I was recently attending a decompress for a very intense Food Policy conference held way back in August of this year. The attendees, even of our sparcely populated decompress were still coming from a wide variety of food policy backgrounds, from the Oregon Hunger Initiative, to the Sydney Lezak Project, a social justice non-profit, members of a subsidized housing community in North Portland called New Columbia, and from within that the community garden project managers, local attorneys whose interest is in protecting the public from harmful and untested pharmeceuticals. Despite the common thread of a fairly liberal mindstate there was another considerable similarity: each expressed some kind of dismay with what do with their wide variety of beautifully grown local vegatables. Most were simply at a loss when it came to cooking a meal at home. As one attendee said as she laughed, cook a vegetable? Just add cheese!
Which brings us to a big problem. We need more than just growing lessons. We need more than just local food awareness and nuttritional awareness. We need more that just people growing as much of their own food as their portion of Earth allows them. We need to learn how to cook (again)! Somewhere during the explosive glut of soft drinks and fast food, bad information (coconut oil is bad for you: see http://www.udoerasmus.com/fatsmain.htm), and simply inedible food products that cost more at the end product: poor health, diabetes, etc, than at the beginning (Family Farms in North Dakota spent more on Health Care than on food, for example, 18% of their household budget, versus 14% for food).
Learning to cook food correctly could save a lot of money on Health care, as the midwest version of boiled dinner all but assures that most if not all of the essential nutrients are destroyed in the process. Correct preparation and storage of foods (some foods, spinach for example, lose 50% of Vitamin C within 24 hours of picking, others, like potatoes, develop toxins if store improperly). But nature, humans are creatures of habit. In 2008 we voted for change. While that may be a buzzword in the political arena, I have witnessed incredible movement in the local scene as well as the national food security movement to make sure that we are in fact secure. Change is coming, and if what I read on a daily basis from the COMFOOD network, change is already here if you are paying attention.
But the root of this change is personal change, and if we are the sum of what we consume, then we need to change the way we approach feeding ourselves. Movements like SlowFood USA provide excellent information on how to approach our personal responsibilty, and are organizing local movement. and those local movements need to be supplemented by a series of simple local cooking classes that are far -reaching in scope, nor complicated in process, teaching skills like how to sharpen and keep knives, how to use them to achieve knife cuts for even cooking, aesthetics of fresh vs. dried ingredients, time-saving (and herb saving) devices such as compound butters, advanced preparation, canning and frezzing techniques for storing seasonal items, wild-crafting techniques to ecourage a visceral connection with our immediate surrounds, and to return a sense of ownership to this thing we call our own lives.
At the center of a country routed in food security, is a populace rooted in self-security: one who knows how to prepare their meals, find variety in the woods and at the market, and keep a record of what they are doing, to help bring about a better learning curve: because if we ever stop learning and moving forward with our understanding of personal well-being, then we have stopped striving to be the dream that Americans seem born to strive for: to be the best. In this case, 'best' is a measurable success, showing itself in the quality of nutrition and food we put into our bodies; best is falsifiable, and requires little more evidence of this than a quick look at Super-Size Me; and 'best' is repeatable: throughout history, a well nourished populace is capable of anything, and this axiom cannot and will not be altered. Total cerealr may have 100% of every isolated, removed, extracted and re-added nutrient and vitamin, but somehow, somewhere, there is something missing, I think I know what that is...
Which brings us to a big problem. We need more than just growing lessons. We need more than just local food awareness and nuttritional awareness. We need more that just people growing as much of their own food as their portion of Earth allows them. We need to learn how to cook (again)! Somewhere during the explosive glut of soft drinks and fast food, bad information (coconut oil is bad for you: see http://www.udoerasmus.com/fatsmain.htm), and simply inedible food products that cost more at the end product: poor health, diabetes, etc, than at the beginning (Family Farms in North Dakota spent more on Health Care than on food, for example, 18% of their household budget, versus 14% for food).
Learning to cook food correctly could save a lot of money on Health care, as the midwest version of boiled dinner all but assures that most if not all of the essential nutrients are destroyed in the process. Correct preparation and storage of foods (some foods, spinach for example, lose 50% of Vitamin C within 24 hours of picking, others, like potatoes, develop toxins if store improperly). But nature, humans are creatures of habit. In 2008 we voted for change. While that may be a buzzword in the political arena, I have witnessed incredible movement in the local scene as well as the national food security movement to make sure that we are in fact secure. Change is coming, and if what I read on a daily basis from the COMFOOD network, change is already here if you are paying attention.
But the root of this change is personal change, and if we are the sum of what we consume, then we need to change the way we approach feeding ourselves. Movements like SlowFood USA provide excellent information on how to approach our personal responsibilty, and are organizing local movement. and those local movements need to be supplemented by a series of simple local cooking classes that are far -reaching in scope, nor complicated in process, teaching skills like how to sharpen and keep knives, how to use them to achieve knife cuts for even cooking, aesthetics of fresh vs. dried ingredients, time-saving (and herb saving) devices such as compound butters, advanced preparation, canning and frezzing techniques for storing seasonal items, wild-crafting techniques to ecourage a visceral connection with our immediate surrounds, and to return a sense of ownership to this thing we call our own lives.
At the center of a country routed in food security, is a populace rooted in self-security: one who knows how to prepare their meals, find variety in the woods and at the market, and keep a record of what they are doing, to help bring about a better learning curve: because if we ever stop learning and moving forward with our understanding of personal well-being, then we have stopped striving to be the dream that Americans seem born to strive for: to be the best. In this case, 'best' is a measurable success, showing itself in the quality of nutrition and food we put into our bodies; best is falsifiable, and requires little more evidence of this than a quick look at Super-Size Me; and 'best' is repeatable: throughout history, a well nourished populace is capable of anything, and this axiom cannot and will not be altered. Total cerealr may have 100% of every isolated, removed, extracted and re-added nutrient and vitamin, but somehow, somewhere, there is something missing, I think I know what that is...
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