Brooklyn Bedouin

To Give and NOT Receive.

Today I did what I have been given permission to do: educate and engage the Muslim community to think critically about their relationship to water, waste, energy, food, and transportation. 

Now, I am sitting back on an Amtrak train headed home. Along the way I stopped at the Reston Town Center. A massive walkable zone of generically named streets, mall-styled shopping, restaurants and babies and young slightly stressed out families. 

It was there that I had one of the first tinges of temptation with sugar. It is pretty obvious that I have a weak spot for cookies. Well, I happened to walk by the final Girls Scout Cookie stand of the season. I surveyed the Samoas, Thin Mints, Caramel deLites, th peanut butter sandwich cookies and thought… “maybe I will just buy them for later…” 

One of the things that Adrienne Marie Brown suggested when doing the cleanse is that you tell people - tell everyone. So I did. I shared with the Girl Scouts and their moms that I was on a sugar cleanse and they laughed and said that this was probably the last place that I wanted to be at. 

Anyways, I did not fall temptation to the annual cookies. Instead I pitched in the price of a box as a donation and told the Girl Scouts and their moms, “God Bless you” smiled and went on my merry way. 

It felt good to give and not need anything in return. 

ps- to the lady on the train who got on and proceeded to tell a college kid her life story and then continue to talk to him when he had put on his headphones, hoodie, and leaned his head against the window… “sigh”

 

Some West African Wisdom about Talking + Eating

I am about done with peanuts and eggs. it seems like as I travel those are the only available options. Yesterday I was fortunate enough to grab a Buddha Bowl from one of my favorite establishments in Richmond, VA. Interestingly it is one of my favorite places because the manager there makes this incredible oatmeal cream cookie that makes Little Debbie look like a straight up imposture that should be burned in effigy. At some point after my current sugar cleanse I fully intend on having a moderate amount of those cookies again. 

All that being said, I am sitting in a Metro station in DC right now trying to get out of the city and head to the NOVA suburbs. Yesterday’s travels subjected me to delays similar to the plane adventure I had two days before. The only reliable form of transportation, it seems, are bikes and my own two feet. Given the speed of capitalism, I wish those two had a bit more to offer in terms of speed to destination. 

If I am meant to I will make it to the ADAMS center later on to hear the friday prayer sermon. Although, right now that is feeling unlikely. I will take solace in the reminder that I got from the UberX cab driver that I just spoke with. 

To give the conversation some context you must know that last night I stayed with one of my wife’s best friends. His name is Paul Kim and he is a education policy professional that works for the federal government. He and I were talking about the Common Core curriculum. Thankfully he was giving me some context and a better understanding of the intentions of the Curriculum since I am not an expert on education policy. 

He also has a background in international development and shared that in both contexts, domestically and internationally, one of the main determinants of a child’s education outcomes is the education level of the mother. Roughly, the better educated the mother the better the chid will be educated - regardless of the educational environment of the child. Okay, I can see that, and I am happy that I intentionally married a very smart woman who is well educated. 

Ok, back to the cab driver. He was a muslim man from Guinea, West Africa. He has two daughters, ages eight and five and he talks to his mother every day. He asked me how I was doing and I said I was doing well, except for the fact that i was away from my sons. I told him it was bittersweet that I was able to wake up at 8a (which meant that I slept in) instead of 6a. He commented on the fact that it was good that I appreciated and liked my children and that he sometimes gets chided by his friends for being the same way. I related something that I was told when looking for a wife:

“Look for a woman who has a good relationship with her father” I was told. As a father of two daughters you could tell that comment resonated with my driver. He nodded. We talked about education and I shared about my newfound statistic about education of mother.

He then shared that his mother was “uneducated”.

“but she must have had some traditional education that she imparted upon you” I said.

