K. made
us BLTs for lunch today. His obsession with bacon annoys me, to the
point where the smell or taste of bacon grease begins to turn my
stomach, but he can still do wonders with the meat nuggets
themselves. The sandwich was a slice of storebought Canadian
greenhouse tomato, a sprinkling of bacon nuggets from breakfast, and
piles and piles of lettuce I cut in the garden. Last night was
Thai-style tom yum (shout out to my brother, who bought us the tom
yum paste) with kohlrabi leaves and cilantro from the garden.
So, see,
it's not a complete disaster. That's the thing. I'm constantly
panicking about the state of some vegetable or another, when really
the thing to do is just to eat it. Even if it's beginning to bolt.
The sandwich was exquisite, maybe the platonic ideal of a BLT,
something worth sacrificing swine for. Who knew a BLT was designed
to be a salad on a bun, with a sprinkling of meat bits?
It's
interesting to me how my expectations for myself and for the world
moderate. I'm even becoming less of a purist about local food. Of
course, the world would be better off if many more people would grow
a much higher percentage of their own food. I'm proof that it's easy
enough, and it wouldn't be bad to have some chickens scratching
around for eggs and meat or a swine in the shed, either. But my
tomatoes from Canada I will not give up and I refuse to feel guilty
about.
There
are all sorts of ways to build and design a more healthy society, but
I think there's room for luxury, too. We're only human. We need
things like melons in winter shipped from Mexico, like
greenhouse-grown tomatoes for all months except this one, and then
our tomatoes are still weeks away. The sooner begin to turn our
minds around to how we can power this global village in a way that
doesn't corrupt our atmosphere any more than it's already been
corrupted the better.
