Roger Warburton: Toasty October in New England
The average temperature for October 2021 was above average across the Midwest and New England.
Roger Warburton/NCEI data)
From ecoRI News (ecori.org)
During October 2021, the average U.S. temperature was 57 degrees Fahrenheit, which was 2.9 degrees above the 20th-Century average. It was sixth-warmest October in the 127-year record.
Recently released data from the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) showed temperatures above average from the Midwest through New England. Temperatures were below average on the West Coast.
Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Maine each saw their second-warmest October since 1894.
The temperature rise for Rhode Island was 2.4 degrees, which was the highest of all the New England states. While this is not a category in which the Ocean State should celebrate being No. 1, the state’s higher-than-average October temperatures meant residential energy demand was 13 percent less than average demand. It was the state’s fourth-lowest October energy demand in the 127-year record.
However, fall and winter declines in energy bills will be more than made up for by increases in cooling bills because of higher summer temperatures.
Roger Warburton, Ph.D., is a Newport, R.I., resident and contributor to ecoRI News. He can be reached at rdh.warburton@gmail.com.
Notes: NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), State of the Climate: National Climate Report for October 2021, published online November 2021, retrieved on Jan. 25, 2022 from https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/202110.
Stage fright
“Actress” (1993) (offset color lithograph), by Hughie Lee-Smith (1915-1999), in the show “Prints from the Brandywine Workshop and Archives: Creative Communities,’’ at Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Mass., opening March 4.
The real Boston?
Twenty one people were killed on Commercial Street in Boston’s North End on Jan. 15, 1919, when a tank of molasses ruptured and exploded. An eight-foot-high wave of the syrupy brown liquid moved down Commercial Street at 35 mph. Wreckage of the collapsed tank is visible in background, center, next to light -colored warehouse.
The original Dunkin’ Donuts store, in the Boston inner-suburb of Quincy.
“I guess no true Bostonian would trust a place that was sunny and pleasant all the time. But a gritty, perpetually cold and gloomy neighborhood? Throw in a couple of Dunkin’ Donuts locations, and I’m right at home.”
— Rick Riordan (born 1964), raised in Texas, this novelist now lives in Boston.
Straining through the winter
“All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding
and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul
sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer,
for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.’’
— From “Names of Horses,’’ by Donald Hall (1928-2018), a U.S. poet laureate who spent his last decades at Eagle Pond Farm, in Wilmot, N.H. This poem is a reference to the horses used by his maternal grandparents at the farm.
They’re in charge
“Crow on a Branch,’’ by Kawanabe Kyosai (1831–1889)
“Five crows, frock-coated in dignity, have arrived and sit upright and still on a bough. One thinks, ‘Oh, beloved symbols of New England’ or ‘Drat those birds,’ depending on whether one is planning a poem or a cornfield.’’
— Richard F. Merrifield, in Monadnock Journal (1975)
Purple P.M.
“Violet Afternoon’’ (oil on canvas), by Susan Abbott, at Edgewater Gallery, Middlebury, Vt. She live in northern Vermont.
Llewellyn King: College melds arcane trades with liberal arts
The American College of the Building Arts, in Charleston, S.C.
The Breakers, the famed Newport mansion, and the other great “cottages in the city, provide work for the sort of artisans traded by the American College of the Building Arts.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
It takes years to learn to fashion something out of a block of stone. You may think that you have talent, but it isn’t intuitive. You have to study stone carving, take up the mallet and chisel, waste a lot of rock, and gradually turn from novice to craftsman.
Likewise, you won’t learn the delights of English literature in a week. It takes time.
All of this can be accomplished in one extraordinary place: the American College of the Building Arts, in Charleston, S.C. — a jewel of the South with its many antebellum mansions and other buildings, making it a place of living history.
The college offers a full liberal-arts curriculum plus a specialization in one of six building arts: Classical architecture, blacksmithing, timber framing, carpentry, plaster and stone-cutting. It owes its existence to Hugo, the Category 4 hurricane that slammed into Charleston and much of the rest of the Carolina coast in 1989. Many of Charleston’s treasured homes and buildings were damaged.
Then came the second heartbreak: There was a dearth of craft workers who could put Charleston, like Humpy Dumpty, back together again. The shortage was so acute that it took more than 10 years to restore the city to what it had been pre-Hugo.
