Zucchini Redux

Rousseau once wrote “plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose,” meaning “I don’t understand why I have to be dragged into this crap.” Or something close to that. Or maybe it wasn’t Rousseau. Whatever. The point is we all have problems trying to make sense of what the hell is going on around us, both in the day-to-day and in the transcendent. Well, at least the day-to-day. My most recent confusion involves the profusion of zucchini in our garden. Not just zucchini. Giant, corpulent zucchini that apparently hide in waiting for days beneath the elephant-ear leaves of the mother plants before emerging one morning like alien spacecraft that landed in the garden in the silent dark of night. By the time they announce their presence, they are beyond edible vegetables, having become unwieldy zeppelins that would require a skip loader to harvest and a chain saw to slice. And I didn’t even plant them in the first place; they just appeared on their own, albeit from fruit (giant, unmovable fruit) that I had carelessly let go to seed last year, my le péché original. So I live with it. I walk to the garden and look down at the dark-green-turning-yellow leviathans. What am I going to do with them? I could chop them up and dump them in the compost pile. But that would spoil the possibility of them returning next year, of my cursing their monstrous progeny next summer, my questioning my own prowess as gardener and human being, my bitching in general about how screwed life is. No, I think I’ll just let them grow, rot, go to seed, and see what happens next year. More or less the way I deal with my own life.

De Facto Locavore

We are, I suppose, de facto members of the “locavore” movement, the trend of eating locally grown foods. We’ve had a vegetable garden for all of the 15 years we’ve lived in this house, shop regularly at the New Pioneer Coop, and this year bought a CSA share with Grinnell Heritage Farm. But we don’t do it for any overtly political motive. We just want good-tasting, healthful food. And that’s what we get.

But I have problems with the movement insofar as it radically calls for only eating within a 100 mile (or so) radius of one’s home. For one, there are just too many foods that I can’t get that are produced within 100 miles that I want to consume — coffee comes quickly to mind, as do bananas (my doctor encourages my eating them), avocados, pineapples, wheat products (no bread? no bagels?), et cetera. To just live on only foods available within 100 miles would mean a severe limitation of what I consider a healthful and sustainable diet. I could survive, I’m sure, but why? I could survive by just eating the foliage and critters that inhabit my own yard (dandelion greens, mourning doves, and chip monks), but I’m not Jed Clampett.

Moreover, if everyone should decide to go locavore, who would work these millions of local farms? How many lawyers, doctors, teachers, sanitation workers, department store clerks are ready to move out to the county, buy a few acres, till the land, plant the crops, harvest them, and haul them to the farmers market? And then what would happen to all those depleted professions? And then there is a big difference between the farming possibilities in Iowa or California or Maryland and that in Arizona or Mississippi or North Dakota. I’ve lived in places where if I had to survive off food from within 100 miles of my home I’d have to survive off pinecones and lizards.

Truth be known, the whole “locavore” movement is a very yuppie, a very privileged pose. And again, we are a part of it. I’m not apologetic. I enjoy the fresh, sustainable, healthful food. But I live in Iowa. I can afford it. I just can’t go so far as to proselytize others to join the congregation of the locavorian saved. It’s a privilege that should be enjoyed by those able, but not pressed on those not so able.