No wonder I felt pangs of guilt while watching “The Ball”. The movie acted as a mirror for my outrageously wasteful lifestyle. It is no consolation to learn that I am joined by the rest of my fellow Americans. One quarter of food wasted, is a hard number to reckon. This is to add to the amount of food wasted in our bodies when we overeat.
Of course our surrounding culture of waste and excess is to blame. At some point, however, one needs to start taking responsibility, and say, enough! I am starting to experience Prad’s comments about my grocery shopping habits, very differently. No longer as an intrusion and an attempt to control my actions, but rather as an expression of his deep concern for his fellow beings. Of course, it does help that he was born in India, a country where access to food is a privilege, not a birthright.
Guilt is good.
I come from a family where we never throw food away, a basic principle. I never questioned it really. If there’s a little left, we eat it. If there’s much left, we save it in the fridge. Always.
It’s not hard to do. It’s just a habit. But it may be hard to adjust to, of course.
I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before: A solution that addresses the energy problem and overeating all at the same time: I was in the checkout line today, and I saw it: It was even on special: Bright pink bottles: “You Go Girl” low-sugar energy drink: If they could only make enough of that, slightly over half the population would have more than enough energy to make the world go ’round: The only problem is, if my writing style today is any indication, the “You Go Girl” pink energy drink seems to have a very odd impact on the male brain: Maybe it’s not such a good idea after all.
Growing your own food puts a whole new spin on this issue. When you order from seed catalogues in the deep of winter, you are planning your menus four to six months in the future- and sometimes, for a whole year if you also put up food. When the seeds come in the mail in the freezing cold, planting them indoors is a bit of a leap of faith. When it warms up a bit, you carefully, slowly harden them off, paying close attention to the daily shifts in spring weather. Finally, you plant them out. Nature takes over with occasional help from you. Growing your own food changes you. You become deeply aware of the time it takes to grow- well, pretty much everything. You become aware of seasons, light, wind, rain. You don’t want to leave home so often. You rush out before breakfast to see how the seedlings are doing. It’s a kind of fine-tuning for us humans. And you find it becomes second nature after a few seasons.
If you are a foodie, gardening takes it to a whole other level. It also connects you to one of the oldest things we do as human beings- and which most people have discarded as hopelessly old-fashioned or needless. It is neither- it is just what our species does.
I’m convinced that if more Americans took the energy to plant gardens- just as their grandmothers and every generation before them did- there would be a lot less waste and a lot more thoughfulness in this country.
Ilex, you are echoing Michael Pollan’s recent NY Times article, advocating that we all take up gardening as a first step towards sustainability. I agree with you that we have become emotionally detached from our food sources, hence our disregard for what keeps us alive. I take great comfort in the current urban gardening movement.
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