Now that fireworks are legal in RI (with tent vendors exploding everywhere), we don't have to go far to see them. Last night, we sat on our back lawn and watched the displays west and east as two different neighbors lit up the sky. In our darker yard surrounded by trees the fireflies raced back and forth. Was it the warm summer night, a confusion or curiosity of sparks? We were captured and even the mosquitoes kept their peace.
Now I long to spread independence from factory foods and farms and publish my cookbook. It has over 100 recipes inspired by many ethnic cuisines, all using local New England ingredients. Even if you're not in the NE area, most regions can grow what we do, so someone in France, Germany, Australia, even Russia can make a lot of this food from their own local ingredients. This book can only exist with your help! Plant it forward, and send out this link: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/475787940/sustainable-cookbook Even if you can only donate $10, if 500 people did that we'd have a 1000 books! As an added incentive, a friend will MATCH everything donated by July 14th (French Independence Day). Below is a sneak-peak at the lay sermon I will be giving about eating locally. If you can, join us at at the First Unitarian Church on Benefit Street in Providence August 19th at 10 a.m. All are welcome!
Ethical Eating & the Interconnected Web of Life:
How Eating Locally Helps Us Build Community and Live Sustainably.
August 19th, 2012
Walking along an urban sidewalk from the bus, I see fast food wrappers, vehicle waste, and weeds. Through research and training, I see that weed is chicory, that one lamb’s quarters. Hanging over the bridge atop the stinking stream are fox grapes. All these are edible were it not for the pollution they’re mired in. The plants speak to me as I walk past. The trash does not, except to speak for those who have not made the connection between what they eat, themselves, and the world.
Waiting for my order of hash browns from Dunkin Donuts, I watched them remove a box from the freezer, cut open a plastic bag, remove a smaller portioned bag (apparently because employees cannot count to ten) and open it onto a throw-away tray, place the tray in the oven with gloved hands, remove the tray and place the food in a bag using wax paper, place the bag into a bag with a paper napkin, and hand it to me. Eleven articles were thrown away for a small order of hash browns.
At work, I started a “Waste-Free Lunch” program. Food scraps get composted. We have monthly raffles where students who come in with lunches that create no trash get tickets toward recycled art supplies, bug collection kits, bird feeders, and the like. An example of a waste-free lunch would be a sandwich in a reusable container, a reusable water bottle, cloth napkins, reusable utensils, and whole fruit. Not by coincidence, these lunches are usually healthier than the single serving snack bags, the Lunchables and Capri Suns. There are few or no ingredients that are unknown or hard to pronounce. It’s hard to break old habits, but small changes occur. We will continue to do audits and spread the word.
Food choices affect so much more than generating trash. A case in point is eating meat. I rarely eat meat not so much because I am ethically opposed to eating the animals themselves, but I am ethically opposed to supporting industrial farming, where animals are kept in confined areas, fed GMO corn they didn’t evolve to eat, and loaded with antibiotics and other chemicals to off-set illness due to the poor diet and cramped conditions. I’m opposed to giving chickens arsenic to combat intestinal flora and think vegetarian chickens are ridiculous. Let them eat bugs! There’s more protein in a grub than in a food-lot grade ear of corn. While I wouldn’t eat a grub directly if given the choice, I don’t want the majority of my food chain to be based on Monsanto corn. Instead, I will enjoy the rich yellow yolk of free-range eggs, soon from my own back yard, and get my chicken meat from the farm down the street. I will not get a corn-fed burger or salmon or ham while their waste piles up in cesspools rather than composted as organic fertilizer. I will eat less meat and I will pay more for sustainable meat, because if I don’t pay more now, I will pay later in environmental clean-up fees and my health.
One way I am able to support my family so we can eat organic and local food is by growing it at home. In the spring, we have Vietamese-style rolls with our herbs, lettuces, and rhubarb, as well as strawberries in our cereal. Summer is full of harvesting, drying, and canning. The garden bursts with tomatoes, squash, eggplant, and flowers. We get some blueberries and blackberries off our young bushes and hope to see fruit on the trees next year. We pick enough at orchards to have blueberries and peaches year-round and always use up the 60 or more pounds of tomatoes that go into sauce, relish, salsa, and more. If there is extra, as anyone who’s grown zucchini will tell you, we give it away. Smith Hill Center, which I found through ampleharvest.org, has accepted our fresh tomatoes. My students donated their basil plants right here at UU. Family, friends, and neighbors also benefit. Now, the RWP Community Garden I volunteer at has expanded and will donate the harvest from their “teaching plots” to the Open Table of Christ Church. URI has an entire orchard manned by volunteers that donates to RI Food Banks. Together, we really can affect the world, one meal at a time.
We cannot do it alone, however. Bumblebees take their impossible flights, filling the satchels on their legs with pollen from my blueberry and squash flowers. I never noticed the many colors of bees until I started gardening. Now, this microcosmos occupies my eyes. Blue wasps buzzing, ants herding black aphids, pleasing fungus beetles found under logs, the once invisible I now capture on film like I’m photographing faeries. The bees, wasps, and ants pollinate it all. Without them, a third of our food would not exist. When colonies collapse, we are next. Pesticides, genetically modified crops, over-worked hives forced to forage monocultures, weakened immune systems, and lack of habitat across pristine lawns – these are the beds our society has made. Do we now lie in them, or stand up against them?
