I take my responsibility as a writer very seriously.  If I deign to give advice, I do so with caution and qualification.  As may be obvious, one person's tip is another's tribulation.  If I give my opinion, it will be clearly interwoven with personal stories, humor (one strives) and self-reflexive bias. 

On the other hand, when I write to simply stir the impulse to discuss, I do so with a detachment that, I hope, is met with openness rather than as an invitation to intellectual combat. I undertake this entry delicately, understanding that, due to the subject, not every reader will recognize that the call to consider my proposal is a gentle offer and not an aggressive challenge.

The most arduous experience of parenting for me has been weathering the unrelenting stream of shots fired by the seemingly tireless dilemma cannon. With every metaphorical cannonball coming at me at hurtling speed, there is a choice to be made between at least two courses of action...or inaction.  Do I go with the flow and allow the outcome of this moment to be organic? 

Do I seize this opportunity to shape the result by my intervention?  Remind my child to go to the bathroom before we leave the house  and I risk over-managing his bladder and his body to the detriment of his self-awareness.  Let him decide and I have - besides a mounting laundry issue - a possible boundary problem on my hands. Either direction could ultimately entrench lasting bad habits, senseless paranoia or... an independent well-adjusted, imaginative child. 

Whew! It could really go either way and there is no way to know in advance. Nowhere do I feel the terra incognita of child-rearing more than in the arena of food.  I spent what amounted to years (in stress and anxiety currency as well as time) making carefully selected, varied, organic baby food to load up the nutrients and coax his taste-buds in the right direction.  Yet despite this and being breastfed well into toddlerhood, never having had any formula or dairy outside his species, my son (now three) will not ingest green food and inhales chocolate milk daily.  So much for best laid plans. 

When Vancouver couple Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon began their experiment - to eat only foods grown and produced within 100 miles of their home - they reported dubiety. This doubt was reflected in the first chapter of their book, The 100 Mile Diet (now among the locavore's principal reference manuals) when Smith asks MacKinnon, "Is this even possible?"¹.

Is it even possible, indeed. Is it even worth it? What is the true value of eating locally? Why do we so instantly accept the bumper sticker worthy message. Is it about taste, social justice, or ecology?

James McWilliams articulates beautifully in Just Food that we are homesick for a time when our food supply was pure, unmitigated and pastoral. He also believes that this epoch never existed but in our nostalgic reminiscence. 'For 10,000 years humans have systematically manipulated nature to our advantage by making plants and animals do our bidding'², he says. It would be impossible then, to return to this simple time just by undoing what agribusiness has done to our food production, proffers McWilliams, as this era never really was.

Without this template of the past upon which to navigate our food future, we are left with a mission that is decidedly contemporary. As such, it should be pursued with the objective of resolving contemporary issues. Eating locally: Is the true benefit to the individual living in the world now; to the current global community; or to the planet earth of today ...or to none of the above?

As a Chef and human, my relationship with food is complex and varied.  In one instance, food is my instrument.  As a kind of artist, food feeds my professional and inspirational needs and as such must remain a little elusive, revealing itself part by part and always a bit discoverable.  As a human, I receive food best when it is fully understood as an ingredient, as fuel or as nourishment.  Lately, I have been feeling a sense of moderation and acceptance that seems, fortunately, to extend to all branches of  life - including of course to food.

So, after weeks of feeling this equanimity of appetite and having relegated 'Muse Food’ to its rightful place and 'Purposeful Food’ to its role, I was recently surprised. I returned home from a disconcerting experience feeling ravenous.  It wasn’t until after a few forkfuls that I realized I was eating, not because of any real hunger, but because I was upset.  With the absence of anyone to talk to about my sudden destabilization, I had turned to food.

Food Should Be Good, Clean, and Fair...

I was young, exceedingly light on Euros and on my first trip to Italy.   Despite my financial challenges, I had friends in high places.  When you’re traveling  'low end’ that  means  friends who are locals.   In that regard,  I was abundant.  As the boat sped around the bay of Camoglie, I considered my good fortune.  Here I was on a de-facto culinary journey lead by my Italian friends and  peppered with the substructure of a movement that a few years later,  would  explode internationally.

Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food Movement believes, "…everyone has the right to good, clean and fair food". ¹ Its mission of educating and providing foundation for universal access to good, clean and fair food has been the movement’s banner since its original incarnation in the late 1980s as a committee (under a different name) protesting the opening of McDonald’s near the Spanish Steps.  Since then, the organization has grown into a 100,000 member movement with chapters (convivia) in over 150 countries.²

Good food refers to high quality, delicious food.  Clean food refers to the way it is produced and transported and fair, to the pricing and treatment  from both the consumers’ and the producers’ point of view.  At the time of my trip, it had yet to be imagined: uniting the pleasure of food with commitments to sustainability and community. 

