I’ve noticed this has been the theme, which maybe started the last week of December. Changes everywhere, with everyone. Changes.
I’ve been going thru a few of my own, including changes at my workplace. This is why I still haven’t put up my awesome shrimp salad recipe, and the Alice B. Tolkas fruitcake recipe. Forgive me, dear food-blog reader.
Well, my old boss, my newly old boss, he was ranter all right, and I will post his final email at the end. He was a ranter that I could respect, even when he verged on being a madman. He was smart, and he walks his talk. This always impressed me. And he made concessions all the time, even though it totally didn’t seem that way. For example, it seemed stubborn that he wouldn’t sell fruit or vegetables out of season, nor would he have them flown by plane, and this turned many away… yet attracted customers who appreciated his dedication to slow food. Now, we understand that we don’t sell everything a customer may want, and that there are fine products out there that can only be found other places. But it was always a hard pill to swallow when people came in with bags from Whole Foods carrying products that we do sell. Or people with meat purchased from other meat purveyors, who’d come in to buy our bread, because the place where they just bought meat from had ran out of baguettes. I heart-breakingly watched him have internal heart break that he would never show.
Well, here’s his last post, in all its un-edited glory. Meaning, I think he spell-checked it, but as a former copy-editor, I can’t help but notice the grammar mistakes. I make ‘em too, so whatever.
“To our loyal customers, friends and community,
I sold Lionette’s Market. After this weekend, Lionette’s Market will be Don Otto’s Organic and Natural Market. All the staff (except me) will remain. The Otto family will keep the store dedicated to local and sustainable food. They will bring in fresh energy and new ideas but retain all the standards Lionette’s Market set. Please come in and meet the Otto’s and continue all your support. Don Otto’s, like Lionette’s, will still be Boston’s best and only destination for local 100% grass fed beef, and local farm raised meats, as well as an outlet for nearly 200 local farms and producers. I personally thank all of you for all the support and friendships over the 14 years I have been working in the South End in Garden of Eden and Lionette’s Market.
www.donottosmarket.com <http://www.donottosmarket.com/>
Other things of note:
Annie Leonard, who did the story of stuff www.storyofstuff.org <http://www.storyofstuff.org/> now has an even better piece called the story of cap and trade. She released it just before the meetings in Copenhagen. You absolutely must see this piece (and if you have not seen story of stuff, watch that too, watch it with your kids.)
www.storyofcapandtrade.org <http://www.storyofcapandtrade.org/>
Last Diatribe.
In case you missed it, there was a meeting in Copenhagen last month. It was a failure. Despite what people (like the president) may say. Nothing happened. The cynics like me were correct, government leaders and corporate elites cannot come up with a plan to combat climate change the destruction of our planet. They are a combination of incompetence and malevolence. People said it was a success because all the leaders of the world came together and all admit we have a problem with climate change. Success? They have known it was a problem for a long time, which is why they met in Kyoto in the late nineties. Nothing happened there, it was a failure, let’s not try to sugar coat it and make ourselves feel good. It is, and always has been, up to normal people like you, me and several billion other people.
There is a line that plenty of business and political leaders keep spewing. We cannot sacrifice our economy to appease the demands of climate change. The world is not flat, and leaders who say this should be publicly hung by their toes. What could be more dangerous (other than still denying climate change is a result of our over indulgent society)? Our economy must adapt to the realities of climate change, we cannot expect the climate to change to suit our economy. We are not negotiating with another ideology; the climate and our planet have no recognition of our economic system. The planet and climate do not negotiate; we must bend to the will of the planet. If our economic system cannot adapt to a new world (one which we can live in some kind of harmony with our planet and its climate) than screw it, that system is a failure. Get rid of it. The other option is that the planet and climate get rid of us, and thus gets rid of our abstract creation called economy.
It is that simple. There is no argument that economics can trump a sustainable and livable planet. Anyone who tells you otherwise is suicidal, incompetent, ignorant, or at best malevolent. And remember who advocates for the economy first the planet second? A tiny minority of people who benefit most from an unsustainable and fossil fuel driven society. The biggest polluters in the planet are the biggest supports of a status quo economy and are the biggest detractors from a sustainable planet and society. That is because there is no place for this tiny minority in a sustainable world.
The local and sustainable food movement and the movement with regards to climate change and our overall devastation of our planet go hand and hand.
