Editor's Note

New Heights

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 09:00:00 -0700

One of the only times a Portland Monthly staffer ever appeared on the magazine’s cover, she was captured between a rock and hard place—another rock. The headline: “Hike! Bike! Paddle! Climb!” The staffer: senior editor (and rare Oregon native) Kasey Cordell.

The reason? Obvious: as shoppers’ eyes drifted over People, Star, National Enquirer, and the like at the checkout stand, how could they not be drawn to this clear, compelling portrait of a strong woman confidently on the rise? Indeed, the image is also the reality: over the past seven years, our editorial team has watched her pull the magazine to a higher place.

As we sent this issue to press, Kasey told us she will be leaving for a gig with our friends at 5280, Denver’s city magazine. Our sadness (and, well, panic) is tempered by our happiness for the opportunities ahead with a great city and publication. But the moment also seems ripe to pull the curtain back on how one talented staffer has shaped the pages in your hands.

Kasey once revealed that she could beat her boyfriend in arm-wrestling. He’s got nothing to be embarrassed about. Since I arrived as editor in chief in May 2009, I’ve tangled with our longest-serving editor over countless decisions: the tone of an article, the selection of a photo, the turn of phrase in a headline, the direction of the magazine. The first few times, her brow literally furrowed, head tilted forward in resolve, I prevailed only by invoking the “I’m the boss” clause. But over the next four years, clashes that could feel like two bighorn sheep squaring off gradually shifted into the kind of rigorous, fun, affectionate debate that yields the best kind of work.

Kasey has overseen many of what we in the biz call “service packages.” In short, if you’ve opened this magazine to discover a great hotel on a little-known river, a terrace to sip wine in an offbeat town, a stroll through a grove of rarely explored old growth, or (most controversially among our readers) a secret swimming hole, Kasey probably found it. She has traveled the entire Northwest, often on three-day, 900-plus-mile, 50-plus-stop tours. If that seems like journalistic fun and games (and only those who have never reported, written, and edited a service package would think so), Kasey has mastered plenty of other moves, from editing our features on the NCAA’s first openly gay Division I basketball coach and Oregon’s struggling hazelnut industry to writing an incisive investigation of military sexual trauma among female soldiers in the Northwest.

Following the script of many of her fellow born-Oregonians, Kasey left once before and then returned. But, ever the contrarian, she’s now swimming against Stumptown’s endless tide of newcomers (and New York Times reviewers) and heading for the Mile High City. Kasey’s 2008 cover shot surely was iconic, but for Portland Monthly’s staff, the talent, spirit, and resolve we’ve all enjoyed in this colleague makes it nicely prophetic.

Watershed Politics

Wed, 01 May 2013 09:29:00 -0700

Lawrence Halprin’s drawing of opening day at forecourt (now Keller) fountain in June 1970

The distance between Keller Fountain and the farms and vineyards of the Willamette Valley can be measured in miles, or the inches between the late landscape architect Lawrence Halprin’s ears.

As Oregon celebrates the 40th anniversary this month of the legislation that protected much of the valley’s agricultural lands, it’s worth a pause to ponder the ways in which one designer’s creative vision helped shape both a city and a region.

Between 1963 and 1970, Halprin and his San Francisco firm completed a series of fountain plazas in Portland’s South Auditorium District loosely based on the idea of a watershed, starting with an artesian spring and ending in a waterfall. Called Lovejoy Fountain, Pettygrove Park, and Forecourt (later renamed Keller) Fountain, they instantly became people magnets, earning photo spreads and critical plaudits across the globe. The final plaza, Keller, with its 13,000-gallon-a-minute cascade, New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable called “one of the most important urban spaces since the Renaissance.”

Two years after Keller Fountain opened, Gov. Tom McCall hired Halprin to help sell a vision for another watershed: the Willamette Valley. Halprin’s study, The Willamette Valley: Choices for the Future, would play a pivotal role in McCall’s efforts to pass Senate Bill 100, the law that laid the groundwork for urban growth boundaries. Without the bill or the study, the valley today would almost certainly have fewer farms and vineyards, and more sprawl. But for Halprin, a watershed was a watershed: design metaphor or breadbasket, both deserved to be nice places for people, and for that, you needed to maximize interaction.

