This is indeed the inside of our freezer. Pretty unspectacular. Except, wait! What’s with that ice cube tray?
I bought ten garlic scapes for $2 at the Copley Square Farmer’s Market last Friday, plus Sarah from Kristi’s office gave her two surplus scapes. So 12 garlic scapes equals twelve cubes of garlic scape pesto (parmesan, walnuts, oil, salt, pepper). I took them out of the tray a few hours later and dumped them into some tupperware. The idea is that later, in the winter, we can grab a cube or two and make a quick pasta sauce or somesuch.
[Insert your own segue here]
Pete Wells, the editor of the New York Times’s Dining section, wrote this last week. It’s about how he can no longer sustain buying expensive, local, organic food from the farmer’s market. $14 gallons of milk, $50 pork roasts and the straw-that-broke-the-camels-back $35 chicken. He said he was unable to continue spending $100 a visit on this food when it would last only three days. I’m not sure what to say. I remember, growing up, my parents (who, needless to say, did not make anywhere near the salary of a New York Times editor, combined) talking about the insane cost of feeding us. They tossed around numbers like $1,000 per month. $100 every three days? That’s roughly $1,000 per month. Put it that way, and it sounds kind of…average.
I have no real idea what we spend currently to feed us both. I think it’s somewhere around $500 per month, much of it of the $35 chicken variety, and I’ll tell you right now that I make less than Pete Wells. Even after the depreciation of his mutual funds (that’s Kristi laughing in the background.)
I would prefer the New York Times and Pete not publish stories like this knowing what he knows about the other kind of food — the kind that’s affordable for an average family like Pete’s but that leaves in its wake a trail of misery and disease. In the interest of being constructive and not just snarky, I think the real question is, What’s going to happen with the cost of sustainable food? Will it continue to rise and forever stay out of reach for the truly less-than-privileged families? Will the end of agribusiness subsidies ever happen, and if they do, will that change the cost of industrial food? In other words, one day, will the cost of all food reflect the true cost of its production? What then? Will the day come when we all spend the bulk of our earnings feeding ourselves, and not just the fraction we spend now (Americans spend the smallest percent of their income on food of nearly every culture and people on the planet and in history).
Perhaps even the most sustainably-minded of us don’t want to part with the luxuries (aside from great food) that make life so pleasant sometimes. They’ll pry my hot showers from my cold, dead hands, for example.
I was irritated by that article too. What got me most was how he complained about the texture of the 4 pound roasting chicken. He was surprised that a free-range chicken, that’s lived 8 months to grow naturally to 4 pounds (as opposed to being pumped with hormones and unnatural feed to grow that size in 6 weeks) was tough. Honestly, he must not know very much about free range meat. Perhaps, if he cooked his food properly, it would taste better and last longer.
I agree, it really does a disservice to the localvore movement. A better angle would have been to show consumers how they can stretch their food dollars AND eat local.
I think you guys would appreciate this article with a much different conclusion…
http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2009/04/25/pinched_ethically/index.html
-Missy