Earlier today, I sat down with Ron and Tom to ask about how giving away a whole restaurant works, plans for the future of the Deli, and what Tom will do with all of his spare time (and cheesy jokes) in life after small business ownership; here are some excerpts from the conversation:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRnKMIDW5gk

I love this city!  Thanks to Tom, Ron, Rachel, and the entire staff of Tom’s Deli for living out a great vision for small business and community building in Richmond, Indiana.

Last night we had a great experience with some friends at the Quarter Barrel Brewery & Pub down the road in Oxford, OH.

The place has apparently been open only a few months after some Miami University alums decided to pursue their vision for a local brewpub, and it already seems to be one of the most popular dining destinations in town.

Featuring an in-house brewery (their own craft beers go on tap next weekend), free wi-fi, an upscale casual environment, lunch and coffeeshop offerings during the day, books for sale sprinkled around the walls, a very attentive and engaged staff and a cozy floor-plan, we felt pretty far away from the typical restaurant scene in the area – a nice change of pace!

The menu is varied and wonderful – ratatouille, steak, edamame, etc. – but if you’re going for the first time, you really have only one choice based on our experience and other reviews: the Lavash flatbread pizza-like dishes were AMAZING.  With three different types (Spinach and artichoke with melted mozzarella / Bacon, ham, and tomatoes with cheddar and mozzarella / Roasted vegetables with Swiss and mozzarella) and beautiful presentation, it was a great meal to share around.

The Quarter Barrel is open Monday-Thursday 8 AM – 12 AM and Friday/Saturday 8 AM to 1 AM.

This morning when I spoke with Tom, the owner of Tom’s New York Deli here in Richmond, he talked of troubling health issues and financial factors in his decision, but he seemed as energetic and excited as ever.  He opened the restaurant in December of 1991 and it’s been a fixture on Main Street in the downtown business district ever since.  Professionals, passers-through, families and sports teams alike frequent the establishment, which is known for its great sandwiches, corny jokes and extensive collection of local and national memorabilia.

But as he looks toward the next phase of his own life, instead of trying to sell the small restaurant to the highest bidder, or close it down altogether, he’s ready to give it away to the person who would bring the best vision for its future.

It’s all a part of Tom’s desire to see the small business culture in the downtown area thrive in the face of a new economic reality.  If he can find someone with a little bit of money and a lot of energy, he’d rather see them spend that money on making the Deli even better, instead of financing the sale in the first place.  And in the meantime, the Deli will keep operating as usual.

Are you interested in owning and running a quirky little deli in a small town in the Midwest?  Tom’s taking applications, but he’s not just looking for an impressive resume; he’ll be looking for the person with the best plan and passion to build on what he’s already started.

Contact:
Tom Amyx, Tom’s New York Deli
820 East Main Street
Richmond, IN 47374
(765) 962-4441
tfamyx@gmail.com

On Friday night I had the opportunity to see The Punch Brothers with Chris Thile in concert at Earlham College. As with many of the artists that Earlham brings to town, I hadn’t heard of them when I came in, but when I left I was craving more of their work. The event was billed as a mix of “bluegrass, gospel and klezmer,” but that hardly does justice to the talent, complexity and variety the group brought to the packed auditorium.  Mandolin player and group convener Chris Thile evoked David Gray, Jeff Buckley and Dave Matthews in his vocal range, honest lyrics and child-like wonder as he danced around the stage – he made it hard not to smile and dance in my seat, and several audience members were moved to call out in praise throughout the show.  It was quite an experience, and based on the quality of the performance I saw and the group’s full tour schedule, it looks like they’re really going places.

On Saturday evening I had the opportunity to go with my Valentine’s Day date (or, Chinese New Year co-celebrant, if you’re down on contrived Hallmark holidays) Kelly to the beautifully restored Gennett Mansion for an amazing dining experience prepared by chef extraordinaire Jennifer Ferrell.  I hadn’t been in the mansion before and it was really a wonderful glimpse into Richmond’s past.  Donna and Bob Geddes were warm, attentive hosts, we had a great time getting to know our fellow dining guests, and the cuisine was outstanding in flavor and presentation.  It was easily the best dining experience out I’ve ever had in Richmond.  The Gennett Mansion has private dining seatings on Friday evenings, it’s worth checking out.

