See what happens? I have all these plans for what I'm going to blog about the next couple of days and then people post these brilliant comments here or via Facebook and all these other "issues" start coming up.So, I wanted to just take a minute and say how blown away I was by two recent comments: one, Brian James pointed out, was that he'd read about a person in the Bronx who had to take two buses and a subway to get to the nearest place that sold fresh fruits and vegetables; and the second, shared by Yvonne Prinz about how there are NO markets in West Oakland, CA... and that the people who live there basically survive off what they can purchase at the dozens of local liquor stores.
That means people all over the country are eating potato chips and Hostess donuts, and washing it all down with Coke and Pepsi, for a daily meal.
All this came about in the discussion of a goofy television ad about pressuring Congress not to tax soda pop as a means of funding national health care reform. But I thought... crap, if people in America are really living the way Brian described the situation for people in the Bronx, and Yvonne shared the story about the People's Grocery in Oakland, then it's no wonder why we are such a chronically sick, disease-ridden nation.
Sorry. It's pathetic.
I'm not gloating or anything, but the reason I moved up here to the mountains when my daughter was born twelve years ago, is that I wanted to provide my family with some degree of self-sufficiency in this pre-packaged and processed age. See that picture up there? It's what I picked yesterday morning in my back yard, after reading those comments from Brian and Yvonne. We also have our own eggs, and produce a bunch of other stuff as well. We heat our home in the winter with a wood stove and nothing else (even though we have central heating and air conditioning, which we have never turned on). If everything shut down overnight (remember the Y2K panic?), we'd be in pretty decent shape.
Now, I'm not a survivalist by a long stretch, but hearing those East Coast/West Coast horror stories made me realize how fortunate my family and I are. Those stories also made me hungry for a breakfast plum, so I went outside and picked some.
Oh yeah... no pesticides here, or petrochemicals of any kind. We all agree we'd rather eat bugs than poison.
