Seasonality and Snow
2013-Jul-18, Thursday 17:45I just finished real Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma (and if you have a Goodreads account and aren't friends with me, you should be--I write a full review for every book I read), and it kind of brought something home to me that I didn't put in the review, but I've been thinking about since then.
Just recently,
softlykarou and I made some edits to the CSA that we get every week. Canceling the corn was mostly because we don't really eat corn anymore, but cancelling the bananas was because I didn't want to contribute to climate change due to having them trucked up from Mexico every week. It's not like bananas grow around here.
Now, I'm not going to say that getting food from far away is wrong, because that's silly. People have been trading for food for as long as there have been enough people to trade long distances. However, I would submit that there's a difference between non-perishable spices carted along the Silk Road and bananas shipped up from Mexico or asparagus flown in from Argentina. At least enough of one in my mind that buying the former isn't so bad but buying the latter is problematic.
The thing I'm running into here is that a desire to eat seasonally butts up hard against deciding to live in Chicago. Basically no food plants come in during the winter, and while traditionally we'd have canned food or have laid down potatos in the root cellar or salted things and so on and lived on them through the winter, we bought a two-people-sized apartment without any room to store such things, even if I knew anything about canning. Which I don't. Maybe
softlykarou does--do you, dear?
This is, of course, why the globalized food network developed in the first place, because people wanted oranges in December. And, barring moving to farm country, it's basically impossible to avoid this completely. I'm not sure I'd want to, either, because it would mean never going out to eat and eating an extremely restricted diet for months during the winter. But I can at least limit it, and not buying fruit in the winter, or having bananas trucked up from Mexico every week, is a good start.
Just recently,
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Now, I'm not going to say that getting food from far away is wrong, because that's silly. People have been trading for food for as long as there have been enough people to trade long distances. However, I would submit that there's a difference between non-perishable spices carted along the Silk Road and bananas shipped up from Mexico or asparagus flown in from Argentina. At least enough of one in my mind that buying the former isn't so bad but buying the latter is problematic.
The thing I'm running into here is that a desire to eat seasonally butts up hard against deciding to live in Chicago. Basically no food plants come in during the winter, and while traditionally we'd have canned food or have laid down potatos in the root cellar or salted things and so on and lived on them through the winter, we bought a two-people-sized apartment without any room to store such things, even if I knew anything about canning. Which I don't. Maybe
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
This is, of course, why the globalized food network developed in the first place, because people wanted oranges in December. And, barring moving to farm country, it's basically impossible to avoid this completely. I'm not sure I'd want to, either, because it would mean never going out to eat and eating an extremely restricted diet for months during the winter. But I can at least limit it, and not buying fruit in the winter, or having bananas trucked up from Mexico every week, is a good start.