And now for another winter…
October 31, 2008
Well.
It’s the wind-down time of this season and this internship and I have documented practically NOTHING.
I do plan to post pictures anyway–although there aren’t many.
So instead, I give you the newsletter I wrote in September:
On the day of this writing, it has officially become Autumn. Soon there will be that cool bite in the milky air and the sky will be filled with the treetops’ fireworks of red and yellow. It’s that transition time where your CSA boxes are full of early Fall Harvest treats and last-of-the-Summer goodies. It’s a time for new beginnings and tying up loose ends.
Part of the new beginnings for this year in particular is that of election time. In November we will have a new president elect. A key issue for many people that has had a looming presence over the election this year has been that of climate change. How can we alleviate our dependency of fossil fuel? What alternative forms of energy are best to invest in? By now, many of us know it is not just enough to screw in CFL light bulbs. We need to do more than that, and a big issue people need to talk more about in terms of combating climate change is food. What we chose to eat is every bit a part of fighting climate change as the daily bike ride to work.
According to the Pew Center for Global Climate Change, one-third of the world’s human-made greenhouse gas emissions stems from food and agriculture. That includes industrial farms’ pesticides, herbicides, and factory farm runoff. Even many packaged “organic” foods are a part of the culprit. How much energy did it take to process that organic General Mills’ cereal, and how long did it take to assemble that lengthy list of ingredients into one final product?
Eating local and whole foods is a crucial way to fight climate change. For many of us, by being raised on a steady diet of fossil fueled food and media-driven images telling us what we want to eat, the consumption of meals throughout the years has been confusing journey. But the vegetables in your CSA box are not only local and grown organically; they’re also 100% whole. So rest assured; there is no malodextrin in your kohlrabi, nor is there any dextrose in your tomatoes. What you have in your box has not been processed and never seen the light of a factory’s interior. Its purity intact, there is no energy required to develop such food into a final food “product”, unless you count the energy of one of our hands picking it from the vine/ snipping it from the plant/ pulling it from the earth.
How does one begin to counter our damaging mainstream food system? Joining a CSA is a great start, but don’t stop there: shop at your farmer’s market. Rip up your lawn and grow your own mini-farm and get a plot at a community garden. If you eat meat (or cheese or eggs), buy locally-raised, grass-finished meat from family farms. Minimize the amount of frozen food that you buy in cardboard boxes with huge paragraphs of ingredients. Preserve your CSA or garden veggies for the winter. Also, compost your kitchen scraps instead of just throwing them out in the garbage; the food that ends up in landfills are big emitters of greenhouse gases.
These food choices are not just for personal health’s sake, but for the planet’s health’s sake as well. There are many things we can do and need to do about climate change. Food choices are just the tip of the melting iceberg. And, on the brighter side of things, it’s also a delicious starting point.
