Local Food & Community

I’ve recently discovered a few organizations in the area that impart an immediate sense of community. The common thread to these organizations seems to be food, more specifically slow, local food. This first struck me as odd, or maybe just coincidental, but when I thought about it more, I wondered if there might not be something to it. People do tend to gather around meals, afterall – be it Thanksgiving dinner or Sunday brunch. It might be a learned association, or perhaps it’s innate, but either way by adulthood we all seem to associate food with social activities. Roger Ebert reminded us of this connection in his beautiful essay, Nil By Mouth, in which he describes what it is like to lose the ability to eat and drink. He finds that the most difficult part is not the loss of the fantastic array of tastes once available to his palate, but rather the necessary dissociation between food and society:

Isn’t it sad to be unable eat or drink? Not as sad as you might imagine. I save an enormous amount of time. I have control of my weight. Everything agrees with me. And so on.

What I miss is the society. Lunch and dinner are the two occasions when we most easily meet with friends and family. They’re the first way we experience places far from home. Where we sit to regard the passing parade. How we learn indirectly of other cultures. When we feel good together. Meals are when we get a lot of our talking done — probably most of our recreational talking. That’s what I miss.

And so it really isn’t that much of a surprise that I’ve found the most easy community in those that meet to eat. And eat local food, since the local food movement is working consciously to build a stronger community. The people at these events come to meet and welcome new people into their group; no one is ever a stranger for long.

The first such organization is Friday Mornings @ SELMA (Soule Eberwhite Liberty Madison Affiliation), which meets just a few blocks from my house every friday morning for a breakfast fundraiser benefiting local farms. Each breakfast has four choices featuring local produce & delectable home-cured bacon (on the side and optional for vegetarians) cooked by members of the community (often local chefs and caterers). The breakfast takes place in the same house on Soule street every morning. 100-250 people show up every week. On Thursdays, volunteers gather to prep the ingredients for the morning, stopping midway through the evening to eat a pot luck dinner. I’ve been volunteering both Thursdays and Fridays. They are some of the happiest hours of my week.

My first homemade crust!

Yesterday, I went with a couple friends to Slow Food Huron Valley’s Pie Lovers Unite event. I made my first home-made crust for a blueberry and blackberry pie for the event. It turned out as well as I could have hoped, and I’ll definitely be making it again. I used Joy the Baker’s buttermilk pie crust recipe, and adapted her blueberry blackberry filling recipe (replacing the half cup of flour with 6 tablespoons of tapioca to avoid a runny filling). It’s hard to go wrong with an event about all-you-can-eat pie, but this one outdid itself, imbuing everyone there with a sense of warm ooey gooey community to match the ooey gooey goodness filling the pies. Maybe it was the Pie-ku contest that won me over. Or maybe it was the delicious pie.

Another Midwestern blogger recently wrote a thoughtful piece on how the media gets the local food movement wrong: it’s not the future of agriculture, it’s a very small piece of it. Big ag is here to stay. I’ll have to read more, but he makes a compelling argument. I appreciate the article because, rather than just jump on the bandwagon of rah rah local food, I had to step back and consider what I was supporting and why. Local food probably won’t change the face of agriculture, but it can strengthen a community, and hopefully it pushes big agriculture to think harder about achieving sustainability.

Outsider

I’m still easing into this blogging thing. I like having a place to house the thoughts that have been occupying huge areas of my brain lately, but I don’t like the constant impostor feeling. The nagging sense that some phantom reader is judging the content, questioning the point, and doubting my qualifications when I throw out some half-baked critique of something else.

In some ways, these fears are silly… there are too few people reading this blog  for it to really matter anyway. But in other ways, I think these concerns are important. They arise not just from generalized insecurity (though I’ll admit there is much of that), but also a legitimate feeling of outsider-dom.

I write about sticking around, but in truth I’ve yet to shed the inner nomad. I’ve lived in Ann Arbor for only a year so far (though this is my third non-consecutive year here). I write as much or more about Detroit than Ann Arbor, but I don’t live in Detroit at all… I’ve never even spent a night there. I’m drawn to the idea of staying put, but I haven’t really done it. I’m fascinated by Detroit, but as a weekender.

