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| Anne's Grandson Rosco Cummings |
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This morning I cooked the last apples from our summer harvest. Yellowed and a bit withered, these old maids were dubious candidates, but the taste of the warm sauce filled my mouth with sweetness and my heart with gratitude. The apple tree stands outside my window, now bare and fruitless, but already I can see small buds forming along the branches. Next week I will prune her carefully in anticipation of another summer of bounty. She is a young tree, not yet strong or vigorous, but with a generous spirit. I value our relationship. I like knowing where my apples come from.
My grandmother, who raised six children on a small dairy farm in Potter Valley, was my teacher. “It was hard,” she said, “but we always had enough to eat.” Except for sacks of flour, salt and sugar, the farm provided: oats, bacon, chickens, eggs, milk, cheese, butter, apples, pears and myriad vegetables fresh and home canned. By World War II, she had sold the farm and moved into town. Her Victory Garden and chicken yard filled a city lot. I climbed the Gravenstein tree, picked plums, pulled fat carrots out of their beds, gathered eggs, and watched in horrified fascination as she beheaded and plucked chickens for Sunday dinner. (Decapitated chickens do tend to run about aimlessly before dropping.) My grandmother knew where her food came from. She didn’t trust supermarkets much and in the winter boiled Del Monte canned vegetables for at least twenty minutes before serving.
My mother, on the other hand, cheerfully and unquestioningly embraced the supermarket world. Wonder Bread, Nucoa, Velveeta cheese, Skippy’s hydrogenated peanut butter and Swanson’s Chicken Pot Pies were her emancipation from weeding, hoeing and endlessly gathering, preserving and cooking from scratch. Her new freedom, however, was purchased with many costs not tallied by the cash register. Relinquishing knowledge of where her food came from and control over how it was processed and prepared, she entrusted the health and safety of her family to the food scientists of large corporations and to government oversight.
And there the health and safety of most American families remains. In spite of the natural foods counter revolution of the sixties and seventies and the recent rapid growth of organic agriculture, health costs spiral, driven upward by rampant morbid obesity and a growth curve for diabetes that rises almost as steeply as our emissions of greenhouse gasses. What to do when so many people are literally eating themselves to death at the trough of a politically supported corporate industrial agricultural system that is poisoning the land as well as our bodies and suicidally contributing to its own demise through its contributions to climate change?.Whew! Many books and documentaries are available which discuss various aspects of this crisis. One of my favorites is Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which dramatizes our relationship (or lack thereof) to the food we eat.
Becoming conscious in our relationship to the food we eat and making choices based on that consciousness is a first step. Sitting down with my three generation family to share a meal, gathered from a garden that we planted and cared for is a blessing that makes all the extra effort worthwhile. My grandchildren, who browse regularly through the strawberry and raspberry patches, eat their vegetables with enthusiasm, perhaps because they’ve helped to plant the seeds and watch the little plants grow. Driving to a local farm to pick blackberries or to the farmer’s market to round out our basket is a family outing which binds us to our neighbors and builds community. Shopping for local foods in a local supermarket rounds out our larder. In the cornucopia of Sonoma County we can do all of this without sacrifice while becoming ever more appreciative of the bounty of the earth around us..
What is more basic than food? Let the paradigm or consciousness shift start around the dinner table and what we put on it to build the health of our families, our community and the ecosystem that supports us all. (For information on buying local see www.OrganicConsumers.org, www.localharvest.org)
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