Went to the grocery store today to get Vegged up for the first day of summer. Recipe is easy: chopped tomatos, beef broth, peppers, onions, garlic, bay leaves, oregano, tomato juice, and lemon juice. Let it chill, eat in the heat.
So we hit the store and were struck by what Linda (wife and muse) and I thought was a retail landscape out of Cuba. Past the blast of fly-blowers over the front door of our local foodmart, we were stunned at the fresh vegetable section. We weren't getting our greedy American landscape of abundant displays of misted vegetables.
Eggplant, for another recipe...gone. Cabbage, gone. Trusty, iceburg lettuce -- a leaf or two. The corn? Looked like horse feed.
Relieved to see tomatos we grabbed the Vine Ripened wonders but noted that the big units carried a price tag AND a barcode. The price: $3.50 for one freakin' tomato. It's a big one with multiple bumps and colors and pretty hefty, but it's a humble tomato after all.
And that's when it hit us. The behavior-avoidance dance we all do in our heads about the gas crisis, inflation, the global food shortage, disasters in the west and midwest, the economic Katrina in Michigan and Florida, the stock market, the value of the dollar, Iran, Afghanistan, and the opiate-induced hope that our parental government will take care of all of this mess once we get a new guy in the White House...well it all comes down to the vegetable aisle, doesn't it?
What is interesting is how we are caught in a whirlpool of spin from an outgoing administration that treats this issue as if beyond their grasp. We haven't heard from the executive office and they get free airtime.
Well, the Republican and Democratic candidates aren't any better. They can't make it past the playbook of taxes, war, ox-is-in-the-ditch metaphorization, blah-blah-blah.
So I asked Ray the foodmart stocker. Ray always tells the truth. He doesn't look at the foodmart playbook when it comes to company information. He is a real dealer. Here's his read: "...shipping costs more, shippers are behind, produce is not coming in, the producers are taking subsidies to bury crops, and some lady from the organicmart bought all of our eggplant to make our display look more miserable than it really is."
People: a tomato costs almost as much as a gallon of petrol. WTF?
What to do about it...in our early war days of the U.S., we were encouraged as a nation to grow a Victory Garden because of food and fuel rationing. Sound familiar? These gardens produced upwards to 40% of the vegetables consumed by our nation at that time....and they didn't even have the food pyramid! So, grow your own. Want to do it? Here are a few great links:
http://wholeearth.com/index.php
http://www.revivevictorygarden.org/
http://www.heirloomseeds.com/victory.html
On another note: you should check out the Anderson Cooper playback on his 60-minute piece from this Sunday about a new product called Plumpynut. Its blessing is its simplicity: peanut butter and vitamins. And when given to a malnurished child during the golden-window when they can stomach whole food, they stand a chance getting into the world alive.
What's cool about it is that the intent is not to create the silver bullet. It is just one silver bullet. All the folks at Doctors without Borders (and others) want to do is handle it one village at a time.
We have over 852 million people starving on our planet (13% of global population). Time to crank up the production of this stuff. Sounds good. I am donating, for sure.
Check out the sites if you are interested. Please, no response rants on the mind-numbing issues that surround starvation. Be cool.
http://www.plumpynutinthefield.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wikiPlumpy
http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/
Time for a second cup, chat with you later....
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