's solution is no less than an overhaul of American cuisine, so that the value of an ingredient is based on flavor, not folly.
Mr. Barber uses the metaphor of the plate—as in plates of food—to describe three stages of modern eating habits and the agriculture that has supported them. The first plate contains a 7-ounce corn-fed steak and a small vegetable side, say, carrots, produced by industrialized agriculture as it developed over the course of the 20th century. On the second plate, where we are today with the farm-to-table movement, the steak is free-range, the carrots organically grown. But the two aren't that different. The future, Mr. Barber suggests, is the third plate: a carrot dish flavored with a sauce made from a secondary cut like beef shank.
The third plate sounds a lot like the way my Italian grandmother used to cook on her subsistence farm. Her tradition called for managing the land. Soil health, seed diversity, crop rotation and diverse animal husbandry kept the farm fruitful and also produced delicious, healthy food. There was modesty to her cooking: The family primarily ate vegetables and killed one pig a year that had been fed on table leavings. There was no deprivation. We've replaced this model with industrialized farming and fishing, and we aren't eating well. We feed.

Let's go back to price. Part of how we can bring down some of the cost of flavorful, nutrient-rich foods is by giving new light to the crops that farmer's plant in between the main crop. If those farmers can make the same amount of money on mustard greens or buckwheat or milkweed that they can on wheat, they do better and then we can do better. And there's incentive for other farmers to return to this way of farming before industrialized farming manipulated the ecosystem into oblivion. I mean, sure, it's important to produce enough. So much of how we farm is a reactionary product of The Dust Bowl, The Irish Potato Famine and other plague of locusts style crop failures. But at some point, you have to ask, is my all-you-can eat more important than the flavor and nutrition of what I eat? And then no wonder we're fat. We have to keep eating and eating to get less flavor and less nutrition. It's hard to stay aware of all this all the time, but you gotta try, right? 

Check out the book, and Dan Barber on NPR. I listened to a much longer version of this interview and I wish I could find it. This is the closest I could find. Scroll to the bottom.

FYI: I'm probably buying this book as a gift for everyone I know for holidays for the next year. 

Music Monday - The Other Guys - St Andrean Skies

Favorites The Other Guys perform the original commission by Oscar Foxley for St Andrews 600th Anniversary, "St Andrean Skies." 

I was never a fresher, or an undergrad at St Andrews at all, but I remember those first few lit-on-fire days there. The wind whipped up every possibility I'd ever considered for myself. I remember my friends, knocking on my door, calling me out from within myself, to new places. I remember frolicking on steep hillside slopes with my hair blowing everywhere, my wellies sinking in the sand, beneath a huge Northern moon and ripped open, flood lit, St Andrean skies. Even at midnight. Even in Autumn. You could see everything. And nothing.

I often wonder if I'll ever have a year as happy as that. But the seeds of that time continue to crop up every day. Even here in Los Angeles. 

What I'd give to relive the days spent 'neath those St Andrean skies...

Landfill Harmonic Orchestra

Make music however you can, people. This is fabulous. 

"The world sends us garbage and we send back music."

Sara Bareilles - The Blessed Unrest

Sara Bareilles straddles the line between the mainstream formula and the unexpected, the insightful better than pretty much any artist I can think of. Most everyone feels like they have to come down hard on one side or the other. Not Sara.

Her new album, The Blessed Unrest, is my favorite yet. With Brave & Manhattan, I knew we should be expecting something great. Filled with rich, textured pop songs, but also, songs about death and life set in one of the largest and most imposing cemeteries on Earth. And you know I love a good uplifting number about cemeteries. Always have. The above and below of it. Something about being uplifted by acknowledging the dark side, the impermanence of all of it. The etchings left behind that only hint at what once was. 

Here's my current fave track (Chasing the Sun) from the album, which is out next week, but you can stream on itunes now. If you know me, these are the kind of lyrics I'd write. And as a bonus, the vid has the lyrics in Spanish... ???


It’s a really old city 
Stuck between the dead and the living 
So I thought to myself, sitting on a graveyard shelf 
As the echo of heartbeats, from the ground below my feet 
Filled a cemetery in the center of Queens 

I started running the maze of 
The names and the dates, some older than others 
The skyscrapers, little tombstone brothers 
With Manhattan behind her, three million stunning reminders 
Built a cemetery in the center of Queens 

Neil de Grasse Tyson at Rice's 100th Commencement

This past week, Rice graduated it's 100th class,  wrapping up a year's worth of Centennial celebrations. And Rice couldn't ask for a more fitting speaker to bring it all home than astro-physicist badass, Neil de Grasse Tyson. Not only did his wife graduate from Rice (Baker!) but he embodies Rice's marriage to NASA and the American spirit of exploration, commitment to the future, and to the great unknown. 

