You are using an insecure version of your web browser. Please update your browser!
Using an outdated browser makes your computer unsafe. For a safer, faster, more enjoyable user experience, please update your browser today or try a newer browser.
If you drink saké (Japanese rice wine), you’ve gotta check out my buddy Henry’s new video series. I met Henry in 1996, when he introduced Ciao Bella Gelato to the West Coast, opening their SoMa production facility. If I recall correctly, that was sandwiched between his successful launches of Brooklyn Brewery in New York, and Belvedere Vodka across the world. At the time, I was just grateful that he’d swing by my stall at the San Francisco Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market with hot coffee on cold winter mornings. Henry, along with my friends Ami, Brian, and Loci, made hawking butter (and other related dairy products) a fun way to spend a Saturday (their visits would also allow me bathroom breaks and time for flirting with customers). Years later, Henry helped me land a sweet gig spearheading Chopin Vodka‘s attempted conversion of potato farms and vodka processing facility in Poland to certified organic. A few years ago, Henry launched JotoSake, importing artisanal rice wine from multi-generational Japanese producers who use locally raised, indigenous rice varietals. Basically, this is the good stuff. Henry’s new videos go behind the scenes with his partners, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see Henry with his own Food Network show.
Despite repeated visits to the chiropractor, hot packs, cold packs and a random assortment of medications, nothing seemed to help Nigel’s back. Quite the opposite, in fact, and the pain continued to worsen. Then, on December 24, while cruising home to Dixon on Interstate 80 from the SF Ferry Plaza farmers market, a wooden chair suddenly appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the highway. With absolutely no time to swerve, Nigel’s farm truck smashed the chair into toothpicks. Unfortunately, the impact had a similar effect on his already-fragile back. Catapulting his agony beyond his British stiff-upper-lip pain threshold, Nigel, upon arriving home, practically crawled to the local doctor who insisted upon doing additional tests, including blood work. Oddly, that chair may have saved Nigel’s life.
It turned out that Nigel wasn’t suffering from some routine farmer ailment, but from a blood cancer viciously attacking his spine. He was rushed immediately to the hospital, where chemo and radiation started almost immediately. Had Nigel waited even a few more days to get diagnosed, he likely would have been permanently paralyzed. When my friend Patrick and I visited Nigel yesterday in the hospital, he was in great spirits, optimistic and continuing to plot his next adventures (including a vegetable-oil powered ice cream truck featuring local, seasonal organic fruit flavors and, of course, Straus Family Creamery).
My friendship with Nigel goes way back to the early days of the farmers market. Recently, he married my dear friend Lorraine (in fact, their first date was at my 40th birthday party). When I visited them in early December at their Eat Well Farm near Davis, I was in awe of their magnificent new gigantic hobbit home, their endless stream of sustainable farming innovations, incredible community building events and, perhaps most of all, a pervasive, passionate child-like enthusiasm. A couple of days ago, when Nigel was asked by the doctors whether he was a glass half-full or half-empty kind of guy, he replied “overflowing”.
Eat Well Farm supports 18 farm workers and their families. During the slow winter season, Nigel and Lorraine keep all of their workers employed without layoffs. Their organic farm supplies 700+ Bay Area families with a delectable produce – this week, their $27 box includes: Mandarins, Pink Lady Apples, Daikon Radishes, Baby Bok Choy, Broccoli, Romanesco, Arugula, Wakefield Cabbage, Spinach, Leeks and Collards.
If you want to eat great food, support Nigel, his family and team, subscribe to their delivery program. Or just keep Nigel in your thoughts. An increasing body of research points to the benefits of prayer and ‘distance’ healing and, regardless, one thing is for certain – it can’t hurt.
