for those of you HAVEN'T stopped checking my blog....
sorry it's been a few months. it's just that summertime seems to get away from me every year. by the time it's nearly septemeber i finally start to get my summertime groove on. and really summertime and blogging just don't seem to go together the way pepper jelly and cream cheese do. or the way cucumbers and dill meld together to make the most incredible pickles. which brings me to the "meat" of my post.
food.
working on a CSA (community supproted agriculture) farm these past two summers has completely changed the way i view food. recently, i learned that the CSA movement was started in Japan, by housewives who wanted to know where their food was coming from. so they made arrangements with the farmers themseleves. they call this arrangement teikei, or
"food with a farmers face on it."
i understand this translation now. how my energy, my sweat, and my care is in each vegetable i tend to. i understand this more fully everyday. and i realize that this is an important job. feeding 40 families is one of the most rewarding things i have ever done in my life. and to think everyone used to eat this way, live this way.
and then i begin to wonder where it all went wrong, where we lost our way. i wonder why food travels 1,500 miles before we eat it. why we export american grown food, only to import the exact same thing? and why the art of subsistance, of growing food, of preserving food, of putting food by for the winter has been lost?
and i wonder...what would it be like if all our food came with a
farmer's face on it instead of a barcode?
