west north

Andrew Martin in the New York Times notices a new study that adds a few wrinkles to the locavores’ “local is better” equation with food. As with any simple equation that attempts to summarize an endlessly complex system, it has nuances.

Gail Feenstra, a food system analyst at the [University of California at] Davis campus, says her group hopes the research will help consumers decide if buying local is better than buying organic food that has traveled hundreds of miles. “Maybe you can buy organic within a certain geographic range, and outside of that the trade-offs won’t work anymore,” Ms. Feenstra said.

At some point, the ethical maze can make you dizzy. But there was one line of inquiry from the California researchers that hit particularly close to home: the carbon impact of shoppers themselves.

Some people walk or take the subway to buy their groceries and then compost what they don’t use. But, let’s face it, most of us drive and toss the leftovers into the garbage disposal or the garbage can. In doing so, we may be contributing nearly a quarter of the greenhouse gases associated with our food, research has shown.

Here’s why: Instead of going to the grocery store once a week and stocking up, many consumers are driving for groceries several times a week, if not every day, to all sorts of different stores.

(BTW, UC Davis makes olive oil from street trees on campus. How cool is that?)

[I'll be traveling for the latter half of December, perhaps without benefit of computer or phone! The horrors!]

A few assorted things from the past few weeks of being away:

* “If I lived 17.5 miles from work, I wouldn’t bike to work, either — I’d move. Remember, location and locomotion are two halves of an equation where neither is constant.” [posted at metrorider]

Todd Litman calculates that every nonmotorized (active) trip displaces about seven vehicle miles traveled — not because active trips are seven miles long, but because they’re associated with smarter patterns of development.

“Not every walking or cycling trip causes seven miles of reduced driving. The lower vehicle mileage in cities with relatively high nonmotorized mode split reflects various land use and transport system factors, such as density, mix, street design, parking supply, and pricing which affect the relative attractiveness of motorized and nonmotorized travel. But programs that increase nonmotorized travel tend to create such communities, which is to say that smart growth supports nonmotorized travel and nonmotorized travel supports smart growth.”

* The Pacific Northwest spends more on oil and gas — 100% of which is imported — than on public K-12 education in 2006 or hospital care, and more than 3.5 times total spending on prescription drugs. [Sightline Institute] All that goes “up in smoke,” as they say. Interestingly, Idaho is separated on that counter — an interesting point of comparison, since as many people live within 10 miles of my house than in all of Idaho.

* An interesting “List of Privilege Lists” — ways of “unpacking the invisible knapsack” that accompany those of us with unspoken social privileges, whether racial, sexual, class, religious, gendered, or ability.

* Jay Mouawad in the Times notices that the oil producers fear the geo-green agenda:

“What we are worried about is for industrialized countries to use climate policy as a pretext to discriminate against oil,” [said Mohammad al-Sabban, a senior Saudi government adviser on climate change].

Over in the UK, $100/bbl oil has led gasoline across the magic 1.00 line: one pound per litre. That translates to about $9.50 a gallon, so really, quit whining about gas prices in America already.

* While in Toronto, I picked up a brochure distributed by Alphabet City — not the Chicago Humanities Festival, not an academic symposium, but rather something in between — outlining a program of events around local food in the Toronto area. (Ongoing online discussion hosted by the Walrus.) It opened up first to a manifesto (er, open letter) that posits food distribution as another problem of internalized profits and socialized costs, principally because “healthier, tastier” food is not necessarily more profitable. Indeed, it’s often less so. As such, it calls for market intervention and political action:

Ontario’s working landscapes, farms, rural communities, and cities are linked in a web of complex exchanges. But our food policies to date have usually ignored that web, dividing rather than connecting. If we are going to build a healthy and sustainable village, we have to make the connections… [W]e believe that food is connected to every major problem being raised in the current provincial election campaign—rising medical costs, poverty and hunger, declining farm incomes, the paving-over of farmland, wildlife protection, urban sprawl, youth unemployment, and communities at risk.

These problems will only be solved when we connect the dots.

Local farmers markets, community and school gardens, food co-ops, urban gardens, food access centres—all of these emerging possibilities support healthier, tastier food for all villagers. As this happens, everyone benefits and communities become stronger and more inclusive.

goat coat Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

I took a tour of Prairie Crossing last weekend [a few more photos]; here’s a photo of livestock with some houses behind. (I wasn’t aware that some people kept livestock alongside the co-op horse barn.) Not that interesting unless you know that the farmland is permanently protected, I suppose.

