BATNA: Lessons from Conflict Resolution

Self-Reliance Improves Your BATNA

 

My conflict resolution students swiftly learn to apply the word BATNA to every conflict situation. The principle of Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement means that anyone negatively affected by another person or entity should first look for options that are wholly within their own control to improve their own position in a way that will minimize the impact of the actions of others.

For example:  Afraid your place of employment might be downsizing? Bolster your eduction and job skills to make yourself as valuable in your workplace and as employable elsewhere as possible; start up other income streams, even small ones like selling some homemade items on Etsy, so that when your employment ends it won't feel quite like dropping off a cliff. Or, relationship on rocky ground with an uncertain future? Strengthen your network of friends and community, and shore up your financial independence; the boost in self-confidence may help put the relationship on better terms, or will clarify its ending without feeling like the your whole life is ending, too.

Every day brings us reports that food prices are rising, food production is down while population is skyrocketing, climate change is bringing drastic shifts in agriculture and patterns of civilization, and the food reaching our grocery store shelves is full of GMOs, lead, arsenic, high-fructose corn syrup, and a host of chemicals with names we can't pronounce. Health care costs are soaring while our health is diminishing.

It often feels as if we are ever-increasingly the helpless victims of massive corporate and governmental forces that we can not possibly control. Do we even have a BATNA in the face of what experts say is global environmental and economic collapse?

It is true that there are many things in life which any one of us can not control. Yet, you always -- ALWAYS -- have a BATNA. There is always some realm of your existence over which you have at least some modicum of control, about which you can make choices and formulate decisions to better your own position.

The food we eat is an area of our life over which we exercise a large amount of control. As supermarket prices rise and family budgets shrink, it sometimes may not feel that way, but it's true. Remember how I said that in the face of possible job loss, starting even a tiny sideline income stream was useful to improve your position? So it is with food. Even the smallest step towards food independence begins to free you from the power of the corporate agriculture giants and reduces the harmful impact of other people's actions on your body, wallet, and family.

Growing sprouts or shoots on the edge of the kitchen sink adds a nutrient-rich green vegetable to helps stretch your grocery shopping dollars and boosts your health. One pot on an apartment balcony with a single cherry tomato plant and some lettuce will give you fresh, nearly free salads all summer, helping to offset shortened summer work hours. Buying at the local farmers market is a fabulous option if you don't have growing space or time -- and can be cheaper than you thing, especially if you come at the end of the day and negotiate. (Many farmers markets also take EBT cards and some states provide food-assistance recipients with extra farmers markets coupons as well.)

Buying produce in season and throwing some in the freezer creates a buffer for lean times. Eating lower on the food chain -- lentils instead of meat some nights of the week--is cheaper and healthier. Drinking ordinary tap water instead of soda or other bottled drinks saves money and could be the best single thing you could do for your health.

Any one of these little steps empowers you by moving you one small step further away from the impact of decisions made by corporate agriculture--yet without any diminishment in the quality of your life or health. In fact, you'll improve your health, reduce your anxiety over food bills, and likely develop new tastes and food interests that will enrich your life far more than the box of expensive powdered donuts could have ever done. BATNA is about making yourself stronger and freeing yourself from the shadow of others' power over you. The more you re-assert your control over the food you eat, the stronger your BATNA, and the less power bad news about food prices and supplies will have over your life.

Waste Not, Want Not: A Thrifty Use for Every Leftover

About a third of America's food available for consumption is thrown in the trash, about a pound a day for every American, according to a report in the New York Times. And this while over 20,000 people a day die of hunger, 16,000 of them children. Saving your leftovers won't directly save the life of a malnourished child, but it will save you significant time and money on your grocery bills--resources that you can then re-direct in any number of positive directions.

The over-abundance of food constantly available in farmers markets, supermarkets, pharmacies and minimarts has numbed us to food's sacred value, much less its economic value. The cost of grabbing an iced coffee and a bunch of munchies on the road adds up quickly, both in dollars and negative health effects, but because it dribbles out a few bucks at a time we tend to ignore it.Getting used to using leftovers stops the hemorrhage of snack money and lets you squeeze every penny's worth out of your food budget in a significantly healthier way.

