![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
One of the side-effects of having no internet at home is that by the time I reach school, my mind has already turned to school-related matters and I can hardly spare a minute to type out my thoughts. This has made me appreciate why ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sytharin's posts are so few and far in between--she similarly does not have internet at home, and when she's somewhere with an internet connection, her priorities are usually elswhere, unless some subject matter has been building up and decides to bubble to the surface.
Last night I rode my bicycle over to Changing Hands Bookstore to hear Gary Nabhan speak about his latest book, Renewing America's Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent's Most Endangered Foods. I ended up buying the book, partly out of a sense of homesickness for my favorite Pacific Northwest foods, which are featured in a chapter. Endangered foods are an interesting conundrum: they're things that aren't commonly eaten anymore, and that are often close to extinction, but Nabhan's interested in reviving them through eating them. Paradoxically, that can result in a revival of the food source.
Maybe it's kind of the reverse of commodified food--many of the "endangered" foods have fallen out of popularity because it's impractical to commercialize them. Take the black sphinx date, for example, which grows in a neighborhood in Phoenix. It goes bad quickly enough that it cannot really be shipped anywhere, but it's supposed to be an utterly delicious date (I'll probably see if I can find any to try, though I'm not too fond of dates).
It also made me think of salmon, which are delicious but overfished and subject to population pressures that we don't fully understand. I generally don't eat fish, but have made an exception for salmon when I'm in the Pacific Northwest because it is delicious and it's strongly tied to my sense of Seattle. [I feel similarly about huckleberries on Mt. Rainier, which probably taste much like huckleberries from other parts of the country, but which will never really be the same to me.] But I'm still conflicted about eating salmon, and would never make a habit out of it out of a respect for constraints on its availability.
Towards the end of the evening, I ended up talking to a few people who are interested in permaculture and gardening, which was also nice. Even if it's just a small herb garden, there's something to be said for growing and eating one's own food. Altogether, I think I'll plan to participate in Native Seed/SEARCH's food-plant growing endeavors in the upcoming year. Sure, it's fun to grow foods we know and love, like tomatoes, but it's also pretty cool to try out things like tepary beans, too.
sytharin's posts are so few and far in between--she similarly does not have internet at home, and when she's somewhere with an internet connection, her priorities are usually elswhere, unless some subject matter has been building up and decides to bubble to the surface.Last night I rode my bicycle over to Changing Hands Bookstore to hear Gary Nabhan speak about his latest book, Renewing America's Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent's Most Endangered Foods. I ended up buying the book, partly out of a sense of homesickness for my favorite Pacific Northwest foods, which are featured in a chapter. Endangered foods are an interesting conundrum: they're things that aren't commonly eaten anymore, and that are often close to extinction, but Nabhan's interested in reviving them through eating them. Paradoxically, that can result in a revival of the food source.
Maybe it's kind of the reverse of commodified food--many of the "endangered" foods have fallen out of popularity because it's impractical to commercialize them. Take the black sphinx date, for example, which grows in a neighborhood in Phoenix. It goes bad quickly enough that it cannot really be shipped anywhere, but it's supposed to be an utterly delicious date (I'll probably see if I can find any to try, though I'm not too fond of dates).
It also made me think of salmon, which are delicious but overfished and subject to population pressures that we don't fully understand. I generally don't eat fish, but have made an exception for salmon when I'm in the Pacific Northwest because it is delicious and it's strongly tied to my sense of Seattle. [I feel similarly about huckleberries on Mt. Rainier, which probably taste much like huckleberries from other parts of the country, but which will never really be the same to me.] But I'm still conflicted about eating salmon, and would never make a habit out of it out of a respect for constraints on its availability.
Towards the end of the evening, I ended up talking to a few people who are interested in permaculture and gardening, which was also nice. Even if it's just a small herb garden, there's something to be said for growing and eating one's own food. Altogether, I think I'll plan to participate in Native Seed/SEARCH's food-plant growing endeavors in the upcoming year. Sure, it's fun to grow foods we know and love, like tomatoes, but it's also pretty cool to try out things like tepary beans, too.
