We did it. One year of eating Alabama. I must admit to feeling a little melancholy by this anticlimactic ending. In this year of investigating where our food comes from - of questioning every grain and every leaf while reconnecting broken foodways and meeting the people who grow what we eat - neither one of us came remotely close to dying of scurvy. Despite some lean times, neither one of us broke down and drove to Burger King as the hour hand cruised toward ten o'clock while a complicated meal sat simmering on the burner with "just twenty minutes" to go.
We did occasionally break down. There was that time in October when, working at the artist hospitality tent of our local arts festival, I decided that the good Lord would not be delivering hundreds of dozens of hot Krispy Kreme donuts around me just to
test my strength. Maybe the first thirty dozens, yes. Those were a test. But after that, He was saying, "Yes my son. They are Hot, Now." And there were others, too. But this is not the time for confession...
This was the year of more food scares, most memorably the contamination of southern peanuts. But it was also the year I first saw peanuts growing in the ground. First saw the
huge mass of a plant that produces the tiny nut. First wiped the dirt off fresh picked peanuts, and discovered the hard way that green peanuts can't dry out in a paper sack, they'll just go moldy. I had a woman in Waverly give me a dozen or so peanuts in an old mason jar - seed to plant this year from a variety that has been passed down in her family from the time of slavery. Maybe this variety, with five nuts to a shell, is one that made its way from Africa in the hull of a slave ship, like so many of the other vegetables we enjoy as staples of southern cuisine. Incidentally, Rashmi and I were never sickened by any of the food we ate during our project.
Maybe this ending is anticlimactic because Rashmi and I have been so absorbed with other aspects of our lives that our food has become, while not taken for granted, at least predictable. We've got certain things in the freezer, and while we wait for the Alabama growing season to start up we get by on frozen okra, green beans, pork, canned tomatoes, canned and frozen soup, bread, cheese, wild onion and garlic, and a few other incidentals. Our meals are variations on that motif nearly every night. Wish that it were that Alabama had a stronger farmers market culture with a local market filled with carrots, leeks, greens, asparagus, salad mix, broccoli, winter squash, beets, kholrabi, swiss chard, and radishes. But we're not there yet. Maybe a few more years of educating consumers and producers and a few more years of rising food prices and we will be.
So we ended this experiment, to quote
another poem by TS Eliot, not with a bang but a whimper. Last night I read the paper while Rashmi made a delicious butternut squash soup (from butternut squash grown and donated by Sara and Joe). We made a salad with kale from Snow's Bend, goat cheese, and a little homemade vinaigrette, and we topped the soup with crispy bacon from our pig. Then we sat down together, like every other night, to talk about our day and reflect on the rich taste of our meal. It was, well, normal.
And this normality, while anticlimactic, is revolutionary. We've inverted the system. Through local food subterfuge, the traditions of our ancestors, and a handful of willing and able farmers, we've thrown off the nearly unyielding pressures of the Food Industrial Complex; the full court press of food marketing and the lure of cheap "fresh" produce year round. We've retreated into our own communities to forge this New Diet, and in so doing we've discovered, despite our own arrogance, that really it's an Old Diet. There is wisdom in the way we used to eat and derangement in the way we eat now. There is vibrancy and pride in local, small scale agriculture, and there is a dehumanizing loss of community in farms that grow exponentially bigger with fewer workers growing less crops with more chemicals. There is logic in eating food grown nearby. There is absurdity in eating food grown halfway across the continent. There is dignity in supporting local economies and complacency in choosing not to.
Like most endings, this one is an opportunity for a new beginning. This blog is not going away. We will continue our local food pursuits (despite some dried beans, tortillas, and rice...) and we plan to keep you posted on the fledgling idea of organizing ourselves into a group devoted to fighting for local food in the state of Alabama. It really has been a joy and an inspiration to read your emails and to know that there are hundreds if not thousands of people around this state who want to forge a new culture of local food. Thanks for your support. But we're not there yet. We hope you'll join us on this new beginning, and we hope you'll stop by sometime to share a meal.
I almost forgot! What did we eat on that last day? As a
comparison from last year, if you're interested, here's the Last Supper, as it were...
Breakfast: Rashmi's famous fig bread
Lunch: At my desk, with leftovers from the previous night - fried okra, sauteed green beans with fresh wild garlic, pork chop with parsley from our garden, and a piece of cornbread.
Dinner: Butternut Squash soup with bacon, kale salad with goat cheese and vinaigrette
Sara, Rashmi, Joe and I will be speaking at the Montevallo Literary Festival this Thursday, April 16th at 2:30 in the afternoon. We'll be talking about the project and the blogging/filming that we've done in our year of local eating. You can find more information about the Festival on Montevallo's website. But the most exciting thing about our trip to Montevallo has to be the Sustainability Banquet that evening. Michael Patton, a philosphy professor at Montevallo, has been teaching a course entitled "Science, Technology, and Value," which has in recent years focused almost exclusively on questions of local food and sustainability. Each semester the students put together what they've dubbed the Sustainability Banquet - where everything served is grown or raised within 100 miles. We're fortunate that the Banquet and the Literary Festival coincide this year. The Banquet is open to the public and if you're in that neck of the woods, we'd love to see you there! That, and Janisse Ray, author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood will be the featured guest and speaker at the Banquet.