Until Halprin’s plazas, Portland public spaces were passive, tree-lined parks. The new fountains offered a hybrid of the town square and the swimming hole. As Halprin wrote in his notebooks, they were designed to “say come in not stay off.” Within months of the opening of the first one—Lovejoy—Portland’s citizens decided they wanted more, holding protests and votes that eventually led to transforming a riverside highway into Tom McCall Waterfront Park and a parking lot into Pioneer Courthouse Square.

The study of the Willamette Valley also invited citizens to “come in”—to the political process. It offered two scenarios for a million more people living in the valley: one developed on the 5- and 10-acre lots much of the valley was zoned for; the other with tight urban growth boundaries. In dozens of town hall meetings Halprin’s team led across the valley, they asked the citizens to get involved and imagine what kind of future they wanted.

With their high, poured-concrete precipices and plunging waters, no city would build these fountains today: liability lawyers and ADA regulations wouldn’t let them. Similarly rowdy political risks would scarcely allow a 21st-century governor to commission a designer like Halprin or a study like Choices for the Future. Even at the time, skeptics in McCall’s administration likened Halprin’s simple, hand-drawn scenarios to the cartoonish world of the Beatles’ still-fresh movie Yellow Submarine: strip malls propagated by “Blue Meanies” in contrast to the “euphoric utopia” of controlled growth.

Yet, four decades later, the Willamette Valley looks a lot more like euphoria than the land of the Blue Meanies. And the first of the statewide planning goals adopted under Senate Bill 100? Citizen involvement. Or as Halprin might have said, “Come on in.”

For our in-depth exploration of urban growth and the Willamette Valley, see our feature article Pushing Boundaries.

Keep Portland Free(er)

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 08:00:00 -0700

Local architects Joann Le and David Horsley design a lot like their firm’s name, Dao, suggests: they seek an ineffable harmony with nature.

In the case of the tiny Irvington house we profile, their efforts replaced an old, dilapidated garage with a simple, elegant, 950-square-foot home so reserved in its subtle interplay of wood, glass, plants, and steel, it is barely noticeable from the street. So it comes as a lucky irony that Dao got its city permit to build only weeks before the neighborhood became the Irvington Historic District; otherwise the quiet little home would have had to meet a city bureaucrat or committee’s definition of “compatible” with its neighbors.

Initiated by Irvington property owner Mary Piper, Portland’s newest national historic district is also its largest. Now anyone who owns property on these 170 city blocks must have any visible change—from building a new dormer to installing more energy-efficient windows—reviewed for its historical accuracy or compatibility. And, for the privilege, they get to pay fees running anywhere from $900 to over $2,000.

Did all of the property owners agree? Not quite. But to block the historic district, over 50 percent would have had to formally disagree—with notarized letters. Irvington follows Northwest Portland’s 50-plus-block “Alphabet District.” If a group of Buckman preservationists succeed, 67 blocks of Southeast could be next.

Registering a historic district used to be a powerful tool for preserving—and, often, economically jump-starting—important buildings and small, architecturally distinct neighborhoods. The Pearl District, for instance, might be a very different place were it not for the 13th Avenue Historic District. Established in 1987, it helped protect the old industrial quarter’s august masonry warehouses and provided tax incentives for renovations. But in total, that district covered just 20 buildings—a surgical strike in the name of preservation. The Irvington district’s regulation of more than 2,800 structures is a carpet-bombing aimed at preventing growth and change. In March, the Portland City Council loosened the regulations. (Now, for instance, you can paint your house without a review.) But the larger issue of a few well-organized homeowners imposing stylistic restrictions on wide swaths of the city stands.

