Sara In Akko

I've come to notice that in the US, coins have been nearly eradicated. Here in Israel (Europe as well) our coins are worth actual money. I can easily pay for the bus, a cab, a carton of milk or even leave a tip at a restaurant all in coins.

On a recent visit to Chicago I made a purchase for $4.67. I handed the clerk a $5 bill as well as the $.67 in change to get back a single $1 bill. The man looked positively befuddled. I thought I was making his job easier. I've learned that nobody would throw and handful of coins at their barista's tip jar, I was told by people in the know that anything not a bill is rude. I doubt any cashier would have the patience to count  a handful of coins to pay for a latte.  I even saw a home clean-up show where the family found a small fortune in forgotten change behind furniture and in the couch cushions, enough money to open a checking account for their college bound teen.

So I just have to wonder, doesn't anybody know that these coins are still worth money? Maybe in these difficult economic times people have started holding on to their nickles and dimes.

These sweet potatoes were the start of an important discussion. One my husband and I had been having for some time. One I'd almost forgot to have with my children, but one they would most certainly be effected by.

"Do you see how this sweet potato grows on it's own? What would happen if we put it in the ground to grow?"

"Would it grow us lots of sweet potatoes Mommy?"

"Yes. It would work with other kinds of vegetables too."

"Then we wouldn't have to go to the store, you would say, 'Go outside and get us vegetables from the ground' and we would say 'Nummy, ground vegetables!'"

Her tiny reasoning was music to my ears.

Essentially my husband and I have been having, not so much a debate, but an evolving conversation that has grown with us over time. How do we want to live?

We're inching towards moving off the grid. Not in the romantic wilderness way but slowly planning for a future that involves self-built and ecologically sound housing and a micro-farming business. Some kids, some small animals and we'll call it a hard fought win.

We're hoping that in the next year or so we'll be ready for the big move from rented apartment dwellers with with potted herbs in the kitchen to home builders with the start to a healthy and self reliant life.

But there is finding land, being absorbed into the community, searching out suppliers, finding the right builders, obtaining permits, learning our limitations, the hunt for financing, government loans and and and...

There is an ever growing list of single tiny hitches that could derail the utopia of our plans at every bend. Just thinking of how to go about a life change of this magnitude isn't easy and so I can only imagine what life on a tiny farm would actually mean to our entire family.

So this is the first step.

"Don't you think it would be nice to live somewhere where we could grow our own food?"

"That'd be awesome Mommy! Let's do it."

Maybe someday soon we will.

Not so long ago my life was not comprised of a husband, children, family business or blog.

At one point I lived in a large house in the city that housed a collection of eco-do-gooders. Conscious communists of the French variety (born into commune life, not self-declared), bicycle messengers, and the other city-dweller sorts of earthy young adults who drove bio-diesel burners or never drove at all. We had the kind of transient roommates that are best described as couch surfers who seemed to drift effortlessly through life without a mailing address.

Everyone held stable-ish jobs for 20-somethings. One was even the head of a large corporation's programing department. His paycheck certainly wasn't the reason he lived in a communal house.

Some of these roommates and transients belonged to the local bike gang. Not quite Hell's Angels. The gang's activities included rehabbing bicycles to become load bearing and be sent to Developing Nations, creating environmental awareness through the city with their rides that closed down major thoroughfares, creating found-art of everything and anything and....

Dumpster Diving... for food. Also known as Dumpster Dining.


Our home often hosted large dinners of coworkers from an environmental watch group that could reach up to 20+ people on any given weeknight. Rent plus utilities and normal groceries rarely accommodate feeding that many others in your home regularly. I won't describe the incredible amount of food large grocery networks are forced by law or policy to throw away daily or the steps they take to ensure that their food isn't accessible once tossed to the dumpster, but you can imagine that every item that does not sell from your local Whole Foods will eventually end up in their dumpsters out back.

If that food is fortunate, and willing hands are fortunate enough to reach it in time the food may end up on someone's plate as a perfectly good meal. This photo of the found food is taken from an interview with a few college-freegans in MN who seem to express the same sort of attitude as my former roommates.

