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Gayle's recommended readingby Gayle Anderson I'm reading a book right now that I think many Cooper's would find interesting. It's called Coming Home to Eat: the Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods by Gary Paul Nabhan. The author is an ethno-botanist who did pioneering work with Native Seeds/SEARCH and is currently director of the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University. He gives a very readable (non-academic) account of his year spent trying to eat four out of five meals from locally grown food (within a 250-mile radius) and - even more rigorously - to have nine out of ten of these edible species be native to his region. You follow his adventures gardening, wild foraging, turkey raising, bartering, food processing and meeting with southwestern Native Americans to try to recover their lost way of living. When he was cleaning out his larder of contraband at the start, I winced, thinking of the Coop:
The only can I hesitated sending away was one of Natural Value 100% Natural Pumpkin . It contained but one ingredient: pumpkin. Apparently it was grown somewhere near Sacramento, California (at least a thousand miles beyond my foodshed), by farmers who identified themselves as "lovers of the Planet Earth." But should lovers of planet Earth assume that it is okay to distribute their products from one corner of the earth to another? And should I assume that I have a God-given right to access the entire earth's bounty, however far away some of its produce is grown? Just because it was organically grown and contained no additives, was this nationally distributed pumpkin product any more benign than Nestle's Quik ? ... As nutritionist Joan Gussow has reminded me, "Organic does not necessarily mean that the food was grown in an ecologically, energetically, or socially sustainable way." If you send it halfway around the world before it is eaten, an organic food still may be "good" for the consumer, but is it "good" for the food system?" What can we do as Coop shoppers? The organic/natural foods business has followed the same path as the food industry as a whole, and it wouldn't have gotten there if people didn't buy their stuff. We have to recommit - as individuals and as a group - to eating thoughtfully and consciously. We need to eat locally : garden, shop at farmers' markets, join a CSA, demand local produce and meat from our grocery stores, pay a little more to keep a local farmer on the farm making a living wage. We need to spend a little more time in the kitchen, weaning ourselves from globally distributed processed foods. I know it won't be easy, but after reading this book I'm ready to try. One meal at a time. |
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