For sure, it’s an unsettling time for Portland’s neighborhoods, with every third block seemingly growing a new apartment complex (usually without parking). But older buildings aren’t necessarily great buildings, and even when they are, who says they are automatically degraded by something new next door? Period styles, high craft, smaller scale, and aged patina of old neighborhoods can gain a richness by the contrast with the new.

Over the years, I’ve been intimately involved in preservation efforts like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Gordon House (now at the Oregon Garden in Silverton) and the Stockyard Exchange Building (which unfortunately no longer stands in Kenton). But these were discrete properties with deep historic importance. Irvington’s breed of historic megadistricts awakens the western libertarian in me. Portland needs to celebrate its history; it also needs graceful additions like Dao’s Irvington project. If I lived in the Buckman neighborhood, I’d join the dozens protesting the proposed historic district with signs in their yards: “Keep Buckman Free.”

Public Art & Debate

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 18:16:00 -0800

For most of the past three decades, Portland has commissioned its public art a bit like a poor, single parent parsing soup servings to a brood too large: a ladle for this artist, a ladle for that one, a ladle plus the bone for another because he or she has done more chores.

Occasionally the pots have been larger courtesy of, say, a big-budget light-rail project. But even then, the broth usually got thinner as artists joined “design teams” decorating stations with tile patterns, glass etchings, and that staple of public art, words.

Then came the exhilarating shock of the sculpture called Inversion: Plus Minus suddenly rising this winter at the eastern end of the Hawthorne Bridge.

More than 60 feet high, drawn against the sky in hash marks of rusty Cor-Ten steel, two building shapes are modeled on a pair of now-gone buildings that once stood on the site: a cast-iron foundry and an art modern factory. A Seattle-based (but University of Oregon–educated) duo—Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo, longtime partners who work under the moniker Lead Pencil Studio—created them. Portland’s “percent for art” program for the east-side extension of the Portland Streetcar is paying for them. In an unprecedented act of courage, the Regional Arts & Culture Council opted to concentrate the streetcar’s $1.4 million art budget on a handful of projects. Inversion will be the most prominent, and it’s only two-thirds done. The final phase will rise this spring by the Morrison Bridge.

Han and Mihalyo are thoughtful, serious artists whose work I’ve followed since Mihalyo published Wood Burners, a beautiful study of the once ubiquitous, now almost extinct conical incinerators that were icons of the Northwest timber industry. Since then, these winners of the prestigious Rome Prize have conjured many projects that blur the divide between art and architecture, from Maryhill Double, a temporary scaffold-and-mesh replica of the Maryhill Museum built directly across the Columbia River from the real one, to Non-Sign II, a swarm of blackened steel rods outlining the shape of an empty billboard now standing permanently at the US-Canada border crossing at Blaine, Washington. The Oregon Arts Commission recently tapped the duo to memorialize the controversial unclaimed cremains of one-time patients, long kept at the Oregon State Hospital.

With Inversion, Han and Mihalyo wanted to monumentalize the Central Eastside’s character. As inspirations, Mihalyo cites the billboard frames rising from the area’s buildings, and Han, the taller buildings that lined SE Grand Avenue before the bridge ramps arrived. Both want the sculptures to reach past nostalgia to evoke the area’s robustness as a place where people make things. Says Han: “We wanted to sketch in three dimensions a form that was neither from the past nor the future but a glimpse of the possibility—of the past and the future.”

This is Lead Pencil’s largest project—both financially and physically—to date. In sheer prominence, it is Portland’s, too, greeting the tens of thousands of commuters traveling daily up SE Grand Avenue or over the Hawthorne Bridge. Whether you like the piece or not, it represents a coming-of-age for both the Central Eastside and the city as a whole: public art you can’t ignore.

Join us March 11 at Bright Lights for a discussion on 30 years of Portland public art.

When I Learned

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 14:20:00 -0800

More than any test in my first 13 years of school, I will forever remember the one in May 1970 that Mr. Mullins canceled. We had spent the preceding weeks diagramming sentences. I was poised for any tangle of an attributive adjective or predicate nominative he could throw at me. But what Mr. Mullins decided to diagram instead that spring day was the history of a war.

