Stumbling

I know my entries have been pretty sketchy lately, and I apologize. I just haven't been able to look at anything that's going on in my life and think, "That's blog-worthy." Today I found myself eavesdropping on my co-workers as they discussed the hideous new paint in the ladies' room, hoping somebody would say something screamingly funny about how flattering Smurf blue is, but the most eloquent response I encountered was a silent shudder. It has truly been a slow month.

I did, however, finally finish a book I've been working my way through for a couple of weeks. I don't know what took me so long; I really enjoyed Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and feel it contains some exciting, thought-provoking ideas. Barbara Kingsolver, best known for her fiction writing, and her family made the decision a few years ago to try only to eat local foods for one solid year. They planted a large vegetable garden in their southern Appalachia yard and shopped for produce they didn't grow themselves at farmers' markets. They raised their own chickens and turkeys for meat and eggs, and they purchased other meats from neighboring livestock farmers. They canned and dried and froze what they couldn't consume immediately, and for a year they lived off the bounty of both their own land and farms in the vicinity. When the year was up, when their "deadline" (imaginary, of course) had passed and they could go back to eating bananas and store-bought bread and other non-local treats, they found that they didn't want to. They liked knowing the provenance of their dinners. They enjoyed supporting their local economy. Growing and preserving food was comforting to them. So, several years later, they're still eating the same way.

Undertaking such a task seems daunting to me. I suppose that says much more about me than the actual difficulty of committing to local foods: I mean, come on, I live in Southern California, where practically every kind of food is growing within a 100-mile radius! I could be at the South Pasadena farmers' market right now instead of blogging. I could be smelling fresh apples and tossing just-picked leeks into my oh-so-conscientious canvas shopping bags this very minute. Instead, I'm sitting in front of the computer with a mug of hot coffee (organic, sure, but fair trade? Uh, have to get back to you on that...) and a graham cracker topped with peanut butter and strawberry jam -- at least I made the jam. Later on I'm hoping to find the time to watch my latest NetFlix acquisition, The Future of Food, described as an "eye-opening documentary, which sheds light on a shadowy relationship between agriculture, big business and government."

Schizo, isn't it, this break between what I do and what I want to do. I'm consistently inconsistent about my food choices: one day I'm making a salad with spinach and lettuces from my backyard garden, and the next I'm eating tortilla chips with salsa made in New York City. Because I love food so -- love to eat it, talk about it, write about it, think about it -- food seems like my natural entrance to the notion of reducing my ecological footprint. At the end of a long day, though, sometimes it is easier to make the, well, the easy choice rather than the right choice. Kingsolver addresses inconsistencies like this (and the resulting guilt) near the end of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle:

I share with almost every adult I know this crazy quilt of optimism and worries, feeling locked into certain habits but keen to change them in the right direction. And the tendency to feel like a jerk for falling short of absolute conversion. I'm not sure why. If a friend had a coronary scare and finally started exercising three days a week, who would hound him about the other four days? It's the worst sort of bad manners -- and self-protection, I think, in a nervously cynical society -- to ridicule the small gesture.... Small, stepwise changes in personal habits aren't trivial. Ultimately they will, or won't, add up to having been the thing that mattered.

I've just started reading another new book, Plenty, that I was worried might be a little too holier-than-thou about the subject of eating locally. After all, the authors, Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, created the 100-Mile Diet. (Plus I am irritated by the word raucous in their title. I'm not sure why, but it really bugs me.) But right there in Chapter One, MacKinnon talks about the pitfalls of trying to walk the walk in a passage I think is a good companion to Kingsolver's:

Can I admit, then, that a part of me silently questioned my own idea for a year of eating locally? That the essential pointlessness of such a gesture is not lost on me? I am acutely aware that efforts like the 100-mile diet are readily dismissed as "the new earnestness,"
which is currently enjoying a very temporary cool, and I am not deluded enough to feel that I'm making a difference or being the change I want to see in the world. Both of these contemporary platitudes contain kernels of truth, but both are also overwhelmed by stark realities. I have traveled these ethical pathways in one way or another for twenty years now, choosing to ride a bicycle in homicidal traffic, to reuse my tinfoil and plastic bags as though I lived in the Depression, to shop little and buy less. It doesn't make me feel "good." It makes me feel like an alien. As I pedal through another midwinter rainfall, virtually every indicator of global ecological health continues to worsen, from biodiversity to energy consumption, and my being has done little to change the world. My actions are abstract and absurd, and they are neither saving the rain forests nor feeding the world's hungry.

Kingsolver's and MacKinnon's words reassure me that I'm not alone either in sometimes feeling I'm wasting my time in doing the "right" thing or worrying that I'm a half-dozen steps behind where I should be and that I need to catch up right now. I feel my life being pulled slowly but inexorably to the left, towards the green, in the direction of remembering who I wanted to be. What I want to be, I guess, is a good person. I think I'm good to the people who inhabit my world. More and more, though, I find myself taking baby steps towards being good to the world itself. "The new earnestness"? Yeah, probably. But despite my stumbles, it doesn't mean I'm going to stop.