Category: Uncategorized

Some of you might enjoy reading an article on Wired.com about how the General Services Administration of the U.S. government is working to put government content on the websites that everyone already uses.

The GSA ,which led the effort for 12 agencies over the past nine months, has finally worked out arrangements with Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo and blip.tv, saying these are “representative of high volume and innovation on the Web.”

All of this information is already in the public domain, and it’s available through other websites and offices, but having it on the “public web” will make it more accessible to the community at large.

Do you think that this will help ordinary citizens become more engaged in government? Do you see any potential problems? What sort of government content would you like to see on the internet?

Lots of you already know about this, but here are some links in case you hadn’t heard!

Last week the NYTimes wrote about the plan for the garden.

Starting a few months ago, though, a group called the White House Organic Farm project (WHOFarm) started petitioning the White House to plan to plant a garden this year. They are thrilled, as you can imagine! If you look on their website, you can find lots of articles and videos.

My perennials have started to bloom — I’ve got daffodils and hyacinths in my tiny front yard. But I’m looking forward to planting herbs and tomatoes — and getting to know some of my neighbors who are doing the same thing.

I told you that we’d have a chapter from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle to read for Thursday, but the scanner at home wouldn’t cooperate, and I want you to have enough time to read. So next week we’ll have that chapter, and also a chapter from bell hooks’ wonderful recent book, Belonging: A Culture of Place, which is about the same area in Kentucky.

For tomorrow, Thursday, March 26th, I’d like you to read an article about the Ed Roberts Campus, a building project in the San Francisco East Bay area that will house several different agencies that all support people with disabilities.

If you get curious and would like to do more reading, there’s a wonderful article about the history of the disability movement in Berkeley. More information about the Ed Roberts Campus is on their website.

Many of our class themes will come up in this reading — I’d like you to think particularly about how disability affects social class, and how social class affects access to resources to help people with disabilities.

See you on Thursday!

I just read a really smart short article on mobile phone use in the homeless population in Washington, D.C.

“Having a phone isn’t even a privilege anymore — it’s a necessity,” said Rommel McBride, 50, who spent about six years on the streets before recently being placed in a city housing program. He has had a mobile phone for a year. “A cellphone is the only way you can call to keep up with your food stamps, your housing application, your job. When you’re living in a shelter or sleeping on the streets, it’s your last line of communication with the world.”

Advocates who work with the District’s homeless estimate that 30 percent to 45 percent of the people they help have cellphones. A smaller number have e-mail accounts, and some blog to chronicle their lives on the streets.

I know most of you didn’t need convincing on this topic — but this article is even more eye-opening than the first one we read!

Clive Thompson wrote a great short article at wired.com about “Why Urban Farming Isn’t Just for Foodies“.

[Urban farming] could relieve strain on the worldwide food supply, potentially driving down prices. The influx of fresh vegetables would help combat obesity. And when you “shop” for dinner ingredients in and around your home, the carbon footprint nearly disappears. Screw the 100-mile diet — consuming only what’s grown within your immediate foodshed — this is the 100-yard diet.

I’m looking forward to growing cherry tomatoes and basil this year!

There are no new readings to choose from for the midterm — you’ll use any of the readings we’ve already done for the class. I hope that makes things easier for you.

Each of the responses is a maximum of one page — that’s about 500 words. Don’t freak out about whether you’re a little over or under, just don’t hand in one paragraph or three pages!

I’ve been having trouble getting to my lists of everyone’s email addresses — I’ll email the midterm as well as posting it here as soon as I can.

I’m incredibly sorry I’ve had so much trouble posting from California — that’s not your fault, and I don’t want you to have less time to work on the final because of that. Now that i’m able to get to all our class software, I just want everyone to know that you have a 2-day extension on the midterm, and I’ll post the questions right away.

Many of you will have heard this news story by now, but the article posted at change.org:Michelle Obama Serves Soup, Nation Misses the Point, got at many of the issues we’ve discussed in class.

So yes, this guy has a cell phone. If this means he has an important job-searching tool, a way for him to keep in touch with loved ones, or a way to call for help if he becomes the next victim of a hate crime, then we should be grateful that programs exist to provide these invaluable services to folks who are struggling.

There’s more in the article, and even more in the blog’s comments. One person writes:

Excellent post.  I’ve worked in homeless services for a while and cell-phones are critical survival tools.  For a family faced with constant locational uncertainty a cell-phone provides a stable point of contact. 
Funny how our collective philanthropic consciousness simultaneously promotes the use of cell-phones amongst the poor in third-world countries as a poverty fighting tool and decries the use of cell-phones amongst our own poor.

Here are some more articles on food that I think some of you will find interesting — these aren’t reading assignments, but I’d love to hear what you think, if you read them!

Last fall, tighter controls on the US-Mexican border meant that there were fewer migrant workers to pick crops in California. An article in the NYTimes detailed the complicated results — many farmers lost their crops because they couldn’t get the fruit picked fast enough. Although there is a “seasonal guest-worker” program that growers can apply to, to legally hire foreign workers, growers find the bureaucracy hard to deal with.

My friend Susan Mernit wrote recently about several projects in the San Franciso Bay area — you can follow her links for more information on local food justice projects there. She and her peers are doing a lot of education around community gardens,  home gardens, and urban gardening in general.

Here’s a great article about “Brooklyn’s New Culinary Movement” — I enjoyed reading it, and I loved hearing about how the people involved are taking “Pre-industrial revolution tactics with food” and they’ve all read Michael Pollan and they hate red tape. But when I look at the photo that leads the article, I can’t help but see what a friend of mine would call “their shining white faces” — and furthermore, the people involved in this movement all seem to be between about 25 and 40 years old, and to have time and money to spend on incredibly complicated efforts. Does this imply that paying attention to food is something that only privileged people can do? Susan’s Bay-Area projects hope that’s not true. What do you all think?

Here’s an amazing article from the hot-off-the-stands issue of Gourmet magazine, a place I wouldn’t have expected to see this: Politics of the Plate: The Price of Tomatoes.

I’ll include a few more links for you to have a look at, but that’s the main reading, about migrant workers picking tomatoes in Florida for what anyone would call slave wages – in heartbreaking conditions.