Michael Pollan has written wonderfully on the subject. He has a long article in the New York Times magazine, January 28, 2007, titled “Unhappy Meals,” which I recommend to everyone in the CSA. Here’s the URL: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/28/healthscience/web.0128foodMAGAZINE.php. He’s also the author of the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which I haven’t read.
You can learn all about politics, from the local to the international level, by looking at food. Frances Moore Lappe looked at the problem of world hunger back in the early ’70s and found that every nation on earth, even the poorest, had the resources to be self-sufficient in food. They didn’t need higher technology or help from the West; they needed the capacity to resist the global economic pressures that forced them to grow cash crops for export. In our day, George Monbiot, who was recently on the Marc Steiner show, has done a great job of explaining how global warming is starving the poor nations through floods and droughts, and how increased production of alcohol fuels will exacerbate starvation, because poor people can’t pay the price for corn that fuel producers will offer. The huge wave of immigration from Mexico comes about because small farmers in Mexico can no longer make even a meager living.
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I got interested in food and health more than 30 years ago, baked my own whole-grain bread every week, and cotaught a course in nutrition at the Washington Free Clinic. I’ve been a flexitarian almost that long, though the word was only coined a few years ago.
I volunteered at the Bethesda Food Co-op and served on its board back in the early ’80s, and in the early ’90s I participated in the Potomac Valley Green Network’s Food and Agriculture working group. We gardened together on the land of a member who had a small organic farm, helped set up a monthly meeting for all the food co-ops in the DC metro area, sponsored a daylong workshop on food and agriculture issues (including a presentation on CSAs), and did activist work in cooperation with the Maryland Safe Food Coalition.
I had a community garden plot in Northwest DC and grew herbs in my yard. That’s not possible here; I have no yard, and when I grew herbs in pots on the back patio, the rats ate them down to the stem.
It never made any sense to me that although Maryland farmers grow tomatoes, corn, squash, beans, and watermelon, to name the biggest crops, you couldn’t buy them at the supermarket. But I became really committed to local food last summer, after reading about the issues, and started shopping religiously at the Farmer’s Market under the Jones Falls Expressway.
I ‘m not a purist; I haven’t given up citrus fruit, bananas, mangoes, etc. I also buy frozen berries, corn, peas, etc., when they’re not in season. (Wouldn’t it be great if we could buy locally frozen and locally canned fruits and veggies? And if it were profitable for farmers in our area to extend the growing season, as farmers learned to do in the early 20th century, but then became overwhelmed by imports from Florida and California?)
I feel very lucky to finally have a CSA right in the neighborhood. Jodean
