I want to stop buying stuff I don't need. How often do we think about what we’re buying? How many tiers are between us and our goods and why do we need them in the first place? Have we become agents to larger corporations, using and distributing goods we were dictated to manufacture or buy? Like sheep, we gather where the jobs and meals are.
There’s an historical amnesia when one generation stops teaching how to do something because the skill has been replaced by manufacturing and machine. There’s certainly a convenience to washing clothes in the basement machine instead of the stream, with the detergent companies and utilities getting their due. While we no longer travel to the nearest stream, we do travel to the nearest department store or supermarket, both of which have evolved to carry a greater number of goods beyond food and clothing. By carrying it all, perhaps our need to store-hop, and thus use more fuel, will lessen. That is, if it’s not cheaper somewhere else... Such is the competitive market, although consumers will pay for convenience. Yet this same appeasement to the manufacturing gods is not without our own power: Just in the area of clothes washing, consumers have demanded more concentrated formulas, less packaging, and cold-water stain removal, lessening our need for fossil fuels and space in the landfill. (Although, shouldn’t we be recycling that detergent container? Or perhaps converting it into a bird feeder?) I, the lazy hypocrite, often feel too tired to haul the wet laundry upstairs to the clothes-line outside, also not wanting to risk rain and time. But I've kept a lot of clothes out of the landfill using a needle and thread, as art materials, or if it was all cotton, a "rolled log" for the fire.
There are many choices we can make if we take a moment to think about them. When we decide what to eat, Michael Pollan says we have the chance to vote three times a day. A new term, the “hundred mile diet,” advocates for buying meat and produce raised or grown within a hundred miles. This is a good plan, although in the winter, I find it hard to resist Florida oranges. With the amount of flights from New England to Florida and back, it’s practically a suburb of our colder area...or at least that's what I tell myself. Perhaps there are other ways to look at it. Broccoli does provide vitamin C. That organic kiwi was sent by truck-ship-truck from New Zealand . While food is a necessity to life, not every food is a necessity to consumption.
My greatest dilemma in buying local is also a New England dilemma: Coffee. Gotta have it. Part of our culture. What we drank to escape taxation without representation. Coffee. Today, it takes a special effort to purchase a travel mug, have it in the car with you (bonus if you cleaned it), and take the time to go into the coffee shop rather than buzz through the drive-thru. Then there’s the distance that coffee travelled, whether it was grown after cutting down rainforests and spraying with pesticides or shade-grown with indigenous plants, whether the growers were paid a fair wage or in fair trade (which also would allow them to not cut corners in order to survive). Our impact on the world accumulates with every sip.
When the first coffee-dispensing machines were introduced, leading later to soda and snack machines, the product could be sold without the need for a shop, where a franchise owner and machine manufacturer stood to gain the most providing a convenience for people on the go or away from home. The first coffee machines distributed their products in little cups, little cups consumers were keeping and reusing. Customers had to be taught to throw away the cup! The idea and practice of reusing materials, avoiding waste, was already a part of American life. But planned obsolescence was in the works as early as the 1930’s. Meanwhile, we had to be taught to throw things away so that we could buy more.
In schools and the workplace, vending machines are everywhere. People make choices based on what’s available and what’s convenient, sometimes with only poor choices the only ones that meet both criteria. Perhaps we need to inconvenience ourselves more. In a school cafeteria, for instance, food is made off-site and trucked to locations. This saves money. To expedite the process of distributing food and clean up, food is portioned in disposable packaging. Milk is portioned in cardboard cartons, also thrown away. Many schools also use plastic utensils neatly packaged in plastic sleeves, all to be discarded. The children actually eating the food make choices between what’s offered them and raise no questions about how it’s done. The adults do their job as instructed, keeping the food warm, handing it to students, collecting the money, and washing the trays. Rarely do schools sort recyclables in the lunch room. It takes awareness and a school-wide effort to do that. Sometimes teachers take up the initiative for its educational merits, or an art teacher may collect “trash” to clean and use in the art room. While time and labor are saved on one end, the workers and eaters have limited choice in what is served. Most schools aim for a balanced, healthy meal, but that does not guarantee students are eating the lettuce on their plates or that the milk is free of hormones or the meat is not off a factory farm. Instead, we’re just links in the assembly-line chain. It’s a stretch, but what if the empty fields beside schools were used to grow food, where the students learned where their food came from and ate it too? It wouldn’t replace the cafeteria, as time, expertise, and too much risk would be involved in relying on the school yard alone. But why not some carrots and lettuce just for the experience?
When products replace knowledge and skills (and perhaps inquisitiveness), individuals, indeed consumers, are limited in making choices that affect change. When tractor power replaces mule power, diesel and the distance it travels make money for the multinational fuel companies (not to mention the tractor companies), just so we can go a little faster, while compacting the soil and polluting the air. As Wendell Berry bemoans, where are the mules to allow the farmer to slow down and notice the land, and tie us to the earth? Gardening has certainly given me this connection. While I am not able to provide all my food for the year on my 100 square feet, canning and freezing go a long way. We just opened our last jar of Harissa sauce this week, have about 5 lbs. of blueberries still, and two more jars of rose hip marmalade, higher in vitamin C than any orange. I can't even look at supermarket strawberries anymore, after tasting my own. (According to the Sierra Club, California growers just developed a new carcinogenic pesticide to replace the one the state just outlawed. I companion-plant with wild garlic chives, which deters the seed bugs, but not the squirrels.)
This morning, I watered the garden, newly seeded with beans, carrots, lettuce, and beets. My CSA starts the end of May, and I'll be posting my culinary solutions to what I bring home or gather from my yard. At the school I teach at, where we are lucky to have a food vendor that buys locally, students have planted sugar snap peas, flowers, and herbs in our newly dug garden. Slowly, I'm involving more of the community. Slowly, we regrow our roots.
