At Urban Center Books last week, I picked up a book called “Sustainable Everyday: Scenarios of Urban Life” (looks like a good chunk of the text is available online) — really an exhibition catalogue from the Milan Triennial, with ideas from univerisites around the world on how to create sustainable communities. Many of the ideas aren’t all that new, but examining the common threads between them: local co-ops, skill sharing, applying smarter logistics to local passenger and freight travel, telework centers, managing the use of space (and capital, like tools) through networks — makes for a fascinating read.

Also interesting is the worldwide focus on food. I’m so darn excited about slow food/slow cities as an organizing concept for sustainability that I’m just speechless about it. I managed to write a bit yesterday explaining how slow food (in this case, a public market) embodies the new urbanism, and hope to be able to expand on that soon.
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Chicago’s farmers markets have started to open — the Green City Market last week and the downtown markets this week, with neighborhood markets to follow next month.

Trader Joe’s has hired Mid-America brokers to find five new store locations in and around Chicago — including two downtown (near north and near south) and Evanston and Oak Park.

Meanwhile, their expansion into the city has changed the market for specialty foods in north side neighborhoods. It’s true: I’ve probably cut back purchases at Dubby’s and Taste in the past few months; the lower prices at TJ’s are unmistakably appealing. The quality is acceptable, as well; I’m willing to buy $5 bottles of wine since most bottles I buy go right to parties (where no one cares) or into sauces. Not that I don’t feel bad about it, though:

‘”What is amazing to me is that people are not more dedicated to small businesses,” [Valerie] Grimbau [of Dubby’s] said. “The public doesn’t get that by supporting small businesses, they’re helping themselves.”‘

[FCG has a great list of specialty food shops.]

frigid but sunny
shoveling snow seems useless
once sidewalk is trod

An unforeseen twist to industrial agriculture, from the NYT:

By the reductive logic that rules our food system, cannibalism should be as legitimate a way of eating as any other: it’s all just protein, right? Yet the great unlearned lesson of B.S.E. and other similar brain-wasting diseases is that, at the level of species or ecosystems, it isn’t quite true that protein is protein. Eating the protein of your own species, for example, carries special risks. The Fore of New Guinea were nearly wiped out by kuru, which bears a striking resemblance to B.S.E.; they spread it among themselves by ritually eating the brains of their dead kin.

This Sunday’s Magazine also includes an article on the Farmer’s Diner in Barre, Vt. The December Harper’s carried a (better) article [not online] by Bill McKibben on the Farmer’s Diner and other peculiar Vermont ways of preserving local ways in the face of industrial logic.

Archibald Candy, better known locally as Fannie May (not to be confused with the mortgage underwriter) has announced its plan to shutter its West Loop candy factory and sell the retail outlets to an owner who will likely offshore production. As a result, 625 manufacturing jobs will disappear.

The city points out that Chicago still has over 100 candy and confection-making companies, providing a $4 billion boost to the city’s economy. Brach’s, by far the largest manufacturer, recently completed its shutdown of its giant West Side factory — one of the last major factories in denuded West Garfield Park/Austin. Owner Barry Callebaut has moved production to Mexico, where American sugar price supports don’t artificially raise the price of candymaking. The sugar supports pay off Jeb Bush’s sugar plantation friends in Florida, corn-syrup distillers like ADM, and corn growers across the Plains, so they’re a great deal for Washington; problem is, America gets stuck with icky corn syrup instead of real sugar in everything, and our food suffers for it.

Meanwhile, tea sellers have caught on to the power of sugar. Of all the articles on the tea boom, this is the first I’ve seen which has caught on to the sugaring up of tea thanks to bubble tea and bottled Snapple tea — but also following Starbucks’ charge into the realm of sugar and spice (oh, and a little bit of burnt coffee). None of the various holiday-theme-flavored coffees and Frappuccinos that Starbucks trots out over the course of a year taste anything like coffee, but that’s the point: Trixies and other middle-American consumers guzzle them down, since sugar in copious quantites can hide whatever drug is hiding beneath (caffeine, or, in the case of flirtinis, grain alcohol).

An aside: Paul Fussell, in Class, writes:

The ultimate class bifurcation based on drink… cuts straight across the center of society, unmistakibly dividing the top classes from the bottom. I’m speaking about the difference between dry and sweet… To a startling degree, prole America is about sweet… Sweet alcoholic drinks are favored by the young and callow of all classes, a taste doubtless representing a transitional stage in the passage from the soda fountain to maturity.

