Food Environment Maps: The USDA says, "Let's Eat!"

Food and Mapping make a healthy diet and the USDA's Food Environment Atlas - the barely year-old online tool, which measures a community’s food-choice landscape has just been supersized. The update was launch in February and increases its food environment factors like availability and type of restaurants and food stores, food prices, socioeconomic characteristics, and health outcomes from 90 to 168. The data is downloadable as Excel files, and are arranged alphabetically, first by state and then by county. State and county FIPS codes are provided. The county list is from the 2000 census.

These data are a trove generating nearly limitless question-posing and question-answering possibilities about community and environmental health, economic development, land and city planning, business placement, and education outreach.

Components measure change over time, and several indicators that will make the Atlas more useful in gauging residents’ food accessibility in rural communities - regions more likely than urban to suffer from obesity - nicely complementing First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign against childhood obesity.

There is a Danger of Being Uncomfortable

With my nose: running in Great Fall, Virginia
I'm going to run 10 miles now. It's 7 am and 82 degrees and the cicadas are already buzzing like electric castanets filling the tree-tops all along Virginia's W & OD Trail.

With a fistful of half-frozen cherry Powerade, SPF'd to the bone, and absolutely no plan, I set off from the last scrap of pretty Dun Loring, Virginia - a cluster of rose-gobbed, stained glass, picket-fenced Virginia surrounding a oak lined common green that had held the Dun Loring train station until as late as the 70s with its deep eaves and a big leaky wooden water tank pleasant to stand under.

The W & OD, which runs from Washington, DC, 45 miles west through Virginia suburb and gradually into countryside. Even at 7 am it's filling up with bikers - wasp-waisted and surly, runners, herds of walkers.

Setting off, it's always the same. The first step - there's always a first step - and it always seems like you're kidding. There is a second step. Ridiculous. You listen to your steps: crunch crunch crunch on the cinders: what are you thinking? You are choppy, too fast, you take little old lady steps, chop-chop-chop. A glossy beauty lopes by: gleaming brown as wood, cruel sunglasses; tidy shoes; legs all one color. What must you look like? You realize you've forgotten to inhale. That, or you are being water-boarded. You breath in - breathing all the way up into your clavicles, you think about how your lungs fill up your torso. It's good to breathe, you think, and wander away and think about how there really is no good place to get shot, even in the shoulder, because your lungs go all the way up there and....then whoosh you breathe out like a horse, and in again, and all the while crunch crunch crunch.

And your old body, having been under the impression you were merely going for a drive and possibly a stroll, is surprised and not a little indignant at being so misled, having done nothing to you all these years but work and toil and put up with abuse, and now this? - when there is a clear possibility - a danger, in fact, of becoming uncomfortable at some point.

She refuses to believe your story that you and she are a person who runs. Ten miles. Your shoulders are climbing up to your ears - your body trying to get a hold of yourself. You keep up the story. We'll just run out to five and come back. Don't think about 5 miles. Think about your left foot. That's all. And she thinks about your left foot. How perfectly serviceable it is. Even better for being, you know, so really huge. In fact, it's possible there may be some benefit in a surf-board-sized springing off ...and she begins to believe you and the story isn't a lie, it's happening, and you and she are running along crunch crunch crunch, and you've become somebody else.

Nimbleweed: Tumblin' Happy

Bluegrass and Chuck Taylors, I do believe in a thing called love! So happy, they are Nimbleweed, who are, as yet,un-Googlable. The YouTube video is notable not only for its horrible carpet, but that there are only five comments (one of them's mine) all said words like: "happy" and "brillant" and "where can I get an mp3?".

Who are these happy, talented sensibly shod young people? Happy, talented, exuberant, skilled people. We need more of them. They could be us. Let's go practice.

Be Bio-Logical

Barefoot, bespattered, and fuming at the door - dead bees in her hair, a bloody lip, and a fistful of black coral - I think it's for you. Earth Day is here and wow, is she mad. Appease her by mulling birds, bees, air-miles, and fish-smothering phthalates -
then, be bio-logical.

Here are some ways to Eat, Drink, Think, and Love deeply this weekend that will make her happy.

