I Don’t Know How to Eat This Apple

I tend to be someone who notices and contemplates ironies in situations. For a long time we have known how social media sometimes isolates people from real life relationships and contact. But now that we need to isolate ourselves physically, social media may be one of the greatest tools to help our communities and nation and world survive things like this on all different levels.

The ease by which information is shared and we can check on others is amazing. I’m up here in Delaware and I can video with my neighbor Hellen in Alabama who has few connections and support system there and check on her. And a friend who lives in Connecticut just checked on me.

Imagine if this virus crept into our nation and we did not have this means of communication. Perhaps this is why the Spanish influenza did what it did in 1918.

That said, in 2020 there are new issues in our whole system of life that can cause equal or even greater potential damage. I hope that through this crisis we all see and learn how interconnected we all are and in some ways how our system of living is unsustainable especially if something were to break a part of it and like a domino it cause collapse.
Not to induce excessive fear but the sobering thought that we all (or many of us who can, and can connect ourselves in community to friends and family that can) need to start learning to grow at least some of our own food and invest in local food growing in our own communities. This is not just to have a hobby but to face the fact that most of us are terribly disconnected from the sources of our food.

Much of our food comes from other countries and ironically we are at odds with these countries politically yet we are dependent on them. The reason to also grow our own food locally and make the shift to local sustainability – at least in part for basics – is that something potentially could happen to infrastructure or as in this case, pandemic illnesses that shut down our workforce.

Someone told me that we are about three days out from food shortages and supply cut off at any given time. I have not researched this exact fact but I can believe its truth. I have not been to the grocery store in several days but I heard from a friend last night that Costco and Acme and such are pretty much cleared out of meat and everything except for chips and cookies. So if the predicted expansion of this virus is correct over the next couple weeks there may be issues in food supply.

Which I suppose prompts people to buy toilet paper??? (insert contemplative irony and sarcasm)
But back to growing your own food. A hundred years ago people’s ability to grow their own food is partly what helped them survive many things, along with the close interdependence with neighbors and family in their local communities. And I am well aware through my studies on the Great Depression and thinking about how my grandfather’s family and many with small farms survived because they could grow their own food and raise their own animals.
Not so today.

Several years ago someone whom I knew that was doing educational programs in inner-city Wilmington, Delaware with children concerning food told me that there was a young boy who asked, upon seeing an apple, “How do you eat it?”
I was discussing this recently with a friend and she said perhaps he had only eaten pre-packaged apples. You know – you can go in Wawa or other small convenience stores and buy a very small quantity of sliced up apples that are in a solution that keeps them from turning brown for several days or a week and they are packaged in plastic.

So an inner-city child may have eaten overpriced, unhealthy, pre-packaged and pre-sliced apples, but never handled a fresh whole apple and did not know how to eat it.

And even the more economically fortunate rely on these quick, processed, pre-packaged foods, myself included at times. I don’t even know where these apples are grown.

This is where we are at and we must wake up.