Package of Heat & Eat Palak Paneer Made Better

Glean What You Can From It

post soon about :

Gleaners

my friend Susan the dumpster rescuer!

all related to the freegan rant….

Changes Abound

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.

Shrimp Salad and other Holiday Party Leftover Ideas

- Celeriac Root finely diced, 1 decent sized root, similar size as a baseball

- Carrot grated, about a ¼ cup or more

- Parsley chopped, a few sprigs

- Capers finely chopped, 1 decent tablespoon

- Garlic paste, good squeeze or decent tablespoon

- Hot sauce, teaspoon

- Burrata and fresh goat cheese, chopped, about ½ cup to 3/4 cup

- Mediterranean Salad (artichoke hearts, black olives, onions in olive oil, maybe roasted red pepper) chopped, ½ cup to 3/4 cup

- Cream, 1/8^th-1/4^th of a cup …and/or, as an alternative to cream, you can add instead: cream cheese dutifully mixed with a little rice vinegar. Or a thick plain yogurt.

Mix this as best you can while withholding on the cream, that way you know how much cream to add at the end of everything.

You may not have Mediterranean Salad on hand, so think of creating the following as your substitute: a sploosh of olive oil, several de-seeded olives, a few canned artichokes if you have them, anti-pasta type fare (roasted garlic or bell peppers, um, you know), some sliced onions (red or shallot before white, and slice ‘em thin)… and then the whole bit needs chopping, so don’t hesitate going to town.

Then once it’s become a Mediterranean Salad, save whatever is too big for the recipe, with the rest, mix it all up with all that is listed above.

BUT… what about the Shrimp!?

Well, I had about 4-5 cups of cooked shrimp, but it’s hard to say because this is pre-chopping measurements, so,… meaning around 20-25 average sized shrimps. Already cooked. So what I did, was grate some more carrot, same amount as in the recipe, get some sliced green onion/chives, and then throw those things into the cuisine-art with the chopped shrimps. Each shrimp can be cut into 5 pieces, and you can do them two at a time. I hold them down and cut off the ends. Then I chop the rest in 3 sections.

Then blend it. Not too much.

Then add this shrimpy mix to the rest of what was pre-mixed. So then the freshly cuisine-art-ed shrimp is having a party with the nicely diced/chopped other stuff.

Then the cream. The cheese should be good enough for a decent blending, but the cream will ease it to perfection as long as you add just what is needed.

Regardless, this is how to make leftover cooked shrimp not suck. My upstairs neighbor pretty much devoured it. I had about a sandwich’s worth. He had like two hogie’s worth.

Annato Oil

…more on that in a minute, just reminding myself to post things! (via putting up a blank post. nothing like a little pressure).

Roasted Chicken on a Wednesday

Stuffing: 1 egg, dried sage, dried anise hyssop, fresh parsley, half onion and some cloves of garlic chopped fine, some cooked bacon and sausage chopped well, some cooked greens, cooked re-hydrated sundried tomatoes, 1 grated carrot, a couple celery stalks chopped fine, 3/4 cup of dank turkey stock, and of course, bread crumbs and a decent amount of chopped bread (including half a bagel I hadn’t finished). I tend to cut things on the smaller side, but after the chicken came out, I thought maybe I could’ve chopped some more bread  into slightly larger chunks.

Chicken: Bella Bella Fedora Chicken, heirloom chicken with larger thighs than the average hen.

I like to cook it a third to half the cooking time, breast up, and then I flip it to thigh up for the remainder of the cooking time.

140 degrees. I know that seems low, but it’s stuffed and that takes longer, and so the cooking time per pound was on-point. I flipped it and cooked it in a cast iron, and that way it’s been heated all over. Finally, it’s a clean chicken, small farm, free range. I’m more worried about juiciness than getting sick.

links about the Bella chickens:

http://moreethicaleating.blogspot.com/2008/01/local-new-england-purveyors-of-food.html

http://www.outstandinginthefield.com

Hardcore House

Is a wonderful place. My boyfriend Andrew lives there, along with Jonah, Brendon Wood, and Brendon Killian. The boys who live there love to cook. So much so that Andrew had to call ahead the other night, to make sure there weren’t a million things going on in the kitchen, so that we could cook a dinner. When we called, Brendon Wood was so excited about the idea, he offered to make some food as well so that we could all eat together. Fabulous.

