I guess the best way to answer that question is how did I get here from there? There being a place where I consumed diet sodas by the six-pack, piles of potato chips and fast-food sushi almost daily. Eventually I gave up the diet sodas because I was worried about what those artificial sweeteners were doing to my body. High Fructose Corn Syrup (HCFS) wasn’t even a blip on my radar, but hydrolyzed oils (the monster that is trans-fat) was. For some reason I’d deduced that injecting unsaturated fat with water was, in fact, going to be just about the same as eating the saturated fat – maybe worse, because this was fake.
I think it was one of OrangeClouds115’s excellent diaries that brought the issues of HFCS to my attention. At the same time, I also became aware that cows were being fed diets consisting mainly of corn, despite the fact that, in nature, they weren’t designed to eat corn much, if at all. Turns out cows are good at eating grass, but eating corn makes them fatter faster, which means they can be slaughtered and sold faster. But I don’t know that faster is necessarily better when talking food, so I filed that bit of info away for another day. Then one day Trader Joe’s had grass-fed beef. I bought it, and it was delicious. Did I say delicious? I mean – it was incredibly good, cooked quickly, and had a true beef flavor that I haven’t tasted in I don’t know how long.
A Book to Grow On
Then I read a book titled "What to Eat" by Marion Nestle. Contrary to the title of the book ,she doesn’t actually tell you what you should or shouldn’t eat, but instead tells you what you should know about the food you’re eating, and lets you make your own decisions about what to eat. It was thought provoking. And of course, it made sense: When you think about the journey that your December raspberries took – from New Zealand to New York to California – well, it’s no wonder that they cost $5 a basket and don’t taste five bucks worth of good.
The book also asks us to consider the ecological cost of out of season foods and feed-lot meat. The fuel cost for those berries, the excess hormones and pesticides that overwhelm the ecology of the area, the breeding for less fat in meats and color and hardiness in produce, at the expense of flavor. The damage done to the air and earth when you transport a head of broccoli across the nation. It was a book that changed my way of thinking about a lot of things, from the kind of milk that I drank to the kinds of produce that I bought.
Food from a foreign land:
Around the same time that I was reading this book, a friend, who worked at the EPA, came back from a South American country and told of the horrible pesticides being used on their foods, against, of course, all US regulations. And you know, when someone is shipping a peach from Argentina to California, how on earth is someone supposed to be able to control the quality there? How do I know that it’s safe to eat? So, that was when I started looking at where the food in the grocery store came from. Was it grown in Mexico? South America? New Zealand? Each of these questions came into play as I pondered a purchase. I tried to limit myself to items grown in California, where I live, but I wasn’t always successful. Sometimes those tomatoes looked SO good. (They never tasted that good, though, they just looked it.)
Bringing it home:
A year ago, I was working part-time, and I was shopping mostly at my local farmer’s market, with a Trader Joe’s run thrown in for meats and dairy. And it was easy to mange. After all, I got home by 4 pm Monday through Thursday, and I didn’t work Friday, Saturday or Sunday. It was a great set up. Unfortunately, life changes. Now I work full time, and my commute is, well, insane. I’m usually out of the house between 10 and 12 hours a day, Monday through Friday. That leaves scant time on the weekends for leisure, food buying, food prep, laundry, dusting, cooking and cleaning. It makes living a slow food lifestyle a challenge, let me tell you. But I don’t think that matters. I think what matters is that I’m going to try.
I so lucky. I live in one of nation’s most productive agricultural areas. I live in one of the nation’s most progressive areas – the organic and slow food movement was practically born in the Bay Area, and finding produce at my farmer’s market that was grown without pesiticides is both easy and inexpensive. Finding meats in the area that are sustainably raised is also not the challenge that it could be if I lived elsewhere.
And so I had this thought: Why can’t I grow some food of my own? Why can’t I work harder at finding food that is good, and good for me instead of what’s easy and on sale?
Today I put a garden in to my back yard. I don’t have arable soil, so I bought several large storage containers (65 gallon size) drilled holes through the bottom, mixed in soil and compost (with rocks at the bottom for drainage) and planted a garden. I have three kinds of cherry tomatoes, two kinds of slicing tomatoes, three kinds of bell pepper, two kinds of squash, two kinds of cucumber and one kind of string bean. I get spotty sun, so this is definitely an experiment. I hope they all get enough of what they need, but if they don’t, because they’re potted, I can move them to see if they do better elsewhere. But I think they’ll do okay. As I sit typing this, with dirt under my fingernails, a wasp is buzzing the containers and the newly transplanted leaves and soaking up sun, leaves shifting in the summer breeze.
If all goes as planned, I’ll have enough beans to get me through the winter. I’ll be serving my own pickles on the relish tray at Christmas, and I’ll be eating marinara sauce in February made from tomatoes that were picked in August or September. I’m committing to shopping at my local farmer’s market as much as possible. I’m committed to finding a butcher who will sell me meat from one of the cows I see grazing in the fields on my way to work each day.
And so I see that I got here from there by taking small steps. I didn’t eliminate HFCS from my diet, but I do consume a lot less of it than I used to, and I’m always aware of when I am eating it. It no longer gets a free ride to my stomach via bread or jam. I rarely eat feed lot meat anymore, although I do still eat it, usually when eating out. But again, it’s a decision made thoughtfully. I am aware of what I’m doing, and I am working at weaning myself off of it completely. Not just because it’s good for the environment, but because it tastes good to eat the right things. The carrot and the stick. I am going to try to eat 75% or more of my diet over the next year seasonally and locally.
I don’t know how my experiment will go. I work 45-50 hours a week, so I know it will be a challenge to skip the big, bright grocery store in favor of the farmer’s market. It will take an effort to get off of work on time on Thursday evenings to get to the farmer’s market. It will mean learning to can (that oughta be an adventure) and learning what can and cannot go in my vermicompost bin. It will mean less time watching television after a long day at work when I’m fried because the tomatoes need to be picked and eating at McDonalds (Fast! Easy! Cheap!) isn’t an option.
I’m hoping to make a series of these diaries, where I check in over the weeks and months ahead, to let you all know how it goes, share my foibles and successes and probably a recipe or two for good measure. I hope some of you will join me, if not for the experiment, at least for hilarity that is sure to ensue.
Cheers!