The civic pride of the city asserted itself. A group of shocked citizens vowed they wouldn’t go through that again. They would train fine artisans right there in Charleston. But they didn’t want just a trade school; they wanted a seat of learning and restoration to be part of that learning.
They didn’t want to turn out graduates who felt that they had to go through life entering through the back door. No. These would be graduates with a robust degree in liberal arts, as comfortable reading Shakespeare as helping restore a European cathedral built in his day.
So, the American College of the Building Arts was born, in 1999, and it is flourishing and growing. By college size standards, it is minuscule: 120 graduates this year. But in terms of educational creativity, it is huge. It shines a light that shows the way to a new concept of education: students learning a trade they enjoy, that is highly marketable, and also getting the benefits of four years of liberal-arts education.
In April 2018, I visited the college to film an episode of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and was captivated. I had never seen anything like it: a slight young woman working at a 2,000-degree forge, making a beautiful piece of decorative ironwork, inspired by work in a French cathedral; a woman, who had had a previous career in the Coast Guard, carving stone, with an ambition to work on the National Cathedral, in Washington; and a gifted African-American man, a former Marine who had traveled the world, working with big timbers in the framing shop.
Because I have an interest in words, I sat in on a literature course wondering secretly whether it was, perhaps, a bit cursory. It wasn’t. The former Marine timber-framing student said the literature course, taught by Wade Razzi, who has a doctorate degree from Oxford, was his favorite, and among the authors he loved was Charles Dickens.
A friend’s daughter was attracted to the college after learning about it from my television episode. He credits the college with having done wonders for her. She is a star stone carver there, likely headed to work on Liverpool Cathedral.
The college is a beacon for these reasons:
It gives its students a sense of purpose they might not have found otherwise: The reward of making something special and durable.
The college accepts men and women, although Razzi told me women were often the stars. Twenty-five percent of the students are women, and they lead in valedictorians. Five percent are veterans.
About a third of the students, within five years of graduating, start their own contracting businesses. This is so prevalent that the college has added accounting courses so that the young entrepreneurs can keep books.
The college must teach one foreign language, and that is Spanish. In a recent episode of White House Chronicle on the college, Razzi said Spanish is taught because it is essential in the building trades, where many workers are from Latin America.
One of the college’s biggest challenges is recruiting faculty, Razzi, who also serves as chief academic officer, said in that TV episode. Many faculty members come from Europe to teach arcane-in-America trades such as decorative plaster, stone carving and blacksmithing.
Some of these trades are arcane but in great demand from Newport, R.I.’s mansions – called “cottages’’ — to the National Cathedral and the Capitol, to memorial gardens. Artisans are in demand and artisans with liberal-arts credentials are something special: roundly skilled and roundly educated.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
American College of the Building Arts junior carving a stone mantle.
Waiting to hunt
Great Horned Owl
“A gravel road leads from the house to open fields that border
on both its sides, then ends abruptly
like an incomplete sentence where dense woods loom up
with depths dark as night. Here the great horned owl
makes its home, whose mating calls persist well into the predawn
when the grip of darkness begins to loosen
and dawn’s light filters through, spreading over fields and flashing
up against my house with such intensity it might set it on fire.’’
— From “Morning of the Great Horn Owl,’’ by Maurice Rigoler
Conn. insurer offering virtual primary care
From The New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com)
BOST0N
“Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield has announced that its virtual primary-care service is now available to some of its more than 1 million members in Connecticut.
“Anthem, which is the market share leader in the state, joins numerous other Connecticut insurers in rolling out virtual-primary-care services since 2020. Anthem said eligible commercial members will have access to virtual primary care through the digital health app Sydney Health. The app provides access to routine services, including new prescriptions and refills, preventive tests, lab work and referrals to in-network, in-person primary and specialty care when needed.
“‘This virtual primary care offering is the latest example of our ongoing efforts to redefine the future of health care with innovative solutions — giving members more ways to connect with doctors; integrating digital, virtual, and in-person care,’ said Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield in Connecticut President Lou Gianquinto.”
Boston drunk and sober
Drunk?
“In the course of my life I have tried Boston on all sides: I have summered it and wintered it, tried it drunk and tried it sober; and, drunk or sober, there’s nothing in it — save Boston!”
