by Roxanne -

Legal Nomads.com

Photo LegalNomads.com

One excellent website that came out of the mediocre book in the previous post was this one: LegalNomads.com; Where culture, food & travel intersect. It’s the website of a young woman who left her job as a lawyer in Montreal to travel around the world, trying foods one country at a time, one meal at a time.

Her site is well documented with interesting links and resources. The photography is beautiful and the way she records her experiences is fun and entertaining to read.

Whether she is Christian or not I don’t know – but her life exemplifies the idea of Christain mission – engaging the world and allowing it to change you. She is entering one culture after another and immersing herself in its people, language, art, food, music, smells and soaking up the experience. This is what mission is about. Opening ourselves to others and to the world.

I’ve put her on the blogroll here at InnerPacific.

 

by Roxanne -

An Economist Gets Lunch

With wheat prices spiralling out of control and food costs going up – we decided to get more creative about eating, and eating well.

I thought that Tyler Cowen’s new book An Economist Gets Lunch: new Rules for Everyday Foodies (Dutton: 2012) might help with that. For example, he suggests using Asian groceries for a more inexpensive, wider selection of greens (Hmmm, there’s a Vietnamese grocery just around the corner . . .).

However, many of his suggestions were tired; when traveling we already know to ask the locals where they eat, for example. Likewise we know to check ethnic restaurants in neighborhood strip malls away from pricey downtown areas.

Nevertheless, his idea to turn any Chinese restaurant in this country into an excellent Chinese restaurant was a good one; ask to speak to the chef and requesting what he would make for himself with tofu.

But on other fronts, I wondered how much was he paid by big agribusiness and the genetically modified food industry to wax on about how wonderful these industries are? The reality that economists are funded in academia by big agribusiness seems especially obvious here. Plus he ends up refuting his own glossy account of agribusiness by explaining at length, later in the book, how much better Mexican beef is because it’s grass fed, or how much better the tortillas are, handmade using local corn, etc. So Tyler which is it? Is big agribusiness creating better food or not?

Toward the end of the book he lost me when his section on France failed to highlight the fabulous street food (can you say golden mushroom crepes anyone?) and fresh fruits/vegies available at any Parisienne neighborhood, morning market – not to mention the delicious and inexpensive table wines at even the local Monoprix. Made me wonder, was he actually in France?

This led me to question overall what he writes about hunger, food distribution and the food industry. He may be an economist, but he’s a privileged, American, white male who doesn’t know much about the complex problem of hunger, countries made poor (by rich ones) or multi-national corporate interests when it comes to food.

by Roxanne -

Bottled Water? Yuck!

Pacific Ocean Trash

In my mind, anyone still selling, using or buying bottled water, or soda in plastic bottles, thus contributing to that massive sludge of garbage – primarily plastic bottles – floating around the south Pacific, is either living in a cave or brain dead.

Get a clue. Drink tap water or get a reusable water bottle. Then use it.

Same goes for plastic bags.

You may also like Kowalski’s Grocery Store and Fiji Water.

by Roxanne -

Undecided is Undecided

Part of my summer reading included a few books that looked promising from my local library’s “newly published” shelf. Undecided: How to Ditch the Endless Quest for Perfect and Find the Career – and Life – That’s Right for You by Barbara Kelley and Shannon Kelley (Seal Press: 2011) looked at the inability of millennium women to decide on a career. I thought it would be interesting to see what challenges and struggles face women of the next generation. The authors did a fair job of demonstrating the challenges and ambivalence facing young women who were raised to believe they could whatever they wanted to do. They used personal stories and some demographic statistics to make their point.

However, a large portion of the book explains the ongoing dilemma for women: how to work in jobs that pay less than men – so less money – while trying to raise a family. This is not a choice that men ever make, because as the authors spend time explaining, the business world assumes that men have a wife at home full time to take care of children and women will leave either to get married (if single) or to have children (if married), so pay them less for the same work (190-192). The fact neither assumption is any longer the case in today’s world is lost on corporate America. These are systemic issues that need to be addressed. The authors are clear that personalizing this issue will not solve the problem (182-183).

