Its that time of year to pay homage to the ancestors. The last couple of years my mother and I have recognized Dia de Los Muertos by paying respects at the resting grounds of loved ones.

As part of my continued genealogical research as an exploration of my family’s oral history, my mother and I made a pilgrimage further south to Los Angeles. We were looking for a record of my great grandmother’s death in Los Angeles in 1928. There has always been a real mystery behind her passing and my  grandfather’s (her son) birth. It seems 1926-1928 was a tumultuous time for them. My grandfather’s birth at home was never properly recorded, so he has no formal birth certificate. His mother’s death record could not be located so we did not know what she had passed from. Directly after her death, my grandfather’s sister was abducted by extended family. This was followed by a move two years later to the Central Valley where my grandfather’s dad then died. Orphaned with a family torn apart, my grandfather’s identity always felt uprooted.

By the time I was old enough to take an interest in my family history, the story of my great grandmother’s death had become family lore, rich with embellishment and lessons for us young ones. It goes: she had recently had my grandfather and was going out dancing. She was dressed in flapper fashion and did not wear a coat out. She caught a cold and died shortly thereafter leaving her husband and five children behind.

Translation: “We don’t know how she died exactly but 1) it is inappropriate to party when you have a family 2) revealing clothing can lead to bad things 3) never go out without your jacket. Defying these basic rules can lead to death or worse, an abandoned family…also don’t blow your nose too often, I know a woman who rubbed her nose right off her face from too much nose blowing.”

When I would inquire further about death records I always got (and still do) the same response “back then mihija, nobody kept records of poor Mexicans.”

It turns out this is not true. Our trip was fruitful. Looking through city and county records, old directory archives and burial records, we found her death record as well as her resting place. We also confirmed the home my grandfather was born in through baptismal records.

We paid homage and brought our findings back to the family over steamy bowls of Cocido (Mexican beef soup) and warm tortillas that my Tio Margarito made. We talked of the days of birth and death at home, herbal medicine practiced by the older generations and the many transitions faced by the family as they made their way in the U.S. My Tia Maria Jesus, still living on the land bought by my greatgreat grandparents from Mexico, cut lemon grass for me and pointed around the yard to where the first generation had kept their tomillo, yerba buena, ruda, epazote, estafiate and the ailments they were used for. My Tios told me how to use spider webs to staunch the bleeding from a cut. Our oldest generation is as eager to share as I am to listen. For me El Dia and this season in general, is when we bring to light and offer thanks to the deep ancestral knowledge passed down to us.

A recent article on Huffington Post featured Michelle Obama’s recent trip to Chicago to discuss food access. The article mentions several ways in which Chicago is working toward food security for its community. Apparently the new Mayor, Rahm Emanuel, has been a champion of urban farming.

“Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced 17 grocery stores will open in the Chicago area to help address the lack of access to fresh food. Some will sell foods from urban farms, he said.

Emanuel has made eliminating so-called food deserts – areas with few or no grocery stores – a focus since he took office in May. However, several projects were in the works before he took office, including a task force of city officials and major grocers committed to opening stores on the South and West sides.

Advocates do credit Emanuel with bringing a new energy to the issue. He’s promoted urban farming and brought together mayors on the issue. Those at the summit were from cities including Somerville, Mass., Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Baltimore.”

Other things to know about Chicago’s food security-  Since 1996, nine community programs in Chicago IL and Milwaukee WI have been raising a variety of livestock for food and sale. One such program is located on Chicago’s South Side at the Robert Taylor Homes, the largest public housing project in the United States, with more than 20,000 residents on over 92 acres. In the midst of this gang-dominated environment, a resident-run youth group has constructed a vermiculture and aquaculture system in the basement of one of the Robert Taylor Homes high-rises where they currently care for more than 100 pounds of worms and two barrels of tilapia fish.  In the planting season worm castings are used as a soil additive in their market garden and packaged for sale to city gardeners.  Every seven months fish are harvested and eaten by the participating youths’ families.  In another site, youth and adults have joined together to reclaim for food production an abandoned lot and illegal dumping ground. There, ducks are integrated into the operation for pest and weed control. They also supply eggs to participating families.¹

¹Alison Meares Cohen, “Urban Livestock: People At The Center,” Community Food Security News, p.15, plus additional information from the author.

I love mapaches (raccoons). They are such specialized and excellent scavengers. Ultimate bandits really. I recently read about a friend losing a hen to a raccoon. While such events can be deterred with predator proofing, it helps to stop and consider the animal you are dealing with. For example, consider this- Animals that have a brain with a cortex have a region that is devoted to somatic (body) sensation. Human, primates, and other mammals have localized regions to process this information. This are a can be mapped to determine regions associated with particular stimuli.

