The Ink-Pot and the Palette

I may have mentioned it before, but I highly recommend the documentary The Future of Food. It's right in line with what you discuss here.

str8ontilmornin has been preaching this for years, but I admit I didn't fully understand or get it until I'd seen that movie and then really started taking him seriously about it. Seems weird to say that now, considering how knowledgeable he is on this subject and that I'd had this tremendous resource in my house all that time, but it's true. But it finally clicked for me and we made the switch a few years ago.

What's funny about that is that we caught a surprising amount of flak from people about it. Teasing mostly, but underneath it was a kind of defensiveness that the change we'd made was somehow an indictment of them and their own food choices. Human nature, I guess. But then last year, with all those scares about contaminated food from China and other places, suddenly there was a lot more interest from those people in what we were doing and why.

(And actually, we caught the most flak about switching the cats to an organic diet, about being those kind of cat owners. But of course that all changed after the pet food scare last year, as well.)

I think the tide is slowly turning on this. We see it here a lot in food-loving PDX, but it's slowly trickling outward to the non-foodie community, too, I think. S just read an article yesterday that the Portland Farmers' Markets have seen something like a 250% increase in activity since 2001 and that CSAs have waiting lists of 2 years or more. And Organics2U (which is what we have) is doing a booming business these days. Gives me hope that people are starting to choose natural, wholesome food and getting back to their roots (HA). Plus, I think the higher energy costs are going to start pushing toward what's in their own backyards -- literally and figuratively -- for financial reasons, as well. I mean, obviously the energy costs are hitting local farmers, as well, but we're reaching (or I hope we're reaching) a point when the cost of a salad made from local ingredients is cheaper than a salad that essentially traveled 4000 miles to get to my plate.