With the frenetic care of a physicist laying out an equation, he began at the far end of a chalkboard with the rise of Ho Chi Minh as revolutionary leader of the Viet Cong and their routing of French colonialist forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Noting the country’s strategically important trove of rubber for a rising China, he marked the first dispatch of US military advisers by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. Then, scratching pivotal battle after pivotal battle onto the slate, Mr. Mullins tracked the Viet Cong’s endurance against Agent Orange, napalm, and the steady escalation of carpet bombing and troop levels (385,000 at their highest) by three presidents.

With a trail of shattered chalk at his feet, Mr. Mullins concluded his history, two room-long blackboards later, with the four Kent State University students who were gunned down by the US National Guard earlier that week while protesting the war.

For our yearly guide to the region’s schools, we invited students and teachers to reflect on what they are learning, both academically and not (“What I Learned”). For me, even decades later, Mr. Mullins’s momentary switch from English to History remains the lesson that most changed my life.

For years, I had watched the war unfold on the nightly news, the growing count of American casualties displayed like a basketball score next to ABC anchor Howard K. Smith’s solemnly talking head. My mom, a Goldwater Republican, would tsk-tsk and offer, “I don’t know why we don’t bomb that country off the map.” My dad, a former World War II B-17 ball-turret gunner (who, by any statistical measure of those who had done his job, should not have survived), sat rigid and silent. A year before, after becoming my sixth-grade class’s debate champion, I had taken on our teacher. The subject: the My Lai Massacre. I picked my side: a defense of Lt. William Calley, the man who led a “search and destroy” mission that left 300 women and children dead. My argument: he was following orders.

That spring day was not the first time Mr. Mullins had canceled a test. The urge to forgo measuring our learning in order to inspire it overcame him many times, whether through an impromptu pageant of a Shakespeare play or his own mellifluous reading of Faulkner’s “The Bear.” In short, Mr. Mullins was cool. But the day he mapped the Vietnam War, he was angry and hurt. And watching his disappointment in his country unfold across the blackboard shook me into the sharpest early rediagramming of my own life: the moment I realized my parents and my country weren’t always right, and that, as one teacher in our survey so enduringly put it, “The teachable moment is often unplanned.”

Sam Adams Exit Interview

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 09:55:00 -0800

Image: Kate Madden

When Sam Adams filed to run for mayor in early 2008, both he and Portland seemed on the
verge of a triumphal march. The economy was rocking. As the veteran of 15 years at city hall cruised to victory, he set a civil-rights precedent as America’s first openly gay big-city mayor.

Instead of a brass-band jubilee, however, Adams’s term turned operatic with the Great Recession and his own Great Transgression (his lie about a relationship with a teenager—former legislative intern Beau Breedlove). As 2012’s political season approached, instead of battling for a second term, Adams opted out.

But as Adams, now 49, leaves office, Forbes ranks Portland among the top 10 cities for job prospects. He has reshaped city policies on everything from economic growth to racial equity while, in his final weeks, cutting deals for new development and taxes. Whether you love Adams or dismiss him (few people are ambivalent), rest assured the next mayor is unlikely to be as interesting. And so, in the waning days of his tenure, I invited Mayor Sam to answer a few questions, fast. Over two Cape Cods at Nel Centro, he was, as always, game.

After 31 years of political life, what do you most want to do?

Lose another 30 pounds

What are you most qualified to do?

Lion tamer

What was the most potent political force when you entered city hall in 1993?

The Oregonian editorial page

What is the most potent political force as you exit in 2013?

That doesn’t exist, and that might not be a bad thing.

Who or what is the most potent political force not based here?

Whoever becomes the CEO of Intel, which accounts for 50 percent of
all exports from the region

Whom in the media do you most fear?

The Oregonian columnist Steve Duin

Whom in the media do you most respect?

The Oregonian writer Scott Learn. He writes stories that are tough, but are actual
in-depth stories, not just shitty stories pretending to be in-depth.

