This story in today’s Hartford Courant reminds me why it’s important to buy locally produced food.

The article talks about family dairy farmers in Connecticut whose 2006 crop of cattle feed is drowning in the spring’s season-long rain. Add to this short-term natural catastrophe a long-term man-made one of cost. Energy prices have raised the costs of running a farm, but the market has held the price of milk below what it actually costs to produce it. Subtract the costs of the middle men — the store owner and the bottler — and the average farmer loses $10 for every 100 pounds of milk they produce. One farmer took out $50,000 in loans last month to pay his bills. Six have been forced to leave farming altogether just in the last year. Two have closed just since January.

Connecticut boasts 169 dairy farms that spread across a quarter of a million acres of land statewide. Twenty years ago (four years after the farm across from my elementary school had been turned into a housing development) 481 farms dotted the state’s landscape. Ten years ago, 289 still existed. Try to remember that this was happening while other businesses were flourishing in a time of economic prosperity. Think what happens when the interest rates on loans start going up.

Picture the cows you drove past last week on your way to work. Imagine now their pastureland plowed under and a McMansion in the cows’ place.

Call or write your state legislator and ask him or her to support economic bills that encourage long-term vitality for farms as well as more immediate low-interest, fixed-rate loans. It’s imperative that legislators understand that this affects more than just 169 families; it affects all of us.

Invest in the future of local agriculture. Tour a family farm — the biggest dairy farm in Connecticut has a herd of fewer than 1,000 cattle. Visit an agricultural fair. Support kids who want to go into farming.

In the meantime, buy locally produced food (such as The Farmer’s Cow milk) whenever you can. You can immediately put money into the hands of farmers by buying into community-supported agriculture — by buying actual shares in a farmer’s crops, buying from farm stands that eliminates some of the middle man costs, or demanding that your local grocer start carrying local produce.

Food tastes better when you buy it close to where it was grown. In the same way that food out of your own garden tastes best because you can see when it is just ripe and perfect for tasting, so, too, can a farmer best judge when it’s time to harvest his or her crop. If, on the other hand, a crop has to be picked so that it isn’t rotten when it arrives on the other side of the country and sits out at the grocery store, it sure isn’t going to be ideal.

Remember those strawberries you bought last season from the grocery store when you thought to yourself, “These looked beautiful but, God, they hardly tasted like anything!” Try a locally grown strawberry from a farm stand this summer. I bet you’ll be pleased with the results. Even when the fruit doesn’t look as pretty (and sometimes it doesn’t because these crops are grown in real-world situations where some days it rains too much and cracks the tomatoes and on other days a worm bites into the apple), it still tastes … real.

Yes, it may cost more than what you’ll pay at Stop & Shop or Big Y or WalMart. And if you are on a tightly fixed income, this may not be how you choose to make the dollars stretch. I can respect that. But if you can afford it, consider investing in a way of life that is rapidly dying out.

Food does not originate in a grocery store. Eggs come from chickens, not cardboard containers — and chickens require feed. Meat comes from living, breathing animals that do (and taste) best when they are allowed to roam in pastures. Fruit comes from trees and bushes that require protection from birds. Fences need mending. Tractors require fuel. All this costs a farmer money, and food you buy in the grocery store is priced so that the farmer providing it is losing money hand over fist. They are losing money so you can save pocket change. Family farmers are not rich. They are not squirrelling their money away for a sunnier day or to save for a vacation home in Florida. They are living hand-to-mouth and another bad season could be the last for them.

A Connecticut farmer is still earning the same amount as in 1979. What were you earning 27 years ago?

You pay less than $4 for a gallon of milk. Farmers earn $1. It costs them $1.60 to make it. A farmer literally pays 60 cents to provide you with a gallon of milk. Think about that for a minute. Can you afford to pay more for milk? On the other hand, can you afford not to?

This is a very real problem, but one that’s not too late to address. You can still see cows as you drive around this weekend. There may come a point where that’s not the case. But right now right here, you can choose to be part of the solution.

(Information for this blog entry also came from June Sandra Neal’s “Not Cowing Down to the System” article which appeared in the May 28, 2006, issue of The Hartford Courant’s NE Magazine.)

The Senate did not manage enough support to force the Federal Marriage Amendment bill to a vote. (Thank goodness!) Now that we’ve taken that waste of time and energy off the table, can we please insert a federal finger into more important pies like an exit strategy for Iraq or a plan to institute the Kyoto Protocol environmental standards or a national living wage act?

Or if we’ve given up all hope of our elected officials actually trying to solve federal problems, maybe we can ask them instead to consider equally wacky federal amendments to appease other key constituents, such as the amendment that all adults over the age of sixteen must drive an SUV made in the United States.