Anyone behind me in line at the supermarket check-out would think me uncharitable.  The cashier asks,'Would you like to donate a meal to the X house for the poor?’  Naturally, it is deliberate that her script obliges that any answer other than an enthusiastic 'Oh, yes please! I would love nothing more!’ renders you instantly a heartless shell of a human.  The supermarket’s bet is that 9 out of 10 people will look sheepishly around them and, if anyone is witnessing their insensitive answers, will succumb to the cashier’s captivating plea.....

At the check-out, as our transaction comes to a close the cashier points behind her at a collage of photos of some of the store’s products displayed neatly to show each one’s label.  She asks as she has on every previous visit, 'Would you like to donate a meal to that poor people place?’  The photos present the shopper with a few options for so-called meals to donate to aforementioned 'poor people’. For $15, the economically (and soon to be nutritionally) disadvantaged can receive the following: hamburger helper with some hamburger (to be helped) and several macaroni and cheese 'kits’ with some semblance of preserved cured meat-like accompaniment.  This basket also includes a vat of diet juice.  $30.00 gets some lucky recipient the deluxe package of instant mashed potatoes, a large jar of Italian-style sauce, a misleadingly plump, white CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation) chicken, canned mandarin slices and instant whipped topping mix. Hmm.

A Philosophical Reflection on "Healthy Eating"

Two tenets of being human are: avoid pain and seek pleasure. It is my observation that, as North Americans, we have twisted these into: ignore pain and seek diversion. We think ourselves triumphant, gliding past all that is unwanted, happily floating towards joy. What we really do is seek out prescriptions, formulas and other ready made distractions from what really stirs us and pat solutions to give us the illusion of control, of recovery, of healing.

Our approach to food and eating isn't really all that different. We adjust, of course, to a starting point in our analysis, that excludes regular consumers of cheese puffs, diet soda and Vicodin. Many of us who even have a sense of food as medicine have reduced the experience of eating to a formulaic one designed with the singular objective of optimum physical health. It should be said that all that follows pre-supposes that food choices are made for alleged health reasons and not for faith, allergy/sensitivity or preference reasons (no amount of beneficial digestive enzymes will convince me to have even one leaf of raw cilantro- blech!).

Just like pharmacy junkies, we want to avoid the pain of disease, yes. And it is true that our mission is more noble because we respect food over gel capsules. But that pesky imposter, diversion, still lurks masquerading as true pleasure. Even those of us who do not medicate ourselves into a state of illusion (ignore pain) have been duped with the new code of the wellness conscious: healthy eating. There are as many prescriptions for this as there are Morgan Freeman voice-overs. Vegan... paleo... raw... eating for your blood type. All are equations that categorically exclude some foods and demand others be eaten in specific combinations or at specific times. Is any of this truly healthy? Do these formulas not sound more like compulsions? I point out that O.C.D. is, according to most clinical definitions, characterized by excessive fixation with certain behaviours, habits or routines.¹

So what appears to be 'healthy eating' is healthy - ostensibly - only for our bodies. What about our emotional, social and cultural health? In her book, The Self-Compassion Diet,² Jean Fain discusses the first of the three. She maintains that nurturing an attitude of self-care as opposed to deprivation or militant food formulas is what will lead to true emotional health and even, only as a coincidental by-product, to an end to donut worship

With our compulsion to buy the specific products called for in many of these 'healthy eating formulas' many of which have specific origins or are grown in specific conditions, we have lost one of the most nourishing parts of the process of enjoying food - procuring it. We are still on this side of the precipice to be sure. However, online grocery sales are expected to have doubled (since 2001) by 2013.³ The apparent convenience of these packaged, plate- ready 'healthy' foods eclipses those other socially therapeutic processes of preparing and sharing food encouraging single people, for example, to seek out the online options rather than a community kitchen, an evening out or friends with whom to break (gluten-free!) bread.

I remember a discussion with a fellow Chef unfamiliar with Mediterranean (specifically Greek) cuisine. He insisted that we use fresh oregano in a recipe because 'fresh is best'. Well, yes on the surface fresh is preferable. But I wasn't advocating the use of onion powder or (food blasphemy alert) minced, jarred garlic(!) but rather an ingredient used for centuries, prolifically in this cuisine to the complete exclusion of its fresh counterpart. This kind of rote insistence on formulas is what loses the match for us and the last pillar of a truly healthy food experience that acknowledges the cultural power of food.

