Simple, simple solutions
Way, way back in in 1989 (the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the other subway series, Tiannanmen, release of Mandela), I worked at a foundation that funded environmental, community development, and some cultural groups. While there, I heard a great story about a simple solution. It involved Lester Brown, head of Worldwatch.
Brown was presenting at an event sponsored by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (a foundation created by later, more progressive Rockefeller cousins) and someone asked the question: “if you could get people to do one thing, what would it be?” Brown is said to have thought a very long time about this question, uncomfortably long for some, when he finally answered: “get people to ride bikes.”
This was a simple solution to many, many, many problems: by using bikes instead of cars or public transit, carbon emissions would be reduced, by getting people to ride they would have fewer heart problems, live healthier. Bikes require less infrastructure and generally pose fewer delays in people’s live so they reduce stress. David Byrne’s Bicycle Diaries makes the charming argument that biking around cities makes him “feel more connected” and provides insights into “the mind of my fellow man.” And bikes are just nifty.
Seems like another simple solution is emerging twenty years later: cook for yourself. For a variety of reasons, I’ve resumed cooking and a friend recommended The Flavor Bible. The introduction has a nice little closing:
Ultimately, cooking offers the opportunity to be immersed in one’s senses and in the moment like no other activity, uniting the inner and outer selves. At these times, cooking transcends drudgery and becomes a means of meditation and even healing. . . . It is little surprise to us, then, that when US Poet Laureate Charles simic was asked by New York Times’s Deborah Soloman earlier this year “What advice would you give people who are looking to be happy?” his response was “For starters, learn how to cook.”
Now, The Nation has an article titled “We Don’t Need a Food Revolution, We Just Need to Learn How to Cook”. It begins with the line:
We need radical thinking, but we don’t need a revolution. We don’t need an overthrow of capitalism. Nor do we need to become vegetarians. We need not become spartans. We’re just going to have to learn how to cook.
Sadly, the rest of the article is mostly about Americans: 1) needing less protein than we think; 2) eating only choice cuts while leaving other interesting bits (kidney, tripe, liver, brisket) to our pets and the rest of the world; and 3) the protein paradox of feeding out protein sources (livestock) more food than we need to feed 4 billion people. It’s less about how a lifestyle change would work or connect to Simic’s line.
Still, my apophenic brain circuitry has latched onto this. I’m getting too many signals in a short period of time to ignore it: David Byrne’s bicycle book, the resurfacing of the Lester Brown story, the Simic quote, my own interest in cooking (and not spending obscene amounts of money for a salad at Pret a Manger), the Nation headline (if not the article in Google Reader).