— Charles Francis Adams Jr. (1835-1915), a member of the distinguished Boston Brahmin family that has included two presidents, he was an author, historian and president of the Union Pacific Railroad. Like most in his family he was highly skeptical and sardonic.
Mr. Boston, previously Old Mr. Boston, was a distillery at 1010 Massachusetts Ave. Boston, from 1933 to 1986. It produced its own label of gin, bourbon, rum and brandies, as well as a few cordials and liqueurs.
Hollywood in Hanover
“Dolores del Rio for the Trail of '98” (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1928, gelatin silver print), by Russell Ball, in “Photographs from Hollywood’s Golden Era: The John Kobal Foundation,’’ at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H.
The Hood’s acquisition of these photographs gives it one of the world’s largest collections of photos from Hollywood’s golden age.
The museum says that "these images cover the gamut of studio photography from portraiture and publicity shots to film stills from Hollywood’s golden era of the 1920s through the 1950s." In addition to the photographs, a virtual lecture by renown film historian and film-maker Kevin Brownlow will be held on March 3 from 12:30–1:30 EST. For more information, please visit here.
Could lineless lobstering help save North Atlantic Right Whales from extinction?
North Atlantic Right Whale mother and calf.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
A group of Massachusetts lobstermen may have a way to be allowed to resume fishing in areas that have been closed off to such fishing because the vertical lines to traps (aka “pots”) at the sea bottom can entangle, injure and kill North Atlantic Right Whales and other whales, too.
The group would use remotely controlled balloon-like devices to bring the traps to the surface without lines. I wouldn’t be surprised if regulators mandate such arrangements, though naturally some other lobstermen are angry about the potential high expense.
Besides the fact that whales are big, highly intelligent, “charismatic” fellow mammals, why should we care if they go extinct? It’s because all species are connected. If you kill off one species, it has a knock-on and usually damaging (even lethal) effect on some others. The “web of life” and all that.
Old-fashioned lobster pot.
Chris Powell: Teen’s missing teeth indict parents and state
Possible ways for adverse childhood experiences such as abuse and neglect to influence health and well-being throughout the lifespan, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
How, in a wealthy and highly taxed state with scores of social programs and constant prattling about unmet human needs, does a 17-year-old girl approach adulthood missing six teeth and able to eat only soft food?
This month a report by Theresa Sullivan Barger, of the Connecticut Health I-Team, blamed the state Department of Children and Families for not taking custody of the girl soon enough after being notified that, after a long period of abuse and neglect, she had been expelled from her home and had to move in with a friend's family.
DCF, always reluctant to remove children from their parents, replied that neglect, abuse and an inability to function independently, criteria for removing a child, are usually harder to prove as children reach their later teens.
Of course, there will be no definitive public accounting for the girl's circumstances, because DCF case work is confidential by law until there is a fatality and the state child advocate investigates and reports. Only the girl herself and her supporters are fully free to talk and give their side now. Despite the journalism here that should stoke outrage, the governor and the General Assembly will ask no questions, much less investigate, though the girl's case is another hint about the foremost problem of both Connecticut and the country -- institutionalized child neglect.
Child-protection agencies seldom cause child neglect. Mostly they just clean up after it. Those agencies often can do little more than prevent kids from being maimed or murdered amid neglect or abuse. If children turn 18 and enter the world on their own with rotted-out teeth, child protection still can consider it a success.
But don't stop with the missing teeth. How do most Connecticut children graduate from high school without mastering high school classes, many illiterate and qualified only for menial work as they reach adulthood?
A painful answer was provided in 2016 by Superior Court Judge Thomas G. Moukawsher in his decision in one chapter of Connecticut's decades-long, futile and misdirected school-financing litigation: neglect by parents compounded by neglect by state government, whose only genuine educational policy is social promotion.
Just as it's enough for state government that children should reach 18 alive, it is enough for state government that children should finish their education with diplomas they didn't earn. Poverty begins at home, with fatherlessness generated by welfare stipends, and then is perfected in school by social promotion. Abandonment of life's crucial standards is comprehensive.
Meanwhile, ever more proclamations, policies, and programs emanate from a government that is oblivious to its failure to accomplish more than its own expansion.
