Thanks, everybody, for the book suggestions! I haven't made a final decision yet but am excited to have the recommendations, both for my class and for my own summer reading. (Though if I'm to be honest, my attention span for "lit-ra-ture" has been markedly lowered of late . . . )
Anyway, the name of this post wasn't intended to refer to my evolving taste in trashy reading. Though I've sampled some lowbrow chick lit in the past few months, the best book I've read lately is Barbara Kingsolver's
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about her family's attempt to eat local foods for a year. It's elegant, funny, and trechant, and it includes recipes. And it showed me why the concept of local food would even be interesting.
I say "even" because in one part, the concept seemed axiomatic, and in another, it seemed impractical. Axiomatic because in the summer in South Jersey where I grew up, on many of the rural roads, you happen across fresh fruit, vegetable, and flower stands every few miles. Everybody has gardens, and my dad had an enormous one that produced the vegetables and fruits my mother canned and made into jams every summer and fall. I remember watching my mom lifting steaming jars of tomato sauce from a pot on the stove, or coming home from school to see her and my grandmother slicing bushels of peaches or apples for sauce.
But impractical because it seemed like it would be an incredibly restrictive diet when not living in South Jersey in the summer, and not necessarily better--even when I was growing up, some foods from other places were just considered to be better for their sheer exoticism (California tomatoes in January!) . . . if you needed to get it from somewhere else, it must be because it was better. Also, produce advertised as organic tended to be small and wormy back then, which is not the case anymore as the concept has become more popular, especially among choosier people.
Kingsolver addresses these concerns in the book, and makes it all sound very lavish and tasty, if labor-intensive. And the concept comes at the right time for me, as I find myself in the midst of a much more wasteful life, foodwise, than ever before. A two-adult household generates a huge amount more waste, because I cook every day (and one of us,
ahem, is a very picky eater), whereas I used to cook every few days and eat with very little waste. Now I cook every day, and one of us (
sorry, I've really got something stuck in my throat!) doesn't like leftovers (so sad!). Plus, on a non-food-related note, we have this baby whose whole set of belongings has come into the house all at once, meaning bags and bags and bags of packaging trash. I think we fill a bag every day, whereas I used to fill about one or two a week.
Then I saw
this article in the
New York Times about how much food Americans waste, and it made an interesting pairing in my mind with the photo essay from Pi of the food various families eat worldwide. I like having good, interesting, fresh food ingredients on hand, which does mean some waste sometimes as things spoil faster when you have more for variety's sake. And I also like reading magazines and having pretty clothes, can't deny it.
But all these things--my reading, the current economy, the stuff I'm surrounded with now that there are three of us--do make me notice a shift in my packrat ways. The greater clutter of two adults and a baby means that it's become more important to have less stuff around and comparatively less important to economize financially by keeping things around just in case. I tend to have stuff because of not getting rid of things more than because of acquiring them. This is why I have, for example, two big bags of lovely gift bags in which we received baby gifts--but how many baby gifts will I likely give in the near future? Is it better to save things to generate less waste overall, or get rid of them to have less stuff around? Is it better to buy smaller quantities of food for single uses, which involve more packaging and significantly higher cost (even when waste is factored in), but mean having less around and thus having things look simpler and cleaner, even if it means driving to the store more often?
What was it Socrates said about the over-examined life? I have a feeling this post is getting less and less coherent, but then I'm writing it while suffering simultaneously from extreme sleep deprivation and acute insomnia . . .
