Lost...

Lost Dog

White, long hair, 105 pounds

                                            Spiva-Mt. Zion-O’Rear

Please call 573-823-9904

Put out about 45 of these fliers today, in the area.  With my Jeep overheating, so the heater full blast on, and not a cool day to start with.  And Boone Electric coming to chop down half my yard soon. Have had better weeks.

later, bob

Comfort Food

Ah, my last night before the big round of classes starting at MU. I'm stressed, tired, anxious, kind of hungry.  Not drinking. Here's the comfort food I settled on Sunday night, after the dog walk, before bed...

Raspberries, which had been on sale for 99 cents at Gerbes, small delights that usually mold before I can eat them all.  Partly, I hoard these treats, eating one or two at a time.  Partly, they aren't well kept before the store's overly generous sale.  So I opened the fridge expecting a gray fuzzy alien presence, hunted down the plastic box, and behold!  They were on the top shelf, frozen, because of fridge issues, which is a bad omen for the collard greens and mustard greens on the shelf below.

And suddenly, I've having cold raspberries glomped with Hershey's chocolate spread which had also, weeks before, been on sale for 99 cents.  I plunged into this with a cup of midnight coffee, nothing special, just a couple and a half spoons of Folger's.  There I am, having a happy moment before brushing my teeth and trying to sleep fast so I can be a coherent teacher the next day.  There are even things blowing up on the new Grit TV, a Rodriguez blood extravaganza, Once Upon a Time in Mexico .

It should have been that last free summer midnight, a last relaxing moment, before that sea of eager, distracted, 18-year-old faces.

Alas.  It turns out I couldn't let even the innocent extravagance of raspberries and chocolate be innocent. Here's what I mean.

 

The raspberries themselves are imported vast distances to my local store here in midMissouri.  The label tells me they are from Watsonville, California, not a place I've ever heard of.  Well, the handy internet says that "Watsonville is located 95 miles south of San Francisco at the southern end of Santa Cruz County, covers 6.6 square miles, and has a population of 52,087 (January 2015). It is a quick 30 minute drive to Monterey and less than an hour from the beautiful Big Sur coastline. Silicon Valley is less than 45 minutes away from our charming town."  The city website also announces that they have "Math Mondays," a Green Building Program, that I could join up with the Monterey Birding Festival in late September, that they have a display of local ag-art, their Apple Crate Murals:

The City of Watsonville has developed the Historic Label Art Mural Project. A series of apple box label murals have been installed throughout Watsonville’s downtown area. Some of these murals were completed with City financial support, and others were completed by private individuals without City assistance. The murals are exact replicas of box and crate labels used in the early 1900s and used to identify the product, shipper or grower, and the area of origin. The Watsonville area, as well as the Pájaro Valley in general, had literally hundreds of labels in use during this time. There are presently thirteen completed murals, created by five artists.

Ok, the folks in Watsonville sound swell, but why are they packaging my raspberries?

Some folks also far away, at a Purdue site, state that "Missouri is considered a minor fruit producing state by any standard statistical measure, although there is good potential for expanded fruit production." Huh.  Meanwhile, the Extension Program here will tell me that: 

Missouri is home to almost all temperate zone fruit plants, including strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries, currants, blueberries, grapes, apricots, cherries, plums, nectarines, peaches, apples and pears. They can be harvested from mid-May through the end of October. However, because of differences in their requirements of weather and soil and in their susceptibility to pests, some fruit plants grow better than others. Raspberry plants favor cool summer and fall temperatures, so plants grown in Missouri are often stunted and produce small fruit. Raspberries also require a well-drained soil to prevent root diseases and therefore do not grow well in clay soils.

Ok.  I know clay soils.  I have clay soils.  Maybe I can't get commercial quantities of raspberries locally grown.  Maybe that's just a backyard and neighbor treat.  But I feel more than a little guilt being part of the market chain that is exporting water from California, in a drought that may have become the new normal, despite predicted strong El Nino rains for this winter.

Then there's that jar of chocolate spread.  Sure, I know the purists out there would scorn mere Hershey's, but it was on sale, and as far as I knew, didn't have some of the exploitation-baggage that Nestle's could once claim.