I never ate a veggie gone bad, there was nothing on anyone's plate that had turned or soured. This was nourishment with intrinsic value both nutritionally and monetarily to our huge dinner tables. In fact, you'd be surprised at the way organic produce looks when finally given the heave ho from the aisles; wrapped, labeled, dated, edible. Most grocers even dispose of their expired items in a re-user friendly way quite naturally as each section takes care of their own clean-up, they bag and separate food items by department.

My life is long since removed from these re-purposed dinner tables. Here in Akko, there are not any alternative bike gangs running around screaming for the environment, or groups of youths jumping into dumpsters to rescue high quality organic produce that has sat for it's one day in the sun. There are no locks on our dumpsters to keep these alt-kids out.

But Akko is a terribly poor city. Our citizens are on average old and many live well under the poverty line even on government assistance. Many elderly collect bottles and cans from the receptacles for the tiny refund they can receive in the supermarkets. There are also quite a few salvagers who look for scrap out of the 40 year old electronics that are thrown to the curb. Although there are assistance organizations that take second-hand clothing for redistribution it is often most common for clothes to be left folded neatly in large bags and placed next to the dumpsters so someone in need might take these items quietly in the night without the shame of visiting an aid organization.

My home is directly behind the supermarket which, for comparisons, is roughly the size of a large American 7-11 with just 4 aisles. Our market opens at 7AM and by 8AM all of the cleaning of the produce aisle and the shipments for the new day have taken place. The old produce, often visibly rotten (high heat and high humidity are not the friends of such products) is brought out to the dumpster. By 8AM when I walk my daughter to preschool the entire back end of the market is covered with elderly waiting for this food to be disposed of so that they can toss it into their market carts to be taken home.

Today was the first day my 4 year old gave any serious notice to this matter. Although she is generally a very thoughtful and caring child she has learned from well intentioned adults that something unclean is labeled "foo dirty."

And so she began with her questioning, "Mama, isn't that a bad man? He is playing in the garbage. Foo. That's not nice."

My heart breaks a little every time I see someone's grandmother digging through our trash or someone's grandfather jumping in after the spoiled tomatoes but I had no idea how to explain in a Jewish and civilly responsible way to my child what she was witnessing.

Jewish law goes very far to explain that you are obligated to provide charity to others in need, even when you yourself are in need. Throughout Israel you will even notice that people do not throw out bread, it is left in the open for the poor to take. And overall, that while you are to provide for others in need, you must grant people their self respect which sometimes means allowing them to do what is necessary to survive. Slipping someone a few bucks to go into the market and buy food might seem like a reasonable action to the untrained bystander, but that very action might take away the person's dignity in accepting charity.

And so today I have to prepare myself for a talk with a four year old about the facts of life, that people in her city do go hungry and that people who look like her grandparents often wait for food to be thrown in a dumpster so they can feed their families. I know that this is true of other major cities, even in the lucrative suburbs of my youth, but here our poverty is apparent and should be confronted head on. Even if that means starting with my own children.

This is a short documentary called Meet the Freegans
Britain has become serious about reducing food waste in the home, great for conservation ideas

Back in 2008 it seemed like everyone had at least started to hear about the dangers of chemicals leeching into our kids' food through their bottles, sippy cups, cereal bowls and more. Europe had done away with the sale of baby products containing BPA and America was pulling items from the shelves as quickly as manufacturers could capitalize on the new trend demanding "BPA-Free" labeling.

Since I had returned to work from the birth of my second child I had become a dairy production line and the bottles to match the pump were kind of prerequisite.

I had seen the reports and checked the site of the manufacturer of my extensive baby bottle collection. The site explained that throughout the European market and the US the company had voluntarily removed products found to be harmful immediately in lieu of waiting for local legislation to catch up to science. So the solution was simple, replace the bottles switch out the pump, move on.

Right?

Not entirely. Upon closer inspection of the available product line I saw lots of new shippments on shelves of our local drugstores and markets all from my brand. But I noticed that not a one of the new packages had new labeling or even a post production sticker to mark that these were BPA-free (safe) products. There were new brands that seemed to have popped up overnight that could proudly proclaim that they were in fact BPA-free. At every store I asked the pharmacist and sales associates "Are these the new bottles WITHOUT BPA?" At everystore I was given a vague and totally unsatisfying answer, "Yes these are the new bottles from the company."