I don't feel like I live in that America. But I'm glad Tyson is around to remind us to keep pursuing the unknown, the spirit of innovation, of advancing, and of defining the universe-- and thus, the universal. That our pursuit of these things is tied to so many other important aspects of our perspective.

I often miss my time at Rice, and what it represents. But this was one of the most stinging. 

Congrats, class of 2013!

Want To See - Sontag Reborn

There's only a few people whose endless thoughts I don't mind listening to. Once of them is Susan Sontag. That's why when I'm in NYC in June, I'm hoping to catch this at NYTW. Based on Sontag's journals and adapted by performer Moe Angelos, this sounds like the perfect way to spend an evening on my old block.

Performances run through June 30th.

Manufacture New York & Bob Bland on CBS News

My lovely and visionary friend, Bob Bland, was on CBS news for her extraordinary efforts on behalf for local manufacturing of clothing products in the US, and specifically in New York. I'm so on board with her Manufacture New York. 

Here's a snippet from the new program:

There was a time when clothes worn by Americans were also made here. By 2011, more than 97 percent of the clothes sold in the U.S. was made overseas. Fashion designer turned apparel advocate Bob Bland explains why in an interview with "CBS Evening News" Saturday anchor Jim Axelrod. She's behind Manufacture New York, a new initiative to bring clothes manufacturing jobs back home.

It's not a good deal if the true cost is someone dying in the process.

Amy Poehler's Smart Girls

While there are so many reasons to appreciate Amy Poehler, today, let's take a minute to revel in her creation of Amy Poehler's Smart Girls. It's a whole channel and website of content expressing appreciation for the awesomeness of ladies and living true to your authentic self. 

They have several fun series, including Ask Amy, Meow Meow Music, Operation Nice (love it!) Boy's Minute (even) and Smart Girls at the Party, where they interview inspirational women. The website also features a nice rotating reminder of all the kick ass women who have changed the world. It features a good many of my favorites right up front: Dolly Parton, Bernadette Peters, Michelle Obama and Suzanne Vega. 

Basically, this is one of the happiest, funnest places on the internet and one of the best ideas ever. Appreciation rules. Change the world by being yourself. Word up. 

New Duncan Sheik - Lay Down Your Weapons - Free Download

Duncan released a new song today, available for free download off his website. It has a similar vibe to the other stuff he was writing at that time period, while he was touring Indonesia. And it seems to be coming from the same emotional plain. 

One of the things I've always liked best about Duncan is his ability to see how the pieces all connect. And in my life, Duncan has served as a little indicator light for connecting things as well. Whenever he turns up-- be it in person and we chant together, or in music-- I am reminded of my own proclivity and need to step back and see how the way we do one thing is the way we do everything. And to be aware of that. Here is his commentary on the song. You can download it for free here. 

I wrote Lay Down Your Weapons in 2011 while on tour in Indonesia. I have been playing it live during the past couple of tours and there have been many requests that I release some version of it. Because of the the senseless, ongoing gun violence that is plaguing America I felt even more acutely that I wanted this song to be available to anyone who wanted to hear it. The lyric was not written as a political statement and is obviously a metaphor about fraught human relationships but I do feel personally there are many types of weapons out there that need to be “laid down” for good and forever. Thank you for listening.

Amen. 

The Most Astounding Fact - Neil deGrasse Tyson Appreciation Day

My heart is warmed thinking of this guy speaking at the 100th commencement of my alma mater. Rice 2013 grads sure are lucky. (His wife is an alum, so I guess that was our in.) 

Neil is more than a scientist. He's a modern philosopher of real life and I can't wait to see what he tells those kids. I feel like he's going to blow our minds. Where Alberto Gonzales (a Rice alum) merely praised the virtues of George W. Bush in my own commencement speech-- in a desperate play to become Attorney General-- I doubt we'll hear much of that from Neil. 

Personally, I hope he break dances to Michael Jackson. But in lieu of that, I'll take something more like this. The simple revelry in the science, but also the magic of our existence. This is poetry as good as any I've heard. 