Think:
At the Phillips tonight, my friend, Ann Yonkers, moderates the discussion: "Earth Day, Landscape and Local Food"
Maryland winemaker Robert Lyons, chef Nora Pouillon of Restaurant Nora, and Pennsylvania farmer Mark Toigo of Toigo Orchards talk about art, food, and the Terroir that makes it good. The brochures says " a light tasting follows," which means something wild like: Crispy nettles and Chili Roasted Asparagus, Fiddleheads, and Ramps.

Drink: Deep six sensibly disaster-plastic bottles, and don't buy any more. What are you thinking?

Love:
Memorials by Moonlight with DCTours: Moonlight, marble, a general glowing
"How the Sinking of the Titanic Changed Washington" Bike Tour: He would go down with the ship for you in that helmet.
MOCA DC Art and Film Space at M and 31: Wander, ponder, brush fingertips

Bee-keeping classes are everywhere

My Friend, Kim, Plays the Harmonica

Kim Addonizio is a poet

...and by "friend" I mean, at the end of a party in a Houston art warehouse, I once stood next to a woman who smelled like roses and Marlboros, who turned-out-to-be-her, and a table, which earlier that night had been loaded with hors d'oeuvres, and on which during the height of the evening, someone had rolled, making a point in a conversation. Smashed - really smashed - pastry, bunches of exploded black grapes, their skins spewing guts and seeds, and the green grape cracked, and pineapple chunks and carrot shards like shrapnel, and tiny pink crab quiches dumped in piles like girls with their petticoats up - pink kneecaps and cream.

So, we were standing there staring at the wreckage, she-who-turned-out-to-be-her and I, and I was embarrassed to be associated with it, and I didn't know what to do with my hands, so I said to her, this woman who smelled like blossoms and leather, "Crab quiche?" and she looked at me, or sort of probably at my chin because she was small, but even standing beside her, she didn't give that impression, instead, she said, ".......don't mind if I do." So I leaned over the table, curving my body over the juice and pulp, shoved through a mound of broccoli floret with my palm, and found the last, battered crab quiche, pink, frothy, kind of oozy, and I brought it out holding it by its crumbling buttery edges, carefully, like a old compass or a lens, placed it on a soggy paper napkin that said, "Starlight" on it in gold, and wiped my hand on my dress. Then we went to get mojitos.

Garden of Grrrlz: Roller Derby in DC

This morning, planting lettuce, I was mulling my Roller Girl name...Having some trouble...
Some were:

Loca-vore
GardenDammerung
Peace and Carrots
Mother Dearth
Sunbeam of Doom
Spring Rain of Terror

Peter'd out with "Alexander the Skate"? Completely ran out of steam and went nautical with:
"Tell it to the Marines," which I just like to say.

"A Few Screws Lucy" and "A Kate 47" are already taken, but Ms. Anne Thrope was offered by the World Famous Roller Derby Girl Name Generator under the "Smart" category. I'm guessing Edith WarTon and is too....

Field to Fork Talks African and Heirloom

The 1902 Carnegie Library that houses the Washington DC Historic Society is a Beaux-Arts bon-bon box with a copper roof, marble columns, and, that day, hundreds of people in hand-dyed wool and well-worn Merrell's talking about urban agriculture, land-sharing, suburban agriculture, heirloom seeds, native tree planting, "Food as Social Justice", double-digging, and the Beauty of Earthworms - all things green and spring.

We heard Yao Afachao, of UDC, talk about the newly resuscitated (really, we thought it was dead) university's agriculture extension efforts working with former tobacco farmers in Maryland to grow alternative crops that serve the culinary desires of African and Latin communities.

In the newly revamped, but still-echo-y, museum space - which is gorgeously gilded and there are lit from below maps in the floor - Yao showed slides of Maryland fields full of eggplant cultivars from Togo. They're lime green and the size apricots. You can eat them raw. They're growing among acres of chiles - crazy hot and sweetly tangy, solanaceous greens called njama jama, and a beautiful Avuvo: slender, blossomed, with edible leaves, called "the husband stealer." Yum.

We heard Tony Cohen's - so smooth from years thinking and talking about food, history, slavery, and freedom. Dazzling photos - some from the Smithsonian magazine's documentation of his walk as a graduate student in the 90s following the Underground Railroad from Sandy Springs, Maryland to the border of Canada.