Rudi and I went to one of the mayoral candidate fora tonight and I thought I would share a couple quick thoughts about the five major candidates running for office:

• Linda Cropp, D.C. Council chair, is grandmotherly. She speaks quietly and may use her Southern charm to win votes.
• Vincent Orange, Ward 5 Councilman, last used Metro last week when he had a flat tire. He also says that he and his wife regularly use the system to come downtown on the weekend.
• Adrian Fenty, Ward 4 Councilman, had very succinct answers to questions. It was nice to hear a politician answer questions unambiguously for once.
• Marie Johns, former head of Verizon, speaks very quickly. I suspect she spent some time in New York, because no one down here speaks fast. This may cost her some votes, since no one will be able to understand her when she speaks at her normal cadence.
• Michael Brown, lobbyist, demonstrated the most flexibility when he was the only candidate able to switch from his planned closing remarks to actually answer the question as posed by the moderator.

My question was one of three from the audience chosen by the moderator to be asked of the candidates. I was proud, but unsurprised, given I was pretty sure it combined the right elements to be asked in such a venue.

Finally, I remain undecided about whom I like best. I know which two candidates I don’t want to have win, but the other three remain in contention for my vote. I went expecting to like one candidate best, but came away with a much better opinion of a different one. So who knows? They’ll have to work hard to woo me.

You know, the one that shoots down the person hitting on you in a public place?

Guys approach me on the street with some regularity, asking me if I date “brothers.” Usually if it’s that innocuous I just reply that I would, but that I think my husband might have issues with it. I laugh. They laugh. Everyone has a polite out. As if you’d accept a date with a random stranger leering at you from a car window or a street corner.

I’ve learned when I travel alone to wear a ring with a jewel-like stone. It doesn’t stop everyone from hitting on me, but I feel like it cuts down on it.

Other encounters, however, are harder to brush off. There was the guy in a church courtyard/public lunch spot who touched my toe and told me I needed a ring for it. There were the elderly men (old enough to be my father, if not my grandfather) who made dirty comments about me as I sat obliviously reading my book in a “family-friendly” pocket park next to Eastern Market earlier this spring. When I noticed, I bolted, and it freaked me out for weeks. In London, a certainly drunk and possibly homeless man kissed me — with an astonished Rudi and a snickering security guard standing right next to me. My cousin later told me I was taking politeness a bit far.

I used to think I was the only one. But then I talked to a few girls at work and it seems to be a cultural thing. One colleague was so irked by an encounter on her walk to the Metro one morning that she learned PowerPoint by creating a presentation containing her response. Another once had someone come on to her at a bus stop. He licked her. She belted him.

Tonight Rudi asked me to pick up beer for him. I had already passed Whole Foods by, leaving a liquor store as my option between there and home. I knew when he asked that it wasn’t going to be a pleasant experience. I was wearing a skirt. I thought about saying no — particularly since I wasn’t going to drink any of it. On the other hand, Rudi doesn’t shirk from buying personal things for me, so that didn’t really seem to be a fair excuse.

Ultimately, though, I didn’t want to feel powerless. I don’t want it to be my problem. I don’t want to have to alter what I wear and where I go and how I conduct my life just because I’m a woman and some stupid git can’t keep his comments or his leers to himself.

But there’s always one. Sure enough, some guy comes up to me as I’m paying for the beer. “Wow, look at those legs. Are you a kickboxer?”

“Yep,” I replied, remembering Amani’s advice to look as if the person hitting on you is remarkably laughable and inconsequential.

“No, you aren’t.”

“Then why did you ask?”

“I just got out of the army. Where did you come from?”

“Home.”

I bet if I’d threatened him with the drop spindle and US6 knitting needles I had in my bag, he would have left me alone. Of course, I bet if I’d done that the liquor store clerk who idly watched the whole encounter would have called the cops.

Instead, I just walked home, getting madder and madder as I went along until I arrived at home fuming.

Maybe next time I’ll ask him if these sorts of encounters ever work and why he bothers if he’s guaranteed rejection every time.

Maybe I’ll ask him what he’d think if some skeevy old guy were hitting on his daughter.

Sadly, I bet he wouldn’t see the correlation.

So, anyone have a killer line to end those sorts of encounters?

Can anyone explain to me why when looking at obesity statistics, I cannot find numbers for certain ethnic groups? I can find numbers for Caucasians, African Americans, and Mexican Americans.

I cannot however find information on Latinos in general (I grew up in the Northeast and am well aware that there are obese Puerto Ricans out there — and that Puerto Ricans would be pretty insulted be classified as Mexicans.), Asian Americans, or Native Americans.

Why hasn’t the government tracked this information? And if they have, why have they hidden it away?

This makes writing a book using facts so much harder…

I admit that a lot of my understanding of what’s going on in Iraq comes less from the Capitol Hill talking heads and more from the Iraqi bloggers, particularly Riverbend at Baghdad Burning.

For her take on the “rift” between Shia and Sunni Iraqis, read her post from Saturday, marking the third anniversary of the Americans’ involvement in her country.