A bevy of berries on display at the Wilshire Center/Koreatown farmers market above the Wilshire/Vermont Metro rail station.
Settling into a life of self-employed writerdom has taken a bit of getting used to. Roadblock number one: discipline. Thus, despite grand plans and great lists and now-fleeting moments of inspiration, I’ve been adoring my French press, discovering there are few breakfasts not bettered by adding a few blackberries (please technophiles, I’m talking about the kind that grow on shrubs, and, specifically, the ones purchased from the Friday farmer’s markets at the Wilshire/Vermont Subway station in Koreatown – See Photo) and semi-limbering myself up with a few rounds of Wii Fit Yoga. It’s only taken since I first drafted this post in early June to get around to finishing it. There’s slow food, a burgeoning slow journalism movement, and, now, slow blogging.
Being the bearer of a new master’s degree from a large, somewhat unduly-pompous university in Los Angeles and an education from a small liberal arts college in flyover country, I begrudgingly acknowledge I might fit into a class-based stereotype or two, especially now that I’ve mentioned farmer’s markets, yoga (and Wii Fit at that) and fresh coffee in one sentence. At the least I’ve done my part to prove I like Stuff White People Like . So I’m not doing myself any favors when I mention that one of my other recent joys is the chance to listen to NPR’s Morning Edition as I putter around coming up with distractions for the day.
Even better than Morning Edition, though, is the ten minutes KCRW devotes at the end of its broadcasts to the Marketplace Morning Report. Marketplace does a tremendous job of putting business news into plain English without dumbing it down, and I generally find its stories more compelling and educational than the business news from NPR (Planet Money excluded), so I’m glad Santa Monica’s gem of a radio station offers this alternative.
One morning, though, I was struck by a promo for one of the Morning Report’s underwriters: agribusiness giant Monsanto, which, audiences were told, is “Committed to sustainable agriculture.”
How would Monsanto maintain this commitment? Apparently, in their view, their recipe for sustainability is “Produce more, conserve more.”
The thing is, that’s the problem. The entire point of conserving more is to counter the need to produce more.
Continue reading “More and More”
