The wonders of moderation

I've been reading Just Food by James E. McWilliams, and I'm going to have a lot to say about it when I'm through.  In the meantime, though, I'd like to talk about the concept of moderation.

People seem to view living sustainably as an all-or-nothing endeavor.  "I couldn't do that, I like my Twinkies/Doritos/McDonald's cheeseburgers too much," is a common refrain I hear when I talk to people about my project.  But no one ever said you have to give up Twinkies, or Doritos, or even McDonald's cheeseburgers, in order to eat more sustainably.

The key there is the word "more."  I'm talking about improvements, not complete overhauls.  Sure, the environment would be much better off if we all were exclusively vegan locavores who rode bikes to work at offices powered by solar energy and fairy farts, but realistically that's never going to happen.  But most of us can make changes - even small changes - in our diets and our lives to move us in the direction of sustainability.

I don't think anything I'm doing this year is out of reach for the average suburban middle-class family.  Sure, I'm lucky to live in an area with a vibrant food community - I can easily get everything from locally made cheese to local pasta to local hummus, right at the farmers' market - but Cleveland isn't the only place with farmers' markets and CSAs.  Despite what my parents keep saying, they DO have access to both in Delaware:

• farmers' market in downtown Wilmington: http://www.inlittleitaly.com/events.htm
• CSA in Newark: http://www.localharvest.org/csa/M38211
• Restaurants, orchards, and more: http://www.localharvest.org/search.jsp?map=1&lat=39.794276&lon=-75.534321&scale=10&zip=19803

Getting to the farmers' market requires a little bit of planning - I'm getting good at remembering to bring the cooler and ice packs with me - but isn't any harder than going to a second grocery store to pick up something that was out of stock at your regular store.  My routine tends to be:

• Tuesday - visit the local grocery store chain while my daughter is in an after-school program nearby
• Thursday - pick up CSA basket (about 10 minutes away from our house)
• Saturday - visit farmers' market and Trader Joe's, which is right next door

Occasionally I need to supplement this with a trip to the local grocery store (which is across the street from the library, which I visit at least once a week), and any trips to the farm stand can usually be combined with a trip to visit friends nearby, so neither one counts as a separate trip, just an extra stop on an existing errand run.

Recycling is easy for most of us, thanks to curbside pickup and the proliferation of paper pickup dumpsters at schools and businesses.  But recycling paper (dropoff at my daughter's school, which I have to visit every week anyway) and cardboard (curbside pickup) means that our family garbage output is now down to slightly more than one bag a week.

Composting works if you've got any sort of yard at all - or even a basement or cool closet, if you're willing to set up a worm composter.  Our compost setup is terribly complex - it's a pile in the backyard that I flip around once in a while with a pitchfork.  I decided not to harvest any of the finished compost this spring, keeping it instead to kickstart things for this summer's output.  But when I'm ready to use it, it will be taking the place of some of the mulch in our existing flower beds, as well as taking the place of some of the soil amendments I need to buy when I make a new bed.  Getting the kitchen scraps out to the compost pile is no work at all - I hand them to the kid and tell her she gets an extra 5 minutes of playing outside before bed if she takes the scraps out for me.  Win/win!

One of our main waste sources used to be cat litter.  But now that I'm using a flushable litter, that's dropped to zero, as has our need for plastic grocery bags to scoop stuff into.  Come on, most of us keep our cat boxes in a spare bathroom or utility room anyway - is it that hard to scoop it into a toilet instead of a bag?

Choosing sustainable products for housekeeping is getting easier and easier.  Even stores like Target and Wal-Mart carry brands that, while not perfect, are at least an improvement on conventional detergents and soaps.  And things like soaps, lotions, and other personal care items can even be bought online from small vendors (we like several sellers on www.etsy.com, as well as local folks who sell at the farmers' market and the gift shop at the botanical garden).

Growing your own food doesn't take 40 acres or a mule.  Don't tell me you don't have time, or space, or even a container.  It takes five minutes to grab an old plastic tote, drill some holes in it, and fill it with dirt.  Plant something in it.  Stick it on a patio, put it on your front porch, leave it sitting near whatever sun you can find in your apartment.  Even growing one tomato plant - or a small planter of herbs or salad greens - lets you control exactly what goes into your mouth in a way that trips to Safeway can't.

And one of the easiest ways to make a big impact on the environment doesn't involve farmers' markets or weird soap or finding a place to recycle #5 plastics, it just means making more informed choices when you plan your meals.  We've gotten so used to having every food available every day - thank you, Chile and New Zealand! - that the idea of waiting until something is actually in season near you before you eat it is completely foreign to most of us.  Asparagus with Christmas dinner?  Sure!  Strawberries in January?  No problem!

There's nothing wrong with enjoying an occasional out-of-season treat, but partaking in the bounty of the Southern Hemisphere all year when there are local alternatives that support neighbors' farms and don't damage the environment as much - well, that's just wasteful.  As I described it to the kids in my daughter's kindergarten class, when you go to the grocery store, you should think before you buy fruit - do you want a banana from South America, a kiwi fruit from California, or an apple that was grown in a suburb of Cleveland?  There's nothing wrong with eating bananas, or kiwi fruit - but we don't need them every day.  They taste that much better if they're a treat to be anticipated and savored, not a staple to be taken for granted.