Sometimes I think about moving to Detroit, but then wonder if that would still count as sticking around? Probably not. And I’m not really ready to give up my job or my house anyway. And even if I were a resident, I would still be a kind of outsider – white & relatively affluent with bougie tastes… I’m worlds away from the average Detroit resident’s experience.

And so I must resign myself to the outsider role for now. I think that’s ok, as long as I don’t pretend to be anything else. I’m a girl exploring my surroundings, trying to connect and, at some point belong.

Getting Ghost

This blog is about my conscious commitment to place and location, and for a reformed nomad like myself, that commitment requires effort. Part of that effort has been reading up on the area, including Ann Arbor, Detroit, the Detroit suburbs, and Michigan in general. I’ve read a few books so far, the most recent of which is Getting Ghost.

Getting Ghost is written by a cultural anthropologist (Luke Bergmann) who follows the lives of two young Detroiters, Dude and Rodney, involved in the drug trade. Their narratives are engrossing. The author’s anthropological analysis is less so – the dissertational interludes produce a sudden, jarring distance between him and his subjects, in spite of the intimate friendships he develops with them. While reading, I liked to imagine some codgy professor behind these portions, urging Luke to make more references to the theories of Foucoult and De Certeau to lend the book academic credibility. I wanted to believe that Luke, the Luke that went out to clubs with them and drove their mothers to doctor appointments, didn’t want to break away from the intimate narratives either, but was forced or at least compelled to.

The scenes of Dude and Rodney’s lives demonstrate a locally-focused value system, with family and neighborhood at center. It reminds me that while the “right-sizing Detroit” effort is well-intentioned and may even improve Detroit for many Detroiters, the only real certainty is that it will leave large numbers of people displaced and disenfranchised, even if executed well. That’s not to say I’m against it (I don’t feel nearly well informed enough to make that call), but it gave me pause. If Detroit is right-sized and people are forced to move into new homes and new neighborhoods, I hope that either the city or some private organizations are ready to help people reconnect to their new neighbors and new surroundings.

Art in Indianapolis & Detroit

The IMA Gardens

On Sunday, I checked out the new 100 Acres sculpture garden at the Indiana Museum of Art with an old friend from high school. It offers a gorgeous trail walk around a pond next to the White River with sculptures interspersed.

I’m impressed with the IMA, it has come a long way since I was a kid. And I couldn’t help but feel a swell of pride when I saw 100 Acres featured in the NYT and the WSJ. The world is taking notice of my hometown!

But then again, I can’t help but feel a bit ambivalent too. Afterall, the IMA earned these accolades by seeking out world-famous artists and exhibits while doing little to support the local art scene in Indy. Sure, the “Indianapolis Island” installation currently houses two Herron School of Art students, but the Herron students I know are overwhelmingly frustrated by how little the museum pays attention to or promotes the local art scene.

I have a membership to the Detroit Institute of Art and love their collection, but I’m a little disappointed that the renowned museum doesn’t do more to promote the local art institutions that are quite literally across the street. Both the Scarab Club and the College for Creative Studies have great galleries featuring local artists and art students, but your average visitor to the DIA wouldn’t know it.

This upcoming weekend, there are a couple of cool events supporting local artists & crafters in the area that I’m looking forward to:

The Shadow Art Fair (Ypsilanti)
Baar Bazaar (Detroit)

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P.S. I love the idea of the Detroit Artists Market’s Art Placement Program which allows companies to decorate their office with local artist’s works on a rotating basis.

Connection

At the last minute, I decided to drive down to Indy to see my family for the long holiday weekend.

I used it as an opportunity to check out some of the areas of Indianapolis that I haven’t seen in a long time. My parents took me downtown to show me the relatively new Peace Walk as well as the Canal Walk.

Indianapolis Canal Walk

I hadn’t been to the canal in at least 5 years, and it was amazing to see how much it had changed. We walked past the Eiteljorg Museum, devoted to Native American art… “Weird, when I was a kid, I felt like the Eiteljorg was in the middle of nowhere practically,” I commented. “That’s because it kind of was,” my mom explained.  Now it feels like an integral part of downtown, surrounded by parks, cafes, condos, and other museums. It just needed to be connected.