Despite Hilary Clinton’s recent headline-making diplomatic meetings in Burma (aka Myanmar), the situation on the ground remains dire. I don’t profess deep knowledge of Burmese politics, but from what I personally observed, I have a very difficult time imagining anything substantive coming from this supposed political ‘thaw’. Here’s a recent report from a friend visiting our development projects in Burma:
“The restrictions for foreigners are worse than ever. The last half year all the villages west of town has been closed to foreigners, including the areas of the project villages. I heard it is because of the presence of insurgency groups in the area. A couple of months ago there was, according to our contacts there, some heavy fighting not far from the project villages. One area (were most of the project villages are located) is full of military, making life hard and dangerous for the villagers. It also makes work on the project difficult, and nothing more have been done since Spring 2011 (prior to monsoon season). Our liaison has also been seriously ill with a hernia, which can be deadly here (in fact, his father died from a hernia). Fortunately, he is recovering from surgery, which he had done in Thailand a few months ago. So I haven’t been able to do much useful, but have been able to visit a few villages that are still unrestricted.
Related, a few people have asked me about the controversy surrounding Greg Mortenson and his book, Three Cups of Tea. I don’t know Greg but, like many of you, I’ve read his book and been impressed by his successes. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my travels in Asia, is that my Western assumptions about ‘how things are done’ often simply aren’t applicable. Things take more time. Bribes need to be paid. Stories need to be ‘scrubbed’ to minimize risk to our local liaisons. It can be crazy-making, especially if you expect (like I did) that a straight-forward, linear approach was the best approach.
Like I said, I don’t know Greg, nor the specifics of his situation, but re-reading some of the criticisms of his work, I’m reminded of a conversation I once had with my mom, back in late 1994. It was in the very early days of Straus Family Creamery, and one of my jobs was handling marketing. With no money, and even less experience, our best bet to sell milk was by attempting to tell our story to the press. In fact, media coverage was nearly the only tool we had to build sales. Well, one day, exhausted from yet another 18-20 hour work day lugging 40+ milk crates and calling grocery stores I had found in the Yellow Pages (this was still the pre-Internet era), I came home to tell my parents, barely able to contain my excitement, about a major story I had landed – it might have been CNN or the New York Times – I only remember it was really big. Mom smiled but, instead of being massively excited (hell, she was always stressed out about sales), she said in a quiet, concerned voice replied “You have to be careful, Michael. People will put us on a pedestal, and then just as quickly knock us off.”
I can’t help but wonder if that’s what, at least in part, happened to Greg.
Every now and then I like to brag … about my friends, and Jered and Nancy at Pie Ranch have the dubious distinction of being today’s victims. I met Jered back in 1999 at the Eco-Farm Conference, where he was mesmerizing an audience with his photographs of sustainable agriculture in Asia (his adventurous spirit was one of the inspirations for my recent adventures). Then, in 2002, Jered and his wife Nancy – both passionate advocates of sustainable agriculture – started Pie Ranch, a 14-acre not-for-profit educational center for sustainable farming techniques, where they host programs for high school students, apprenticeships and internships for aspiring farmers and, of course, grow delicious food.
They’re about an hour-drive from San Francisco, so check them out next time you’re taking a road-trip down the coast.
Walls made of plastic bottles instead of bricks. Given how mercilessly my nephews harass me (rightfully, regretfully) for my prematurely failing memory, I nonetheless remember clearly the first time I saw this remarkably simple-yet-innovative idea in action.
Back in 2008, I was visiting the rainforest hippie enclave of San Marcos, accessible only by boat and nestled along the shores of Lake Atitlan, Guatemala. As I casually wandered the mostly-dirt paths leading from the docks, I passed by a pyramid-shaped meditation retreat and then, an Italian vegetarian restaurant – a charming culinary alternative to the abundantly-common rice, beans and yucca, minus that one evening they were showing Sex in the City movie, volume blaring, for a dining room filled with backpackers apparently needing a dose of ‘reality’.
There, along the path, I saw plastic 1-liter water bottles, filled with dirt and stacked like bricks, held together with wire mess and forming solid walls. Most was covered with plaster of some sort, but windows of exposed bottles had been created to demonstrate the innovative building technique.
Empty plastic bottles have become a locally-abundant and renewable building resource (not, by the way, a good thing, a fact to which my colleagues at the Plastic Pollution Coalition would readily attest). But given that our culture’s current addiction to single-use containers, I’m grateful that innovative community activists are creating hope from heaps.
