Foodie Memory: This is What Sara Said

I grew up spending most of my time outside. Creek swimming, family hikes, fort building, camping- “Go outside” was the answer to any suggestion of boredom. To go with my generally outdoorsy upbringing, my family engrained an environmental ethic and awareness into both me and my brother which has stayed with both of us for our entire lives. Discussions of energy use, climate change, pollution, preservation, development, and sustainability were common. My parents did, and do, believe these issues were and are important, and it was not unusual for conversations to drift to these subjects over dinner. 

But over what dinner? While my mom always meant well, supplementing veggies from the garden or farm stand with items from the one lone little grocery store in my town, environmental concern never really drifted from the conversation down to the dinner plate. As we kids got bigger, schedules got busier, and more and more cheap and processed food made a presence in our house. Grab it! Go! It didn’t take long before the family with such strong environmental values was eating in a way that regularly undermined their own beliefs. I went away to college with the eating habits I had developed. While I’d eat fruits and vegetables, I didn’t really think about if they were organic and more often than not I subscribed to the collegiate concept of dinner: If it comes from a packet and can be boiled and sauced- it’s dinner. Cheap meat on the Foreman Grill? Dish up.

Once away at school, I took environmental class after environmental class- and more and more I was faced with the conflict between the conventional food system and my values. Food miles, the treatment of animals, water pollution, energy use, endocrine disruption and the bioaccumulation of chemicals and antibiotics, the more I learned about the conventional food system, the more uncomfortable with my eating habits I became, but little change was made. Graduate school led to even more conversations about food and ethics and sustainable development. Although I had been exposed to a great deal of information about the industrialized food system and importance of alternative models while in college, it wasn’t until I was working through Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation for Environmental Ethics that I came face to face with the hypocrisy of my eating and consumption habits. I could no longer make excuses for my consumption habits clashing directly with my environmental values. I promptly dropped meat entirely and began the transition to a primarily organic diet.

The shift to a more ethical and sustainable diet has been a relatively easy one. Having access to organic produce and on rare occasions, ethically and humanely raised meat, through LFFC has been wonderful and allows me to better reconcile my environmental values with my diet. It’s not necessarily practical for many of us to completely eliminate our impact on the environment, but changing your food, making the simple choice to pick food produced in a way that does no harm to the workers, land, water, and animals that create it, that’s an easy choice and simple change and one I’m glad I’ve made.
Thank you, Google Images and CSA Files for included pictures.