The Most Astounding Fact from Max Schlickenmeyer on Vimeo.

Anais Nin Explains Why I Don't Date Anymore

Thanks, Brainpickings for this.

But I Have Been Privy To Something True...

I remember with utter clarity the moment Sophie first performed "Something Old, Something New" for me. She had just finished it, Mama Louise was consulting on the newest additions, and we were at Bamff in the Morning Room. Everything was cast in a kind of golden/pink light. It was one of the happiest moments of my life. It came to symbolize something. Something old and something new-- and all the "splendid times that would probably ensue." (And they did!) I beamed, still stunned and still wondering how I had fallen into this surreal crevice of people who seemed to be just embracing me all the time. And I remember thinking that I needed to pay attention to this moment because Sophie's album was going to be something so special. So unlike anything in contemporary song writing. 

Looking at the landscape of music during my lifetime, I have a hard time naming many, if any, lyricists who leave their guts on the table the way Sophie does. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that price you pay for doing first rate professional work is that you've got to "sell your heart." Sophie does that and somehow manages to keep it too. She is unflinching from the grief she's experienced. And even though I missed that darkest chapter in her life, when Fred was quickly and unexpectedly taken from her, I can't help but know -- because she has succeeded in conveying to me through song and soul-- the strange dark place she journeyed through.

In "Something Old, Something New," the vivid New York she experienced in the aftermath of Fred's death is perfectly etched, and we see the city as a perfect conduit to move her into the alternate version of her life without Fred. And the friends who would help her. The upside down bridal imagery is arresting. It breaks and eventually raises my heart to think of her re-imagining her wedding and her future. 

"Song I Never Wrote For You," was the first original song off the album I heard. And also, the last song I heard Sophie play live on my last day in Scotland. She was just wrapping up recording the album. I heard some not-quite mixed tracks. And on Dublin street, as I went through clothes to give away, her simple, pure piano version echoed down the hall to me as she played. I thought about Fred and I thought about Sophie and how I would miss this part of my life so dreadfully. No part of my American life is as simple, or bare, or uncomplicated, or earnest as any moment I spent with Sophie. Except for when I listen to her album from my house in Hollywood. 

Sophie Ramsay is a blessing to this or any life. Add her to yours. 

A Musician's Response To Violence

This is courtesy of my dad. And courtesy of the wisdom of Leonard Bernstein. 

Become You. The NPR version of You.

Pretty much all of my adult life, I've been looking to make my life circumstances align with my deeply-held idea about myself as an avid NPR listener. Only one other-- brief, beautiful-- time was I able to make it a real fabric of my day. That was when I was working my worst job to date: as studio assistant to a world-famous lighting designer in New York. 

For the months I had this part time gig (before she flipped out and called me incompetent for not reading her mind) I came to associate the morning pleasant lull of WNYC with the lighting designer being in a good mood. When she was travelling, I'd flip it on just for my own pleasure while I watered her ficus plants and cacti. Before that, in my childhood, I associated it with night driving and my father and laughing to Prairie Home Companion. Now, I equate it with the mental state I'm after. 

But Los Angeles. Oh, Los Angeles and my sunny Hollywood spot. My home now was made for NPR. Just today, my best friend Emily said, "Don't you love the NPR in LA? KCRW?" And I do! It's one of the few realities that live up to my fantasies of it. In my mind, I'd flip on an old radio to KCRW on misty Los Angeles mornings while I make coffee. I sit at my little kitchen table in my robe, taking my sweet time, and I laugh and am enlightened on all foreign policy and art issues I care about, but feel sometimes overwhelmed by, and I learn about all kinds of new things to hold my interest. The only difference between my fantasy and the reality is that I listen on my NPR iphone app. Sometimes I pick and choose stories and sometimes I flip to WNYC when I miss New York. But I am utterly happy when I do this. 

One of my favorites is The Moth. True Stories told live by artists and interesting people ranging from relative obscurity to relative and/or fading fame. Storytelling. Mmm. "Storytelling for everyday raconteurs." You go, Peabody judges. 

It's like a dream come true. They're all very real and basic and often simple and always poignant while revealing some mono no aware thing about living. Recently, I laughed in every room of my house while writer Walter Mosley told a wonderful and very real story about identifying language and its meaning. It is a delight. I cannot recommend enough. 

Also check out my old friend Suzanne Vega on Stage Fright. 

Sometimes, I lament that we have no BBC. But then I remember NPR and I am soothed again. 

