So, I’m now in the ranks of the self-employed, and I need health insurance. When I left my job a few weeks ago, I signed up for COBRA and it’s around $350 a month, which is totally unreasonable. So I’m switching to something else as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, the landscape is bleak when you’re not covered by a cushy employee plan. There are actually only a handful of companies that even bother to sell insurance here, because the state laws are so strongly in favor of the patient. Massachusetts and Maine are the only two states with guaranteed health insurance, for example. This means that you cannot be denied coverage by an insurance company if you already have coverage. If you are on a rinky-dink health plan, and you develop some major illness, you can switch over to a better plan and the insurance companies can’t say no. Of course, there are exclusions here—for example, there might be a 1 year waiting period before you can get prescription drugs on the newer plan.

Anyway, a little background. I am 28, a Massachusetts resident, a non-smoker, and self-employed, so I want to pay as little as possible. I don’t want dental or vision coverage—I just want major catastrophes to be covered, and I don’t mind paying for my office visits out of pocket. I rarely go to the doctor.

So, I looked around. Some other self-employed folks I know pointed me to “catastrophic” plans, which are the cheapest non-Medicare health plans that I could find. There are a few companies that provide these in MA: Mega Insurance/NASE, Mid-West, etc. The plans are around $150 a month and are either “accident-only” (no illness coverage) or high-deductible. You pay the first $5,000 of health costs per year, and after that is supposed to be covered. But there’s a lot of bad news about these companies, and the biggest problem for me is, there’s a maximum that they’ll cover! So if you get into a catastrophic accident with one of these “catastrophic” plans, and the bill is $75,000, you may end up paying $20,000, not $5,000. The coverage caps are what get you. Unfortunately, they don’t tell you this in the sales pitch. What you have to ask about is the “maximum out of pocket” for a given plan, which isn’t necessarily the deductible.

Anyway, now that I know way too much about this, I’ve decided that the only plan worth getting is a low-end Tufts HMO plan called “Advantage 2000” that costs around $250 a month, and is available to business owners through SBSB. I’m having to register my business with city hall ($50) and join SBSB ($85/year) in order to get this plan. But it looks good: it has a $20 co-pay, a $2,000 deductible, and $100 for an ER visit. No prescription coverage. My understanding is that because it is a “100% coverage” plan, the maximum out of pocket is the same as the deductible ($2,000). HMOs only work inside their network of doctors, so you can’t really pick and choose your doctor, surgeon, etc. So, for outpatient services, most HMOs require you to be inside Massachusetts, because that’s where the network is. Worldwide outside of MA, you are only covered for ER visits.

While on the topic of health insurance, here’s some other stuff you should be aware of:

• Many of these “high-deductible” plans can be combined with a health savings account (HSA), a Federal program introduced in 2003, which lets you save pre-tax money for health care in an investment account. It is very similar to an IRA. Not bad for the entrepreneurs and self-employeds of this country. Check hsainsider.com to see if a plan you’re evaluating supports an HSA.
• Insurance Partnership can cover some of your premium, up to 50% in fact, if you make less than $20k per year.
• But whatever you do, avoid healthplans.com!

Some of these are from Mark Bittman. Karl and I have been loving How To Cook Everything—it has quickly become our most-reached-for cookbook (thanks Winnie!).

• You barely need to “cook” corn, you just need to heat it up. You certainly don’t need to boil it. Fill a pot of water to an inch, add salt, put the corn in, cover, turn it on, and set the timer for 10 minutes. If the water’s already boiling, make that 3 minutes. Doesn’t matter if the corn is half-submerged. Just keep the lid closed.
• Speaking of corn, do not put Tabasco on corn; it tastes awful.
• Speaking of Tabasco, do put Tabasco on most other things, in leiu of salt.
• Pesto freezes very well in an ice cube tray. Cover it with a thin layer of olive oil, to keep the nice green color.
• You can make unripe fruit riper by macerating it. Toss the sliced fruit with sugar and let it sit for a few minutes. This concentrates the sugars in the fruit, and you’ll get some nice fruit juice at the bottom of the bowl.
• Hot chocolate will froth up better when you make it with whole milk.
• Speaking of froth, Alex is right — Diesel Café makes the best latte in town.
• Speaking of cafés, French in Action is a great way to learn French. And if you know French, your food will taste better.
• I don’t know French.

But I do know an amazing amazing pizza dough formula from Cook’s Illustrated. I say formula because it is a dough, and doughs are very formulaic. Hopefully my saying “formula” instead of “recipe” will give you pause before you fuck with it. This cooks in a home oven at 500°F with a pizza stone, preheated for an hour while the dough rises. It comes out with a beautiful thin crust that is crispier than I’d ever thought possible at home.

Crusty 500 Degree Pizza Dough Formula

1 1/4 tsp instant yeast (this is not active dry yeast)
1 cup water at room temp
1 3/4 cups (8 3/4 oz) unbleached all-purpose flour, plus more for work surface
1 cup (4 oz) cake flour! This is where the magic happens.
1 1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp sugar

You might also try this on the grill (I haven’t yet). Just add a 2 tablespoons of olive oil to the dough to help prevent sticking to the grate.

