Stephen McGuire's Open Salon Blog

The Food Production Chain and American Hunger

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 18:12:19 -0500

The corn don’t grow so good around the edges, so this year, I ain’t planting any edges. Eighty-year-old Connecticut farmer, as reported by Mark Winne, 2008

Let us suppose, for a moment, that we are apples. Of course, we could just as easily be tomatoes or kumquats or lima beans or pork bellies. But I suppose that most of us, at least, have some familiarity with apples growing on trees and then perhaps falling off in the autumn of the year and rotting and feeding the insects. That is a part of the natural food chain, and that is important, but has little to do with the food production chain, which begins with the production of seeds, maturity to ripe fruit or vegetables, harvesting, marketing, and consumption. The same sort of thing applies to animal products, except without the seeds.

The American food production chain is quite well-organized. Most major producers have it down to an efficient science. Apples (all we know of the process is the warm sun, the gentle rains, soft breezes, and getting fat on the branch), grown mostly in Washington, Oregon and Michigan, have an approximate two-month period during which their ripeness and flavor is at their peak. But the market demands that apples be available in that condition year-round, and so extra steps have to be taken to ensure that the demand is met.

And if it were just that simple, which it isn’t, everything would be just fine. But according to a 2004 article by FoodProductionDaily.com,, apple growers use aggressive methods to ensure that the best apples hit supermarkets at just the right time, with others being made into applesauce and canned products. Still, this isn’t so bad, all things considered. The problem is that apples are commodities, and apple growers, in order to conserve prices paid for apples, often bet on apple futures. If they bet wrong, whole orchards are left to rot in the fields, and these apples never reach the market at all. The same is true for tomatoes and lima beans and pork bellies and other foods that we consume.

According to the article, half of US food goes to waste. Let me say that again—half of US food goes to waste. Much of it is risking these bets on the prices of foods to keep them artificially high. Most of the rest of it is the cost in transportation and processing these foods undergo. Barbara Kingsolver (2007) reports that each food item in a typical US meal has traveled an average of 1500 miles.

Put these things together: half of US food goes to waste, and it is marketed and sold and consumed an average of 1500 miles from where it was produced. Consider that 10-12 percent of the US population is food insecure, meaning tha these people do not know where their next food will come from or will run out of food with no certainty that there will be any to replace it. That is approximately 30-35 million people in the US.

Half of the food we produce is wasted, some of it intentionally, yet there are 30-35 million people who are food insecure. It is a travesty which must change.

But there is hope. There are community gardens in many cities, efforts within the White House to address the problem, and other high-profile efforts to bring awareness to the public at large. But there aren’t any simple solutions—poverty, obesity, equitable food distribution, waste, and other factors all play a part. In subsequent posts, I will address some of these.

Home, Vulnerability, and a Spiritual Journey

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 14:06:14 -0400

Home, Vulnerability, and a Spiritual Journey

Part 1

So. I am home now from the hospital, after nearly a month of being confined there after a stroke on May 28. I wrote about that in a blog I posted last week, and which I actually wrote as a cognitive therapeutic homework assignment to determine if I had sustained any cognitive damage. There is some damage, as I discovered, but it isn’t linguistic, exactly, but more in the areas of cognitive organization and fluency. There seems to be a maddening lack of spontaneity in my thinking process, making everything feel more tedious and linguistically mechanical. With the loss of the use of my left hand, writing is now more difficult and more of a chore than it has ever been.

In the other blog, I wrote about how it happened, and what my response was at the time. I also wrote about the worsening symptoms, and what was discovered at the hospital. This is what I wrote then:

I was not initially aware that I had experienced a stroke. Who, after all, would think the worst from the beginning? A stroke is something serious, really serious, like a heart attack, or a coma, or something like that. All I had, when I awoke, was some tingling, and a hand that wouldn’t hold on to anything, and a leg that was curiously sluggish when I tried to walk. No speech delays, no cognitive delays that I knew of, nothing like that. The first few hours were just a curiosity.

It got worse.

