Cheery Observations

The Apple Store ‘cube’ on 5th Avenue

For the past 7 months or so, I have been completely immersed in all things ‘food related’.  Whether I’m at a farmers’ market, trying out a new recipe, learning about school food or USDA policy, or taking pictures, I seem to spend much of my time on a constant quest for more information about our country’s food systems and traditions.  It seems that when I open one door and learn something entirely new, I end up with five new questions (and the realization that this will be a long journey).  Years of school taught me my preferred learning style (that I don’t think many of you would really want to employ):  if I read something that I know I want to remember, I take complete handwritten notes and then transfer these notes to my computer.  For each of the past food or environmental books (including ‘Omnivore’s Dilemma’, ‘Fast Food Nation’, and ‘No Impact Man’) I’ve read, I did this, and now if there’s something I’ve forgotten or something I want to reference, I can simply open my notes.

I picked up ‘Eating Animals’ in November, after reading an excerpt from it in the New York Times magazine, scanning numerous reviews, and hearing Foer speak.  Despite all of my pre-reading research, I started ‘Eating Animals’ with a fairly open mind.  In person, I found Foer to be an eloquent speaker, sharing excerpts and stories calmly and rationally, without malice (even fielding a few off-the-wall comments about pet food with grace).   He exuded a strong faith in his beliefs, but he made it clear that his goal wasn’t to convert others.  He did make it clear, however, that while his goal wasn’t to make us all vegetarians, he couldn’t think of a single good reason that anyone could support factory farming.  I am in complete agreement.

Before I read this book, I already considered myself a selective omnivore.  For the past 7 months, my meat intake has been extremely limited due to multiple requirements:  the meat must come from an actual family farm (not a made up family farm!); the animals must have been raised honoring their species specific behaviors (whether this is being pastured, access to nesting, etc); the animals must be fed appropriate food (not their own species’ animal parts fed back to them); the animals must be treated with respect and not be injected with growth hormones or antibiotics; the farm should be transparent in their operations . Also the animal shouldn’t be forced to produce more than it is naturally capable of (eggs and milk).  So obviously my meat intake has been limited to what I can buy at the farmers’ market or at specific restaurants that share the sources of all of their food.

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Lena Corwin is a designer and illustrator living in Brooklyn.  I was recently clearing out some old Domino magazines (I miss that magazine!) and saw some of her work featured.  Her patterns and color choices are extremely visually appealing.

More specifically, her travel poster caught my eye:

I love the cheery, playful images of people, objects and buildings around the world, seemingly scatterered in a ’stream of consciousness’ effect.