Blog Intro

You may have noticed that we love food. We definitely have a strong belief in living where one lives, and that means having reverence for the native flora and fauna. But we also think it’s really important to know about the food we put into our bodies every day: where does it come from? How is it made? The plight of modern humans is how disconnected we are from our resources and how we rely on so much every day and have no idea about how everything is sourced.

This is why we have a vegetable garden. Sure, also it’s a fun and delicious endeavor. This is why we suggest you try growing plants, even if you aren’t really growing enough to supply your personal needs. When you grow a plant like a tomato, you become acutely aware of what it takes to make that fruit you purchase in the store. It makes you a smarter consumer. Of course, homegrown vegetables are almost always better than store-bought vegetables. This is true for a few reasons: you can grow varieties that suit your needs, whereas grocery stores select varieties that have a lasting shelf-life, or look attractive and cause people to purchase them. Some of the most delicious food varieties are ugly to look at but delicious to eat. But also, when you’ve grown your own backyard tomato, you’ve paid more attention to it than a giant farm has to their individual tomatoes. You have probably spent more time working on the soil. And the fruit was picked when it was ready to eat, and spent less time sitting around. It’s fresher. Also, a freshly picked vegetable or fruit has far more flavor and nutrition than one that sits for weeks or even months in a box, on a truck, on a display at the grocery store, etc.

I digress though, because this blog isn’t necessarily about growing food, it’s about the food we eat every day, and where it comes from. If there is one thing that continually plagues the modern person, it’s the lack of awareness about the sources of our material world. And that lack of awareness is an issue.

Meat eaters: have you ever raised, killed, and butchered your own meat? If you have, you may never again expect meat to be cheap. It should be special. We should all eat less of it, but when we eat it, it should be celebrated. Because a lot of work goes into producing meat. Everything that is wrong with the modern factory farms comes from our expectation that food should be cheap and fast. So producers are forced to cut corners to meet those expectations. They also rush the process and cut corners to save money. But TIME is what makes good food, always. Whether it’s not rushing a cow to getting fattened up with a grain that it can barely digest (cows being fed corn instead of grain in a pasture), or taking the time to ferment your sourdough bread, time is what makes food delicious and healthy.

Think about what you eat and drink in one day. Even your morning coffee has a rich, convoluted path it took before it ended up in your cup. You may have ground your own beans, but you probably didn’t grow the plant, you didn’t ferment the beans (most people drinking coffee probably don’t know that many coffee beans are fermented as part of their processing). And how much do you know about the plants we use to make coffee? Do you know what growing conditions are required for coffee, and that global warming may decrease the number of places coffee can be grown? Did you know that a coffee “bean” is actually the seed of a fruit? It is the pit inside the red or purple fruit.

I don’t know about you, but the idea of not having my morning coffee makes the climate change issues THAT much more pressing. And coffee as a crop is threatened by the changes being brought about by climate change. How many people might be that much more willing to change their bad habits if they truly knew how their food sources are being threatened by climate change? Knowing about our food and where it comes from makes us better citizens, helps us make better decisions.

Each ingredient we use as food isn’t just some isolated thing that you get from a grocery store—each ingredient has its own story, its own path to getting to our plates, and its own ecology. And we should know more about each ingredient. Blindly consuming everything in our world leads to problems. If we don’t know that the purchase of some ingredient causes misery, we contribute to that misery. If we aren’t aware that we are depleting the world of organisms because of our rampant consumption of it, we are contributing to extinction, personally. If we aren’t aware on the effect the production of one item or anther is degrading the environment of a region, we are contributing to that degradation.

Don’t worry, we won’t make this all about the depressing and looming threat of climate change and how it effects our food. Knowing more about food, how it is produced and where it comes from, is also fun. It makes us appreciate what we put into our mouths every day. So this blog is dedicated to this subject. I don’t know how often I will post here, because we also have a nursery to run. But I have written about food a lot in my adult life, and it’s a hard habit to quit. And I am obsessed with the subject of where our ingredients come from.