Part of the dinner would include veggies I’d harvested that day, the last day to really harvest. It would snow that night. But that day, I did put a mini-greenhouse on my garden, made out of old pampason chairs, thick clear plastic and rocks. Underneath, semi-protected from the cold, grows sorrel, kale, tatsoi, spinach, parsley, mustard greens, arugula, collards, and in the dirt, the seeds for Bibb lettuce arise early as the greenhouse heats up while the days get longer. (Starting Dec. 21, 12:47pm EST)

On Hand:

- Huge bunch of sorrel, bunch of parsley, sprig of rosemary, decent amount of kale and collards

- Half a butternut squash, and some unknown winter squash that I grew. It looked like a spaghetti squash and an acorn squash made a baby.

- Large Salmon Fillet. I acquired this piece of fish at zero cost. If you have read some of my earlier posts, you might have noticed I do not recommend buying salmon for environmental reasons. However, I’m sorta a freegan, and if it’s eaten and not trashed, that’s good.

http://laurelthelarder.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/food-fight/

http://laurelthelarder.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/what’s-a-freegan/

So, with this food we made the following:

Salmon steamed on a bed of parsley and rosemary.

Sorrel sauce with cream, butter and egg. This would go on the fish.

Kale and collards were fried up in the traditional manner, with chopped garlic, onion, and olive oil…. and oh yes, some honey.

The squashes were chopped, drizzled with oil, splashed with water, and tossed in the oven.

Brendon Wood’s contribution would be dirty rice. They have a rice maker, which is pretty sweet. In the rice he threw chopped and sautéed: button mushrooms, green pepper, onion, bodega pork, sploosh of beer, and a bit of jalapeño pepper. Turmeric was added for color mostly.

Eventually I finished my end of things in terms of cooking and the boys continued the dinner making. While they did that, I read from the Alice B. Tolkas Cookbook, in particular the chapter dealing with how eating was drastically different during the German occupation of France. In that section of tales, I was siked to find a recipe for Fruitcake, which she made as a celebration, when WWII was over.

http://laurelthelarder.wordpress.com/2009/11/14/fruit-cakes/

At the end of dinner, we were so happy that Brendon Wood announced we should have a dinner club, or underground restaurant. I suggested that we focus on what the goal(s) would be, outside of eating food. We were all on different pages. We shall see….

Winter and Basil Seeds

sometimes you gotta bite yer lip!

it’s winter.

time to haul in the parsley and rosemary. They look good. Geraniums and X-mas cactuses should be in at this point for sure! I did my best to rescue basil in October, but it’s already bye-bye. I’m gonna try this year with early seeding of basil and see what happens. Successive sowings may be the way…..

If you have basil seeds on hand, start them in January, in a bright window that’s not too cold, and keep ‘em moist! You only know if you try! Commentary welcome!

Late Fall Food

We have had the best fall ever. We have barely hit frost. There is a foxglove blooming in my front yard. So there’s still plenty to harvest, the Green Salad made for this dinner was all harvested goods.

Fall Dinner

The other night I cooked a pork tenderloin for Andrew and myself. It was a small cut, but a perfect size for two people. I usually like leftovers, but this piece of meat is best eaten cooked once. Not that I reheat leftovers much, but some leftovers you shouldn’t, like small cuts of meat. It dries them out.

Pork Tenderloin: Celery, Tomatoe, Thyme, Rosemary, Garlic, Parsley, Gin

Brussels & Kale: Maple Syrup, Butter

Roasted Fruits: Bosc Pear, Green Apple, Shallot, Peach Nectar, Acorn Squash, Ginger Ale, Braggs, 1 large Onion

GREEN Salad: Boc Choi, Sorrel, Parsley, Dill

oh and this was Marla’s use of the turkey she roasted…..

Turkey Salad: Raisins, Dried Cranberries, Celery, Mayo

What’s a Freegan?

Freegans are often vegans.

When they bring home food for themselves, those items will be vegan. In their homes, cupboards and fridges, you will only find vegan food. They may live with a non-vegan, and that person’s food may or may not be vegan, but the food belonging to the vegan freegan will be vegan.

So why Freegan and not Vegan? First and foremost, the Freegan lifestyle is what makes a freegan. They are anti-rampant consumption, they are pro-environment, they are anti-greed, they are pro-community. This lends towards a variety of lifestyle choices, including the love of free stuff. They like finding it, they like giving it away.

Some freegans are truly strict vegans, and it’s debatable whether the majority of freegans are vegan or not. Some people insist that the anti-consumer/corporate aspect of the vegan lifestyle, is fundamental to the anti-consumer/corporate aspect of the freegan lifestyle, therefore many freegans are vegans. But looking at it another way, some freegans eat whatever is free whether vegan or not. Some freegans eat what is given to them. So if they go home for the holidays and the only thing served one night is Beef Stroganoff, with bread and maybe a side of green beans…. the freegan will eat bread, green beans and probably some beef stroganoff! Maybe they won’t eat the meat chunks, maybe they might have one or two or even a few meat chunks, but the point is, their form of veganism does not forbade the eating of food provided to them from the universe, whether in the form of family dinner or the pizza shop’s trash.

