Obamano

Be forewarned. Shopping for groceries with an eye towards local and a pallet towards vine-ripened in December is a practice in frustration. Walking through the natural food store today with my list of necessities for this week's recipes, I ended up with a litany of things I won't be able to buy when my year of "buy local or grow it" begins. Really, how much longer will they call those peppers "red" for? In addition to giving these new recipes a taste rating, I've taken to giving them a month in which their ingredients would be available locally. After about 35 recipes I think I've covered July and August only. Every tag of produce now has a foreign country next to its name - Argentina, Chile, Mexico, New Zeland. That's a lot of miles, and not a lot of choice left if you cut your eating radius down to 300 miles or less. It's enough to make a person give up before one begins. But begin I must...

Coming off of two weeks of listening to Democracy Now's War and Peace Report from Copenhagen, it looks more and more like symbolic individual actions are the only actions that are going to take place. My Obama bubble has completely burst. On the home front he seems to be forwarding his espoused values of justice - appointing people of color to positions of power despite the far rights mantra of "racism." But internationally, the hegemony and thirst for empire continues. He and his negotiators doing business behind closed doors. Coming out with a non-legal, non-binding agreement that has not one single voice of a developing country in it and absolutely no significant carbon reduction goals for the U.S. Then chastising the audience for not working together? Yuck! Asking others to do what he himself won't commit to? I am tempted after the past two weeks to agree with Evo Morales, Bolivia's radical indigenous President when he said the only thing that has changed is the color of our President. Looking at it through the eyes of any South American that is paying attention, it would be hard not to agree. (Minus Brazil who was included in the closed door talks - what's up Lulu?)

This "eat local" mission which started out for me as a love affair with food and the desire to harmonize my relationship with the earth, has become deeply political. Where politicians fail, we must succeed, or suffer the consequences (insert any number of climate change statistics and predictions here). My mantra has always been to keep it positive, keep it focused on the solutions. But right now I feel too duped and angry to keep it on the chipper tip. Having eight years ago shut out the political realm after the brick-wall-hitting-like re-entry back into the States from my three year stint in the reality villages of Panama, I recently started paying a little attention to the political realm again because someone looked like they might actually come through on a platform of hope and change. POP! The fall from that bursting bubble is turning out to be quite steep. I find myself turning to a last vestige of hope - Michelle. Come on darling, get that boy into shape. PLEASE!

Anyway, I am snacking on aged cheddar cheese from California, rosemary sourdough bread made locally but ingredients from who knows where, and, ahhhh! some delicious bread-and-butter style pickles from my very back yard, cucumbers and onions grown right out my front door and canned this august on my very stove. I can't tell you how good it feels in a land of foggy, hidden deals to know exactly where at least one bitty part of my life and my plate has come from and what went into every step of these pickles existence from growing, packaging, and devouring them!

Thank God for small yet significant acts in the kitchen and garden.