Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

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I grabbed this book at the last minute because I noticed it was our book club selection. Up until now we had only read fiction. There was a request for some nonfiction - and, boy, am I glad there was!

This book is based around a family who lives off of local foods for an entire year. They have a small farm and are surrounded by farming neighbors. This book is really about making informed food choices and realizing the effects of those choices.

I found this book incredibly inspiring. As I have mentioned before, I have been very interested in conscientious consumerism. This very much includes buying local. This book is full of facts that amazed me, such as the U.S. loses 300 farms per week and each food item travels an average of 1500 miles.

Now, obviously, this book is slanted (aren't they all?) The one fact that annoyed me was: "Family farms sold $236,000 worth of organic produce to regional retailers and supermarkets which those markets, in turn, sold to consumers for nearly $0.3 million." Now, really, that is only a difference of $64,000. I realize that when making a point you have to carefully construct your words, but this felt like a jab at my intelligence.

I think this book is a healthy balance between preaching and informing (like me?) Ideally, yes, it would be best if we could all only buy locally but that is impossible, even for this family; they still bought coffee. They did buy fair trade coffee. I think the take-home message is to do what you can, try to buy foods only when they are in season, eat at home more, go visit farmer's markets, and maybe plant some tomatoes of your own.

One thing that really struck me was that these people did not miss the food that was out of season because they were fully enjoying the ones that were. Everyone kinda does that already. We do not miss watermelon at Thanksgiving because we are enjoying cranberries. We eat strawberries in the spring and apples in the fall. Thee apples that you find in April just don't taste as good. If you are in Boston, like me, and it is February and there are oranges at the market, you have to wonder where they are from and how much oil it took to get them there.

Farm or Circus?

When I planned to the farm today, I thought that we would buy some fresh fruits and vegetables, play in the corn field, go on a hayride, and see some animals. Not exactly how it happened.

I got directions to Connor Farm, although we could not have missed it. There were people everywhere and a cop directing traffic. Despite this we parked surprisingly close. I must admit that I was a little nervous about going to a farm. Where could we walk and where couldn't we? Would we be imposing? Would we be interrupting a nice farm family's Sunday dinner?

Not at this farm. Bouncy houses? Really? There were people everywhere. And this modest display:

That is a lot of pumpkins.

We walked all the way to the back of the farm to their actual pumpkin patch and got a little one ourselves. There seemed something wrong about a pumpkin patch that didn't have any plants. It was cute though.

Animals. I love animals and was dying to see them. Here they are:

That's it. Two. Two animals. In the same pen. They are cute, but I was disappointed.

Ryder liked the sandbox.

We did not partake in the 2 acre corn maze, because I figured that I would end up just carrying him. I think their maze is the real attraction. We went into the farm stand to pay for our petite pumpkin and pick up some fresh veggies. There were a zillion people in the stand all buying their tickets for the maze. The first food I saw was bananas. Bananas. For some reason, I do not think they were grown at that farm. More disappointment.

I grabbed a squash (of unknown origins) for my friend, some fresh cider donuts and milk and cider that were made at Brooksby Farm, a town over. Next time we will skip the circus and go straight to Brooksby.