Winter's Tales

I’ve been on hiatus since farm season ended, keeping busy writing grants while I thought about where to take this blog.

I started blogging in the first place to share this little adventure with friends back in New York, and various urban centers across the country. To many of them, my decision to exchange my office for outdoor work seemed both alien and exciting; people were envious but still responded to my plans with the “You’re doing what?” tone of voice that I once learned to associate with extended stays in Africa. But, since at heart I’m still an activist, I ulterior motives. Not everyone has the freedom to do what I did—but that didn’t mean they couldn’t get something out of it.

We’ve all become alienated from where our food is from. There are studies showing that urban kids have no idea what a corn plant looks like, or that carrots come from the ground. For the most part, we’re completely cut off from the natural world. In western countries in particular, nature is something to be conquered, bent to our will, rather than something we’re a part of. And we forget that our food, also, comes from the natural world

“So what?” you’re probably thinking. Many authors much more talented than I have addressed that question, but I’ll settle for quoting Wendell Berry:

For decades now the entire industrial food economy, from the large farms and feedlots to the chains of supermarkets and fast-food restaurants, has been obsessed with volume. It has relentlessly increased scale in order to increase volume in order (presumably) to reduce costs. But as scale increases, diversity declines; as diversity declines, so does health; as health declines, the dependence on drugs and chemicals necessarily increases. As capital replaces labor, it does so by substituting machines, drugs, and chemicals for human workers and for the natural health and fertility of the soil. . .Eaters must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.

Our health and well-being is inextricably linked with the health of the soils and the air, the animals and the plants, that we exploit for our own food. And as we destroy these things, we are destroying ourselves, with exploding obesity, cancer rates, heart disease, and a variety of other metabolic diseases that are rooted in what and how we eat.

One of the reasons I decided to leave New York and head for the hills was that I thought it was time to learn to live another way, to be truly conscious of my place in the natural world, of the decisions I made every day and their effect on so many finite resources.

As a part of that, I wanted to regain the ability to watch nature’s progress through the year. In New York, I mostly moved from my temperature-controlled apartment to the temperature-controlled subway, got off and walked about a block down a concrete street with more trash bags than trees, and spent the day ensconced in a temperature-controlled office. At my last job, I felt lucky to have a tree outside my window, but my overwhelming view was still the brick wall across the street. I was only barely aware of the seasons passing.

Since we moved, we’ve fallen into a routine during the weekdays. We work from about 9 AM until about 3:30, and then rouse the Puck the Labrador Retriever from his slumber near the window and go for a long walk. We usually wind up either at the cemetery where Puck can swim in the pond, or at the conservation land trust at the top of the hill. (Columbia County has its own land trust.) Since we came here in June, we’ve watched the leaves fall off the trees, noticed the different birds migrating through, and negotiated our way around new streams that rain and snow run-off cut through the forest floor.

Our food life has, indeed, changed. We stay away from industrially-raised food as much as possible, shopping at the newly-opened Chatham coop when we can for local fare, and visiting the Berry Farm store down on Route 203 for most provisions. They’re still running a greenhouse, mostly growing salad greens and a couple other veggies out back. The neighborhood Price Chopper (a huge chain that stretches northern New York, Pennsylvania, and New England) is our last resort. Even though most produce at the Berry Farm store comes from out of state this time of year, I’d still rather give my money to the local guy who’s always ready to engage in a lively discussion about wild vs. farmed salmon and the inner workings of his greenhouse. Try having THAT discussion in the check-out line at Price Chopper!

Since there’s no farming for now, I want to start writing about both these things—first, where my food’s from now that it’s winter. It’s more complicated than I realized; there are huge conglomerates controlling even the food the co-ops buy. (I’m sorry—did you think they got food from lots of little indie food companies?). Then there are all the controversies over the FDA and the food (or food-like product) that’s available in your local supermarket. I’ll also be posting more about natural changes around here, as the seasons march on, the birds migrate out and back, the snow covers the land and then melts away.