Pill bugs abound in the litter of leaves, the great recyclers breaking down the detritus of the garden. My daughter collects them to feel their crab legs tickle her hand. We know how helpful worms are with their vermicompost and aeration of the soil. They are as obvious as rain. But who gives a thought to worms as they dose roses with Imidacloprid to kill everything they don’t understand, or add herbicides and over-lime their lawns to prevent a single dandelion from growing, killing the microflora and fauna below and polluting the ground water. (Dandelions and roses are edible as well, both high in vitamin C.) Now think of acres of crops laden with pesticides, grown as monocultures where they are dependent on fertilizer the excess of which descends into the water supply and eventually the ocean, creating huge and expanding “Dead Zones”. Imagine eating something that was cut off from all symbiotic relationships, the very ecosystem developed between other plants and animals, and think if that can be considered a “whole” food. Imagine cutting something off from its own evolution. Do you want that to become a part of you, both in the food sense and the spiritual sense? Imagine a butterfly that no longer flaps its wings, and the ripple effect of that.
The supermarket isolates us further. Each item is arranged by sometimes artificial categories, grown for its shipping qualities over its flavor or nutrition. We don’t often speak with the employees other to ask where something is or how much it costs, never mind where and how it was grown. Then we get home and throw away the packaging, the plastic bag. Changes are made with small but important steps. Step up your shopping by bringing a reusable bag, or ten, mesh bags for produce, and buying food in bulk, with recyclable packaging, or no packaging at all. One small step for man and giants like the plastic bag companies and the Koch brothers (who make many products designed to be thrown away) go down.
We live in a world of negative reinforcement. Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange, discusses the reduction of the freedom of the individual in this year’s June 4th & 11th edition of The New Yorker. He describes B.F. Skinner’s research that man is motivated by positive and negative reinforcements. Most of us operate under fear: fear of losing a job, disappointing loved ones or authority figures, of looking bad or different or weird. We avoid change out of fear. Instead of banning Big Gulp soft drinks, shouldn’t we be promoting all-natural fruit smothies? Which really benefits you: not drinking soda or eating healthier? We need to change our way of thinking not to avoid the bad but to seek the good. Burgess writes, “Given the right positive inducements...we shall all become better citizens, submissive to a state that has the good of the community at heart...We need to be conditioned in order to save the environment and the race.” Of course, we must also have a government that promotes positive changes in the community. The amendment to the recent Farm Bill to give subsidies to organic farmers using sustainable practices rather than just King Corn and Queen Soy passed; making it mandatory to label GMO ingredients as such did not.
So much of our choice of food dictates all the choices we make to access it, such as what we buy, where we buy it, what waste we generate from consuming it, what jobs we work to pay for it, and who we vote for to keep everything the same. In the hunter-gatherer society of the !Kung San bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in Botwana, they spend about 15 hours a week getting food and the rest of the week resting, embroidering, visiting others, or entertaining (Ryan, p.176). Not a bad-sounding life. Psychologists and Anthropologists Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethà argue that when foods are available in the natural environment, no one can control people’s access to what they eat (p. 176). I would also argue that when healthy foods are available in school cafeterias, convience stores, and local Farmer’s Markets, people will eat it. In “food deserts”, only processed foods are available to the local population, who often have limited access to transportation. One Providence convenience store had a “make-over”, placing healthy foods front and center so they would sell more produce than bagged chips. Two small supermarkets have opened in former Providence food deserts to carry local foods: Urban Greens Food Co-op and the Fertile Underground. Supporting these businesses, either by buying from them or becoming a contributing or sustaining member, helps the community grow as well. Society becomes more egalitarian and leaders arise not from coercion but respect. I didn’t force anyone to accompany me to the Farmer’s Market for their first visit, nor did I coerce them to return on their own. No one is making me teach my friends how to preserve foods. They just asked. When your neighbor is growing zucchini, you will not know scarcity.
How similar are the words “scare” and “scarcity”? Where there is scarcity of resources, misinformation, and fear, we turn against each other. We’ve been conditioned to want every new gadget, the right label on our clothes, the quick and easy solutions to dinner. We let corporations decide things for us, giving them our respect as our leaders without even casting a ballot. We are constantly told we live in the best society in the world, so why change it? But we can make our own choices. When Captain Robert FitzRoy of the HMS Beagle (yes, the one Darwin travelled in) took three natives from the hunter-gatherer community of Tierra del Fuego to England to expose them to “civilization” and western farming practices so they could then act as missionaries to the rest, he returned a year later to find the natives had reverted to their own ways and been happier for it (p. 163-165, 181). Conversely, farmers in India today, talked into Round-Up Ready GMO seed from Monsanto, have lost everything and even resorted to suicide. The slash and burn agriculture too-long prevalent in Rainforests to grow cocoa and coffee is slowly being abandoned for organic, shade-grown farming closer to the way these plants actually grow. We can promote these sustainable practices by buying organic, free-trade coffee and chocolate, now easily available. I know I certainly prefer the taste of Green & Black’s 70% dark over a Hershey’s bar, which contains soy lecithin (a filler), PGPR (made from castor oil), vanillin (derived from petroleum products), and artificial flavor.
This is a war on many fronts, but it need not be stressful. In the garden, I find serenity, a deep connection to the earth. The sun shines bright as a deity, the orbiting moon reflects his light and she pulls the tides. Rain is a blessing, bird song a choir. The earth is my altar, a table set with her bounty. And look, a neighbor I’ve never spoken to is leaning over the fence, asking about the flowers. It’s time we talked.
Citations:
Burgess, Anthony. (2012, June 4 & 11) Life and letters: The clockwork condition. The New Yorker, p 69-76.
Ryan, Christopher and Cacilda Jethà. (2010) Sex at dawn: How we mate, why we stray, and what it means for modern relationships. New York: Harper Perennial.
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