Posted by Meredith Nelson on Wed, Feb 01, 2012 @ 10:54 PM
Maybe the ideas that guided my first steps into the organic realm were irrelevant to my sister or my mother. But if I couldn’t even persuade my own family to make the right choices about organic food, how could I persuade total strangers? And how could I stop myself from passing judgment on their choices? It wasn’t that they were necessarily wrong and I was right, but there was a gap between what they saw and what I saw. My way of seeing the world — and of seeing food — is constructed by my amalgamated experiences and intersecting social identities. I’ve been shaped by experiences in Massachusetts's Pioneer Valley, my job, even my gender studies major. It’s a unique perspective, one that cannot be replicated or simply stamped onto another person. It would seem impossible to expect objectivity given our individual distinctness. If I uttered the same phrase while two people listened to me, I could never guarantee that it would sound the same or mean the same thing to each of them. Our understanding is sometimes indescribable.
It is this distinction that led me to understand why I couldn’t expect the people around me to breathe in the organic doctrine as easily as I had done. Our unique systems of value and ways of “seeing” define the way we understand food in our lives and subsequently, the way we understand organic foods. What do I care about? What do I want to be surrounded by? What guides my decisions? What makes me feel at home? These are questions that have guided my way of seeing the world around me. I found that making choices that aligned with the “organic consumer” helped me come closer to answering those guiding questions. As a gender studies major, my worldview is shaped by the effort to create powerful, independent, healthy new models of community — and clearly creating a better food system is a big part of that. The answers and the path may be different for everyone, but I think it is important to make sure that people arrive at their conclusions having explored all options.
So regardless of how differently people around me may see the world, I want to encourage them to go organic.
Posted by Meredith Nelson on Tue, Oct 25, 2011 @ 03:13 PM
You know when you tell a child not to touch something, that child will stop at nothing to make sure that she defies you. I’m not a psychologist, but I would guess that it’s a mix of the curiosity that results from forbidding and perhaps a desire to rebel against authority.
These days, it feels like when I go home, that is exactly what my family is doing. Do they find it amusing to see me writhe in frustration when I open the refrigerator to find a new package of Driscoll’s strawberries with the yellow label? Particularly with this product, in every store I have seen, the yellow label and the green label sit next to each other. I can understand the challenge of opting for the $3.99 price over the $2.99 price, but it still hurts every time. I love strawberries, and now I’m sitting at home, silently protesting them.
I said nothing of the strawberry defiance until dinner the next night, when a strawberry in my cocktail conjured up images of the yellow label.
“Why?” I asked. “They’re literally sitting right next to each other in the store. It’s so easy.”
“They were more expensive,” said my mother. With all due respect, if she were concerned about the price difference, we wouldn’t be going out to dinner, we would be cooking. So I knew this it was a front.
“It’s what you put in your body. What’s more valuable and worth spending money on?” I asked. I knew the discussion would only go as far as my willingness to complain.
“You can blog about this!” my mother said jokingly. Voila! (Hi, Mom!)
They better watch out, because one day I just might sign them up for an organic farm share. I think that would merit a rebellion on the level of a DDT milkshake.
Posted by Meredith Nelson on Fri, Sep 09, 2011 @ 07:43 PM
For the past month and a half, I’ve been eating organic produce and choosing natural foods — products where I know the ingredients — and can actually pronounce them. My neighborhood haunts have been Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, where I know there are tons of products to help me in my organic and natural food quest.
In a decision driven by geographical convenience, today I decided to switch it up and grab some vegetables for dinner at Stop & Shop, a regional grocery chain. As I strolled down the aisles, I felt I was in a nightmare. Everything around me looked artificial and sad. I had been shopping at supermarkets like this one since I was a kid, but the shelves felt so foreign to me now. I paced, basket in hand, around the produce section, looking for the organic sign…or the organic stickers…or organic anything. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a small table. I raced over, my heart sank. There were cucumbers and tomatoes that looked as if they had been sitting there for weeks. None of the other shoppers cared about this table like I did: poor neglected organic veggies.
I looked around, feeling both an insider and an outcast. Maybe I could swing the other shoppers over to the organic team. But how would I argue that they should spend more money to choose a marginalized and neglected section of the produce aisle? For the moment, I was in this alone.
I had ventured outside the bubble, where organic food wasn’t normal; it was exceptional and uncommon. This store said to me that organic was an outsider.
Maybe the food industry is like high school. In high school, students want to put in the minimum effort for the maximum output: from popularity and letter grades to frozen and fast foods, it’s all about the short term. But none of those achievements will mean much when graduation rolls around: it’s about the knowledge you gain and the decisions you make. I like to picture organic as the smart kid that people don’t care to make friends with, because he’s still at the bottom of that social ladder. Bill Gates once said, “Be nice to nerds. Chances are, you’ll end up working for one.” From what I know, he’s done pretty well for himself, so maybe focusing more on the substantial and the long-term won’t be so bad.
Posted by Meredith Nelson on Tue, Aug 02, 2011 @ 03:06 PM
My gaze was frozen, staring down at the menu of a hip D.C. lunch spot. Menus have always been overwhelming for me anyway, but now there was an added challenge to my decision between the hamburger and the salad. My eyes slowly scanned the page, top to bottom, desperately searching for a keyword that could put my troubled mind at ease. Just one word — “organic,” “local,” “free range” — even if it wasn’t what I was looking for, would have breathed consciousness and redemption into that menu. The question had come instantly to my mind when we sat down, but I dared not ask it aloud. So instead, it played in my mind on repeat: What did the cow eat?
Before I came to Pure Branding, knowing that my hamburger was 100 percent beef would have been more than enough detail to render a confident and enthusiastic order. But I sit here today, telling you that just saying “beef” has ceased to mean anything to me.
