Category Archives: blather

Expanding the definition of “locavore”

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The concept of a “locavore” is pretty easy for most folks to grasp: someone who buys things that are produced locally. Typically, this is used when describing people who purchase locally-produced foods, whether those foods are animal or vegetable. There’s also the idea of “Think Global, Act Local” to remind people that we need to support local businesses. And, between the bevy of days designed to get us out there frequenting local businesses (i.e. Record Store Day, Free Comic Book Day, Small Business Saturday, etc.), you have a whole host of reminders that we need to consume local resources first, before we look outside of what’s right nearby.

And so, it was with a terribly heavy heart I heard the news yesterday that WFNX (101.7FM to those of us in Eastern MA) had been sold to Clear Channel. Yes, the folks who own the “IHeartRadio” brand that seems hell-bent on destroying all variety in radio had bought yet another station and was planning to take it from its current alternative music format to (likely) either Spanish-language talk or country.

I can’t describe how awful I felt when I heard this. I have all kinds of words that I would typically use for this circumstance which I try pretty hard not to use on this blog, for fear of giving the impression that I’m an off-duty sailor. Basically, this decision is just bullshit and it’s robbing the local area of a resource that many of us really enjoyed. My sister introduced me to WFNX in the early 90’s, on one of my trips up to Boston while I was still in college. I loved the variety, the fact that they played music that no one else even considered putting on the radio, and the sheer bravado of putting on music that wasn’t designed for people who only wanted aural pap. When I moved up to the Boston area several years later, WFNX became “my station” – the one I would listen to in the car all the time. Even now, working well out of the range of its puny transmitter, I stream it to my desktop at work so that I can keep tabs on the music I love and the DJ’s that I find highly amusing (in an era when most DJ’s are interchangeable animatronic figures with their own inner laugh tracks on constantly).

These days, when you turn on the radio in your car (assuming you only have terrestrial radio and haven’t ponied up for Sirius/XM), what you hear is fairly homogeneous. Any station you land on fits neatly into one of five categories: news/talk, classical, classic rock, pop rock or college radio. The alternative rock stations have been wiped clean off the map in many cities (my beloved WHFS in DC disappeared one day, suddenly, but is available for streaming these days). And now, the station that introduced me to Mumford & Sons, Foster the People, Arcade Fire, Young the Giant and many, many others is disappearing. The radio personalities that actually lent personality to the radio were let go. A skeleton crew will man the station until its final switchover somewhere between 2-8 weeks from now, and then Clear Channel will re-baptize it as something else.

If you think about what being a locavore means, there’s an inherent sense of consciously bypassing the homogenized experience – the pre-packaged, chemically-enhanced version of what’s on the market. You want the fresh strawberries from the farm one county over, not the ones that flew in from 3,000 miles away. You want the beef that’s hormone-free instead of the beef that’s had god only knows WHAT done to it in order to get that cow to grow faster in a pen that’s smaller than a bathroom stall. Sure, you pay more for that, but you pay knowing that you’re supporting local businesses and your own local community, and you’re doing something that’s better for you in the process.

Listening to local radio isn’t all that different. Sure, the sales channel isn’t exactly the same – you don’t purchase directly from the station, although you may hear about a show or a service and purchase directly from the vendor who advertised on the radio. But still, how is there all that much difference? When you have the opportunity to listen to new bands that have a sound that challenges your preconceived notions of what’s good, expanding your mind, how is that so different from turning up your nose at packaged foods? In my mind, my rejection of all things Bieber and any of the digitally-enhanced crapola that comes out of the record company machine doesn’t stray all that much from my desire to have organic milk in the house. I’m consciously rejecting that which I know is being spoon-fed to me and branching out. That I listen to this on local radio is far better than just streaming it from some faceless server owned by a media conglomerate.

The other piece of this is that I don’t just listen: I buy. When I hear something I like, I go to Newbury Comics and I buy it. I don’t buy constantly, and I often look through their used selections when something finally occurs to me months after a disc has come out and I’ve heard enough to know it’s worth buying. But I buy. And I buy local. Newbury Comics is much like a DC-area chain I used to work for back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. That chain was destroyed by the rise of Tower Records and Best Buy, and ultimately Walmart and Target did them all in. Newbury’s still managed to survive, although they’re very much on life support, to hear their CEO tell it. They’ve had to expand their offerings to include more clothes and other ancillary items, because that’s where they’re getting sufficient margin. They’re being eaten alive by iTunes.