Some other reviews from other sources:

• Aaron Hill reviews the Roku Internet media player
• Rachel Sheeley reviews the Richmond Civic Theatre’s production of “A Streetcare Named Desire” (how’d she do, Jean?)
• Director Kevin Smith reviews Southwest Airlines` “too fat to fly” policy on his Twitter stream; the airline better step up its efforts at amelioration ASAP
• Matt McKimmy reviews his new Droid phone (not quite posted yet, coming soon I’m sure)

What about you – anything to weigh in on?

One of the new additions that I’m most proud of right now is the Clear Creek Food Cooperative, located at 710 East Main Street, right below my company’s new headquarters. The store is open to the public as of this past weekend, and the inventory is still growing as we stock local foods, organic produce, crafts and gifts made by local artisans, and healthy bulk foods, snacks, spices and more.

On one hand, it’s just another place where you can buy food and related stuff here in Richmond.  But behind the facade of a simple grocery is the promise of something that, I think, is much greater than that.  As a cooperatively-owned business, it has the potential to help us return to the roots of what small business is about – a community of people meeting a common need or desire in our town, pooling their resources to do it in a way that everyone benefits.  With a focus on locally sourced items, it helps work toward the promise of Richmond as a self-sustaining place.  With a focus on organic and fair trade items, it helps work toward an economic model that values justice as much as it values monetary wealth.   And so on – you can read about the co-operative identity to learn more.

Four years ago I joined the Coop’s board of directors to see how I could help out.  The Coop was a place that served the primary function of serving a lunch to students on the campus of Earlham College, and much of its other mission – to be a gathering place for a community of people interested in those Co-operative principles, healthy food, education and collaboration, etc. – had been left behind.  Even with that clear role on a college campus – it was still struggling financially, and people in the wider Richmond community who wanted to take advantage of it had a hard time finding it, knowing when it was open, feeling at home shopping there, etc.  And yet, conversations about making changes were hard – students didn’t want to lose this campus gathering space, and the traditions and culture that had evolved up over the years had become sacred to some; the idea of taking a risk on a big change like moving was at times unthinkable.

You may remember about a year ago when I made some snarky remarks about an article in the Earlham Word about the future of the Coop and whether or not it would move off campus.  That was one step in a long process of considering our options for revitalizing the organization, one that goes well beyond my time with the board – so many people have put so much time and energy and passion into making the Coop a better place.  We did decide that the best place for the Coop was out in the community and that it was time to make that leap, and this new beginning in a new space represents not only a success of the current board, staff, membership and volunteer base, but a gradual progression of a decades-long conversations.  And even though the future is uncertain and there are still plenty of things to figure out, it’s a milestone to celebrate!

Shopping at the Coop will not be like shopping at Meijer, Kroger or Walmart, and you’ll still have to go to those other kinds of places to get everything you need.  It won’t be open 24 hours and you cannot get your oil changed or your photos processed while you browse.  But if you find value in the values of small Main Street businesses, one that considers the health of its customers and the local community in its decision-making processes, you’ll find that you belong at the Clear Creek Food Cooperative.

I hope to see you there!

In short, if you think about what you eat, how it got to you, and the issues of nutrition, morality, politics and spirituality come with it, it is paramount that you encounter what The Vegetarian Myth has to offer.

My full review continues:

Keith‘s central point is that in order for you to live, something else has to die.  While it may seem like a simple enough statement, it may become pretty controversial pretty quickly, especially if you’ve tried to build your diet (or any part of your life, for that matter) around the avoidance of killing other creatures for food or otherwise.  She essentially says that not only are the practices of vegetarians and vegans misguided in their effort to help us lead a more sustainable and just life, they actually often propagate a harmful cultural story about food and the relationship we have to it.  By necessity, I won’t even try to support those statements in this review, as the whole substance of the book is about doing that meticulously; please don’t ask me to summarize her thinking for you.