Why could nobody look me in the eye and proclaim these were the BPA-Free products that are safe for your children? Needless to say, I didn't buy a single one of these bottles. There was something hallow in the answers I was receiving and I was not pacified by these empty promises.

After much inspection and hounding of the UK company's local importers I turned up some shocking replies to my search for safe bottles.

When the rest of Europe and the US demanded that these products be pulled from shelves for what was perceived as an apparent threat for European and American babies, the Middle East was receiving the rejected shipments for local sale.

Yes, that's rights. When baby bottles were determined to cause toxic leeching into babies milk and formula, all the recalled shipments to Europe and the US were packed up and shipped to other nations throughout the Developing World with slow legislation and lax safety laws.

I don't know if I will ever be in a position to use bottles again for another child. But I can say very certainly that despite my usually brand-loyal consumerism, I will never trust this company again.

Immediately following this bottle incident I went into a house-wide plastic cleaning frenzy. The entire bottle collection- gone. Tupperware and saved food containers- out. Questionable toys- no more.

We strive to keep a plastic free house and it feels pretty darn good.

This post over at Blogher reminded me how angry I still am at this company in particular.

And this is a pretty good summery of BPA, what it is and why you should think twice about the convenience of plastics from a water appreciation site out of South Africa. The graphic "The BPA in You" is from their website which works for the promotion and appreciation of safe drinking water.

I recently stumbled across a blog that expounds the joys of Green Living by living bellow the poverty line. This is what caught my attention. Not that sustainable living is possible on a pioneer-fashioned lifestyle. Rather, that by plunging yourself (and Family) below the poverty line you can still surprisingly survive.

This is based on assumptions; you live in a city, can leave your home for several acres off in the country-side, til the soil, bake your bread, brave the weather, join a co-op that wants your homegrown products, and eek out a nature-based living without the cellphones, WiFi, Wii's and whatnot.

It really does sound euphoric. I don't deny that, but what about people who live below the poverty line, and not for novelty's sake?

Let's try quick comparison, although I am not an economist, I like to think of myself as savvy. The Israeli minimum wage is about $4.80. The Federal rate in the USA, $7.25.

Suffice it to say, Israel's poverty line is significantly lower, thusly the average family income is lower, incomes tend to be lower within larger families.

What does this all mean? People that exist closer to the poverty line tend to know "Green Trends" far before a cultural icon has time to publish a book about it.

When there are less resources available, you truly exemplify two of the three ecological R's a younger generation learned about in grade school.

Reduce.

Re-Use.

I'm going to look for some good examples around here.

Living in a city with several thousand years of history it is easy to see the impact of a modern city living within ancient spaces. Right now the Old City is under constant construction. Building cranes and hard hats abound. It can be a bit difficult to navigate the streets with normal excavations uncovering Templar tunnels every time the city repaves roads anywhere in town but progress is good, or is it?

UNESCO threatened to remove World Heritage Site classification for Akko if the development became distracting or destructive to the nature of the city (Ynet article), but it would seem plans have been scaled back to an amicable compromise between all parties.

Israel's Antiquities Authority can be seen all over the city digging up, cataloging, photographic, and recovering with dirt until the next excavation but apparently they are receiving help from students from Israel and abroad. Save the Stones is a program that takes aspiring amateur archeologists to unearth and care for the treasures of the ancient city buried by centuries of semi-urban sprawl and the decay of time, sea water, and society on the time weathered constructions.

AkkoNet reports that of the 6,000 Arab residents of the Old City an overwhelming 40% survive on social security benefits from the State. Wouldn't it seem reasonable to take vacant properties within the Old City to sell to investors that want to refurbish these eyesores and bring a bit of money to the area? We're not talking gentrification but conservation of an ancient city, decaying with neglect.

No, say Arab residents of the Old City. Well, not if they're Jewish at least.

Arab residents claim that the sale of properties to investors is "Judaization." Residents claim a vast conspiracy of Jewish settlers coming into Akko. I won't debate the ridiculousness of the claim that Akko is somehow not a part of the State of Israel which grants all residents the right to live and grow where they choose or that the ethnic makeup of certain residents precludes the existence of residence of other ethnicities but I will say this; a mixed city with a split population has no room for racist housing policies. Dictating that Jews or Arabs may not live in one area or another because of the surrounding population of the city is ludicrous.

Here's the Hebrew from Haaretz.