Fox Business

I was wearing a suit, and no one was getting married. No one had died. I felt like I was going to my own funeral. I felt like I had lost myself. I was going to be on Fox Business.

This was 2007. Fox was Fox, but it wasn’t quite the Fox it is today. And business? There isn’t much business in my soul. But the PR person at my publisher had booked me on a show on Fox Business to share my “expertise” “on” “trade” “in” “China.”  

I had been to China exactly one time. I met a couple who worked in the factory that made my Teva flip flops near Guangzhou. I had traveled to the…

Local Business

The Rings

My friends Dave and Sara Ring own and operate an organic grocery store in my hometown of Muncie, Indiana. 

I wrote about them in my book Where Am I Eating?”: 

“The Downtown Farm Stand is located in the heart of Muncie.  Like our food moving overseas, like farmers moving to the burbs, life in Muncie has moved to McGalliard Road, a long strip of middle America strip malls and every chain restaurant a binge eater could want. The Farm Stand is the only place downtown where Munsonians can buy groceries these days.”

Recently Dave and Sara announced that for a variety of reasons, including declining grocery and deli sales, their store…

“Each Land has the Magic” to Help in These Troubling Times

During this time of self-isolating, curve-flattening, and social-distancing, we find ourselves removed from the comforts and relationships of our normal world. We may feel alone, isolated, distant, afraid, and flattened. 

COVID-19 is a reminder that we are part of nature whether we understand that or not. A tiny little life-form previously unknown to us has brought our world to a stop. I have friends in Kenya that are bracing for the impact. My friend in Colombia, Maria, is on lockdown and playing Scrabble with her roommates. And here in Indiana and across the United States we are half-heartedly hunkering while the virus closes in around us. 

Nature Therapy

But removed from our day-to-day world, and as disjointed as that…

Why we’re canceling our trip to Kauai: an exponential essay

Why we’re canceling our trip to Kauai: an exponential essay

1. Today
2. I cancelled
3. My trip to Hawaii. 
4. I was leaving next week. My wife, too.  
5. She was joining me the first week of a three-week research trip for my next book.
6. We never really had a honeymoon. Unless you count another book-trip stopping at a garment factory in Perry, New York, and then going to Niagara Falls, Canada, for a day. She doesn’t. 
7. I first visited Kauai nearly 20 years ago. Since I hiked her trails, paddled her waters, ate her wild…
   

It’s HUGE to Feel small

I laid on the bottom of the ocean and stared into space. 

The surface of the water was so still and flat that it ceased to exist. The light of the stars traveled unimpeded trillions of miles, through the Earth’s atmosphere and 20 feet of water. 

I held my breath, the sound of my heartbeat joining the primordial hum of the Atlantic. 

I pushed off the bottom. Underwater like in space one is weightless.

That night off the coast of Key West, I slowly kicked towards constellations, no difference between air and space. I swam into eons and lightyears, not an observer of the universe but part of it. 

—

I stood in my…

Building on the work of other journalists

Yesterday I chatted with a documentarian in Scotland who is working on a film on where food comes from. We chatted for an hour about chocolate, bananas, and coffee.

I think journalism is like science in that community members build on each other’s work. I always take the time to help out a fellow journalist. I think it’s part of the responsibility of this work.

I had a chat with Elizabeth Cline very early on in her process of writing Overdressed. I even introduced her to my friend Dalton, who appeared in WHERE AM I WEARING. I also chatted with Marcus Stern who did a really great piece on child labor in coffee for The Weather Channel and Telemundo.

…

A baboon in Ethiopia is named after me

Check out this note from a student who read WHERE AM I EATING a few years ago:

Hi Kelsey! Thanks for the invite for The Facing Project. Can’t wait to look into it more! You spoke to my sociology class with Máel Sheridan at Hamline university after we read your book in 2015. Funny story, and long story short: I’m a Peace Corps health volunteer in Ethiopia and was trying to explain in local language the idea behind your books as it relates to my community (where are all these goods coming from? How did they get here?). A couple weeks later the live-in guard at my health center appeared with a pet baboon. It was then named after you in honor of your books. “Kelsey” spelt differently in afran Oromo…

On Prom Night I was a Lucky Immoral Idiot

In high school I drove a black Firebird. It was a ‘93 Trans-Am, the first year for the curvaceous f-body, with a 275-horse-powered LT1 engine. The same engine the Corvette had. It wasmy dream car then and now. The license plate read: BATMBLE.

Batmobile. I’d be lying if it ended with the license plate. I had Batman floor mats. I had the soundtrack to the first Batman movie, the one with Michael Keaton, in the CD player. I loved blaring it on fall nights, leaves swirling where the Batmobile had been.

“You want to get nuts,” Bruce Wayne said to the Joker’s henchmen in the movie. “Come on let’s get nuts.”

I occasionally got nuts in the Batmobile….

Speaking in Indy & Evansville this week

I’ll be speaking about WHERE AM I WEARING? at Marian University in Indianapolis tomorrow night 9/5. Doors open at 7.  Details here – https://events.marian.edu/events/#!view/event/event_id/6761

And I’ll be speaking about WHERE AM I GIVING on Thursday, 9/6, at the downtown Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library at 7 PM. Details here – https://events.evpl.org/event/922843…

My son the tiger

Raise your expectations to succeed.

“Aim for the moon and, even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”  – W. Clement Stone

Or, inversely, lower your expectations to feel like you succeeded.

“The secret of happiness is low expectations.” – Barry Schwartz

Expectations can be healthy or unrealistic.

My son Griffin is in Kindergarten. We didn’t expect autism and had never suspected it until our pediatrician raised the concern when Griff was only 18-months old. Then kindergarten seemed like light years away and an impossibility.

Would he talk? Would he learn? Would he listen?

He exceeded our expectations during kindergarten. Academically he performed on a fourth grade-level; that’s as high as the test would go….