We are nearing the peak of the season! The food is amazing right now! Massachusetts blueberries are here, corn, green beans, and…

albino eggplant!

and two early tomatoes, of heirloom geometry

I made some “100 mile bruschetta” with tomatoes, basil, and garlic from the farm share. Haven’t decided what to do with that eggplant…

Daniel pointed me to current.tv today, which I’d seen a few months ago when Al Gore announced it. Now it’s live. A great concept, well executed. It makes me wonder where the ideal point is on the spectrum between pure, direct democracy and more representational democracy. YouTube is pure, Current TV is just slightly more representational. Reddit is pure (or “self-representational” with collaborative filtering?), Google News is radically representational. The user base toward the pure end is really transparent! YouTube is so clearly focused on teenagers, either because it is marketed to teenagers, or because teenagers are the ones pushing on the edge of video right now, or because it just happened to hit upon something that teenagers had wanted: a place for laughter in dark times. They’re certainly addressing more than one need. Then there is Reddit, with its tech focus. Reddit has grown up around geek culture in a lot of ways, so it’s targeting geeks both implicitly and explicitly (though not as explicitly as, say, Slashdot).

Are better forms of government possibly emerging from all this technology? Imagine a congress consisting of everyone in the country, bills voted on by everyone, with collaborative filtering so you only see bills or parts of bills that matter to you.

One Christmas, my brother and I compiled a mix CD from his vinyl record collection. It’s filled with records we had growing up. We hooked his turntable and receiver up to a laptop and recorded each song as it played, being careful to include all the space between songs, so the final CD would never leave you alone in cold silence. We sat on the floor, looking through stacks of LPs while putting the mix together. We read the liner notes, examined the record covers, and listened intently, and it felt like we were tapping into a cultural tradition that was lost long ago. It was a listening style that is way outside of today’s digital music experience.

As packaging has shrunk over the years, digital music has gradually degraded the visceral connection with artists. Brian Eno often talks about the importance of identifying the inside and outside of art—of asking yourself, “Where is the frame?” With packaged music, the frame is everything but the music. The frame brings the artist closer to the listener. The Velvet Underground is universally associated with Andy Warhol’s banana print from the LP cover. Michael Jackson brings himself closer to us with his fold-out portrait on “Thriller.” But we have taken so many steps backward since the arrival of digital music. With CDs, the frame was reduced by 75% and placed in a plastic cell.

Now the iPod is our frame for listening to digital music. A slab of white plastic and chrome, sterilized and dissociated from its creator. White like the walls of an art museum; there is no cultural context. Instead there are three lines of text: song title, artist, and album title. This is not a rich experience, this is a radio request line. With the latest digital music technology, the life-sized headshot of Marvin Gaye on my “What’s Going On” LP is represented as a 200x200 pixel scan of a CD cover. It’s a fuzzy JPEG that I can squint at—just enough information to recall the splendor of the actual foot-square album cover. But there is nothing to open up, nothing to read, and no interaction. There is no deeper discovery, and certainly nothing physically collectible. MP3s may have the advantage of simplicity and atomization, but they alone deliver so much less metadata than even CDs did. There’s a thick curtain between me and the performer.

How can the experience be rescued? Does anyone care about the visual aesthetic of music anymore, or is it all really just MySpace and mp3s?

I don’t see what everyone is complaining about. You want wealth? You want fame? Just follow my advice.

1. Two words: Contemporary dance. You would not believe what the foundations are paying these days. They are filthy rich, and they are just waiting for someone like you to strip off your clothes and pogo around the black box. It’s a high-stakes game, but everybody wins. Start early—around 6 or 7 years old—and by 20 you will have funders beating down your door. That beautiful Chelsea brownstone will finally be in your grasp.
2. Win the Tour de France. This is an obvious one, and really I’m not sure why more people don’t do it. Between the sponsorships and prize money, you’ll be set. Brush your teeth before you do that Nike commercial.
3. Build and flip a tech startup. For procrastinators, this usually takes a year, but you could do it in 3 months if you put your mind to it. You really only have to fill out a few forms, and you’re off. Easy.
4. Bring in a great producer. Here’s the real low-hanging fruit. Get Timberland in there to lay some beats down on your tracks, and you will be a high roller in no time flat. You just need some decent marketing folks and a few dollars for promotions. No, you don’t need to know how to sing, just be your hot self. It’s gonna be off the chain!
5. Hit the casino. You just put some cash down on the table, grab a drink, and when you return, you’ll pocket a fat win. Repeat until you run the world.
6. 7 years of silent meditation and prayer. This is a sure-fire route to mega wealth and fame. Don’t worry about the electricity bill—just sit tight and everything will work out.
7. Marry someone really rich. Well, this one goes without saying.

This is from a few months back, I just forgot to post it.

