Writing is the hardest thing for me. It is like inviting you to look at me naked. I feel vulnerable and not good enough.

I know there are worse writers than me, I was trolling one on twitter today with the same simple amusement one pokes a jelly to watch it wobble. Still that's hardly a yardstick for achievement- less shit than someone else.
To hone my would-be craft until the thought of another person reading it didn't require me to take a Xanax and quietly cry is my ultimate goal.

In life in general, I do not require any sort of endorsement whatsoever. I truly go my own way. I have no need of fitting in other than to not make other people feel uncomfortable about themselves. Being subversive, difficult, weird, ranty, random or generally coming across like an extra in a David Lynch film is all par for the course. I tend to attract a small group of like-minded weirdos and we are all good with it.

Even drawing which, in comparison to people who can draw, I'm complete rubbish at- I will still pull out a crayon and construct you a barely passable attempt at a map/schematic/ robot prototype without thinking Oh well I'm fucked now that they have seen this!

So why writing? Why the angst?

I thought about this long and hard and came up with I DONT KNOW but this is why I write a blog in the first place.

Feel uncomfortable, do it anyway, get better. Constant improvement. If you aren't macheteing your way through life's bullshit then you will believe your own hype and die satisfied in the suburbs of some shitty city thinking you have it all.  Please no!

I'm highly unlikely to stop pushing myself to feel uncomfortable. I'm so awkward as a default setting this is really hardly a blip on the Richter scale... as you do one thing you do all things and awkward is my superpower... I don't think that is how it works but you get what I mean right?

You are what you eat.

Why would perfectly nice people climb into a rubbish bin to retrieve food and eat it?

I don't know if you know about freeganing but it is a thing- I'm not making it up. Some people know Freegans as Dumpster Divers. There are also Meegans- I had to look that one up. Anyhoo, it is folk  that are diverting food from landfill back into the food chain.
There are oh so many reasons to get in a food dumpster and it has to start at the beginning which is a history lesson.

So agriculture and urbanism appeared approximately 10 thousand years ago roughly around the same time. This allowed cities like Rome which had about a million people to exist in the way that they did as a centralised entity with food being brought in via a chain of food production kept close to the city. Previous to this you had to live in the food belt. We were all Localvores back then my little hipsters, we had no other choice.

In fact cities were shaped by the influx of food, often literally walking into market.  Just check out London's food markets like Smithfield with nearby Cow Cross Street and Turnmill St...  until the advent of rail lead to the ability to slaughter your dinner anywhere and bring it from far afield.

Between then and now we have decreased the amount of farmers to the lowest amount in human history and now those people mostly spend their time in board meetings.
We have developed a relationship with food devoid of any love of food production. Mostly we make shitty food.

Now add to that 40 percent of all of the food we produce is wasted. Thats pretty fucked and somehow this bullshit leads to a billion obese people and a billion starving in our current world. Seriously.

So supermarkets throw out crap tonnes of food every day that is fit for human consumption- People like Jen and Grant of "Just Eat It" made a movie about climbing into dumpsters to retrieve that food and eat it which seems like the kind of thing you say you will do and in the cold light of day and sober sounds borderline crazy and dangerous- And that is all they ate for 6 months. This movie blew my mind.

Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story from Grant Baldwin on Vimeo.

I mentioned this to a person I was working with at a local organic shop- I say working, I was a volunteer because it was a community initiative about food security which has always interested me. I wanted to see how this stuff works up close from a logistics perspective. My workmate encouraged me to come along and go diving with her. Imagine my excitement at the invitation. I wanted to document it but turns out I couldn't bring my camera because of stuff that was happening in her life. Still I was curious so what the hell, jump on in.

We met at a train station because neither of us have cars and caught a tram together to a local Aldi.

Apparently the big supermarkets lock their bins to stop people going through them but Aldi dont.
Seems weird to me that supermarkets aren't donating their food to FareShare, Second Bite, the Asylum Seekers resource centre, any of the churches that feed people- geez really... we throw food away? Yeah we do.

We arrived at Aldi and she flipped back the lid of the dumpster, donned her gloves and began pulling out food and stuff. After the third or fourth time I time I asked "but why would they throw away that?" She said "I've been doing this for years- they throw away everything" She was pulling out child sized merino jumpers. The Asylum Seekers Resource Centre is 2 Km away. People have nothing.
There were brand new kids backpacks, fruit and veggies ensconced in more plastic wrap than I think is seemly, a packet of saffron, bike lights, cosmetics, and so much bread- there must have been 60 loaves in there. Couldn't they go to a church or a homeless shelter? I stopped waving things at her and saying it isn't even at it's best before date because it all became so meaningless. I could have cried.

