A Hard Day For a Vegetarian, by Theresa McDaniel

Freedom From Want- Norman Rockwell

Some days I want bacon.  This time of year is the hardest. My mom makes the best turkey at
Thanksgiving and vegan substitutes have never quite fit the bill.  This Thanksgiving I had hummus and a huge salad.  My mom assured me that the apple pie was vegetarian.  Thursday was not the hard day, though.  Friday was.

I work for Compost SC.  It is an organization that I started and we gather food scraps and compostable matter so that we can compost them and then use them for soil amendment, all so that we can grow more food.  We call it closing the food loop.

The problem is that, much like a leaky boat, there are a number of other little holes that we do not see in the food loop.

to be clear, not me or my friend.
I didn't want to embarrass him or the business

Friday morning, my parents and I went to get coffee.  I ordered a bagel and my usual quad-soy-raspberry-no whip- mocha. Even though it is November, it was still warm enough to sit outside and there before going out to look at the world and watch people spend wads of money on Black Friday,  was a man drinking coffee.  He looked as though he had seen better days.  He looked to be holding on to his black coffee to warm his hands as much as his insides as he sipped.

My dad warned me to put the butter on my bagel before it got too cool to melt the butter.  I told him that I don't eat butter.  I told him that I was working on becoming full vegan.  My dad smirked.  It was the same smirk that I had seen when I told him that I wanted to play the violin when I was 12.  That same violin that sits on the wall of my bedroom and that I rarely pick up and for which I had only recently learned to read music.  It was not a smirk that said he thought I was not going to do it.  It was that smirk that said, "I know that you are going to do it.  It will just take a while."

I was going to do it.  It was going to take a while.  I became a vegetarian when I was 16.  Within a week I felt lighter and better.  We were living in San Diego at the time and the options were plentiful.  I could find vegetarian options all over the place and my mother was more than willing to cut back on the protein.  I was always able to cook for myself and so when it came to making things just for me, it was pretty easy.

I started with just giving up meat, then eggs.  Slowly it led to almost all animal products.  Every day, it gets easier and easier.  Some days, I crave bacon and it is difficult to find things that compare to what momma makes.  I miss her mac and cheese and I miss the piles of bacon and sausage.  Now, I have been a vegetarian a full third of my life and someday, I will be at a point will I have not eaten meat more than I have eaten meat or animal products.  I feel pretty good.

The pats of butter sat on the plate and they did not melt.  Every so often, the man who had seen better days would glance at the plate.  I could tell that he was interested in the butter, but there was no real context to offer it to him and he seemed like he did not want to ask.  If I had offered him a bagel along with it, that would have made sense.  Just the butter though, was weird.  With a look, I just pointed to it and he nodded.  I handed it to him.  My dad glanced back and we both watched the man place the wrapped pats of butter in a plastic bag and put them in his pocket.

He continued to look at me in an curious way.  It was as though he was looking for a break in the conversation to say something to me.  Even when my dad would pause, he didn't say anything; just looked at me.  Finally, I returned his gaze and raised my eyebrows.

"You're that girl."

"I am a girl...I don't know if I am THAT girl."

My father, surprised that I was talking to the man behind his back, turned and asked in an imposing baritone, "What girl?"

Miles away from home, literally across the country from my home, I was behaving myself.  I am sure my dad was waiting for stories of me passed out, drunk, on the floor of some bar.  I was nearly sure there were no stories like that out here about me and I felt safe.

The man went on to say that he sees me all the time by the dumpsters.  Rubber boots, sweat pants and hoodie at 3 or 4 in the morning.  I am never hiding.  I will often just stop, pick up our bucket of compost, throw it in my car and be on my way.  The thing that I have always known about where every I am is that someone is always watching.

My dad gave me a look that asked if I still had my pistol and in an unspoken shorthand that we had developed from knowing me all my life, I nodded yes. I told the man yes aloud and felt a mild flash of red to my face as if he was about to ask me for my autograph.  How would I sign it?  Theresa the garbage girl?

I told him what I do and he asked me if I ever looked in the dumpster.  I had to confess that unless I had a really compelling reason to look, I would not.  It was never worth the queasy feeling that I would get to look.  Every so often, I would see a bucket that was tossed in there.  We always needed buckets.  I never really looked in or dove.

