Stop looking at my food!

[logovo]

I was reading a blog that said something like, it's really no one's business what anyone else eats, and I was yes, of course! But after mulling it over (and considering how many freakin books I read on the subject of food and food production I should not have needed to think about it that much) I had the *duh* moment when I remembered that while any one individual's choice is certainly none of my business, what we in general choose to eat pretty much is everyone's business.

What the people around me chooses affects what is available to eat and how much I pay for this food. I've benefited from the selections made by others that have resulted either in better quality food or at least more information on what we eat, so I'm grateful to that collective will, but the flip side of that is if the current food culture turned, if suddenly it was back to meat and potatoes all the time, I'd be pretty screwed.

Food is now such a controversial subject in the US, what with the moralizing and then the backlash of I WILL HAVE THIS COOKIE!, that I rarely discuss it to any great length with anyone besides Mr. L, who gets to hear way too much about factory farming and subsidies, the weird luxury of fresh, tasty vegetables and the not-that-slow death of Mexican food culture. Then he runs away.

The moralizing over food was what that blogger I mentioned was trying to poke at, but I came away thinking about interconnectedness, distribution chains and shifts in what we will allow to be sold to us as food.

Comments

[cleo]

OMG you can discuss with meeeee!

So glad I opened DW tonight and ran across this because i definitely feel the same way about discussing food and twtd will only take so much.

Have you read Eating Animals, btw?

[amalthia]

Since moving to Alaska I really miss fresh fruits and vegetables. For 7 months of the year most of the "fresh" food is already rotten in the grocery store. So I eat a lot of carrots. But seriously, food is important! But it could be because most of my family events involved large feasts and gatherings. I now equate family with food.

I think what people eat also creates a culture and in the past what you ate had a lot to do with what was in the immediate surrounding villages that you could eat. It hasn't been until recent history that you could eat Cherries in winter or avocados in Alaska. So in a way food also shows us our historical roots.

[logovo]

I haven't, but funny enough I've been thinking of getting on Audible, since a have a couple of credits. You read it?

I do think a lot about where our food comes from, how different the way I can and sometimes do end up eating, when compared to the way my mom and her sisters ate growing up in Mexico, raising chickens and growing their own corn.

[logovo]

I imagine that that fresh food is quite expensive too.

Living across the border has contributed at making me very sensitive to what the culture and emotion behind food means to me and my family. It is the a sure way to run up to those warm feelings of belonging and comfort that I associate with them.

There are some fruits that I never had until a few years ago, when suddenly it seemed local markets carried everything from green figs to cherimoyas and sapotes. I remember growing and only reading about these fruits in grammar books.

[amalthia]

Fresh food up here is very expensive. But normally in the summer months it's pretty good. :)

They don't have a lot of variety up here but they still have a good enough variety where I don't even know how to cook some of the vegetables they offer. :)

[logovo]

I'm always learning how to cook the weirder part of the vegetable bins. I have yet to try to make anything out of turnips. They scare me!

[amalthia]

I didn't even know people actually ate turnips.

[logovo]

If I ever manage to make anything tasty out of a turnip I'll be exceptionally proud and probably post about it ;)