The Shinn Digs

I’m just barely cognizant of the issues this book brings up, but I am hoping to slowly change both my awareness level and my actions. Did you know the average meal typically has traveled between 1,500 and 2,500 miles? Meaning, from wherever the particular food item originated (was grown and/or processed), it has traveled vast miles to reach your plate. What is the cost? Not just how much did you pay for that particular meal, but what is the cost to the environment? Infrastructure? Local economy? Here’s an interesting article regarding the subject. This being an election year and all, here’s a power-packed quote from that article:

“The most political act we do on a daily basis is to eat, as our actions affect farms, landscapes and food businesses,” said co-author Professor Jules Pretty, from the University of Essex, UK.

Now, I grew up eating locally. Seriously … the vast majority of what I ate from the time I was born until when I left for college came from my backyard and the barnyard. My parents had a huge garden. We grew just about every kind of vegetable you can imagine. During the summer we enjoyed the fresh produce, and during the winter we enjoyed the excess, which was canned, frozen or stored for that purpose. I can remember many summer days Mom and Grandma being elbow deep in tomatoes, green beans, corn … you name it. I can also remember many times being involved in the process … picking berries, cleaning berries, “snapping” beans, shelling peas, etc. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I suppose it did really connect me with the food, in that I knew exactly where it had grown, the process used, had watched the plants germinate all the way through harvest.

I also was quite familiar with the butchering process. When there was no longer enough meat in the freezer, we simply sent a pig off to the butcher, who did his thing with the little animal we had been raising, and a week later called us to come pick up the meat, which we stored in a huge freezer in our garage. The meat from one pig would fit in the freezer with all the garden produce, but if we wanted beef we would split the meat with my grandparents or another neighbor. And yes, I distinctly remember what happens when chickens get their heads cut off … the saying is true … the little things run around and even “fly” as headless as the character in the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. For many years we even could walk down the road to our “neighbors” (meaning 1/4 mile to the nearest house) and get eggs from their chicken farm. Nothing like the nasty smell of a chicken barn to connect you with your omelet in the morning.

Now, as a 38 year old adult, I’m so detached from my food! I go to the grocery, perhaps use a coupon I cut with my own hands, and look for a good deal, but that’s about as connected as I get. That’s why I’m so challenged by what is rapidly becoming a movement across the US to eat more locally grown food. The depleting oil supplies are a big part of the argument to eat locally, rather than ship food across the country … and even the world. We do some of the craziest things … like for example … we’re about to be in prime strawberry season in California … huge, beautiful berries. We are the number one producers of strawberries in the nation, and the US overall is the number one producer in the world. Rapidly gaining on us is China. Even in the midst of California exporting all these berries during this prime season, guess who is China’s largest strawberry customer this time of year? China. We are growing berries, shipping them elsewhere, only to bring berries in from China. Does this make any sense to anyone??

It’s a great thing to go to the local farmer’s market (here in Santa Barbara we have one literally every day of the week in various parts of town, 52 weeks of the year!) It is fun to see all the fresh produce and get to know some of the farmers and their families. But you seem to get even more green points if you have a garden and grow your own food (which sounds awesome, and as my childhood memories remind me, taste incredible too!) I know more people who live here in suburbia or even in cities who are growing some of their own vegetables. Last year my housemates and I had a bumper tomato crop. That’s pretty much all we had, since the plants overtook the carrots and radishes. We celebrated in the late summer with a “Harvest Festival” serving nothing but chips and salsa! It was a great feeling to grow our own food (even just one variety) and enjoy the harvest!

Now, I’m about to go out on limb here. as I’ve done a limited amount of reading on the local food movement, and a limited amount of listening as friends have discussed their various passions, I feel like we’re missing something major that we are either avoiding (for political correctness) or I have finally had an original thought and will soon get a Nobel Prize for something (the latter is highly unlikely). As this local food movement continues to gain momentum, I have often wonder why we aren’t talking about the difficulty that comes when most families are dual-income, with both husband and wife working. You see, while my family was able to plant, grow, harvest, and store almost all of our own food, my mom didn’t work outside the home until I was fifteen. It takes ALOT of time to plant and maintain a garden the size you would need to sustain your family, let alone harvest, then can and freeze all the produce. While I’m sure some dual-income families are able to do that, it would be an incredible challenge!

So, I guess my point is this … as we seek to return to some of the best of the yesteryear, we have to keep in mind the necessity of living within the context of 2008 in this global, technological advanced cultural and society. It’s easy to idealize certain past practices (it’s pretty cool to be green right now), but I’m curious if those who are pushing this local food movement/grow your own food are also ready to tell women to stay home and tend to the house and garden?

With that, I open this can of worms to your comments!

This book was really informative. It’s essentially a compilation of a survey of adult children of divorce and adult children of intact marriages. For this particular survey, the researchers limited their data of divorced families to those who continued to be in relationship with both parents after the divorce. There is a great deal of statistical data and interpretation, but it really is informative and helpful.I’ve been formulating my own “theory” that perhaps children from divorced families are not able to articulate their feelings about their parents divorce until they are much older (perhaps adults). I would say the same is true for children in intact families … as a child, we simply don’t have the emotional IQ (and language to go with it) to articulate our present-tense emotions.

I suppose more than anything, this book gave me a small glimpse into the stresses a child must endure when faced with a divorce. As the author describes her own experience, she felt like a football, tossed between parents, spending more time in the air, than in either place. Having not faced this experience as a child, I’m not familiar with this, but am seeing it up close from a different vantage point now. It’s interesting how hard parents work to provided safety and stability, yet how the ideal was never experienced or reached for those participating in the survey.

I did appreciate the author’s challenge that as a society, we’re doing everyone a disservice to consider even the possibility of the “good divorce.” (Between Two Worlds seems to be in direct competition with the findings from The Good Divorce, and refers to that data quite frequently). That term is simply not something the author or survey participants have experienced. There are some really interesting comparisons between those from “good divorces” and “bad, but low conflict” marriages.

For some additional web articles on the idea of “staying together for the sake of the kids” versus “the good divorce,” here are some links:

• About.com article
• USAToday.com article

Any thoughts?