24 hours
One of the excuses you get when you talk about eating local is that it just isn’t possible to travel all over the city to different markets and shops to buy the ingredients. Then we are told by multimillion dollar ad campaigns that it is time consuming and near impossible to prepare meals. You know the ones with the rushed mother chopping vegetables at the board room meeting. In reality there needs to be a shift in how we eat along with a shift in the importance of eating.
My grandmother married my grandfather over 80 years ago and she told her grandchildren about the hardships that they faced during the early years of their marriage. They built a sod cabin near Didsbury and she talked about hauling water from 500 yards away and having bread dough freeze in the middle of the cabin on some nights. She cooked, baked, cleaned, preserved, and anything else necessary to survive in Alberta 80 years ago and it was all in a day’s work.
My Grandmother had 24 hours in a day and if I’m correct, there are still 24 hours in day. We are busier than ever though and there just doesn’t seem to be the time. What if we make time? I don’t mean create a time machine and pause the world before every meal, but reevaluate our priorities and make time to gather ingredients, prepare them, and dine together. We might spend a little less time on Facebook or skip a round of golf now and then, but we’ll be healthier and happier. You choose what to do with your 24 hours and once you choose to eat locally you find the time.
Posted in commentary
May 8th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
I totally agree, Wade.We all need to reevaluate our priorities in life and the more I find out about the industrialization of food, the more I want to support other local farmers and or grow and raise my own. We’re lucky that we are able to raise most of our own meat as we know how it is raised, fed and cared for. We are also lucky that we can do the old time practice of bartering with other Farmers Market vendors for some of their products for variety. But we also grow a large vegetable garden in the summer, in fact my window sills are now full with a variety of small seedlings waiting for the snow to melt and the earth to warm before they move outside. Gardening or buying locally is time consuming but to be able to have a summer meal consisting of most of your own grown or raised product is so rewarding as well as fresh and flavorful. Those 24 hour summer days are busy with all the jobs, including harvesting and preserving the extra things. It does take time to preserve by freezing or canning these “local fruits of the earth” either grown yourself or purchased locally but to those who care about what you eat, it is well worth it. Micheal Pollan in The Defence of Food wrote, ‘you are what what you eat eats’, whether that be fruit, vegetable, fish or animal. We need to be more conscious of that and support local small scale food producers before we loose more of them.