I told him that I would sometime and he said "Tonight...Tonight is a good night."  It was almost conspiratorial, as though he wanted me in a on a heist or something.  I looked at my father and he looked at me, neither of us saying a word.  I had the same look I imagine I had when I asked about going on my first date only this time it was a homeless man who looked to be in his 50's.

My dad looked at me as if to say, "Go ahead."  I told him that I normally go out at 4 and that he and mom would be asleep at the hotel anyway.  He gave me his exasperated wave that indicated that he knew that I had already decided.

I was trying to take some time off because my parents were in town.  It was my first Thanksgiving not in California and if I could not be home then I thought I was grown up enough to invite my parents out here to South Carolina.  To watch my mother putter about in a kitchen that was far too small and my dad constantly updating scores on his laptop from games in sports I had no idea about was a bit strange but we, for the first time, shared some bottles of wine and ate, mostly standing up.

Next year, it will be at my brother's house, with his new wife and their new child in Oregon, but this one was all mine and apparently, I had accepted a date from a homeless man and was going to spend a portion of it with him, dumpster diving.

Most of the time when I go out on these missions it is relatively solitary.  Some days I will have help from other volunteers who are in the area.  Just for some company as I go from place to place like a bee picking up pollen and nectar only this case, it is garbage.

It was freezing.  Literally.  The temperature was about 25 degrees and it felt like I could feel my breath freezing every time I inhaled and it made me cough a little.  We met at a local supermarket and he directed me to park at the side, out of sight. I brought him a coffee just in case and I sipped tea. The temptation to pour it on me just to heat up was almost unbearable.

He looked around crouched behind a bush and through to the corral that held the dumpster.  It was piled high with trash and nearly overflowing.  In the corral were waxed boxes that once held produce.  In the corner was a turkey.  It was a whole wrapped turkey and perhaps something happened to it, but regardless there it was, wasted.

He blew into his hands and rubbed them together.  Then he pulled the door open.  Inside were boxes and in those boxes were lots and lots of food.  There were cakes and cupcakes, brownies and sweets of all kinds.

The dumpster was filled with boxes and boxes of food.  He said it was like this every holiday and that on regular days it was still pretty full.  There were expiration stickers on each item that indicated the date.   For most, they expired that day and not even really expired, but were just not sold. He took a bite of one many sandwiches and had a look on his face like he had not eaten in days.  I asked him what kind it was and he said it didn't matter.  He had not been starving he had just gotten past the point where he cared or was concerned about the taste of thing.  His life had become about sustenance.  The particular store we were outside of (I will not mention the name) was kind of a specialty place.  They do not donate their compostables to us so I was not familiar with the outside.  I went inside it nearly once a week or so for random things.

We ducked every time there was a passing car thinking that it might be the police.  I began to wonder what that would look like.  I wondered what my parents would say if they had to bail me out in the morning.  Whether my father, a decorated military lawyer, would make a big deal about his little girl getting arrested for going through a dumpster full of wasted food.  He would have a fit but somewhere in the back of his mind he would have loved it. Not only were they throwing it out, but they were going after people who were going to get it?  I can understand the more conservative narratives.  There are laws.  People could get sick from eating something that was tainted.  Or, something could happen to them while they were diving.  Or, and this is pure devil's advocate here, they could see it simply as people would just wait to go through the dumpster at night rather than shop in the store.  That is a far reach.

This was one of the leaks in the boat of the food loop.  Not only was food being wasted, but animals had given their lives and died so that sandwiches and wraps could be made and disposed of when the concoctions we had made with their flesh was no longer appetizing through the unrecyclable plastics they were wrapped in.  A whole turkey lay rotting in the corner, bound for the landfill.

My new friend loaded a duffle bag full of food.  I asked him about the turkey and he said that there may or may not have been a reason it was tossed and it was too dangerous to take.  Cooking it would have been a hassle in his living conditions anyway so he left it.  We left the box full of beef and of course the box full of sushi and fish that had just hours earlier graced the shelves inside.  The boxes and wraps of some of the things that he had taken simply said "Best By 11/28" as if as soon as the front door of the store was locked and the last customer was gone, the food went bad.