Then many many photos from summery Button Farm (http://www.menare.org/buttonfarm.html) - 200-year-old, 70-acre farm, lost in the center of Seneca Creek Park - his Dream-Made-Reality Living History Center in Germantown, Maryland. The Center features retreats in which participants (families, individuals, corporate team-building groups) immerse themselves in 19th century rural life in America. That immersion can be a dunking or a dabble, choosing characters black, white, rich, or poor. He said, "It doesn't matter what color you are. People, at the end, call the experience 'freeing'. Everybody's a slave to something."

He talked about Oprah Winfrey (his slide showed her immaculately coiffed and glossy in watered silk and pearls). In preparing for her film role in T. Morrison's Beloved, she asked him to give her an authentic experience of slavehood. They blindfolded her, drove her out to the Center, and she began an experience that involved being chased through the woods at night by bloodhounds from Frostburg, sleeping in caves, and wearing chains.

Interesting questions about carrying seeds with you when you set out for freedom, about poring over 19th Century agricultural journals to find out about traditional cropping techniques, pest control, and how to keep the deer at bay (use a fence and hunt them). Cleverly, Cohen read old cookbooks to find out what people were eating. Button Farm, with Cohen's tireless - really tire.less. - cheer-leading and touting and recruiting of volunteers, and dredging and pleading for dollars and support, sleeping surrounded by heat-lamps and delicate seedlings or tobacco and squash, is now a beautiful, if fragile success.

He works at times with food historian Michael Twitty, founder of the fantastic AfroFood Ways (http://www.afrofoodways.com/).

Then we had vegan lunch on our laps sitting with everyone on the marble staircase in the sun. The Carnegie Library is a beautiful space to talk about food and freedom.

Slow Food is Good Food and the Snail is Metaphorical

Slow Food USA's logo is a snail. Good in a garlicky butter-and-parsley sizzle of course, good too as metaphor for us, of course - plump and happy, clambering through arugula and heirloom tomatoes of an evening. "Soil, water, air, and light. Simplicity," the garden says to us, "Now, That's Delicious."

Slow Food USA (www.slowfoodusa.org)is a movement, a grassroots groundswell, and, as missions go, "the revival of the kitchen and the table as centers of pleasure, culture, and community" is a mission as profound, pleasing, and optimistic as soup.

Slow Food USA and all its state affiliates (SlowFoodDC is the closest/biggest to Annandale) is an educational organization dedicated to land stewardship and ecologically sound food production. They work to establish sound food policy, healthy, affordable school lunches, encourage people to plant victory gardens, save heirloom fruit, veggies, and animals (see Orange Oxheart Tomatoes and You).

These are hardly smug and indulgent goals. The group works to feed kids and families. Slow Food USA is one of the reasons why your town has a farmers' market. It's why you know the words "sustainable" and "organic" and "community-supported agriculture."

Then, like all People-Plant-Earth revelries, there are poetic connections. The message is that Slow is Good. Slow is a crusty loaf and dewy glass, snowy cloth and chiclet-toothed friends. Under an arbor. It's history human and animal in that Norton grape, in that Amish Pie Squash. Thoughtful Food. Eat slowly, it says, talk, nod, mop that thick plate with a chewy slice.

Smell.

Slow Food says that eating is another opportunity to exercise calm in our worlds - to exercise ease, naturalness, frankness, maybe even, what's this?, Love.

Well.

Car-Free is Care Free on an Autumnal W & OD

It's the Autumnal Equinox and Car-Free Day. This morning, I ran to work along W & OD Trail (http://www.wodfriends.org/), cool and damp both me and it. The picture above is not me very much at all, but Abiyot Abebe, who, not touching the ground, won the 2009 W&OD 10K in August 2009.

Steamy as it was then, it was chill this morning, and a canyon like running down a gully sluiced with a big autumn buffet full of wines and cheddars and mustards. In the stream valley below the path, white tail deer were out in the flood plain, lifting their pretty knees and plunging them down again into the mounds of fescue and sedge tussocks, and vetch, like they were spearing fish from a canoe. They stomped delicately through ripe poke and barged through wingstem tall as they were like breasting waves. They're taupe now, autumn deer are.

