I share with almost every adult I know this crazy quilt of optimism and worries, feeling locked into certain habits but keen to change them in the right direction. And the tendency to feel like a jerk for falling short of absolute conversion. I'm not sure why. If a friend had a coronary scare and finally started exercising three days a week, who would hound him about the other four days? It's the worst of bad manners - and self-protection, I think, in a nervously cynical society - to ridicule the small gesture. These earnest efforts might just get us past the train-wreck of the daily news, or the anguish of standing behind a child, looking with her at the road ahead, searching out redemption where we can find it: recycling or carpooling or growing a garden or saving a species or something. Small, stepwise changes in personal habits aren't trivial. Ultimately they will, or won't, add up to having been the thing that mattered.
-Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
-"The World Is Too Much With Us," William Wordsworth
Oh yes, I'm back to write about food some more. I had no idea when I started this blog how many food-related books I would be reading. It's an interesting development for me.
In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, author Barbara Kingsolver and her family document the year they've pledged to spend eating locally. Month by month, we follow Kingsolver and her family, who have recently relocated to a farm in southwestern Virginia. Kingsolver tells the bulk of the story, which is supplemented by short articles by her husband, biologist Steven L. Hopp, and by essays and family recipes from her teenage daughter, Camille. The going is tough, at first. When they begin in March, they are heavily reliant on the local farmers' market, and there's not much there, either. They persevere, allowing only a few non-local exceptions in their diet: coffee, quite understandably, and flour to make their daily bread. As the weather gets warmer, they are able to plant and reap their own crops, though they remain dedicated customers at the farmers' market. They are overjoyed when their first asparagus starts tentatively pushing its way above ground.
It is Kingsolver's belief that people are too disconnected from the sources of their food. (Hence my inclusion of the Wordsworth poem about the growing alienation of man from nature. Oh, snap.) When people consume food grown locally, they know where it came from. It's as simple as that. Eating food from far away is unhelpful in a lot of ways. It's worse for the environment, since it takes energy to move the food around. It's worse for animals, who are often existing in appalling conditions prior to their slaughter - and non-local animal meat generally comes from these Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). It's worse for family farms, who are being edged out by large corporations. And it's worse for us, the consumers, since we are often getting inferior food, already days old before it's available in a grocery store. Pretty much the only winners in this system are the corporations - and with some corporate giants practically twirling their mustaches as they tie farmers down to the railroad tracks, it hardly seems like helping them out is our best choice.
So what to do? Kingsolver has ideas, and I especially love that she is not so militant that she expects everyone to do as she and her family have been able to do (see the excerpt above). She's not Jonathan Safran Foer, either. Eating animals is okay, but there is a line to be drawn. Yes, you have to kill an animal to eat it. But do you need to support, through your buying power, the existence of a system that allows such suffering? No. I'm trying to take the advice of Camille, who warns against self-righteousness when talking about food. It's something I feel more and more strongly about, though. I'm not perfect (I'd have a hard time turning down a Chik-Fil-A chicken sandwich), but I'm becoming more aware of my choices. Once you have the information, I have trouble understanding the lack of motivation (assuming you have the means and opportunity) to choose food more deliberately. For me, it's like trying to understand another person's politics. Logically, I can understand having different ideas, but really I only understand what feels right to me. Maybe it's sanctimonious of me, but that's why I am going on about it in my blog and not as much in real life. Perhaps it's more forgivable if you think of it as a particular pet peeve of mine. I mean, everyone's allowed to have a few of those, right?
I always tend to go on and on when it comes to food books. Obviously I enjoyed this one a lot, although it wasn't a particularly quick read. It was informative and it was entertaining (the section on breeding turkeys comes to mind). I actually think I enjoyed it more that either of Kingsolver's novels that I've read (The Bean Trees and The Poisonwood Bible).
Related: I thought this profile of Whole Foods CEO John Mackey was really interesting.
Up next: Remember my mentioning an eclectic haul from my last library trip? Well, I've just started Underground London by Stephen Smith. It's a nonfiction book about...underground London. Well, it's something I know very little about, so I'm preparing for a lot of (potentially useless) knowledge coming at me.
No comments:
Post a Comment