I began to wonder if I had any right not to eat anything with so much going to waste.  Did I have the right to be picky when others are starving?  It was their food and their right to do with it what they wished.  I had always had a problem working in food service.  I could not rectify people throwing out food that was good and that others would never get a chance to taste.  High end, quality, artisanal were not a lot of words used in shelters I imagine.  I could not bring myself to do it.  At the end of the night just toss all that food.

There were boxes full of eggs and empty bottles of milk that had likely been poured down the drain.  My friend found the remnant cans of a six pack of great beer.  It seems that two of the cans had been crushed and opened so they threw the rest out.

There are a lot of layers to this whole thing but the overall thing that stuck with me is the notion that there are people starving, food being wasted, and those like myself who do not think that an animal should have to die to feed anyone.  Mores or taste, it is all still there.  Why didn't they take it to a shelter?  Why didn't they at least compost the veggies?

I met with my parents a few hours later and I told them what I had seen.  We took a drive around the city and we drank coffee and watched the sun rise together.  They were renting a car and driving to Atlanta for the day to fly back to California.  Before they left, I looked at my father and asked him what I should do.  I wondered, what did all mean.  

"That is hard to say, but you will figure it out."

"Will I?"

He looked at me and he smirked.  That smirk that said, "I know that you are going to do it, it will just take a while."

It was a hard day for me as a vegetarian.  I wondered if my vegetarianism is a luxury and though it is something that I consider, it is not the primary reason for me writing this.  If I were homeless and hungry would still be a vegetarian?  There were piles of food in there, but nothing with any protein.  Some of the wraps had hummus in them and were stamped proudly as "vegan", and yes, I took a bite from one and added the remnants to the compost bin, but if I were on the street, the chances of coming across something like were few and far between.

I write this primarily because I have always been one of those people who wonders how others live and now that I have that peek I wonder more.  I wanted to eat a sandwich with him out of solidarity.  I wanted to find the animal that had given its life for that food and tell him or her that they did not die in vain and that if nothing else, some random girl somewhere took a bite out of respect (?) just to keep you from going into a landfill somewhere.   I lost my appetite not because there was flesh, but more because it was going to waste.  I lost my appetite because I was not hungry enough. This is something that it is going to take me a little while to wrap my head around.

Earth and Pollen

For the next couple of months, at 99Knives our primary focus is going to be on the things that we can do over the winter, the crops that we can grow and harvest, and the ways that we can prepare for the coming spring.  Yes, we will be singing Christmas carols and offering all kinds of holiday cheer, but rest assured that we are going to be thinking about the things that brought us here and how we arrive at these moments, surrounded by friends and family, and eating things that were lovingly brought to us and prepared by skilled hands.

While we eat turkey and pumpkin pie somewhere in the back of our minds is how we are going to
recreate this scene next year and, being human, how we are going to make it better.

We have said it before and we will say it again, the work does not end in winter and in fact we are joining nature in the amazing loop that will bring us back to where we are now.

Investments in our future...
To date, we have designated approximately $120,000 to be put into our various projects over the year in a rather diverse engagement in several projects, each that engages with many people, and each that builds on our core ideology...the best food for the most people.

Compost SC
...was started as a method for reclaiming waste from restaurants and coffee shops.  We invested in this program to create a way for us to get low cost soil amendment for crops in the coming year.  We realized that we would soon have too much to utilize and have devised ways to donate it or sell it off.  What started off with a desire to help the planet, to the tune of 100 tons saved from landfill, turned into a profit center.

Worm Works... 
...was devised as a way to take this a step further.  We were able to create a network of worm farmers who were willing to sell their worm based fertilizer at a profit for them and a means of further closing this loop.  Better soil, better plants, better food.


Bee-kind...
...is working with honey producers as well.  Bees are a keystone to our environmental well being.  There are many producers out there and we feel that as chefs, we should encourage people to make
more and to develop many more ways to help bees thrive.  More bees, more plants, more food.

Bee-kind is working to promote these ideas and develop networks for growers so that they can sell their products locally at a nominal profit.  We need more bees in the world.

