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.