I used to teach a theme-based composition course on the farmers’ market and the homemade food Renaissance. Half of the required booklist is on the food manufacturing crisis; the other half poems and fiction on subjects like vegetables, flowers, nature, Adam and Eve. We watched documentaries on farming. Daily my students heard me rant on the toxic quality of corn in this country, and when they asked me for an alternative, I would walk them down to Union Square Farmers’ Market in New York City, and introduce them to my friend, the first female CEO of canned homemade garden fresh jam and tomato sauce in New York City. She fed my students spoonful after spoonfuls of strawberry, blueberry, blackberry, pepper jam on warm freshly baked bread. She made them laugh, and then she made them cry. I’m not saying it was hard to go back to store bought jelly but I’m not saying it wasn’t.
Now there is even more compelling evidence of global warming and a climate crisis in the world. Yesterday my husband found a gorgeous bouquet of locally grown parsley and another pungent cluster of mint at the grocery store. I’m going to add it to our lunch today. I eat a big salad every day at noon, and I can’t figure out why average children and young students can’t do the same. Oh, the big deal schools with monied families do. They started growing their own much healthier food for school cafeterias many years ago, but most public schools don’t and the FDA keeps using tax money to pay for food, mostly frozen pizzas, that go missing, and products that cannot be identified as the animal listed on the ingredients label.
It’s hard to describe the beauty of Vermont adequately, so I won’t even try, but I will say this much: the current flooding crisis scared the crap out of everyone I am close to. First one would have to buy into the belief that the ecosystem and the people who lived there made it safer. I never fully believed it, but I wasn’t waiting for this to happen any time soon either. Obviously there are other places struggling too. I am deeply worried about my friends and their children in California, and I don’t know how Hawaii is going to pull through this current disaster.
And yet, faced with fewer affordable options, most of us will continue to eat food chocked full of things that can make us sick or kill us, and we know better than to drink any water that comes out of a sink or water fountain because it can make us sick or kill us, and despite a mountain of evidence, the GOP doesn’t seem to care about what’s happening or the connection between pesticides and cancer or global warming and pesticides. Nobody wants to care about how bad food makes you depressed because Big Pharma has a pill for everything that happens to your body after it consumes chemicals like pesticides, but they won’t fight for better quality of food, water, air or admit that’s what could help fix your thyroid or bladder problem better than any pill.
I was at a political gathering one time when a guy crossed the room to tell me that he was ashamed of his party because he knew the truth:
“My party doesn’t care because we won’t be alive for that much longer so who the hell cares.”
Me back in the day in my beloved New York City: from http://foodfest.weebly.com/cuny-professors.html
Mary Louise Penaz – Baruch College
Mary Louise Penaz is a creative writer and professor at Baruch College where she teaches a theme-based course on food justice issues and creative problem solving. A long time advocate of the farmers market and locally grown agriculture, her blog is dedicated to how we market the farmers market and handmade food Renaissance. Mary Louise holds a BA from Hunter College, an MFA from Bennington College, and a PhD from the University of Houston.
Mary Louise Penaz 
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