Friday's Feast

Appetizer: Describe your laundry routine. Do you have a certain day when you do it all, or do you just wash whatever you need for the next day?

Ha ha ha. Tell me another one. I do one or two or sometimes even three loads of laundry every day. If I miss a day, for some reason I don't have twice as much the next day—I have about six times as much (I've never understood this phenomenon). There's even more laundry in the summer, what with all the sweaty clothes, swimsuits, and grody towels that were jammed, wet and chlorine-y, into a backpack to sit in the sun for a few hours at camp.

Soup: In your opinion, what age will you be when you’ll consider yourself to truly be old?

Well, not surprisingly, that number keeps going up as I age. I'm sure there was a time when 45 sounded positively geriatric. I'll say 70 for now—but I'll reserve my right to revise in another decade or so.

Salad: What is one of your goals?  Is it short-term, long-term, or both?

Shit, I don't think I have any real goals. Is that bad? I mean, I have plans and resolutions and all that, but nothing like "I will run the Boston Marathon next year" or "I will learn to speak Portuguese fluently" or "I will get a Masters' in American Lit" or the like.

Main Course: Name something unbelievable you’ve seen or read lately.

I've just started reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, and every page brings a revelation. (For those of you who've been living in a hole, Kingsolver and her family left Tucson to move to a farm in Virginia where they intended to learn how to live off the land—theirs and their neighbors'—for at least a year.) I'm learning all kinds of shocking, disturbing truths about American agribusiness. Here's an example from one of the sidebars (contributed by Kingsolver's biology-professor husband, Steven Hopp): "If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country's oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week. That's not gallons, but barrels." As you can imagine, I will have lots more to say about this book after I've finished it, but I can now see why everyone is describing it as "life-changing." I'm only on p. 43 and I'm already committed to making some changes to my shopping habits—and that's coming from me, already pretty much a "good girl" when it comes to considering the environment, the plight of local farmers, and my family's health as I fill my shopping cart.

Dessert: On a scale of 1-10 with 10 being highest, how happy are you today?

I guess an 8. Ask me again later, though, as I just don't have the capacity to be any happier than that in the morning.

                 

Comments

[Mark]

We're reading the same book! I'm 250 pages into it and I haven't felt preached to yet.

[Karen]

How can we make EVERYONE read this book? Unfortunately, she's largely preaching to the choir. Well, not preaching -- as you say -- but you know what I mean.

[Elena]

I have been meaning to read the book, and I already agree with the general philosophy. However, the New York Times recently had a compelling article about how eating locally grown items isn't necessarily always the best thing for the environment. Darn--I can't remember when I read it, but the overall point was that it is so inefficient to grow certain foods in certain regions that there is less overall impact by having those goods grown where it can be done most efficiently and then transported around the world. There seem to be no easy answers!

[Karen]

There's no question that it's not a black-and-white issue, and Kingsolver acknowledges that she'll need to buy non-local things like flour in order to get by. I've really only just begun the book, but it strikes me as a very sensible approach so far (and that's what the reviews say). She also makes the point that doing the right thing by the environment and the farmers also inevitably turns out to be the right thing by our palates: An ear of corn picked and eaten the same day is going to taste better than one that was shipped cross-country 2 days ago.