make soil, not war

i've been reading a book lately called 

"plenty- eating locally on the 100 mile diet".

it's about a couple in british columbia who decide to eat a diet made exclusively from food grow or produced within one hundred miles of their home.

imagine what that would mean in boise... no salt, no curry powder (or any spices for that matter), no olive oil, no pineapple, or bananas... the list goes on and on.

on the flip side, take a minute to think about the distances that our food travels. from the plastic wrapper, to the processing and all the way to our local mega-mart. 

we have no clue where our food has been! 

the change to eating the food that surrounds us would make our world and our bellies so much happier. we have an abundance of potatoes, corn, onions, greens, all kinds of veggies in the summer that could be canned and frozen, access to local wineries- the list goes on. 

here's a passage that caught my eye, made me stop to think, and has stuck with me:

"I had run through internet lists of local farms, hoping for some new breakthrough. One, I noticed, promised olive oil. That was something we really had been missing. The farming family had a Greek name, so if anyone would know how to coax the trees along...

'No,' the woman who answered the phone replied scornfully. 'You can't grow olives here.' 

I hung up the phone, smiling inwardly. What would happen if we all stopped believing that so much was impossible? Only weeks ago I had spoken with a vineyard manager on nearby Saturna Island. His vines were arrayed on south-facing slopes wedged between the humid sea and a bank of rock walls that reflected the sun. The owners were thinking of putting in olive trees."

the seedlings i started only a week ago!

eggplant, peppers, a couple tomato varieties and more to come this week. 

and one more passage from 'plenty' to end on:

" 'We have an insane food system, one that's totally based on cheap oil.' Is it possible to build a new and different system closer to home? It is. The lesser economies of scale could be partially offset by greater employment on small farms. Subsidies, like the $20,000 the US gov't spends on every corn grower each year, could support that small-farm economy rather than factory operations and industrial monocultures. Any of this is possible, and more. 'But it's theoretical. Is it possible to do it in practice? That's politics. People have to demand it and exercise their democratic rights.' "