Urban Ecoist

So, last week, I wrote a post about turkeys, and I really meant to continue on the whole tip-sheet on being more sustainable in your giving of Thanks to our corporate benefactors. I was planning on writing about vegetables and their seasonality, making your own gravies and stocks and soups, buying organic, you know all that good stuff, but then I got other ideas for things to bitch write about, and here we are. I could try to cover things in this post today, maybe extend it through tomorrow, but you have most likely figured it all out last week when everyone else wrote about sustainable or “green” Thanksgivings.

Instead of rehashing what others are rehashing, today, I am thinking about generations, namely that of my grandparents and mine. I was raised by my grandparents, who were really fantastic people that made me who I am today, and their generation was born during the Great Depression. My grandfather fought in Korea and married my grandmother soon afterward in 1953. Their generation saw great hardship, and it was from this time that the Agricultural Revolution was born.

My great-grandparents passed down recipes and gardening skills to their children, and my grandparents were into farmers markets and making things from scratch. And then my grandmother started getting lazy…

She admitted, so it’s not like I am calling her out here. She started buying graham cracker crusts at the grocery store for her cheesecake. My grandfather would make little digs about it, saying it was not how he remembered it, or not as good as his mothers. My grandmother would remind him of his diabetes and maybe he shouldn’t be eating cheesecake.

The Agricultural Revolution did increase yields and provided this nation with a great deal of food, and some of that food went to countries around the world, preventing millions from starvation. But the AR also lead to the rise of the Processed Foods Industry. The Archer Daniels Midlands and Cargills lead to the Sara Lees and the Krafts, which filled our kitchen cupboards with all sorts of partially-hydrogenated deliciousness and high-fructose goodness. Just today, a new Government Accounting Office report finds that farm subsidies are profiting millionaires (and corporate farms) rather than that small, family-based farm, and health doesn’t get in the way of big profits.

Enter my generation. Actually, I doubt that I can speak that generally about my generation. I live in two bubbles when it comes to food. I live in Portland, which is a localvore’s dream, and I have spent many years working in pretty decent restaurants that at least tried to source locally, even in Michigan. That and being raised by an older generation that didn’t always rely on buying everything in a handy box-kit or frozen prepackaged, I may not be as common as I like to think I am. But the fact that more and more organic food is available and more and more people are talking about organic produce (and fabrics, furniture, cleaners, etc), I am convinced that my generation is making progress.

Funny how things come full circle. Now, it’s all the rage to make your own stocks and sauces, compost your vegetable peelings, recycle your glass jars. For my grandparents, and their parents, and their parents, you had to make your own stocks. Composting wasn’t called composting, it was just burying the kitchen scraps, because what else are you going to do with them. Jars were precious commodities for “canning” the vegetables from your summer garden, and insuring that you had food for February. Sure, the Agricultural Revolution may have freed us from the seasons, but at what cost?

Thanksgiving, sustainable, green, organic, vegetables, generations, Great Depression, Agricultural Revolution, farming, processed foods, junk food, agriculture, Archer Daniels Midland, ADM, Cargill, Sara Lee, Kraft, partially hydrogenated, high fructose, subsidies, Government Accounting Office, composting, recycling