Food for Thought
I talked to my dad on the phone this morning, and the subject of food came up, and for once, the conversation wasn’t a criticism of my weight or my assumed diet. (Since I moved out of my parents’ house when I was 19, my parents and grandparents have scolded me for not eating enough and on holidays force me to eat three times what I should, plus a big piece of pie or cake.) Our conversation this morning, though, was a diatribe against the food industry. I’ve been reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and my dad has watched his lectures on CSPAN’s Book TV. Of course, much of what Pollan has to say about the industry isn’t new. We’ve known farms aren’t what they used to be, that fertilizers and pesticides get into our food, that animals are penned up for most of their lives and fed cheap, disgusting food and hormones, and that the farmers aren’t profiting from our over-consumption. But we both conceded we’ve learned a lot we didn’t know about the industry from Pollan and that something is majorly awry with the American diet.
There’s one piece of advice Pollan gave in one of those lectures that both my dad and I agreed is a pretty helpful and intuitive guide in deciding what to eat: don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize. He gave the example of the processed granola bars with the artificial layer of milk or yogurt. And he’s referring to all the processed foods in the grocery store. My grandmother—well, I’ll use my great-grandmother as an example, since I’m of a younger generation than Pollan’s—wouldn’t recognize Pop-Tarts or Fruit Roll-Ups or Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal or the various combinations of fruit juices, even. It is my understanding that most of what my great-grandmother ate was grown and raised by her and her family on their farm in Northeast Florida, where I grew up too. My parents have a black-and-white photograph on their mantle of three women—one of them is my great-grandmother—standing outside a smokehouse, holding butcher knives. There has probably just been a pig slaughter, and the women are finding a way to make use of every bit of the meat. They’ll eat pork roast, bacon, ham, sausage—and they’ll use the intestines to mold the sausage links. They’ll even use the bone to flavor vegetables. Those vegetables—corn, squash, beans, okra—were grown in their own gardens. They also made jellies with muscadine grapes and quince and native wild berries. They had fig, pear, peach, citrus, and pecan trees. They milked their own cows and ate eggs produced by their own chickens. They were masters of self-sufficiency.
Obviously, not everyone can live this way today. We have adapted to a system that makes all sorts of foreign food items available to us in one central location—the supermarket. But I want to go back to Pollan’s advice about food and apply that to the way we live, because it seems that the way we live now, and the system that drives it, is collapsing. In John McKnight’s introduction to his book, The Careless Society: Community and its Counterfeits, he acknowledges friends and teachers who have aided him in his work, and one of those friends is a physician named Robert Mendelsohn, whose prescription for the ills he believed are caused by “lack of community” is simply: “What would your grandmother say?” And in the first chapter of the book, McKnight quotes E.F. Schumacher: “The guidance we need…cannot be found in science or technology, the value of which utterly depends on the ends they serve; but it can still be found in the traditional wisdom of mankind.” What did my forebears know? What did the forebears of my current community know? In taking a walk here in Oregon Hill, I see the remnants of a community that appears to have been self-sufficient at one point, at least partially so. But no longer do corner storefronts invite us in to buy butter or eggs, or to have a fountain drink, or to share in conversation with our neighbors. If I need something, I have to go outside of my community.
I said earlier that it seems our system is collapsing. But paralleling that collapse are changes to the “inscape” of our communities. I found this word—inscape—in a book called Rebuilding the Front Porch of America: Essays on the Art of Community Making, by Patrick Overton. This is his definition for it: “the way community works—from the inside—people and the way they communicate with each other, the way they relate to each other; the shared values, interests, and concerns that bond them together.” And later he says something that’s maybe a little sad, but maybe a little hopeful too, about the changing inscape of our communities, that “We need to realize the deep hunger people have to become ‘makers’ again. We have become a nation of consumers, a people defined by the consumption of things made by others. As a result, we have little relationship between the things we use/consume and the people who make them. This has created a market-place, commodity-based society.” I see changes taking place in my own community—changes that appear to be a response to the commodity-based society. The Grace Arents Community Garden and William Byrd House Farmers Market are both in their second year of organized existence. While neither promises to do so, there seems to be an underlying theme or goal of helping the community move toward self-sufficiency, even if in some small way. Even if it’s to teach each other that it’s possible to come together as a community and create something worthwhile.
