The weather today has been really great for my burgeoning garden. The mix of reliable heat, mild breezes, intense sun and shadier moments has coaxed my teeny tiny little lettuce seeds into sprouting teeny, tiny shoots. I was incredibly excited when I woke up this morning and saw them--they don't look like much to the untrained and impatient eye, but to me, they meant a gorgeous salad in just a few weeks time!
A few weeks, jeeze. That's kind of a long time to wait for salad, isn't it? Why not just rip the top off of a triple-washed bag of pre-mixed salad greens? It's a simple question with a not-so-simple answer. You could just buy the lettuce, pre-washed, mixed, and cut from the store. Or, you could spend a bit more time, and exert more influence with your money, and buy lettuce from a real farmer's market...or, I know you're rolling your eyes by now, grow your own! Lettuce and most other vegetables and herbs--even if they are organic--are produced on such massive scales on industrial farms thousands of miles away. Lettuce is something most of us eat on a regular basis, but few of us really know how the lettuce is grown, who grows it, where it is grown. Basically, do you know how your food gets from the farm to your dinner plate? For too many of us, the answer is no.
On a small, localized scale, our ignorance about our food manifests itself in the presence of "big-box" supermarkets and shopping centers and struggling family farms. From the national and even global perspective, our lack of understanding and interest about our food means that our planet often suffers from our desire for convenience. The ease of purchasing, at any time of year, everything from blood oranges (from Florida) to chicken breasts (from an unknowable location) to fennel (Mexico) to dried seaweed (Japan--and for now I'm just considering food people buy at supermarkets with the intention of cooking it--leads us blindly into a cycle of buying food that is not seasonally or regionally in sync, food that is not as tasty or nutritious as it would be if it were grown sustainably, and food that is outside of our control in terms of monitoring its safety and quality.
One of the main reasons I decided to take on this project was so that I could learn more about the farm to table process and how that process affects us on the individual, national, and global levels. I will write about this issue in different ways and its different manifestations many more times throughout the course of this project.