I really like Freegans.

What I don’t love, and get with annoyed sometimes, are vegetarians and vegans who hold distain for meat consumers, and I occasionally bump into people like that. My vegan and vegetarian friends tend to be pretty cool about it with me. They might say they don’t like meat at all and think it’s disgusting. I know when they say these things they aren’t talking about me, they’re talking about something I do. Hell, you know, there are people out there who choose to shower less often and wear dirty clothes… and you what, they probably know they stink a little and probably don’t care too much about it until it’s actually bad, either via tight quarters, or true lack of cleanliness. MY POINT IS, I can tell if someone thinks I’m the one who is disgusting, not just my habits. I could think my friend should put powder in their shoes, but really I’m not gonna make a big deal about it, unless you’re in my home. In that case, I would offer powder to the guest and even a fresh pair of socks. (And to be honest, in someone else’s home, I might tell a close pal that their feet stank if I thought it would be helpful).

So in one’s home is where these issues become their most important. That’s why it’s crucial to know the rules beforehand. No assuming. I once brought a pound of ground beef, which was locally raised, from Vermont, grass-fed, and kryo-vacced, to a household where the residents didn’t allow any form of animal product to be in the home. I had to stick it in my car. I even begged a little just to put it in the fridge.

But they are allowed. Hell they get the shaft all the time when they go to BBQ’s and no one has listed the ingredients of the dishes, and there’s no separate grill which is designated veggie. Right!?

But sometimes I worry that all of this is a luxurious American point of view. Now, we can’t help but live in the environ we are living in, where all these choices about food can be made. But sometimes I think we don’t see how easy everything is for us. At Lionette’s, where I work, a vegetarian customer came in and we were chatting. He asked me, “When are you guys gonna go the distance and stop selling meat?” I was instantly shocked. I work there because we sell the most local, sustainable, fresh meat there is in town, and we are “plane-free”. And with little censorship I blurted out, “You vegetarians have your food shipped all over the world, what makes that any better?” My point was so clear that he agreed I was right. I felt bad for being so defensive, but at the same time I thought this customer would be aware of why the store does what it does. He was blind to us because he was too busy thinking about how vegetarianism is “better”. There are a lot of places in the world, where the choice to think that way isn’t possible.

Now quick point! Vegetarians and vegans are often so because it is the food they prefer, and they just don’t want to eat animals, so I would like to leave them out of this whole argument. I’m sure wherever they would end up living in the world, their food choices will stay true to their leanings. I’m friends with many people like this, and they don’t eat meat even if it is free. I like to call them “true vegetarians”, cause it’s more their body (or perhaps their soul), and not their brain choosing.

But freegans who can and do eat meat are exciting people in my book. They truly are free. They are free from “better than thou-ism”. Free from the societal ideal that all the food you eat should be freshly purchased, cause if it’s not, it’s “gross”. Free to step out of many boxes. Free to be you and me. My grandmother was kinda elitist, and one day I showed her this 60’s skirt and vest set that I bought at a used clothing store. She said, “Why do you buy used clothes? Those clothes are for poor people, you can afford to buy new clothes”. Freegans wouldn’t like that point of view. They would say, “Our society over-consumes clothing. There is so much clothing that buying new clothes is irresponsible. There’s plenty for poor and non-poor alike”. At the time, I just looked at my grandma with a ruffled brow. I never really liked her.

I do like Flexitarians. They are like vegetarians, but flexible with their intake of different types of food. In their home they might have eggs, maybe fish (Pescitarian), even onto other meats as long as the animal was sustainably raised. Again, there’s a degree of freedom and forgiveness that I find comforting.

All in all. I wish the battles would end. I had a vegetarian friend who never called himself that, he would instead say, “I don’t eat meat”. He put it that way because people were less likely to discuss the issue. It sounds more like a health choice as opposed to a political choice. But the truth is, he stopped eating meat for political/societal reasons. Yet even because he did, it didn’t mean he wanted to debate it. I agree. If you want to convince the countless many to believe you, then do what the Smiths did. (Or host a blog.) I don’t tell a million people they need to eat local and seasonal, even though I’d like to. I state my case if the chance arises, just like a vegetarian telling me to get that f**king meat out of their house.

“That sh*t’s disgusting Laurel, get it out of my house.”

“I’m sorry. I should’ve called and asked.”