Here's a laundry list of leftover techniques to get you thinking about it:

Freezing.  I freeze leftovers of just about every variety both for reasons of frugality and health. Bake a traditional two layer cake recipe, for example, but just top one layer with frosting and fruit and slide the other layer in a zipper-close freezer bag, suck the air out of a corner, and pop it in the freezer for another occasion. You won't over-eat dessert, and you already have a nice treat made for another night. I freeze even the smallest leftover bits of icing as well as gravy, bechamel, and cheese sauce. But removing a cup of these rich sauces from the pot and freezing them before they even hit the table, I have dinner started for another night and that's one cup less to needlessly devour at that night's meal. Baked beans, grain pilafs, muffins, soups, casseroles, pasta sauces and cooked vegetables all freeze just fine. When we've inadvertently bought two containers of milk or buttermilk, I just stick one of those in the freezer too, unless I can foist it on a neighbor.

Label your freezer goods well, and group them together by use, such as putting all the sauces and all the desserts together. If the day promises to be hectic, take a peak in the freezer in the morning and pull out a container of sauce, veggies, rice pilaf, some leftover baked beans, and stick them in the fridge to thaw through the day. A quick heating at night and you have a nice balanced meal.

Omelets.  Eggs are getting redeemed in the eyes of nutritionists, who have realized that their cholesterol is not as bad as they once thought, and they provide valuable protein and micronutrients that protect vision health. Improve the healthful qualities of eggs by whipping up an omelet with last night's leftover vegetables and rice. Even a couple tablespoons of leftover green beans, cooked carrots or peas add vitamins and fiber to eggs and don't cost you an extra dime.

Pizza. Throw leftover spaghetti sauce and vegetables onto a homemade pizza. Go crazy and throw on leftover fruit, mushrooms that are getting beyond where you'd eat them fresh in salad, or leftover fish, chicken or beef.

Muffins. Bananas going bad, fruit that's got brown soft spots on it, a bag of cranberries or half a can of pumpkin puree never cooked at Thanksgiving, are all perfect fodder for muffins. Cook up a basic bran muffin recipe and throw in the extra fruit. If it's very juicy you might cut down slightly on the liquid in the recipe; if it's more than a cup of chopped fruit you might also add another egg to make sure it holds together.

Loaves and patties. Add an egg and some breadcrumbs to leftover mashed potatoes and beans, roll them into patties, spray lightly with cooking spray and bake at 350 for about 20 minutes, until they are golden brown, for an easy-to-grab lunch treat. Throw leftover mashed potatoes into a bread recipe for a high-rising loaf, or use whatever chopped vegetables you have in place of zucchini in a zucchini quick-bread recipe.

Soup.  Dump last night's leftover vegetables, rice and beans in a pot, add stock, and call it soup.

Sandwich Spreads. Most folks think a leftover turkey, cranberry and stuffing sandwich is even better than the turkey dinner the night before. Leftover meats sliced thin, or fish mixed with mayo and celery make obvious sandwich material, but leftover beans and veggies thrown in the blender -- with a touch of hot sauce if you're into that sort of thing -- make a fabulous sandwich spread or hummus-like dip.

What's YOUR favorite way to use up leftovers?

The Price of Gas: Stop Eating Petroleum

Shop Your Local Farmers Market and Save Fuel

 

As I write this, gasoline is topping $3.50 a gallon.  According to quite a number of media reports, by the time you read this, that price could be well on its way to $4 in time for peak summer travel season.  That’s like $50 for most folks to fill the tank of gas.

Ouch.

When you think about the relationship between gas prices and food shopping, the first thing that probably comes to mind is the gas you put in your car’s tank.  Rising prices may mean that you become more conscious about the efficiency of your shopping trips, hitting all your errands on the same drive in as your grocery-gathering trip to local supermarkets or area box stores.

But the fact is, you are consuming far more gasoline with the products in your shopping cart than you are in your car’s gas tank.   No, I don’t mean you are actually eating oil – though you are, in small amounts. Rather, the amount of petroleum required to grow and, more importantly, to ship, much of the food you are purchasing is astronomical. 

According to Kitchen Gardeners International, a Maine-based global home-food growing movement (www.kitchengardeners.org), “Ingredients for the average meal travel between 1000-2500 miles from field to table, 25% farther than they did 2 decades ago, using up to 17 times more fossil fuels than a meal made with local ingredients.”  And while in 1907 between a third and a half of the food consumed in the United States was home-grown on farms and in gardens, today 100 years later, that figure is nearly zero.  

