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Tuesday, October 13th
From Bon Appetit to Bill McKibben
PRESS: BON APPETIT SAYS
"If Sarah Palin's love of moose burgers sparked your interest in Alaskan cuisine, the documentary Eating Alaska might provide further insight into "the last frontier." And while other regional cuisines might not feature caribou and salmon to the same degree, ultimately the movie speaks to a widespread trend in American eating: connecting to where we live, and coming to terms with what we eat and how we come by it."
SCREENINGS
This week Eating Alaska shows at the National Food Security Confrence in Des Moines Iowa, is on the agenda for the Alaska Native Brotherhood Grand Camp Meetings and next week shows in Haines and Kluckwan, Alaska. More film festivals and community screenings are ahead from West Virginia and Utah to Cuba and New Jersey.
THOUGHTS AND STATS
I'm reading Bill Mckibben's DEEP ECONOMY, published in 2007. He writes that he was thinking over a decade ago about the need for a "deep ecology that asked more profound questions about the choices people make in their daily lives. Now McKibben has moved onto "deep economy," explaining it as rethinking growth and efficiency as ideologies and taking a look at our appetite for more. As he writes, growth has created more inequality, we don't have the energy to keep the model going, and it doesn't seem like growth is making us happy.
Here are some stats from the first part of McKibben's book that echo a call to think about our daily choices. to question the ideas that more is better and to keep thinking about community:
- In 1946, the U.S was the happiest country among four advanced economies. Thirty years later the ranking was eighth among 11 so-called advanced countries. A decade later the ranking is 10th among 23 nations, many of them from from the third world.
-In the U.K. per gross domestic product grew 66 percent between 1971 and 2001. At the same time there was no reported increase in satisfaction. In the U.S. per capita gross national product grew 24 percent between 1947 and 1960. Rates of alcoholism, suicide and depression have risen, even as the amount of stuff we have has increased too.
-The size of new houses in the U.S. has doubled since 1970, even though the average number of people living in them has decreased.
-The media wage in the United States is same as it was thirty years ago.
-The percentage of Chinese who own cars matches that of Americans in 1912.
- Farmer's markets are the fastest growing part of our food economy and with that are new possibilities for community identity and land use.
Ellen Frankenstein, on 10.13.09 @ 10:12AKT [link]
