Food fright: The odyssey begins

Apparently I’m eating sludge.

I’m just finishing Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and having a lot of duh moments. Also a lot of eeeeeeeeuw moments. And this is compounded by discussions with colleagues, grocery store produce managers and a nice lady at the train station, all of whom seem to have read this book and have at least one gruesome, gory anecdote to support its conclusions.

Remember The Jungle by Upton Sinclair? Kinda like that.

I can say with some confidence that the less you know about the production side of the US food chain, the better. Otherwise you’re pretty much obliged to change your ways, i.e., find alternatives to highly industrialized agriculture, which appears to be a daunting task.

But that’s what I’m going to be doing for awhile. Like Pollan, I want to know where my food came from. Unlike Pollan, I’m not going to travel across the continent to find out. If a food’s origins are murky (or unsatisfactory) after a reasonable investigation, out it goes. Into its place goes stuff I can trace and trust, stuff that’s hopefully sustainable.

I’ve been warned that this is not easy, it’s more expensive and requires a lot more time than just running to Safeway, and it requires a lot more prep. I’m told that I’m like 90-gazillion others who’ve also read this book and suddenly decided they need to think as much about what goes into their mouths as what goes on their hair, so I may need to go on a waiting list to buy groceries. This will be a novel experience.

I don’t want to be unreasonable about it–I’m not going to insist that friends and family only serve me “good stuff,” which, knowing my friends, would likely be met with a laugh anyway. And I’m going to eat in a nice restaurant every once in awhile, whether or not I get to meet the farmer who raised the chicken. Also, if it looks like my only option is berries and grubs from my own backyard, I will acknowledge defeat and head for Taco Bell.

But I’m also counting on a very big ace up my sleeve: Oregon. Oregon is one of the most earth-conscious places I’ve ever encountered (an ex-hippie friend calls it “the place where the hippies went to die…and didn’t”). I’m counting on enough of that consciousness being around to sustain sustainable agriculture, sufficient to meet my needs.

I’ve also got a second ace, New Seasons Market. It’s a local grocery store chain that appears to strongly support local, sustainable farmers. There’s a New Seasons within driving distance, the people are fantastic, the food’s good, and I already enjoy going there on “market day.”

That’s when the local farmers come out with their produce, spread it out in front of the store, cook it and pass out samples. They’re fun to talk to, and I can HEARTILY recommend the pink grape tomatoes. Best tomatoes I’ve ever bought, so good that masking them with salad greens is probably blasphemy. And with a bit of balsamic vinegar, a little olive oil, maybe some home-made mozarell…

Ahem.

So. First thing to do is draw up a set of rules. Then I’ll assemble my resources, and see where they lead.

Rule #1: No more fast food, or food processed to the point that I need a dictionary to understand the label.

Rule #2: I will confine my food buying to products harvested within a day’s drive from my refrigerator.

Rule #3: I will eat a completely balanced diet. No cheating by living on rutabagas simply because they were the only thing that fit rules 1 and 2. No additional complications, i.e., no diets, sudden-death vegetarianism, etc.

Rule #4: No food out of season unless–like olives and tomatoes–it’s been appropriately preserved. Appropriately does not mean came off the tin can assembly line at Del Monte.

Rule #5: I will make an exception for the necessities of life, i.e., chocolate, popcorn (unless it’s grown locally, which I doubt), lemonade, and other stuff as I think of it.

Rule #6: I will spend no more than an hour of my day (hopefully much less) in researching, collecting and preparing food.

Rule #7: I will not become a food bore, and annoy my friends with smug little factoids such as “Did you know that your steak came from a cow standing in its own waste, chewing food that made it so sick it had to be pumped full of antibiotics to keep the pus levels down?” (Actually this won’t be a problem, as my friends would have knocked me unconscious by the second prepositional phrase.)

The rest I’ll make up as I go along. More later.

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