Watermelon sex

Bear with me while I step up on my soapbox for the next couple posts.

I want to provide some background as to how I arrived at my journey.

The first time I ever really gave a sustained amount of thought to where my food came from and what effect it had on the world was my junior year in college, at age 20. I spent 20 years never questioning the idea that the grocery store could provide me with whatever food I wanted, whenever I happened to crave it. Bell peppers in January, chicken without any bones or skin, ripe pineapple and bananas, seedless watermelons, anything at all that I could imagine. And to top it off, all cheap as dirt.

Actually that's incorrect. Dirt might now cost more that many of those items.

This didn't seem odd to me for twenty years.

And then, at the end of my sophomore year, the magic and mystique of food-like-substances began to crumble like one of those cardboard cookies from the snack aisle.

I watched King Corn, I traveled to Antarctica, I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and probably too much Wendell Berry, I watched Food Inc, I talked to family, friends, and professors.

And now I can't walk into a grocery store without wondering where everything came from and how it was grown or processed.

In the society we live in, it is so easy to not think about or question whether or not a bell pepper can be grown in January where we live, or how a seedless watermelon can reproduce (maybe there's a vegetable porn industry out there waiting to be tapped?).

This is a great place to start. Think. Ask questions. Be curious about the growing season for potatoes, about what an asparagus plant looks like, about how a chicken can have boneless wings.

I've found that there are ways to find where my food comes from. I bought eggs from Ralph in Parkland, vegetables on the side of the road in Valmont, and am growing tomatoes on my own back porch. Not everything that I eat is local, or raised in a way that doesn't make my stomach turn. But I like to imagine each batch of pesto from our herb garden as a small little battle won against food-like-substances and the corporate food industry.

I'd like to say a quick thank you to all the professors, family, and friends who've helped and inspired me to reach this point - there have been so many of you. But particularly to Kevin O'Brien, Barbara Temple-Thurston, Chuck Bergman, and most of all Tim and Lee. Happy eating to you all.