For parents, there are all stages of food from nursing or bottle feeding stories to the introduction of solid food to the interesting process of helping another person eat, attempt, enjoy, not throw, and appreciate food.
I still remember speaking with one frustrated babysitter about how although I cannot any longer remember how important it might feel to have my different food not touch on a plate, to my five year-old, clearly, it was a very big deal. “For whatever reason, this is just his reality now,” I remember saying. “It won’t always be this way for him.”
My boys are much more adventurous eaters than I ever will be.
One of our family’s great pleasures is living in an area where there are many farms, many farmers’ markets, and a pretty strong passion—communitywide—both for justice and health and environmentalism surrounding food, food activism if you will and for deliciousness.
As a birthday gift, the second guy attended a cooking class this past week at the local kitchen store. Apparently, he skewed the median age by numerous decades—and he loved the session, which was about using autumnal herbs.
People who have read my blog—or known me in real life—this past year-plus are aware that I was very involved with raising money to secure 120 acres of farmland in my town through Grow Food Northampton. In a few weeks, we’ll be showing a film that sounds fantastic: Farmageddon.
Anyone on the East Coast knows that recent weather events gravely damaged many farms. Our local farm support and advocacy organization CISA has just announced an emergency fund for farmers. CISA received a wonderful challenge grant for this loan fund that will provide some much needed relief to area farmers hit by Irene (here’s how to contribute). The farm we belong to and visit each week had a field underwater. When the grim humor of learning our farmers could canoe their fields was shared I remembered Almanzo Wilder’s similar silver lining-ish response to a hailstone on the prairie flattening the harvest. Weather is bigger than we are, that much is for sure. Supporting the fund is a way of acknowledging that truth.
Bigger truths: that the further we go to disconnect food from small farms, that food is an issue not only for those who care about the planet but also the health of our nation, that it’s an issue of social justice—really, our humanity, from the most simple pleasures of eating something fresh or being able to cook a meal all the way to corporate sway holding our lives and livelihoods in the balance, I won’t say more beyond these issues are one that we should be talking about, involved in—and making sure our kids are also “getting.”
I’ve written this for Blog Action Day. You can learn more with a few clicks. Maybe you can talk up these issues over the coming days, or cook instead of zipping to TJ’s one evening or whatever like that—or not. A day like this is only to bring more awareness. Action follows, in all kinds of ways.