Some interesting figures: one homeowner estimated that his front "lawn" might have 100+ species. Compared to the site’s previous incarnation as a cornfield, the development has created an interesting human habitat (~1,000 residents, school, a few shops) while increasing biodiversity tenfold (example: 110 bird species on site vs. "10-15" before) and reducing water runoff 50-80%. Lake Aldo Leopold, a.k.a. “stormwater detention basin A,” is among the cleanest lakes in Illinois, with water clarity of 20-30 ft. The Sand Hill organic vegetable/flower/fruit farm grosses $18,000 per acre from sales via CSA and farmers markets, vs. $1,700 per acre in even the current overheated market for corn.

DPD has posted Chicago: Eat Local, Live Healthy, a food policy document that outlines solid reasons why local food growing and processing are big economic opportunities for the city and region — and some broad (if vague) steps towards both increasing the size of the local food market and tapping into its potential.

(Interestingly, they acknowledge Environment, MOSE, Public Health, and Aging on the credits page as well.)

Page 4 has an interesting map, showing that both West Town and Logan Square have more than 45,000 residents per supermarket — shocking, since only 10,000 residents are needed to keep one afloat. Page 13 also confirms my suspicions: even though northern Illinois and eastern Iowa have some of the richest farmland known to mankind, high-value vegetable production in the Midwest is really focused on meeting demand from Madison and the Twin Cities (and on exporting asparagus from Michigan’s western shore). Yes, that’s right: more high-value produce is grown for the Madison market, population 0.5 million, than for the Chicago market, population 9 million.

Another interesting map (available from Chicago magazine but created at UIC UTC) shows that yes, thin is in: BMI by ZIP code (as reported to the DMV) is pretty well correlated with education. The north side is skinnier.

Among the implementation tools that the report cites is a “farm forager,” a market-maker who connects farmers to markets. The job is described over at GCM’s page:

For this purpose, GCM and MOSE are funding a “farm forager” to assess, find and support sustainable farmers, increasing the fresh locally-produced foods coming into the city… This innovative partnership presented the first annual 2006 Farmer Workshop in February for 175 attending farmers to help them be more successful in the Chicago marketplace… will build the infrastructure that’s needed to increase the diversity and amount of locally produced food coming into the city of Chicago and the region.

Farmers’ markets are a wonderful thing, but sometimes good old-fashioned division of labor can be even better. Re-creating the human infrastructure of the supply chain leading directly from farm to table will take time, effort, and “new” business models.

* I feel sick. Why? Earlier today, I was hit (no damage, at midday, in the middle of the Loop) by a driver who was clearly in the wrong — double parked, no signals, suddenly backing up without looking (through an illegally black-tinted rear window) — and suddenly found myself with four cagers all simultaneously screaming obscenity-laced insults at me. (None asked if I was all right.) One person on the sidewalk, a woman smoking, seemed to care, and told me to take down details for the cops. Of course, the cops arrived 22 minutes later, moments after the driver finished his business and pulled away, and there being no blood, there was no way to press charges.

Yet when there is blood, as with architect Steven O’Rourke (evidently a friend of a friend) — his body dragged for one mile through the streets of Jefferson Park, knocked out of his shoes just steps from the home where his wife and three small children were sound asleep — it’s too late. Your best witness is dead.

Not one week later, a child riding in the middle of Critical Mass was violently struck by a car fleeing the scene of a crash; his bike was dragged under the car for six blocks. Not just any kid, either, but a regular, an eager boy whom I’d seen graduate from trail-a-bike to his own two wheels, whom I’d fed cookies to. He’s shaken and bruised, but the gall!

Soon, I won’t be able to count the number of people I know — or have known — struck by hit-and-run drivers with mere single digits. This fact, and the utterly nonchalant attitude that countless drivers and the authorities have towards this most soulless, evil-hearted cowardice, fills me with toxic rage.

* A text ad on that O’Rourke story directs readers to the Campaign for Global Road Safety, which points out that worldwide, road deaths kill more people than malaria and diabetes, and as many as either of two lung diseases (tuberculosis and lung cancers) — and that every minute, a child is killed or maimed on the world’s roads. Worldwide, most of these deaths are of pedestrians. This is beginning to get attention from the UN, with a General Assembly session on road safety set for this fall.