But there are problems with chocolate, too. For starters, the world supply of chocolate may be in danger.  Yes, really.  I know this sounds like denying Santa Claus, but there's a reason global climate change gets that "global" label stuck on:

The shortage isn’t just about the world going crazy for chocolate — it also has a lot to do with climate change. A decrease in cocoa supplies can be pinned on West Africa’s dry weather, which is only getting worse. In Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire — responsible for more than 70 percent of global cocoa supply — a study released by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture predicts a 2 degree celsius (36.5 F) increase in temperatures by 2050. Higher temperatures mean that more water evaporates into the air from leaves and earth, leaving less behind for cocoa trees — a process called “evapotranspiration.”

Further, 

There’s also a fungal disease called “frosty pod,” which has ravaged between 30 and 40 percent of the world’s cocoa production. Brazil, once the world’s second largest exporter of chocolate, is now its biggest importer, after being hit with “witch’s broom,” another fungal disease that devastated the Brazilian state of Bahia in 1989. [End of Chocolate...]

[And here's another source to flesh out that info, from Scientific American, 2011--Climate Change Could Melt Chocolate Production.]

Beyond the threats to the supply of chocolate, if we look around very much, we have to consider the ethics of chocolate production:

For African children, chocolate poses a much bigger threat than just cavities. A 2011 Tulane University study found a “projected total of 819,921 children in Ivory Coast and 997,357 children in Ghana worked on cocoa-related activities” in 2007-2008. (I use the term “work” loosely: That implies payment, when most of these children are in fact slaves who are imprisoned on farms, beaten for trying to leave, and denied any wages.) NGOs, politicians, and even a Hershey shareholder have tried to force the industry to change, but so far, these efforts have been stymied by the powerful chocolate barons, who are surprisingly evil for folks who make candy for a living...after intense industry pushback, the Harkin-Engel Protocol that passed made certification voluntary; the idea of labeling products was abandoned entirely. In the more than 10 years since it was signed, the new rules have done almost nothing to liberate child workers in the chocolate industry.     And by the way, these companies crush more than children’s dreams. They are also responsible for encouraging farmers to clear West African rainforests to make room for more cocoa plants, as well as mowing down the Indonesian and Malaysian rainforests for palm oil plantations. The multi-continent deforestation subsidized by Big Chocolate also releases tons of greenhouse gases and displaces indigenous peoples.  Sigh.  That makes my few spoons of Hershey's spread a little less satisfying. And I didn't even investigate the various oils and sugars and miscellaneous ingredients included in my cheap chocolate.  I begin to wish that those folks in the soon-to-be-rainforests of Louisiana and Mississippi would take up chocolate production, but that may be a pipe dream as well.  Here's a bit of how chocolate is produced: The contents of the cocoa pods are scooped out and set in heaps where microbes occurring naturally on the plant cause a fermentation which lasts for 7 days. The beans are turned daily to let in air. The fermentation process is complex and involves a succession of microbes, starting with yeasts, continuing with bacteria and finishing with moulds. Over 30 different bacteria have been found in fermentations. The alcohols, acids and heat formed during fermentation induce complex biochemical reactions inside the beans.Unfermented beans do not produce chocolate flavour and scientists have been unable to replicate the complicated biochemistry that takes place on the farm in the laboratory. Chocolate is a food which can only be made with the help of microbes.  The problem is in that unique set of microbes.  Could we duplicate the same range of critters down there with the Cajuns and crawfish? Or would we produce a new and untasty black glop?

 

Ok.  Let's look at my cup of coffee...

What I made for my midnight comfort was also shipped from Ohio, home of the Kroger Company. The label itself doesn't give me any clue where the coffee beans originated.  I imagine some wide blend of beans from many places.  And where and how, especially how, coffee is grown makes quite a bit of difference.  The Huffington Post, reviewing a study of the impact of coffee growing, reports this:

The study's authors, led by Shalene Jha of the University of Texas, found that a far larger share of the world's coffee than ever before is now being grown in direct sunlight, rather than under the shade of a canopy of trees. These full-sun coffee farms are scarcely any different from the large plots of monoculture corn and soybeans that have been vilified by environmentalists over the past several decades.

And, 

Much of the recent shift away from shade is due to the growth of the coffee industries in Brazil and Vietnam, the first- and second-biggest producers in the world in 2010, according to the study. The researchers found that more than three-quarters of the coffee farmland in those two countries contains no tree cover.     While more people might be ponying up for an occasional $5 latte at a hipster outpost, enough of us are still buying cheap coffee that full-sun farms are expanding. The industries in these two countries are dominated by the cultivation of inexpensive, bitter-tasting robusta coffee, which is used to make instant coffee and the bulk ground coffee you might buy in a can at a supermarket.