The most effective way for government to end poverty might be just to stop manufacturing it -- to ensure that children have parents, to stop pretending they are learning when they're not, and to start treating government as the means to an end, not the end in itself -- the end, the purpose, being the child, the future.
The writer, philosopher and Catholic polemicist G.K. Chesterton raged about similar obliviousness in government in Britain a century ago.
"With the red hair of one she-urchin in the gutter I will set fire to all modern civilization," Chesterton wrote.
"Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home: because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free and leisured mother, she should not have an usurious landlord; because there should not be an usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property; because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution.
“That little urchin with the gold-red hair, whom I have just watched toddling past my house, she shall not be lopped and lamed and altered; her hair shall not be cut short like a convict's. No, all the kingdoms of the earth shall be hacked about and mutilated to suit her. She is the human and sacred image. All around her the social fabric shall sway and split and fall; the pillars of society shall be shaken, and the roofs of ages come rushing down, and not one hair of her head shall be harmed.”
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
Sonali Kolhatkar: Spotify is disaster for musicians
Spotify prefers Joe Rogan’s misinformation-laden podcasts to the work of musicians.
The May 1969 concert schedule for the Boston venue The Boston Tea Party displaying acts such as Led Zeppelin, the Velvet Underground and the Who.
Via OtherWords.org
Neil Young’s recent decision to pull his music from Spotify, the world’s largest streaming service, has sparked important questions about how streaming services operate.
Young demanded that the company choose between his music or Joe Rogan’s misinformation-laden podcasts. Joni Mitchell, India Arie, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash followed suit and made the same demand.
Spotify chose Rogan over all of them.
Why? “What they’re doing always comes down to profits,” says Zack Nestel-Patt, an organizer with the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW). And Spotify sees Rogan as more profitable than even the entire catalogs of legendary musicians.
Spotify’s model isn’t the end of the world for Young, Arie or other major artists who can rely on competitors like Apple Music. But the millions of “working-class musicians struggling at the bottom of the Spotify ecosystem,” as Nestel-Patt describes them, have no such leverage.
The company’s business model, to put it simply, is built on the severely underpaid labor of millions of creators.
Say an independent musician spends years putting their heart and soul into their craft. Finally, they score a hit that garners millions of plays on Spotify. You might imagine this translates into a generous payout.
But in reality, Spotify’s paychecks are peanuts. One analyst estimated that band members with families would need more than 24 million plays on Spotify per year to just barely clear the federal poverty line.
Even those minuscule royalties may need to be split with a record label, collaborators, songwriters, managers, and more. The money that most of Nestel-Patt’s musician friends earn from Spotify is “so negligible that they don’t even account for it.”
In short, Spotify sells products that creators get almost no money to produce. It’s akin to theft. “Imagine any other business working that way,” says Nestel-Patt.
There was a time when musicians made money from selling records, cassettes and CDs — sales that were fueled by their songs being played on radio. That started changing in the late 1990s when digital platforms began offering music for little to nothing, paving the way for Spotify.
That digital transition forced musicians to rely on live performances and ticket sales to earn a living. But in 2020, when a global pandemic brought the world to a standstill, live performances abruptly stopped. “It was catastrophic for everyone I know,” recalls Nestel-Patt.
Now though, musicians are fighting back. From the ashes of musical careers rose the UMAW, where artists proclaimed that “music workers are workers, and it is time we get organized and join the fight.”
The group, which also supports universal health care, a Green New Deal, and more, led multi-city protests against Spotify in 2021. And tens of thousands of musicians signed a petition as part of UMAW’s #JusticeAtSpotify campaign.
Their demands were simple: Pay artists fairly, directly, and transparently, and treat them with dignity.
With Americans spending increasingly more money on music, there should be more than enough to go around. But even as industry revenues have risen to $43 billion a year, very little goes to musicians. Creators get only about 12 percent, with corporate middlemen sucking up a majority of the profits.
It’s not just musicians who lose out. Music itself suffers.
In a recent Atlantic magazine headline, music historian Ted Gioia asked: “Is Old Music Killing New Music?” Record labels, he observes, are “losing interest in new music.” While there’s plenty of incredible new musicians, he writes, the industry “has lost its ability to discover and nurture their talents.” And Spotify is a big reason why.
