I want food that is both healthy for me and healthy for the planet. Fortunately, my unofficial Tree-hugger’s Guide to Saving the World includes a lot of ways to do this.
Unfortunately, they’re all about individual choices that I don’t find particularly palatable. It glaringly overlooks systematic change of our food systems and agricultural industry that we desperately need.
I don’t like to cook. My mother started my brother and I out young, making us each cook a family meal one night a week starting in junior high school. Spaghetti was acceptable, but she would help us if we wanted to try something new. I never moved very far beyond Hamburger Helper.
Yet, food is an important component of any self-respecting tree-huggers’ agenda. There are all kinds of movements: organic, local, slow food, non-genetically modified, free range, low/no meat, and the list goes on.
The green blogs are full of tips about cooking with bulk foods that have strange names, like quinoa, finding a local honeybee keeper, making your own yogurt, and the Herculean task of avoiding disposable packaging. There are entire blogs dedicated to the vegan lunches one mother packs for her 6-year-old son, growing your own vegetables in a container garden and raising urban chickens.
But what happens when you just don’t give a damn?
The entire “green” food movement is designed for and by people who like to cook. These people are honestly interested in food the way other people are interested in football or classic cars.
As long as it tastes good, I can afford it, and I didn’t have to make it, I just don’t give a damn.
I do give a damn about the harmful overabundance of petroleum based fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides rapidly accumulating in our natural environment. I give a damn about the unnatural and sometimes downright cruel conditions in which livestock in this country is kept. I give a damn about how food contributes to fossil fuel emissions and about unsustainable irrigation practices that deplete irreplaceable groundwater stores.
And I give a damn about the economic well-being of my rural neighbors and farmers and ranchers around the world.
So like a good little guilty liberal, I have tried and tried and tried again to cook and eat the way everyone tells me and I believe I ought.
However, as I enter the final year of my thesis, some stress pruning was in order. All my cooking angst went to the chopping block. I have other things to worry about.
I am henceforth giving up on the entire notion of cooking and committing myself to becoming a takeout queen. All that guilt, worry and confusion vanished like fresh strawberries in December.
This does not mean that I have given up any of my other concerns. This tree-hugger is still firmly wrapped around the big oak on the corner. What it means, however, is that I have become even more committed to systemic change.
Let’s face it – our current industrialized agricultural system is broken. No industry that requires billions of dollars in subsidies can be considered to be working (except maybe the banks…and the car industry). Yet, I believe farmers are entirely correct when they assert that loss of those subsidies will lead them to ruin. At least, as the food market is currently structured.
But just imagine that it could be different. Imagine how much money we could save if we didn’t have to pay the transportation, packaging and retailing costs for most of the food we buy. Imagine a world with no middle men. Imagine putting those cost savings directly into the hands of farmers.
This is the kind of food system we could have. It’s not that hard to imagine. Anyone who has been to the farmers market on Saturdays knows how the system could operate.
Those of us who love places like Bread & Cup and Maggie’s Vegetarian Wraps can see entrepreneurs making it work right here in Lincoln.
Just imagine that on a wider scale – a dozen restaurants with local and/or organic menus right here in downtown – always buying your steaks from Frank (who raises and butchers his free-range cattle 30 miles up the road) at the year-round daily farmers market.
It won’t happen until more and more of us demand it on as large a scale as possible. There will still be room for the Birkenstock wearing, slow food, vegan gourmets, but let’s face it; they’re the elite.
No system was ever changed by the elite. Entrenched social systems can only be changed by the masses.
It’s going to take all of us because I certainly don’t know how to get there on my own. I tried to read the 2008 Farm Bill, but it is 1,770 pages of “…in the case of barley, $1.85 per bushel. In the case of oats, $1.33 per bushel. In the case of base quality of upland cotton…”
Like I said, I just don’t give a damn, and I can’t imagine anyone who actually cares enough to read that entire piece of legislation. (If you’re out there, give me a shout.) So on behalf of someone who wants to do both the right thing and the easy thing (and never, ever, feel guilty about hating to cook again), please help me change this system, save our farmers and the planet in the bargain.
Monica Sanford is a graduate student in Architecture and Community and Regional Planning. Reach her at monicasanford@dailynebraskan.com.
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