Given how much being a veg*n becomes a matter of identity for so many, Keith acknowledges right off that these assertions are painful ones to make, let alone to hear and receive.  The potentially biting nature of her premise can only be alleviated by her willingness to explore it so thoroughly and sympathetically, and to share about the close relationship she has to the subject matter.   She tells her personal story of being a long-time vegan, and how she journeyed from an approach to diet that inherently required malnutrition and delusion to one that led to health and awakening.  She knows what’s it’s like to question the foundation of the choices we make about food because she’s been doing it rigorously and relentlessly for much of her life:

I know what you want to be true, vegetarians.  You want to open the circle of concern to everything sentient.  With all your hearts, you want us humans to be meant for cellulose or seeds or berries or anything that you believe can’t feel pain.  And I’m telling you the truth: it doesn’t work.  What you are made of — bones, blood, brain, heart — needs animals.  This is not the universe you wanted.  But it’s the way the world, always alive and always hungry, works.  You can try to live on those other things — the cellulose you can’t digest, the seeds that fight back, the berries and their sugar.  If you’re like me, you’ll do it until you’re half dead.  If you’re smarter than me, you’ll learn.  You want to open that circle, but in fact there’s no way out of it. We’re all of us, seeded and feathered, rooted and furred, already in it.   (p. 243)

Despite her empathy, Keith is still ruthless in her exploration of modern thinking on food.  She tackles, chapter by chapter, all the reasons that one might have for being a vegetarian or vegan: moral, political, nutritional.  She turns the writing of food scholars like Peter Singer, Frances Moore Lappe and Jim Merkel on its head, calling out the flaws in the thinking and research that is so often held up to support commonly held viewpoints around veg*n lifestyles.  She does make extensive use of other recently trending writings by authors like Michael Pollan, whose books The Omnivore’s Dilema, The Botany of Desire, and In Defense of Food provide a great conceptual framework for Keith’s particular messages.

Of course, the question that naturally arises when one encounters material “attacking” a given approach to make the world a better place is “well, what does she suggest we do instead?”  It’s important to note that Keith is not at all suggesting we stand down from the calls issued by the veg*n communities and many other kinds of concerned citizens about stopping the horrors of CAFOs and industrial agriculture, and the book is not just a permission slip to eat meat without consideration of how it came to be dead on your plate.  To the contrary, she asserts that she wants an even more full accounting of our thinking about food production and the values, morals and assumptions that are behind it – an accounting that goes beyond turning to soy, or raw foodism, or other kinds of well-intentioned alternatives to a carnivorous diet.  As she notes in her concluding chapter, Keith doesn’t just want an alternative to mainstream thinking on food, she wants us to build a new approach that is self-consciously opposed to the dominator culture that fuels that thinking.

Despite my request above to avoid trying to summarize Keith’s work, I will provide a few of the questions she suggest you ask in considering what you eat (p. 248):

1. Does this food build or destroy topsoil?
2. Does it use only ambient sun and rainfall, or does it require fossil soil, fossil fuel, fossil water, and drained wetlands, damaged rivers?
3. Could you walk to where it grows, or does it come to you on a path slick with petroleum?

She also offers three strong recommendations for those interested in personal solutions:

1. Refrain from having children
2. Stop driving a car
3. Grow your own food

(I list these here in hopes that they make you want to understand more about why those questions and recommendations are relevant; again, please don’t take them out of the context of the larger book, or ask me to defend them here.)

If I can offer any criticism of The Vegetarian Myth at all, it’s that the book is so dense with information, and Keith often takes such a significant amount of time to make a point from multiple perspectives and with multiple supporting arguments, facts, etc. that it almost becomes overwhelming.  I fully understand the necessity of this approach given the resistance her arguments are sure to encounter, but it makes the book unsuitable as a starting point or introduction to these issues for someone who is not already exploring them in some form, or for whom there isn’t already some deep cracks in their own previously solid thinking about their veg*n lifestyle.  (In fact, I’m sure many vegetarians and vegans will be insulted by her statements and find her condescending, despite her great care to note, “hey, I was just like you once.”)  I don’t think Keith intends the book as said introduction, so maybe that’s just a fair warning to readers of this review, instead of anything wrong with her text.  But, at the risk of over-simplifying what is definitely not a simple topic, perhaps a future project could include a version of Keith’s book that can get the core assertions and arguments across in a shorter form, with pointers back to the full book and related resources for those wanting to know more.