Was the beef raised on a grass diet?
Would it give me all the omega-3 fatty acids that my brain pined for?
Did the meat come from a local farm?
Was it 50 miles outside of D.C.? 100 miles? Please say it was under 100.
That hamburger was part of a network of power and value that existed almost invisibly around our table.
How would it affect my body and mind?
What did the restaurant care about?
What industry was this meat supporting?
How would it contribute to global warming?
If I ate the meat and it was grain-fed, would the world around me implode?
I’m being dramatic, but on a less drastic scale, these are the things that run through my head. Ignorance may have been blissful, but it sure is scary to look at in retrospect. I’ve been captivated by the reality of the food around me and can’t look away.
My concentration broke as the waitress placed my drink on the table. My mind flashed to an image of my friends and me laughing at a clip of the TV show Portlandia with Fred Armisen, where the couple trace their restaurant’s chicken dish back to its farm life as a chick. Though I longed to ask the waitress if the cows had been grass-fed, I couldn’t get past the image of the show’s character getting up from the table and driving two hours to inspect the chicken’s farm of origin. Would I become that woman? I couldn’t do it. I can say confidently that despite the unconditional love of my friends, I would have been laughed at for quite some time if I had asked the waitress my pressing question.
I restrained my curiosity and ordered the hamburger. When the waitress left, I realized that I was far from having a panic attack — I wasn’t nearly as worried as I thought I’d be. For that moment, I found enough comfort knowing that I cared enough about what I put in my body, even if I was too nervous to ask. It may sound silly, but I realized that I would be able to tell what kind of beef I was eating when it arrived and regardless of the outcome — grain-fed or grass-fed — I felt empowered to be able to independently draw conclusions about my food.
Posted by Meredith Nelson on Mon, Aug 01, 2011 @ 03:07 PM
My weekend of failed conversion and organic betrayal has been haunting me.
While I was home, I knew that something had changed within me over the past few weeks. Maybe it was the air in the office? Or maybe I was experiencing a side effect of overexposure to the Northampton farmers market? When I ran out of plausible conspiracy theories, I thought maybe I had done something wrong by asking my family to change their habits; had I stepped out of line? Maybe I was overzealous in my effort to persuade my family to go organic.
I kept flashing back to the crudité platter from our Sunday brunch. The vegetables were fresh and bright with color. It was the same platter I had prepared with my mother for almost every family gathering since I can remember. I had eaten them for years, so why all of a sudden did I feel like I was committing some distorted form of adultery by indulging? It was just celery, after all. But I couldn’t shed my mind of my newfound knowledge. Where I used to find trust, I now saw the reality that we were all under siege from the big bad food industry.
But the way the food industry marketed GMOs as more “evolved” to consumers was working. As a society, we still don’t question the sacrifice of technological evolution with the rigor and curiosity that it merits. It’s much easier for people to blindly trust those clean, shiny GMO fruits and vegetables as a step forward in agricultural technology, just as I once had. After all, they did look perfect. And in a culture that prizes an idealized surface beauty above all other, it’s no surprise that we trust the foods that look like they do in movies above the food that comes from the farm down the road.
My submersion into the world of organic had given me the ability to see the larger world in an entirely different way — a way that focuses on finding a meaningful connection to food. So far, it has involved much more research and an engaged approach to seeing beyond the surface of food, but I think it is entirely worth the effort.
Posted by Meredith Nelson on Fri, Jul 29, 2011 @ 08:49 AM
“Yeah, OK,” my mother sighed as I finally finished my tirade against nonorganic celery and apples. After 10 minutes of nonstop talking, I was actually impressed that she was still on the line. I had called her as soon as I left the office and began listing the countless facts about pesticides that had been flooding through my mind for the past week.
“Seriously, Mom,” I continued, “only buy organic apples. You’ll regret it if you don’t.” I didn’t know exactly what I was threatening or if she really would regret it, but I needed to grab her attention somehow and the talk of pesticides wasn’t expressing the imminent danger that I was aiming to convey. “Not to worry,” I thought to myself; I’d take care of it soon. I was going home that weekend and I would have a chance to implement my plan. I would grab full control over the produce purchasing when I drove back for our Father’s Day brunch that weekend — neither a crown nor a pod would pass without my inspection.
I always enjoy gatherings at my parents’ home. Whether there are five guests or 50, you can guarantee that my parents will be food shopping at least 10 times at 10 different stores in the final 48 hours (even if the event is catered). My late arrival foiled my produce plan. I arrived in time for the final 24 hours before the big event, and managed to maneuver organic peas, zucchini, corn and broccoli onto the menu. It may not seem like much, but I was up against a lot of powerful shoppers.
I had been soaking up all of this organic foodie knowledge and couldn’t help but try to spread the gospel to everything. I saw myself as a sort of organic superwoman coming to rescue my loved ones from the grasp of commercialized agriculture and its trusty sidekick DDT.
If you’re waiting for the heroic ending to my story, I urge you not to hold your breath. “Look, Meredith, I’m eating pesticides,” my sister taunted between bites of celery. The celery was the worst to watch. I had just read the EWG’s Dirty Dozen list and celery sat snidely on top. I cringed at the sight of it in my house with my family. Maybe my sister was showing that I couldn’t affect her, or, maybe worse, she had bonded with the DDT; she had developed Stockholm syndrome.
I didn’t understand why, but my family couldn’t have cared less about “going organic,” despite my pleas and (I would say) well-formulated arguments. I think they thought it was part of my inconvenient tendency to choose the most expensive thing on the shelf — I did, after all, insist on shopping at Whole Foods.