So, if I have to leave you with one idea as I sit in mourning for WFNX and desperately hope that Newbury won’t go the way of the dodo anytime soon: be a locavore about more than just food. Think Global, but for pete’s sake CONSUME LOCAL. Listen to your local radio station. Buy from your local CD store. If you live in the radio/musical equivalent of a food desert, seek out new music and new acts and buy their stuff. Go to local shows if you can. Just don’t give up on what’s local. Because, just as a radio station can disappear in the blink of an eye, so can a family farm. Businesses need patrons to succeed, and they need word of mouth to grow their base. Don’t let another decent station or music chain suffer because the deal is better on Amazon or the instant gratification’s there with iTunes. Think Global, CONSUME LOCAL. Please.

How to tell if you’re “mom enough”

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So, TIME Magazine decided to kick over a tracker jacker-level nest this week by putting an extended breastfeeding (EBF) mom and her 3 year old ds on the cover. With him breastfeeding. While standing on a toddler chair. [The article can be read in print or, if you can unlock, you can read it on their web site. More links – unlocked – here and here.] The basic premise is that it’s fun to star a holy war amongst moms during a year when we’re already talking about a “War on Women”.

Oh TIME, you are so awful sometimes.

My first reaction to seeing a mom EBF her 3yo was shock. It wasn’t that I was repulsed by the idea of a woman bf’ing her son; far from it, I think that’s fantastic. That she’s also incredibly beautiful and has a slammin’ body only made it seem crueller. She’s pretty, she’s got a great bod, and she makes bf’ing look like it’s so fricking easy (when I know for a fact that this is NOT the case for everybody). Ultimately, what bothered me about it is that her child shouldn’t need breastmilk at this stage of his development.

Over the course of a breastfeeding cycle, from when your colostrum first starts to come in all the way through weaning, your milk is constantly changing its composition to meet the nutritional needs of your child. By the time your child is starting to get onto solid foods, your milk is nowhere near as thick or heavy in nutrients because your body just knows that other stuff is going into their system to handle that. So it seems rather odd that anyone would *need* to breastfeed that long…the milk can’t possibly be any better, nutritionally, than what they’d get from a dairy or grocery store. If anything, it may not be as good for you, since it will have less vitamin D and calcium – requiring the child to need to lean more heavily on vitamins or foods rich in the appropriate, otherwise lacking, nutrients.

So, it is mostly me shaking my head say, “This makes no sense.”

I also have a co-worker whose sister just gave birth to an overdue child who has lost a little too much weight since birth. The rule of thumb is that if a child loses more than 10% of their birth weight, they need to be fed more frequently, potentially be supplemented with formula, etc. while the pediatrician monitors more closely. We went through this with dd when my milk didn’t come in well, so hearing that my co-worker’s sister was going through this, too, was giving me flashbacks to my crying fits in the hospital when the milk just wasn’t there and dd was screaming out in hunger until I finally relented and let formula take the place of what I thought only I should provide. Apparently, my co-worker’s sister is taking this in better stride than I did with dd, so good for her. She’s also using a syringe (for those not in the know, this involves a very thin tube that you can strap to your breast so the child is mimicking the comfort of being held close without potentially getting nipple confusion from a bottle). So, she’s better positioning herself for being able to continue bf’ing once she’s gotten the weight issues under control.

As you fast-forward in life, there seem to be no end of times when you compare yourself to other moms. I look around and see moms who appear to be more capable, more patient, better financed, fitter, happier…just generally BETTER. And then I think about my own mom, who’s a superhero to me even more every day as I learn about what it takes to be what I consider a “good mom”. She was epic during my childhood – working full-time, often in managerial roles, being a full-time mom and primary caregiver, cooking dinner every night, keeping the house together and clean…she never seemed to lose it.

