Wednesday, March 18, 2009

I cannot wait . . .

Last summer, once my garden was well underway, we ate almost exclusively from it. True to the Animal, Vegetable, Miracle concept, it was a rare event for me to go to the grocery store. I might have zipped into Whole Foods to get grains or meats -- but that was it.(Now, incidentally we get our beef and pork from a local Rehoboth farm.) But at one point I remember having to go into my local Stop and Shop supermarket. I walked into the produce department and stopped dead in my tracks. I looked around -- everything looked like plastic. Perfect plastic food without life to it. You couldn't tell that any of this stuff had been in the ground! I remember being so surprised at the change in my perspective. 

When I took an Organic Apple Growing class last spring a big topic of conversation amongst the larger orchard growers there and the teachers was how Americans had become conditioned to purchase only perfect looking food. Nothing misshapen, no fly-spec, no scab . . . we want perfection. Otherwise we won't buy it. The irony is, it's tough to grow a perfect apple without spraying the dickens out of it. At the class was a middle aged couple who wanted to start growing some of the apples in their orchard organically. The previous year they had tried to go completely spray-free (not even organic types of prevention) and came up with such "damaged" apples that they had to make them all into cider. No one would purchase the poor things. 


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Now that ALL of the vegetables and fruits from my garden are long gone, I have to resort to the supermarket for my vegetables. I cannot wait to harvest my REAL food! 









2 comments:

Kristi said...

Agree with you totally. I had to purchase bell peppers recently. It's hard to do.

a. borealis said...

I've been experiencing some of the same sentiments!! Isn't it amazing???