I did it twice and it depressed me.

Our over production and over consumption of food, especially meat, has lead us to not value what we have.
"Meat production requires a much higher amount of water than vegetables. IME state that to produce 1kg of meat requires between 5,000 and 20,000 litres of water whereas to produce 1kg of wheat requires between 500 and 4,000 litres of water."  Can I put this in perspective by telling you 10 hamburgers = 1 year of showers.  So one dumpster worth of food could account for every shower you ever had in your life... then multiply every day, over thousands of shops a year.
Surely we could demand some stewardship of our food chain? Let's not fuck up everything along the way in the name of "Give me convenience or give me death."
Do we really think these unsustainable systems are going to keep serving us?

My hope is the farms of the future are high rise buildings that bring food production close to the people where they could see what they are going to eat growing in actual dirt, not limply lying in plastic trays.

I would like to see what agribusiness has stolen go back to wild places- between farms and cities there were always the bits that just belonged to the beasties... more of that.

Perhaps the gift of being able to stare at a pile of raw vegetables and know what to make of them will not being a dying art. It will be recognised as a necessary skill for living.

We could reconceptualize the way food shapes our lives, how it connects us with our environment, with the people we love and the people we don't know like oh, time immemorial.

I think I expect a lot from food. Maybe we all should.

Winds of change

Heres a little gem about life I learnt while long distance running.

If you don't run then you will just have to use your imagination- There is this moment when you are in the zone. You are clocking along at a great pace. You are comfortable, pushing yourself but not too hard. Your body feels amazing and your mind is free to absorb the surroundings. You wonder why everyone doesnt get up at 5am and run. The sun is shining and all is good and right with the world. Cue choir... hallelujah.

You pass runners going the other way and wonder why they look like they are having such a bad time. Their heads are bowed in concentration and they seem to be fighting for every step. Geez how do they make it look so hard? Maybe they arent as fit as you? You do train pretty hard. Thats probably it, your superior skills are paying off as you sail through life. 

Haha... Darling you have a tail wind. 

The amazing thing is you cant even feel it. Those other runners are battling a head wind that is sweeping you majestically in the other direction. They ARE fighting for every step. Some of them will be thinking of it as resistance training and others will be wondering why they got out of bed early for this shit. 

This, my friend, is what privilege feels like. Wind at your back and sun in your face. 

Sure you got up at 5am and did the work. Yay you. But when you look around and think it's a level playing field and you're winning because you are a better player then I have news for you. 

The beautiful thing about running is you generally have to turn around and run home thus experiencing the head wind as a reality check against your personal marvellousness. In life you can sail along with privillage and never have a moment of insight that allows you to feel compassion for those not blessed to have wind beneath their wings. 

Failing to see bias doesn't negate its existence- that's what people mean when they say "check your privilege". If you react in anger or denial then you might have some work to do there.

Maybe you are suffering from the Just World Fallacy whereby you think that pretty much all good efforts will be rewarded and conversely bad deeds will be punished therefore ultimately people get what they deserve? But wait Cyberia, surely that is how it works, otherwise the world would be a random violent place right where bad things happen to good people and it would be hard to remain positive and optimistic in the face of this? For some people the world is a random violent place where their success is less correlated to their efforts than the colour of their skin, their gender, their age or a myriad of other attributes that we pretend not to judge. It is hard for them to remain positive and optimistic. Check your privilege. 

We are also prone to a spot of correspondence bias aka fundamental attribution error whereby when we do something (run the red light) because we had a good reason but 'they' do it because they're such a (insert curse, rude hand gesture and cue road rage) 

Check if you've done this one lately because it feeds our feeling of superiority. Don't expect people that pack up their belongings and walk a 1000 miles to save their kids/ love of their life/ their own skin, etc from war, violence and persecution to wait patiently in a fictitious queue. You wouldn't and you know this for a fact. They want a better life? No shit Einstein. 

You have to be careful about creating a world in which any particular group has nothing left to lose. They get very low down in the hierarchy of needs and your cushy world starts to look bourgeois... Viva the revolution. 

Woo,  I totally got all ranty-pants... Back into the yoga pants.

All I'm really asking you to do is to turn around for a moment and see if that isn't a tail wind at your back and if there is then maybe you could create a slipstream for someone else, after all, we are all in this together.