The next day, the sluggish leg didn’t work at all. The hand was and would remain still for more days. It was all on one side, the classic symptom of stroke. A CT scan at the hospital emergency room gave evidence that it was, n fact a stroke—an MRI the next day confirmed it. Of all things, most unexpectedly, I had a stroke, a cerebral vascular accident (cva), as it is called. My brain was wounded, perhaps by a small blood clot that clogged an artery too small to see with the naked eye, when the blockage cut off vital oxygen to the cells in that area that aid in muscular movement. Neurologically disconnected, the muscles in my left arm, hand, leg, and foot could no longer work or respond to signals to move. They were effectively paralyzed.

As I said, it is now a month later. I am home—in a manner of speaking. I lost my apartment, giving it up voluntarily because I could no longer negotiate the stairs there, and more practically, I could no longer work and pay the rent anyway. I am now with my sister and her husband, wonderful people but evangelical Christians, and that is of some concern to me. Evangelical Christianity has always seemed to me to be the province of control freaks, meddlers, those unable to think for themselves, and people selfishly concerned with their own salvation at the expense of the planet, the stunning diversity of life, and the sense that human beings, in all of their imperfections, are perfect as they are. I don’t believe the Christian model of sin and redemption, but rather a gentler and more profound narrative more ancient than Christianity and infinitely more deserving of God as he seems to me rather than he is portrayed by the Christian right.

Perhaps my assessment is unfair. But I think if these people were more honest, and didn’t mention the bible as “proof” of everything, which it isn’t, and cared about people and the environment out of simple kindness rather than something to make them feel good or to “bring glory to God,” and understood that prayer doesn’t cure everything and is mostly just egotistical babble, I’d have more faith that they were being genuinely human. And if they didn’t associate themselves with political policies that hurt people and are incredibly selfish, they’d really get more traction with me.

As it is, though. I am here. I don’t know if I am being cared for because I am loved by them or whether I am just some kind of little Christian project they hope they can evangelize to mend me of my waywardness. What I need most now is a safe place and time to heal. I don’t need quoted scripture, or invitations to church, or intimations that if I were more Christian, I wouldn’t have had the stroke in the first place. Just a safe place and time to heal.

This writing is about my recovery, my now-vulnerability, which is palpably real, and my continued journey of spirit. I hope that you will try to understand me as I sort these things out. At the very least, I hope that you will help me to celebrate my healing, physically and mentally.

Nazim Hikmet, Strokes, and the Remarkable Human Brain

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 07:06:39 -0400

Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example--
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.

---------“On Living” Nazim Hikmet, 1948

I was not initially aware that I had experienced a stroke. Who, after all, would think the worst from the beginning? A stroke is something serious, really serious, like a heart attack, or a coma, or something like that. All I had, when I awoke, was some tingling, and a hand that wouldn’t hold on to anything, and a leg that was curiously sluggish when I tried to walk. No speech delays, no cognitive delays, nothing like that. The first few hours were just a curiosity.

It got worse.

Living is no laughing matter:
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example…
you can die for people—even for people whose faces you've never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.

That first night, after I knew for sure, I didn’t sleep well. I kept thinking about whether the condition I was in was the best I would ever be again, and if it was, what was I going to do? How could I live life in a wheelchair with only one functional hand? Of course there are people who live this way, and some of them lead remarkable lives. A lifelong friend of my own has been blind from birth, and does not consider himself handicapped in any way. He is an amazing man.

But this was all new to me, and I was as unprepared as anyone can be. I was very much afraid that some loss would be for me, practically, major loss. I wasn’t sure what I would be able to do, or would do, or could do. I worried about writing, which is my occupation, and how I would do that with only one hand. I worried about standing and walking, which is also a part of my occupation, and how I would do that with a paralyzed leg, and about how people would see me in a wheelchair and discount me and all that I am because I am not physically functionally whole even though I am the same man I was before, in all the ways that matter.