In a raccoon, the forepaw (hands) occupy 60% of their primary sensimotor area.¹ While I did not find a like statistic for human hands, we do not even come close to this degree of sensory specialization. In fact, one distinct difference between human hands and raccoon forepaws is that in humans each finger sensation is processed in the same region, while in raccoons each digit is represented in individual cortical regions.²

What this means: Raccoons have incredibly intelligent hands.

While a human can tinker with something to figure it out, a raccoon is a Master Tinkerer. So if you think you’ve raccoon proofed your animal enclosures think about a creature that can open, lift, pry, unlock, reach an arm in and figure out how to make things happen. My coop is located within an enclosure (the run) covered in poultry wire. We dug a ~18″ trench around the run and extended the wire into it, curving it upward and covered it with soil. The have a lockable automatic gate latch on our door about 4′ off the ground. While we have lapses on actually inserting a lock in the mechanism, I think the location off the ground has deterred unwanted visitors.

For those of us outwitted by a determined raccoon, take solace. While El Mapache has flipped you the proverbial finger, at least it was one very smart finger.

¹Herron, P. (1978). Somatotopic organization of mechanosensory projections to SII cerebral neocortex in the raccoon (Procyon lotor). Journal of Comparative Neurology. 181: 717-728.

²Robinson, CJ, Wurster, RD. (1997). Testing Peripheral Somatosensory Neuroprostheses by Recording from Raccoon Cortex. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. 5 (1): 75 – 80.

I’m wishing I planted more than six peanut plants now. Turns out the dry summer in the south has caused a shortage of peanuts. I recently read that peanut butter will go up in price by as much as 40%. Its alarming. I have always looked to peanut butter as a dependable survival food. I spent childhood as a latch key kid eating government program food. We would get boxes of food that always included a huge metal can of government branded peanut butter. I lived off that stuff. So in my mind peanut butter is what you can turn to when there is nothing else.

I am not a doomsayer…not at all. I don’t grow food because I think the world is going to collapse. I do it because I think it is essential. I think we need to recall our human knowledge about where food comes from and how to produce it. We need to keep it active and strong. I believe that by doing so, we have a better chance at developing appropriate alternatives to a food system that has been failing us. That said, I cannot help but be alarmed by the ever increasing prices of basic foods.

I am feeling glad to be in a community of active local food producers working with others to teach them how to grow food and to distribute excess food throughout the region. That said- those of you in the East Bay, don’t forget you can get a winter garden in place for food through the coming months. You can extent your summer crops by using floating row covers, plastic or other heating trapping techniques. General rule of thumb, cover crops will grow in two hours of sun or less; leaf vegetables need two to four hours; brassicas and root vegetables need four to six. Direct sow your roots. Do it now!

What to put in the ground now: Read more…

Ponder a moment giving food to someone in need in comparison to changing a current system in which people go in need of food. While charity has its place, it definitely only addresses symptoms. While reading a paper recently, I came across this quote:

“Charity provides social services, while justice promotes social change. Charity responds to immediate needs, while justice responds to long-term change. Charity assumes people need expertise and help from others, while justice assumes people have expertise and are capable of helping themselves. The analysis and strategic choices that come with the approach have huge implications for how, and even if, a problem is sustainably solved” – Brahm Ahmadi, 2009

I’d like to take this lens and apply it to raising and processing animals for food. Some believe only “experts” can kill and dress an animal for food. Whereas others believe that centuries of history and tradition inform this process. The idea that we would depend on “experts” to provide our food diminishes our power of choice, and our power to act. It disables us. Growing food and raising food producing animals is a basic human activity. It is a basic human right.

The author of this paper, Kristin Reynolds, was researching urban agriculture in Alameda County. As she worked to define urban agriculture she initially left animals out. However, she quickly realize her omission of livestock products overlooked food important in several cultures in Alameda County, namely African American and Latino cultures. Lets add to this some of the Asian cultures present in Oakland, i.e. Chinese, Filipino, Hmong, Korean, Laotian, and Vietnamese. In Oakland, we all account for 77.9% of the population, according to 2010 Census Data.

People in Oakland are practicing urban agriculture for access to affordable healthy food. Food that is unadulterated by chemicals, that is humane, and food that is culturally appropriate. The suggestion that animals should not be a part of urban agriculture is not only a blatant misconception of ecological principles, it perpetuates an unjust and racist food system. Haven’t we seen enough institutionalize inequity and racism in Oakland? If people want to produce their own food, let them.