The Idea Was Suburban Homesteads

The original concept for suburban development was the notion of “for every man, a farm.”  The point was to enfranchise people by ensuring that all were landowners, meaning that all had the inherent political power and freedom which comes from self-sufficiency: that half acre to five acre lot was originally envisioned as being used to grow all the produce, fruit, and small livestock and poultry a family could need, meaning citizens would not be reliant on government and corporate organization of food production and distribution. Land and food are wealth; the person who is growing much of their own food on land they own themselves can not be starved out, subjected to ‘clearances,’ or sent to forced labor in factories and mines, as happened time and again to the landless tenant classes of Europe.  

Ironically, today we have more landowners in the U.S. than ever before, and yet home food production has fallen to nil.  Those suburban lots have been turned over to lawn, itself a huge consumer of petroleum products and producer of little but pollution and the color green. Lawnmowers in the U.S. alone consume more than 800 million gallons of gas annually, and the EPA says 17 million gallons of gas are spilled in refueling mowers every year, which is more than was released in the Exxon Valdez disaster.  Studies indicate that an hour of mowing puts out as much air pollution as a 100-mile drive in an average sedan.  Use a hand mower.  Stop mowing and plant flowers for bees.  It’s not laziness.  It’s good global citizenship.  Better yet, turn at least part of that lawn into a vegetable garden. And when you do go grocery shopping, buy local. 

Why ‘buy local’?  Why not just ‘buy organic’? 

 If you want the full-blown answer, pick up a copy of Michael Pollan’s newest book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.” A New York Times journalist and professor at U.S. Berkeley, Pollan set out to discover the roots and paths that led from ingredients to four different meals on his plate.  The first is a McDonald’s meal, and the last a dinner comprised almost exclusively of things Pollan hunted (a wild boar) and foraged (mushrooms, fruit hanging over a neighbor’s fence) himself.  In between are two farm-based meals. 

The book explores nearly every moral food question you can imagine, from the political economics of subsidized commercial corn and livestock feedyards, to vegetarianism, animal rights, and hunting.  (I use this book as a text for an Introduction to Ethics class I teach at a local community college.)  As a vegetarian of over 30 years who prefers organic when practical, I thought I already knew a lot of what there is to know about food production.  But Pollard’s well-researched assessment of commercial organic farms taught me a thing or two. 

Pollard visited the grounds of the two biggest organic produce growers in the U.S., Earthbound Farms and Cal-Organic. The good news is that he found these companies to be far better than most commercial agricultural operations in their pay scales and treatment of farm labor and business employees. And the other good news is that, of course, these operations are growing organically.  That means less petroleum-based pesticides are going into the ground, and you don’t have to worry about nasty trace chemicals left on the produce and going into your body or into your kids.  To those ends, the Cal-Organic carrots and Earthbound lettuce is certainly better than non-organic commercial produce.

But from a petroleum-consumption standpoint, the commercial organic and commercial non-organic products come out virtually even.  Pollard’s research led him to the conclusion (double-checked by economists from Berkeley) that at the end of the day, organic commercial produce utilizes about 4% less petroleum in its production than nonorganic commercial produce.  While the petroleum is saved in the course of pesticide choices, it is matched and even lost in the refrigeration, packing, and shipping processes.  That organic lettuce, without preservatives sprayed on it, is whisked into refrigerated processing buildings instantly upon picking, is packaged in plastic, and kept in refrigerated cars right up to your plate, all fueled with petroleum (and cooled with CFCs to boot). 

Fuel Savings Is Food Security

About one-fifth of the petroleum used in this country is used to ship food.  It takes about 57 calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of California lettuce that winds up on a Vermont dinner plate. Fuel savings and food security go hand in hand – and national security, in the form of greater energy and food self-sufficiency, is one more benefit of buying local.

Fact is, we live in a place blessed with rich productive soil and talented people who have not forgotten the skill of gathering and coaxing food from the land around us.   Whether from your own garden, the farmers markets and farmstands, or food co-op , buy local, and stop wasting gasoline in the supermarket check-out line.