In just 4 months, the coronavirus tested the world’s food system – and FAILED. People panicked and started hoarding food, masks, and toilet paper! With shelter-in-place orders, farmers let edible produce rot and gassed, shot or buried livestock because food supply chains were broken. If this happened in the few months we have faced a pandemic, imagine what is going to happen when global warming changes our food supply due to droughts, water shortages, and an outdated supply chain.
By the end of this year, over a billion people will be without sufficient food supplies. The United Nations is holding a “Food Systems Summit” next year to craft a well-organized global effort to address food security and challenges that agriculture faces today. We need to rethink what we grow and stop over producing commodity crops; instead, we need to prioritize conservation methods. Farm groups are banding together to create a sustainable alternative to the Farm Bill.
Rather than forcing farmers to succumb to Big Ag, we need to support farmers as they grow a variety of vegetables using non-GMO seeds, maintain organic systems, and reduce pesticides and fertilizer use. We need a new business model that doesn’t create an assembly-line approach to food. This has caused countries to produce just a few types of crops and makes them dependent on imports to feed their people. That’s how we ended up with over production of corn in the US, wheat in Russia, and soybeans in the Amazon rainforest.
Big Ag is causing a rise in CO2. We need to make American agriculture carbon neutral and expand soil conservation programs. To do this, we’ll need Congress to support farmers and ranchers to employ climate stewardship practices. We can’t allow Big Ag to consume resources, crush biodiversity, pollute the environment, and negate agriculture’s potential climate benefits, while they produce crops and food with little variety or nutrition.
If the coronavirus pandemic has taught us anything, we don’t want to be dependent on food imported from other countries. This can be dangerous and can cause starvation when governments make export decisions and restrictions to feed their own populations or for political gains. Let’s support the small, local farmers and get Big Ag out of our food supply chain.
In just 4 months, the coronavirus tested the world’s food system – and FAILED. People panicked and started hoarding food, masks, and toilet paper! With shelter-in-place orders, farmers let edible produce rot and gassed, shot or buried livestock because food supply chains were broken. If this happened in the few months we have faced a pandemic, imagine what is going to happen when global warming changes our food supply due to droughts, water shortages, and an outdated supply chain.
By the end of this year, over a billion people will be without sufficient food supplies. The United Nations is holding a “Food Systems Summit” next year to craft a well-organized global effort to address food security and challenges that agriculture faces today. We need to rethink what we grow and stop over producing commodity crops; instead, we need to prioritize conservation methods. Farm groups are banding together to create a sustainable alternative to the Farm Bill.
Rather than forcing farmers to succumb to Big Ag, we need to support farmers as they grow a variety of vegetables using non-GMO seeds, maintain organic systems, and reduce pesticides and fertilizer use. We need a new business model that doesn’t create an assembly-line approach to food. This has caused countries to produce just a few types of crops and makes them dependent on imports to feed their people. That’s how we ended up with over production of corn in the US, wheat in Russia, and soybeans in the Amazon rainforest.
Big Ag is causing a rise in CO2. We need to make American agriculture carbon neutral and expand soil conservation programs. To do this, we’ll need Congress to support farmers and ranchers to employ climate stewardship practices. We can’t allow Big Ag to consume resources, crush biodiversity, pollute the environment, and negate agriculture’s potential climate benefits, while they produce crops and food with little variety or nutrition.
If the coronavirus pandemic has taught us anything, we don’t want to be dependent on food imported from other countries. This can be dangerous and can cause starvation when governments make export decisions and restrictions to feed their own populations or for political gains. Let’s support the small, local farmers and get Big Ag out of our food supply chain.
Get this message out to the teens and young adults who think they are invincible and won’t get COVID-19. One-third of young adults may be at risk of getting seriously sick with COVID-19 – especially if they smoke or vape. For young men, smoking or vaping can more than DOUBLE the potential of being hospitalized, needing intensive care, or dying from the virus. For young women, it could increase the possibility about 1.5 times.
With young people partying during spring breaks, summer vacations, 4th of July and more, they are now driving the nation’s surge in COVID cases. Kids between 18-29 years old are filling more hospital beds today than they did at the start of the pandemic. There’s been a 300% increase in hospitalizations of youth between mid-April and late June.
In California, new coronavirus cases among young people under age 35 surged by 73% at the end of June (compared to the first of June). During this same time period, infections for people over 50 rose only 43% — showing that smoking/vaping youth are at higher risk than people over 50.