Cronin At Vroman's

Yesterday, my favorite Rice professor and writing mentor, Justin Cronin, was at Vroman's in Pasadena, reading from his new book, The Twelve. The second in The Passage Trilogy, the book has already garnered great praise and sales. 

I'm excited to delve back into that world. And it felt like a great touching base of the soul to see Cronin, get a quick bit of life advice, and remember that time in my life when I was just starting out. So much hadn't happened to me yet. So much hadn't yet happened to Cronin. 

But he believed in me then, and he still does now. Thanks to him, I've tried never to put my skills in a box... "you write how you write, no matter what you're writing." And thanks to him,  I still think success finds the right people. 

Cup of Gold - Wisdom from The Steinbeck

"And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens—The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away."

— John Steinbeck

Some California wisdom from a great California author

The Pressure Is Good For You

Let's hope so. 

Ryann's Life Coaching Service

You too can experience the joy of this satisfied customer. And for a limited time, only $49.95 per session! Just paypal me the money. I may have no idea what I'm doing with my life, but I can sure as shit tell you what to do with yours. Here's me warning Spellman he better not go get a soda at In-n- Out. We are revolutionizing up in here. 

Into the Mystic, Away From The Market

One really good reason not to cut funding for PBS, Mitt, is their awesome series, Sound Tracks featuring (among others) the fabulous Gaelic singer Julie Fowlis. I have previously written about her awesomeness when her song, "Tha Mo Ghaol Air Àird" was featured in the BRAVE trailers. 

You don't put your soul up to the mercy of "The Market." Art is our soul. The less we appreciate it, the less we're fulfilled. I'll go down with the ship on that one because I don't want to live in a world that doesn't set aside time and space and money for art for its own sake. I think a lot of why it's hard to feel fulfilled in modern life is our turning away from appreciating art on a regular basis. 

Lots of things don't make money, but keep us full of life. Children for one. Or maybe we should send them back to work. That's in line with the same Dickensian England style attitude that I just can't get behind. 

I want to live in a world where someone thinks to put Wynton Marsalis, Youssou N'dour and Of Monsters and Men in the same show. I want always to remember that it's a big world and America is just one piece of it. I want to be able to experience Scotland even when I can't be there and the music of Senegal even if I never go. 

The Market only lets us have what we know we want. PBS or an entity like BBC gives us what maybe we didn't know we wanted. Big Bird, sure. Julie Fowlis, singing with her baby on her lap, hell yes. 

Watch Sound Tracks: Preview Trailer on PBS. See more from Sound Tracks.

Today I Go Here Friday Links

As I embark for my fourth and final city of residence for 2012, I wish I had something more concrete to impart to you lovely readers. I live, for the most part, somewhere far below the surface of whatever city I am in-- the inner life my friend Trevor recognized about me when we were very young. It's not that I'm not present. I think I am. Most of the time at least. It's just that I make my decisions from that place that is... well, it's not the real world, is it, the way I've been lucky enough to live so far?

Whatever kind of inner compass I have, I try not to tamper with it too much. I just try to be so very thankful for the people around me who support me and encourage me to follow my strange, nomadic inner compass. It's hard to live out of a suitcase. And hard to accept so much help from people. But the more I see of the world, the more I know that's what I'm supposed to be doing.

Your links:

- The professional photos from Aly's Wedding. Such good memories. Such wonderful friends. 
- Very cool. The American story via music. 
- Let's hope Mc, Tom & I can avoid Carmageddon II this weekend... oh shit. Traffic. Welcome to LA. 
- On my reading list: Italy, Edinburgh, Hollywood, NYC? Sign me up.
- I never get sick of this. Mansplainers. Let's just say, I had a boyfriend recently who is the very definition of mansplaining. 
- More on gender gap whatnot. 
- Unspeakable, soul-crushing awkwardness.
- America's Top 50 Cities. Um. Always with the San Francisco. Whatever. And putting LA as 50th? Listen, no way. I'm sticking up for you today, at the very least, Los Angeles. Don't make me sorry. 

Here's my favorite two quotes about Los Angeles. And a whole page of them for some laughs:

"When it's 100 degrees in New York, it's 72 in Los Angeles. When it's 30 degrees in New York, it's still 72. However, there are 6 million interesting people in New York, and only 72 in Los Angeles." - The Great Neil Simon

"Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles." -Frank Lloyd Wright."

Finally, "keep it, use it, build it, move it."