For a more detailed and bleaker eco-statement, look here. 

And then, I wasn't just chewing dry ground coffee.  There was some water involved.  In one of my very self-conscious luxuries, I do use distilled water in that fancy coffee machine, because the local tap water, with all those minerals, will kill off a coffee pot in short order.  But let's go ahead and consider that jug of water.  I find that a gallon of water weighs 8.33 lbs, and that for no really good reason, the water I buy is produced in Cincinnati, Ohio, which is 465.7 miles from Columbia, a fairly straight-shot along I-70, if there aren't side-trips to regional distribution centers.  How much diesel fuel goes into that transport?  We can't distill water here in Missouri?     

Of course, the water comes in a plastic jug, for reasons of transport cost/weight, since the jugs are vastly lighter than glass [Why don’t we buy our milk in glass jars anymore?].  And, as we tell ourselves when we haul loads of cans and bottles toward those community bins, "The jugs are also recyclable, at least in theory."  In theory is key here:

While plastic bottles can be melted down and made into new bottles, none of the milk containers in the United States are actually made from recycled material. That's because of safety concerns over bacterial and chemical contamination, and strict FDA guidelines for the manufacture of food packaging from such secondhand sources. When it's reclaimed, plastic from milk bottles is usually turned into toothbrushes, flowerpots and children's toys, among other things. But according to the Environmental Protection Agency, just 28.9 percent of it ends up in the recycling bin. The rest may spend hundreds of years decomposing in a landfill. [Washington Post]. 

There had been some kids' show on, early Saturday morning, the company making toys specifically from milk jugs.  But I wasn't in a note-taking mode, having not yet had my first 5 cups of coffee.

And then there was the electricity that went into brewing the coffee, keeping the lights on...

That late Sunday night, I finished my comfort food, brushed my teeth and turned off the TV.  I didn't sleep well.

later, bob

Elderberry Jam

This was where I should have been headed, this JAM upon a hill. I don't quite know what the chunk of plastic drainage pipe was for--that twilight wormhole to alternate realities?

https://threatqualitypress.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/altered-states-4.jpg 

Here's the situation.  I'd heard of Elderberry Jam, from Graham, and had looked up just enough to decide I'd plop down the 25 dollar Saturday admission.  That seemed a little steep, but I was curious enough to go.  I'd had not such a successful experience going to the Blue Note for a "country" band (sometime, I'll write about that and show you the shoes that shaped that event).  For the Elderberry Jam, I expected, not the Testicle Festival, not Art in the Park, maybe something like the Hartsburg Pumpkin Festival, just focused on a smaller and less orange agricultural product.  All wrong.

Graham had texted me google-map directions.  I looked.  I really did. Head down 63 South, daydream about my highway tree project, the need for high speed subway/rail from Columbia to Jeff City, be irritated at that "parkway"/industrial park, whatever it is. Turn off through Ashland, following Route M out of town, east and south, and look for Jemerson Road on the left.  Simple.

And it's a pleasant scene, where I would have stopped to take pics of scenery, had someone not been following too close on those windy roads.  Cattle wading in a clear pond, hay rolls out in fields, caught between an image Keats might have used and something quite alien.  Whole landscapes that could be gathered, and put into minor commodification as postcards.  Not that I'd ever be able to make money with postcards of Missouri fields and hills, but I've always been fascinated by how that simple piece of hard paper can shape our sense of beauty, our sense of exotic place.  And more cynically, image at this speed is about all the attention most people have to give these days.  How does one get involved in the vast postcard industry?

Oh, and I passed this yard proudly flying its own Confederate Flag. I'd liked to have been able to stop and chat, find out more there. Sometime.

And I passed a "castle," a huge structure on a hill with its own French turret, and passed several houses with 10 or 12 acres of straight-mowed lawns, the kind that require high-grade mowers and either local serfs or captive sons to maintain.  Maintain--to impress us?  To keep a sense of "civilization" out here a good ways from any good coffee shop?  Or, are we really, really in Little Dixie down here...

