Watch Food Inc.

Learn more about these issues and how you can take action on Takepart.com

1 Stop drinking sodas and other sweetened beverages. You can lose 25 lbs in a year by replacing one 20 oz soda a day with a no calorie beverage (preferably water).

2 Eat at home instead of eating out. Children consume almost twice (1.8 times) as many calories when eating food prepared outside the home.

3 Support the passage of laws requiring chain restaurants to post calorie information on menus and menu boards. Half of the leading chain restaurants provide no nutritional information to their customers.

4 Tell schools to stop selling sodas, junk food, and sports drinks. Over the last two decades, rates of obesity have tripled in children and adolescents aged 6 to 19 years.

5 Meatless Mondays—Go without meat one day a week. An estimated 70% of all antibiotics used in the United States are given to farm animals.

6 Buy organic or sustainable food with little or no pesticides. According to the EPA, over 1 billion pounds of pesticides are used each year in the U.S.

7 Protect family farms; visit your local farmer’s market. Farmer’s markets allow farmers to keep 80 to 90 cents of each dollar spent by the consumer.

8 Make a point to know where your food comes from—READ LABELS. The average meal travels 1500 miles from the farm to your dinner plate.

9 Tell Congress that food safety is important to you. Each year, contaminated food causes millions of illnesses and thousands of deaths in the U.S.

10 Demand job protections for farm workers and food processors, ensuring fair wages and other protections.

The well has been dry,

nothing but silt  and scratch paper down there.

Inky ideas float away before they can be buoyed in my brain.

________________________________________________

Dreams are of earthquakes and rattle snakes,

of mama bears ferociously defending their wily cubs.

It’s autumn in the market—
not wise anymore to buy tomatoes.
They’re beautiful still on the outside,
some perfectly round and red, the rare varieties
misshapen, individual, like human brains covered in red oilcloth—

Inside, they’re gone. Black, moldy—
you can’t take a bite without anxiety.
Here and there, among the tainted ones, a fruit
still perfect, picked before decay set in.

Instead of tomatoes, crops nobody really wants.
Pumpkins, a lot of pumpkins.
Gourds, ropes of dried chilies, braids of garlic.
The artisans weave dead flowers into wreaths;
they tie bits of colored yarn around dried lavender.
And people go on for a while buying these things
as though they thought the farmers would see to it
that things went back to normal:
the vines would go back to bearing new peas;
the first small lettuces, so fragile, so delicate, would begin
to poke out of the dirt.

Instead, it gets dark early.
And the rains get heavier; they carry
the weight of dead leaves.

At dusk, now, an atmosphere of threat, of foreboding.
And people feel this themselves; they give a name to the season,
harvest, to put a better face on these things.

The gourds are rotting on the ground, the sweet blue grapes are finished.
A few roots, maybe, but the ground’s so hard the farmers think
it isn’t worth the effort to dig them out. For what?
To stand in the marketplace under a thin umbrella, in the rain, in the cold,
no customers anymore?

And then the frost comes; there’s no more question of harvest.
The snow begins; the pretense of life ends.
The earth is white now; the fields shine when the moon rises.

I sit at the bedroom window, watching the snow fall.
The earth is like a mirror:
calm meeting calm, detachment meeting detachment.

What lives, lives underground.
What dies, dies without struggle.

September has slipped by and I’ve barely put my fingers to the keys. There are lots of reasons for the hiatus, the largest of which is that I am attempting to determine what the next chapter of my life will entail, all the while steadfastly working 72 hours week fulfilling my current contractual commitment.

I think my life is changing. I’m interested in new trajectories. New territories. Diversifying myself. Offering myself. Broadening, enriching, extending. I’m not abandoning my acting career, nor my dedication to the performing arts, but I’m definitely not exclusively an actor.

So what will all of these thoughts boil down to in January? I’m having hundreds of ideas and truthfully its more than a little daunting (to think: I can do anything! I can move anywhere! whew!). I am rekindling a sense of enterprise, adventure, and intrepidity!

I’ll fill you in on the exciting details once I figure some of them out.

_________________________________________________________

Took these today:

Autumn Allotropes

I read my old ‘Ode to the Avocado” on the Fruit & Vegetable themed Over the Back Fence Radio Show.

I always receive tremendous feedback whenever I read it. A woman came up to me afterward said that I really brought the room to a stand-still. I think that’s my favorite part about reading my poetry in front of an audience, when the room gets quieter and quieter as I roll the alliteration off the microphone.  People listen, and listen hard. I can see them seeing the images in their mind’s eye.

Words. Are. Wonderful.

Sometimes I feel like I’ll never be able to write anything as good as this one; like I capped my poetry potential years ago on accident.  Its my “Play Freebird!” poem.

Click ahead to 37.40.

Over the Back Fence – August 23, 2009

Commonweal Theatre – Over the Back Fence

I’m an official adventurer!

I admit, once upon a time I frowned upon ‘adreneline junkies’….those reckless individuals who risked everything for the sheer pleasure of the thrill. But now, I’ve learned a kind of lesson that can only be taught when falling at 120 mph from 13,000 feet…..life is for the living.  I’ve never felt such bliss. It was an opiate experience, emotions pulsing, senses blazing, every breath vital….no comparisons to be made, your brain very essentially naive again.

The push-off from the plane’s ledge was the most terrifying. For a split second I thought ‘I hate this’ and then nano-seconds later I thought, “NO! I LOVE THIS!’ and the rest of the 60 second free fall was roundly exhilierating. I wanted to free fall forever (thankfully, the rip cord was not my responsibility).

When the parachute opened I thought ‘YES!’ I love the air! I love velocity! I love gravity! I love the fact that I live on a planet where this is fucking possible!”

As you can see in at the end of the video after I’ve landed I act like I’m drunk on oxygen. I’m also continuously futzing with my hair because my barrette flew off my head (and probably landed in some farmer’s cornfield).

The rest of the day the five us took every opportunity to tell people that we had fallen from the sky merely hours before. We watched our videos on loop. We philosophized around a bonfire.

It was a great birthday.

It finally feels like a proper August afternoon.

The sunshine is thick and everything is beaming.

I resent what passed for the month of July, an anemic bindle of vanilla days.

I want some salt on my brow and glint on my lip. Dampness down my spine.

I want to show my shoulders and my knees, put my feet wide on the bright earth and whistle ‘atcha.

I want to kiss deeply in the berry colored night, with calescent limbs inseverable. Crickets singing of their bliss.

Almost forgetting about the fireflies…almost.

I wrote this poem about an hour before the ‘Glitter’ show for the  Over the Back Fence radio program. I was stumped at first….stars? fireworks? prom dresses? TIN FOIL.

Click ahead to 33:05 to hear the silliness.

Over the Back Fence – August 2, 2009

Commonweal Theatre – Over the Back Fence