On both fronts we in the USA absolutely must give up our sense of entitlement. We must realize we live in a fantasy land. Americans are really out of touch. The morning after the earthquake in Haiti, Al Roker (that weatherman from one of the good morning TV shows) gave the weather report for Haiti, clear skies and temperature in the upper eighties. He said the good news is there will be no rain, but the bad news is that it will be hot, and without electricity no one will be able to use the air conditioners. That is how out of touch mainstream America is with the rest of the world. We have this assumption that everyone has the same ‘stuff’ that we do. It is exactly this stuff that we have an excess of, that most of the world has none of, which is burning up our planet. This stuff is dangerous, and we are the only ones who have it all, and we fight to keep it all. It is so easy to shed our extravagance and not die. Most of the planet (especially in hot climates) do not have stuff like air conditioners and are surviving. We can too. We have become so entitled that we forget what a necessity is and what a luxury is.
Now Food.
People always say that food at Lionette’s Market or at Farmer’s Markets is expensive. There is an argument that most people in the USA cannot afford to eat local and sustainable food. You might say you cannot afford to eat local and sustainable food. If you have a cell phone, cable TV, a car, lots of fashionable clothes, lots of machines in your house, if you buy alcohol or drugs, if you go out to eat (that includes breakfast and lunch) then you have enough money to eat local and sustainable food. As much as you try to justify it, those things are all luxuries, only food is a necessity. And if other people are cooking your food for you, that is a luxury, and it costs more. If you boss makes you pay for you cell phone for work, or if the boss brings the job outside of the city and public transportation to save money, then you should be compensated for it. Whatever the justification, you are lying to yourself that you luxuries area necessity, and that food, one of the basic means of subsistence is a luxury that can be cut.
And then there are those people who work and truly have no luxuries and still do not get paid enough to eat real food (food that is not dangerous to body or planet). In both cases it is a failure of our economic system. If our system cannot adapt to promote a sustainable society than screw it, it is no good.
We have to realize that light bulbs, recycling and wholefoods are not the solution. They are mirages. They are sales pitches to get you to buy into something, to make you believe that you can maintain your current state of indulgence and not ruin the planet. It is as asinine as the claims by Exxonmobil that they are educating Africa and leading the way for a green future. Marketing and soothsaying, nothing more.
Our food is painfully cheap in this country. The rest of the planet pays on average 33% of their income on food, in the USA we pay on average around 17%. We also have the worst food in the planet. We are the first society in the history of civilization to make food dangerous. Where is the rest of our money going? It goes to junk to fill up our homes and on mortgage/rent. We are buying more luxuries and too often getting screwed on our property/rent. The former we can control directly, the latter will take some organizing and work. Regardless, dump your luxuries and focus on the necessities of life.
I could go on for pages (and have) about specific examples of how dangerous our food supply has become, but I’ll try to be brief. In the past year we saw two people die in New Hampshire from bad beef (half million pound recall of ground beef from a source which sold to Trader Joe’s, Price Chopper, and several other chain supermarkets), salmonella in Peanuts, Pistachios, and sprouts. A nearby town lost its tap water because of e-coli contamination! Reports of diabetes, heart disease, and obesity rates that is not alarming, but downright horrifying. Kids seem to have it worse than adults (because now cheap dangerous food is pretty much all that exists, at least when we were kids we had access to some safe food). Our society is only trying to be healthier, safer, and sustainable ONLY if someone is profiting off it. The truth is, the more we try to cheapen our food the more expensive it gets.
All over the airwaves, internet and media are articles, books, movies and reports of how dangerous our food supply is.
For the first time in human history, we have made food dangerous.
It is up to us to figure out this problem. Without trying to sound like some conspiracy freak, our government is in the hands of a few corporations that control most of our food supply. Watch food Inc to get some real connections. And as for our present president, remember he was a senator from a corn state and is president of a corn country. With a Monsanto boy-toy in Tom Vilsack as department of Agriculture I wonder what the president has in mind with food policy. Remember he supported the farm bill and energy bill as senator. They are two of the most unsustainable bills to come out of D.C. in the last five years.
Martha Stewart, Oprah, even the cover story of Time magazine (august 31, 2009) are screaming about “The real cost of Cheap Food.” But everyone is more concerned with this abstract and useless thing called an economy.
Lionette’s Market is one of the only places in Boston NOT to have any food recalled in the last two years. I do not know of ANY supermarket that can say the same. If I was not selling the store that would be our next marketing campaign.
Another marketing campaign would be something like “Only and A**hole shops at wholefoods.” As controversial as this sounds, that supermarket will be the death of us all. We must get rid of chain supermarkets; we must stop believing in marketing and start trusting our community. There is absolutely nothing community orientated about a chain supermarket. Walk into these sterile, lifeless warehouses of cheap food and you will be bombarded with propaganda and vile marketing. It’s like watching TV and hearing about fuel efficient SUV’s, and Chevron and ExxonMobil being green companies, or that car that is a perfect harmony of man, machine and the planet.
To believe that the wholefoods, purdues, trader jos, monsantsos, tysons, earthbounds and the rest are not aware of how dangerous their food is, is as naïve as to believe that tobacco companies are not aware of deadly and addictive cigarettes are. Instead of changing how we live the marketing these criminals bombard us with changes. But marketing is an illusion.