The mystery owners behind the unnervingly well-capitalized Argo Tea, plopped right at Lincoln Park’s most conspicuous corner, are exposed with their plan: to convert half-caf-Frap-guzzling Trixies nationwide (starting in Lincoln Park, naturally) to tea with “Carolina Honey Breeze, a blend of honey, tea and lemon, and Tea Squeeze, a mix of hibiscus iced tea and lemonade.” Even the WASPy Yankees over at Nantucket Nectars mix their iced tea with sugary lemonade, creating something vaguely akin to the sweetened Lipton or Luzianne served by the pitcher all over the South. Kudos to the Trib’s ever-astute Susan Chandler for picking up on this.

And kudos too to John Wallace of the local Aion Tea & Antiquities: “I find people are looking for something that isn’t a cookie-cutter franchise environment. The environment is really important.” Sure, but for my buck, I really like the Zen appeal behind Wild Lily Tea Market and TeaNY. Tealuxe ain’t bad, even if I haven’t been to one in years; the East India Tea Company theme is kind of cute, and the brass tables at Harvard Square are a nice touch.

Want to find a tea house near you? Try TeaMap.

From Reuters, via the Chicago Critical Mass list:

“It’s probably something to do with the culture,” [Mayor Kwame] Kilpatrick told local journalists, when asked about a report that Detroit had passed Houston to take the title as America’s fattest city.

“We’re not a walking city,” Kilpatrick said, adding that this was because Detroit is “the automotive capital of the world.”

Detroit’s international auto show, the industry’s biggest yearly event and a celebration of all things automotive, opens on Sunday.

I read through the Men’s Fitness cover story in 2002, when Chicago was declared second fattest. Compared to the Men’s Health copycat cover, the Men’s Fitness story is not only the better researched of the two (which is not to say that the methodology couldn’t be a lot better); it also offers much more pertinent recommendations. Men’s Fitness recommends that cities install bike racks, bike lanes, and bus bike racks to fight obesity — whereas Men’s Health recommends that guys get computer voice recognition software and eat cinnamon. Umm, sure. That’ll help. The latter recommendations absolve government of any responsibility for people’s health, which, I suppose, might help to sell health-related magazines.

Okay, so The Minimalist admits that there’s not much to congee — a bit of rice, a lot of water, whatever kitchen scraps are around, and a few hours to turn it into a glutinous mass. (But what? No mention of scallion pancakes or fried dough sticks?) Still, it’s strange to see this in the same section as William Grimes’ farewell paean to the spiraling prices of hamburgers on Manhattan Island ($50 at DB Bistro — and still climbing, apparently).

Instead of keeping a separate blog on the Greenhouse Garden, the community garden that I (through the Wicker Park Greens) help to maintain, I think I’ll just toss my posts in here. So, the “food & garden” subject heading will function as a mini-blog of my gardening and eating (and, perchance, drinking) life — along with the usual musings or links about slow food.

I mention this because the first garden catalog of the season has arrived (from Burpee, a consistently excellent seed supplier). I’m looking forward to an early start in the garden, before the bugs and heat of August come by and knock everything out. Several plants worked really well this year, including bok choy, mustard greens, collard greens, beets, arugula, and (finally) sorrel. The asparagus rooted well, and maybe I’ll be able to get a few stalks this year.

Possibilities for this year:
beans (none this year): edamame and French beans
edible flowers: mums, squash, and violas
fruiting: long eggplant, bell peppers (which we forgot this year), honeydew (Charentais), yellow squash, tomatillo, black beefsteak tomatoes
greens/roots: arugula, beets, bok choy, broccoli raab, carrots, yellow chard, leek, mustard, Napa cabbage, red garlic, tetragonia
herbs: Thai basil, bergamot, chamomile, chives, verbena
bush versions: delicata squash, sunflower, zucchini (much larger versions of these took over the garden last year)

Too bad my apartment’s porch is too dim for most anything to grow. I might try placing some perennial herbs in the courtyard immediately below the porch; as long as they look like they fit in, the landscapers won’t bother them. Plus, it’s sunnier down there than it is under the porch.

Hooray! Darwin’s, which appears to be an atheist meeting house opened up the street, with great food to boot!
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Pneumatic feeding tubes just might be a more effective route to obesity than just living in American suburbia. Might.

“Mr. Cohen said because the American male is growing fatter every year, the men’s clothing market may end up like the children’s market.” NYT