Harvest for Hope

Amazingly enough I've become something of a slow reader since I started playing WoW. What used to take me three days to read now takes a couple weeks. I used to read a book a week at my slowest. Now it takes me a couple weeks to finish some of the fastest books. It's something that I'm going to look to correct, but for right now I plod through books when I used to glide. 

So when I say that it has taken me weeks to read Jane Goodall's Harvest for Hope, it is not because of any flaw with the book. In fact this book is wonderful. It will gladly go onto my shelf for future perusal. Harvest For Hope is a book about the food industry and all the issues and challenges that face it. Food production has changed completely in the last 50 or so years and not for the better. Corporations control too much of our food supply now, monocrops dominate farms, and animals are kept as commodities not living things. So many of us have no concept of where our food comes from or the huge lengths it goes to, getting to our plates. 

Goodall presents all this information in her standard direct way but she is quick to point out ways in which we can improve the system. The tone of several sections are bleak but there is always hope at the end of each chapter. Her section on local eating is fascinating. There are a ton of slow food, local food movements out there that I was not aware of. The sections of factory farms for animal products made me physically ill and continues to cement my decision to be vegetarian, no matter how often Jeff offers me bacon. :-) 

Goodall touches on the natural order of eating, animal rights, genetically modified foods, obesity rates, water issues, and corporate control. None of this information was new but the solutions Goodall offers are not normally given in these types of books. I came away feeling more hopeful then I did after reading Fast Food Nation. Like reading The Jungle by Upton Sinclair in high school, these books make a huge impact in the way I view my world. Goodall's section of fish farming was new and very eye-opening. I was not aware of how often these farms contaminate the wild fish that live nearby. The sections on local foods made me want to start growing my own vegetables. I'll have to start a small garden this summer. 

Again not a lot of new information (after having read multiple books on food production) but told in a wonderful way. I felt dispair and I felt hope within a couple pages of each other. A call to arms if I ever read one. For anyone interested in all sections of food production, it is a must read. 

Food Is the New Sex

Since the 1950s the number of books that have come out about sex have been staggering. Masters and Johnson produced their well known book, Human Sexual Response. The Joy of Sex has been printed in version after version. Kinney came forward with his ground breaking research. And through the sixties, seventies, eighties, and even some of the nineties it is what we talked about. Sometimes in hushed tones but it was on the tip of a lot of people's tongues.

The 2000s seem to have brought a new focus: food. And suddenly it seems like the market has been glutted with books about food. We discuss trans fats in hushed tones and talk about antioxidants the way we use to talk about the g-spot. I of course only mention all this because I've been hit with this craze as well. "Fast Food Nation" was the first book I remember reading on food and I was shocked by what I found. I eat fast food (Subway excepted) far less then before because of it. I finished "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" about a year ago. Barbara Kingsolver's beautiful book on eating local made a huge impact on me. I started to think about where my food really came from and what distance it had traveled to make it to my table. I began to think about the seasons food has. I'm currently reading "Harvest for Hope", Jane Goodall's book on eating in a sustainable manner, both for the planet and the animals and humans who live here. And I'm on hold at the library to read "The Omnivore's Dilemma" Michael Pollan's revolutionary book on food production. After that will be another Pollan, "In Defense of Food" about the debate between food and nutrients. In short, I'm suddenly paying a lot of attention to what I'm putting in my body.

The idea for this post came from my dad who just finished "The Omnivore's Dilemma". My dad has never been a man who has been bitten by the environmental bug. He used to get my sister's ire up by denying that climate change was happening. He would drive me crazy with his defense on CAFOs. Suddenly he's talking about sustainable, organic farming. He's mentioning the hormones in his meat. We're talking crop rotations at dinner. He has become interested in food. And one night he mentioned that food was the new sex. And we started debating why we, as a society, were suddenly interested in something we've taken for granted for years.

Perhaps this focus on food is coming at a good time. The obesity rate in this country is skyrocketing. We eat processed foods with ingredients we can't even pronounce much less know what they do. We add artificial flavors and (as I found out from Fast Food Nation) scents to our foods. Corporations control a good portion of what we eat. Within my parent's lifetime we have seen a shift from natural foods to grocery bought packaged foods pumped with preservatives. And suddenly people are starting to notice that the food they eat doesn't really feed them. At least not provide them with the nutrition they need. It is amazing that something created in a lab can be so tasty but there is very little to match a free off the tree pear or a bit of honey drizzled over a biscuit. Nature at its finest.

This wasn't meant as a lecture. I've been interested in food for a while. I'm trying to strip more and more of the artificial out of my diet. My family is now pretty comfortable with my vegetarian diet although my mother (bless her heart) keeps inviting me over for beef stew. I've often said that I don't cook, which has been mostly true. But I'm ready for a bit of a change. I want to start making more food from scratch. I love the idea of knowing everything that went into the dinner I eat. I'm excited about the idea of eating less preservatives. And I'm excited about trying out some new meals. Plus I just like food.

And just a little something to sweeten you up, since this post seems a bit like a lecture and that wasn't my intent. Food is not just the new sex but sometimes the new art.