I was doing ministry at a kids church in Jersey City, New Jersey one summer when one of the kids came up to me and asked me this question in response to telling the kids where I grew up. Jersey City is a dense urban city of row houses and corner stores just across the Hudson from Manhattan. The kids there have never seen the countryside, the farms that make up some of the landscape of my hometown of Holland, MI. They know their block, their city, their corner. Being so close to New York city, most everything (good and bad) is accessible to the Jersey City resident. Little thought goes into how something exactly comes to be available in the city. The more important thing is that it's available.
There's a cultural movement going on right now in U.S. that is moving people towards having a better understanding of where their food comes from, eating locally, and considering the carbon footprint their dinner leaves behind. While I'm not about to cut pineapple out of my diet because I can't grow it in the Illinois season, the movement has brought out a couple things in me when it comes to food.
First, I've found that I enjoy gardening. Andrea and I tend a small 4x6 food raised bed that will be filled with plenty of tomatoes, peppers, carrots, beets (yuck - that's all Andrea), lettuce, and basil. I've found that a vegetable you grow yourself tastes better than a vegetable someone else grows for you. And if the vegetable I grew is in food that I didn't have to make, it's doubly good :) It's also amazing to be able to see God provide us dozens of tomatoes from a seed we planted months and months earlier. I might go as far as saying that gardening is a spiritual experience. Birth, life, death, earth, water, pruning....
The other thing I've found is that I enjoy getting to know to know the other people who grow and raise my food. Andrea and I walk to the Bloomington farm market each Saturday as we are able from late May to September. We know the guy who raised our burger, the couple who planted our tossed salad, the woman who milked the cow for our cheese and crackers. It's interesting to put faces and hands with your dinner plate. In a way it makes eating more meaningful - more than just a necessity or entertainment.
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| Our dog mila next to the garden |