Erg, this has gone on too long.  I'm not done - plenty of blog fodder in my brain, at least today! - but I'll put it on hold for now.

Now, got grab some asparagus before the season is over!

The meaning of cherries

"The main barrier standing between ourselves and a local-food culture is not price, but attitude.  The most difficult requirements are patience and a pinch of restraint - virtues that are hardly the property of the wealthy.  These virtues seem to find precious little shelter, in fact, in any modern quarter of this nation founded by Puritans.  Furthermore, we apply them selectively: browbeating our teenagers with the message that they should wait for sex, for example.  Only if they wait to experience intercourse under the ideal circumstances (the story goes), will they know its true value.  "Blah blah blah," hears the teenager: words issuing from a mouth that can't even wait for the right time to eat tomatoes, but instead consumes tasteless ones all winter to satisfy a craving for everything now.  We're raising our children on the definition of promiscuity if we feed them a casual, indiscriminate mingling of foods from every season plucked from the supermarket, ignoring how our sustenance is cheapened by wholesale desires." - Barbara Kingsolver in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

I am not good at delayed gratification.  If self-restraint had been a class in school, I would have squeaked through with a C- at best.  I find it hard to justify denying myself anything I can reasonable afford and procure if it's something I think I want or need.  And nothing is as attractive to me as something I'm not supposed to have.

So you can imagine that it's been a bit of a trial for me to walk through the produce section of the grocery store these past few weeks, surrounded by luscious-looking fruits and vegetables carted in from six different continents.  Avocados.  Oranges.  Kiwi fruit.  Grapes.  Bananas.  A laundry list of forbidden fruits (ha ha) that all sounded much better than having another apple from the farmers' market.  I made it through without buying anything foreign by chanting, "The strawberries are coming, the strawberries are coming," under my breath like some sort of locavore Paul Revere.

But the strawberries were already there, sitting right in front of me, giant and glossy and nicely displayed in their plastic clamshell packages that protected them on their journey all the way from California.  "Local ones taste better, local ones taste better," became my new mantra, which worked pretty well ... until the first of the sweet cherries came in last week.  Like all early produce, these were not exactly at their best, and they were pricey - I think the organic ones were close to $7 a pound.

Still ... cherries.  The fruit that I most associate with summer - happy memories of pit-spitting contests held on the porch swing and giant bowls of fruit for snacking on during our yearly trip to the beach.  Fruit that is never, ever cooked, because it doesn't last long enough in my presence to make it through the preparation.  Halving and pitting them for fruit salad, juice staining my mother's fingernails pink, and half of them not making it to the salad, anyway.  Fruit that is so hard for me to resist, I have to admit I'll be spending rather a lot of time in the bathroom during the first week we've got them, as they don't agree with me in large quantities but I just can't help myself.

Cherries, sitting there and taunting me.  They're organic, so I can justify them, right?  It was hot out, the porch swing and hammock were at the ready, and the cherries were right there.  I was forced to avert my eyes and flee, lest I trip and knock a bag of those Chilean temptresses into my cart "by accident."

And then the strawberries came in, and they really were better than those at the grocery store, even if they were in really short supply this year.  And while I was getting sort of sick of salad and snow peas and a bit of broccoli at various dinnertimes, according to my chart it wouldn't be long before more versatile veggies should be coming.  Right?  Right?  Please, for the love of god, somebody just give me something that's grillable that I can put on a sandwich, okay?

And then today I walked into Fitch's and found local sweet cherries, which I had completely forgotten they carry and which have such a short season that Jason may miss them entirely because he's gone this week (bwahahahaha!  more for me!).  And I turned to my right and saw ... local green peppers.  And local zucchini.  Hallelujah!  Grilled veggies for sandwiches and pasta salads and just to eat straight out of the fridge because we've run out of cherries again.  I'm not kidding when I say I got all choked up over the bounty that was displayed before me.

And then I tried some of the cherries in the car on the way home, and I just about died.  I seriously thought about pulling over so I could fully appreciate them, and I'm fairly sure that you could have dubbed my exclamations into a porn movie with no problem.  They were that good.

Really?  Were they actually the best cherries in the history of cherry-dom?  Well, probably not.  But, like anything else, absence makes the heart grow fonder, and boy, had those cherries been absent from my life for the past six? eight? months.  The first bites of anything are always the best, and a week from now I'll be happy if I never see a cherry (or pepper, or zucchini) again.  But for today, all the kiwis and bananas and pineapples** in the world couldn't measure up to those cherries.

And I can guarantee you those cherries wouldn't have tasted as good if I'd bought them a few weeks ago, purchased for twice the price and shipped thousands of miles farther.  Sure, they would have been cherries, but it's just not the same.  It's easy to take foods for granted when you can have them any time you want, and things seem to lose some of their value to us - at least subconsciously - when they're easy to acquire.  That's why diamonds are expensive and quartz is not, and why heirloom tomatoes always cost more.  And that's something that I never would have been thinking about, had I never decided to embark on my sustainable summer.



**Okay, I lied.  If a perfectly ripe pineapple had been available, I would have committed unforgivable acts to get it, up to and including homicide.  But how often do you actually get a perfectly ripe pineapple from the grocery store?  Not very, unless you live in Hawaii.  So the cherries win, at least until our next island vacation.