Marketing Nature's Own

March 29, 2006

Rains again. Rains expected.

Ryan has 4 zucchini seedlings up now and you have never seen a kid so excited by vegetables. Well, he likes watching them grown and picking them he doesn’t necessarily enjoy eating them.

Someone was cursing Marketing and Marketers the other day, primarily because it’s so difficult to keep track of what’s good for you because they are constantly playing with the words. If wheat bread is good for you, they’ll include something in the title of their product like Ground Wheat Flour (which I believe is actually just flour, ground from wheat, which we eat all the time) to make you buy it with the understanding that this is good for you like wheat bread is. Which is essentially a lie.

I laughed. It imitates Nature herself, don’t you see?

Let’s say there’s a butterfly, like the Monarch, which tastes good to birds. Somewhere along the line, nature produced a toxin in some of them which made them taste horrible to birds. In time that feature came to be in all Monarchs, and as a direct result, birds won’t eat them. What is also interesting is that birds will associate the color and pattern of the Monarch with the foul taste. Now along comes this other butterfly (and I’ll be damned if I can remember the name) who develops the same coloring and marking of the Monarch but, get this, don’t contain the toxin that makes them so inedible. They are mimicking in order to increase their chances of survival.

And if that’s not Marketing, I’ll eat my hat.

Our ancestors didn’t have it any easier, so don’t fool yourself. Anyone who foraged had to be able to tell the difference between an edible morel mushroom and a Death Cap. They also needed to know the time to pick wild berries, roots, and tubers, because doing so at the wrong time could cause illness or death. They needed to be able to read seasons, prepare meats, buy meats and vegetables from sometimes untrustworthy sources; in other words they had a hell of a lot of work to do that we never even think about.

These people were up at dawn and asleep before their heads hit their pillows.

So complaining about a bunch of stuffed white shirts making marketing campaigns trying to fool you doesn’t get you very far when you look back historically.

In fact, we look bad because we have it so damn easy. If the Marketers are trying to stick it to us, don’t just sit and complain, you’ve got 3,000 pages of reference materials all over the Web on any subject from Types of Wheat Flour to the difference between Biodegradable and Compostable.

As my mother always used to tell me, referring to those hucksters who sold vegetables on the streets of South Philly, “Did you ever hear a huckster yell, ‘Rotten tomatoes!’”

Stay one step ahead of the Marketers and read as much as you can to give your family the nourishment they need, your planet the treatment it deserves, or the company the money for products made that agree with your actual standards, not ones laid on afterwards by a campaign team.

And don’t be surprised when they change their stripes because you aren’t buying.

Lying Down

March 27th

The rain has just set in. Temperatures in the mid 70s. The California Poppies are just coming up, Ryan was excited to show me two this morning.

The weekend in the yard wasn't a particularly difficult one, I'm still maintaining (or trying to maintain) the balance between working in the house and outside on Saturdays while Wendy is working. And, yes, by the end of the day (5pm) I am ready for a) a long bike ride or b) a cold beer.

We'd all gotten free seeds last week from our little Farmer's Market (I think there are only 10 stalls, one of them devoted entirely to mozzarella, if you can believe it). They're last year's seeds and I don't expect them to take. Thankfully. Abby I believe is trying to grow turnips, which I can't stand. Ryan is frustrated that we have to wait a few weeks before planting the watermelon. We have a few Gold Rush yellow zucchini sprouts up which we'll move to the back, where they did so well last year.

Working in the garden started me thinking (which is actually not such a difficult task) about what is real and what is fake. Moreover, where are we lying to ourselves and where are we true.

I was thinking in particular about this really awful restaurant we took the kids to just outside Disneyland, called Rainforest Cafe. What's so terrifically sad about it is how goddamned misguided the whole adventure is, from the gift shoppe at the front to the food choices for the children. If you can believe it, at a place called the Rainforest Café a child’s plate does not come with fruit. The adult plate does not come with fruit. What a perfect opportunity to give a kid a banana (though, notably, I’m sure plenty of rainforests fall to make way for banana plantations, but still…) And how about donating a portion, even a nickel a plate, to saving the rainforest? How about skipping the desserts and sponsoring a gorilla in the wild? How about compostable plates? Here was the horrible themed restaurant based on a fragile ecosystem which is dying while you eat the fried onion blossom appetizer.

Honestly, you can’t take me anywhere.

We did get drinks, and sometimes that takes me out of If-I-Ran-The-Circus mode.

But still, where does this enormous corporation get off fooling people into thinking their somehow a part of the circle of life while they run laughing to the bank in their Hummers?

One of the very things I love about my garden is it is true. Whether or not you see it as a weedy mess (and most people don’t, I’m probably the worst offender here), it actually is a pesticide free, fertilizer free, environment for that circle of life Rainforest Café was imitating. Everything from the skunks to the billions of little ants living under my porch have a place to live. You can’t dig in my garden without turning up earthworms. That, my friend, is what they call a good thing.

The birds come in looking to eat the worms, and when they do they don’t have to worry that they’ve been soaked in Malathion or something else. And the worms that live can do their business. This is real, this is what’s happening as you stick your hands in the soil. Not a flock of birds trilling at the push of a button.

I may have said it before, but I always wondered why those crazy Zen monks were always telling you to do the most boring things: wash dishes, weed your garden, sit and stare at a wall for 40 minutes. But here it is, can’t you see? Here is where you can’t escape yourself and you can’t run away from reality. Boring old stupid reality. Just sitting there and clearing out the pond of amusements, taxes that need doing, and plasma screen TVs.

I’m not saying that diversions aren’t fun, and aren’t necessary, but I always crave something deeper, something meaningful. Which often makes me a pain in the ass.

