Last week Kristin and I traveled back to my hometown near Buffalo, NY for Christmas.  My brother, his wife Kristen and nine month old Charlie (my first nephew) also made the trip from Fort St. John, British Columbia.

Traveling back is usually a culture shock.  I don’t use television, microwaves, automatic dishwashers or disposable plates, but those are just the basics of my family’s lifestyle.  Christmas morning, Uncle Television screamed as we opened gifts and tried to talk to each other.  It didn’t really faze anyone else, but Kristin and I realized that no one was even watching the stupid thing.  That morning was the first of many where I asked that it be turned off.

We watched my brothers play video games for days.  Guitar Hero and some other games for the Nintendo Wii shared time with random shows about how peanut butter is made and Shirley Temple movies.

I gave in and played some bowling on the Wii.  It was pretty fun - all the fun of bowling and you can quit any time you want.

Discussion of taxes crept into every daily conversation.  A new “obesity tax” on soda drinks proposed by the governor of New York has members of my family up in arms.  My response - “don’t buy soda” - was met with weird looks.  The best anyone living around there can do is complain, stay uninvolved in any decision making process, watch television, eat crappy food, and complain some more.  It drives me insane to see so much apathy attached to so much moaning and groaning about the state of things.  And no proposed solution makes any sense to them.

“Food is too expensive”. Have you tried growing more of your own?  “Vehicle registrations are going up in price.” How about ditching one of your vehicles?  “The gas taxes are crazy.” How about driving to town once a day instead of four?  It is always the same whenever I visit; nothing is ever good enough or cheap enough or easy enough.  My response can only be that we live in a world of our own making.

I had some complaining to do myself.  Besides the television being on all the time and eating on Styrofoam, I had issues with the same old racism and homophobia that plagues my family.  Not much to do with that except argue and inject some acidic comments into the mix.

As if all that were not enough, a ten acre field of carrots rotted in a field across from the house because the industrial sized farm (where I worked as a teenager, by the way) had met their quota at the cannery.  As an aside, my father insisted that the owners of the farm didn’t receive much of anything from the federal subsidy system.  A quick search of the federal database says that each of the four brothers received $52,000 in subsidies last year.  So the farm received a total of $208,000 last year.  That seems significant to me.

Tons of carrots will stay in the ground not because there isn’t a market or people aren’t hungry, but because an arbitrary threshold has been crossed at one processor.  All the labor, fuel, time and thought that went in to tilling, planting, weeding are wasted.  Not to mention all the energy that went into growing and shipping the seed…

We managed to rescue a few carrots from the field for our salads, but most were so large as to be impractical for anything but the processing facility.

For food, we made a pumpkin lasagna based on a recipe from a recent local lunch.

On the way from the airport we stopped at Lexington Co-op to get the needed supplies, looking out for local ingredients.  Local milk, acorn squash and butter made it into the dish that we would end up eating for four meals.

The alternatives were not appealing:

After the pie auction, folks could be seen in every corner of the room eating and sharing their pies.  A few people dug their fingers into our sweet potato dish.

I’m not sure which pie bakers ended up with dates, but I don’t think that was really anyone’s intent.

With pies filling bellies, it was time for the entertainment to begin.  A puppet re-enactment of the victory over the police, presented in three hysterical segments…

Then on to some anarcho-country folk punk from Dan Mac.

My favorite song from Dan was about liberals, their hypocrisy and how they are part of the problem and not the solution.  My distrust of the right is often eclipsed by my distaste for the inaction, posturing and verbal drooling of the left.

i’m sick of you
and your goddamned hypocrisy
if peace is patriotic
i’m starting a fight

they’re not my soldiers
and they’re not my astronauts
we can all be leaders
and we don’t need fuckin’ cops

clear cut the forests with hybrid machinery
Brutus and Judas have nothing on us
don’t say the “R” word, just write to your congressman
we’re here and profiteers, traitors of trust

The recent Obama selection of big-ag, cloned meat cheerleader, GMO loving, ethanol guzzling, bio-pharmaceutical conman, and all around jerkstore cowboy Tom Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture illustrates the last verse perfectly.  When you trust a politician, sooner or later you lose.  Now we’re losing sooner - maybe there won’t be rainbows, peace on Earth and gold raining from the sky on January 20th after all.  Thankfully, we can still rely on each other instead of the so-called representatives.  Can we just call them “self-described representatives”?

Anyway, the last band to play was From the Depths.