I’ve just finished reading Eat Here by Brian Halweil, a manifesto on the benefits of locally grown and processed food. It’s an inspiring book and has gotten me excited about how food gets to the right tables. Our current system seems to trade labor costs for transportation costs: get cheap labor on a huge, highly mechanized farm in Mexico, then pay to move the harvest a few thousand miles. My favorite statistic from the book: with this system, you get about 10% of the calories from eating the food vs. calories required to move the food. In a way, we are just moving lots of water around the world.

On the other side of the spectrum are CSAs, local cooperatives, etc. It’s a good system but it’s very fragmented and doesn’t feel optimal to me. So I want to work on this problem of getting local food to local tables.

Do you think urban gardening, on many small plots across the city, could be scaled up to yield a substantial amount of local produce (enough for a profit), if the logistics were greased with a bit of technology? Peer-to-peer gardening? I’m thinking of a system that connects land owners who have extra yard/roof space—and no desire to garden—with nearby stewards who love to garden but have no land. Stewards ride/walk/run to gardens on sunny days after work, getting exercise and doing what they love in exchange for some produce. Land owners are paid in cash, produce, and/or the beauty of a garden where a pile of dirt once was. Old folks who used to garden, but don’t have the energy for it anymore, might love to see some tomatoes growing in their yard again.

This is truly local food: The bulk of the urban harvest goes out to farmer’s markets and restaurants, if that’s the easiest route to the table. This is probably the hardest problem: knowing when things are ripe, and gathering and selling them quickly. The problem is made harder if the gardens are biodynamic, because you can’t just say "go pick all cabbage plots." How would crop distribution across gardens allow you to minimize the number of gardens visited in a given week? Gardens with a few vegetables that ripen around the same time vs. 12 that ripen over different times might be easier to manage.

I think the stewards and landowners could coordinate some things online, but getting soil and seed, and doing the prep work each season and for each new garden would take a lot of time and up-front capital. Each garden would have to be pretty standardized—which is why I like the Square Foot Gardening approach: it has high yield, it doesn’t depend on existing soil quality (BYO soil), it requires fewer tools, and it’s modular and scalable across many different garden sizes.

Crop loss via theft, drought, and negligence would have to be absorbed somehow. Supermarkets get by with 5% shrinkage so this isn’t a huge concern when the garden network is big.

Other concerns: liability and accessibility for rooftops, raccoons and other collateral nuisances, having "steward capacity" for coverage while other stewards are on vacation, how to process excess yield—ideally, a local canning facility. OK, this is a huge project and one could spend a lifetime on it.

Your thoughts?

May 18, 2006

July 13, 2006

In high school, in the Nashville summers, perhaps my favorite thing to drink was the fruit tea served by Calypso Café. It had a tropical flavor, but it was also iced tea. Plus, Calypso gave out free refills, so I would drink quarts of it over a lunch plate of roasted chicken, black beans, and greens.

Here’s a fruit tea recipe I found recently that tastes just like the Calypso version, and that will be available in my fridge for the rest of the summer. It is really easy to make. To make a little more than a gallon (don’t worry, you will drink it all):

12 cups water
a whole large can of pineapple juice
one stick cinnamon
10 cloves
8 coins of ginger, each about the size of a quarter
1/2 - 1 cup sugar, to taste
16 teabags

Boil all ingredients except the tea bags, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Turn off the heat and add the teabags. Brew 5 minutes. Run the whole thing through a strainer and put into a pitcher in the fridge. Serve with loads of ice.

(adapted from Let The Flames Begin)

A few weeks ago, Jon and I went to the BALLE conference to find out why our world is so unsustainable, and to see if there’s any hope. Bill McKibben gave a fantastic, extremely distressing, inspiring, and generally excellent talk on the opening night of the conference. He covered a lot of ground, but I think I caught the central thesis: Peak oil demands a continuous solution that must change where and how we live and work, the policy and culture of local farming, local businesses, and local green initiatives. All of these demand a refocus on our local community and on the things that make us happy (hint: it’s not big profit$$$). We have the power to create businesses and policies that can substantially push these changes ahead. Here are some tidbits from his talk:

• Ten times more conversations take place at farmer’s markets than at grocery stores. At the farmer’s market, people are actually talking to each other and directly to the farmers! They are trying to figure out what’s ripe, what they are looking at, and why they don’t buy local food more often. They’re connecting with their neighbors. They being a community together. At the grocery store, the typical conversation is very short and usually ends the same way: “plastic.”
• Speaking of neighbors, 75% of people in this country do not know theirs.
• Speaking of local food, here’s how the local food movement is doing: The average bite of food on the American plate travels 2,000 miles. As McKibben put it, “We are ordering take out from across the world, three times a day.”
• Meanwhile, the most productive farms in the country, in terms of food per acre, are between 8 and 15 acres, according to the USDA.

(I can track down sources for any of these stats, in case you are wondering.)

This stuff is staggering. We have a lot of work to do! As late Jane Jacobs said, “Find your place in the world, dig in, and take responsibility.”

Are you ready?