All of this means better and more crops for us in the spring.  It means more people to buy from and more people to sell to.  It means stronger networks, stronger people, a stronger economy, and a stronger planet.

These are all ideas worth looking at and investing in.  We have a vested interest in creating sustainable, afforable/profitable food systems.  These are things that everyone can agree on and watch as we grow together.  We can put a little more money in our pockets.  We can grow a few more plants.  We can get to know our growers.  In the coming weeks and months we are going to be working along every link in the chain and making a huge impact on the world we live in.  All we need to do is start where nature starts...with earth and pollen.

I Am Somebody and So Are You

This is industry related, I swear...

I have wild hair and I have a piercing in my belly button but I like to think that the similarities between me and the trolls of myth end there.  Yesterday I said some things about some things and it irritated quite a few people.  To them I say good!  I am a living breathing human being and I have a voice.  So do you.  Use it.

A troll in the internet sense just says things to get a rise out of someone.  Trust me, I read the comments sections of a lot of articles.  That is not at all what I was doing here.   I had some thoughts, I voiced them.  I will have many more and no, I will not shut up.  Nor should you if you believe in something.

I fear I may have gotten on this person's bad side when I referred to his event as "hipster bullshit".  He ended up doing the equivalent of stomping like a child from a room and leaving the conversation when I called him on it.  Not before doing the very cowardly thing of lobbing what he thought was an insult.  He called me...brace yourselves..."irrelevant". I think his hope was to make me feel small and insignificant.  It didn't work.

He said that other people were saying the same thing about me in private messages to him and were basically saying "Who is she?"  I am a living, breathing, human woman with an opinion, that's who I am.  Why were these conversations going on in the backrooms and corridors of Facebook?  Everyone is someone.  Everyone has a valid opinion.  Moreover the moment I start couching my self worth in what some other person on the internet said about me, is the day...well, I don't know because it is never going to happen.

When I called his event elitist, he denied it.  When I said that neither it nor he came anywhere near what he claims he was trying to do, he scoffed.  If nothing else his final comments were very telling about who he is and what this event was about.

Everyone has a voice.  Everyone has something to say and someone who is trying to educate someone else should be the first to recognize that there is no one who is irrelevant.  This is especially true when we are talking about food.  Everybody's gotta eat and everyone who ingests food has a vote.

Pam Warhurst of Incredible Edible has a wonderful ideology...



The best thing about Incredible Edible it is that it is inclusive.  No one is irrelevant and no one should be out of the loop.

Am I a nobody?  No, I am a wife and mother and business owner.  I am a daughter, a farmer, and a darn good chef and my opinion matters.   So I was really very happy when he said that I was irrelevant.  It sealed my faith in myself and proved my point.  It was a bunch of hipster bullshit put on by a pretentious douche who puts himself out there as the new every man while simultaneously calling anyone who disagrees with him ignorant and irrelevant.

My husband is a comic nerd who always laughs at this scene from the Avengers.  The one where Loki attempts to put his foot down and assert how lowly we all are in his presence...

I get it now.

The Ones Who Walk Away From Suzie's Farm

For the past couple of months I have been getting notices for an event in my Facebook feed and I found it quite interesting.  Not that it was anything that I would ever go to, but because of all the event proposed to be and all of the other people who were interested.  If you are in the know and were one of the 1200 or so people who got an invite to this oh so exclusive event, then you got an invite to it then I hate to break it to you, but the event has been cancelled...kinda.  It does not matter really anyway because of lot of the spectacle was in the events leading up to it.

Let me say a few things right off the bat in the interest of editorial honesty.  Let that be the first thing; that this is an editorial and that I am writing this to offer my opinion on things that happened and I fully accept criticism and contrasting viewpoints.  The second thing that I would like to make abundantly clear is that I am not a vegetarian.  I gladly eat meat but more on that in a few moments.  Finally, let me state that I do not personally know anyone in this debate.  That is to say that I have not met any of these people face to face and that is a large part of why I am going to say what I am going to say about this particular happening.