* How to end our long national nightmare. [Wonkette]

* At a recent event, new alderman Brendan O’Reilly mentioned one idea worth grabbing from NYC: camera enforcement of Gridlock Sam’s “Don’t Block the Box” directive. Between these, the Natarus sound cameras, and various anti-terrorist cameras, downtown could have a pretty thick network of cameras — pretty useful for also ticketing double-parkers, or for London style cordon pricing.

* Recently viewed and highly recommended: the Criterion Collection release of Tati’s Play Time. No plot whatsoever, but the views of oppressively modernist, traffic-choked “Tativille” alternating with his gentle physical humor made for an enjoyable (if long winded) viewing.

* Speaking of oppressive modernism, I was amused to see that an “urban quarter” (named Quartier sur le Fleuve, but that name currently generates no Google hits) at the northeast corner of Montréal’s Île-des-Soeurs was submitted for the LEED-ND Pilot. The place really looked like a Tati nightmare. [PDF from earlier planning process]

* Québec also passed a “carbon tax” last month, amounting to 0.8c per liter. Curiously, part of Illinois’ gas tax is really an “environmental impact fee” (415 ILCS 125/310). I’d be curious to see what kind of interesting local projects could be funded under a CMAQ-like regional grant program to cut carbon emissions: car sharing, bike sharing, hybrid cabs, beater car trade-ins, electric peak load conservation, whatever.

* “Airplane security seems to forever be looking backwards.” So, billions of dollars in America’s most valuable workers’ time is wasted stuffing “Freedom baggies” and pulling off shoes, all to CYA over yesterday’s threats. [Schneier on Security]

* Pithy comment by Carrington Ward on the Obama-arugula flub:

It’s an interesting point about the price of arugula. One of the problems Iowa farmers face is a dependence on monocrop agriculture — corn, corn, corn.

It is a flipside of the problem that many urban neighborhoods face: bodies sculpted by corn syrup, corn syrup, corn syrup.

We’d be better off as a nation if Iowa farmers were paying attention to the price of Arugula (or apples) in Chicago.

* Portland has a Courtyard Housing Design Competition underway. I’ll be curious to see how they reconcile this type (among my favorites, as you probably already know) with parking. The jury is pretty solid; my sense is that they’ll tend towards the traditional, though.

My pal Maureen made a bunch of worm composting bins for us city-dwelling environmentalists. I recently expanded mine into full-fledged Worm Flats, adding a second layer for super-simple worm management. (The worms migrate up to the second “floor,” leaving behind the now-easily emptied lower “floor.”) It’s worked flawlessly so far. Just watch the short video to join in the fun:

Nicholas Day wrote recently in the Chicago Reader about the new certified-organic pizzeria opening soon four blocks south of me. One interesting bit:

bq. These days, any local organic product is precious. According to Slama, Illinois residents bought $500 million worth of organic food last year, 95 percent of it grown out of state. And still, he says, “there were tens of millions of dollars in demand that weren’t met.” In hopes of increasing production, Sustain helped write the Illinois Food, Farms and Jobs Act, which was introduced in the state legislature last month. It calls for the governor to appoint a task force that would develop policy recommendations for a local organic food system, and to earmark $5 million to support those recommendations.

With proper coordination, a project to increase local organic-food growing capacity to capture even a small share of the state’s organic-food market could yield millions of dollars in revenue for farmers and “farmland preservation projects”:http://www.thelandconnection.org/files/saving.html.

John and Dottie mince no words:

bq. If we had to sum up the taste, overall, of inexpensive American Chardonnay today, we’d say the single most notable smell and flavor is pineapple, with syrupy sweetness, some acetate or nail-polish remover, far too much alcohol and a bizarre overlay of unintegrated acidity, as though a big sack of industrial-strength acid mixture had been dumped into the tank at the last minute to compensate for the lack of natural acidity.

From the Economist, 9 Dec:

bq. The term ‘food mile’ is itself misleading, as a report published by DEFRA, Britain’s environment and farming ministry, pointed out last year… It transpires that half the food-vehicle miles associated with British food are travelled by cars driving to and from the shops. Each trip is short, but there are millions of them every day.

(Incidentally, this is the first post I’ve made from a BlackBerry. Scary.)