But even this early, the healing had already begun. It happened and is happening in the most remarkable of ways. My mother came from Georgia to visit me. My older sister came, too, as did my younger sister. My daughters came from out of town, the younger one twice, armed with snacks for me and an egg-crate pillow top for my comfort. Cousins, some old school friends. A girl I had one date with in high school and who I had not seen since then visited with me and has since. Another girl I have been in love with since 8^th grade, who never had much time for me in her life and still doesn’t, took time out of a busy day to come and see me. The oldest and dearest friend of my life came and spent an hour with me, bringing me joy. So did another friend, even though his wife stayed in the car reading while he visited. The first love of my life graced me too. I have never felt so deeply cared for in all of my life. A visit from a friend is worth a million prayers to me—it is immediate, it is visceral, and palpably real to me, an active-tense commitment that speaks of an individual taking time to show me that my experience matters to them. No prayer can afford that.

But there is more, too. At the first hospital, every single person—every single person—encouraged me, engaged with me, taught me, listened to me, shared with me, hoped with me and helped to make everything much less fearsome without minimizing the truth. And at Cardinal Hill, too, it is the same. My therapists—Marilyn and Molly and Ann Trevor, and sometimes others—are among the very best professionally that it is possible to be. But they have also become friends, helping the frustrations easier to bear, and making me work and work and work so that my body responds. Darwin probes my mind, and my visits with him bring me great pleasure. I think that he and I could talk for many hours, rather than the half-hour to which we are daily limited. These people are incredible, and make me believe, through their own faith in me, that I will be healed.

And of course, there are nurses and CNAs and they have been incredible as well. Shauna and Sandy and Patty and Kathy and Beth and Chrissy and Julie and Rachel and Bill and any of a hundred other names I could mention have all been an important part of my healing, too. And I could never express enough thanks to them for what they are and have been to me. I am very fortunate indeed.

I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees--
and not for your children, either,
but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard brain researcher who suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke at the age of thirty-seven, discusses in her book[1] the capacity of the human brain to recover from trauma and repair itself. One of the brain’s functions is to monitor the body’s position in space. The brain collects data from sensory input and measures such things as the pressure of one’s feet on the floor, the body’s orientation toward the horizontal and vertical, the relative positions of the body’s parts in relation to other parts, and a thousand other things that tell the brain where the body is and how well it is doing. And all of this occurs automatically and constantly.

When there is trauma of any kind that impairs the brain’s ability to perform its functions, as in a stroke that kills some cells and neurons responsible for movement or sensation or speech, the brain immediately begins searching for ways to overcome the deficit. It may begin to construct new nerve pathways around the damaged area. It may use bits of protein to construct new arterial pathways to compensate for the damaged ones. And as before, this is an automatic response. It is the brain’s function to maximize health and minimize damage in an effort to help the person survive. This is remarkable.

From the outset, however, there has been a serious disruption of function. The affected muscles are no longer neurologically connected to the area of the brain that controls them. They don’t work any more as they did before. There may be paralysis, as in my case, or there may be a sluggishness and an inability to control muscular movement. Even now, with some control returned to me, I still find it impossible to hold my arm and hand still, or to make precise movements. Coordination and any but the grossest kind of dexterity are still missing. Moving my leg where I want it to go is still very much a total mystery to me.

But I also know that my brain is remarkably repairing itself, and that the therapies I am undergoing are retraining my muscles so that they can coordinate with the new neurological pathways, restoring everything to balance and health. That is the way that the wonderful human brain works. The human brain, my brain, always chooses life.

There is still a very long way to go. It is agonizing, and frustrating, and sometimes still scary. My life has changed dramatically. The simplest things are now among the most difficult. It may be a year or more before I am healed.

But I will heal. The grace of every day with these people has taught me that. I am very lucky, and deeply blessed.

I mean, however and wherever we are,
we must live as if we will never die.

