No. 2

take the red pill

I got my first job out of college in 1988 – one year after Gordon Gekko pronounced “greed is good.”  I became the highest-ranking analyst at my company at age 26.  After-work cocktail chatter revolved around critiquing people’s power suits.  For fun, I would go to McMansion open houses and dream of the day that I could own one.  I saw my parents’ depression-era artifacts – their ratty towels and repaired wares -- as quaint leftovers of a bygone era.  The eighties, and its emphasis on self as expressed by one’s possessions, dominated my world view for quite some time. 

The questioning of that world view began when I was pregnant for the first time.  What food does the human body need?  Is it in what I’m eating?  What happens to pesticides when you eat them? What does organic mean?  What is BPA plastic?

My husband was an invaluable ally in my research.  His upbringing taught him how to grow and preserve food.  He had a close family that communed around food.  He understood the joys of cooking and did not see it as a burden.  Just as important, he is a wicked-smart, independent thinker who always examines agenda.  With Drew’s support, I began to think beyond comfort, convenience, and status and started thinking about outcomes.

Our culture is intentionally designed to turn a blind eye to unwanted outcomes.  We whisk manufacturing overseas.  We raise and slaughter livestock indoors.  We outsource scrutiny to governmental agencies.  We have effectively clocked out of how anything is made.   And the bad actors could not be happier.

The more I learned, the more I became aware of my staggering ignorance about a lot more than food.  I don’t even remember where it started.  Was it the Chinese workers getting cancer from making my smart phone?  The enslaved men fishing off the coast of Indonesia for my kids’ tuna fish sandwich?  Or the 250,000 Indian farmers committing suicide over the stress of having to produce cheap cotton for my clothes?

What do you do when you learn these things?  What do you do when you realize that just about everything has a shady backstory and that your ignorance makes you complicit in all of it?  What do you do when you’ve built a life that depends upon all that?

You begin.