I kept going.  No Jemerson Road.  When I got to that big plunge, the way the roads always suddenly announce that we're getting closer to the river, the air changes, the view shifts...you know, River ahead, I started wondering.  Still, I kept going until I reached the official town line of Wilton.  And I didn't remember Wilton on the map.  So I stopped, got lucky that I still had a few bars of phone service, and dialed out that map to way local scale.  Oops.  That other road, not Jemerson, that connects with M.  

So, back up the hill.  Past the castles and plantation lawns.  Past the Stars and Bars.  Until I found Cedar.  Which led to Jemerson.

Ok.  Several miles, winding through the woods.  Jemerson was asphalt for 30 foot, then white gravel.  No festival signs.

 

I did stop, lean out the Jeep, and ask two women in a pickup if I was headed the right way.  They laughed.  "Yeah, up there on the left.  Keep goin'."  I passed barefoot people in the creek, crossed those not-bridges, those concrete bits of road that would be underwater in even a hard mist, passed lots of "Flood area" signs... 

Saw some tents and not much else, till Jemerson decided to dead end at Hart Road.  And with only a few more backtrack turns, found a place offering to take my 25 dollars and vague directions where to park.  I've arrived.

I parked between two rows of elderberries and walked up to the hill.

With a pretty quick survey of the place...tents...

...find-a-spot-camping (not my plan)...a few vendors...

 

The requisite hand-made jewelry and display bones...

 

One tent for readings, spiritual, though I didn't catch what persuasion...

But to my intense dismay, on this 90 degree and climbing mid-afternoon, no beer!  Oh, folks had their own coolers, but not as Graham suggested, anyone selling beer.  A different inflection here, though not my taste...

Well, a few more vendors... 

 

Sweating pretty well by then, not shifted into the shirtless mode of most guys there, I got the 4 dollar shaved ice, blue raspberry.  I expected a regular slushy, but no, this just mostly ice with a little syrup a quarter way down.  I almost went back to complain, then had that rural light bulb moment, and realized that a cup of sweet ice would be just fine, with a good pour of peach brandy on it.

So I just settled down on the grass to look around at the people, waiting for Graham's band to play at 5, which seemed an awful long ways away.

 

I did investigate the actual elderberries-in-production...

 

and harvested a few.  Not bad.  But although there was one booth from an elderberry farm in North Carolina, this isn't at all a summery harvest festival.  I went back to sweating, sitting on the ground, not tie-dyed at all, feeling more than a little out of place.

But then, Sam wandered by.  He's the guy who'll be able to ramble off a book when he's 80--my D&D friend from Lupus.  And Sam was camping for the weekend with a huge icy cooler of Pabst.  All good again.

That's Sam, posing by the poster up on the hill above the stage.  We hung out, watched people...

 

This, by the way, not a bear, but a hairy guy coming up through the rows of elderberries...

 

 

 

I got us some food, the veggie Thai noodles, which Sam rightly critiqued as needing some more spices, some vinegar, eh, more...

And after a lot of trips back, some riblets.  Which also needed some oomph...

 

More tents during a beer refill...

And we ran into a guy who was showing off his silver neck-pieces, made he said from silver grain.  He's tried to get a sales deal here in Columbia with Good Nature, right up here in Alley A, but said they wanted a 50% consignment fee.  I urged him to try some of the places further down 9th.

A friend of Sam...

And finally, Graham's band, Don't Mind Dyin'...

BC, of Klik's, the main singer.  Graham is back there in the blue shirt on the bass.

More folks there...

 

Bubbles on the hill...          

Ok, I like bubbles...

And other folks conserving their energy, for unlike me, most people there were camping, and had a long night of festivity ahead...

I do want to write more about festivals someday.  Seems like I once had some theory about how festivals worked as a kind of attenuation, a way to live inside hyperobjects, the particular take that Tim Morton gives to speculative realism.  I had been thinking of festivals in terms of both size and self-conscious performance, but that got lost in some whirl of grading or travel.  

In any case, I need to build up my "festival bank," my realm experiences here in mid-Missouri, before I'll figure anything out. Back to the Rose for more Don't Mind Dyin' on Friday?  Or, same time, Soren's band, Big Muddy, at D&D?  I think we're set to to the Talking Horse theater on Saturday.  And next week, there's the Ashland Rodeo.  I could maybe go to cage fighting at that country bar on Paris, the Wild whatever.  The State Fair in Sedalia?  The October Sufi Camp?  Back to Lupus for the Chili Fest on Oct. 3?

So much to do.

later, bob