We're at the grocery store buying the fruit and raw dipping veggies to supplement a pizza dinner for 35 people.
The woman in front of us has exactly two items: a case of ramen noodles and a 20-lb. bag of rice. When the ramen rings up, she gets excited, asks if the price is really what she thinks it is, and runs away to get two more cases of ramen noodles. Her bill comes to $14.95.
We buy two five-pound bags of oranges and apples, a couple of bags of baby carrots and snow peas, some dip. Our bill comes to $52.
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Mr. Burns and I are taking a significant donor and a significant prospect out to lunch. We go to what is reputably the best Italian restaurant in town. The room is hushed, the linens are ironed, the staff is adept.
I order the quail. The others order lobster ravioli, a beef dish, and a lamb dish. We all order water except for our significant donor, who gets a glass of wine. My food arrives beautifully plated on a small rectangular white dish: four small quail drumsticks, each perched atop alternating 1/2-cup piles of mashed potatoes and sauteed spinach. It's the perfect amount of food--tasty and filling but not overwhelming.
The bill is in the neighborhood of $150.
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Last weekend we investigated CSAs in the area. We found one that essentially runs year-round, that supports several sustainable farms, that has politics we like, that comes in shares for two adults, and that has a pick-up spot that isn't too far out of our way.
It's $850 for the six months of the summer/fall season, and we'll get weekly produce supplemented with the odd dozen eggs or bread or cookies or flowers or other goodies. We do the math--we spend that much and quite a bit more on produce for six months, and the goal of this particular CSA is to keep you from going to the grocery store at all.
We write three checks, each dated a month apart, to pay the $850 in three monthly installments before the CSA begins in June.
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Do we really need to ask what's causing the obesity epidemic in the United States? Do we really need to look any farther than what food is available to which of our citizens and at what prices?
We're reading Michael Pollan's fantastic book The Omnivore's Dilemma, in which he looks at four systems of food production in the US: the industrial global food conglomerates, the organic industrial food system (i.e., Whole Foods), sustainable farming, and hunting/foraging. It's simultaneously fascinating, disturbing, and inspiring.
Ina May Gaskins, the grandmother of the modern midwifery movement, says the first rule of nutrition in pregnancy is this: eat food. And by eat food, she means, eat things that you know what they are, things you can identify. In an article in the New York Times' Sunday Magazine, Pollan suggests a similar rule for non-pregnant people: eat things with five or fewer ingredients that you can pronounce and identify.
It's hard to read the book and not take it even further. Do you have any idea how many things we call food are made from the same two ingredients: feed corn and soybeans? We are being served the illusion of choice and plenty while simultaneously being restricted to two basic ingredients that aren't, in the end, very nutritious for human consumption.
Pollan makes a convincing argument that what we eat is even, in the end, less important than what the animals we eat have themselves eaten. Modern industrial animal farming is entirely driven by feed corn, which is not the natural food for cows, pigs, or chickens (much less salmon), and that, combined with the speed at which the animals are fed and grown, means that their composition is much less healthy for us than they were once. Studies are showing that corn-fed beef causes heart disease in a way that grass-fed beef just doesn't, because the essential balance of fatty acids changes.
I expected to come out of this book deciding to be a vegetarian, but that didn't happen. I've come out of the book inspired to commit to local agriculture in a truly profound way, to do as much of our grocery shopping through farmer's markets and CSAs and metropolitan buying clubs and our own garden as I possibly can. Without even looking hard we can buy grass-fed beef and free-range (really free-range, not just technically free-range) eggs and pastured pork and lamb and goat. (Chicken, for some reason, is proving a bit more complicated.)
As one of the farmers he talks to points out, it only looks like the food is more expensive. Sustainable agriculture is honest in the sense that there are no hidden costs: no government subsidies, no pollution and cleanup or lack thereof, no fossil fuel consumption that allows us to eat nectarines grown in Argentina, no risk of global economic collapse that leaves us starving. Of every dollar I spend, 95 cents ends up in the pocket of the farmer who actually grew the vegetables and pastured the pig, instead of 4 cents ending up with the corn farmer and 96 cents going to Monsanto and Arthur Daniels Midland and Cargill and General Foods and Halliburton and goddess only knows who else.
This is true, and at the same time, it does cost more money, pound for pound, to eat this way. I happen to think it should cost a significant part of our budgets to feed ourselves well, that skimping on food is the kind of thing that has a significant bodily and spiritual cost. But there are people in our country--many, many people--who cannot afford (and sometimes cannot even physically access) produce and good meat from the industrial complex as it is, much less from sustainable agriculture as it ought to be.
Pollan does not address the question of nationwide food economics directly, only obliquely; it is not his subject. It should be one of ours. I have the opportunity (and thus, I believe, the obligation), to choose sustainability. I can afford it and I can access it, and while our choice will not bring down the global industrial food complex, it does help elbow out a space for people who want to opt out of that system. And even as I embark on this journey, I am conscious of how much it is a measure of my privilege that I can do so. I don't have any answers for how that can or will change, but it is on my mind tonight as Ms. P cooks up potato-leek soup and lentil-kale soup and roasts asparagus and boils freshly-made pasta and stirs up a meat-sauce with grass-fed ground beef.
For us this is both as simple as buying our food from a new source and as profound as changing our sense of our place in the world. Buying and eating this way is to commit to living a mindful interconnectedness, to really knowing what has died so that we may live, to celebrating not our collective social sense of humans as the top of the food chain but our implicitly-known sense of humans as always collaborating with other species to be, in fact, the body of the world.