Had Beau not happened, what could you have gotten done?

Not answering that question

Had the recession not happened, what could you have gotten done?

Exponentially more public-private development across the city.
We lost our private partner.

What was the best thing about the recession?

I got to help reinvent economic development and education. Sixty-five percent of the cuts we made came from administration, so I made the city leaner in ways it should be.

What was the most difficult thing about being a gay mayor?

Being asked that stupid question

What was the most difficult thing for a gay mayor’s partner?

Sharing me with 585,000 other people

What was the worst day of your tenure?

Two in the morning at the scene of a gang shooting outside Season’s bar,
when I had to restrain a mom from crossing the police lines to see her dead son.
I knew her. She knew me. Legally it would have poisoned the crime scene.
I tried to hug her and stop her, and she just started wailing and beating on me.

What was the moment as mayor in which you were most nervous?

When Storm Large got completely naked in a dressing room we shared—because I found her very attractive. I was even more nervous than when I met President Obama.

What does the world get most wrong about Portland?

That this is the place “where young people go to retire.” We’re one of the nation’s top cities for job growth, and we’ve had a 6 percent reduction in greenhouse emissions.
As someone recently put it, Portland is laughing all the way to economic success.

What do Portlanders get most wrong about Portland?

That we’re a city of racial equity. We are not. Not even close to Seattle or
San Francisco, and nowhere near our values.

Who is Oregon’s most underrated politician?

Congressman Kurt Schrader

Who is Oregon’s most overrated politician?

Might be my next boss, so no comment.

A few words of advice to Charlie Hales?

Be a leader of the city, not just city government.

Words of advice to those working with Charlie Hales?

We only have one mayor; make sure he’s successful.

Of those who have never run for the office, who would make the best mayor?

Scott Andrews, chairman of the Portland Development Commission

Why won’t he run?

He has a stable and balanced personality.

What’s the dumbest Portland idea that won’t die?

That nonfluoridated water is somehow good for you

If you could pick one failed initiative to succeed, what would it be?

The Living Building (Oregon Sustainability Center). Portland can’t remain
on the cutting edge of green building by reputation alone.

What criticism of you stung the most?

That I wear a toupee.

What are the odds you’ll do another, nonconsecutive term (à la Kitzhaber)?

I’m flattered you’d ask. I wouldn’t bet on it.

OHSU's Commuter Science

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 10:31:00 -0800

Dr. Brian Druker, the busy discoverer of the cancer blocker Gleevec, and his rapidly growing team of researchers will soon be spread across three buildings at Oregon Health & Science University. Druker’s own lab sits atop Marquam Hill, but he sees many patients at the Center for Health and Healing in the South Waterfront.

And by 2014, he will be viewing powerfully magnified images of his patients’ cancer cells at the new Collaborative Life Sciences Building. Lots of science and healing happens in all three posts. But the discoveries, Druker says, are most likely to come on the commutes: the short strolls down the hall and rides on the streetcar or the aerial tram in between.

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“The way science happens is we have our formal interactions ... with people who are anywhere from Boston to China,” Druker explains. “But where the real action occurs is when you’re walking down the hallway with someone, just kinda free-associating about something.”

The new center on the South Waterfront will be a first for Oregon higher ed: one facility serving three universities (OHSU, Portland State University, and Oregon State University). The brief treks between offices and floors will be thick with the kind of potentially discovery-laden conversations Druker prizes. “We’re going to put a bunch of people together from different disciplines and force them to interact,” he says. “That’s where the next breakthrough will happen.”

Over its history, the entire OHSU campus has taken shape through dynamic connections: every building and discipline on Marquam Hill, no matter where or how high, is linked together in a single-level network of busy hallways and skybridges known simply as “the Ninth Floor.” In 1992, the university built the longest suspended pedestrian skybridge in North America to extend the Ninth Floor to the nearby Veterans Administration Hospital. In 2006, the city and OHSU completed the aerial tram, connecting the Ninth Floor to the long-fallow industrial lands of the South Waterfront. On slow days, more than 4,000 ride the tram, a number destined to rise with the future campus of labs, lecture halls, and outpatient treatment centers OHSU is planning around the Collaborative Life Sciences Building.