The event was Death For Food At Suzie's Farm and I am sure that you could see from the title alone, it got a lot of objections.  A lot of people were going to get together and serve a gourmet meal of turkeys and lamb and more.  Chefs from all over San Diego were going to lend their talents to this event and the organizers were going to talk about humane killing of animals.  In the interest of editorial honesty I am not going to write in grandiose terms about killing and murder of animals.  We can see that what most telling about this event is not what is said so much as what is not said and how it is not said.  Bear with me.

We have been down this road so many times and this was simply the last straw for me.  This is the culinary industry's collective "jumping of the shark" moment.  The event is ostensibly cancelled and our  feathered friends may get some reprieve but who knows.  Attendees were ready and willing to shell out $150.00 per person to $300.00 per person should you like to participate in the "harvest" of a biodynamically raised turkey to take home.

The initially $150.00 is for a delightful, I am sure, dinner but my frustration and annoyance comes from the additional $150.00 people were willing to pay for the honor of watching their bird slaughtered in front of them supposedly in the interest of education on the origin of your meal.  This is where we get into terminology.  "Slaughter" is the correct term.  This term is conspicuously absent when we are talking about this event.  The organizer uses words like "harvest" so that people feel better about what they are doing all the while couching the event in the idea that people must confront their idea of what it means to kill what you eat.  If it is slaughter, call it slaughter and reclaim the word.

The event is promoted as an educational event, which, in my opinion, is designed to make it more palatable to the attendees. I would have felt more comfortable with it as an event if they had merely said that it was just a dinner and if one so chose, they could slaughter their own and take it with them for Thanksgiving.  Instead, they chose to say that the point was to make sure that people knew where their food was coming from and what went into its arrival at the table.  Here is where I have to take a swing at a few myths.

Myth #1  People don't know where their food comes from...
People know exactly where their food comes from.  The matters that are at issue now is how much they care or can afford to care.  Aside from once hearing that someone thought that mayonnaise came from plants (and I think/hope that was a joke) no one over the age of ten or so does not know where their food comes from.  The question is and should be how to get people to care and put them in a position where they can make the choice to care.  Ironically, that involves making it more affordable.  When the goal is to get your family fed on a holiday and have that big brown bird with the crispy skin on the table few can afford to keep in the forefront of their minds how it got there, whether it had a big field to roam around in or whether it met a peaceful end.  They have mouths to feed and if anything needs to be removed from the table, it is the notion that this was about educating Americans.

Myth #2  That this was not about the money...
I am a capitalist.  I do not believe that people should do things for free and I never will.  I do believe that charity is charity and capitalism is capitalism and the moment that profit exceeds loss  is when that threshold is crossed. Myth #1 is hard to extricate from this also.  Whether or not the organizers were out to get rich, I do not know enough to say.  I do however know that people were coming out ahead and that everyone involved was going to get more out of it than they were putting in.  Again, I have to say that this is not a bad thing but combined with Myth #1 it is problematic.

Myth #3  This is about reverence for the animals...
NO!  Short and simply put, the moment this becomes about people paying to watch what they eat get killed it crosses the line from reverence to spectacle and there are two sub-myths that accompany that.  The fact that there are 700 million people in the U.S. alone and nearly 8 billion world wide.  I am all for baby steps in positive directions but we have to confront an end game here.  Can we honestly say that these events are helping the cause? I have to say no.  I have to say emphatically no.  That leads me to...

Myth #4  This is about awareness...
One of the main reasons I chose to write this is to open the dialogue.  Organizers of this event said that this was one of the main things that they wanted to get from it.  They wanted people to speak about it and talk about where their food was coming from.  At last look 1500 people were invited.  About 100 responded.  52 said they were coming.  I am not sure how many tickets were sold or who was slated to show, but let's assume that Facebook is in this case reliable.  52 people were going to learn about this event.  52 people were going to show up and participate.  Let's look at the demo of that 52 people.  These were 52 people who were in the food industry.  These were 52 people who could afford to pay that kind of money.  These were 52 people who were able to plan that far ahead and were willing commit to this.
Of course, this is just Facebook and I never saw how many tickets were sold.  Even it were half that are we willing to say that this was an educational event.  I have to admit that I used the word "elitist" in a forum about the event and people said that it was not.  I still cling to the notion that this is the epitome of elitist and the irony is that people were not seeing that.
There was a notion that this was a wide ranging event and that there were huge numbers being reached and lives changed etc. etc.  Maybe not that much but let's call this what it is, a bunch of people who could afford two sitting around drinking craft beer and cocktails ruminating on how wonderful this whole thing is and they are for supporting it.