For me personally, The Vegetarian Myth was a great unpacking of a phrase that I heard Daniel Quinn use many years ago to describe the practice of those who choose not to eat meat: “Kingdomism.”  In other words, discriminating against one kingdom of beings in the taxonomy of life in favor of another.  Lierre Keith does an excellent job of making the case that by practicing such discrimination, we deprive ourselves of and disconnect ourselves from the cycles of life in which we were designed to participate.  Some of the ideas were not new to me, but I’m still figuring out what this means for my own diet and food politics, as it was just this past January that I started trying to eat less meat, a project that has withered as I’ve turned the pages of this book.  And as with every experience that transforms our thinking, I’m left somewhat disoriented and full of questions, but also set on a new and exciting path of exploration and challenge.  As Keith kindly inscribed in my copy of The Vegetarian Myth, “First the Fight and then the Feast.”

(I linked to the Amazon.com product page for the book above, but if you buy it from Lierre Keith directly, she gets the most compensation, and you have the opportunity for a personalized inscription too!  If you’re in Richmond, you’re welcome to borrow my copy.  You can read the first 14 pages of the book online.)

Updated, from the comments: I should add that I find this book important and useful because of the important questions it raises and the challenges it offers, not because I can personally endorse every conclusion made. By no means have I followed all the primary research, and there are certainly people out there who offer the possibility that much of it is incorrect or misleading.  -Chris

Updated 8/3: In a private e-mail exchange after this review appeared, Keith noted that “many reviewers are focusing on my suggested personal actions, when I tried to be so clear that there are NO personal solutions. What we need is a serious political resistance movement–that’s the *only* solution. We need huge institutional change, and have been sold a useless bill of goods by both corporate America and liberalism as to the efficacy of personal consumer and lifestyle choices.“

I did eat a salad for lunch today (nice transition) – radish, green onion, and goat cheese on spring mix greens, with poppy seed dressing.  Everything but the dressing was grown/made at Abundant Acres Farm, the provider of the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) share that I bought this season.  Friends Kent and Dori have again done a great job making fresh, local, chemical-free food available, and I’m grateful for it.  I don’t have a garden on my own land right now, but having a bag of garden-fresh stuff delivered to me every week is hard to beat.  There’s still quite a gap between my ideals about where my food comes from and my actual diet.

This past week I took a vacation from the office to focus on…not being at the office for a week.  It was a brief but effective period of rest and catching up on life’s other projects – I spent some time hiking, traveling, exploring, unpacking and rearranging the new house, working in the yard, reading and researching, responding to old e-mail messages (I’m down to just 2 personal inbox items, YAY!), spending time with friends, getting my old house ready to rent, journaling, sleeping, lounging, and planning for the future.  I’m grateful to have co-workers and a work life that makes this kind of break possible and easy.

Yesterday I heard a clicking/chirping/screeching noise in the hallway outside where I was sitting, and emerged to find that the cats had surrounded a bat on the floor of my bedroom.  After swearing lightly a few times, I went back into the room I’d been in to compose myself.  When I emerged again, the bat had moved to the window frame in the bedroom, cats plotting their ascent, and I’m pretty sure it was looking at me.  “Your move, help me out here,” I think it was saying. I swore again and then shooed the cats out and closed the door behind me.  Then I did what anyone in my position would do: I Twittered about it.  The immediate responses varied in their helpfulness, from some genuine offers to come assist, to naming the bat Howard, to, “Bats carry rabies and if they bite you in your sleep, you’d NEVER KNOW! I heard it on NPR.“  Gee, thanks.  By the time Becky arrived to take charge of the situation, the bat had gone into hiding, and has yet to re-emerge.  Part of me honestly believes that it intercepted my Twitter feed and knew what it might be in for.  Oh well.  Sleeping in a bee-keeper suit was not too uncomfortable.

