Reconnecting To Our Sources

“One of the most important things we can do around our food culture is to reconnect to its sources.”

— Michael Pollan

In the documentary “Cooked”, Michael Pollan truly hits upon the reasons why I love shopping farmer’s markets, visiting farms as often as possible and posting photos of fruits and vegetables:

“One of the most important things we can do around our food culture is reconnect to its sources…. Outsourcing has its values, and it certainly makes life easier, but it renders us all into passive consumers.”

I’ve never been entirely comfortable in the Western mindset of passively consuming products. As a consumer, I feel like I’ve ceded choices and decision making to supermarkets, clothing manufacturers and advertising agencies. On the surface, it appears to make life easier: they satisfy with convenience, taste or speed; and they free us from doing a lot of manual work ourselves. But this mindset actually strips us of *real choice* and desensitizes us to what the earth actually provides us.

At heart, I’m passionate about sources in all aspects of my life: I love exploring plants in the forest, examining rocks along the coast, wanting to know the story behind each thrilling discovery. As a kid, I learned how to tend to the myriad fruits and vegetables that my dad grew in our backyard. While eating our harvests, we often talked about the uniqueness of each pick: the enormous zucchinis; the scrawny grapes; the fat blackberries; the hefty collards that gave my dad a kidney stone.

There’s a certain sanctity in reconnecting to food sources, in recognizing the panoply of shapes, textures, flavors, aromas, colors and sounds in which nature packages its bounties. No plastic wrap; no cardboard boxes; no refined, processed & unrecognizable ingredients that are generations removed from their primary sources.

Pure, unadulterated joy.