And here it is: some traditional West African education (that also served as my friday reminder just in case I miss the friday khutba or sermon/message)

1. If you are very mad or if you are very happy - do not speak. Hold your tongue. 

2. Do not promise anything. Stay silent and just do what it is you meant to promise you are going to do. 

3. DON’T EAT TOO MUCH. and he specified that his mother used to counsel, DO NOT EAT TOO MUCH SUGAR, DO NOT EAT TOO MUCH SALT, EAT UNTIL JUST BEFORE YOU ARE FULL AND THEN STOP EATING. (this is the one relevant to my sugar cleanse) 

All of the above aligns with the Prophetic example. The Prophets were simple, frugal, and non-gluttonous people. Miqdam bin Ma'dikarib said:

"I heard the Messenger of Allah (S.a.w) saying: 'The human does not fill any container that is worse than his stomach. It is sufficient for the son of Adam to eat what will support his back. If this is not possible, then a third for food, a third for drink, and third for his breath.” (Sahih) 

‘Nuff Said. 

ps- i made friday prayer 

On The Road (without the Sugar)

These are musings of business travel. The observations of a man who cannot eat anything he sees. Everywhere you go in America sugar is staring at you out of glass cases. Pastries are so neatly arranged, cookies are perfectly stacked, factory farmed burgers beckon, and if you look beyond the fine print of the healthy snacks you realize that sugar is ubiquitous. 

This became an issue on my recent journey because of what seems is inevitable in plane travel these days - delays. I was delayed in New York - twice and then delayed in Philadelphia - twice. There was no real reason given. 

My colleague at The Frontier Project, Kirsten Cluthe passed me the book Travels With Charley In Search of America recently, It is John Steinbeck’s account of a road trip across the USA in the the shadow of the 1950’s and 1960’s. A trip tucked between useless wars abroad and crucial culture wars at home. Travel back then in our land was intimate. It took time. I recommend this book. It helps to remind you of how amazing the country is and how it could be. It also reminds us that the challenges that we have as a people with trying to understand one another are nothing new

Now, the time we take traveling is spent sitting in airports or on trains that move far too slow. We don’t see nearly enough, stop long enough, or interact with the strange and odd like travelers once did in the past. America is a huge country and I often wonder what actually binds us all together. Why have these strange lands stayed linked politically, emotionally, culturally?

Today I met a dairy farmer, a mom from Long Island, a telecom executive who has a commercial pilot license, and a pharmaceutical rep. I found something in common with all of them. imagine what we could have discovered if we had more time to really get to know one another?

This is Day-9 of my sugar cleanse and day-1 of a 4-day trip south... more to come. 

Syracuse Orange Season!!

The other day I went to Barclays Center to, sadly, watch the University of Rhode Island lose to UMASS in the A10’s tournament. As it is day-9 of the cleanse I will say that I held back and did NOT eat the Spumoni pizza at Barclays which I think is perhaps the best stadium food in the world.

(RELAXX, I am still on my cleannse!!! this pic was taken a few months back at a Nets game)

That being said, it is now March. March Madness!!!

In my typical fashion I have chosen Syracuse in one of my brackets to go all the way. However, they way that they have been playing since their win streak was snapped I am not feeling good about their prospects - I love them still. 

I really like individual performers in to get to the lower rounds but team play to win out in the end. That being said, look for good tournaments from Creighton, Oklahoma State. I also like the standard higher seeds, since they have good teams and also have coaches who have done this before. I do NOT have Duke making it to the Fina Four even though they probably will make it there.

All in all, this mens college basketball season was so up and down and topsy turvy. Unranked teams beat top ranked ones and the conference championships I think started the process of getting those in the middle of the pack, who made the round of 64, ready to compete and do some upsets. Look for teams on the rise like NC State, Providence, etc, to do some damage to some egos early on.  

Anyways, I am still sore from the University of Rhode Island’s loss in the first round of the A10’s but am looking forward to totally obsessing about college basketball for the next few weeks. Hopefully that will divert my attention from the maple syrup in my fridge that is screaming to drench some french toast. 

Go Orange!