Further, they noted that in some countries, such as Sweden, these issues have been addresses systemically. Laws have been changed to require both men and women to take leave to care for infants or family members. The authors observed that this has narrowed the pay differential between men and women in Sweden significantly in just ten years (200-201).

But then these authors fall out of bed. Rather than provide ways that women can work to legislate similar laws in this country – they do exactly what they previously said will not work – they personalize this issue. Chapters thirteen and fourteen discuss how women should just turn inward, learn what they are really passionate about and all these problems will somehow be solved. They use the same individual stories from earlier in the book to demonstrate how it will work.

This is magical thinking at it’s worst (or best depending on your POV). Turning inward and learning more about ourselves can be helpful – but unfortunately it will not eliminate the inherent structural issues that women face – being paid less for the same work and society not valuing the work required to care for society’s children. This is the kind of thinking that must change. Unlike the authors hopeless suggestion to turn inward, women and men must see the ugly discrimination built into the system as it really is. Then it can be changed. Women must demand systemic change from men, and both can look to successful models (elements of Sweden for example) for ways to make things different.

So – I’m undecided about this book. It does help the reader see the dilemmas facing millennium women. But neither author understands the systemic changes necessary to solve the dilemma brought about by the discrimination of men against women.

 

by Roxanne -

The Healing

If you liked the story The Help, you’ll enjoy The Healing. It’s a great novel for summer reading from Jonathan Odell, a Minnesota author. Beautifully written, the reader is instantly transported into a plantation in the Deep South.

Rich in mood and atmosphere, The Healing is a warmhearted novel about the unbreakable bonds between three generations of female healers and their power to restore the body, the spirit, and the soul.

In Antebellum Mississippi, Granada Satterfield has the mixed fortune to be born on the same day that her plantation mistress’s daughter, Becky, dies of cholera. Believing that the newborn possesses some of her daughter’s spirit, the Mistress Amanda adopts Granada, dolling her up in Becky’s dresses and giving her a special place in the family despite her husband’s protests. But when The Master brings a woman named Polly Shine to help quell the debilitating plague that is sweeping through the slave quarters, Granada’s life changes. For Polly sees something in the young girl, a spark of “The Healing,” and a domestic battle of wills begins, one that will bring the two closer but that will ultimately lead to a great tragedy. And seventy-five years later, Granada, still living on the abandoned plantation long after slavery ended, must revive the buried memories before history repeats itself.

Inspirational and suspenseful, The Healing is the kind of historical fiction readers can’t put down—and can’t wait to recommend once they’ve finished.

“A remarkable rite-of-passage novel with an unforgettable character. . . . The Healing transcends any clichés of the genre with its captivating, at times almost lyrical, prose; its firm grasp of history; vivid scenes; and vital, fully realized people, particularly the slaves with their many shades of color and modes of survival.” The Associated Press

But in the end, one of the characters, wasn’t able to envision freedom. Caught in the culture (in the story it was a culture of the plantation life) creates blinders that prevent us from accepting the invitation for a new life when it is offered.

This story alerts us to the fact that merely changing the laws on slavery doesn’t create free people. In the same way enacting a law requiring affirmative action doesn’t eliminate descriminatory behavior – it just takes on more subtle forms.

Like the characters in the story, in our own lives we are often caught in the same way. We are invited, either by a new situation or by someone we know to embark on something new, to leave what we know. Because we can imagine something worse, but not something better, we refuse. We are too caught up in our own story – which we believe is true. It is our failure to imagine something better that holds us back – a failure of imagination. God exists, however, in our imagination – or God doesn’t exist at all. Our imagination is the only place God can exist because we can’t see, hear, feel or touch God.

God is not safe. Through our imagination, God is constantly inviting us to stretch, to become uncomfortable, to step out of our comfort zones. But we want so much to be comfortable, to have health insurance, to stay in a space that no longer serves our needs or our life. We are complacent and we want to stay that way. However, this is not living, this is not a life.

Next time you are asked to stretch – say “yes” to life, “yes” to God.