Quibbling Dot Net

Our beloved and much-missed friends The Wasyliks were in town this week for another beloved friend’s wedding, so we got to have them over for dinner on Thursday night.  We served steamed broccoli, mashed potatoes with chard, and garlic-rosemary lamb roast, and pretty much everything except the garlic and the butter and sour cream that went into the potatoes was from a local source. The potatoes, chard, and broccoli came from our CSA box, the rosemary came from our backyard, and the lamb came from our butcher, who specializes in locally raised and pastured meats.  Even the lemon olive oil the lamb was rubbed with, while not local to us, was purchased by Tom’s parents from a producer local to them and then given to us as a gift.

As you might expect, everything was delicious, even though none of it had a particularly fancy presentation. Mike and Tom, who generally eat broccoli because they should rather than out of any particular love for it, agreed that it was especially tasty.

During dinner conversation, Dineen asked what had made us jump so wholeheartedly into local sourcing of our food. It was a good chat, and I realized that I had written somewhat incompletely about these issues in this space before the Wordpress accident obliterated my archives, so I thought I’d ramble about that some more.

The more I learn about food production and our globalized food system, the more complicated it all proves to be. So I’m not saying I have all the answers, or that I’m doing anything but oversimplifying. At the same time, I can only act on the information I have as I understand it, and I find that preferable to throwing up my hands and buying a box of Froot Snax at the grocery store. I also recognize that I am fortunate enough to be in a financial position to act on this information, and that not everyone is. I am well aware that when you have $50 to feed your family with for the week, 14-cent ramen is high on your shopping list. However, since I DO have the financial means to make other choices, I will, and hope that as more people use their buying power to make similar choices, those choices will become more accessible to people who are less fortunate than I.

I suppose you could say that this really started way back when I was living in Pittsburgh. Tom came to visit me one weekend, and had promised to bring me caprese salad from the farmer’s market near his house. He showed up grinning, with tomatoes, basil, mozzarella, and a bouquet of wildflowers, “all produced within a hundred miles of [his] house!”  The wildflowers were a little wilty from the long car trip, but the tomatoes, basil, and mozzarella were some of the tastiest I’d ever had up to that point. 

Gradually, the farmer’s market became a regular part of our routine. And after all the food and Chinese product scares from last year and earlier this year, I started to think more about where it is that my food comes from.

We get rather a lot of our food from other countries. A great deal of what you see in your grocery store comes from other countries, where the regulations governing farming, processing, and production are implemented and enforced by governments we did not elect, and where the food is produced by people I will never meet. That’s all fine and good for my cell phone, my notebooks, and even my clothes, but it’s rather an overextended chain of trust for something as basic as the food I consume.

Aside from heavy thoughts about world trade policy, food that hasn’t had to travel as far to get to me is fresher (and therefore better for me) and tastes better. That makes me want to eat more of it, which is good for me too, at least as far as fruit and veg are concerned. That makes it a superior product, and deserving of my proudly capitalist dollars. Continue reading “food politics, deliciousness, and becoming a locavore and ethicurean”