But fertile connections don’t stop with OHSU. A 10-minute streetcar ride lands you in the middle of PSU. Soon, a new car-free bridge will put the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry and Portland Community College’s Southeast Center within a short walk, pedal, or MAX trip. In the history of medical universities, commuter science is nothing new—it dates back to the Middle Ages, when the first hospitals began as annexes to churches. But in the history of American cities, Portland is verging on something more original: an urban research, development, and education district that, with all its soaring bridges and moving parts, is as inspiring for a tyke trading ideas with Mom on the MAX to OMSI as it is for a potential Nobel Prize–winning scientist soaring with a colleague on the aerial tram.

In Memoriam: Robert Reynolds

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 13:43:00 -0700

The first time I met the late chef Robert Reynolds he gave me a short lesson on how to cut a duck breast. We were sitting at adjacent tables for the opening night of a tony new west-side eatery. The protein was proudly delivered, but sliced woefully wrong.

Duck is a long-fiber protein, Robert explained. You cut it across the grain—otherwise it’s hard to chew, much less to digest. As my fork split each slice like a rotted wood plank, I instantly understood.

The first time Robert met me, as he liked to tell it, was in his car a few months earlier. It was 1997. I was giving a speech to the City Club of Portland, arguing how Portland needed to strengthen its regional identity through more thoughtful architecture, else the boom of newcomers would gradually erode our sense of place. “What about the food?” he hollered at his radio. “What about the strawberries?”

To Robert, Oregon strawberries—a distinctly more flavorful genus than can be found almost anywhere—are pillars to the region’s gastronomical architecture. Lose them, he feared, and Oregon would become just another bland suburb of Big Agriculture; properly celebrate them, and they could be the icon for the Willamette Valley’s natural wealth. And until he died of cancer in August, Robert lived to inspire broader love for those riches, and a deeper consciousness of how to use them. As he put it, “Oregon is the one place in America with the ingredients to create a regional food culture on a par with France.”

Robert had traveled the world, learning its food by making friends, from the home cooks he hung with while on military duty in Japan to his immersive studies with French cooking icon Josephine Araldo. In San Francisco, he opened a legendary restaurant, Le Trou, serving its first meals from a Coleman camp stove with ingredients gathered on morning motorcycle rides on his BMW between farmers markets and the backyard gardens of friends.

He discovered Oregon in the ’90s and tried on the shoes of the great Oregon-born chef James Beard but with his own Francophile skip. A goal—never realized but gleefully imagined in the occasional tours he offered to friends—was to establish a series of bronze plaques throughout downtown marking places where Beard had worked, shopped, and eaten. He opened a unique entity—the Chef Studio—where he taught classes (often to leading chefs) and held gatherings. He self-published a delightful combo of recipes and reminiscences, An Excuse to Be Together, and cowrote a sumptuous ode to the region’s offerings, The Paley’s Place Cookbook.

But Robert’s most important contributions to the region were also his most ephemeral: the countless conversations with Portlanders from every walk of life. As he seduced us into pleasures of eating well, he gave us a framework for what the flavors could mean, historically, gastronomically, and politically. And in a city with an abject fear of open disagreement or criticism, he was unsparing in his love and opinions. If a trend, a hot restaurant, or a dish didn’t match his philosophy and standards, he blithely flicked it like so much plastic garnish: “This doesn’t belong here,” he would say, flatly, to a wide-eyed chef. But one beat later, he’d gleefully extoll the virtues of a burrito he discovered at a Korean bulgogi stand: “Best thing I’ve had in weeks. Five bucks. They’re just doing it.” If the banter became too trivial at one of his studio gatherings (which might include an advertising guru, a venture capitalist, or the mayor of Portland alongside a stay-at-home mom or a barista who’d just taken a Chef Studio class), he would happily halt the dining and announce, “Can’t we talk about the bigger questions?” And the gathered would.

