Jacob's Cove Blog

Have you thought, recently, about where your food comes from?  When you sit down at your next meal see if you can determine the origin of each item.  It’s a lot more difficult than I thought it would be.

Carlyn is a graduate student at the U.  I met her a few weeks ago when she came to interview Dale and I as research for her thesis.  She has a very interesting major that I had never heard of before: Community Art.  From what I understand, a community artist does art in the community or creates it with help from the community.

Carlyn has been coming over to our house once a week to teach my children about art and especially about maps.  Maps have never been particularly interesting to me until a few weeks ago.  We began with the children drawing a map of their bedroom.  We then went into the bedroom to see if they had remembered to include everything.  Dale and I had switched rooms with the kids so they easily forgot to include several items like a sibling’s bed and where the toys were kept.

They were then instructed to add lines to show where they went when they got up that morning. This trail showed the different habits of each child.  The one who hops out of bed and gets dressed had a very different trail from the one who goes directly to the kitchen table.  In this way the map began to tell the story of our morning instead of just showing where things belong.

The next week we made a map of all the places where we purchase food:  Real Foods Market for raw milk, Walmart for lots of price matched produce, Sunflower Market for greens and Macey’s for the occasional apple fritter.  Looking at the map told us where we bought our food but it didn’t tell the full story.  Where was the food before it got to the store?

Carlyn had a birthday last week so the kids wanted to do something special for her.  The original plan was to make a meal and then map where all the ingredients came from.  That proved to be more than this mom could handle so we just made a dessert.  As I brainstormed with the kids about what to make it became evident that I probably couldn’t track down the origin of all the ingredients.  Where did the wheat come from that made the flour?  From what country was the sugar imported?  The nuts – where were they from?  It became abundantly clear that I am terribly disconnected from my personal food chain.

We ended up serving her zucchini bread we had in our freezer from last summer.  (I think that’s the bet way to store zucchini.)  We topped it with sweetened, strained yogurt we’d made from our raw milk from Redmond Heritage Farm.  Nestled into the creamy white yogurt were thawed cherries that we’d stored in the freezer from our abundant crop last summer.  It was simple, delicious and beautiful.  Best of all, I knew where most of it had come from.

This new perspective on the diversity of my food choices has given me a new appreciation for the abundance I enjoy.  Now I feel a greater call to be a better steward of my meals.  And, of course, to eat what’s real.