Have found new meaning in life

Always a good thing, non? Remember that one time when I sat through a Relief Society lesson about how it's important to be self-sufficient and to can peaches?

Here were my questions:

What's up with canning and all that? Why should we do it? If I already have a year's supply of peaches from Costco then shouldn't I be good? Why on this sweet earth should I spend a Saturday up to my elbows in sticky nastiness just to give myself botulism? I mean, if you like to do those things and you like knowing where your food comes from and it gives you a feeling of satisfaction, then that's wonderful and I say more power to you. But what if you just don't care?

So that's the question I really wanted to ask, even though there was no time for it: If you really could not care less about this stuff and you can get your food/clothing needs met in other ways, why bother with it? Should we learn just because you never know what might happen and it's good to have as many self-reliance-type skills as possible? Because I actually can accept that as a reason. I just want to know if there are others.

So that's where I was at.


Then a couple of weeks ago I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. The School Library Journal's review of the book says, "Give this title to budding Martha Stewarts, green-leaning fans of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, and kids outraged by Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation." Which, me . . . me . . . me . . . Only they should also have included "Mormons who need a reason to care about canning."

Because oh friends, I now care. This was one of those books where I kept calling people up and saying, "And then do you know what the Man did???"

The premise is that Kingsolver and her family packed up and moved from Tucson, Arizona to a farm in the Appalachian mountains. They felt that after so many years of living in the middle of the desert they'd made enough of an environmental footprint (all their food has to be imported in from other places, because hi, desert) and were ready for a change. So their experiment was to see if, for a year, they could live comfortably on foods that they either produced themselves or which came from local sources. For them a big part of it was not wanting to waste fossil fuel and other natural resources to feed themselves. They did cheat by buying olive oil & spices that come from other places, but for the most part they stuck to their guns for the experiment. And they seemed to eat pret-ty darn well, it seemed to me.

Barbara Kingsolver is a fiction writer who wrote, among other things, The Bean Trees and The Poisonwood Bible. I will be honest and say that there are a few places where she comes off just a bit too "Hey, remember the part where I'm a really deep author? Because I am. Check me out with my deep descriptions."

Anyway. It was kind of fascinating. Because Kingsolver not only writes about her family's experience, but she talks about the larger picture of food production in our country and where we're headed as a people. Answer: Nowhere good. She makes the point that in just a couple of generations we have lost a lot of the knowledge and skills that are needed to produce food. Much of the US farmland has been moved into crops like soy and corn, which are nice and all but won't actually cut it if our food importation channels break down. (ps. And then so all that corn and soy aren't getting wasted they put them in all of our foods, which makes us fat. Thanks for that, America.) And if/when our current system of food-getting fails, we're going to be in trouble. We can do without electricity but it's a bit harder to do without food.

You also read about the benefits of buying local fruits and vegetables and of eating these things in their season. A few benefits:

You keep your neighbors in business, which helps your local economy, schools, libraries, etc.

Foods taste better when they're in season. You're a lot more likely to want to eat your veggies when they actually taste good. You know how you're always excited to see your summer clothes when you pull them out of storage? It's like that. Because you get to wear them when it's the perfect time for them, and then you pack them up again before they have a chance to bore you. And then it's time to be excited for fall clothes.

You enjoy more variety, rather than only eating the few breeds of fruits and vegetables which have been deemed hardy enough to survive thousand-mile trips and uniform enough to look nice in the supermarket. Example: the delicious and very cool-looking heirloom tomatoes I bought at the farmer's market on Saturday. They have names like Jubilee and Pink Girl and Brandywine. Last night I made pasta primavera with my farmer's market tomatoes, squash, and zucchini. It was fabulous.

You get better information about where your food has been, how it was raised, and what's been done to it. Or what hasn't been done to it, as the case may be. Or what it might do to you. Who doesn't love eating wax with their apples? Who doesn't love wondering if animal remains and feces were part of your beef's diet?

You help the environment, because you're not wasting loads and loads of gas having your food trucked in.

You're not exploiting people in developing countries who work under awful conditions for terrible wages and then ship all the food they've produced to us.

The more you support local food, the more local food your neighbors can produce, which leads to even more tasty local options for you, the consumer. And then it's like this big food love fest.

You get to stick it to The Man. Which, really, for me is always one of the best reasons to do things. Did you know that there are varieties of tomato which have been genetically engineered to produce sterile seeds? That way you can't save them and plant them the next year--you have to buy more from the seed company. That kind of crap just enrages me, no matter what form it takes. If food is becoming a form of intellectual property, what's next? Killing babies, that's what.

Yes, it can be more expensive to buy local rather than going through Wal-Mart. But the very reason that stuff is cheap is possibly because it isn't very good, it might kill you, and because the farmers have been screwed over. And even if you don't have the space or resources to grow the stuff yourself, you can still support the farmers who are Fighting the Good Fight.

Now let's reintroduce the canning thing. This way you can still enjoy all those lovely seasonal local foods during the off-season times. Kingsolver recommends buying up all the local stuff you can find at the end of the summer to can or freeze. The farmers win because they are able to sell everything from that year's harvest, which means they can invest in next year's. We win because we have a freezer/pantry full of good stuff at very good prices.

So yes. It gave me lots to think about. I can't start growing all my food in the back yard, but I can do some things. A coworker gave me two bags of corn from her garden, so I froze them in freezer bags. I found Utah peaches at the grocery store, so I bought a few pounds and froze them. My neighbor has two apple trees which hang over into my yard. I've been picking fruit for the last couple of weeks and eating it with lunches and breakfast, but I think it's time for a real harvest.

This, to me, feels pretty cool. Because I'm getting these guys when they're absolutely at their best flavor, I'm getting them for practically nothing, and I haven't wasted anything or exploited anyone. And I'm being a force for social change. Next year I might even try it with jars and everything.