Jeff Speck interviews the CDC’s Richard Jackson in Metropolis Magazine about the ongoing effort to portray sprawl as a public health issue.

It has been asserted that I’m too negative when I describe this situation [the sprawling built environment], and it’s true that we doctors tend to focus on pathology. But we know the treatment for these problems. We know how to build communities with central commons surrounded by civic buildings, with sidewalks, parks, and transport, with kids and old folks being able to get back and forth to their daily destinations. I think we are at the right moment to reinvent American communities back to what they were at their absolute best.

In fact, the focus on pathology — on those big, ultimate causes of death rather than the smaller causes leading up to it — has played a large role in blinding medicine to the problem for decades now.

Another day in America, another sadly useful technological innovation:

bq. They say cameras add ten pounds, but HP digital cameras can help reverse that effect. The slimming feature, available on select HP digital camera models, is a subtle effect that can instantly trim off pounds from the subjects in your photos!

Wild Oats brought People’s Market to Evanston, Supervalu just premiered Sunflower in Lincoln Park; Chicago’s underserved natural foods segment seems to be quite popular with small-city companies looking to test new concepts in the big city.

H. Lee Murphy at Crain’s Chicago Business reports:

bq. Roundy’s Inc. of Milwaukee, which operates 143 supermarkets in Wisconsin, plans to bring an upscale grocery concept called Metro Market to Chicago next year, sources say. “We’re in a growth mode and looking to expand,” a Roundy’s spokeswoman says.

Metro Market’s one 53,000 square foot location is on the east side (near north?) of Milwaukee. I stopped by (wholly incidentally) last year and don’t remember anything in particular; the press release description sounds promising but still quite Wisconsin specific (a dozen varieties of sausage made on the premises daily, adult-sized cupcakes, pierogies and a Friday fish fry with rye bread). Interestingly, Bob Mariano, current CEO of Roundy’s, was head of Dominick’s before its sale to Safeway.

Supervalu describes Sunflower as “efficient” and “convenient”; one of its most promising features is is compact footprint: 8-12,000 SKUs in 12-15,000 square feet.

William Saletan in Slate notes that “[Chinese] households with [motor] vehicles have an obesity rate 80 percent higher than their peers.” (The link in the article doesn’t lead to a good source.) Sure, that correlation probably has two huge confounding factors: income, as rich Chinese both own cars and eat more; and maybe a bit of selection bias.* Yet it’s nice to think that such a big correlation implies at least a little bit of causation.

Incidentally, elsewhere in Slate “Joel Waldfogel”:http://www.slate.com/id/2148759 points to British evidence that taller people are paid more because they’re smarter, while “Daniel Engber”:http://www.slate.com/id/2132990/ links heavy babies to bigger adults. All of which sets me up as an outlier again: against American male norms, 87th percentile by birth weight, 5th percentile by adult height, and, well, an immodestly high figure on intelligence. Of course, earnings — well, never mind. (Of course, a decades-old British data set also wouldn’t account for Jewish or Asian Americans, two short[er] groups with above-average incomes.)

* This seems more likely in the U.S., where not driving is an anomalous choice. Bicyclists as a group may be skinnier than average, but no one claims that the act of playing football makes one hefty.

Even if Dick Cheney sinks exploratory drills in every single playground in America, there will never be enough oil to slake the SUVs’ unending thirst for tar:

bq. “SUVs alone burn half the total for all passenger cars, far more than their fair share and more petroleum than our entire country produces in a year.” — Mark Morford, writing in the SF Chronicle

And since we’re dealing with an nonrenewable resource, faster consumption now merely hastens “the inevitable decline and fall”:http://www.salon.com/tech/books/2004/05/19/end_of_oil/index.html :

bq. “We believe oil markets may have entered the early stages of what we have referred to as a ’super spike’ period — a multi-year trading band of oil prices high enough to meaningfully reduce energy consumption and recreate a spare capacity cushion only after which will lower energy prices return… Perhaps the ultimate answer to high how oil prices need to go before demand destruction occurs is derived from knowing when American consumers will stop buying gas guzzling sport utility vehicles and instead seek fuel efficient alternatives… Based on our analysis of gasoline spending and the economy noted above, we estimate that U.S. gasoline prices may need to exceed $4 per gallon.” [Goldman Sachs analyst report, quoted at "Energy Bulletin":http://www.energybulletin.net/5017.html]