“This is as much a listener issue as it is a musicians’ issue,” argues Nestel-Patt. If Spotify relies on major pop acts or controversial podcasts for revenue, then “what happens to classical music? What happens to Tejano music? What happens to Appalachian bluegrass music?”
The ultimate losers here aren’t just those who make music. It’s all of us who love it.
Sonali Kolhatkar is the host of Rising Up With Sonali, a television and radio show on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. This commentary was produced by the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and adapted by OtherWords.org.
Tools of off-and-on abstraction
“Bone Music #1” (1949) (pen, ink and watercolor), by Dorothy Dehner (1901-1994), at the Yale University Art Gallery, in its group show “Midcentury Abstraction: A Closer Look,’’ Feb. 25-June 26.
The gallery says:
"Eschewing the notion that there was a linear shift toward abstraction at midcentury, the exhibition showcases a group of artists who freely moved in and out of abstraction or blended their radical approaches with traditional subject matter, such as landscape, portraiture, or still life."
John O. Harney: An early look at 2022’s college-commencement season in New England
BOSTON
From The New England Journal of Higher Education (NEJHE), a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (NEBHE.org)
Long before COVID changed everything, NEJHE and NEBHE’s Twitter channel kept a close eye on New England college commencements. “The annual spring descent on New England campuses of distinguished speakers, ranging from Nobel laureates to Pulitzer Prize winners to grassroots miracle-workers, offers a precious reminder of what makes New England higher education higher,” we bragged. “It is a lecture series without equal.”
In the past two pandemic years, we tracked a lot of postponements and virtual commencements on this beat, as well as Olin College of Engineering’s March 2020 “fauxmencement” ceremony right before coronavirus shut down the campus. Some medical schools at the time moved up graduation dates so graduates could join New England’s COVID-fighting health-care workforce. Dr. Anthony Fauci addressed graduates of the College of Holy Cross, his alma mater.
Going virtual meant hard times for some small New England communities where college-commencement days were crucial to local hospitality providers and the economy. Not to be confused with such larger commencement hosts as the Dunkin Donuts Center for Rhode Island College and Providence College and TD Garden for Northeastern University (switched to Fenway Park during COVID).
This year, as we all hope the pandemic is easing, some New England colleges plan to celebrate not only the class of 2022, but also the classes of 2020 and 2021—for the most part, in person.
Many years, we would pay special attention to the first few announcements of the season. When there was a season. Generally it was spring in the old days. But today’s nontraditional student pursing higher ed on a nontraditional academic calendar might just as easily graduate in January … or any other time for the matter.
As with other stubborn aspects of higher ed, the richest institutions often announced the heavy hitters, though sleepers at quieter places add special value too (think Paul Krugman at Bard College at Simon’s Rock or Rue Mapp at Unity College).
Harvard University, for its part, announced that the principal speaker at its 369th commencement, on May 26, would be New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Not a bad pick. Ardern has been lauded for her work on climate change and gender equality and, lately on how she has guided New Zealand through COVID. Harvard noted she will be “the 17th sitting world leader to deliver the address.”
John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.
‘Flowers as departure point’
“Bouquet “(color block & polka dots), (collage, acrylic & silkscreen on canvas), by Emily Filler, in her show “Wild Flowers,’’ at Lanoue Gallery, Boston, through March 26.
The gallery says:
“Canadian artist Emily Filler weaves painting, printmaking and photography together in her ‘painterly collages’. Using old photographs, pieces of fabric, and silk-screened images to create imaginary landscapes and whimsical bouquets of flowers, Filler’s artwork walks the line between the real and imaginary. Flowers act as a departure point to a world that dissolves into abstraction, whereby creating a sense of the familiar, but also the feeling that one is falling into a dream. What began as fragments are finalized into a complete image, something whole.’’
Chaseedaw Giles: What does it say about your Boston neighborhood if your grocery store isn’t great?
Not very healthy: A variety of Oreos line the shelves at the Stop & Shop at 460 Blue Hill Ave. in the Dorchester section of Boston.
— Photos by Chaseedaw Giles for Kaiser Health News
The Stop & Shop at 301 Centre St. in Boston’s heavily gentrified Jamaica Plain section features a large marketplace for natural and organic foods.
