Non-packaged Food and the Hunter-Gatherers, by Mollie

We concluded our first month of the Family Food Adventure with a meal of locally grown green beans and sweet potatoes cooked with garbanzo beans yesterday afternoon. Looking out onto our lush front garden, we talked about the things we'd each discovered over this past month of trying not to eat/purchase packaged and processed food.

Having just completed my first full week back to school, I'm still recuperating from the constant rush that fills my days. First there's the insistent ear-beating from my alarm clock (those familiar with the iPhone's "piano riff" know what I'm talking about when I say there's a reason I chose that for my alarm clock - it's not the kind of thing you can stand to listen to more than three times). Skipping to about forty minutes later, it's time to decide what to have for breakfast - and this certainly isn't the time to concoct a masterpiece, so I usually end up settling for some fruit or half a cup of protein powder (packaged!). After the first five periods of the day, along comes lunch, gulping down bites of home and usually the night before in a frenzy. A pretty much daily topic on the car ride home is what we'll fix for dinner, and my homework isn't really done for that night until I've packed my lunch for the next day.

Now let's think: what if I ate cereal with milk for breakfast? That requires about thirty seconds of preparation. If I bought lunch at school, the only time dilemma I'm facing is waiting in line; the same goes for packing microwave meals or a myriad of packaged snacks. And if we got dinner at a fast-food place on the way home, the minutes planning and preparing dinner would be freed. The point is: what we're going to eat governs our lives. This past week, my mother met with a colleague over dinner. The first stop my friends and I made when we went to look for Homecoming dresses the other day was to get food, and then we worried about whether we could go into a clothing store with our shakes.

In World Civilizations class, we've been talking about hunter-gatherers and the Agricultural Revolution. And here's the most fascinating thing: agriculture actually changed the structure of society. Hunter-gatherer communities were egalitarian (one of those new words we find ourselves unanimously shouting out at least once per class), partly because women and men held equal positions in society. Women were the primary gatherers, and most of the people's food came from gathering, while men were the hunters. The San culture, which still lives near the Kalahari Desert, actually had a tradition called "insulting the meat," where they said negative comments about a hunter's kill so that he wouldn't become too proud of himself. Everyone had the same skills; there were no specializations. But when agriculture came along, some were more successful because of luck or skills. People developed specializations. Chiefdoms grew from this, eventually leading to the idea that some are higher than others due to birth, which is now a common idea. So agriculture - which, back then, would be like the equivalent of packaged food - forever changed the structure of human societies.

Here's something to mull over: hunter-gatherers only had a seventeen hour workweek. Now, in a time when almost everything we eat has been touched by many hands before us and is covered up by a package, we have less time to focus on eating because we're so busy. So many people don't focus on it; and I see why, because when you're making your own meals from scratch, you have to be constantly planning what your next meal will be. And even though we had to take more time with our food, I'm glad we did, because it forces you to spend time together and to appreciate that which fuels you to keep going and do other things in life.

There are many choices I made over the past month because I was avoiding packaged food: I drank a different kind of tea, I reminded my dad that, even though the rice cakes at Kroger were on sale, we shouldn't buy them because they were packaged, I didn't chew gum or have any of the candy I bought in China...and despite how trivial these things seem, they did play a part in changing my day.

Un-Packaged Food by Dione

We spent the month of August trying to eat food that does not come in packages, and it was an interesting experiment. The point of this, for me, was twofold: 1/ not wasting plastic wrapping unnecessarily - it bothers me to think about all the plastic we put into the environment and I wonder where it all goes, and 2/ eating food that comes more directly from its original source.

August was a good month for this kind of experiment because the organic farm that we have a share in gave us big boxes of locally grown food, AND our garden was also producing a lot of food. So, we had a lot of un-packaged food at our fingertips: fresh zucchini, tomatoes, cucumbers, green beans, corn, peppers, eggplant, chard, raspberries, and Amish grown peaches from a local orchard. We had so much it was difficult to eat it all, but we had so many choices when we set about preparing our meals.

One of the challenges for me was not reaching for packaged food in the grocery store that I'm accustomed to buying out of habit. For example, we make a lot of soup and it's easy to use the No-Chicken Broth from the store instead of making our own broth - which is actually also SO easy to make. Another time I had the good intention of making a raw cheesecake with cashews, but I grabbed a bag of cashews instead of thinking to buy them in bulk. Once Mollie reminded me, it was just as easy to buy the bulk cashews and save some plastic. Mollie had to remind me a number of times that something was packaged and I had to think of another alternative to my deeply ingrained habit. It's amazing how often I think of food in a package instead of thinking of the food itself as it comes from the earth.

One thing I'm puzzled about recently is why some people have resistance to working with their hands in the earth to plant and grow food. It seems to be perceived as menial labor or as work done by peasants or low wage earning farmers. We are very disconnected in our society from the source of our food, to the point that we have no idea what the food originally looks like. We expect it to be shiny and clean like it looks in the grocery store. It's like, in our consciousness, we actually think that food comes from the grocery store!! I think that growing food is very honorable, that it is truthful work that one can learn many spiritual lessons from, and that it has integrity. I like the feeling of planting a small seed and getting a plethora of vegetables from that one seed. I like having the connection to all the teeming life there is in a spot of earth - insects, plants, birds, butterflies, squirrels, mushrooms and fungi - it's wonderful. I feel really alive when I am working in the garden and lately I feel as though I have not really lived during the day unless I have done some work there.