Easy food.
It waits patiently in the refrigerator or in Styrofoam in the midnight microwave. It asks little from your back or the watch on your wrist. It is instant and overly edible: cleaned up, cut up, sanitized, frozen, flavored and fortified. As soon as the wrapper slips off, easy food is ready. Bite-sized or chocolate-dipped, it is gone practically before it reaches the lips.
On the other hand, there is non-easy food, or what I'd call "real food." This food asks far more of you before being consumed.
I've taken part in producing "real food": I've fed cows one week and made beef bits into hamburger patties the next. I've fenced fields and shoveled poop. Considering the blisters and backaches this work entails, it is understandable why human society has fallen in love with easy food.
Yet along with abandoning our muddy roots, we've abandoned physical fitness and community connectedness. More, we've lost the experience of true taste.
A food system saturated with easy foods has forced the American palate to forgo the best part of eating: tasting. Apples now come in three varieties (red, green and yellow) and raspberries are available year round.
Yet foods aren't designed to be transported 2,000 miles, and apple varieties are more complex than red, green and yellow. Flavors are complex and volatile.
A tomato cannot be experienced through a dollop of ketchup or the pale pink rounds found on a Whopper. By participating in the food production process - by growing tomatoes or by picking apples - one can understand the real flavors of food.
By escaping our agrarian roots, we've escaped the experience of taste. Today, less than 2 percent of Americans are employed in the agricultural sector. Instead of shelling peas on a porch, we spend afternoons in a commute (to be followed up by a microwave dinner).
This is not to discredit the achievements the last 100 years have brought; it is to say we've gone too far. We've traded time in the field for time in the car. We've traded the aroma of the outdoors for the odors of carpets, copying machines and bathroom disinfectant. We've exchanged sunlight for screen glow and bird calls for our favorite cellular device.
The solution to this dilemma? Eat what is simple and what is fresh. Most importantly, eat what is locally grown. Eat slowly. Eat with friends. Better yet, go out to a farm and pick it yourself.
Dribble olive oil on top and nothing else. By eating foods in their freshest and simplest forms, you will be opened to a world of flavor and fulfillment.
Roots and Shoots is a recent development in the Ratty. It is designed to offer students more natural food options. Specifically, the line aims to maximize its selection of locally grown foods.
Give Roots and Shoots a shot. If you're willing to go one step further, join Brown Dining on a weekly Harvest Crew or Farm Tour.
It's a fresh idea: pick your peas and eat them too.
Louella Hill '04 picks beets for Roots and Shoots.
