Metacentricities

For those of you who have lived in Berkeley, you know the Berkeley Bowl. I knew about it, but it was always so crowded, and impossible to find parking, that I avoided it. But then, one Monday morning at 10:00 (perfect time to go) I went shopping. And I was a happy camper. I finally found a way to get good, wholesome food without breaking the (at this point tiny little) bank, like I would by going to Whole Foods (commonly nicknamed whole paycheck, or whole checkbook).

There is an entry on Tree Hugger about an article on Alternet - which puts Whole Foods to the WalMart test: can an entry-level employee at Whole Foods afford to shop there, even with the discount? The answer is, of course, no.

It’s nice to know that yes, Virginia, it is possible to get good wholesome food, at prices that won’t make you broke. Farmer’s markets, CSA programs, co-ops (I left the Pioneer Valley just in time for the River Valley Market coop to get going in Northampton) etc., provide a nice alternative to Whole Foods, which is, after all, simply another publicly traded company, and its major mission is to maximize profit for shareholders, not provide good, healthy, wholesome food at reasonable prices. Yes, they pay better than WalMart, but that’s hardly saying much, and they remain ardently anti-union. It’s nice to have alternatives.

technorati tags: organic, food, coops, berkeley, walmart

Remember my post about my drive from Berkeley down to Santa Barbara? Well, the drive up from Idyllwild back to Berkeley was even more instructive in the ‘where we get food’ department.

First, my image of the San Fernando Valley, as this lush, garden of eden like place where all our vegetables come from has been utterly shattered. I don’t know where I got that image, but I guess I must have figured if all this great stuff comes from there, then it must be like a garden of eden.

I was travelling through during probably what is the driest part of the year, but there is no doubt in my mind that at least the landscape that route 5 goes through is naturally very dry. Brown scrub grass and little desert plants were on both sides of the highway, and on the west side were often these hills that were totally brown. On the east side, were large swaths of green fields, clearly irrigated, surrounded by brown. Where there were trees (citrus, I think), the ground was mostly brown (some green grass) in between. There were large patches of burned grass next to the highway (I suspect the result of someone’s flicked cigarette.)  Where there were brown fields, they were growing hay, which seemed like a very natural crop for the climate.

As I drove further north, these huge aquaducts came into view. Miles and miles and miles of aqueduct - concrete rivers bringing water to the valley.

Now I fully, completely understand the price we pay to have grapes and lemons and lettuce and strawberries and tomatoes in November and January. It was actually kinda scary - understanding how much these fields depended on that water, and how much we depend on that food.

The second part was that like my drive down to Santa Barbara, in my drive up the valley, it was really clear who was working the fields. And, in my scanning of the radio stations, the majority of the stations I found were actually spanish language stations, which surprised the heck out of me.

I feel like the drive peeled away another layer of understanding of the way we’ve chosen to construct our society, and both the precariousness of it, as well as the way we hide from ourselves it’s true nature.

One of the things that I often do before a meal (at least when I’m being conscious) is think about where the food came from. When I was driving down to Santa Barbara from Berkeley yesterday, I passed fields and fields of food crops, some of which were being picked. At one field, there was a semi, with a flat bed with lots and lots of boxes of cabbage. I recognized the boxes as ones I’d seen in the supermarket - when the folks were stocking the vegetable tables with varied kinds of vegetables.

I also passed two semis with big buckets full of just picked carrots. I wondered if those were going to be processed into "baby carrots" (sorry, no, they don’t pick them small, they take regular carrots, and process them into baby carrots.)

I’ve always known that much of the veggies and fruits I buy, especially between November and June, are from California.  It was amazing and revelatory to spend several hours passing through the farmlands that are the source of my food.

Also, especially having had the experience and conversation about slow food, as well as the experience of knowing how expensive fuel is getting, it really made me stop and think a bit about the whole thing.

But, I guess, now that I’m living here, I get the advantage of the abundance of relatively local food grown year round.