It reminded me of all the efforts to connect various parts of Detroit, like the extension of the Riverfront from the Ambassador bridge to just past the Belle Isle bridge, the new Dequindre Cut from the Riverfront to Eastern Market, and all of the Greenways being built.

When discussing the intentional “right-sizing” of Detroit, many people point out the inherent challenges with shrinking a city dotted with islands of relative prosperity–there will have to be sacrifices if the city is to be condensed. When exploring, you quickly realize how quickly the landscape swings from blighted to well-off and how often the most popular museums, boutiques and restaurants are located next to vacant lots.

These bike and walking paths are some of the things that give me hope for Detroit’s revitalization. It’s not a quick solution though. It took Indianapolis nearly 25 years…

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Photo Credit

Michigan, home of people who stay in Michigan

There was a column highlighted in the Urbanophile today (a blog out of Indianapolis about Midwestern urban issues and initiatives) from The Philadelphia Inquirer called “Pennsylvania, home of people who stay in Pennsylvania.” In it, Karen Heller laments the high percentage of people in Pennsylvania who were born there:

Only Louisiana, Michigan, and New York (not the city, but the state) have a higher percentage of residents who were born there than does Pennsylvania…

When your world is small, you tend to think small. You take for granted the bounties that you have while believing that what’s inexorably wrong can never be fixed. You’re not prone to adventure. You believe the broken way of our government is the way that all governments work, and you give up trying to change the system or your situation. You accept the inadequate leadership, the status quo.

With an enveloping love of home often comes a distaste for risk and a fear of innovation. And all of this comes at a price of stagnation.

I don’t intend to argue against her analysis–there are statistical fallacies, but there’s also a lot of truth in there. Moving around (not just traveling) has widened my worldview, and I like the person I’ve become as a result. I encourage people I know to leave home and to try living somewhere new. And I do feel that people who stay in one place their whole lives miss out on something special… But I also believe those of us who live a mobile lifestyle lose something too.

I’m not surprised that Michigan was on the list of states with an even higher percentage of native-born residents than Pennsylvania. When I first moved here, I was struck by the number of people I met who were Michigan born and bred and had no intentions of ever leaving.

On Tuesday, my office hosted a company-wide presentation skills training in which we were asked to create a short presentation on anything at all. My coworker chose to give her presentation on her favorite place, Ann Arbor, which she will be leaving in a few months for the first time in her life. She was clearly moved by the topic throughout, and by the end, she could barely choke out her closing line, “but what I’ll miss most is… the people.”

I was touched by her passion for and attachment to this town. I envied it. My own perspective felt cold in comparison. I’ve chosen to live in Ann Arbor for the foreseeable future, but I wouldn’t be horribly upset if I had to change those plans.

I’ve left cities with little sentiment or ceremony–I was moving away from some friends, but inevitably moving closer to others. My attachments were so disperse, they were no longer really attachments at all. The last few times I moved, I didn’t throw a Goodbye party. I didn’t want to feign the required emotions.

I have a few friends that I remain close to in spite of long distances, and some with whom I can pick back up easily in spite of long periods without communication. But there is no denying that distance weakens relationships, no denying the loss that has accompanied the widened worldview.

Karen Heller points out that staying put leads to complacency and stagnation, and that may very well be the case. But “mobile culture” has its own discontents, both on an individual and societal level. We lose the strength of our attachment and commitment to our location, and I imagine that must have implications on civic engagement.

I’m not sure how these ideas bear on the economic future of Michigan or for that matter Pennsylvania, but my intuition is that it will be easier to modify our economic strategy to take advantage of our demographics than it will be to alter our demographics to fit our economic strategy.

And in the mean time, I hope to build enough attachment to my community that leaving it would hurt.

I believe in Pegasus

Pegasus in Greektown

When I first moved to Ann Arbor, I didn’t think much about Detroit. I’d heard so many bad things about the crime that I was afraid to venture in the city without a guide. What if I got lost (as I tend to do)? I’d spent plenty of time in the “bad” neighborhoods of Indianapolis and the projects of Louisville, but I didn’t want to be naive about it.

My first group of friends in Ann Arbor were out-of-towners like myself, and their feelings about Detroit were similar to my own (or even more dismissive), so we left it alone. There seemed plenty to do in our immediate vicinity.