What smacks the event in the face is that when it poked its head up, people were outraged.  There were people who were outraged on a number of levels.  I was in the camp of people who are meat eaters but saw this as nothing but animals dying for what I called "elitist hipster bullshit" in the guise of social commentary and education.  The average person can't afford this nor would they if they could.  There is no educational value; no positive agenda being advanced.  Without any of that, then it really just killing animals for show. You could save a few hundred dollars yet spend more than you would for a Butterball and have a humanely raised bird at home with your family that you know was raised comfortably and killed quickly.

Then there were the vegetarians, vegans, animal rights people, etc. camp.  Again, in the interest of full disclosure, part of me took glee when they got involved because it proved just about everything that I said above.  This event was going great guns when it was a bunch of people speaking amongst themselves.  That is the nature of elitism.  If you surround yourself with people who tell you exactly what you want to hear, you end up thinking that you are a pretty great person and that everything you think is right because well everyone within earshot thinks the same thing.
I took glee because I was one of the few voices on the Facebook pages saying that it was wrong.  I was shouted down by people saying that no it was great and that people everywhere are going to love this and us for what we are doing.  Wrong.
In case you have not noticed, I have been speaking in pretty generic terms mainly because I don't want to advertise for either side.  No links, no invitations for debate, etc. If you want to find it, it can be pretty easily Googled, just look up Death For Food.

That being said, the other faction showed up pretty quickly and in force.  The only kind of force this group musters on a regular basis and that is petition and protests.  The interesting thing is that these petitions, I found, have no force of law.  So, they were not doing anything but making many people aware that many people did not like this.  Overnight, 2000 signatures.  Those are pretty stark numbers when you could only get 52 people RSVP on Facebook.  Overnight, 2000 plus people were disgusted, threatened to boycott Suzie's Farm, and picket the event.  Overnight, the event fell apart.

The legs fell out from under the thing and we are forced to look at the resulting issues.  Again, keep in mind that the petition does not have the rule of law so there would not be police out there stopping them from doing this event.  Essentially, they caved from public pressure.  Suzie's Farm backed out and without a venue, there was nothing to be done.  Go back to what I said earlier, if the the thing itself were so meaningful, shouldn't the event have gone forward?  Is this not the opportunity to take on a fight that "everyone" thinks should happen?

At this point, prepare to enter the spin zone.  What is the outcome of this story?  I doubt even any of the chefs involved will offer their restaurant for the event because even if it is a full house that will be what they are known for.

Some are considering having the event in private but that leads to how do you get people to attend, shell out the money and again it flies in the face of everything that the event purports to be about; education and reverence for the origins of our food.  "Secret rich people animal killings" does not sound like a promising spin.

The man who organized the protest, is he satisfied?  I don't think so.  Some have labeled him an opportunistic food terrorist.  When all is said and done all is not said and done.

I wrote this because it brought to mind one of my favorite stories.  It is a short story called "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" by Ursula LeGuin (here it is in full.  It is a good and short read) and it poses a very deep ethical question, one that I think is expanded upon here in real life.  Could you live in a town that is absolutely perfect and peaceful aside from one child, sitting alone, starving, crying, and wallowing in its own shit?  In the story, some just walk away from Omelas.

Here, are we ok knowing that every time we eat a chicken nugget, it came from one or several chickens squished together and deep fried not knowing how it/they were treated or do we bring this front and center and charge $300 to see it? Here, some people don't acknowledge it.  Some people walk away.

For more on this CLick!

A Day in the Life of a Composter

I get asked for meetings all the time.  "Hey, let's get coffee" or "Let me buy you lunch!" and these are from friends.  Friends who were with me at strategy meetings and potlucks where we talk about veganism (I am a budding vegetarian and yes I have slips from time to time. I love bacon but I digress.) Lately I have had to turn a lot of those requests down.  Here is how my day goes...

I am new to South Carolina.  I was born and raised in Southern California and my academic advisor told me that there was an opportunity out here to help to build a community and get credit towards my masters degree in Sociology.  So, here I am.

