Confessions of a Not-Rich Foodie - PART ONE

I read this article this morning, and have been stewing about it a bit, mostly the comments.  I'll try to keep this short, because it could probably become a novel.  There's this commonly held idea, propagated by so many people, that foodies are all rich elitists.  I get it.  I mean, Micheal Pollan is a big, egghead, academic snob.  I love a lot of his ideas, argue with some of them, and appreciate the way his writing is challenging and not dumbed-down, but I know at the end of the day he lives in a world that's a LOT different than most of us.  But I will argue that not everyone who cares about food, and/or where it comes from, is a yuppie with a large expendable income who is competing with their friends at who is the "greenest".  For me the way I eat and live has been an evolution, and I for one don't think I fit the stereotypes.
I am a foodie because a few years ago I decided to trade having money for having time.  I had a stressful job that I hated, and I gave it up for a low-stress part-time one.  In my favor was a little house with a real kitchen, and a sunny backyard.  And free time.  If I wanted the good but expensive loaves that I liked from the grocery store--the crunchy, European style loaves, I decided I would learn to make them myself.  So armed with library books and improvised baking stones, I figured it out. 



Both my husband and I had played with gardens at various apartments, so having one was a given when we bought our house.  In fact, we got permission to plant a few tomato plants before we even closed.  We didn't think about it as food--beyond the fact that it was a source of cheap tomatoes.  But with more free time (and less money) my garden grew, because gardening really is a cheap proposition.  A garage sale shovel, free compost from the city, and a few dollars in seeds and starter plants, plus labor, is all you need. We gardened organically mainly because we were cheap--pesticides and fertilizer cost money.  It was easier to look up a homemade organic method, or just tolerate a level of imperfection.



So very gradually, I got better at cooking and baking and gardening.  Even poor results were often a lot better than processed foods or grocery store produce.  We started growing more tomatoes than we could eat, and a friend taught me how to can tomatoes and salsa. I didn't necessarily think about replacing my grocery store purchases, it was mainly a frugal desire not to let things go to waste.  And then we got chickens.

The chicken thing started out as kind of a joke--our city passed an ordinance allowing a few backyard hens, and we thought the hubbub about it was hilarious.  But on reading the stories about it, we were intrigued:  As a gardener, the idea of chickens eating up leftover garden waste was appealing--that they exchanged it for fertilizer and eggs was even better.  So we got chickens--not because we wanted to know where our food came from, or because it was trendy, but because we thought it would be fun--and useful. And "free" eggs!  We built a coop ourselves, bought day-old production birds from a hatchery for less than a dollar each, and read a lot of poultry information online. 



I credit the hens with helping me understand how food can be a cycle.  In my backyard, there was suddenly a system that I could see in motion.  Those girls had a way of teaching lessons.  I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about food ethics, but now when I read stories about retired factory hens being dumped at an area landfill (some still alive!) I had a connection to the story that I never had before.  I knew I couldn't buy eggs from those places anymore.  So when winter came and production slowed, I shelled out a few extra bucks and got free range eggs, either at the grocery or at a local market.


to be continued....