Phtoto: My tired son meeting a sad rhody at the recent loss. the cool thing is that he has a rhody toy at home and was blown away at a life-sized one :)

Day-8 of the Sugar Cleanse: Habits

Being on a cleanse or a diet of any kind makes your aware of you own habits related to eating. Where it gets tough for me is with snacking. I love nibbling on things, and munching, and working and eating at the same time. That is my pattern and this is the intervention that will hopefully make me more aware and less subject to that pattern. 

Is it good to snack - well, I guess it depends on what you are snacking on. Yesterday I took some raw hazelnuts and roasted them in my cast iron pan with a little bit of coconut oil and some sea salt. Slamming. 

This past hot summer I was fond of a late night walk to the local bodega where I would buy a few “gus” sodas and gobble them down on the stoop while the city’s humidity seeped into my skin. 

But lets’s be honest, there have been times in my life when all that I wanted to do was buy some cookies and just eat a whole bag sitting watching something mindless. The question I have is how can I become more mindful when this cleanse is over? What will intervene in my head when I am compelled to guzzle down some sugary fizzy water (sounds so good right now!). Or When I buy a bag of ginger snaps and am sitting alone after the kids go to bed… 

21 days is a long time. But I get it. I once did a 22-day expedition in Joshua Tree and when we were coming out of it I worried how I was going to adjust to the rest of the world. Our world was real. Heat during the day and cold during the night. Scorpions and packs of wild dogs. Rock faces with quartz monzonite that ripped your skin as you climbed. We even had to splint and evacuate one of our crew and were trapped in a storm we saw coming in the distance for days. 

Right now I feel like at day-8 I am looking at the storm and the worst is yet to come. But I get it, 21 days is the amount of time you need to reinforce new habits. 

photo: a table full of Gus Sodas at the Grow Our Grassroots Conference I attended this weekend. 

Death in the Marketplace

I think of the old New York, the one that had the food revolution in the 1970’s when black and white urban and rural hippies, nationalists, and communists all transformed their diets after reading books like Diet for a Small Planet, How to Eat to Live and, Dick Gregory’s Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat: Cookin’ with Mother Nature. 

There is a NYC that is almost dead. It hangs on by the thinnest of threads. It used to thrive in the Upper West Side, Park Slope, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and many other neighborhoods. I came across this old New York recently when I was looking for a place to eat in the West Village. 

The health food store was filled with some throwbacks and refugees of this old time. There were rastas getting juice and thin haired white hippies poking through trays of raw foods. I was there to find a meal, something yummy, filling, spicy, and something that fit my diet. I pulled a choice selection from their hot plates and then headed upstairs. This is where I met Beni. 

She moved like lightening. As I munched she was buzzing around the room cleaning up items that customers had left. I was the last person seating and looked up. We noticed one another and I noted that she was moving fast. She laughed and said that people always said that to her. as I packed up my things we chatted. 

Beni used to be a basketball player. She was darn good and a star in another world and another time. She would have played division one and maybe even played in the WNBA. Until something tragic happened. She would not say what it was but she experienced a near death incident. In fact, she did die. 

The person I saw before me, she noted, was not the person she was before the accident. 

It has been told to me by some spiritual seekers in my circle that one on a path of the heart and spirit will likely have to die at various moments in their lives - they will have to die to their former selves so that they can be renewed again. 

Beni was powerful. She moved like lightening and explained that after three years she feels like she has finally woken up, finally getting to understand what her purpose and path will be.

This diet I am on is not perfect. But what it is doing is in some ways helping part of me, the one that was mindlessly subject to sugar and sweet to provide me comfort and nourishment - to die. Perhaps the outcome of this cleanse will be another “spiritual death” of sorts and then, like Beni, like lightening, a new me will begin to take shape. 

Photo: Grays Papaya used to be a iconic outpost over in the village. I never went there because it seemed to only be about hot dogs and other food I did not eat. It used to always been packed but, as is the times, it is shut down as demand for processed foods is diminished. Some business in the free market will die - and that's OK as long as new ones and new models rise. 

The Power of Constraints

Five days into my sugar cleanse and, truth be told, I am doing fine. I like the constraints. Reminds me of a conversation that I had with one of the people who designed the New York City pedestrian plazas. He shared that they had (and have) a laundry list of transformative changes that could be done on the roads and sidewalks. 