(Trans. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk (1993))

[1] Taylor, Jill Bolte. My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey. New York: Plume. 2006

Sunday Funnies: Do Not Try This At Home

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 10:01:24 -0500

When I was married the second time—I know that makes it sound like I am a serial husband, but I have only been married twice (I know I could say “in my last marriage,” but that has no better traction with purists)—my wife and I decided that we needed a bigger house to live in. We cast about for one over a period of months, and finally settled on one that was, to me, an opulent estate in an opulent neighborhood. Well, it had been opulent once, both of them, about 30 years prior. By the time we acceded to the place, it had undergone less pretentious descriptions. Not to say seedy, exactly, more like settled, which is a step above run-down and the finest we could afford. It suited our purposes.

We had a mother (hers) who was to live with us, bless her heart. My wife had two children from a previous marriage, and I had two daughters (I still have them—they are not gotten rid of as easily as a wife is, not by a long shot). We also had a dog, Mindy, who was quiet and well-behaved and absolutely useless in a pinch. We had four bedrooms, and two baths, and that made me feel like King Solomon himself. The problem was—and it is the reason for this post—that both bathrooms were upstairs, and my wife and I slept downstairs.

It was one of those so-called split-level arrangements. If you went in the front door or through the ample two-car garage, you were downstairs. If you went through the back door, you were upstairs. The living room and kitchen were upstairs, the den and laundry room were downstairs. My wife and I gave the master bedroom to her mother, and the children du jour had the upstairs bedrooms. These three bedrooms were easily accessible by the two bathrooms nearby. The bedroom my wife and I occupied was a small room adjacent to the laundry room. That worked out ok—we did get kind of loud sometimes—until about two years in, when I grew weary with late-night attempts to go to the bathroom freshly woken from sleep. Negotiating a hallway and a set of stairs and another hallway in the dark is dangerous; and it will flat wake you up.

Being the gentleman and romantic sort that I am, I told my wife that I would convert the little washroom next to the garage into a full-fledged bathroom. I was confident in my abilities then, and figured that if I ordered a shower arrangement and stuck that in there, we’d both be much better served and less prone to dying young. So I ordered the thing—the package and materials said that it could be completely installed to our satisfaction in a couple of hours—and set to work.

It took me about a month and forced me to the hardware store about 600 times. I became so familiar with the hardware people that I knew their first names, their spouses first names, where their kids went to school, what kind of pets they had. What I never could remember was the name of the part I needed. I’d walk in, look about like I knew what I was looking for (suave), would find something that looked sorta like what I wanted, but not exactly, and by that time Billy Bob or Lisa Ann would have sauntered over, smirking, and ask me casually what exactly it was that I was looking for. I’d say something intelligent like, “Well, it’s a dooflotchey, and it has this doowhackey thingy hanging out over here on this side, and it’s round but not exactly…” and trail off miserably. While I was describing the thing (my inner draftsman’s eye was inerrant), Billy Bob or Lisa Ann would somehow magically produce the very thing I needed. Then they’d say, with a knowing look, raising their eyebrows up and down a few times, “See you soon.” This happened twenty or thirty times every day.

Hardware store

It has been my fond experience that any sort of do-it-yourself, put-it-together-if-you-can project always has one part that there is only one of. This is insane. Suppose you lose it? Do you have to order a whole ‘nother shower kit? You can order the blasted part sometimes, but if it is a special screw at $1.59 plus tax plus $1,000 shipping and handling and you have to get it from Snail Worldwide and wait about a year for it to arrive just as you’re not home and the FedEx guy won’t leave it, so you have to learn that the FedEx place is inaccessible in some industrial park somewhere, this can be a weighty decision to make. How important could one part be?

My shower kit had one of those. Little ol’ thing. Looked like sort of a screw-hickey thing. But you can’t fool Savvy Stephen. I put it in the sink so I could remember where it was and it wouldn’t roll away, and Mindy wouldn’t try to play fetch with it, and my stepsons wouldn’t try to hold their doors open with it, and my wife wouldn’t throw it out thinking it was an aberration in her otherwise orderly house.

