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Qustion of the Day: Why isn't there food growing everywhere, and why don't we eat it when there is?Submitted by Norm Roulet on Sat, 10/04/2008 - 10:10.
Apple tree by board-up on Terrace Drive, East Cleveland Until I started brainstorming about local foods with City Fresh's Maurice Small, I never thought about the industry of food, and how much more sense it makes to grow and produce food for a community within the community - food for a home within a home. Considering taxpayers pay government to maintain huge amounts of "public space", why is that space usually planted at our expense with grass and trees that do not produce food, when it would be less costly to make these lands farms, creating industry for individuals and feeding them in the process? It seems to make such sense. But then I stumble upon something that makes even less sense than not growing food, which is seeing fruit ripening on a tree in a place where people can't afford to eat well, and people not reaching up to pick the free food and eat it... seeing hundreds of good apples rotting on the ground. That shows us how far we have strayed from a sensible society, and how much we need to change. Everything.
Here are a handful of the same fresh, tart, juicy, delicious apples, ready for eating at home, providing good free food for my family when we would have had to spend $1.00-$1.50 a pound at the grocery store, where the apples would be older and probably from another state or country... not to mention factory farmed, by underpaid labor, and sprayed with poison. The movement toward growing and eating local healthy food is critical to the future of our economy and national health. It shall transform the most blighted places and most troubled lives for the better. That is a movement toward global sustainability through environmentalism, social justice and good public health, against the interests of many industries. Change to believe.
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livin' just enough for the city
Both these links have appeared before in realneo content, but they bear repeating here:
Cleveland Fruit Share
Fallen Fruit
Might I add - plant fruit trees on school and municipally owned properties - teach farming to students.
Imagine if Cleveland Clinic, UH and the 7 colleges and universities locally began to grow their own food - the food they serve in their cafeterias. What if CMSD (and schools in all NEO districts) began to commit to serving food grown in NEO. Wow!
Corporations have added an IT component in the past several years - a host of people who manage their hardware and software - their networks. What if they added their own farming operations.
This sort of perk - being able to eat wholesome fresh locally grown food for doctors and patients, staff and clients, students and faculty could be part of the benefit package.
There's an opportunity for the opportunity corridor. How to increase the value of abandoned urban land. This also has been discussed on realneo, "a dedicated urban farmer may earn more than $30,000 per year from sales
of food grown on one typical urban lot (say 1/10th an acre)"
Last night we visited the restaurant of Chrissie Hynde who is well known for her song, My City Was Gone (first released in 1982). Now Chrissie has come back to give Akronites a chance to eat healthy vegan meals that are low on the food chain. Is any of it grown locally? I'll have to ask the next time I visit.
So Cleveland Clinic - in the spirit of Chrissie Hynde who so generously gives back to Akron via this beautiful offering, what can you give back to Cleveland to keep the region healthy - what prevention, what leading by example healthy life style opportunities, what workforce-development-for-the-unemployed-folks-who-live-around-you opportunities could you add as a sector of your leadership in healthly living?
walk by apple snack
Yesterday afternoon my friend Colleen and I walked our dogs up to run free on the playing fields at Regina High School on Green Road. On the way there, we passed an apple tree that offered fruit for the taking. That was apple snack #1. Apple snack #1 was so delicious, we had apple snack #2 on the way home. Mmmmmm...
middle of the road?
Isn't that the one that has the lyric that sounds like, "standing in the middle of the road with my pants behind me"?
I always hear weird things with rock and roll.
There's that other one--"there's a bad moon on the rise" was, for years, "there's a bathroom on the right," to me. That's one thing Gloria and I have in common--we both misinterpreted the same thing the same way worlds apart.
Mondegreens...
The American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term mondegreen in an essay "The Death of Lady Mondegreen," which was published in Harper's Magazine in November 1954.[3] In the essay, Wright described how, as a young girl, she misheard the final line of the first stanza from the 17th century ballad "The Bonnie Earl O' Murray." She wrote:
The actual fourth line is "And laid him on the green." As Wright explained the need for a new term, "The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for them, is that they are better than the original."
Other examples Wright suggested are:
The columnists William Safire of The New York Times and, later, Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle have long been popularizers of the term and collectors of mondegreens. They may have been the chief links between Wright's work and the general popularity of the notion today.[citation needed]
In 2008, it was announced that the word had been added to Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.[4][5]
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Much Much more at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen
I'll never leave your pizza burning
Love this thread. I am very, very guilty of mondegreens, I just never knew what to call them. Thanks Peter!
This site should entertain you:
http://mondegreen.otheday.com