Quit Sitting on Your Hands Until People Love Organic Tomatoes!
According to Tom Philpott, the food editor of environmental site Grist.org, evangelists of the farmers' market movement like Michael Pollan and Alice Waters should quit simplifying the food shortage issue. Instead of arguing that expensive industrial foods will eventually drive people toward equally-pricey organic and sustainable eats, they should focus on the accessibility of these happier, healthier options.
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1 Comment:
Wow, this subject gets my blood boiling. It is one thing to support the farmer's market movement, and another to actually work to make the movement accessible to real, normal, average Americans who work full-time, have kids in ballet and soccer and band, must do their own laundry, mow their own grass, and fill out their own IRS forms, and pay for gasoline at $4.00 a gallon.
It's pretty hard to force yourself out of bed at 7 AM on a Saturday morning when you hit the rack at 11:30 PM after the kid's soccer game and post-game team pizza party, to get yourself to the paltry farmers' market in my town (San Antonio) offering, if we are lucky, at the height of summer, maybe 10 vendors offering about the same thing.
Of course, I can drive the 80 miles to a much better one in Austin (with about 20 food vendors), but that uses up about 3-4 of those $4.00 gallons of gas ( my car gets about 40mpg).
Then, there's the CSA I joined this year. I have to drive only about 10 miles to pick up my veggies, but I won't get any until mid-May at the earliest, and it's over in early October. It took two years of calling and writing to get the farmer to deliver to my city at all.
Pollan and Waters (whose restaurant I have enjoyed on visits to the Bay Area) should spend their time, their money and their prestige making sustainable agriculture work for middle America, instead of chiding us for spending money at that team pizza party. Help us out here, y'all, instead of making us feel even worse about things we have no control over.
dksbook at 2:00PM on 05/01/08