Originally featured at Civil Eats, the Olivia Sargeant article on how to create a new food economy is very well thought out, read on:

The DIY craze has shacked up with the local food movement to produce some inspiring examples of entrepreneurialism: Mason jar magic made by suburban fruit salvagers powered by pedals; workshops on wild-crafting, axe-making, rooftop bees and city-living chickens; lecture series that focus on the how-to rather than just why, when and where; and more.

But we can’t just take pictures of these ingenious innovators for the glossies and call our work finished. We have so much creativity (and cabbage) fermenting at the intersection of craft, food, and agriculture–now we need to connect the dots.

Our spirit and gumption produce marketable ideas and we must distill the unique and visionary experiences into capacity-building structures to create long-term stability for our farmers,  eaters, and land. Our pet projects and pop-ups can morph into replicable systems, operations, and communications strategies so our movement can evolve into a true revolution.

An economy is a system of production and consumption and distribution. The local and organic food movement has developed a solid set of best practices for production, as exemplified by our National Organic Program standards and older, more venerated third party certification programs. We have proven the power of consumption of our wares with sales of organic food reaching almost $25 billion in 2009. Now we need to focus on the system of distribution, which is not simply the means of transportation. For our revolution, distribution is the act of transporting our objectives, mission, and human capital.

The first building block of our new food economy is defining our roles and job descriptions, so we can divide and conquer, and share each others’ workloads. Carlo Petrini, founder of Slow Food, has identified that consumers must be “co-producers” in order for good, clean, and fair food to permeate our markets. In practice, I’d say that means our eaters must turn into farmers, our chefs into ranchers, our butchers into distributors–and we all must teach each other. We have the demand, we have the supply, now we need to get out the pencil and craft paper and rewrite the distribution, starting with our jobs.

Here are our jobs as defined in the old food economy:

The farmer farms
The butcher processes.
The distributor moves product and creates new markets.
The chef prepares and cooks.
The consumer eats.

Here they are in the new food economy:

The farmer farms, processes, prepares, and teaches distributors.
The butcher processes, creates new markets, and teaches consumers.
The distributor moves product, processes, farms, and teaches chefs.
The chef prepares and cooks, farms, creates new markets, and teaches butchers.
The consumer eats, moves product, processes, and teaches farmers.

Let’s bring back the guilds, the grange, the purveyor, the merchant, and the artisan, so we have both craft and community intrinsic to our livelihoods again. Let’s renovate these old world terms for new world applications. Let’s redefine the jobs together, and imbue teaching in each role. Our revised positions will become the foundation of a truly functional new food economy. But wait, there’s more…

The Sacramento Bee covered a story on whether we Oaklanders should be able to raise and process our own animals for food (read here). Those of us that have chosen to do this are practicing what is a basic human right. I have the right to affordable unadulterated food, including meat. I have a right to raise my own as it seems the only way that I can actually afford meat that is raised organically and humanely. I have a right to access food that is culturally appropriate for me.

The handful of Oakland based individuals that oppose this basic human right use arguments that are incoherent. They resort to using “disturbing anecdotes and a small, pseudo-statistical pile of psychobabble about Fido and Mr. Whiskers” as was done by one of their vegan supporters recently (more on that). If you stop to consider what is really going on, you will notice that the people raising their own food producing animals are doing it to provide humane conditions to those animals. We are not driven by profit. We uphold the quality of life for our animals. That is the point.

The other important consideration is that the five or so people in Oakland organizing in opposition to this basic human right, are from a very narrow demographic of white middle class vegans, most of which are not even urban farming. Yet they believe they know the best way to do it. This is an age old dynamic of a small group, who believes their practices are the most righteous, imposing their values on others…and using guilt, shame, and force to accomplish their goal. I don’t want to be told what to eat or how to eat it by anyone, especially this group of people.

Mr. Elwood states that “People are learning through do-it-yourself…” I learned through my mother and grandparents who kept rabbits for food in San Francisco and later a full farm elsewhere. They learned from their parents before them. They did it well and provided many nourishing meals from their “do-it-yourself” skills. I believe in maintaining this basic human knowledge.

Growing and raising your own food is not a scientific endeavor that requires experts and factory farms to ensure “quality.” It is experiential knowledge that is best passed on through oral teaching and hands on experience. We best learn our land and animals through direct contact with them. Why would anyone want to take that away?