When lymphoma left him with weeks to live, friends from every facet of Portland culture rallied, with dinners and checks, to send him on “a victory lap” to France and Italy to visit the places and friends who had inspired him to inspire us. He finished the trip, barely, came home, and died within days, in part because he quit eating.

Every dead friend leaves a void, but the loss of the Portland food culture’s BFF is deep. Yes, we are hot, with our restaurants, food carts, wine bars, and coffee shops collectively becoming the kind of tourist destination and creative magnet any city would long for. But the standard Robert Reynolds wanted us to understand had nothing do with that. Mike Thelin, the cofounder of Feast Portland, put it best. In the days leading up to a breathtakingly successful launch of this new event, in which a large contingency of the nation’s leading chefs and food writers converged in Portland, Thelin was asked if he’d considered dedicating the festival to Robert. His response? “We first have to prove we’re good enough.”

Poll Positions

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 23:00:00 -0700

In these final days of deciding who will run the country—and the city—for the next four years, every hour spits out a new survey of the electorate’s razor-thin fickleness. So, you might ask, why would a city magazine commission yet another poll?

The answer is easy: at a time when all eyes are on Obama, Romney, Hales, and Smith—or, really, on a wishy-washy micro-minority who will decide who wins—we felt an urge (if not a desperate need) to step back, turn around, and look at the bigger us: in a sense, our neighbors. With the help of DHM Research, which has been polling Portland attitudes for 30 years, we asked some basic questions, such as: Who among us believes in a god, feels underpaid, spanks their kids? Who thinks the “creative economy” is real? And, of course, who’s having lots of sex—or none at all?

How surprising you find the results of our poll likely will depend on how long you’ve lived here. Despite our progressive, liberal, green, crunchy, youthful, fertile image, long-timers know that, deep down, Portland can be fairly (lowercase-c) conservative. That realization dims the city’s luster for many a newcomer. But in important ways, our collective ambivalence—especially about certain brands of ambition—steers us clear of the fads that cookie-cut so many other cities. After all, 68 percent of us would “feel rich” with $100,000 or less in the bank.

Yet our poll also discovered that some long-held assumptions about our region are fraying, particularly around the questions about future growth. Consider that when asked what the best thing about Portland is, more than 70 percent said either the proximity to outdoor activities or the food scene. Yet 61 percent don’t care about or would happily expand the urban growth boundary—one of the key ingredients that has kept so much fresh food within easy picking distance and has made the greater outdoors such a quick escape.

Between the time I type the final words of this column and you get to read it (about four weeks—even if our managing editor always wishes it were five), stats of all sorts will have been drilled deep into every undecided voter’s mind. A single wrong chirp by one candidate or another (with any luck, caught on a microphone someone forgot to turn off) may have decided our fates for the next four years. Hopefully, our survey of Portland’s values offers a longer, wider view. If nothing else, know that three out of four of your neighbors plan to stick it out in the Rose City for the next 10 years, even though nearly as many think the Big One is coming in the next 25.

Let the Feast Begin

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 05:19:00 -0700

Image: Kate Madden

THE GROWING NATIONAL consciousness about what we eat has had many proponents, from farmer/philosopher Wendell Berry to journalists like Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, to the documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock. But few people have made the simple act of cooking and eating your own food as accessible—and politically meaningful—as Mark Bittman.

With his long-running New York Times Magazine columns and books like How to Cook Everything and Cooking Solves Everything, Bittman melds food consciousness with conscientiousness. And so it makes sense to open our city’s first major food festival, Feast Portland, with a lecture by Bittman on September 20.

Feast is arguably the most ambitious freshman effort at an event Portland has ever seen. Cofounders Mike Thelin and Carrie Welch have reached wide and deep to create three days of showcases, seminars, parties, and, of course, fabulous meals with some of the nation’s leading chefs and thinkers. And at every turn, they’ve paired them with the Portlanders who are shaping this city into one of the country’s most talked-about dining destinations.