I hope that youth will stop smoking and vaping to increase their chances of making it through this pandemic. This will also improve their overall health and life expectancy.
I’ve had some interesting conversations about future expectations and plans with both young and old people. Now that we’re in our 4th month of shelter-in-place with new COVID-19 surges in half of the states, we’re really feeling the stress of the unknown. When can we see our families again? Will schools and colleges offer on-campus classes this school year? Will I ever go back to work again? How did this pandemic become so political that misinformation has become rampant? I’ve addressed these questions in past blogs.
Learning how to deal with pandemics may become part of the way we live our lives. All of the brides and grooms who have postponed their weddings and honeymoons for months are having to make difficult decisions about their nuptials and who they can invite. Guest lists have been stripped from 250 people down to 40. Church and restaurant venues are now being replaced with outdoor beach gatherings with social distancing. Grandparents and at-risk family and friends are watching the event on Zoom or Google Meet.
Deciding when or if they should have children has also become a serious conversation. Grandparents are missing opportunities to be there for baby arrivals and celebrations. Many 30-somethings are considering not having children – after all, should they bring babies into a world where pandemics isolate kids from family and friends? What about another real threat: climate crisis? While our climate problems have been sidelined as the world focuses on finding a vaccine for the coronavirus, we still need to reduce our CO2 and develop sustainable energy.
High school and college students are stressed as they make decisions about how to finance an online college experience and how far away from home they should go. Parents worry that their children may become infected by other students if they return to campus this fall, yet parents need to go to work and school has always been the place kids go during the day. If we knew that the coronavirus would be contained in 6 months, we could make plans and start living our lives. But this pandemic may take years to understand and eradicate.
70% of current college students (who took a survey) have lost income due to the recession caused by the coronavirus. 50% changed their living situations in the spring; and 25% dropped at least one course. Over 90% are concerned about their colleges shifting to online learning.
It’s time to rethink how we socialize, work, learn, and celebrate. We need to look ahead and make smart decisions. And, we need to do this as people, not political parties. It’s time to work together so we can move on.
I’m neither good at nor comfortable receiving gifts. It must be the Japanese in me. I usually [awkwardly] don’t know what to say, because the spotlight is on me and I want to show appreciation but my mind is whirling in circles wondering if I deserve the gift or acknowledgement. So when Valley Medical Center staff gathered around me and presented me with a gift that they wanted me to open right there, I had one of those awkward moments. I didn’t know what to say. There were dozens of cameras shooting photos and videos as I opened the plaque.
The plaque had a photo of the ER docs, nurses, and staff holding their gift bags of 3-layered cloth masks, plastic shields, and bottles of wine. The plaque read: SCVMC Emergency Department Staff Thank the D’Arcy Family for supporting us during the Covid-10 Pandemic. Wow!
I don’t know how they had the time (or energy) to have the photo mounted and plaque engraved. They were thanking us? Huh? We made the gifts and gave them dinners to show thanks and appreciation for them working on the frontline with COVID patients and risking their lives (and their family’s lives) to treat and care for everyone.
I feel humbled that they presented me with this plaque when they are the heroes. I love knowing that we all shared that moment together – something we all needed during this terrifying pandemic. I would make gifts and bring meals to every one of them every day, if I could. And I plan to keep supporting them until we get through this.
Having more time because I’m NOT going out to dinners, walking on the beach, and hosting parties has its benefits. Yesterday, I finished a 3-month weeding project on my 2.5 acres. I just logged in 140 hours of weeding thistles and poison oak. This is definitely NOT something I would have done without the shelter-in-place order that forced me to stay home.
This year’s thistles consumed our property. Instead of having a few here and there, we had thick forests that were taller than me. I realized that simply weedwhacking the problem away each year only lays the perfect environment for seed propagation. Normally, I’d gasp at the crop of weeds and then hire a weedwhacker to level them, but this year I stepped up to challenge myself and handled it myself.
I started at the top of my property and spent 2-6 hours pulling thistles before work. I doubled up on leather gloves and bought every variety sold. After donning my knee pads, hat, and sunscreen, I hand pulled every thistle plant on my property and when I found huge pockets of fluffy seeds, I put them in trash cans. I shoveled poison oak by the roots and put them in cans to dry. My fingers are swollen from embedded thorns and my arms are covered in rash.