And thus I come back to how I feel about my momming. I was “single-momming it” this week, as dh spent the majority of the week out of town for a work trip. Each night, I was on the hook to get the kids from daycare on time, get them home safely and make dinner. I was the only one to put them both to bed, and I was the only one to clean up. On the night when one of them couldn’t sleep well without a parent, I was the only parent who could be woken, and I still had to get up on time the next morning and find a way to shower so that I wouldn’t go into work anything less than clean. I managed. Actually, I did a bit better than managing – I somehow convinced the kids after that first awful night that they should stay in bed all night, and both of them did. Evenings were well-coordinated and everyone played their part, and they ate and slept well for me. I got hot showers 4 out of 4 days that I was on my own. And each day, the kids were happy, got play time, got relaxing time, ate square meals, slept for the required amount of hours, and went to school looking as though we were still a two-parent household all week. Oh, and I managed to get all of my work done at work and then some.

So, then we circle back around to this notion of being “enough” of a mom. In my mind, if you’re trying to do as much as possible within your power (and within the limits of reason) to make/keep your children happy and healthy, then the answer is yes. There’s a lot of stuff that we can’t control, but there is a good bit that we can control, too. Parenting is all about jumping off a cliff not knowing whether the bungee, parachute or other flotation devices are going to work. And, on your way down (or up), you keep experimenting because what worked 5 minutes ago no longer flies, so to speak. You don’t need to EBF to be a good mom. You don’t need to buy the most expensive clothes or toys for your kids to be a good mom. You don’t need to be model-pretty and model-slender to be a good mom.

There’s a big difference between being able to have a child and being a parent. When you decide to BE a mom and devote time and effort to that, then you’re mom enough. Setting up unnecessary fights and agitating an already on-edge population just seems mean-spirited. Shame on TIME for fueling a fire that just needs to burn out, already. I don’t need a magazine to tell me whether I’m “mom enough”. I can figure that out on my own.

{interlude} Time to post

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At tonight’s dinner party for family, an interesting conversation broke out (as one often does) – this time, one the subject of this blog. My mother, sitting across from me, commented that she wanted the cookbooks that were used in the generation of the meal, and I explained that one recipe was a mish-mash mod that I will be posting (next post I PROMISE) and the other did come 100% from a cookbook. I then commented a bit about how infrequently I’ve been posting lately. It is, after all, fairly hard to post frequently about all the lovely recipes I’m creating when much of our routine is built on…well, routine, and that means that we tend to cycle through a number of the same recipes every month because that’s what keeps our schedule from flying completely off the rails.

My sweet BIL then commented about how that’s actually fine. That’s my M.O., basically. My sister then chided me to remain true to my brand (tee hee), and thus that means dealing with the balancing act that my life is so much of the time. Really, creating new recipes daily just isn’t for me; I simply don’t have the time. I whined a bit about how I wish I could post as frequently as some of my other friends, and then I was swiftly reminded by dh that most of the frequent posters I know are people either A) work from home/stay at home, B) have no children, or C) both. Good point. Working outside of the home and having a husband who does the same, plus having two kids, it’s sometimes a wonder that I get out of the house with underwear on and my teeth brushed. (Trust me, on the days when you can’t have it all, best to go with the underwear; mints cover many evils.)

And thus we have this reminder: I may not post a ton, but I’ll post when I have something to say. Hopefully you’ll find it worth reading. If I ranted every time I got ticked off at the rampant attacks on women, I’d be posting every five minutes. If I posted only every time I create or discover a new recipe, IT MAY BE A WHILE. Thus, balance. You get some rant, you get some recipe. Sometimes, you get some parenting stuff as I discover things like how incredibly frakking smart dd is (she read everyone’s fortunes to them after our Chinese dinner the other night…which would be unremarkable if she weren’t still < 5-1/2 and waiting to enter Kindergarten). I will also note that I don’t post recipes that fall flat. If I don’t think I’d want to eat it again and/or if it needs significant adjustment, it won’t get posted until said adjustment(s) have been made. No point in posting something that’s only half-baked (no pun intended); when I fish around for recipes online, I’m assuming that they don’t suck. I just try to return the favor by posting recipes that I think absolutely are worth having again and again.

So, there you have it. And, as for the dinner party that we had tonight…there WILL be a recipe posted soon for the main dish: a crock pot Carolina-style BBQ pulled chicken. I can truly vouch for that recipe NOT SUCKING. And that’s what makes for a post, at least for me.