Their set was energetic, but it was the crowd that made the show.  Animated and dynamic, many of the folks were pulling out some of the old dances, but I saw some new things during the show as well.

Intensity was not lacking…

During the From the Depths set, someone said that they voted for Obama because he promised to make punk lyrics understandable and audible.  They are going to hold him to that promise…

From that seed
A mighty root
And it grew

Capitalism is dead to me.  I would like to see its stinking carcass burned and buried, preferably someplace where no archeologist could ever attempt an excavation, some cavern on the edge of town guarded by the ghosts of slaves, undead Wobblies and a statue of Mother Jones that shoots fire from its eyes.

Yeah, capitalism is dead to me, but mine is a minority opinion.  I’ll dance on that grave someday, and my own grave too, thank you.  But what happens when people decide that a symbolic gesture is in order, a mock procession of ecstatic mourners cheering the burning hulk of centuries of mistreatment?  What happens when a funeral for capitalism gets disrupted by folks who simply don’t want to believe it is dead?

To back up, in late November Kristin and I were planning to go to a street party in Chapel Hill to celebrate the death of capitalism.  The plan was to have a funeral in the street and then dance in the same street.  But that night was cold, so we decided to stay home, stoke the wood stove and get under the blankets.  We figured the industrialists, et al wouldn’t miss us at graveside.

Many other folks thought it too cold for a funeral as well, but eventually enough people showed up to actually make the party go on.  The cops didn’t like the idea, started shoving and pressing and yelling and spraying and doing all the things that annoy all the people like me who have any sense of the rights and responsibilities of anti-authoritarian living.  Just try to get your dancing condoned in the streets of Chapel Hill!

Police Chief Brian Curran said his officers dealt with the situation appropriately. He said police do not condone dancing in the street and had not issued a permit for the protest.

As the clash went on, several un-arrests were made, but one person was taken to jail.  It is that one person that brought about the need for another party.

Nick Shepard, 24, the manager at International (sic) Books on Franklin Street, was the only person arrested. He was charged with assaulting an officer.

This is where the story pretty much starts for me.  I love knowing that if I were in a similar situation, a hundred people have my back even if they don’t know me very well or know me at all.

Friday night Kristin and I went into Carrboro for a benefit event billed as “Punk ‘N Pie”, a date auction where the winner of the pie gets a blind date of their choice with the pie baker.  After the auction would be a re-enactment of the defeat of the police using puppets, then a smashing of a capitalism pinata and finally a bunch of bands.

Yeah, we made a pie - a chunky, buttery, local sweet potato pie made with Carolina Ruby sweet potatoes, local honey, local eggs and sweet cream butter from Homeland Creamery. No, it wasn’t a vegan pie, but I wanted it to be different and supportive of local farmers.  Local fat is hard to come by unless it is from a creature.

There were a dozen or so other pies on the table when we got there, many with multiple bids on them.  There was the dumpstered pie with the added slogan “Let’s Paint the White House Black” with a black flag decorated on the side.

There was the giant apple pie with a heart cut out…

…a vegan pot pie and several cookie pies.

Then there was the “Let’s Make a Pie Together” date pie…

…and a Mud and Flowers pie that was really a pie pan filled with mud, leaves, sticks and flowers.

The auction raised several hundred dollars for a legal defense fund for Nick.

Kristin won our pie despite some other pretty high bids.  So I got that date going for me.

More to come…

When I left Wilmington, I generated a new version of the 100 mile diet circle.  Gone is the vast expanse of salt water; in is a nice chunk of rural Virginia and a bit of country in South Carolina.  Many of the farms included in the old map are still in the new map.  After all, I did stay in the same state.

All that said, I have to admit that my local food habits hit a rut when I first moved.  I was eating peanut butter and canned crap for a good four week period before I realized that I was missing out on what the new circle held.  I started eating five mile salads and thirty mile meats.  Locally grown and milled flours, grits and rice made their way back onto the table.  I also found my way back into a box of Carolina Ruby sweet potatoes.

Through Eastern Carolina Organics, I also have access to produce from the entire state of North Carolina, from Valle Crucis to Ivanhoe, Edenton to Hurdle Mills and back to Bakersville.  Occasionally things get culled due to poor quality and I of course get my hands in the boxes just like back in Wilmington.  My scavenging eyes are returning and - without my staff discount from the coop - I am looking for ways to slim down the food budget.

Basically what I am getting at is that I am back in the food bubble.  I am also looking forward to producing more of my own food in the coming year.