So you think you know your food...

I just finished reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver (the fourth book I've read in just under two weeks). It might change the way I eat. The first thing that struck me was the amount of fuel I'm responsible for using up just by going grocery shopping. I never considered the amount of energy it takes to harvest, store, and transport food to my local Fred Meyer. The farther away it comes from, the more energy it took. We're not talking one tank of gas here, and one there, we're talking 400 gallons of oil per year per person. Here are some other interesting tidbits I learned from this book:

• Each food item in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average of 1,500 miles
• If every U.S. citizen ate just ONE...that's ONE...meal (any meal - breakfast, lunch, OR dinenr) per week (not day, but week) made up of locally and organically raised items, we would reduce our country's oil consumption by 1.1 million barrels per week.
  
• Most of the vegetables in the produce section are genetically altered to look better and stay looking fresh after being transported long distances. Although you might thing you are eating a nutritious tomato, you are really eating a vitamin lacking red sphere that vaugely tastes of tomato.
• U.S. farmers produce 3,900 calories per U.S. citizen per day (twice what the average person needs). What happens to those extra calories? Well...the food industry has figured out how to get them into our bodies, the bodies of people who don't want to or need to eat 2,000 extra calories per day. Most enter our bodies in the form of high-fructose corn syrup.
  

There's more, but that's the most important. I am going to do what I can to eat locally...all year long. Yes, that's right, even in the winter time, in Alaska, where nothing really grows. Tomatoes can be purchased from a farmer's market (or grown at home, gasp) during the summer, and canned, dried, or turned into sauce and frozen for winter months. Other vegetables can be preserved in the same manner.

Meat poses a bigger problem. I feel comfortable eating pasture-raised or free-range meat. Especially after driving past a place dubbed "Cowschwitz" off I-5 in California. Cows raised in appaling conditions, force-fed a diet that is unnatural to them, and never seeing sunlight. Nope. These conditions support disease (mad cow included). There has never been a documented case of mad cow in pasture-raised cows.

The situation in this book is extreme, a family of four subsisted in rural Virginia on food they grew themselves. The food that they couldn't grow themselves, they purchased from friends or neighboring farmers who did grow it. It does not suggest that living that lifestyle is for everyone (or even them after their one year). It does suggest that we should think twice before we reach for tomatoes in the produce section in December. How far did those have to travel?

After reading this book, I will be more conscious of what I'm eating. I don't like the idea of having high fructose corn syrup put into places I never imagined, causing me to eat less but consume more calories than I need because I'm still hungry! I also don't like the idea of being robbed every time I go to the grocery store. Robbed of nutrients. If I pay $2.99 for a red pepper, I want $2.99 worth of nutrients in said pepper!

Nutritious veggies...I'll see you at the Saturday Market next weekend...