Disclaimer: this post was the result of an interesting thought I had that turned out to be very difficult to articulate. I apologize if it comes across as such.
While skimming through my blog roll this week (it’s so nice to finally have the time to do things like that!) I found a great quote by Liz from Pocket Farm: “Instead of thinking of myself as an environmentalist, I like to think that I am living in a way that my grandparents would understand.” I read that and it gave me a pause.
Sometimes, like when I mentioned to a co-worker that I was baking a peach pie (I didn’t even bring up the fact that it was an all local peach pie for which I had come into work a little late just that morning because I was buying local flour over in Oak Ridge) and she asked why I didn’t just buy one at the grocery store, I realize that to most people in this country the idea of my making jar after jar of strawberry jam or gallons of local tomato sauce is totally insane. None of my friends do anything similar. I’m the only person I really know who would spend a whole weekend boiling and freezing corn for use in the winter even though I know that fresh ears will be sitting on the shelf at Harris Teeter in January. But does this mean that I’m disconnected with reality?
Is it weird to waste time canning food for the winter or is it weird to waste energy delivering food across the world when it’s not available where we live? And why is the first one considered so much weirder than the second?
I must admit that I like thinking of my little Italian immigrant Great-grandmother as a hard core environmentalist, putting up her pasta sauce every summer and processing her chickens every fall. It’s an appealing idea. However, it’s also an out of context idea. It would be like saying that Rosa Parks was an environmentalist because she took the bus. My great-grandmother didn’t store food for the winter because she was a rebel, she did it because it was what made sense back then.
My real question is why those behaviors don’t make sense now? What is it that changed to make the energy involved in transportation trump the energy involved in food storage? Why is my behavior, which was the commonplace occupation of tiny Italian women across this country 100 years ago, now the dangerous act of a free thinker. I don’t know the backgrounds of many of your lives, nor do I know how you came to be interested in seasonal eating, but I got into this whole thing in college. As I’ve mentioned before I was mostly raised in Key West where local food is a pipe dream. Now living like a locavore (or a very old lady) seems natural to me and living with Zone Bars and microwave dinners as replacements for real food seems very unnatural.
So who are the crazy ones? The people reading this blog or the people who never will?
August 15, 2007 at 12:48 AM
The other day one of my co-workers made fun of me because I preserve food and maintain a strictly local diet. She called me an old woman. It got me thinking about many of the same things you bring up here. Two generations ago what we are calling our “new” lifestyle was simply “the” lifestyle. Most food came from very nearby, and the exotics, tropicals and packaged goods were luxuries. Now it is the other way around, with local food sometimes hard to come by but a 59 cent mango can be found at the corner store. Something is crazy here, but it is not us…
August 15, 2007 at 1:33 AM
It *is* difficult to articulate, but I think you did a great job. You are *so* connected with reality, through the food that you eat and store. You get the full food experience every time you have a meal. It may seem strange to your friends, but at least you know how well you eat on a daily basis (we say this all the time… we’re so lucky to eat like this!)
Someone called me “subversive” recently and it gave me pause. Me? Subversive? Because I grow my own food? Pshaw!
Once you start thinking about these food issues, it becomes apparent how fragile the oil economy is. The fact that the nation’s entire food infrastructure is based on cheap oil is really quite alarming!
August 15, 2007 at 2:40 PM
Well, you certainly aren’t crazy.
Two generations ago, people in this country also had vegetable gardens.
What I just cannot understand is how people think doing all this is a square peg issue. “Where do you find the time, I certainly don’t have any to put up my own food,” they say. To which I say, turn off the television and see how much time gets freed up!
August 16, 2007 at 3:24 PM
You’re not disconnected from reality; you’re just paying attention.
I bet if you brought some of that pie into work your coworker would figure out the difference between a pie and the garbage they sell at the supermarket. I know there are plenty of people who thinks it’s silly for me to spend time putting up local foods that I could just buy from the supermarket in the winter. But no one who’s eaten my food thinks it’s a waste of time.
I’ll second the comment about television. Most people could easily make the time to cook and put up food if they would just make it a priority.
August 20, 2007 at 3:25 AM
Wow, I’m thrilled by how much dialog this post has created. Thank you all for your thoughts.
As for the spare time comments, I do with people had/made more time for canning, preserving, and cooking. However, this country’s work ethic being what it is (absolutely insane in my personal opinion) I don’t think we’re going to see that happening anytime soon. People need time to relax and many of them do not equate cooking with relaxing.
What I do wish is that more people were open to the idea of local food and that more local food (preserved or not) was available at our local stores. If only we had an infrastructure that supported such values. Or even the possibility of those values.
August 28, 2007 at 6:06 PM
I’m a little late to this conversation, but I think all locavores experience what you are talking about. Even my family, who grew up raising all our own produce and canning and freezing it for the winter, doesn’t understand why I would WANT to do that now. They do understand that food from the garden tastes better, but they’re not willing to make it a priority when it’s easier to buy a Mrs. Smith’s pie. I think that more than anything else, convenience rules in today’s society. There are times when I choose it too – I’m not perfect – but I do try to put other values higher on my priority scale.