How can you trust people who transform sustenance into commodity? Just because they start spreading propaganda about how organic they are, the methods of monoculture farming are the same. Its cheap price tags and expensive hidden costs.
We can live in a society where local and decentralized food is eaten 12 months a year. We have only one or two generations of bad decisions to reverse. It is not as difficult as people think.
There are some bad habits we can easily reverse. The idea that we must eat nasty 10 day old raspberries from California or Mexico to survive the winter is one of them. The natural shelf life of a raspberry is 48 hours. How can you eat a ‘fresh’ one after ten days? Is it because the box at the supermarket promotes it as organic? There is no nutritional value in fruit that old and god only knows what was done to it to keep it ‘fresh’. Add to that the amount of energy used to hydro cool it, pack it, transport it by a refrigerated truck across country, hold it in a refrigerated warehouse, and finally then truck it (again) in a refrigerated truck to a supermarket. Is that sustainable? Even with the ‘sustainable fuel, green trucks, and green……… and other green marketing these criminals spew, it is still burning up our planet and not doing you any nutritional favors. We seem to think that when a company tells us they are using green this that or the other thing, it means no harm is being done to the planet or climate. Wrong. It means less (maybe less). But it is still contributing to our own downfall. The better solution is dump the whole system of an international food supply and switch to the tried and true system; a local and decentralized food supply. It worked for thousands of years of humanity. It is only the last fifty or sixty years that we tried this suicidal experiment of cheap food from hidden places around the planet.
Eat New England food if you are going to live here. If you don’t like the food here then move. No one is so special that we need to burn our planet and ruin our future so you can get exotic and out of season food.
Stop believing this rubbish that some of your organic food from around the world is from small farms in Idaho, Florida or Peru. It is not true. There are no farmers over there thinking to themselves, “shit I got to send this small crop of mine up to Boston, those people are really important.” There are factory farms who can slap a nice label on something mass-produced and ship around the planet for cheap money.
Your kid’s DNA is like the DNA of all other young humans. They are not special, they can eat food that grows locally twelve months a year and survive. Parents must start teaching their kids to respect what local food is, and learn to eat what the seasons offer, not that you can get what you want whenever you want it at the supermarket. And you adults, same goes for you. I hear more adults whine about rutabagas and cabbage then children. Not to sound cliché, but there are several billion impoverished people who not only do NOT have air conditioners, they also would be quite happy to eat rutabagas and cabbage through the winter months. So get over it, learn how to cook, and eat locally, eat food that is nutritious, and eat food that is regional. You might find that you feel better, are stronger, are more in touch with your community, are much healthier, and probably are part of something like a real local culture with you local food.
We have to stop expecting other people to subsidize our food for us. We are one of the richest countries in the world and we still expect other people to foot the bill on our food? People subsidize our food by sacrificing their land, community, their health, drinking water, and usually their children’s future. And all of us are asking our children to pay the difference on our food tab. As we go to the supermarkets and restaurants and but the cheap food, there is an open tab getting larger and larger for the next generation.
Eating can no longer be seen as an individual act. What you eat affects all of us, and affects the next generation (that means your kids). This is a new thing. But that is how dangerous our food supply has become. The risks of a dangerous food supply have made it so that I need to be concerned with what you eat and vice versa. Sorry, but our overly self-centered individuality is going to take a beating in a sustainable planet. But don’t worry, the rest of humanity has never been as individualistic as our country. It is quite normal to live within a community and not as a collection of self serving individuals.
At this point there is absolutely no reason that all your perishable foods (meat, dairy and produce) are not from New England twelve months a year. None. There is absolutely no sane reason why we should allow chain supermarkets and an international food supply to exist one day longer. None. The only justifications are those which benefit our current economic system (and really only a handful of people in this system) or benefit our insane decadent lifestyle.
We must pay the real prices for real food. Cheap food, like our decadent-climate-burning-lifestyles will be gone in our lifetime. How? Either because our planet is no longer suitable for humans to live on it, because of civil unrest, or because we decide to live a sustainable lifestyle instead of a decadent one. We know the first option will happen, and soon. As much as we want to deny or ignore it, we are in the 11th hour in our planet’s future with climate change and pollution. As for the second option, we saw a small glimpse of that almost two years ago when there was civil unrest and food riots in 3 dozen countries around the world. As for the latter, let’s hope we can get it together. It seems to be the best option. But for sure, no one will every live a more decadent lifestyle and eat as much crap food as our present society is. The question is how will it be stopped?
Jamey Lionette“
if you like this post you may also like
http://laurelthelarder.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/simpler-times
And last but not least, my favorite note James ever left for me when I came to open one morning.
