Food has become my obsession of late. Well, I’ve always enjoyed food. I’ve was, and still am, a big fan of eating out, trying new things, eating good food. I cooked, but usually either out of necessity or a desire to nurture people in my life with food. It really wasn’t until I had my first child, three years ago, that I started to really pay attention to food: where it comes from, what it’s made of, what all the labels mean (organic, natural, free-range, cage-free, etc). I’m ashamed now to admit that I really wasn’t too concerned about it before then.
I live in Portland, Oregon now, but have been a rather transient person throughout my adult life. I grew up in Utah and Arizona. I went to college in Washington, D.C., then moved to Seattle with Seth, my partner (then boyfriend, now husband). From Seattle we moved to Portland and lived here for two years before joining the Peace Corps together and moving to West Africa…Niger to be exact (this was the reason for Seth’s move from boyfriend to husband). From there we moved to New York City, so I could pursue my graduate degrees in public health and social work at Columbia University. While there, we decided to start a family, and our first son J was born in 2005. About a year-and-a-half later, I was barely pregnant with our second child, E, when we decided we needed to move back to Portland. We felt like our nuclear family would be happier and enriched by living closer to grandmas, aunts and uncles, so we made the move back to Portland. E was born here in 2007.
The point in telling you all of this is simply to describe my journey to this point. When we lived in Portland last time I was surrounded by forward-thinking people who were already concerned about the state of food in this country. I was peripherally interested. I’d been a vegetarian since middle school, probably mainly as a form of adolescent rebellion, but I had become well-versed in describing the various justifications for that decision (environment, cruelty to animals, health). But generally, I didn’t really get what all the fuss was about. My dear friends were moving to organics, becoming informed about genetically-modified foods, shopping at stores that provided those organic/non-GM options. I guess I just didn’t want to think too much about it. After all, I’d grown up on presumably non-organic food and was healthy, right? This GM stuff, how bad could it be if the FDA approves it? I mean, great for you that you have the time and desire to figure this stuff out, but I pretty much didn’t want to be bothered with it.
When we moved to West Africa I became obsessed with food in an entirely different way. The way you do when you don’t have access to much, are perpetually protein-starved, and still far better off than the local people who essentially one bad rainy season from devastating famine, and generally hungry the rest of the year anyway. As for the protein, I did start eating meat again. I sort of had to justify that decision, and did so by reasoning that it really wasn’t the meat I was against in the first place (and it wasn’t, really), but the meat industry in the United States. Therefore, if I could make the more political decision to eat torture-free, hormone-free meats I’d be able to continue with my newly omnivorous eating habits. The other thing I was exposed to in Niger was gardening. Seth and I helped the women of our village cultivate a rather large community garden with great success, and although we’d dabbled with gardening in the past, this really solidified for me how easy it could be to grow some of our own food.
Fast forward to pregnancy in New York. I started thinking more about hormones in meats, pesticides in produce, genetically-modified ingredients in foods. I kind of moved toward more organic eating, since it seemed like a nice favor to my unborn child. But I still wasn’t totally committed. However, as I pursued a degree in public health, and thought more and more about how certain additives in food, like high fructose corn syrup and trans fats, have been a major factor in our country’s obesity epidemic; or how other unnatural flavorings, dyes, and chemical compounds seemed kind of toxic to introduce into a growing child’s body; I started to do a little more research. When J was old enough to eat solids I was faced with really confronting this head-on. I guess when it was just my body, it didn’t seem like that big a deal. But he didn’t have a choice about what he ate and was entirely trusting me to do what was best for him. That responsibility weighed heavily on me. So, I read a lot, started cooking a lot, and generally delved full-force into understanding our food choices and their potential effect on us.
It was around this time that we joined the Park Slope Food Coop, in Brooklyn (where we lived). That was a profound experience for me, as I was suddenly surrounded by people who felt even more strongly then I did that not only did we need to eat organic, sustainably-grown food, but that as much as possible we needed to eat locally-produced foods made by responsible companies. I felt so sheltered while shopping there, blissful that somebody else had done all the work to stock the shelves with food I could feel good about eating and buying. The sort-of food activist mentality of the staff was really inspiring to me. It became clear that it would not be possible for me to go back to my old way of thinking. At this point, nearly every purchase felt like a political decision. Will I be putting my money behind companies that willfully deceive their consumers by lobbying against labeling genetically-modified ingredients in their food? Companies that support the monoculture cropping, the outsourcing of our food-growing to resource-poor countries? Those that practice factory farming techniques that are neither kind to the animal, nor the environment, nor the small family farm. The answer…no.
Now, in Portland, I’ve been delving slightly deeper into this. Mainly because of the easy access to good, local food. There are many, many companies in Oregon producing exactly the kinds of foods I like to eat. I can drive to numerous farms within an hour of my house and can buy produce directly from them – which I do mostly for ‘putting up’ for winter. There is a thriving farmers’ market scene, including one only a few blocks from my house. And, we have a yard in which to grow things. I don’t have a coop. They have them here, but they operate really differently from ours in Park Slope, and they don’t interest me as much. I often fantasize about opening my own. But until then I have New Seasons, a store that, while expensive, stocks almost entirely organic produce and many, many locally grown foods. They even identify them for me with hand “Home Grown” labels. Certainly the thinking person’s grocery store…if you can’t have a coop. Still working on that one.
So, why blog? There are so many out there, why add another? I guess because everyone in my life is tired of listening to my thoughts and rants on this subject. This blog is an outlet, a place to catalog, complain, explain, learn, process. I won’t try to pretend that we are complete locavores. We aren’t. We eat bananas. I drink coffee. We eat some bagged/boxed foods that are often not produced in Oregon. But, we try to eat and shop responsibly. In the end, all of this is a sort of grand experiment. We’re still trying new things, learning as we go, making mistakes, trying harder – in food, and in life.
