On a mission

I told you I was going crazy.

This new blog is the next step in a long, hopefully life-long, journey to a more wholesome me. When I say "wholesome" it brings to mind images of Normal Rockwell paintings, my mom's rhubarb pie, hot afternoons on my dad's old horse farm, or picturesque fields in which grow a bounty of nature's produce - kissed with dew and framed by misty mountains, a rustic fence, and a windmill, such as you'd see on a package of pre-washed lettuce or a carton of 79 cent eggs.

I want to emphasize the root word here, whole.

As in, "whole food."

Not "Whole Foods." There is a much larger difference between the above and a box of locally, ethically produced and distributed bag of lettuce or carton of eggs than the price points of Jewel and the popular organics juggernaut. The people who know and reject what goes into producing a dozen eggs that retail for less than a dollar don't realize that much hasn't changed with the $4.59 option.

This is not a reaction against that fine establishment - I hardly shop there - but halfway through Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma I had decided enough was enough. I'd decided that, knowing all that I know since first reading Fast Food Nation in 2001, to continue partaking in a system that I know is wrong is to be nothing less than a sociopath.

This year I will attempt to live on locally produced food as much as possible, here in the great city of Chicago, and document it here in this space. I know this will be harder than it seems. For I live in a large American city where convenience is everything, and none of my neighbors are farmers. How can I do this practically, within my existing budget, staying carless and true to my 20 minute neighborhood ideal?

I had long ago banished the frozen meals, the packaged pasta dishes, canned soup, or low-fat this and low-salt that. In doing so I shed over 70 pounds and ushered in what has so far been the golden age of my life. That was the easy part. Most of it is nothing but corn anyways. The end product from the tap of a torrent of government-subsidized, genetically modified corn. Never trust a corporation to feed you.

However, our beef, chicken, pork - and even our fish! -are forced to feed against their nature from the same river of cheap calories, forced into a life that not even under the most liberal of interpretations would be considered humane.

Cows are meant to eat grass. Feeding them corn causes them to get sick. So does keeping them packed together in conditions that are worse than a concentration camp. So does forcing them to wallow around in their own shit for the final weeks of their lives. Hormones and antibiotics are necessary in order to profitably raise them this way.

Chickens have it just as bad. Never allowed to so much as walk in most conventional operations and bred for their meat, their breasts grow so large they can't even stand up. Pigs - just as smart an animal as your pet dog - are treated the same, too. And fish - our prized salmon, carnivorous animals that get their pink flesh from their diet of ocean krill and shrimp - are now being bred to eat much cheaper corn in farming pens, while their pasty white meat is dyed their natural color in one of the supermarket's biggest lies.

But the worst of it is, with all that corn and those unnatural living conditions, you'd be better off eating cardboard. Mr. Pollan is able to explain this much better than I can in his seminal essay, "Unhappy Meals" but, in summary, the nutritional result of all this engineering to grow our food for greater and greater profits is not at all to our own benefit.

So in a moment of clarity, I found the inspiration to begin the project that will be documented in this blog. His words are so often quoted, hollow and empty most of the time, but in that instant they intoned with absolute truth:

"Be the change that you want to see in the world."

What Mahatma Gandhi meant was that we have change ourselves, not the world.

So in addition to creating this blog in an attempt to influence each of you, I will back up my words with action.

As I said, I have already gone a couple years since last buying a prepackaged meal. I haven't bought supermarket meat in a few months as well, instead choosing to buy what little meat I do now eat at the Logan Square farmer's market from a producer called Black Earth Farms. Free range eggs have been occupying space in my fridge as well as organic yogurt and tofu.

While I was moved beyond words by the plight of the industrially produced cow or pig, I still reject the vegan's utopia. Domesticated animals do not exist by man's hand alone. Those animals - cows, pigs, chickens, dogs, horses, I could go on - found that their own survival was perpetuated by a symbiotic relationship with humans, and so, in effect, "chose" to become domesticated as much as we chose to base our society around them.

As Mr. Pollan so eloquently demonstrated with the Polyface Farm in Dilemma, ending up as a food source for humans is a pretty fair trade for being allowed to live your life as nature intended, grazing on dewy grass as a cow, scratching your back satisfyingly against the rough bark of a pine tree as a pig, or digging for grubs in dried up manure as a chicken.

This naturally produced food does cost more... or does it? We indeed pay more up front and in the open, rather than farther down the line for conventional food, and the hidden costs of its agricultural pollution, massive carbon footprint, and health ramifications associated with poor nutrition blown out on a national scale now approaching a national emergency.

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants," Pollan tells us in Unhappy Meals. Eat less of better food.

And so I will. For knowing what I now know, doing anything less would be unconscionable.

Coming up:

I'll detail my practical approach to this effort and set down a few rules and exceptions for myself.

I will review of two new co-op grocery stores, New Leaf Natural Grocery of Roger's Park and The Dill Pickle in Logan Square, along with the now-indoors for the winter Logan Square Farmer's Market, and detail my search for a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) membership.

Over the course of the coming months, the main focus of this blog will be on the practicality (or impracticality, is it may turn out) of living locally, seasonably, and sustainably, whatever that means.

And I aim to find out.