or this, from “the Financial Times”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/f20cfb8a-920d-11d9-bca5-00000e2511c8.html (reported by Kevin Morrison and Javier Blas):

bq. “The rapid rise in global oil demand should lead the industrialised world to promote alternatives to oil as well as energy conservation, the International Energy Agency said on Friday. The warning, from the West’s energy policy adviser, signals a sharp turnaround by the IEA, which has previously tried to cool oil markets by blaming prices on speculators and short-term supply disruptions…. The agency also plans to release a report next month entitled _Saving Oil In A Hurry_, which will cover among other issues the topic of energy efficiency in consuming nations. Energy analysts said a new drive on energy efficiency could be difficult because most of the increase in oil consumption is in transportation, where there are few economic alternatives.”

At a new year’s party, the conversation turned at one point to survivalist techniques for dealing with the forthcoming civil war between Red and Blue — with the assumption that we Blues are in trouble since the Reds obviously have a better armed populace. (And no, I’m not a good shot.) At the rate we’re going, we may very well end up in armed conflict, but I’m a bit more optimistic. Even in the event of a peak-oil situation or currency crisis (both of which some pessimists predict will happen this year), I’m encouraged by the natural resilience of diverse ecosystems — human in the city and natural in the countryside — to absorb shock.

Toby Hemenway, formerly a permaculture farmer in rural Oregon, came to different conclusion than most of the pessimists–the socially denuded countryside, completely stripped of social capital by capitalism, would implode during a crash while the socially diverse cities would maintain their resilience. It’s worth reading in its entirety; an excerpt follows the jump.

(more…)

Christopher Conte writes in _Governing_ about Chicago health commissioner Dr. Terry Mason and his new “war on obesity”:http://66.23.131.98/archive/2006/jun/obesity.txt, in the context of both national and local efforts.

[My opinion coming soon]

bq. With this mix of promising starts, disappointing gaps and unknowns, how can Terry Mason, the city’s new health commissioner, best contribute to the effort to reduce obesity? He can, of course, add a strong voice to the chorus urging people to improve their eating and exercise habits. But public health advocates say government is uniquely able to contribute in another way: It can change the environment in which people make unconscious, daily decisions about such behaviors. And that, experts say, may be crucial. As the long, sad story of failed diets and abandoned resolutions to get more exercise demonstrate, relying on individuals to change by willpower alone doesn’t have a good track record…

bq. Some Chicagoans would like to see Mason join the effort to make the city more pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly… That attitude, [Benet] Haller [of DPD] says, repeatedly thwarts the department’s efforts to make Chicago a more pedestrian-friendly city. Drivers oppose efforts to increase housing density for fear it will lead to parking shortages, for instance, and businesses insist on surrounding their buildings with parking lots rather than locating on the sidewalk where they would be more welcoming to people on foot. The issue is politically radioactive, says Haller, who adds that he would welcome the health commissioner’s support.

bq. Perhaps even more eager for an alliance with Mason is the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation. It is working with the city to close a few miles of city streets one day this summer for bicyclists and pedestrians, a first step toward a goal of closing 68 miles of city streets on Sundays. The group’s ultimate goal is to make it much easier for people to bicycle city streets every day. To do that, it would deliberately slow down automobile traffic by making changes such as reducing the size of lanes and intersections–another politically explosive idea. “We need to broaden our base of support, and public health is a big piece of that,” says Rob Sadowsky, the federation’s executive director.

“Virginia Groark”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0605130220may13,1,2838462.story?coll=chi-newslocal-hed breaks the good news in today’s Trib: the bowels of Northwestern Station will soon host an indoor, year-round public market:

bq. Operating under the name French Market of Chicago, Bensidoun USA Inc., an international operator of fresh-food marketplaces, has been selected to open the 15,000-square-foot market in the northern end of Ogilvie Transportation Center, said the firm’s executive vice president, Sebastien Bensidoun.

Apparently, Bensidoun (a contract operator of markets) runs a few markets in the USA already, including contract farmers’ markets in “several suburbs”:http://bensidoun-usa.com/list%20market.pdf (and Lakeview?) and in “White Plains”:http://www.westchestercountybusinessjournal.com/archive/041204/041204wrop08.html. Those seem like pretty standard operations; maybe we can hope for something more like the famed “Blvd. Raspail organic market”:http://www.bensidoun-usa.com/marche%20de%20raspail%20bio.html.

