Slow Down--Where Are You Taking Yourself Now?

I found a heroine.

Every movement needs its hero, and the local food movement has Alice Waters. She founded Chez Panisse in the 1970s and she is also the founder of the Edible Schoolyards program. She is all about local, fresh, being involved with the food. She also recognizes the necessity of atmosphere, about the way a place looks, about hominess, about having a place for people to come together.

She started CP when she was 27. 27! That's a year older than I. So what for me?

The more I read about food, about agriculture, about the environment, the more that I know that this is where my heart is. I know that I want to be part of the movement toward local food, to encourage people to buy from local producers, to realize what it is like to taste something picked a few hours ago or to have an egg that was just hatched this morning. The decrease in biodiversity worries me. The idea of agribusiness in our country shoving out small producers in other nations infuriates me.

So I have that much. I know what I love and and what makes me angry and what makes me passionate. And where do I go from there? Maybe I don't know yet. I know that I want to start a community garden. This city is has such little access to food. It also has so many empty lots. I'm sure it's tough to grow crops in this climate, but there must be something we can do. I know also I want to be involved in writing about this. I feel like I've been so focused on this vague dream of writing a novel when really, my skills lie in expositional writing. I love the research, I love the communication, I love organizing so that someone reads it and gets it.

Where will this all lead me? Again, I don't have to know yet. But I'm tired of it just being an idea in the back of my mind. Since I was little, I wanted to save the world and I wanted to write. I remember writing about the environment, in fact. When, if not now?

There are so many pieces to this. I'm going to have to really think hard about eating local...I pay attention, but sometimes I can't resist the Washington apples or California strawberries (although I'm still laughing about the sign in whole foods that told me that the watsonville strawberries might be damaged by the san diego fires). I need to learn how to keep one plant alive and see if I can do some container gardening. I want to get better at my cooking and learn to pay attention to each individual ingredient. And, of course, I feel this need to tell the world about it...probably starting here in this blog.
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