Serendipitously, our food editor Karen Brooks will release her vivid portrait of our local scene, The Mighty Gastropolis, during the festival. And whether you go to Feast or not, we figured there was no better time than now to tour the city’s wide world of ingredients in our “Food Lover’s Guide to Portland”

But, like Feast, let’s begin with a few words from Mark Bittman.

Your e-book, Cooking Solves Everything: How Time in the Kitchen Can Save Your Health, Your Budget, and Even the Planet, offers a recipe for how eating better can change the world. But you write, “Oddly the ‘food movement’ hasn’t helped much.” Why not? The “food movement” is in quotes because I don’t really think there is a food movement. But I will say, part of the answer to our problems around food is cooking. To the extent that the food movement is celebrating restaurants and esoteric and exotic and expensive ingredients more than the pleasures and importance of home cooking, that’s counterproductive. It’s home cooking that’s going to make a lot of difference in how Americans relate to food—not restaurants, and not things like organically grown local dragonfruit.

A lot of what you advocate for—CSAs, farmers markets, locally grown produce, for instance—still accounts for only a tiny fraction of the market. Is there a place in your wide travels in which change is matching the scale of the problems you see? That’s a great question, but no. Most places have not moved in as extremely bad of a direction as the US has. They’ve stayed closer to their roots, in part because they have much better roots than we have. By setting such a miserable example, we’re performing two services: we’re setting ourselves up for showing others how to turn things around (it may be a fantasy, but it’s an important fantasy), and we’re also showing other countries why they don’t want to go in our direction.

What buoys your optimism? I would not say I’m optimistic. I would say I’m hopeful. Statistically there is more cooking going on. There’s more lobbying for it. Ingredients are getting better and more widely accessible. But even if people think cooking is desirable, they don’t know how to do it. In a way, it’s as simple as asking, “What happened to Home Ec?” And when you ask that, you’re asking what happened to education in general. And when you ask that, you’re into questions of what our national priorities are. I’m not sure I can say that cooking should be a national priority. But I would say that food education should be—and cooking is part of that.

You’ve argued for subsidizing home cooking and developing a Civilian Cooking Corps. How would that work? We need to make it easier for people to cook and eat good food. And we need to make it harder for people to not cook and to make bad food. It’s a carrot-and-stick situation. To teach people to cook, we could have thousands of people out there running cooking classes and helping people figure out what to buy and how to buy it. What’s really going to happen is we’ll continue to see a small but growing number of people who believe in cooking, and those will be mostly well-to-do people. That’s OK. Lots of times movements are led by wealthy people. At the same time, things like New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s ban on big-gulp sodas is the thin end of the wedge. At some point, someone will enact a tax and the revenue from that will be significant and the public health benefits notable and that will snowball.

You’ve written screeds against milk and dairy products. You’ve been crusading against meat. You want to tax cheeseburgers and fries. What are your guilty pleasures? That stuff, of course! Cheeseburgers and fries! Pizza and hot dogs! Taxing something isn’t the same as making it illegal. We all pay alcohol taxes, and many of us drink. Why not raise the money and encourage people to eat other things? We live in a state that regulates things. The people who scream about this are either dedicated libertarians (and I’ve never met a consistent libertarian), or they are people in the industry.

You recently wrote about a pilgrimage to see Wendell Berry. He told you, “Your trial is to be patient in an emergency.” What’s a good working definition of “patience”? There are really only two options: you can be active, or you can be passive. If you are active, you have to understand that things aren’t necessarily going to happen quickly. I will tell you something that is really heartening and even enlightening to me: I wrote a column about [the history of federal support for and the unhealthy effects of] milk, based largely on personal experience. It was wildly popular. And I got 10 or 12 e-mails that directly said, “As a result of your column, I stopped drinking milk and my chronic fill-in-the-blank—migraines or heartburn or whatever—went away.” That’s pretty rewarding, and that took no patience at all. Sometimes you can change lives in a real hurry and things can make a difference.