Food for love is not the idea of getting our hugs from cake and ice cream (though perhaps there is a time and place for that too). It is more the idea of how we can use food to show love, share love, give love, and get love. In the last week, I have been to more food-centered community events than I think any one person would ever normally attend.
Photo by Sarah Winter
It started last week when my Whole Foods Convertee (soon to be revealed) and I hit up the book launch of Edible Action, a dense academic read about the politics behind our food choices and how these choices are at the heart of social action and social change. While at the book launch, I met these three great guys, designers, who are working on a project called “You are Where You Eat”, something of an interactive map to help people work out where they can source the best local food in their area.
A few days later, I found myself with my fellow nutritionists at The Whole Life Expo, where I met Gabriel Cousens, who declared that our food choices are a direct reflection of how much we love ourselves, and that the more we love ourselves, the more value we will place on what we feed ourselves.
After the food filled weekend, I had the pleasure (and honour) of being part of a sneak peak tour of the Wychwood Barns. My heart soared at the site of 10,000 square feet of green barn space that will become a green house, a teaching kitchen/classroom, an indoor garden space, an outdoor garden space, and a compost facility.
All the positive exposure I had to these food-focussed community-based initiatives were sadly juxtaposed by the articles coming out this week about skyrocketing sales of Kool-aid, Velveeta and Spam as people start to tighten their food spending with the challenges of the current economic shifts. For the love of food, don’t let this be true!
Given the conversations I have had of late, it seems that people are going to extremes in both directions. Those of us who can see beyond this current economic crisis to the fact that we will live the rest of our lives in this very same body, are going the whole foods route; putting more time in to food, learning traditional cooking methods, doing what we can to plant, harvest, eat local and be healthy. Those of us who are using this economic crisis as an excuse to head over to Wal-Mart for discount and bulk sales of non-food, high calorie, chemical substances like Velveeta, will be the ones who pay the highest price in the end. What we don’t spend on food, we will spend on health care. Put another way, what we don’t spend on staying healthy, we will spend on being sick.
Kool-aid may be only pennies a glass, but last I checked, water was free. Giving our bodies more love through good whole food will either cost us a little more money, or a little more time. Most of us have televisions, cell phones, and high speed internet. We drink alcohol, buy lottery tickets, chew gum and even smoke cigarettes. I think it’s safe to say, if that’s the case, we could also make the choice to have a little extra money and a little more free time. It’s all a matter of how we choose to spend both.
Saturday morning you’ll find me out enjoying the first Wychwood Barns Farmer’s Market with my fellow community food love peeps. Come check it out and say hello if you see me. I’ll be the one ladden down with squash and apples.
[...] I am pretty sure I would soon become a regular. I am a total sucker for a good mix of community based food love and [...]
[...] 19, 2009 by Meghan Telpner By now you know how community food related events give me the warm fuzzies. I was therefore geekishly excited about visiting Carrot City, an [...]
[...] the earth it grows from and the energy that goes into growing it. And you know how this kind of community based food love warms my [...]
Good points I appriciate your post. I really like the look of your website great job!