Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Sourcing Food Locally

I'd blogged before about how Anjali is a rice and curry girl. She especially loves her 'mas curry', so we finally paid a visit to the farm where we get our meat from. It was a truly amazing experience for our family. First, I never realized how much work it is to farm (Deck is a family farm and the entire family works EVERYDAY rain or shine, kids included). Second, our food comes to us at a great cost to the environment, and the industry is corrupt with farm subsidies and big industry. Third, animals are cute! Its hard not to have a relationship with your food when you really know where its coming from (at the end of our visit I was in love with a dairy cow named Seamus).
Christine the owner is fabulously smart and a great advocate for 'food as it should be'. And she has a no-nonsense attitude that I loved. After watching the sow breast feed the piglets and goats jumping over the barn fence, petting the horse, herding the cows to the milking pen, Anjali was put to task cleaning Duck eggs. At $0.75 an egg I was incredibly nervous about her handling them (after all she is an urban gal!). But she loved it, and most importantly brought home the message that putting food on the table is no easy task, and that everyone even kids have chores they can do. The duck eggs were yummy!

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Solitude


This note greeted me when I arrived back home last week. Since I rarely travel for work it brought tears to my eyes that I had not seen my daughter in two days. It’s hard to remove myself from the role as Ammi who makes sure her clothes are laid out the night before; breakfast is ready, teeth brushed, etc, etc. When you are traveling alone (through airports especially) you find yourself with more time to ponder what its like to be an individual. I have been engrossed in reading this book by Adele Barker: Not Quite Paradise: An American Sojourn in Sri Lanka which led me to think about the importance of simplifying life (she has a whole chapter on how she learned to live with ants). This wiki how was a catalyst to my thoughts. I like #3 Do less each day, and #9 Create solitude. #4 is my favorite, Leave space between tasks and appointments. As a mother you don’t get much solitude, but the opportunity to live in the moment, for every hug, smile and the “I love you more than hot lava coming out of a volcano.”