(HOST) As we approach one of the biggest food celebrations of the year, commentator Vern Grubinger is thinking about the food choices he makes, and how they’ve been changing over the years.
(GRUBINGER) You are what you eat.
Now there’s a scary thought.
As a kid, if it tasted good, it went in my mouth. I guess that made me mostly sugar and fat, wrapped in plastic. Sort of like fried dough, to go. My intake of food coloring gave me character, and thank goodness for all those preservatives which have propelled me to middle age.
In my teenage years I sprouted leaves, set down some roots, and became a vegetarian. Green as I was, I relied on black and white choices that didn’t complicate my world view. Beans were good, ham was bad. Where food came from or how it was produced were not items on my checklist. I was a tossed salad of unknown origin.
During college I fell in love with agriculture; specifically soil, and sun; water, and bugs, and the way that plants grow. The magic propelled me to organic farming. I moved on to another simplistic perspective on food and diet: natural was desirable, chemical was not. I was a cube of tofu, wrapped in kale, bathed in tamari.
In grad school the complexities of farming, or agro-ecology, got my attention. Basically, the knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone’s connected to the… and so on, with an agricultural twist. I saw nutrients and energy, microbes and molecules, plants and animals all interacting on farms to make them thrive. A very complex recipe. I became jumbalaya, or a maybe a pu-pu platter.
After many years of Extension work, I’m still smitten with an ecological perspective on food, but now, it includes people: farmers and consumers, buyers, sellers, processors; localvores, omnivores, walmartvores, whatever.
I’ve left the land of simple choices behind and wandered into the food system, which is populated by complex individuals, like you and me. When deciding what to eat we hunt and gather from an amazing abundance of food and ‘food-like items’ from all over the world.
The kind of food system we have is driven by our eating choices, which aren’t simple, either. They’re determined by cultural, economic and culinary factors. Add to that the influence of advertising, packaging and the latest media hype on food and health and it all gets very confusing. I see this so clearly now that I hardly know what to eat anymore.
But that doesn’t stop me from trying to eat intentionally.
I look for food that will keep me well, but tastes good. I want food that supports family farms, but is varied and affordable. To do all this, I need information – from labels, store signs, and farmers.
I’ve become a food detective.
I’m still missing a lot of clues, but I’ll just keep working to solve the mysteries that are on my plate.
Vern Grubinger is the vegetable and berry specialist with UVM Extension, and coordinator of USDA’s Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program.