About a year into living here, I discovered Sweet-Juniper!, an engaging blog about a young family in Detroit proper. The ex-lawyer/stay-at-home-dad in the family (Jim/”Dutch”) fills his days exploring Detroit with his children. These tales of daily exploration and discovery inspired me. That this man would venture through “America’s most dangerous city” (a dubious, but prevalent epithet) with two young children emboldened me. I started developing lists of Detroit to-dos and then doing them. I’m glad I did.

I have a soft place in my heart for Sweet-Juniper! as a result. I gobble up even the personal posts that have nothing to do with Detroit, the way I would devour the biographical details of a favorite author. Yesterday, Jim wrote about his daughter’s fascination with their church-going neighbor and his thoughts on how he would approach the subject of God and spirituality to his children:

We never go to church, true, but we do not want her to think people who do are silly. Some people, we explain, believe in Buddha. Other people believe in Muhammad and Allah. Some believe in many Gods, while others only believe in one. Lots of people believe in Jesus. We tell her that as she grows up she can study everything and decide for herself what she believes.

She pauses and nods, as if she understands. “I believe in Pegasus,” she says earnestly. “Don’t you?”

My adult and childhood perspectives merge at this anecdote in a comforting way. I too intend to approach the God-question this way with my children, and  I can imagine myself responding this way as a child. Though I attended Catholic mass weekly, I directed my most unwavering faith toward the mythical winged horse. Before going to bed each night, I would pray for the creature to present itself to me in the middle of the night, and each morning I would chide myself for not believing in it enough for the fantasy to come true.

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Photo Credit
Pegasus Taverna, Greek Town Detroit

Detroit: City On The Move

A friend sent me a link to a 1965 promotional video for Detroit– Detroit: City On The Move. It’s heartbreaking and ironic. From the positive rhetoric about tearing down slums (which was devastating to the black community) to its naive description about ethnic diversity and harmony (just two years before the race riots), it’s hard not to cringe at how far off the mark the video is.

Jerome Cavanagh Presents

Part of what I love about Detroit, part of what makes it fascinating, is exactly this stuff though… It’s an American tragedy in the making, complete with heroic hubris (the urban planning initiatives that intended to create a “model city”) and anagnorisis (the recognition that this very planning had exacerbated racial tensions and led to the city’s demise).

This is why the media writes relentlessly about Detroit, this is why people around the country and world have become engrossed in its story, this is why the people who touch the city come to love it in spite of its flaws, the same way we root for tragic heroes in spite of their mistakes. The tragedy is not the fall, but rather the unfulfilled possibility of redemption. Detroit’s story is not over, and so we hope for better things. Resurget Ciniberus.

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P.S. I love Mike Rowe’s TED Talk Celebrating Dirty Jobs, which inspired me to look for anagnorisis in every day life. Check it out.

Michigan by choice

Ann Arbor

Michigan’s current net migration is outbound, not inbound [source]. People obviously aren’t clamoring to move here–why did I?

East and West coasters are often shocked to learn that anyone who’s had the opportunity to leave the midwest would choose to return. The region is, after all, nothing more than a large swath of indistinguishable farmland with a few scattered cities–fly-over country (though they would like to visit Chicago sometime).

And growing up in Indianapolis, I wanted nothing more than to get the hell out of the midwest. I thought people who stuck around were unlucky or unmotivated or just plain stupid. My friends wanted to leave too, and for the most part, they did. So I shipped myself off to Yale, expecting never to return and never to want to.

I found a lot of wonderful things on the East Coast, but I started to resent the way so many people would assume so many things about my background and so many stereotypes of the midwest without having seen it. Assume that I must be a farm girl (when I grew up in a city). Assume that I must have barely any contact with non-whites (when my high school was ~35% african-american, and I was one of only a handful of white people in my class in my inner-city middle school). And worst of all, assume that I agreed that the midwest didn’t matter.

When I left the midwest, I hated it and expected my new surroundings to reinforce my hatred. But instead I found leaving it taught me to appreciate it, to love it even. I thought the midwest was close-minded, but I discovered the east coast was just as (if not more) close-minded, just in different ways. I missed people who didn’t question why you would ever want to visit St. Louis or Louisville or Cincinatti… Who didn’t laugh unapologetically and assume I was joking when I suggest they visit Indianapolis.