The W & OD is an old railroad bed, the steep banks are tumbling over with dogwood and fern and blooming golden rod dusty as bees, and dunes of smashed bracken, the color of deer, and fern in lime greens and chocolate, and sumac the color of bruised cardinals. I found a tiny, wild persimmon in the gravel the size of a thumb nail and perfectly formed with its four leaves unfurled like the crest of ancient family line.

The Crystal City Runs From Grim to Glossy

Did I tell you this? In late July, I ran in the Crystal City Twi-Lighter 5 K.
In a shuffling mob and a summer downpour, we set off, all 2078 of us loping along the wet city streets, past the newly bustling Crystal City Centre.

Full of restaurants and cafes overflowing with family and friends waving Buffalo wings and mugs of hand-crafted Pilsner, cheering us on through smeary puddles full of green and red traffic light reflections, and whistle-tooting cops looking like gleaming yellow mushrooms in their sou'westers and slickers, out to that boggy, forgotten end of Crystal City, where you dump the bodies and the oozing petrochemical drums - the last scrap of what the whole place used to be.

Five years ago, Crystal City was empty canyons of office buildings filled to the ledges with consulting, accounting, and logistics firms: the togglers and tenders of the fly-wheels and bezels that run the government machine across the river. Those buildings cast the empty streets, a disturbing Holiday Inn, and drippy, long-in-the-tooth bachelor pad apartment buildings in a perpetual, salt-mine gloom. The Crystal City Underground, a subterranean Mall-cum-Disco, built in that Golden Age of Design that brought us brown glass, donut-shaped transistor radios, and pebble-dash pre-cast by people wearing Bryl Cream and plank-wide ties made of sofa upholstery. Take all this glamour and rain down upon it the a heavy metal particulate emissions of Reagan National's northbound air traffic. Even on the cheeriest summer afternoons, if you glimpsed anybody at all, they were rumpled clots of Government Consultants with mustard on their Sears ties smoking, clawing at the sunlight, or scuttling like crabs around a distant corner toward the Olley's Trolley for a chili dog and a 9 am beer. Like one big office itself, Crystal City slammed shut with the last car door every afternoon at 5.

Now, what's old is new again! We love donut-shaped transistor radios and Crystal City is more polish than spit. Crystal City gleams! It's all light and life and air lined as it is with chic restaurants like butterfly-themed Oyamel for cultured tapas, or playful King Street Blues, and the horrible, drippy bachelor pads are now swank and retro, and the bachelors themselves have aged to a patina that flossing and good real estate investment will get you.

The Pacer's-sponsored run completed the street party feel they were playing Boston for some reason, Barry White's "My Everything" and Earth Wind and Fire's "Let's Groove" and Chaka Khan. People were safety pinning on each other's bib numbers, and lacing up their shoes, waving and meeting each other under the pretty trees, and everything was swathed in redolent gouts of barbecue char from the swaggering Ted's (as in Turner's) Montana Grill across the street. The idiotically beautiful Saucony Running Shoe models, one, clambering nimbly in nylon shorts onto the roof of the Saucony-Mobile to do something sexy and capable like link up the aerial feed, and it must be said, moving the way creamy coffee pours, caused a pile-up in the practice lane, and it was a lively happy Twilight vibe.

So, we ran out of the rain and into malarial steam somewhere around Mile 2 with the fastest runners coming back, passing the bolus I was in, fast and beautiful, and as if they had run right out of their clothes, all wet ribs and bony shoulders. They were like hounds, really leaping along through the puddles at truly stunning paces. We cheered them on with hardly a bitter thought.

Of the field of 2000-ish, 52% were women, whose average age was 32.7, and whose average time was 31:11 at a 10:02 minutes/mile pace. This was me:
# Bib First Last Age 1M 2M 3M Time ChipTime ChipPace
1204 2041 Liz Kirchner 46 09:37 19:03 28:46 31:14.2 29:41.0 9:33

Here are the data for everybody and The Best:
People Years Old AverageTime Minutes/Mile
33.5 years old 28:52 9:17
Male 34.4 26:20 8:29
Female 32.7 31:11 10:02

First Male 27 14:34! 4:41 AHaha!Yikes
First Female 23 16:20 5:15