After a couple of weeks or so, I had the shower enclosure fairly well put together. The directions said that it should be placed flush with the wall. I learned, to my surprise, that nothing on this earth would go flush with the walls of my house. One would suppose that the walls were plumb—straight up and down. The only thing plumb about them is that they were plumb crooked. Now I had a dilemma. Should I attach the thing to the wall as specified, knowing that I would have to lean to take a shower, or should I stand it up straight and figure out a way to attach it to the wall? The directions were clear on this, at least. In just such a situation as I had, one should use shims to fill the gaps and make everything more stable. So I contemplated the gaps and estimated the shims—one wants to be professional, after all—and concluded that the only shims that would work, in just such a situation as I had, were tree stumps.

So I went back down to the hardware store, and told Billy Bob that I thought I needed some putty. He instantly fetched some DAP silicone putty, one of those tubes you put into a putty gun. I told him that I thought it would take more, about 50 gallons. He seemed surprised by this, and stifling a sarcastic guffaw, he went to the hard part of the hardware store and got out the heavy-duty stuff and wheeled it back to me on a cart. I thanked him and asked him to give my best to the wife and kids and Buster the goldfish.

A week or so later, I was ready to try it out. Not in a wet sort of way, but in a dry way with my clothes on. Just to see if everything worked. I got in the shower and closed the sliding doors, and imagined that I was under the hot spray receiving accolades for my artistry. Man, that dude sure knows what he’s doing. Why is he a teacher? Ought to been a plumber. Yep. He’s a natural-born tradesman if I ever saw one.

But my finely-tuned sense of these things told me that the shower had wobbles. It was sitting on a concrete platform, and the platform had a step up into the shower. I quickly determined that the step was the culprit, and that all I had to do was to get my sledge hammer out and break up that little offender. A couple of whacks and the step would be a non-issue. But the shower doors wouldn’t slide open. Here I was, imagining myself wet and cold and naked, and unable to exit the shower. I wiggled the doors, tried to slide them open. This went on for hours. I tried everything I could think of. Finally, as I leaned in defeat against the shower wall, the doors slid open on their own. This surprised me, but I jumped out before things changed again.

Now to the concrete step. I wanted my stepsons to see it, the brute strength I offered, the slick way I had with tools. They gathered round, smirking. I licked my thumb and set to with a Finn McCool swing—and nearly knocked myself out. The sledge hammer bounced off the concrete, not a chip in evidence. I muttered ‘mulligan’ under my breath, and swung to again. The result was as before, but this time there were chips. Sledge hammer chips. I graciously allowed as how the step wasn’t that big an issue, anyway.

Mustering up a certain savoy-faire, I went in search of that one part I hadn’t used yet. I looked where I had left it those eons ago, but it wasn’t there. I asked the boys if they had seen it, but they said that they hadn’t. Mindy the dog was non-commital. My wife just rolled her eyes and asked if I was finished yet.

By and by we got it finished and working. The doors never did slide right, and I have no earthly dreaming idea where that part went. I got a Christmas card from the hardware store asking me to stop in again real soon for my next project.

A Kentucky Miracle

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 11:01:47 -0500

The Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) defines Appalachian counties and states in socioeconomic terms. In total, there are in Appalachia 420 counties, of which 84 are in the “Economically Distressed” category. These counties have three-year average unemployment rates at least one and a half times the national average, per capita market income no greater than two-thirds the of national average, and poverty rates at least one and a half times the national average. Of the 84 counties in this category, 40 of them are in Kentucky (Kentucky has 120 counties, so that amounts to a third of the state that is economically distressed).

Pike County, whose county seat is Pikeville, is the easternmost county in Kentucky. It thrusts between the borders of Virginia and West Virginia, as you can see by this map. It is the largest county by area in Kentucky, and the 11^th largest by population.

Pike County is in the “At-Risk” category. At-Risk counties are so-called because they are at risk of becoming economically distressed. In 2000, the population of Pike county was 68,736 (Kentucky’s population was 4.04 million—Kentucky’s Appalachian population is 1.14 million). Per capita income in 2002 was $21, 172. Per capita market income (excludes child support, alimony, retirement income and the like) for the same time period was $14,697. To put this in perspective, that rate is better than Kentucky Appalachia as a whole, but is still barely half of the US rate for the same period. Pike County residents, in general, earn half of what an average American earns.