Somehow I feel a sense of accomplishment. While this isn’t exciting and it’s something most people don’t understand, getting up at the crack of dawn and racing to pull weeds – section by section – before the sun comes up over the ridge was challenging. I didn’t have to think and there was no stress. I saw insects – even a black widow! – and a snake. Normally they would scare me but they quickly moved away and I just kept weeding. Looking back at the piles of weeds I pulled each morning and evening made me feel proud. Yeah, it sounds odd even as I write this blog.
For now, I love looking at my weed-free rolling hills, and I’m hoping that next season will bring fewer thistles and poison oak. I’ll keep you posted next April!
Let’s get our heads out of the sand and start making important decisions about how we must conduct our lives in the midst of a pandemic that is NOT going away anytime soon, or ever. Yup, without a unified plan to lockdown – yes – keep everyone home until the coronavirus is dead, this will go on for years. I just had a heart-to-heart conversation with Nicole, my daughter who is an ER doc, about the coronavirus. This is what she believes we’re facing:
The coronavirus is very contagious and it can adapt. Additionally, the science behind designing vaccines is very complex. First you find a part of the virus to mimic in the targeted vaccine. That way when your body comes into contact with that part of the virus, your body already has antibodies to fight it. Next you need to make sure that the antibodies that your body makes to the vaccine will work to help your body fight it when you come into contact with the actual virus. You don’t want those antibodies to actually make your response even worse such that you get even sicker (this happened with dengue vaccine attempts).
We can’t blindly wait for a miracle vaccine to solve our coronavirus problems. To make a vaccine safely, and confirm that it will not cause this increased response that makes it even more lethal via antibody-dependent enhancement, we will need to perform phased clinical trials on real people (likely on 100,000s of healthcare workers who volunteer for this). Most vaccines take years to decades to prove efficacy and safety before they are ready to distribute, especially to millions of people at once. This will take years to roll-out safely/responsibly.
Nicole spends most of her free time reading scientific journals to follow developments in treatments, vaccines, and epidemiology. Your doctors aren’t getting their covid-19 updates from TV news, politicians or social media.
She is now worried about the two possible trajectories for this pandemic:
1. Everyone begins to go back to work and school/college; gather with family and friends at home, restaurants, and other public venues; and travel across city, state, and national borders. The coronavirus continues to spread and COVID-19 kills millions of people around the world. Anyone who is going to get coronavirus will get it and those who are susceptible will recover, suffer long-term lung and blood vessel damage, or die. After these millions of people are infected, whoever is left standing will either be immune themselves or protected by herd immunity.
2. We collectively, in unison, change our lifestyles to prevent spread of the virus. Universal mask wearing, social distancing, hand hygiene, stay completely isolated at home when you have any hint of the sniffles or body aches, etc. This would slow the transmission of the virus such that the healthcare system is not overwhelmed (like NYC in the beginning and like Texas and Southern California are trending towards now), and the people who do get sick will be treated with all of the techniques that are being studied and developed with reliable and reproducible scientific clinical trials (which takes time).
Individual cities or regions or states or countries cannot make decisions about when to lift shelter-in-place orders. This pandemic is global and affects the entire world population. As a planet, we need to protect ourselves and protect others from spreading this deadly virus. That means that until it is contained everywhere, we all need to stay home to minimize nonessential contact, consistently wear masks, and maintain 6-10 feet distance away from everyone.
Stop thinking that your life will go back to the way it was BC (before coronavirus). We will always need to protect ourselves and others from spreading the virus. A new swine flu with pandemic-level characteristics has just been discovered in China this month. There are more pandemics on the horizon, even when this one slows down. Washing hands (or using hand sanitizers when out in public), and wearing masks can become our new normal. Dining outdoors when socializing and staying 6-10 feet apart will be how we meet with and gather with friends and family. Shaking hands will be replaced with nods or fist bumps.
Want to see how I’ve created a place and protocol for social gatherings that respect our need to protect one another? Check out my blog:
Or take a look at my guidelines for safe gatherings.
Our house has always been the party house. We have hosted all holiday parties, birthday parties, meetings – any reason to get together. I love to cook and entertain. So I’ve had to rethink how to socialize with family and friends in a safe and responsible way. At first, it seemed cumbersome, but as months pass, I realized that I can do this. Here are my tips on Socially Responsible Gatherings.
