First Investment, Day 5

Breakfast - granola, almond milk, blueberries

Lunch-on-the-go - veggie wrap from Diablo Foods.

Dinner - lentil, chick pea, eggplant, zucchini, carrot stew and sangria.

First Investment, Day 4

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Breakfast (granola, almond milk, blueberries)

Lunch (the last of the leftovers)

Dinner (Sandwich - bread, veggie burger, avocado, tomato, salk and a glass of white wine with blueberries, raspberries, and cherries).

I feel like so far this project has emphasized how little time I have to cook and eat, and that so many meals are just on the go, or hastily dashed off. I had envisioned images of lovingly prepared meals, instead of things just slapped together.

At this moment, I find that kind of depressing. I don't think it's because of some food reasoning like I'm not getting enough protein, I'm just aware of how crazy-overwhelmed-busy I am. This project was about examining the difficulties, but I think the real difficulty is just so many demands and commitments on my time. It's Friday, and even tomorrow I will be teaching a workshop - no rest till Sunday, then the week starts again.

First Investment, Day 3

Breakfast (granola and almond milk)

Lunch (bread, garlic hummus, avacado, tomato, salt)

Dinner (still leftovers)

One of the things this project has made me realize is how I sometimes skip meals, especially when I'm overly busy. I was considering skipping dinner last night and just going to bed, as the time I finally got to eat was after 10 PM. However, it felt important for this narrative to structure it with three meals a day, so I ate a meal. Probably not a bad thing.

First Investment, Day 2

Breakfast (granola, almond milk, mango).

Lunch (leftovers from last night - roasted vegetables and brown rice).

Dinner - at Cafe Colucca with friends!

I've never been a food poster, really. And posting these images the past two days made me realize that this process of documentation makes me a bit uncomfortable, like I am seeking approval. Not sure what to make of this, yet.

First Investment, Day 1

Breakfast (granola, almond milk, cherries)

Lunch (Bread, red pepper humus, avocado, beans, grapes)

Dinner (roasted vegetables and brown rice)

If only...

Allegory of the Long Spoons

There is a story that has permeated various religions about two rooms. The first room is in hell, where the people have row after row of tables with laden with a feast of delicacies. Yet the people sitting around these tables are emaciated, moaning in hunger. In their hands, each held a long spoon, but their arms were splinted to wooden flats, so they could not bend their elbows to bring the spoons to their mouths.

In heaven, there is an identical room, with people in the same predicament of spoons. However, in heaven, the people sitting around these tables are comfortably sated. There, the people had discovered that it was only possible to feed each other, by reaching across the table with their long spoons to bring the food to each others' mouths, being fed depended on everyone being kind to one another.

Recently, Mark Bittman had an article in The New York Times called, Why I'm Not A Vegan. It's more a promo for his book, VB6 (Vegan Before 6), a lifestyle choice he made for health reasons. The idea behind VB6 is to basically eat vegan until dinnertime, although he admits to frequent cheating. It's very similar to meatless Mondays, forms of scheduled moderation for diet and health.

I've written previously on this blog about the concept of ahmisa, but today I'm thinking about community, and how eating is a communal act.

Even when a person dines alone, rarely did they grow or hunt their food themselves, or at least, not all of it. They are the end of a (typically) long producer/consumer chain. In most cases, this chain is invisible. It brings to mind an article I read several years ago about how the definition of "cooking" has changed in America to include opening and heating up a can of soup.

With its invisible status, this producer/consumer chain is not considered part of most people's communities. But what if our thinking were to change? What if we started seeing eating as a form of engaging with community - not just through dinner conversation, but through product consumption? It might mean that we want more of connection to said products - by knowing the farmers, by shopping locally, by gardening ourselves, and that a faceless corporation is not a good dinner companion.

And what if we went beyond that? Aldo Leopold suggested the idea of in A Sand County Almanac, "The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land." What if we considered the pollinators such as bees, or the microbes in the soil, part of our community? They certainly contribute to our food production. What does it do to our thinking then?

What sort of spoon could you extend?