Think Global, Eat Local
by J. Michael Wheeler
It seems it was about a million years ago, in Los Angeles, California, that I was born. The epoch of mankind as hunter and gatherer was long past, the agricultural revolution had already been supplanted by the industrial revolution, and as a society we had finally determined how best to put food on the table: frozen TV dinners. They were easy to cook, easy to serve, and there was no cleanup. What’s not to love?
Plus, they were pretty good.
For a kid, how could they not be good? Each portion of food had its own compartment so there wasn’t any unintentional food-type touching: carrots and peas were walled off from mashed potatoes and gravy. There were plenty of meals from which to choose. In the odd case that a kid grew tired of the Mexican Style TV Dinner, there were Fishstick TV Dinners, Meatloaf TV Dinners, and Grilled Salmon with Wild Mushroom Risotto TV Dinners (not really, I’m projecting here).
Mom loved them too. She’d come home from work, pop a couple into the oven and Bam! Dinner! (We would have said, “Bingo! Dinner!” Emeril was still decades away.)
As a kid, a lot of my food came from the freezer, or in a can, or in a box that shaked and baked our chicken. Not all kids ate that way, I know, but that’s how the kids in my tribe learned about where food came from. It never, ever, came from the ground!
A lot of kids still learn about food that way. Unless they’re part of a group like The Food Project. The Food Project Summer Youth Program dirties the hands of kids by teaching them to plant, tend, and harvest organic produce. Their web site tells us “…Each year, a diverse group of sixty youth, ages 14-16, enter The Food Project’s Summer Youth Program and work to grow and distribute thousands of pounds of organic produce for people in need.”
The Food Project is part of a quiet movement whose aim is to get you and I closer to the food we eat, both spiritually and in fact. Eat Local wants us to seek out and support our local farmers, fishmongers, and other
independent food producers. Forsake the factory food for the local goat
cheese maker or the young new bakers like A&J King, Artisan Bakers, in Salem, Massachusetts. Andy & Jackie King, the “A” and “J” of the bakery even have a mission:
Making artisan bread is not about following a recipe. It is about honing technique and honoring tradition. We have opened A&J King, Artisan Bakers in order to bring those traditions to your table in the form of beautiful handcrafted breads and pastries. We are not doing anything new, just something that has been forgotten by some in an increasingly “on-demand” world.
It is our hope that more and more communities will have bakeries of their own as people are reintroduced to the freshness of locally-made products. We are proud to join those bakers who have helped revitalize the artisan bread movement in this country.
If you think it’s just we Americans that have lost our tasty way, take heart, an Italian wrote a food manifesto (he is Italian after all) “…whose aim is to protect the pleasures of the table from the homogenization of modern fast food and life.” Whew.
Those words have grown into the Slow Food Movement. Founded in 1986, it has become an international organization with over 80,000 members in 100 counties. The manifesto, Slow Food, The Case for Taste, by the movement’s founder, Carlo Petrini is a dense read, but worth the struggle. Alice Waters wrote the foreword and that says a lot.
If we’re lucky, we might take a step backwards on the culinary timeline. The aluminum TV dinner trays in our landfills would be fossil evidence of an evolutionary path wrongly taken.