I need to learn to sit and weed and listen and not get up on my high horse (as it were) taking potshots at passers by. Do not judge, lest ye be judged, boy. That’s the difficult part. Even taking away many of the diversions, which I seemed to have done, is not enough, the road is longer, and you have just taken the first steps.

Not that they are bad steps.

There are just a hell of a lot of them.

And I hope they will get easier somewhere along the way.

Green is also the Color of the Ocean

I'm jealous. Today, anyway, of my friend Karen. And Anne Lamott. They're both writers who write during the day and are devoted to it. That's actually a little unfair, since Karen is home schooling children during the day and shouldn't have the energy to write. But they both write anyway.

I think it's painful to write sometimes. Especially when I'm reading Anne Lamott, who not only goes into her past addictions and bad behaviors in general, but brings you into the uncomfortable present. Here she's out of money right near the end of her last book, here her son Sam is telling her how much he hates her, here another parent is worried about her son's school performance. Okay, that last one is hilarious:

"Sam really has a gift for making things out of next to nothing… His last teacher, after expressing some concern about his handwriting, said, "He makes such amazing things out of… of… of," and I said, "Garbage?," and she said, "Yes!"
Sometimes I have a knee-jerk concern that he has so little interest in school. At the end of second grade, on of the mothers said, "Gee he doesn’t go much for homework, does he?," and I wanted to scream, "No, but he makes inventions, you dumb slut, out of garbage. While your kid is an obsequious little Type A suck.
I realize I may be the least bit sensitive."

-- Traveling Mercies

Wendy, my wife, is very shy though startlingly open to those who are open with her. I'm afraid at times to bring my life out into the open, when the open is so horrifyingly scary sometimes. The open, it seems, is Howard Stern and American Idol. It's people who grew up in schools making fun of other people, now spending all their free time to laugh at people on TV. (If you want to know, the people who produce those shows more than likely hate the shows and themselves for making it. They also hate the people watching it. It's a tiny little circle of self-loathing anyone outside of the TV industry cares to talk about. I know, I worked in it for 7 years.)

So I take those moments to the garden. And most times they go away. And I wonder, am I stunting my writing by gardening, or does writing stunt my growth?

I keep thinking of those crazy Zen Buddhist monks telling everyone to shut up and go back to washing dishes. Washing dishes! What the hell can you find there? We should be at revivals, or shopping, or learning new things with our friends, you're telling me I'm going to find peace doing something I wanted to hire a housekeeper to do?

(Those not my personal thoughts at the end there. I can't afford a housekeeper and I do my share of dishes every day.)

The garden brings all those self-loathing, confusing, and horrifying thoughts to soil level. And I don't know how it does it, but it usually can take care of them in an hour or so.

So, I don't know if it's I'm afraid to write because I'm shy or because I'm lazy.

Regardless, lunch hour is over for this day, and I guess I got to spend this time writing at least.

It'll do.

Rainy Days and Saturdays

March 4, 2006

The rains are just finishing here today. People in Southern California, the ones who live in the city anyway, look at rain as an inconvenience. Maybe all people in the suburbs and cities around the country do. As if the weather was here for them, to help them go about their days of shopping, soccer practice, golfing, or whatnot. I think it’s one of the beautiful things gardening taught me about the nature of weather and its intimate connection with the growing things on the planet. Without rain, the trees in the forest would never grow, nor the wild berries that feed the bears. It may sound corny, but when my corner of the world gets rain I know intimately about the water percolating down through the soil and each plant bringing in the life-giving nectar. Listen to me, waxing poetic about the rain.

It’s just that in my mind before rain was entwined with bad feelings like loneliness and depression. I imagined Karen Carpenter standing with an umbrella in my front yard singing to herself “Rainy Days and Mondays always get me down”.

Perhaps, too, that our lives are so busy as adults that it’s nice for once to take a break and sit inside. Since there are so few bad weather days here, it’s easy to hear your mother still yelling, “Go outside, it’s a beautiful day.” Going to a movie during a sunny afternoon here is still one of the few guilty pleasures I still love.

Ryan and I have gotten out the seed growing tray and have been trying to germinate some old seeds that the garden store guy gave us last time we were there. They hadn’t taken off all last week so I thought they needed the warmth of being inside. Ryan was very excited yesterday when he showed me the sprouts. Unfortunately they were sprouts of various kinds of mushrooms whose spores must’ve been in the soil mixture. We’re really not the best seed growers. In fact, I’m always surprised at how brown our thumbs are. Sometimes I think I’m just lazy because I don’t want to do all the work so many other gardeners do: the endless watering, daily checking on seeds, fertilizing, double-digging, and mulching. We do some of that, but really we kind of let things fend for themselves and consider it a huge bonus when we get lots of lettuce or see our Spanish lavender blooming.

I’m excited whenever I see a plant with the description Thrives on Neglect.

I guess I swing back and forth in my heart on what a gardener really is. Which is what neurotics do really well. The one thing I can confirm is somehow both our children, Ryan especially, have an appreciation of nature I never had as a child. They are excited, as they should be, when they go pick lettuce for us. Though kids with massive gardens in their back yards may dread going out, that we have just a taste of it brings a sense of wonder which is enough, I think, for city kids.

We will never be great gardeners. That’s just a fact (unless, of course, Ryan suddenly decides when he is older to raise his own vegetables and flowers). We will never be leaving bagfuls of zucchini and tomatoes on our neighbors porches then run away into the night, as we barely grow enough for ourselves.

I think it’s okay we still experience the awe of plants growing and the it drives us out, farther out, to the deserts, the forest, and the ocean. And while others are hell bent on taming it with their noisy, obnoxious machinery, that maybe we will have the patience to sit quietly for a minute or two and fully enjoy God’s bounty and gifts to us.