FROM THE ARCHIVES
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Food
[Frederica Mathewes-Green 03/06 02:27 PM]Turns out that the speedy-growing fruits and vegetables so loved by agribusiness grow too fast to develop a normal range of nutrients. They're as beautiful as wax fruit, and taste just as good, and are just as good for you.
The food chapter is the one that had the most direct impact on domestic life 'round these parts. After reading it I purchased Matthew Scully's Dominion, which we passed around the family. It was electrifying. My husband kept saying, "How could I not have known about this?" — about the shocking and, ultimately, dehumanizing reality of factory livestock farming. One daughter-in-law has permanently sworn off factory meat. We all have made it a priority to search out family-farm meats and dairy. My daughter wants us to chip in together and buy a dairy cow, and board her at a local farm. (Crazy as it sounds, we hear that such "cow-sharing" is illegal in Maryland; could there be a dairy lobby behind that?)
But I've got to admit, some packaged organic foods are very disappointing — lower in quality, higher in price. A local farmer can beat the competition when it comes to fresh homegrown produce, but when he attempts to take that fine produce and turn it into something packaged for wide distribution, he's going to fall behind the curve. Compared to what a mega corporation working at extremely high volume can do, he'll always be coping with higher prices for processing, packaging, and distribution prices, and comparatively lower results. The only excellent thing he has is the vegetable as it came out of the ground, and by the time its been on the grocer's shelf for a few months, not much of that excellence remains.
As Orthodox Christians, our family follows a vegan diet during Fast periods (for example, the Nativity Fast from Nov 15-Dec 25, and the current Great Lent which lasts till Pascha.) During this past Nativity Fast I bought a package of frozen Organic Vegetarian Burritos. I ate one. It was a piece of cardboard, wrapped around chopped cardboard. The remaining burritos are apt to live in my freezer a long, long time.
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