It may just be the time of year or the particular circles I am in--or it may be a zeitgeist in the early stages of formation. There seems to be a lot of attention on food these days: where it comes from, how it's raised, what's in it, how it's sold. In the last month we've had an issue on food from Sojourners, then a few weeks later an issue from Mother Jones. My father-in-law sent me a book review about food. A friend sent a link to a site about the "100 mile diet." A group of friends joined a CSA with us and a number of us have small gardens out back.
Here's a summary of some of the items, feel free to add more in the comments:
When the average North American sits down to eat, each ingredient has typically travelled at least 1,500 miles—call it "the SUV diet." On the first day of spring, 2005, Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon chose to confront this unsettling statistic with a simple experiment. For one year, they would buy or gather their food and drink from within 100 miles of their apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Since then, James and Alisa have gotten up-close-and-personal with issues ranging from the family-farm crisis to the environmental value of organic pears shipped across the globe. They've reconsidered vegetarianism and sunk their hands into community gardening. They've eaten a lot of potatoes...
“Lord, to those who hunger, give bread. And to those who have bread, give the hunger for justice.” —Latin American prayer
I love grocery shopping. The tidy rows of boxes and cans, the perfect mounds of fruit, the wheeling of carts, the checking of lists, the whoosh of the automatic mister that leaves the leafy greens sparkling. I even like the Muzak.
So last summer, to celebrate the grand opening of a Super Giant grocery store in Washington, D.C.’s Columbia Heights neighborhood, I walked five blocks to buy flour for my fiancé’s birthday cake. Behind the renovated Tivoli Square complex, which now houses the Sojourners office, I found a gala underway: red, white, and blue bunting, a live salsa band, and shoppers scrambling for the opening-day sales.
“What is this—some kind of school project? You guys aren’t homeless, are you?” asked the clean-cut young policeman with well-gelled hair. His confusion was understandable. Actually, the first thing he said was, “You’re eating out of the garbage? That’s disgusting.”
Indeed, why would four middle-class guys be pawing through garbage bags looking for food? Officer Hair Gel vainly tried to fit us into a category that made sense to him. “Is this for some kind of frat thing?”
When global food shortages loomed 30 years ago, the Mennonite Central Committee asked its constituents to eat and spend 10 percent less on food. To help with that, the international relief and development organization produced More-with-Less Cookbook, which connects Christian faith with eating rice and beans. Eating more simply, cookbook author Doris Janzen Longacre argued, was not about “cutting back.” Rather, it meant “living joyfully, richly, creatively.”
Last summer, MCC released another cookbook that calls people of faith to connect values and eating habits. Simply in Season, which I co-wrote with Mary Beth Lind, promotes local, fairly traded, and sustainably grown foods, even if choosing them means spending more.
Other resources : Useful links to go deeper with the special issue on Food.
Eat at Joel’s! An evangelical Virginia farmer says a revolution against industrial agriculture is just down the road.
I might never have found my way to Polyface Farm if Joel Salatin hadn’t refused to FedEx me one of his chickens.
I’d heard a lot about the quality of the meat raised on his “beyond organic” farm, and was eager to sample some. Salatin and his family raise a half-dozen different species (grass-fed beef, chickens, pigs, turkeys, and rabbits) in an intricate rotation that has made his 550 hilly acres of pasture and woods in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley one of the most productive and sustainable small farms in America. But when I telephoned Joel to ask him to send me a broiler, he said he couldn’t do that. I figured he meant he wasn’t set up for shipping, so I offered to have an overnight delivery service come pick it up.
“No, I don’t think you understand. I don’t believe it’s sustainable—‘organic,’ if you will—to FedEx meat all around the country,” Joel told me. “I’m afraid if you want to try one of our chickens, you’re going to have to drive down here to pick it up.”
The first thing I did when my friends invited me to their seasonal potluck was pull out a map and a sharp compass.My friends, Jessica Abel and Matt Madden, are exemplary hosts, and the potlucks they've thrown once a season are pretty casual affairs with just one constraint: Every ingredient of every dish must have been grown and processed within a 100-mile radius of their house in Brooklyn, New York.That means not just no flour or oil, but no beer (plenty's brewed locally, but the barley and hops come from outside the radius), no cinnamon and no coffee...
The eat local movement places emphasis on consuming fruits, vegetables, meats and other products grown miles, rather than days, away. It has gained ground nationally and throughout the Washington area in recent years, particularly in Loudoun County.
It may just be the time of year or the particular circles I am in--or it may be a zeitgeist in the early stages of formation. There seems to be a lot of attention on food these days: where it comes from, how it's raised, what's in it, how it's sold. In the last month we've had an issue on food from Sojourners, then a few weeks later an issue from Mother Jones. My father-in-law sent me a book review about food. A friend sent a link to a site about the "100 mile diet." A group of friends joined a CSA with us and a number of us have small gardens out back.
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