Saturday, August 1, 2009

Weekend Words

I've been wanting to put some excerpts from some books I've read or have been reading up on the blog, and since weekends are slow in the blogosphere, I decided that the weekends were a perfect time to do it.

I hope to spur some good conversations with people from these excerpts, so I hope you will find them interesting, too.

"Knowing the secret natural history of potatoes, melons, or asparagus gives you a leg up on detecting whether those in your market are wholesome kids from a nearby farm, or vagrants who idled away their precious youth in a boxcar. Knowing how foods grow is to know how and when to look for them; such expertise is useful for certain kinds of people, namely, the ones who eat, no matter where they live or grocery shop.
Absence of that knowledge has rendered us a nation of wary label-readers, oddly uneasy in our obligate relationship with the things we eat. We call our food animals by different names after they're dead, presumably sparing ourselves any vision of the beefs and the porks running around on actual hooves. Our words for unhealthy contamination - "soiled" or "dirty" - suggest that if we really knew the number-one ingredient of a garden, we'd all head straight into therapy. I used to take my children's friends out to the garden to warm them up to the idea of eating vegetables, but this strategy sometimes backfired: they'd back away slowly saying, "Oh man, those things touched dirt!" Adults do the same by pretending it all comes from the clean, well-lighted grocery store. We're like petulant teenagers rejecting our mother. We know we came out of her, but ee-ew."

-From Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

5 comments:

Chris said...

I'm okay with dirt.

Martha Lee said...

After many attempts at reading this I finally finished it. (My attention span is way low right now.) I have to agree with Chris' comment, "I'm okay with dirt" you just have to watch out for the little critters that come in with your food.

I love fresh garden salad and when visiting one of my friends house (I was 14) we had this great salad all from their garden. I was eating along when I spied a little green worm. I stopped eating. It was at dinner with all the family so I just said nothing and stopped eating.
Later, her mom, knowing of my usually like for the salad, ask why I did not eat it. I reluctantly told her.

The morel of this long tail is fresh food is wonderful but wash wash wash.

Kimba said...

I will admit. I am SO not okay with dirt. :) I can't think about the fact that once upon a time the peach I'm eating probably had a bug crawl across it. Or that someone TOUCHED it before I did. Or that the lemon chicken before me ever had feathers. I just can't think about it.

Abby said...

I heart dirt.

Unknown said...

Abby:

Tell them about the salad at Camp 18.

Dad.