Despite being on vacation, I had a few great organizational meetings, and I joined two new organizations/projects this week.  The Creative Industries Task Force is a working group sprung from the city’s comprehensive plan, helping to prepare the ground for a county-wide organization that can support, celebrate and coordinate the arts and cultural environment of Richmond and Wayne County.  The Earlham College Alumni Council works to advance the College’s development and keep its alumni engaged with the life of the institution.  In both cases, I’m honored to be asked to contribute, and am optimistic that both efforts are already so much in line with work I am already doing informally that I won’t notice any additional time commitment. 

Doors are opening all around me with opportunities to dive into more of the community building work that I know I want to do.  I’m still working on some implementation plans following my Transition Training conference last month.  Coming up in June the Imago folks in Cincinnati are putting on a conference on ecology, spirituality and living economies that I’ve registered for, and just a week later the Earth Charter folks are having a conference in Indianapolis to help people create an ethical framework for sustainability in their communities.  I see excitement building locally around local food, alternative transportation, better communication and dialog, alternative media and citizen journalism, and a general openness to new ways of making the community better.  The hard part is no longer trying to get something moving – the hard part is figuring out what I have to say “no” to because there are so many things moving.  I’ll take it!

I saw this Maya Angelou quote recently and found it useful: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.“  I’ve been paying a lot of attention since to how each person I encounter makes me feel, and how I might make them feel.  My attentiveness has not been about striving for the answer to be “good” all the time, but at least to know that something is being felt, that there’s some emotional engagement we can both find worth remembering.

Those are a few of the ingredients tossed into my salad of life lately.  How about you?

It’s at 3:30 PM at Ivy Tech Community College, 3421 Johnson Hall – I hope you can join us.

In case you won’t be able to attend, here’s a list of 12 reasons that it’s a good idea to support the production and consumption of locally grown food (adopted from a list produced by The Ohio Ecological Food and Farming Association):

1. Freshness – Locally-grown organic fruits and vegetables are usually harvested within 24 hours of being purchased by the consumer. Produce from California can’t be that fresh.
2. Taste – Produce picked and eaten at the height of freshness tastes better.
3. Nutrition – Nutritional value declines, often dramatically, as time passes after harvest. Because locally-grown produce is freshest, it is more nutritionally complete.
4. Purity – Eighty percent of American adults say they are concerned about the safety of the food they eat. They worry about residues of pesticides and fungicides. These materials are not permitted in an organic production system either before or after harvest.
5. Regional Economic Health – Buying locally grown food keeps money within the community. This contributes to the health of all sectors of the local economy, increasing the local quality of life.
6. Variety – Organic farmers selling locally are not limited to the few varieties that are bred for long distance shipping, high yields, and shelf life. Often they raise and sell wonderful unusual varieties you will never find on supermarket shelves.
7. Soil Stewardship – Soil health is essential for the survival of our species. Conventional farming practices are rapidly depleting topsoil fertility. Creating and sustaining soil fertility is the major objective for organic growers.
8. Energy Conservation – Buying locally grown organic foods decreases dependence on petroleum, a non- renewable energy source. One fifth of all petroleum now used in the United States is used in Agriculture. Organic production systems do not rely upon the input of petroleum derived fertilizers and pesticides and thus save energy at the farm. Buying from local producers conserves additional energy at the distribution level.
9. Environmental Protection – Soil erosion; pesticide contamination of soil, air, and water; nitrate loading of waterways and wells; and elimination of planetary biodiversity are some of the problems associated with today’s predominate farming methods. Organic growers use practices that protect soil, air, and water resources; and that promote biodiversity.
10. Cost – Conventional food processes don’t reflect the hidden costs of the environmental, health and social consequences of predominate production practices- of, for instance, correcting a water supply polluted by agricultural runoff, or obtaining medical treatment for pesticide induced illness suffered by farmers or consumers. When these and other hidden costs are taken into account, as they should be, locally grown organic foods are seen clearly for the value they are, even if they cost a few pennies more.
11. A Step Toward Regional Food Self Reliance – Dependency on far away food sources leaves a region vulnerable to supply disruptions, and removes any real accountability of producer to consumer. It also tends to promote larger, less diversified farms that hurt both the environment and local economies/communities. Regional food production systems, on the other hand, keep the food supply in the hands of many, providing interesting job and self-employment opportunities, and enabling people to influence how their food is grown.
12. Passing on the Stewardship Ethic – When you buy locally produced organic food you cannot help but raise the consciousness of your friends and family about how food buying decisions can make a difference in your life and the life of your community; and about how this basic act is connected to planetary issues.