San Diego, CA-based Hug it forward is one of those leaders. Earlier this year, I met and became friends with of their founders, Heenal Rajani while attending a TedX event in Goa, India. Heenal wasn’t presenting, but he should have been, with his Oxford-accented enthusiasm utterly contagious, and tales of success utterly uplifting.
Since 2008, Hug it Forward has helped build schools in 14 communities across Guatemala, one of which – built for about $10,000 – serves nearly 300 students. The entire community pitches into the construction, creating a real sense of local ownership. Impressively, H.I.F. uses fully 100% of donations for on-the-ground work, because they have a separate, private source to cover overhead and operating expenses. They coordinate ‘voluntourism’ missions and have also developed a free how-to-build-a-bottle-school handbook.
The ‘moment’ is infinitely small … no matter how you slice it, it just gets smaller and smaller. And yet, in that briefest flicker of time, since that’s all that there is, infinity exists in each and every moment. What a gift.
I’m exploring my 95-year-old cousin Alfred’s breakthrough cancer detection research from the 1970s, in which he applied electricity to a drop of blood sitting upon NASA-created liquid crystals, and took remarkable photographs of the resulting color patterns. Here’s Alfred in a 1982 “In Search of” TV episode, hosted by Leonard “Spock” Nemoy:
In nearly all test cases, healthy blood produced symmetrical images (left), while cancerous blood produced more sporadic images (right):
Healthy blood (left), cancerous blood (right)
If you and someone you know is interested, I’m in search of a team of scientists, cancer researchers, medical photographers to help preserve Alfred’s knowledge, methodology and perhaps re-start his research. Combining his research with modern digital imaging and computer analysis could yield important results in cancer detection, and may have application to the field of Kirlian energy / aura research.
My friend Joel Singer, an American artist now living in Bali, just finished his latest work. For me, it’s a lovely reminder of Bali, a place which I’ll soon be calling home.
Velveeta, Rondele and Laughing Cow. That’s what ‘cheese’ meant to me in the 1970s. Somewhat ironic, given that I grew up on a dairy farm that since has become emblematic of the sustainable, local and organic food movements. Once, I was embarrassed to admit to my city friends that I grew up shoveling shit. Today, farmers are oft-viewed as veritable rock stars, and farms as foodie porn. I’d fail miserably as a cool hunter. My sister Vivien, however, is charting a new course … not a cheese course per se, but a cheese map. Specifically, the new Sonoma Marin Cheese Trail – a delicious and beautiful (if slightly fattening) guide to exploring the cheesy North Bay. Introduced less than a year ago, more than 50,000 maps have already been distributed. So, watch the piece below, download the map, and enjoy.
I met Kirill at the German Bakery in Arambol, the hippy-chic beach community in Goa. Mind you, there are dozens of German bakeries (all, invariably, named ‘German Bakery”) strewn across ex-pat neighborhood across India and Nepal, as if some entrepreneurial genius had created a German-style ‘Let’s bring “real” food to the East” Marshall Plan to incubate a cinnamon bun economic development program. Some travelers have speculated that the bakeries were all connected by some hidden central processing facility, because the pastries were so uniformly uninspired. Or perhaps, the bakers were too baked on Manali hash to notice that their taste buds had long since faded into the distant haze of Goa’s previous counter-culture glory.
But it was at a beat-up, though up-beat bakery, in a tight cluster of shops where Arambol’s singular, narrow one-lane road meets the beach, where I met Kirill while taking a break from my evening wanderings along the Arabian Sea.
I was in a mood to talk with someone, and Kirill struck me as an intriguing prospect. He was Russian – as apparent and obvious as I am American, and as easy to spot as a dread-locked post-Army world-traveling Israeli – and yet, there was something distinctly … different. I couldn’t place it at the time but, in retrospect, I think it was Kirill’s absence of arrogance which all-too-many other Russian travelers exude.