Today’s odd web find: sure, I understand taking photos of meals and posting to Flickr, but thanks to the wonders of the web, you can find out what vegetarian curry aboard Air New Zealand (and any number of cuisine/airline combos) looks and tastes like. Or maybe an “Air Zimbabwe meal circa 1981″:http://www.airlinemeals.net/oldies/AirZimbabwe.html is more to your taste.

(FWIW, I’ve stuck to Indian vegetarian [often vegan, sometimes yogurt or cheese] in-flight meals ever since an unfortunate food poisoning incident involving a turkey wrap on a flight to PDX.)

“I think panic over gentrification is usually sublimated panic over risk or unfairness in the economy as a whole. We just think we can control the local housing market.”

Comment by clew at Cascadia Scorecard

I’ve been posting retouched “Vancouver photos”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/paytonc/tags/vancouver/ to Flickr, finally fixing some of the extreme shadow/highlight problems in the originals. (I took them late one afternoon near summer solstice; the high latitude means that the sun sets late, after many hours at a low angle. Further, I was trying to get shots catching both the gleaming towers above and the then-shadowed streets below. Quite a challenge, and they turned out pretty poorly.)

In any case, some research finds that the West End may not even be “Canada’s densest neighborhood”:http://cascadiascorecard.typepad.com/blog/2005/09/the_manhattan_p.html#comment-12611275: although Statistics Canada won’t give me easy access to that info, Vancouver’s planning department says 31,360 per square mile for the entire downtown peninsula, including the West End; Montréal’s planning department says one census tract there (can’t tell which) nears 113,000, and the overwhelmingly low-rise Plateau arrondissement 33,918 per square mile. It pales compared to the densest tracts in Manhattan (200,000+) and Chicago (91,000), or neighborhoods (Upper East Side, 108,000; Near North Side, 48,500).

Further, Vancouver’s towers are tiny compared to those in Chicago, much less Manhattan. Their planning department cites new developments there as averaging a floor-to-area ratio [Yanks say "color" and FAR, Canucks say "colour" and FSR] of 2-4; in downtown Chicago, home of a famously lenient City Hall, many new towers reach 20 FAR, and we don’t even get the parks or schools or social housing that Vancouver demands of its developers. Sure, our apartments are larger, but not ten times bigger!

Anyhow, useful links:
* Atlas démographique et socio-économique de “Montréal”:http://www2.ville.montreal.qc.ca/cmsprod/observatoire_economique/cartes_thematiques/atlas_demographique_et_socioeconomique?lid=5&pid=2&iid=73&mid=-1
* Overviews of housing development in Vancouver’s “former industrial areas”:http://vancouver.ca/commsvcs/cityplans/majorinfo.htm
* Photos of Vancouver’s skyline compared, “1978-2003″:http://vancouver.ca/commsvcs/fade/fade.htm
* A “Seattle Times”:http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/pacificnw/thebigsqueeze/theseries.html series on urban growth in Cascadia
* Alan Loomis’ essay on “other urbanisms,”:http://www.deliriousla.net/essays/2000-conversations.htm a 2000 conference at Berkeley co-convened at CNU that partially explored West Coast urbanisms

And while we’re on a Cascadia kick, Marian Burros of “the Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/04/dining/04well.html writes about New Seasons Market, a small supermarket chain in metro Portland which focuses on service and — surprise — locally grown food, sourcing 27% of its items from within the bioregion. Not too surprisingly, its second store is at Orenco Station, “considered a leading example of ‘New Urbanism.’”:http://www.newseasonsmarket.com/seasonings/PR_OrencoStation.shtml

Doc Hatfield, a rancher, has a heartwarming quote: “Most of the ranchers are rural, religious, conservative Republicans. And most of the customers are urban, secular, liberal Democrats. When it comes to healthy land, healthy food, healthy people and healthy diets, those tags mean nothing. Urbanites are just as concerned about open spaces and healthy rural communities as people who live there. When ranchers get to the city, they realize rural areas don’t have a corner on values. I think that’s what we are most excited about.”

While walking through the newly built Ikea at Atlantic Station, I noticed a huge line for the restaurant — including many office worker-bee types, probably escaping Midtown for a cheap eat. I’d read somewhere before that Ikea is the tenth-largest restaurant chain in the USA by volume, and it certainly seems plausible given the persistent crowds there. Yet the food isn’t all that wonderful and no cheaper than standard mall-food-court fare. Sure, they have stuff you can’t get elsewhere (lingonberry juice, apple cake), but that’s not really the draw. What is, and what elements would a knock-off or spin-off Ikea restaurant have to keep?