What might an improved attentiveness to local food consumption look like in your community?

• How DO you end parenthetical statements with emoticons? I’d really like to know.
• Make your own handwriting font – I used to dream about this kind of tool when I was a kid.  Really.
• Wayne County Veg*n Resources – Aaron and Mel FINALLY write a blog together, and it’s actually a great compilation of food/restaurant reviews and tips, especially as they relate to vegan/vegetarian diets.
• I’m on Facebook now, though it’s largely just a rebroadcast of my Twitter feed.  Please don’t ask me to justify this.  I don’t generally respond to requests or event invites there, don’t take it personally, cyber-friends.
• The next time you see one of those flashing LED road signs, you’ll know how to reprogram it to say what you want, e.g. “Zombies Ahead.”

What sites are you obsessing over this week?

For now I’ll skip over last year’s resolution – which failed miserably – and bring you to my 2009 resolution, which is to eat less meat. Specifically, I’m trying to eat meat at no more than two meals per week. This is a revised plan of attack from past attempts to try an all-vegetarian diet, which I eventually decided wasn’t tenable for me.

Without getting too far into the food ethics involved in meat-eating (which are nonetheless important and deserving of further treatment), I thought I’d note why I’m doing this, and how it’s going so far:

I’m eating less meat because:

1. There are myriad statistics and resources showing that eating less factory-farmed meat is a good thing for my body, and for reducing the harm I cause to the planet and the life on it. Since most of the meat I have convenient access to is factory-farmed, I should eat less of it until I can change that reality.
2. I don’t want to give up all meat. I don’t want to practice “kingdomism,” and I recognize that having some meat as a part of my diet is important to me for a variety of reasons. I also didn’t want to take an approach that puts friends and family in an uncomfortable position when they’re cooking for me, or that precludes me from eating meat that was brought to the table in an ethical, humane way. (I fully realize that there are plenty who say there is no way to humanely eat the meat of other beings, or that the discomfort of the cook is far outweighed by the discomfort of the animal being eaten.)

How’s it going after a month? Well, mostly so far so good, but definitely with some complexities:

• Handling leftovers remains an interesting point of debate. If I eat at a restaurant and have meat at a meal there, and end up having leftovers, does it “count” as one of my two meals to eat those leftovers the next day? I think it’s mostly about intent – if I make a batch of meat-filled lasagna that lasts me all week, that’s definitely a major violation, but if I happen to have some leftovers, it seems within the spirit of the resolution to give myself some leeway, right?
• Despite eating almost no meat at home, I’m still not conditioned to hone in on the meatless dishes in some settings. I was at a catered event last week where I got a bowl of soup that looked vegetarian, and only found after I was eating it that it had meat in it…should’ve asked. At a Chinese buffet I found myself mindlessly putting a dish with meat in it on my plate as I’d done in the past, even though I’d fully intended to not eat meat there. So there’s definitely some mental adjusting still to be done, all worthwhile I’m sure.
• Vegetarians everywhere will roll their eyes at how obvious this is, but of course the whole experience is reminding me how hard it is to go against any given cultural norm when you’re in the minority, e.g. trying to avoid meat in a town that has more steakhouses than grocery stores, and where saying you’re vegetarian still prompts the question, “but you eat chicken, right?“

To be clear, I’m not at all prescribing vegetarianism or any particular diet as the right or wrong thing for anyone else, I’m just talking about what’s right for me.

As Jim C. noted two years ago, I have to be careful of “quitter’s righteousness” here, and not let a month of relative success go to my head. That’s partly why I’m blogging about it – if you dine with me or see me on the street, feel free to ask “how’s that meat twice a week thing going?”  I will hopefully give you the thumbs up sign, but I also might pretend I didn’t hear you and avoid eye contact.

If anything, this resolution is helping me to balance an increased attentiveness to what I eat (and the health/environment/social implications of that) with a desire to remain a little more flexible than quitting cold-tofurkey, and to try a personal change of habit that’s not so dramatic I can’t sustain it.

I’ll keep you posted.