I constantly confronted anti-midwest stereotypes, and I reacted by stereotyping the East coast right back: the pervasive snobbery, the unrelenting hierarchies. I didn’t care about designers, I’d never heard of Louis Vuitton or Jimmy Chu or Hermes. I wasn’t impressed by old money (wasn’t it more impressive to be self enterprising? To make your own fortune?). I was offended when people would chuckle condescendingly when someone at the table ordered their steak medium-well.

I moved to the West coast and found a different breed of snobbery–focused more on independent labels than designer names, that assigned prestige to non-traditional paths rather than ivy league credentials (the MIT drop-out turned entrepreneur, the uber-successful graffiti artist, the guy who gave up his life as a corporate lawyer to lead kayaking expeditions). The aesthetic appealed much, much more to me… I loved shopping at all the cute indie boutiques, running into quirky flash mobs, and exploring niche genre bookstores. I had to admit that I was not immune from snobbery myself. The East coast brand just wasn’t my style.

Still, I missed my family, now three time zones and a long flight away. I missed major family events because of the distance, my brother’s high school graduation, my great uncle’s funeral, my dad’s confirmation as honorary consul.

So I returned. I moved to Ann Arbor, site unseen, because it was 5 hours or less to Indy, Louisville, Chicago and Pittsburgh, where my family, aunts and uncles lived. And because it was the only office in the midwest where I could transfer within my company and department. And it seemed like a cute and relatively progressive town. And it had a fair community of young professionals and grad students around my age. And it was near a major airport with cheap flights to see my friends around the country and the world.

I stayed for two years and then moved back to San Francisco when opportunity knocked. But in San Francisco, I realized didn’t want to be a nomad anymore. I wanted to put down roots, and I didn’t want to put them down so far from my family. I didn’t want to put them somewhere so prohibitively expensive. And I didn’t want to raise my children in a culture that assumed the midwest didn’t matter (which West coasters did just as much as the East coasters had). So I quit my job and found a new one back in Ann Arbor.

I love Ann Arbor’s pace, the sense of community, its proximity to Detroit (which I’ve grown to love in its own right), and its values. It’s not perfect–it’s fairly homogenous, annoyingly cloudy, it strives for cloying levels of yuppy-friendliness, and the restaurant scene leaves a lot to be desired. But it’s home, and home by choice.

Staying put

My house in Ann Arbor

This blog is a home for my musings on place and community, planting roots and the daily choice to stay put, not flee.

Sticking around doesn’t come naturally to me–I’ve lived on both coasts, the midwest, and Europe. I’ve moved cross country four times in the last five years. I’m an expert Craigslister: I’ve found apartments and roommates, bought and shed furniture as needed, and shared long car rides with strangers (vetted carefully).

Moving is a rush. And when the high wears off, no longer overwhelmed by the possibilities of this no longer new location, I find myself seeking the next high. Jonesing to move.

After years of breaking leases and following opportunity, wherever that was, I finally saw the long-term disadvantages of my nomadic lifestyle. My friends were disperse, once close friends becoming shallow acquaintances. I found that I had to explicitly prioritize friendships in a way that seemed to cheapen them: if I plan to visit this friend, I won’t be able to afford seeing these others. And in all the traveling to keep up with my friends from past places, I was giving up opportunities to deepen local relationships… Then again, as a nomad, what value is a local friend? A local friend will cease to be local soon enough. I began to approach new friendships with skepticism: is this person worth the effort? My romantic life was also affected: I’d never had a long-term relationship. While there are likely a whole host of reasons for that, undoubtedly at the top of the list is the fact I’d never really had the chance.

And so I bought a house. And got involved in my community. And started to learn about its history. Because the daily choice to stick around is not an easy one for me to make. The temptation to move is strong, and the pay-off quick and easy (but ultimately empty).

Luckily, the commitment i spaying off, and I’m slowly developing richer relationship with my location, discovering its more subtle textures. This is my effort to record those discoveries and share them with anyone interested. There will no doubt be rough spots along the way, when sticking around will feel like more of a rut than an opportunity. I hope this record will remind me why I’ve made the choice to stay and help me make it all over again.