Though I grew up in Roxbury, “the heart of Black culture in Boston,” I now live in Los Angeles, where I typically shop for groceries at Whole Foods Market or Trader Joe’s. Their produce is fresh, green, abundant. Organic options beckon as you walk in the door.
So it gnawed at me, a Black woman, when I recently walked into a supermarket in a lower-income L.A. neighborhood and was greeted instead by an array of processed, high-sugar, high-sodium foods — often offered with a nice discount: Coca-Cola products, five 2-liter bottles for $5; sugary cereals, two for $4; boxed brownie and cake mixes, four for $5.
The pandemic had underlined long-standing health disparities of Black and brown communities. COVID had resulted in a 2.9-year decrease in life expectancy for Black Americans, compared with 1.2 years for white Americans. Research had consistently shown that among the underlying factors giving rise to those poor health statistics — high rates of diabetes and heart disease, for example — is poor diet, fueled by a lack of healthy food options in their neighborhoods.
“I could go into a supermarket, and I can tell everything about the people who live [in the area] based on what’s in their carts, based on what’s at eye level, what’s not at eye level,” said Phil Lempert, also known as the “Supermarket Guru.”
In retail, specific product placement — not just a store’s inventory — heavily influences a shopper’s experience. So shouldn’t responsible markets encourage shoppers to make better choices?
“There’s a lot of racism, to be honest, I think, behind these decisions, whether it’s unconscious or implicit,” said Andrea Richardson, a policy researcher focused on nutrition epidemiology at the Rand Corp. and professor at the Pardee Rand Graduate School. The presence of a supermarket in your neighborhood should signal that you aren’t living in a food desert, but, I wondered, if the supermarket isn’t guiding you toward more healthful food choices, you might as well be.
Chaseedaw and Lilie’s Shopping List
– Oat milk
– Lettuce
– Ezekiel bread
– Breakfast sausage (MorningStar)
– Fruit
– Cereal
– Cashew cheese
– Quinoa
– Snacks/chips
– Soda/juice
– Meat (fish)
– Mushrooms
So when I flew home for Thanksgiving, I enlisted my mother, Lilie — who always cared about her kids’ diets — to help with more research. I have vivid childhood memories of her scouring multiple grocery stores — often traveling to different parts of town — for the freshest ingredients when none were available close by. We set out one Sunday last fall to buy 12 items on a simple “healthy eating” shopping list at five locations of Stop & Shop, a supermarket chain with stores in a cross-section of Boston neighborhoods.
First the good news: We were able to find every item we wanted at each store. But, just as I’d experienced in L.A., healthy foods were easier to find in higher-income neighborhoods. In lower-income areas, junk food was more likely to be front and center.
At the Stop & Shop I recall from my childhood in Jamaica Plain, the food choices had become much more balanced, with a plentiful organic food section in the front of the store. My mom can now buy fresher greens locally.
But that likely in part reflects the gentrification that has taken place since I was a kid. Jamaica Plain now has a median income of almost $77,000 — though the poverty rate is 18.3 percent and the aroma of Dominican and Haitian patties still scented the air as we approached the entrance.
Our next two stops were in even fancier areas, Brookline (median income over $115,000) and Somerville — both green oases compared with many of Boston’s grittier neighborhoods.
At the Brookline location, each aisle started with low-fat, low-sugar choices like Crystal Light and V8, and the candy section was minuscule. In Somerville, the produce section was spacious, leaving plenty of room to browse the bins of guava and dragon fruit.
Our next Stop & Shop was in South Boston — a working-class, Irish Catholic community. It was strikingly different than our first three stops. The organic section consisted mostly of breakfast bars and cereals. The produce section positioned caramels, candied apples, and pumpkin-spice doughnuts in a bin alongside regular apples — at the bargain price of two packages for $3. The “International Foods” aisle sold everything you need for a very American Taco Tuesday, while a big part of this section was dedicated to Italian and Irish foods.
In the Grove Hall neighborhood in Dorchester — a predominantly Black neighborhood with a median income of $55,000 — the offerings were downright dispiriting.
Soda was displayed prominently near one entrance. And as we walked the aisles it seemed that many of the “sale” items were sugary soda products, chips, or cookies. This store had a dizzying array of snack food options, including 20 kinds of Oreos. And there wasn’t an organic food section at all.
