Slow Food Nation 08

We finally made it today, on the last day, in the last hour. We couldn't really afford the entrance fee for the events, so we were glad to just stroll around the stalls and see the lovely garden that was right in the middle of Civic Center. I was excited to see Organic Pastures with their raw dairy and their evangelizing of real milk. We bought 2 tubs of lovely butter. One to use and one to freeze. Each tub was only $5! It's about twice that at Rainbow and they're always out of it by the time we get there. I figured that it would actually be worth while to drive all the way to Fresno to stock up on the stuff a few times a year instead of going to Rainbow, even with the phone book coupons. 

In the middle of the square, beside the garden, was a small bandstand with all kinds of music going on. There was great produce from all over California. We stopped at the Pt. Reyes Bookstore stand to check out the books that were, in the last half-hour, on sale for 30% off. I bought "Full Moon Feast" by Jessica Prentiss. I read her first essay while Rain slept this afternoon. She wrote about her young-adulthood in which she partook of what Pollan calls our "national eating disorder," that is, being faced with excess, but little real food, and finding herself obsessed, yet incapable of eating well. 

That made me think. The oddity of starvation when food is so plentiful, yet so awful, makes horrible sense in a way. I grew up eating what my mother grew in her garden, along with traditional foods like chicken bone broth, homemade sourdoughs and meats from the supermarket cooked simply. Some time in the late 70s or early 80s, the foods in the market changed. Corn and soy were hidden in prepared foods. Corn syrups took the place of sugar. Weirdnesses like Nutrasweet joined saccarin on the shelves. The meat industry became more and more deregulated, resulting in an unsafe meat supply, full of hormones and antibiotics. Our eating lives became the equivalent of being alone in a crowd. People were surrounded by huge excesses of food, but it was junk, stripped of nutrients and filled with additives. It became more common to see fat, yet malnourished poor people, while toned, slim physiques became the mark of the wealthy. The overweight and the thin were all starving, because despite the huge amounts of food, with the illusion of choice (it was all wheat, soy and corn additives, citric acid, corn syrup, vegetables and fruits were tasteless and filled with pesticides, corn-fed meats with little nutrient value and too much fat, etc), but actually none. If you were sensitive to corn, soy, wheat, gluten, dairy, casein, citrus or any of the other big 8, you were up a creek. 

I realized something when I started to buy and prepare real foods. Food is expensive. It's also rare to find. There are places in the country where it's impossible to get produce without pesticides or that can be guaranteed not to have been watered with raw sewage or chemical runoff. Most of the country drinks pasturized and homogenized milks and eats meats that some from the centralized slaughterhouse system. In fact, it's nearly impossible for independent ranches like Marin Sun Farms to slaughter their own animals thanks to the regulatory system that is weighted towards big business. A woman I saw at the market today told me that in the centralized slaughterhouses, the ranches are told that there may not be a guarantee that the meat they will receive will be the cows that went in. That means a lot if those cows were raised as carefully as they are at MSF. Although raw milk has made it back to our markets legally, it's always under threat from big dairy. It's rarely seen at any market and often has to be purchased through a cow-share.

Real food is scarce. It is unbelievably expensive. If we choose to only eat real food, we eat sparsely by necessity. The famine, is, in many ways, real. 

Okay. Now I have to reserve Michael Pollan's new book at the library. :)