1. Portion sizes. Part of the magic behind the low prices: you get what you pay for. Despite the low prices per menu item, a lunch there easily runs the $10 that it would anywhere else after adding on a drink and dessert. Yet each individual piece is quite affordable since it’s largely stripped of the bulk and fluff that surround typical American plates. Using the kids’ menu as a loss leader also makes eminent sense — something that McDonald’s does quite well.

2. Cafeteria, or better yet, Automat format. This cuts back on staffing and the latter perpetuates the whole Modern aesthetic; the a la carte pricing makes the prices deceptively low.

3. Limited, internationalist menu with gradual changes. I’m not even sure whether the generic Euro-bland menu — e.g., English-style “chicken masala” with vaguely Indian-Chinese overtones — would make sense outside the generic Euro-bland confines of the Big Blue Box. Yet the menu succeeds in selling processed, generic, not all that tasty fast food (tiger shrimp, farmed salmon, frozen vegetables) to a snobby audience, and the occasional shifts might keep them coming back. Or not.

A bunch of incomplete blog-able blurbs archived during the server transition — which, of course, took place while a major American city disappeared under the sea, American media actually sat up and noticed, and the Bush administration was exposed as the lying sack of incompetent cronies they are. Oops.

* Some surprisingly good reporting about the TV reporting (”available online”:http://www.crooksandliars.com for us TV-free folks) on Katrina comes from Maureen Ryan’s “Watcher” TV column, notably “this recap”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-tribtv,1,3096468.htmlstory#katrinatv of “a week when everyone’s mask dropped and raw honesty was everywhere.” Meanwhile, Oprah’s “endless well of empathy”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-tribtv,1,3096468.htmlstory#katrinaoprah boiled over into anger: “When it comes to what happened, and didn’t have to happen, to children, it’s pretty overwhelming. It makes me so mad. This makes me mad! This should not have happened.”

* Todd Purdum in “the Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/03/national/nationalspecial/03voices.html reports on the “outrage at the response” from the viewpoint of a revered big-city mayor. “Andrew Young, the former civil rights worker and mayor of Atlanta who was Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations, was born in New Orleans 73 years ago, walked on its levees as a boy and ‘was always assured by my father that the Army Corps of Engineers had done a masterful job.’ But, Mr. Young said, “they’ve been neglected for the last 20 years,” along with other pillars of the nation’s infrastructure, human and physical. “I was surprised and not surprised… I think we’ve got to see this as a serious problem of the long-term neglect of an environmental system on which our nation depends.” Mayors, more so than any other high-profile elected officials, know the minutiae of infrastructure and know how important it is to the proper functioning of a great city, state, or nation. Too bad that 30 years of anti-government rhetoric from Washington has deprived our nation of the chance to do some great things with its infrastructure.

* The National Review’s “Rich Lowry”:http://nationalreview.com/lowry/lowry200509021731.asp offers up a grand bargain that my New Urbanist conscience thinks acceptable: “If the tableaux of suffering in the city prompts meaningful soul-searching, perhaps there can be a grand right-left bargain that includes greater attention to out-of-wedlock births from the Left in exchange for the Right’s support for more urban spending (anything is worth addressing the problem of fatherlessness).”

* The “NY Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/opinion/08thu1.html has editorialized against Congressional pork in light of the disaster, particularly the “Sprawlway”:http://www.sprawlway.org/news/nytimes090805.html, er Hastert Highway, er, Prairie Parkway.

*Miscellaneous stuff*:
* Geoff Canada’s “latest idea”:http://nytimes.com/2005/09/09/nyregion/09promise.html is to bring Slow Food ideas to Harlem on a public-school budget: $5.87 a student buys two meals and two snacks a day of fresh, healthful food.

* Charles Shaw, who somewhat “confusedly conflates”:http://www.planetizen.com/node/148 public housing redevelopment, New Urbanism, the war on drugs, and the Creative Class, has “gone out of commission for a while”:http://newtopiamagazine.net/articles/58?POSTNUKESID=9d6121b529292a6621e24b12b2c46c02. It all makes more sense now, or maybe not.