The chain has been “doing a lot of work” to make sure that stores are “culturally relevant and [reflect] the demographics of the neighborhood,” said Jennifer Brogan, director of Stop & Shop’s corporate external communications and community relations.
How a store is stocked depends on size, product movement, shelf size, and a mixture of customer feedback and data. That data comes from companies like IRi, a research company, that provides consumer, shopper, and retail market intelligence and analyses.
Lempert, the “supermarket guru,” further explained that companies and brands pay retailers “promotional dollars” to put their goods “at eye level” or on sale, or make them available for consumers to sample.
But in making these largely commercial decisions, markets make it more difficult for people in low-income areas to eat healthfully, encouraging those with poor diets to continue the habits that landed them with diet-related illnesses.
“It has been well documented that junk-food companies spend significantly more money advertising in certain communities,” said Kelly LeBlanc, director of nutrition at Oldways, a Boston-based food and nutrition nonprofit. A 2019 report, for instance, found that junk-food advertising disproportionately targeted Black and Hispanic youth.
Stop & Shop has started to try to redress the inequity, with changes coming first to its Dorchester location, including an in-store dietitian. The Grove Hall store also sends out an ad circular that features promotional pricing on better-for-you items, which may include fish, vegetables, and fruit. It has joined the Fresh Connect food prescription program that allows participating doctors to prescribe to patients a prepaid Visa card that can be used to purchase fruits and vegetables.
Still, why not simply cut down on the soda and bewildering number of Oreos, I wondered. “I think our job is to give customers a choice,” Brogan said. “I also think we have a responsibility to help them make healthier choices.”
I’m glad my mom taught me how to make those choices early on.
Another thing I learned: There’s a whole science behind how supermarkets are organized, and depending on where you live, that could say a lot about the surrounding area. So the next time I think about moving, the first place I’m heading to is the local supermarket because, as Lempert told me, “going to that community grocery store is going to tell you about the neighborhood.”
Chaseedaw Giles is a Kaiser Health News reporter.
Perhaps we aren't doomed?
“Exuberance, Green” (clay, papier mache, wire), by Boston and Biddeford, Maine-based Rhonda Smith, in her show “Say That I Am You,’’ at Kingston Gallery, Boston, through Feb. 27.
The gallery says:
Rhonda Smith’s sculptures “evoke humanity’s connection to the universe through the poetry of Rumi. Her multimedia pieces combine disparate elements of nature to create works that challenge the notion that destruction is our only future.’’
Melding buildings and landscape
Henry Hobson Richardson’s famous Trinity Church (built 1872-1877) on Boston’s Copley Square.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Many people have seen the great Gilded Age architect Henry Hobson Richardson’s (1838-1886) famous public and private buildings around America, with Boston’s grand Trinity Church still the most famous. Richardson invented a unique Romanesque Revival style with ingenious massing and use of stone, and he was also a pioneer in developing the remarkably modernist “Shingle Style” houses so popular in New England.
And yet while Richardson was very well known in his fairly short lifetime, few people now know his name, even though many historians consider him a founder of modern American architecture.
But Hugh Howard has come along to help rectify that with his duel biography Architects of an American Landscape: Henry Hobson Richardson, Frederick Law Olmsted, and the Reimagining of America’s Public and Private Spaces.
Olmsted (1822-1903), unlike Richardson, remains famous, as the co-designer of Central Park and designer of many other famous parks, such as those in Boston’s “Emerald Necklace,’’ across America. Many see him as the father of American landscape architecture.
Richardson and Olmsted, despite very different backgrounds and personalities, worked very closely on dozens of commissions for cooperative designs for parks, railroad stations, public libraries and houses. Their projects integrated the built and natural environments. Many of these collaborations resulted in Richardson’s buildings looking comfortably settled into Olmsted’s landscaping.
Olmsted said of Richardson:
“He was the greatest comfort and the most potent stimulus that has ever come into my artistic life.”
This is a terrific book, elegantly written. It would have even better with bigger and clearer pictures.
In Waltham, Mass.: “Stonehurst,’’ now a museum and built for Boston Brahmin lawyer Robert Treat Paine. Richardson designed the house and Olmsted the grounds, in close collaboration, in a project that took from 1883-1886.