Organic fields
I've been mulling over something I noticed while we were in New York and have been thinking about since. One of the, I guess I'd say, unspoken expectations in California is that you'll be serving your children nothing but organic products (maybe I should say this is the Bay Area; I don't think people in Fresno are obsessing over this). As a sign of just general organic food interest, today my friend Dana sent an email to a few of us in the book club with a link to a site noting pesticide retention in various fruits and vegetables.
I call it "unspoken," because while many people talk about feeding their children organic food, it's really only the people who do it who talk about it -- and those who don't have a stigma of somehow being bad parents. It's never said that anyone is a bad parent for not feeding their children organic peaches from the farmer's market, but there's whiff of negligence for someone to admit publicly that they're feeding any old thing to their kids. At least around here, where Alice Waters is evangelizing the Edible Schoolyard project and restaurants regularly note the provenance of their ingredients on their menus.
Something fascinating I noticed in New York is that this is not a big issue; and even more interesting, no one seemed the least bit embarrassed about serving obviously non-organic food to kids. Both of my friends with children were feeding them regular food (and I'd note that these are very well-educated people -- the ones you'd see in playgrounds in SF fretting over the organic juice boxes). The organic expectation is so strong in San Francisco that I noticed this immediately in New York -- and it was actually rather refreshing. There are so many expectations about child raising, that it was nice that the whole organic question was a choice and not a social expectation.
Now of course I have to do full disclosure and say that we're totally on the organic bandwagon (although not to the extent that another friend of mine is -- whose identity I will protect here -- who told me his wife packed a separate suitcase of food for his son on a trip. It's the California version of being an Orthodox Jew.) I'm also more willing than most to pay a lot of money for food and go out of my way for special goodies, family orchards and the like. I'm sure New York has other social expectations for children that are (mercifully) passing me by on the west coast...
Walt and I had someone come by tonight to give us an estimate on replacing the windows in our apartment. The previous owners installed these hideous vinyl windows that I'm desperate to get rid of and replace with something at least halfway acceptable. We learned several intersting things about the San Francisco building codes during this conversation.
For one thing, the city banned the use of vinyl windows a few years ago, so the ones that we have couldn't be installed now. This is entirely for asethetic reasons and has nothing to do with function -- the city council just decided the city would look uglier with more vinyl windows (I have to agree with this decision). Apparently any windows that face the street ALL have to be replaced, so we couldn't just replace the windows in our apartment. Because the tenants downstairs have these cheapo vinyl windows, we'd have to replace any windows in their unit that are visible from the street (we'd also have to replace a window in Burke's unit that is visible from the street). We can't even do a staggered replacement -- once you take out one front-facing window, you have to replace all of them at the same time. All of this means that any window project is now significantly larger than what we planned for originally.
Additionally, the city requires a permit to replace windows -- and the woman who came by tonight mentioned that the city has 3 people whose jobs are solely to drive around the city and cite projects that are happening without the required permits. I can totally imagine this, since I'm sure it represents a huge revenue source for the city. The worst part of this whole thing was the price -- after learning all of these reasons why we couldn't do it ourselves and why we'd have to install far more windows than we planned -- the woman quoted us $35K (and that didn't include the windows in Burke's unit). How depressing, I was really nurturing a dream of getting rid of these horrible vinyl ones for something at least nominally pleasing.
I call it "unspoken," because while many people talk about feeding their children organic food, it's really only the people who do it who talk about it -- and those who don't have a stigma of somehow being bad parents. It's never said that anyone is a bad parent for not feeding their children organic peaches from the farmer's market, but there's whiff of negligence for someone to admit publicly that they're feeding any old thing to their kids. At least around here, where Alice Waters is evangelizing the Edible Schoolyard project and restaurants regularly note the provenance of their ingredients on their menus.
Something fascinating I noticed in New York is that this is not a big issue; and even more interesting, no one seemed the least bit embarrassed about serving obviously non-organic food to kids. Both of my friends with children were feeding them regular food (and I'd note that these are very well-educated people -- the ones you'd see in playgrounds in SF fretting over the organic juice boxes). The organic expectation is so strong in San Francisco that I noticed this immediately in New York -- and it was actually rather refreshing. There are so many expectations about child raising, that it was nice that the whole organic question was a choice and not a social expectation.
Now of course I have to do full disclosure and say that we're totally on the organic bandwagon (although not to the extent that another friend of mine is -- whose identity I will protect here -- who told me his wife packed a separate suitcase of food for his son on a trip. It's the California version of being an Orthodox Jew.) I'm also more willing than most to pay a lot of money for food and go out of my way for special goodies, family orchards and the like. I'm sure New York has other social expectations for children that are (mercifully) passing me by on the west coast...
Walt and I had someone come by tonight to give us an estimate on replacing the windows in our apartment. The previous owners installed these hideous vinyl windows that I'm desperate to get rid of and replace with something at least halfway acceptable. We learned several intersting things about the San Francisco building codes during this conversation.
For one thing, the city banned the use of vinyl windows a few years ago, so the ones that we have couldn't be installed now. This is entirely for asethetic reasons and has nothing to do with function -- the city council just decided the city would look uglier with more vinyl windows (I have to agree with this decision). Apparently any windows that face the street ALL have to be replaced, so we couldn't just replace the windows in our apartment. Because the tenants downstairs have these cheapo vinyl windows, we'd have to replace any windows in their unit that are visible from the street (we'd also have to replace a window in Burke's unit that is visible from the street). We can't even do a staggered replacement -- once you take out one front-facing window, you have to replace all of them at the same time. All of this means that any window project is now significantly larger than what we planned for originally.
Additionally, the city requires a permit to replace windows -- and the woman who came by tonight mentioned that the city has 3 people whose jobs are solely to drive around the city and cite projects that are happening without the required permits. I can totally imagine this, since I'm sure it represents a huge revenue source for the city. The worst part of this whole thing was the price -- after learning all of these reasons why we couldn't do it ourselves and why we'd have to install far more windows than we planned -- the woman quoted us $35K (and that didn't include the windows in Burke's unit). How depressing, I was really nurturing a dream of getting rid of these horrible vinyl ones for something at least nominally pleasing.
posted by Devon Szalva at
8:53 PM
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