I was just cleaning up the toys when I noticed that Esme's little shopping cart was full of cardboard boxes of play food, complete with a much-used brown paper shopping bag, and I realized that it's not an accurate mimic of our actual shopping trips. We use reusable bags (which are much nicer to carry than plastic bags and never break like plastic bags), and we hardly ever buy frozen or prepared foods. We even make our pie crust from scratch these days. We are definitely on the road to being a green family, although we have a long, long way to go.
I've been reading increasingly about a trend to attempt eating locally, or in other words, using only foods that are grown close by. There are a number of reasons why this is a good idea: it's a healthier, more sustainable model of farming than big agribusiness. It's also healthier to eat the freshest foods available (i.e. food that hasn't been shipped or flown a great distance).
I have been trying to buy mostly local produce from the grocery store or G. Berta's produce stand (which I haven't been to lately because I haven't been driving to Half Moon Bay much), but I'm not being totally strict about it. When local corn popped up, we were stoked. It was so much tastier than the corn that was being brought in from Southern California just a month ago. Ditto with the green beans. I'm contemplating signing up for a local produce box delivery service. We did it years ago, but I had trouble using all the veggies and fruit before they went bad. But now, with a family of four, we might be able to make it work.
I guess living a healthier, better-for-the-environment lifestyle will always be a journey because no one's perfect and our knowledge is always changing. But it feels good to be making baby steps.
3 comments:
If we eat what we grow, roughly when we grow it then there is a hidden bonus in the food. Nature provides us with a tailor-made seasonal diet. For example, squash and pumpkins ripen in autumn, and are full of vitamin d which we miss out on during the shorter daylight hours of winter.
I think it's called macrobiotics, but we call it 'grow your own'!
As for playing grocery shops, I've gone for a scale and scoop approach. Imogen has a shopping basket, set of scales and some small storage tins (currently filled with pasta, rice, rose hips, lavendar and furry pussy willow buds). She can go off to the pantry and shop for the ingredients I need for that dinner, or weigh and measure for her own invented soup.
As we know from gardening with children, picking the fruits of their own labour gives them an incredible appreciation for food. especially when the slugs or rabbits eat a crop overnight. Food boxes are great, but some still include bus or freight foods. Shopping at local farmers markets is key, but I just wish supermarkets would support locally grown. They wouldn't have to stop selling their Hawaiian pineapples, but offering local potatoes would make a big difference!
I do feel like having children makes me want to be a better version of myself. Food matters on so many levels, and I want my children to grow up craving the snap of a fresh pea or musky goodness of a raspberry just off the plant. Play both mimics what children see us do, and processes it, setting up patterns for later behaviour. Seeing myself reflected in my daughter's play is always illuminating, although not always complementary, but it lets me know that the message is getting through!
Thanks for this post. We have been very lucky to have access to great farmers markets in both Corvallis and Seattle. We have also been lucky enough to have productive gardens in both places. Additionally we visit farms on a regular basis. Consequently, Anna has what I think is a very high level of connectedness to her food and where it comes from.
One of the most fascinating aspects of this connectedness is how it has extended beyond plants in the garden that turn into vegetables on the plate. Vendors at the market who sell honey, shell/fish, meat, cheese, eggs, and mushrooms have all provided more than just wonderful things to eat; they have given her a great way to explore the world. She's learned when the mushrooms in the forest come out. How cheese is made. And, not only are there many different kinds of fish, there are about seven different kinds of salmon (this the the Pacific Northwest after all).
While most of it is fun, feel-good stuff, it has extended into topics like death that I had no idea how I would ever talk with my child about. At first I was worried about scaring Anna with discussions about "making it dead" before we ate things. Later on my fear of scaring her disappeard and eventually turned to annoyance when she would ask repeatedly at dinner what the animal would do if you tried to eat it before it was dead.
Now that we're beyond that stage it has become really interesting. For example, you can tell when she really enjoys a particular type of meat because she'll ask you what part of the animal it came from (like the other night when we put a particularly expensive type of ham on her pizza). And the other day while we were driving she asked what Roggie (her grandfather who she knows is a hunter) hunts and whether he makes his own bullets and has to put gun powder in his gun. Trying to explain to her that Pa in the Little House boooks used a muzzleloader which is different than the type of guns Roggie uses to hunt is something I never expected to have to do (let's not even talk about questions of whether I thought I'd be capable of such a thing). Now, even if you are a vegetarian who thinks meat is murder, you would still have to say that when a kid thinks a gun is for shooting animals so that they can be eaten is a much better thing than what most kids who play first person shooter games think.
Here's a book that I've come across recently that is along this topic. It's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver (the novelist). I heard her on NPR talking about the book, and from what I understand it's a narrative about her family's experience eating all local foods for a year. It's not a how-to book by any means, but it's supposedly very thought provoking, and since I'm a fan of Ms. Kingsolver's novel, I'd wager that it's a good read. Another one to pick up from the library... (or the bookstore, to support the author).
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