B: The revolution will not be ambidexterous!

I have been reading The Omnivore's Dilemma over the past few weeks. It is really good, but really discouraging at the same time. Mandy and I have been into organic and slow and all that for a while now, but not super hard core. We buy what we want, when we want it, and try to make responsible decisions along the way. The problem with this book is that it really makes you think about where your food is coming from and suggests that responsible people should choose their food sources rather than allowing others to do it for them. Those decisions you thought you were making about organic aren't as easy as you thought. It is all a big commercial machine that has been packaged and hidden away to prevent our noticing how industrial our food system is.


It is really pretty crazy when you think about it. Your Grandparents and to a lesser extent even your parents lived in a world where food and cuisine were native and seasonal. They ate fresh tomato dishes in late summer because tomatos were were ripe and that was what everybody else you knew was eating. There were no fresh tomatos in February! Maybe sun dried or canned, but never fresh! They had a limited selection of foods in any given season and knew precisely what to make with those foods because that was the regional cuisine. To me that is amazing!

I have no regional cuisine, and no knowledge of the seasonality of local foods. I don't really know what is ripe and when in the Puget Sound region, and even if I learn that, I still wouldn't know what to make. Through convenience we have allowed our native cuisines die and very few people seem to have noticed.

Anyways, I strongly reccomend this book if you are interested in food. If you are happy eating vending machine food, then I might skip it because you just won't care. The book led me to look more into local foods so I am going to start posting things about that here on occasion.

Here is the link to Slow Foods Seattle Chapter. And here is a link to find local farms near you.