In his engagingly written book, In Defense of Food,⁴ Michael Pollan writes, '..don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food'. I would humbly add : 'if your great-grandmother ate it, maybe she was on to something - don't mess with it!' He goes on to prescribe perhaps the most blinding flash of the obvious in recent food theory with his credo 'Eat food, not too much, mostly plants'. With the greatest respect, I suggest an amendment: 'Eat food you love, not too much of it by yourself, mostly plants you get from the market, not the mailbox'.

1. http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/obsessive-compulsive-disorder/DS00189
2. Fain, J.; The Self-Compassion Diet; Sounds True Inc., Boulder, CO; 2011 3.
3. http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Nielsen-OnlineGroceryReport_909.pdf
4. Pollan, M.; In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto; Penguin Press; NY; 2008

Is sustainable food an all or nothing construct like truth or pregnancy?  If we do not, as consumers, buy 100% organic, 100% sustainably sourced food 100% of the time are we doomed to a fate of ill health and - worse - relegated to the periphery of our communities and blamed for the demise of the earth?

I have always believed that - assuming we are talking about organic actual food versus conventional actual food and not aluminumized 'American cheese’ or weird sweeteners our bodies don’t know what to do with and, as a result tuck neatly away in our livers (the attic of the body) - that the dosage makes the poison.  That is to say, buy organic, locally, ethically produced food whenever you can. 

Whether one can or cannot is a matter of various factors.  Commonly, it comes down to either availability or cost.  Supporting all-organic retailers may still be the domain of the ecologically, economically elite few.  But the grand tipping point is on the horizon.  We have already seen micro moves in preparation for the seismic shift. I’ll provide an ironic example: sugar.  In 2000 the price per pound for conventionally produced sugar was 50 cents.  Conversely, organic sugar sold for $2.00 per pound.  A mere 4 years later, the margin narrowed from the 200% seen at the turn of the century to 45%*. Understandably (for big agri-business) there is a reluctance to disclose the numbers from more recent years but the trend is clear.  Some of the difference can be attributed to a rise in the production cost of conventional sugar in the wake of practices exposed beautifully in movies like "The Price of Sugar"** reminding us, of course, that even the factor of cost is complicated.

All this said, as a health conscious foodie and mother, I cannot be described as a moderate. I am passionate and determined to see and be part of the seismic shift. As a health conscious foodie and mother, I probably didn’t contribute a whole lot to the shrinking price gap between conventional and organic sugar.  But I probably did contribute to the virtual doubling of the revenue generated from national sales of organic food between 1997 and 2000***.

How did that 100% increase occur in just three years?  The answer is that we did it.

As middle class consumers, we often underestimate the potency of our dollar votes.

In 2009, Gary Hirshberg, Founder and former CEO of Stoneyfield Organic Yogurt was lambasted for his lauding of and commercial partnership with Walmart.  Yes, Walmart has generated controversy over its alleged sweat shop like processes in their production of garments.  So don’t buy the clothes.  But if the price is right and buying organic yogurt or rice or apples at Walmart can move some of us out of the cannot category into the can category, why not make that choice?  Walmart put those items on their shelves because Walmart knew there was enough demand to make it worth Walmart’s while.  It’s OK: Walmart’s motivation does not have to be pure.  As long as ours is.

How else can we get closer to that elusive 100% organic, sustainable and always?  The obvious prescriptions have been written before: support farmers markets, be guided by the Environmental Working Group**** lists and those like them.  Other methods are more abstract but perhaps can lead us more fervently to the tipping point:  Don’t just join but also cooperate in your local co-op; Don’t just listen to but also generate discussion;  Don’t just read blogs - also write them!  Remain conscious and conscientious at the grocery store, farmer’s market and online.  Whether your shopping cart is real, virtual or metaphorical, vote for every item in it.  And don’t worry just yet if every item isn’t 100% organic .  But know that every conscious, impassioned, knowledgeable vote brings us closer to the shift which, for the first time in over fifteen years in within our reach.

* Buzzanell, P. ʻHot Issues for Sugar, 2000; Peeplo.com

** ʻThe Price of Sugarʼ; Haney, Bill (Director) DOCUMENTARY; Uncommon
Productions; 2007

*** IBID 2.

****“Dirty Dozen and the Clean Fifteen”; Environmental Working Group; ewg.org