My food podcast

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Paonia, Colorado


Time to think about food again. Maybe my next column and maybe my podcast will be about food, in all its permutations. Food justice—how we can get good, sustainable food to people making minimum wage or less. Sustainability—how we can feed ourselves in a way that doesn’t destroy the soil or warm the planet. Ironic that so many things in my life are pushing me in this direction and I don’t even know how to make a quesadilla. Ok, I do now. But that’s definitely a recent development. Food is so intimate, so political, so much a product of culture and upbringing and values. Food is community, the least threatening way to get people to talk to each other. Trying to bring ranchers and environmentalists together, we invite them to share a meal. After a storm, a long day in the cars or a wet day in the field, we gather together for a warm dinner, comforted by the conversation and the ability to feel nourished. But food nourishes us without nourishing the land. Agriculture is crazy. Beef isn’t any better. What do I say, in five minutes, about the topic that connects everyone in the world? I want to speak to poverty and the struggle to put food on the table at all, but there’s no solution to that problem. No one has a real answer when I pose the question, except Eric Porter, and I don’t want a world where poor people can only eat his beef. Someone needs to figure this out, but I can’t do that in a five minute podcast. If no one we’ve talked to can give me an answer, I risk making an audiobook of my last epiphany. What else can I say about food? Where’s the story I’m missing? Maybe it’s a tragedy or an unfinished quest. But that’s not the story I want to tell. Maybe it’s the wrong subject. Maybe I should stick to water. Or water politics. Nevada politics. But something always calls me back to food. I’m hungry. We’re all hungry, looking for a better world, a better way to eat. We need to free ourselves from corporate agriculture and American democracy. We need to remember how to take care of ourselves.