This week in the feed:
- Rob Paterson concludes his harvest of the Boyd Conference on a pessimistic yet exhuberant note.
- Staffordshire Oat Cakes and Easy No Knead Bread
- Brad Ovenell-Carter’s medieval teaching methods.
- Michael Herman distills work he and I did for a few years into a poem and an offering.
- Steve Moore tweets a great story of mutual aid
Please…hotel and catering companies of the world, please stop serving melon slices when what you are trying to serve is “fruit plates.”
I spend huge amounts of my life eating catered food. Most of the food that is served at meetings, while it may be prepared with varying degrees of care (and let’s be honest, most of that is minimal) it is certainly grown on an industrial scale.
In the last ten years there has been a trend away from serving pastries for breakfast and more towards serving a selection of fruit. While this seems like a good idea, the fruit that is served is usually underripe, bland and probably not even good for you. Almost always what we get served is a selection of green and orange melon, watermelon, pineapple and strawberries. Doesn’t matter what time of year it is, these five make up the standard breakfast fruit tray. Almost certainly, the only thing that gets eaten is the pineapple. Sometimes the strawberries go as well. But what is left is the melon. Huge amounts of barely picked over, hard as a board melon slices.
This is a travesty for while green, pink and orange melons aesthtically work on a plte with yellow pineapple and red (actually usually pale pink underripe) strawberries, there is nothing else about them that works. In order for melons to be available in December, they need to be shipped huge amounts of distances, and the only way to do that with a soft fruit is to pick them when they have reached the right size but before they have ripened. People will tell you that they ripen on the journey, or they ripen with the help of various chemical agents, but what is really happening is that the fruit is decomposing, desperately trying to complete its work of producing and nurturing seeds with a fixed amount of energy and resources. No longer growing on it’s vine, the lowly melon fruit tries its best to fulfill its reproductive instinct.
What we get, as eaters, is a hard fruit that has been out of the ground for probably days, trucked halfway or more across a continent and probably dyed for colour as well. And after all that, it sits on a plate, offsetting the pineapple and strawberries and then THROWN OUT.
Melons take huge amounts of water to grow, and they grow in dry places like the southwest United States where water is a premium. Most of a melon’s weight is water, and it is that precious water that ends up in the garbage cans and landfill sites of North America as ton after ton of melons goes to its demise every day.
So here is my appeal to you, catering managers of the world. I know you’re pretty much bound to serve whatever comes off the Sysco truck, but trust me, people don’t eat the melons. By serving them you are not serving fruit, you are serving colour, and no one is gaining much nutrition from eating them. They may be cheap and they may work well on the outrageous profit margin that your hotel skims from a “fruit plate” but is is just short of unethical that these things are served as food.
So, please stop. Even a bowl of frozen blueberries and some local apples pulled out of storage would work better than melons. Please stop serving melons.
Back in June, I hosted the Open Space part of a conference on reconciliation policy and practice co-sponsored by Queens University, the First Nations Technical Institute and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The harvest from that gathering is now online as an article about the event in Canadian Government Executive Magazine
It makes for some interesting reading.
It is snowing heavily here in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia and most people are doing what people here do when it snows like this – staring at it, making comments to each other and abandoning their plans for getting home on time. Heavy snow here can bring out irritation and anger, but today I have been struck by how beautiful people look. There is a lot of smiling and laughing and radiance today. Dunno why it seems that way, but I like it. I’m falling deeply in like with everyone I meet this afternoon!
Ever had a day like that?
Thinking these days about home.
Last week I was in Prince George working with people who are establishing an Aboriginal school in that city. I went from there to working with coaches who support Jewish day schools in the United States and Canada. In both places I felt at home, among people who lived out of a deep worldview, an ancient language and culture and way of life that included spirituality (but not religion per se). In each case we began with prayers and teachings – from a Lhedli T’enneh Elder in Prince George and in Boston a dvar torah delivered but a lovely and thoughtful Jewish Elder.
Home in both places. I am a mix of peoples and ancestries, none of which includes Lheldi or Jewish although I grew up in a mixed Christian and Jewish neighbourhood in Toronto and came to my Ojibway ancestry when I was a teenager. I don’t live in Toronto anymore – haven’t for 20 years now – and I’m far from Ojibway culture, living out on the west coast. Yet for me, this dislocation from home means that I can find home anywhere.
And what does it mean to find home? As my friend Teresa said on Sunday, it means discovering people that hold part of your story. She was relating a story of returning to her grandmother’s hometown in Missouri for her grandmother’s funeral and discovering there people that held the story of Teresa’s family, of her mom and her grandparents who owned the local grocery store during the Depression and helped hold the community together. What a gift to go home and hear your stories, as if they had lay there for generations waiting to be told.
Finding home means hearing whispers of your story everywhere, it means diving into any situation and seeing your relations there (all my relations) and feeling hosted. Being at home means being aligned with what is natural, what is constant everywhere, whether it’s in people or landscapes or stories, and using that to rest so that you can experience what is unique and particular to any given situation.
And as my friend Tenneson also said this weekend, it means acceptance of where you are. You cannot be at home if your mind is filled with the aversion of the present moment or the present experience. Open to right here and right now is what makes home. Finding myself in these situations I recognize that I have a choice of how to be, and that home is in my mind and in the way I rest it in the present experience.
Skillfully done, this can mean that you can be a snail, a slow itinerant who carries its home on its back, ready to stop and set up at any given time. A transient who can live anywhere, open to what is, curious about the gifts of the moment (even the hardest moments) and at home in the world.