Animal integrated agriculture is as old as dirt. The practice of raising your own animals for food in the city has been done for centuries, and will continue to be done- legal or not. However, legalizing it would allow for the open creation of an infrastructure to ensure access to excellent resources for learning and care.

Interested in this issue? Read more posts on it here.

Decolonize your diet…I love the ring of those words. They provide inspiration to move away from a corporate owned food system and to take our nourishment into our own hands. I believe this can and should be done for your own health and the healthy of our communities. At the same time, when I settle into the thinking of what this means, it is rather complex. Who is the colonizer and the colonized? I am of two races- Native North American and European. My body is of this continent and another much further away. What is my native diet? How far back do I go? Some opinions on the matter seems to think that meat is “The Colonizer’s” food. This is not true at all. Native Mexicans, for instance, ate a plethora of meat varieties, just not daily as they had be hunted or were raised with limited resources. Two typical domestic species raised for food were turkeys and dogs.

I can also say from first hand experience that native people, even those deep in the Amazon, eat meat they have hunted. I stayed in a shared Yekuana & Yanamamo village many moons ago. The men brought back hunted food like monkeys, egrets, rodents. So lets set aside the fallacy that eating meat is the way of the colonizer or the corporate way.

When I think of decolonizing my diet, I think of the food heritage preserved by my mothers before me. I think of a time before food was a massive industry and a time when communities were self sufficient. I think of foods that were not highly processed or high in nonessential fats. Whole and real food grown and raised by the folks eating it.

With that, take inspiration for the Indigenous People’s Day this Saturday October 8th 2011. Celebrate our diversity in culture and food ways! Those of you in the East Bay, come out to the Phat Beets Event: Decolonize Your Diet! This Saturday, 10-3pm at the North Oakland Farmers’ Market @ Arlington Medical Center, 5715 Market St. Oakland, Ca.

“Participants will build a deeper understanding of how the conquest of the Americas altered our relationship to food and what we can do to create a healthier, more equitable food system by returning to our cultural and ancestral food ways.” Sounds good to me!

Also, for further information and access to great recipes, check out Professor Luz Calvos Facebook page Decolonial Cooking Club.

After yesterday’s Oakland City Council vote on an amendment to home occupation rules, it is now possible to grow and sell crops with a $40 permit. Member of the public, Kitty Sharkey of Havenscourt Homestead, spoke in favor while holding a basket full of 1 pounder tomatoes. She shared that she had harvested 80lbs of tomatoes this year which could earn her up to $400. The council members took this calculation enthusiastically.

With their consent we are one step closer to food independence for Oakland residents! Why is this so important you say? It is preserving the right to grow and raise our own food within city limits. Its promoting self sufficiency and pathways to business, two things we need desperately to see our way through economic hardships. According to the following chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics,

food costs are rising across the United States. The cost of living in general is sky high in California (check out recent report from Insight Center for Community Economic Development). The cost of fresh, organic, local food is unaffordable for most, including my own household.

Neighbors, with a home occupation permit, can now make food available at affordable prices and the money supports community.

Lest you doubt our communities are food insecure, the very concept has entered popular culture. Sesame Street has developed a character called Lily, a 7 year old girl representing one of 17 million American children that the Department of Agriculture estimates are “food insecure,” meaning their access to food is limited or uncertain.

Today the Oakland City Council will vote on a proposed amendment to the “home occupation” (home-based business) rules that would enable plant-based crop growing for the purpose of onsite sales with an appropriate permit. With this simple but important change, Oakland residents will now be able to start their own locally-grown food micro-enterprises.

A “home occupation” permit can be obtained through the city’s Community and Economic Development Agency (CEDA) for a nominal fee of $40. With this rule change, residents will no longer need to obtain a Conditional Use Permit for growing crops with the intent to sell. Obtaining such a permit has proved a burdensome process, taking many months and costing as much as $2,800 to initiate, with possible additional fees.

Oakland is being a national innovator by establishing official support for small-scale urban agriculture enterprises and enabling its residents to creatively address limited food access while respecting the unique cultural food traditions of its populace.

Local groups such as the Oakland Food Policy Council, East Bay Urban Agriculture Alliance, the Oakland Climate Action Coalition, Bay Localize, HOPE Collaborative and others continue to organize residents around policy changes that boost local food production and the sale of fresh produce within city limits, as well as for humane, neighbor-friendly, and safe standards for raising animals for personal consumption.

WHERE: Oakland City Hall, 1 Frank Ogawa Plaza, 3rd Floor
WHEN: TODAY! Tuesday, October 4 @ 6 pm

Learn more about it at Oakland North. You can also catch a quick piece from KQED Radio News.