To get the process started his team went to the technical people at the Department of Transportation and asked them for the “constraints” - what were the things that were totally off the table. By starting here with the technical people he avoided presenting them with ideas that were never going to happen. Instead, they were able to use those constraints and along with the essence of the original laundry list, they devised some of the most iconic street transformation programs the USA has ever seen. 

Right now the constraints I exist within have to do with the intake of any sugar. This is already on top of the existing framework I have to eat halal foods, no alcohol, and nothing that is derived from pork. Given those constraints last night I made a mushroom curry dish with some brown rice and black beans sautéed with garlic, olive oil and lemon juice. 

It is not perfect. We are finding that the after the kids go to bed sweetness is one of the most cherished and sacred times of the day for parents of young children. We want to curl up with dood ki chai and some cookies, chocolate or some other deliciousness and unwind - the same way some of you out there uncork some wine or roll a joint. And that is the point isn’t it?

My sugar addiction is real. In the mornings I crave a glass of apple cider, I want butter lathered with butter and jam, and I want to snack on chocolate covered almonds or have a cardamon bun from the Swedish place Fika. 

The point of this is to notice all these cravings and to understand why I want these foods when I want them. Do I reach for sweet the same way someone reaches for a cigarette? If I do is that OK? What type of relationship DO I want to have with food? 

The other thought is this: I have been very productive as of late within these contraints. This productivity is making me appreicate the lack of the "sweetness" in lieu of getting stuff done. For you... what constraints do you have in your life? What opportunities and creative energies are lurking just outside of them once you have fully committed? 

Food for thought (hahahahahahaha)

photo: a wonderful bevy of breakfast foods that I was presented with at a facilitation I did a few weeks ago that I would NOT be able to eat today!

Where Does All of Your Food Come From?

Last night as my sons and I were driving home in the pouring rain my older guy said, “dada, I want meat”

Hm. I was planning on going home to fix him some of what I was going to have: some brown rice with black beans and some choice veggies from whatever was available. 

But I am a sucker for what my son chooses on his own. This is new for us. I decided that I would attempt to find some organic meat that was sumptuous enough and pre-made for us to roll up and gobble up for dinner. 

What a mission!

Because of our current appetite for meat  (that supports the factory farming system) we push substandard and poorly treated and raised animals onto most of the populace. So few animals live a dignified existence that the highest standard that Whole Foods has for their internal system is a 5+ which essentially means that the animal spent its entire life and was humanely slaughtered on the same farm. 

That is so rare that the Whole Foods in Brooklyn did not have any in stock. The guys behind the meat counter were talking about how weird it was to them that chickens eat grass and they only found about that when they started working there. We all need to be better educated about where our food comes from.

In the coming months Muslims, and others specifically seeking halal and organic meats, will have an alternative here in NYC. Honest Chops should be an interesting experiment in whether this market has any power to push a new company quickly into the black. It is unclear whether there will be pre-made food there. I hope there is for moments like this. 

One exciting development is Norwich Meadows Farm in Upstate NY. Funny enough, I used to live near Norwich a long time ago. We even played sports against them when I was a City kid living in rural America. It is nice to know that food from an area where I used to know is available in a way that fits with my moral constraints. 

Personally, I am still unsure if I want to, for political reasons similar to the reason that I am four days into a sugar cleanse, become vegan and swear off meat altogether. I still have serious questions about the viability of a vegan diet. Is it natural for humans to eat only plants all the time? I am drawn to it and am also curious about raw diets. What is the right diet for optimal health?

We did end up getting some organic chicken which my son gobbled down. It was pretty good and fit within my current diet. After the boys were in bed and Fatima and I were reclining on the couch I “relaxed” by looking up cuts of meat on the Norwich farms meats website and watching videos on how to make pastrami from scratch. “DIY carnivore” i told her, “I should go up to Norwich and slaughter the meat myself” I reconciled with myself. 

