although Cheetos and Ding Dongs remain an ecological mystery.
For the most part, I can use dollars as the currency of good
ecological choices, alongside my questionable but persistent need
for chocolate.
I don’t have much patience with food proselytizers who refuse all
but organic, free-range, fair-trade gerbil milk. We each do what we
can; the Honorable Harvest is as much about the relationships as
about the materials. A friend of mine says she buys just one green
item a week— that’s all she can do, so she does it. “I want to vote
with my dollar,” she says. I can make choices because I have the
disposable income to choose “green” over less-expensive goods,
and I hope that will drive the market in the right direction. In the
food deserts of the South Side there is no such choice, and the
dishonor in that inequity runs far deeper than the food supply.
I am stopped in my tracks in the produce section. There on a
Styrofoam tray, sheathed in plastic and tagged at the princely sum
of $15.50 per pound, are Wild Leeks. The plastic presses down on
them: they look trapped and suffocated. Alarm bells go off in my
head, alarms of commoditization of what should be regarded as a
gift and all the dangers that follow from that kind of thinking. Selling
leeks makes them into mere objects and cheapens them, even at
$15.50 per pound. Wild things should not be for sale.
Next stop is the mall, a place I try to avoid at all costs, but today I
will go into the belly of the beast in service to my experiment. I sit in
the car for a few minutes trying to rouse the same attunement and
outlook with which I go to the woods, receptive, observant, and
grateful, but I’ll be gathering a new stock of paper and pens instead
of wild leeks.
There is a stone wall to cross here, too, the three-story edifice of
the mall, bordered by another lifeless field of parking lot, with crows
grace
(Grace)
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