The plan is simple and the goal is to answer some simple questions.  What is the nature of community? How does one form a community?  How does form a community in a first world country.  Is it possible to integrate 3rd world mentality into first world community constructs using modern technology. Essentially, how do you get a bunch of Americans to work towards a common goal in real life.

It is not as easy as it sounds in part because of social media and other sociological substitutes.  Early villages and towns had early constructs for interaction.  Word of mouth and letters were first, of course, but then when we look at how languages evolved and the introduction of the phone, the computer, etc. the foundational elements of societal tribe building brought with it a paradigm shift.  People do not get to know each other the way they used to.  That is where this project was born and why I now get up at 4 a.m.

I thought about who I am.  What are the things that I value. I value the earth, health, nature, helping my fellow human, and sustainability.  There is more, but the goal for finding or creating my tribe started with those.  I have to eat.  I have to have a roof over my head.  How do I satisfy these needs in a manner in keeping with my values.  I want to live small, cheaply, and sustainably with limited

resources.  That means living in a place where I know where my food comes from, where I know my neighbors (hopefully other people working towards similar goals and coming from similar circumstances).  The answer...live on a farm with other people who share my ideals.

So we have to set up the farm.  It is November and getting cold outside.  We have a need to be productive, to get things done even when things are not growing.  We need to get things ready to grow.
One of the biggest problems in this state is that it only recycles 29% of its waste.  The numbers for food are far worse and we saw this as an opportunity to solve a problem...Two birds, one stone. My desire is to capture a portion of that (we have set a goal of 100 tons which, is a really small amount of what actually goes into land fill and put it to work growing more food; growing other food).

So I get up at 4 a.m. The weather fluctuates here so I dress appropriately, hoodie and work gloves.  We get buckets from a deli in Columbia that sets the empties aside for us, though sometimes they are not completely clean so I spend about 20 minutes hosing out potato salad, pickles, and/or mayo. and letting them drain before putting them in my car.

We operate in Clemson, Greenville, Columbia, Moncks Corner, and Charleston.  My weekly travels take me literally the length of the entire state.  Mondays, I am in Clemson.  There are two coffee shops there that donate their spent coffee grounds and most days they are outside waiting for pickup which is great for everyone because it saves the baristas from taking them to the dumpster and it adds both heat and odor control to the compost pile.  The rest of Clemson is households who subscribe to our service.  We are currently at 104 homes across the state who pay for us to pick up their compostables. We pick up the full bucket on the curb and leave an empty one.  Some of our subscribers have started a book trading system, so if they have requested a book in particular, we will leave it or pick it up.  Like a library that delivers.

DHEC says that we cannot haul great amounts of garbage since we are not commercial so we carry small amounts and we have Compost Hosts who let us dump the stuff in their yards.  We have set up 6 foot by 20 foot compost piles at each of these sites to begin a hot composting process. Each "pile" is no more than 4 cubic feet.  Hot composting or active composting means that we get and hold the compost at 140-160 degrees for three days to kill off any harmful pathogens.  This causes the compost to cook faster and by flipping, moistening, and aerating the pile, the process gets faster sometimes finished product can be spreadable and ready in about three weeks.

So, we add to the pile, flip the rest, then cover with coffee grounds to quell the smell and cook the stuff underneath.  We do this every other day all over South Carolina.

Tuesday it's the same thing in Greenville, then Columbia, etc.  Charleston is my favorite.  Some days I get to watch the sun rise and contemplate how the sun is on the wrong coast, missing California.

Most days I am done by 8 a.m. and exhausted because I spend so much time during the rest of the day doing other things but mainly my problem is that it is inefficient.  We can do better.  If you are like me then you have realized that the obvious problem is seven people coordinating schedules to see who will toss the pile who will pick up and who will drop off.  With the travel, we are still near our carbon footprint and our compost hosts are more than willing to host an overnight guest so we are not driving tired.

So what do I do all day?  I pick up compost, I drop off empty buckets, I dump compost,  I flip compost.  I repeat...I spend a lot of time talking about it.

There are seven of us right now.

Let's see if we can get more people.

