SLM AT HOME | Secretary of the Interior

All I Want for Christmas

Outdoor Christmas decorations have always confounded me. Every year, I nudge my husband and point wistfully to all the icicles and glowing bulbs on our neighbors' houses, and he just shrugs, not the least bit interested in the ladders and tedium implied.

A few years ago, I decided to take matters into my own hands. On walks, I stared, trying to figure out how people actually rigged them. I can comprehend the process if you have a nice handy outdoor outlet on the front of your house. But failing that, you either leave a window cracked and risk home invasion and pneumonia, Or you string the cord through your mailbox, as I once did, feeling like Wallace and Gromit as the dog watched in bemusement.

Then we moved, and I couldn't even string my Target topiary trees through the mailbox. So this year I resolved to hire an electrician, pay him the cost of universal health care, and insist he drill right through three layers of brick and concrete. I wanted a festive house, dammit!

I was about to call when I saw the walkway trees. Brookstone has swags, wreaths and walkway trees in its catalog, and they are battery operated! Brilliant on so many levels...

Of course, they only come in warm white or multicolored, and as my husband and I have a lifelong war going over white or multi, I had hoped for a compromise. Amber! Amber would be perfect. It would look golden, it would match the trim on the house... I could use the forlorn topiary trees and restring them...

Excited, I started searching the Internet for amber + outdoor + LED + battery operated + Christmas (retailers are not p.c.). I searched compulsively, using various recombinations and fragments of these search terms, for four nights in a row. I emailed sellers. I wrote Brookstone. No dice.

Every string of battery-operated LED lights that comes in amber or gold is rated "Indoor."

And every string of "Outdoor" battery-operated lights is either white or multicolored.

Either I'm doomed to continue the marital wars, or I blow the house up by putting indoor lights outdoors.

"The hell with it," I told Andrew. "I'm buying an inflatable Santa."

He grinned. "I think you have to plug them in."

--Jeannette Cooperman, staff writer

The Omnivore's Cornicopia

On Tuesday night, the Webster Film Series screened Food, Inc. as the final installment of this year's Human Rights Film Series. The woman who introduced the film stated that the programmers left that movie for last -- prior screenings included King Korn, A Civil Action, Blue Gold: World Water Wars, and Manon of Spring -- because it's such a fantastic documentary, and the industrialization of our food supply is one of our most immediate and pressing concerns.

For me, realizing that most of the beef that ends up in fast-food burgers is washed with ammonia because processors just assume high levels of e. coli (a problem caused by overcrowding cattle, as well as feeding them corn, which they cannot digest), convinced me that yes, this is an emergency. What compensated for sufferng through dry heaves -- and wet eyes -- during the factory farm and slaughterhouse sequences was footage of renegade farmer Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm. According to Salatin, a cow will shed most of the e.coli in its gut in a week or so once you put it back out to pasture and allow it to eat grass. So why are we pumping cattlle full of antibiotics, which only serves to breed resistant strains of e. coli? Why are we still feeding them corn? Sure, corn is cheap; but I can't imagine that grass isn't! The answer is that all of these practices are subsidized, the result of lobbying by the processed food industry. Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, who also appear in the film, make that point repeatedly. And that we can change that by supporting small, family farms like Salatin's, growing our own gardens, and being as conscious as possible about what we buy and stick in our mouths.

Though Food, Inc. screened one night only (it caused a lot of controversy when it opened in St. Louis, thanks to a critical chapter on Monsanto, so perhaps the run was cut short?), the good news is that Salatin will be here Monday October 5 to deliver a lecture, titled "Ballet in the Pasture," at Webster's Grand Gynmasium (if you can't go, check out Jean Ponzi's recent interview with Salatin on KDHX's Earthworms.) Interestingly enough, St. Louis seems to be the point of constellation for this issue right now, perhaps because we are hosting Farm Aid this Sunday at the Verizon Ampitheater. Related to that event: the Farm Meets Fork Farm Aid benefit October 2, the Farmer Cook-Off at Taste of St. Louis and HOMEGROWN Urban Country Fair at the Tower Grove Famer's Market October 3.

As for the future of industrial iceberg lettuce -- I'd like to echo the sentiments expressed in  this edition of Ben Katchor's Hotel & Farm. --Stefene Russell