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I
confess I love Winter. When it’s cold and blustery and the snow
starts piling up, I happily try to calculate just how slowly it will
melt and join the watertable that feeds our well. I mull cider, bake
bread, and cook dinner from scratch -- anything that goes in the oven,
warms up the house, and produces a smell that brings the kids
downstairs to ask, “Whatcha cooking?”
But March finds me eyeing the snow shovel wearily. Even cold mornings
have a soft smell, and all it takes is three dry days to find me out
cranking up the tiller and pretending Spring is creeping up the
mountain.
I’m most content when surrounded by the smell of newly turned earth.
This winter, I spent some time with Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle,
a book about the year her family spent eating only what they and their
neighbors grew on farms not far from Watauga County, over the state
line in Virginia. My grandparents would have found the idea of such a
book ridiculous. After all, their generation survived the Depression
doing just that -- planting gardens and eating what they raised. But in
the two generations since then (three, if you count my children),
Americans have come increasingly to rely on processed food grown on
corporate farms and feedlots, loaded with pesticides and antibiotics,
and shipped using HUGE amounts of fuel, from places in the world that
have very poor controls over product quality.
Yikes! Baby formula and pet food from China that’s laced with melamine. Blueberries for $8 a pint, if you please, from New Zealand.
Pink, mealy tomato-shaped objects that taste like the white glue we
used in kindergarten. Most of this stuff has come from so far away and
was picked so long ago it just looks like food ... it sure
doesn’t taste like it. No wonder many of my kids’ friends
don’t like vegetables!
Most of us are trying to drive less and use less gasoline these days,
but our dinners are coming from farther away than most of us have ever
dreamed of traveling. It’s raised on huge corporate-owned farms
in a monoculture that demands ever-larger amounts of pesticides just to
keep the rapidly evolving bugs at bay. Or it comes from CAFO’s
(Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) that jam so many animals
together in such small spaces they have to be pumped full of
antibiotics, and it’s a nightmare dealing with the waste. We all
remember what happens to a hog waste lagoon when a hurricane brings a
foot of rain to our state.
With most of us struggling because of the economy, this is a really
good time to think about what we put on our tables, how it got there,
and where it came from -- and how we can make our families and our
planet healthier while helping out our neighbors and the local economy
at the same time.
I’m talking about the Local Food movement, and the
“locavores” (people who try to eat locally produced food as
much as possible) in your neighborhood.
Watauga County is lucky to have a healthy Local Food movement. Because
of it, you can find local produce at most area grocery stores. Our
Farmers’ Market is packed with shoppers every Saturday from May
to November, and other markets operate on other days. And several
locally owned restaurants feature cheese, meat, and vegetables that are
raised right around here.
This is food that doesn’t take barrels of Middle Eastern oil to be trucked up the mountain.
This is food raised by our neighbors in Watauga, Ashe, Wilkes and
Caldwell Counties ... and the money for it goes into their pockets and
back out into the local economy, instead of straight to someone’s
corporate headquarters in Arkansas or New York or Shanghai.
This is food you cook at home -- cheaper and healthier than take out.
And this is food you can trust. We have local farmers raising beef and
lamb on grass. That means the meat is leaner and healthier than an
animal raised in a CAFO and “finished” on feed laced with
antibiotics and animal by-products. (Remember mad cow disease? It got
into the food supply because dead cows were put into cattle feed.)
Americans worry a lot about National Security. It’s been
suggested that perhaps the biggest challenge to national security is
our food supply. Food security means we don’t depend either on
food shipped from halfway across the world from places where we have no
control over whatever can taint it, or on just a few foods grown on
huge farms where a natural disaster or a pesticide-resistant bug can
wipe much of it out. Food Security means we eat a lot of different
food, locally and sustainably grown either by our neighbors or by
ourselves.
And that brings me back to my garden. I know our last frost is still
weeks away, but the smell of Spring is in the air. I have flats of
seedlings that are just sending up their first tender green shoots.
I’ve gotten some old windows from the Re-Store to make a cold
frame for early lettuce. I’m counting the weekends until the
Farmer’s Market reopens at Horn in the West.
And with any luck, next Winter I’ll have my own food security policy in quart jars on my pantry shelf.
Marjory Holder is 2nd
Vice Chair of the Watauga County Democratic Party. Her freshly tilled
garden is waiting to be planted in the Blowing Rock Precinct.
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