this week i began harvesting big bunches of spinach and lettuce from the garden. other than our herbs, it is the first time we've eaten something we set in the ground this year. it felt exciting to go clip and snip and then lovingly wash the leaves for dinner tonight. in the process of collecting, i also noticed that some of the tomato plants now have the little yellow flowers that will lead to those delicious tomatoes in a couple of months. the nasturtium and morning glory seeds have popped up this week so it is starting to feel like full blown garden time. everything is still small and a wee bit sad but i noticed a huge growth jump in the last 10 days as temperatures have started creeping up and up. this past week we hit 80 for the first time and the tomatoes really responded. i think some of them doubled. cleo and i are going to measure all the plants every sunday and record them in her nature journal. i think it is a good project for her (she loves any excuse to write important notes) but i have to admit to being really curious about the rate at which things grow. i simply have no idea to expect. an inch a week? 6? a foot?
there is a lot about growing stuff that i simply have no idea about. i've just finished reading animal vegetable miracle by barbara kingsolver and i must say it was very inspiring and provocative. i can't recommend it highly enough. the subtitle of the book is "a year of food life" and it basically chronicles kingsolver and her family's experiment to live for 12 months as "locovores", eating only what they themselves grow and produce on their farm in appalachian virginia, or what they can purchase directly from a supplier in their own community. they go the whole year with the only exceptions to this being whole wheat flour for their bread and coffee. their goal was to forgo our society's damaging industrial food system that uses gazillon gallons of petroleum to produce and deliver our food, gazillons more gallons of pesticides, chemicals, and drugs to manufacture our produce and meat, and has long ago forgotten the farmer side of the food equation, instead creating huge corporate farms and meat plants or CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) to give us what we eat.
the entire book is insightful about what it takes to produce the food we all eat, but instead of being a wagging finger handbook about all the things they had to swear off and why, the book is very much a celebration of all that they discovered about food through the process of seeing it through all its steps: from seeds to plants to fruits and veggies, from egg to chick to chicken dinner. they make cheese, can and dehydrate food, raise and slaughter heirloom chickens and turkeys, forage for wild morel mushrooms, and grow literally tons of vegetables.
the book made me aware that what and how i choose to eat really does have a larger impact. what we eat shapes who we are, not just physically, but culturally as well. if we continue to support a food system that is wasteful and harmful not only to the planet but to our own farmers, what does this say about our humanity? if we encourage meals that can be ordered and paid for and put down the hatch in less than 10 minutes and all within the confines of our own car, do we like to eat? do we respect what it took to produce that food?
i think the larger question is do we really care about our food anymore? i'm not talking about the food network and the george foreman grill and the hot new korean bbq taco truck people will wait on line for 2 hours for, and all the other food gadgetry and pagentry. i'm talking about food broken down to the basics. the actual ingredients of what we eat. this seems like such a basic thing to swear off...after all food IS survival. it is life. and it seems that in the course of history, most cultures have elevated food (and the producing of it) to a very important and even sacred realm. the knowledge of how to grow things and then transform them into something deliciously edible has been handed down from generation to generation for eons...at least until the recent past. kingsolver makes a lot of great points about why america has a particularly dulled appreciation for its food. one of the best is that we have no intrinsic food culture here. we don't have, she claims, " a collective wisdom about the plants and animals that grow in a place and the complex ways of rendering them tasty." In short, we do not have a cultural relationship with our food like say, italy or france.
when viewed in this light, it makes sense that we're so screwed up about food and the ways we go about producing it. having this kind of handed down food culture is like the checks and balances of eating. it appears to impart some intrinsic awareness of how to eat well and how to eat smart. if you have a relationship with the land that produces your food, chances are you won't want to spoil it by covering it with pesticides that kill everything but the wheat. if you have always grown your food, you know that eating a peach in january doesn't make any sense and why would you want to fly a peach half way across the world again when everyone knows mr. x down the road has peaches worth waiting for? if you have made bread every day for your entire life, there is no possible way that someone can suddenly tell you that eating bread will make you fat. and chances are you probably won't be fat because you will know that eating tons and tons of food (or all your bacon in one sitting) will leave you with nothing come winter, and on and on. food knowledge is power. i'm a believer and i'm going to work hard to be an American willing and ready to come up with a responsible, tasty food culture i can be proud of. too bad i have to divorce the one i've got first.
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