There’s a kind of Murphy’s Law quality to a Monday morning that begins with keeping three (out of four) kids home sick. What was the point of the week starting save but to taunt you?
Did I mention that it was pouring? And that it was a cold March rain, not a gentle nearly April shower?
The day quickly improved, in that the seven year-old, although a bit cough-y and sneeze-y was in good spirits. He really remained happy if playing games. So, we went from Connect Four (mama was champion) to Othello (he whipped me numerous time at that) to Monopoly (as yet unfinished). The teenager slept all morning, then moped, then slept, then moped, then watched television. The toddler was cranky and clingy all the day long, but three adults shared the burden of endless hold-me throughout the course of the day so that made her misery bearable (for the adults, at least).
That rain, possibly leading to floods, is a harbinger of spring. Buds peeking out, flowers will burst, vegetables will emerge… It’s hard not to feel excited about the electricity of spring just upon us, the explosion of green.
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With that spring-has-sprung theme in mind, I was reminded of fiddleheads. How I enjoy watching ferns unfurl in my front yard and how grateful I am to Lucien and Remy’s kindergarten teacher for Lucien’s kindergarten class cooking and eating fiddleheads. She boiled them, put butter and salt on them, and these five year-olds loved them, or at least my five year-old loved them. Perhaps, fiddleheads marked the beginning of his gourmet ways. Certainly, that he loved them so inspired me to buy them and soon all the kids adored ‘em and they became a marker of spring and local food pleasures and all that good stuff.
I haven’t yet watched—I do plan to—Jamie Oliver’s television show about trying to make a West Virginia school community eat healthier food. Reading on the Internet, Oliver (whom I remember quite fondly from the year plus I lived in London, when he was just launching his Naked Chef fame and the show was kind of tatty and homespun and un-self-conscious) has his fans and his foes. He’s either a crusader or histrionic, take your pick, authentic or arrogant. Shaquille O’Neal did a similar series on the telly a few years back, trying to save a group of obese kids from obesity. He found out change—he, too, tried to transform a school’s kitchen—is very hard.
Regardless of what you think about Oliver or taxing sugary soft drinks or even whether bake sales should take place in schools (what about selling Girl Scout cookies on school grounds?) there are some obvious change-is-hard truths here: getting healthier (read, real) food to underserved, poor communities and all of us is critical, as is a movement to bring more local food more places (read, urban agriculture, kitchen gardens, CSA’s and much more, home-cooked food). We need to get people of all ages moving. When we make these changes, other changes that need to happen will naturally follow suit. Fresh food, cooked at home, requires less packaging and shipping requiring less reliance upon fossil fuels. One person making this change doesn’t change the system, but a widespread shift, well…
I do not think that we can imagine this kind of change is going to be easy to enact. Over spring break, the seven year-old, his grandmother and I watched Who Killed the Electric Car and that menacing demon called corporate power really has an invincible hand in making certain that we don’t do what make sense (or feels right) if those changes deprive big money its big money. When health care “reform” passed and stocks went up, it was hard to feel the quotes should be removed from reform.
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Still, I live in the little-Valley-that-could (we started the Nuclear Freeze movement; Frances Crowe is my neighbor, we have the wonderful CISA that stands for Community Involved in Supporting Agriculture) and CISA just added Farm-to-School page on its site. Red Fire farm just added two CSA pick-up points in town (one in Amherst, one in Northampton). Soon enough, we’ll have farmers’ markets galore. Before that, fiddleheads.