The poverty rate in Pike County is 23.4%. This is nearly twice the national average.

In Pike County, 61.8% of residents have high school diplomas. The rate for college degrees is 9.9%.

Pike County, while better off than 40 of Kentucky’s counties, is certainly at risk.

But I did say that this was about a miracle, didn’t I?

Prior to 1996, there were two accredited medical schools in Kentucky—one at the University of Kentucky (student population 27,000) and the other at the University of Louisville (student population 22,000). In 1996, a third was added—at Pikeville College, a private Presbyterian college with a total student enrollment of 950. Most urban high schools in Kentucky have larger enrollments.

It began with a vision and a dream, as most things of worth do. The Kentucky mountains have long been plagued by a shortage of qualified doctors. There is still a high risk for live births, as there aren’t enough doctors. Patients sometimes have to travel more than a hundred miles to see a specialist. Many towns do not have practicing general practitioners or family doctors. People die simply because there aren’t enough doctors.

Imagine that you are a medical student at UCLA, or NYU, or at any of the other medical schools in the US. You are hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, you see a career that can make you millions, you’re attracted by the glamour of state-of-the-art facilities in Chicago or Dallas or Portland or Phoenix. Want to take that hard-earned degree to Virgie, Kentucky? How about Slemp? Or if you’re really squeamish, how about Hazard? Pine Knot? Pippa Passes? At least there’s a college there. Come on down.

That has been the problem. No one wants to come to the mountains where a Chevy truck is better for the terrain than a Lexus. Where you actually have to go and see the people at home, because there isn’t a facility for them to come to¸ even if they could get there. Some of the places are so remote that even after you park your Chevy truck, you still get to walk for half an hour.

And then, if you don’t know the culture and understand these people, you won’t have any patients anyway. Mountain people have an extreme distrust of outsiders, and you can understand why. The mountains have been exploited for a hundred years and more, and mountain folk always come out on the short end. If you’re going to treat them as patients, you’ll die of starvation. Treat them as people, and you’ll have them for life.

Now imagine, if you can, that you are a mountain kid. Always wanted to be a doctor. Your family income is $20,000 a year. You can’t afford to be a doctor. The training is more expensive than your family’s take-home.

The Pikeville College School of Osteopathic Medicine (PCSOM) will give you a scholarship, paid for with coal severance tax funds. And books, computers and supplies?

"When students enter here, they're given state-of-the-art laptop computers and all the software they will need. We buy all of their textbooks. Last year we spent $330,000 on books. We buy their stethoscopes and other equipment, even their scrubs and lab coats. Many of these kids are coal miners' kids. They don't have any money. So we provide what they need. Think about the textbooks. Typically, a medical student will buy a text, use it, and then, the minute they get out of that class, they sell it. So they never develop a reference library. By our buying textbooks for all the students, they don't have any reason to sell them—and, really, they don't have anyone to sell them to. So they develop a beautiful reference library. I know of no other medical school that does all that for their students. They may require them to have laptops, but they don't buy them for them."

Kentucky residents who are accepted in the program (nearly 2,000 apply each year; 60 are accepted), and agree to provide primary care services in Kentucky after they have completed their schooling, can receive a scholarship.

John Strosnider, the school’s dean, says that when the idea of a medical school in Pikeville was first proposed, "many people felt it was foolish and impossible. We've proven them wrong. We've graduated our first class, and 90 percent of our graduates went into primary care. That's an unheard-of percentage, higher than we dared hope for. We have residency programs established. We have post-doctoral programs established. So we pick students from the mountains and train them in the mountains. They can do their residencies in the mountains, and we believe most of them will stay and practice in the mountains."

It’s a miracle. Maybe not the kind the Catholic Church would recognize, but a miracle all the same.