Best Practices: Leafy Greens & Truth

This evening I cooked up a whole lot of wilted old kale. In years past, I'd  have thrown it out, but I've been influenced by the "eat ugly food" movement [was it Anthony Bourdain who popularized that?]. I did compost the yellow leaves, but I washed the rest in a sinkful of cold water several times and boiled it up.

I'm now eating the simple bean soup I made with it, and it's good.

Mz says she puts Best Practices into action when she's feeling out of balance. BPs include eating good food. 
I definitely could use more good food.

I've been out of balance for the last two-and-a-half weeks since starting the store's Instagram. I've been tipped a bit toward Frenetic... though mostly in a happy way, and for a good reason--I've wanted to create a good IG that I like, and have fun doing it. 
And I have.
We reached cruising altitude yesterday: 100 followers! Now I can relax a bit.
AND EAT REAL FOOD.

Every so often I post here about trying to eat better. 
And then a while later, I post about it again.
In between, at least in the last couple years, my kale melts to sludge in the crisper drawer as I slowly slide into a diet of bakery items (donated to the store) that have a one-week "freshness" date,  .
No baked item should be considered "fresh" after a day.

So. Up and at 'em again, Fresca:
Best Leafy-Greens Foot Forward!

OK, then.

As for relaxing about IG, though--not today. 
bink and I had coffee this morning, on my day off, and she thought it would be fun to come to the store and help me photograph things to post.

It was fun!
She photographed the neckties, below left;
and I photographed my coworker shoveling the sidewalk, carbon-free (because we have no snow blower), center.
The shark-sweater shot was a collaboration: 
it was bink's idea to have the shark go for little animals. I found the rubber duckies.

After we finished shooting the shark, before I could hang the sweater back up, someone came along and bought it.

I suppose the point of the IG is to market things--but it's also to "market" what we, SVdP, care about, which is not to make money for the sake of money. 
(Which is good, because we don't make much of it.) 

It's easier to photograph things than ideas, so the IG is more about "reduce reuse recycle" than "feed the hungry".
The mission statement says we're "a network of friends... building a more just world."

I don't know that we're building that, feels more like we're trying to keep the house from falling down...
And if we made more money we could pay a living wage and better support our food bank, which operates on a budget of the coins we find in the couch cushions. (Almost the truth.) 

Still, I DO have conversations, regularly, with staff and customers about what's true and what's right. 
As impeachment manager Adam Schiff says, 

"Right  matters. And the truth matters."

(Thank you, Orange Crate Art (OCA), for posting the clip of Schiff's closing statement.)

Yes. So, it's interesting. I'll keep trying to figure out best practices for IG... More living food, less dead stuff disguised by preservatives.

Oh, wow! After I posted this, I went back to OCA and clicked on a link on Jim Lehrer's best practices journalistic guidelines.
A lot of them are good guides for me now, as I think about IG, which is a kind of public journalism.

Number 1:

"Do nothing I cannot defend."