Let's see if we can save more.

Let's see if we can do more.

Contribute to actual change...
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/completing-the-food-cycle-from-the-ground-up/x/6821972

There is a saying that we have at 99Knives and it is catching on.  We are having our "meetings in motion"....Talk with a bucket or a shovel in your hand!

The Letter We Get Every Year or A Year From Now, You'll Wish You Had Started Today

Given the work we are doing this winter, this seems particularly poignant to post.  It is a blog post written by Melissa Arteste and it speaks a good deal to the frustration that a good many of us are feeling today.  Read, enjoy, think...--Carol Jordan-McKern

We have gotten the same or a similar letter for the past five years.  It will start around April or May and
then they come in rapidly right after all the way until about the end of August.  The first time I got the letter, I sprang into action.  The second time, I was a little frustrated.  The third time, more so, and the fourth and fifth and sixth, etc. I was just downright annoyed.

They tend to start innocently and even honorably enough and go something like this:
   "Hi, We are trying to raise money to build a garden/ community garden/ school garden etc. and we need your help to buy x y and/or z"

Mainly they are looking for money for lumber to build raised beds...understandable.

Or they are looking for money for tools... There are other solutions there, but ok.

Or, (and this is the one that really annoys me) they are looking for money to buy compost or fertilizer.

The reason this annoys me the most is because the time to start thinking about this is right now.  Not the first warm days after a long winter, but right now as the leaves are setting up to fall and there is very little else that can be planted.

A good time to get into these things is right now.  The BEST time to get into these things is right now.  We need to get away from the idea that gardening and growing start when the sun is warm and getting high in the sky and when the world is   We need to realize that a lot of preparation needs to and can go into the creation of a great garden and especially if it is in a school.  The lesson of a garden is in what it means over the long term.  The lesson is in what it means when it is not so pretty outside.

The lesson is to go and find a shady place and gather as much and as many leaves as possible.  Combine that with as many food scraps as you can find and get to work.  Engage in finding other sources of compostable materials.  The idea is to get ready for the spring...right now.  Get ready and stay ready.

A year from now, you'll wish you had started today.

Where are we going with this?

I miss my chef coat some days.  I really do.  There was always that moment when I would walk into the kitchen, especially on a hot summer day and throw on my coat over my tank top, a single roll of the cuff of my sleeves and a quick tap on my left arm to know that my thermometer, my pen, and no less than two Sharpies were there.  Clean, white, pristine. The first hour of my day is sitting at my desk, reviewing sales and then ordering for the next three days.  I make a few phone calls then stuff shows up.

One of my favorite executive chefs told me once that what made him the exec wasn't the fact that he could do his job but that he could do my job and he then pointed to everyone on the line and said that he can do their job too.  I like that and want to take it to the next step.

But it's not magic.  Not a day goes by when someone doesn't ask me what we are up to with all of these "little" projects.  All of this talk about compost and worms.  I thought this was supposed to be about food?  The unstated promise of blogs like this is that this will be all about recipes and problems with guests in our restaurants.  How do we get stars and when is the next farm to table event?

We're different.  We are going back to the beginning.  We are going to where it all starts.  So what does that mean?  That means when the prep cook on the line hacks off the butt of a nice head of romaine lettuce, where does it go?  Landfill?  Buried forever and lost from the cycle for years.

We are going back to beginning of the cycle.  We are talking about getting back to how the food that
winds up on the plate got there and how to make sure it tastes good and there is more of it.  That starts with, I hate to say it, garbage.  It starts with poop.  It starts with worms.  It starts with those things that we do not want to talk about and since we do not want to talk about them we do not pay attention to them.  Since we do not pay attention to them, the things that go into our soil and then into our plants and from those plants then into our animals and ourselves; it could be anything.

When we say that we want to start from the beginning this is what we mean and that means getting our hands dirty.  Where are the seeds coming from?  What are the seeds going into?  A year from now, we will be talking about what to do with all of the things that we grew.  We will talk about various methods of roasting, pureeing, drying, canning, whatever.  Until then, we are talking about what gets it out of the ground.

We wanna believe that great chefs know their growers, the best chefs know how to grow food themselves.

Carol Jordan-McKern
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