Where:
I just built a redwood deck and 3 bistro tables with 2 chairs per table. I also remodeled my kitchen deck with 2 bistro tables with 2 chairs per table. The tables are set 6 feet apart. Being outdoors is much safer than indoors.
When:
Rather than dinners with late-night activities, I’m planning afternoon gatherings when we can be outside.
Who:
Instead of having 25-50 people, I am inviting just one or two couples. While it’s fun to have huge bashes, it’s also fun to talk to a few friends and really catch up on our lives, politics, and our families. Besides, it’s easier to manage 2-4 people than 25-50. I’ll just need to have more Socially Responsible Gatherings to see all of my friends and family!
Masks:
Everyone will wear masks except while eating. That means that they’ll wear masks as they serve themselves, walk to the bathroom, and while talking at their bistro tables. If everyone wears a mask, we show respect for one another and we keep our germs (and viruses) to ourselves.
Hand Sanitizer:
Have a bottle of hand sanitizer at every table and any location where guests may visit. This reduces the risk of spreading viruses.
Meals:
I’m planning individual servings that don’t require sharing serving spoons. Burritos, tacos, shish kabobs, wraps, and sushi maki are all easy to grab – and they don’t require serving utensils. No more taco bars or buffet-style dining. Guests serve themselves using their utensils one at a time. When the first guest is done getting their food, the next guest goes up so only one person at a time is near the food. Good social distancing.
Plates and Utensils:
Everyone brings their own plates, utensils, drinking containers, napkins, and whatever they’re drinking. At the end of the meal, guests put their dishes and utensils in their cloth bags and put them in their cars. That way I won’t be touching their dinnerware and placing them in my dishwasher. I won’t worry about a bunch of people in my kitchen touching the faucet, fridge, cabinets, and everything.
Bathroom:
By having sanitizing wipes in the restroom, guests can wipe the toilet handle, toilet seat, door knob, and any surface they touch as they exit the bathroom and head back to the deck.
Clean up:
When guests are ready to leave, they’ll take their dinnerware and trash/recycling with them. I’ll take the serving trays up to the kitchen for washing and storing. Then I’ll disinfect the chairs, tables, serving area, railings, bathroom, and areas where guests may have visited in the house.
While this is a different way to party, we can still have fun. We can catch up, play games, and enjoy each other’s company. Before the event, I send a Socially Responsible Gathering Guidelines to guests so they understand the new protocol and will feel reassured that they’ll be safe. Check out my tips to create your Socially Responsible Gatherings.
All my gardening during the SIP is paying off big time! All 3 of my cherry trees were loaded with beautiful cherries this year. Made a DIY cherry picker (they were sold out at all stores) out of a liter soda bottle. I picked the cherries a few days before they were fully ripened so that the birds and rodents wouldn’t get them before me. When you pick cherries early, they’re a little sour because they don’t continue to ripen after you pick them. So I left about a 100 cherries on the tree so I could pick them when they were perfect, but the birds got every one of them. They know when to eat cherries and they beat me by a few hours…
Want to learn more about the American Mothers, Inc.? Check out the Meet the California Mothers of the Year zoom meeting. President, Dorothy Devore, hosted the meeting and several past Mothers of the Year spoke about their platforms and projects. What a diverse and interesting group of moms. I spoke about my projects and what I’ve done over the past year. And, we got to hear from Simona Grace, the 2020 Mother of the Year!
Watch Zoom Meeting here
Just delivered a gourmet lunch to all of the ER staff at Valley Medical Center in San Jose today. My aunt and uncle asked me to deliver really special meals to the entire ER staff (3 shifts) to make sure that they know that we appreciate what they do to take care of all of us. This was the first meal delivery. I’ve been discussing menus, tastings, presentation, and costs with all of my favorite restaurants in Santa Cruz. Besides gaining a few more pounds, it’s been fun putting together the perfect menus. That’s right up my alley!
I love The Farm in Aptos, CA. They have the best fresh fruit tartlets, shortbread cookies, and spinach and gorgonzola quiches. Just to make the lunch extra special, we added a turkey club sandwich and a cobb salad! You know – so the staff would have all kinds of amazing tastes!
Thanks to my aunt and uncle for their generosity and for their love and concern for Nicole. Big thanks to the entire ER at VMC. They’re the best and they have incredible spirit. They sent us a thank you video that I’ll share here. 