Sometimes it’s easy for me to jump-start a conversation, other times I (yes, even I) am more tenuous. One of the ‘tricks’ I began using a lot was quietly mumbling ‘Hello’ or something similar in Russian, which was inevitably met with a surprise-filled “Oh, you speak Russian??” Mind you, I used this primarily with fabulously gorgeous Russian women and, one day, I made the horrific mistake of sharing this conversation ice-breaking technique with my buddy Vlad, the Ukrainian-born Aussie. Vlad, with good reason, subsequently and mercilessly gave me shit about it for weeks. Which I wouldn’t have minded so much my silly attempts had worked better.
I was grateful that Kirill’s English was significantly better than my Russian, though his patience for my stumbling attempts seemed, at moments, to max out. Kirill, as I came to learn, was a musician from St. Petersburg, Russia. We spent many evenings hanging out, with his girlfriend Elina, bass-guitar playing friend Dima and their friend Igor. Igor was a loud, gregarious guy, the manager of St. P’s FedEx (I kept thinking of Igor as Tom Hanks’ Russian counterpart in the film Castaway. Igor had a little taste of mafioso, who’d give the gift of an expensive black SUV to a friend-in-need, a guy who couldn’t be fired … I liked him immediately).
Travel friendships developed quickly, deeply and are all-too-often ephemeral, fading into the increasingly distant memories of an adventure once-lived, in a lifetime which feels unreal, surreal. And maybe, likely, that’s how my friendship with Kirill would have transpired, expired, were it not for the fact that, a few months later (and just a few months ago), he suddenly appeared in San Francisco, conducting a series of house concerts for Russian ex-pats across a dozen U.S. cities.
I picked him up near the San Francisco’s Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market, and then drove to Golden Gate Park. We walked and talked for hours, smoking a little White Rhino he had already resourcefully acquired from a local dispensary. And, as we walked, there was a moment when my entire body suddenly loosened up and relaxed in a way that I had forgotten possible. A body memory that came flooding back, a reminder of how, just a few short months prior, I had been so deeply in the flow. Here I was, with my Russian friend who I had met in India, transforming a fading memory back into the present.
He explained in insanities of Russian politics and the ridiculousness of Putin’s manipulative antics (think George W. Bush’s ‘Mission Accomplished’ times 1,000). I looked at Kirill, and saw an unquenchable human spirit. Here was a man who grew up in communist Russia, whose literary heroes were Steinbeck and Jack London. His every moment in America was a joy, and he longed for the opportunity to bask in the freedoms of America in a way that few native-born Americans can or will ever fully appreciate (myself included).
Kirill is a true Russian hippie, but that’s not exactly the right word. He embodies the of the counter culture, but in Russia, that means something so much than here in the West. Here in the States, hippies are a dime a dozen. In Russia, it’s all about machismo – it’s a country that will squash the softness right out of you. To live there, there’s a brutal daily reality in which showing any indication of softness is to subject yourself to exploitation. Dog eat dog, defined. In that context, Kirill’s artistic genius, his love and poetry, shine all the more brightly.
Here, then, is Kirill’s latest music video, the aptly named “Nobody dies in paradise” … I don’t understand all the lyrics, but I do remember some of the moments when he filmed in Goa and Hampi, with his friends – now my friends – and so appreciate how well he’s captured and, well, immortalized, the spirit of Goa.
Despite repeated visits to the chiropractor, hot packs, cold packs and a random assortment of medications, nothing seemed to help Nigel’s back. Quite the opposite, in fact, and the pain continued to worsen. Then, on December 24, while cruising home to Dixon on Interstate 80 from the SF Ferry Plaza farmers market, a wooden chair suddenly appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the highway. With absolutely no time to swerve, Nigel’s farm truck smashed the chair into toothpicks. Unfortunately, the impact had a similar effect on his already-fragile back. Catapulting his agony beyond his British stiff-upper-lip pain threshold, Nigel, upon arriving home, practically crawled to the local doctor who insisted upon doing additional tests, including blood work. Oddly, that chair may have saved Nigel’s life.