I am  a man, a heterosexual, an urban dweller, a Muslim and technically, I am registered as a Democrat. When It comes to my diet I am still undecided. 

photo: from the AMNH these poor endagered turtles were eaten almost to exinction by hungry sailors while they hunted whales during the horrible episode where we hunted whales for their blubber. 

Gotta Read The Labels On Your Foods!

And all these labels be trying to lure us in like spiders / into the web, you know what I'm saying / So sometimes people gotta come out and speak up / And let people understand / That you know you gotta read the label / You gotta read the label / If you don't read the Label you might get poisoned -- GZA

Yesterday I wanted to buy some almonds. I looked on a package of some big brand almonds and saw a ingredient that I did not know what it was. In my book, Green Deen: What Islam Teaches About Protecting the Planet, I relayed a story about my mom. I will share a selection here:

 My mother taught me to be a food- conscious individual. She taught us to read the labels on all foods in the grocery store. If we couldn’t pronounce the ingredients, we couldn’t buy the product.

The ingredient that I could not understand on my almonds was Corn Maltodextrin. I did little bit of research and found out that it is indeed something that I cannot consume. I dug a little bit more about it and found a team of West Virginia scientists that are making batteries from sugar!

So strange, but not.

I tracked down the name of the scientists and will be interviewing them on thursday morning for my PCMag. com column  on the intersection of technology and sustainability. My initial thought is that, given my screed on the politics of sugar yesterday, perhaps sugar ultimately has a role - not to be ingested by humans but used as a source of fuel to power our devices?

Remember what GZA said:  "If you don't read the Label you might get poisoned" Make sure you know what is in your food and if you do not know don't eat it!

Photo: from a friends book, a shot I took while he as reading it. I will find out the name of the book, forgive me for not having it right now. 

Why am I giving up sugar for 21 days?

In Islam we have an ancient wisdom that says, “Actions are according to intentions, and everyone will get what was intended…” This comes directly from the mouth of the Prophet Muhammad, Peace and blessings be Upon him. One commentator on this wisdom notes: “the believer should constantly ask himself; “Why am I doing what I am doing?”

That’s a darn good question. Why am I giving up sugar for 21 days?

We talk a lot about oil, coal, the dangers of fracking. I even wrote about these energies from hell in my last book. We also talk about other things like the drug trade, in fact there have been silent and militarized raids on heroin dens  here in Brooklyn - that murderous trade is on the rise. We talk about human trafficking, child pornography, and slavery that exists to this day - all scourges that must be ended. We do NOT talk about sugar in the same way. 

Maybe we should.

It s the second day of my fast / cleanse from sugar and while there are certainly going to be health benefits from the abstention I am equally, if not more, reflective about the role that sugar has played on the world stage. 

The production and mass selling of sugar has shaped countries and dramatically altered families, whole communities, and regions. The early demand for sugar puts it in league with alcohol, tobacco, and cotton as one of the primary fuels for the slave trade. Millions of Africans were brought across the Atlantic to Brasil and to the United States to work on plantations that helped to feed the Western worlds burgeoning sugar addiction. This cleanse is perhaps akin to the way a vegan swears off eating meat because of cruelty for animals - it is a direct intervention into the normal operating procedure of how we live our lives. 

We accept so much about the present time and do not allow ourselves to recall that things have always changed and that the things we take for granted once did not exist. 100 years ago Saudi Arabia did not exist as a country, the Ottoman Empire was still intact, and nuclear weapons did not exist. 

What original intentions created the places you know and love so well? We discount the power of intention in todays world. The original intention  of sugar producers was for the mass production to make money. They prioritized maximizing profits at the expense of the sovereignty of the Hawaiian people and the freedom of millions of black Africans.

Even if it is just a brief moment to be reflective, pause and gain a deeper understanding with the relationship that I have to sugar, especially since its productions has literally shaped world history. Giving it up right now make so much sense. 

Photo: A typical meal that is NOT on the good food list from a breakfast on South Beach that I enjoyed a few weeks ago.