Dreaming

I am reading the most wonderful book called Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart-Cooking Mama's given to me out of the blue by a friend of mine.  He said he saw it and it reminded him of me. It is really interesting and has gotten me fired up on the aspect of not eating food that is highly processed. While I was reading yesterday the image of a community surrounded by farmland came to my mind.  I imagined a farm outside a little village where each person in that village got what they needed from the farmer.  In the village, there were little shops that carried local wares and in the village, there was a school, some churches, and the people of that village could walk to the central part to do their local shopping.  I thought to myself that if I were Queen that's how this world would work.

Wait a minute, that is just how things used to be way back when before we all got "civilized"!  It was like that before we took away all the farmland and built McMansions on it, before we decided that stores would carry cheap, easy-to-break crap from China, and before we started manufacturing food rather than enjoy what comes out of the ground. There were little villages like that where people lived and were healthy because they ate was God intended and not things that no one can pronounce. Furthermore, there are places like that still in Europe more or less. Why can't we get back to that?

We are close to having reached the point of no return (at least in my neck of the woods) in this country.  But there is hope.  We can model the village life in some of the small cities in towns in America.  We can have the community gardens and local CSAs grow the food, we can create walk-able communities, and we can buy locally produced goods.  It will take desire and the political will to do so.  In the meantime, I will keep dreaming, looking for local produce, growing what I can, and boycotting food I can't pronounce.