It's all about the taste

Food is what makes life worth living for me – it’s very simple: I love to eat. If I want to treat myself to something special, it is no shopping spree or a day at the spa, it’s either cooking an elaborate meal with special ingredients or a visit to a restaurant.

But where does this importance of food come in my life? I would argue from my family. When I remember the best moments of my childhood and my time growing up, the memories are always related to food. It can be a home-cooked meal, a dinner at my grandparents, or the experience of tasting real Italian pasta during a family vacation. Thus, when I decide what to eat, it’s all about the taste for me.
However, I believe that my mother, who embraces cooking as a form of art, taught me what to value in food and I can see her influence in my daily food choices today. It has always been and continues to be a ritual of us, a “mom-and-daughter thing” if you want it – to go for groceries together and she would show me what produce to buy, what ingredients to combine, and what flavors to look for.

I guess it is important to note here that because I have spent all my life until I was 19 living in a small village in Switzerland, most grocery stores would carry produce from local farmers, many of whom I know personally. Thus, we would always try to buy products from our very own region to support members of our own community, but also because we knew how they were produced, how fresh they were, and we could be sure that would be tasty. Furthermore, this proximity to local food sources also determined the selection of produce to be found. For example, until I have come to the United States, I have never seen strawberries being available in December, as winter is simply not the season to grow them in Switzerland.
Additionally, because farms are part of many Swiss communities, people relate to cattle as living organisms and value their good treatment very much. I would not eat meat from a cow, from which I know that it hadn’t been given the chance to graze fields, as I neither believe this to be a “humane” treatment of the animal, but also because I don’t think it’s healthy for it. However, I can understand that a person who grew up in a big urban city, such as New York, he or she doesn’t have a personal relationship with animals and therefore does not even come to consider these reasons as important for his or her choice in food.

Along those lines, I am very troubled with the idea of genetically modified food out of similar reasons. I don’t believe that human beings are capable to understand and capture the full complexity of nature, and, therefore, their interfering with it in such fundamental ways scares me. I don’t think we truly know what side effects the scientific modifications have, and I feel more secure by simply eating not genetically modified foods, which generations and generations of people before us have done and have fared well with. Nevertheless, I might be wrong with that, but because I grew up in an environment that for long periods of time had been dependent on nature, and of which some members continue to do so, my relationship with nature does somehow not allow me to fully embrace this concept.

Thus, in short, I value food. I value it as part of my life, as part of my family, and as part of my environment. Because I grew up surrounded by local food production and cattle herding, I believe having a different relationship to food than people who have spent their lives living in urban areas and the different values that I place in food emerge from that.

However, once having moved to the United States and Washington D.C., I had to find out that it was a lot harder to make the same food choices here that I would make at home. Food that is considered organic here, is mostly standard in Switzerland, and in order to buy products that I feel comfortable buying, I need to pay a price that is almost dangerous to my student budget. Thus, to be able to embrace food in the way I know, I had to change and adapt my diet. I used to eat meat 3 times a week, now, I only do so on Sundays. This allows me to safe enough money to buy meat that comes from farms that treat their animals in fair ways. I buy bread once a week in the farmer’s market from a local producer and freeze it, so it will last for the week. I limit my fruit variety to a minimum, as besides apples, most of the exotic kind is imported from South America or some other distant part of the world that tells me that it could not have had enough time to truly ripen and develop the flavor I would be looking for. Thus, with those changes, I was able to continue making food choices that allow me enjoying food in the way I always have. It might be a little more difficult and costly than back home, but it is possible.

Thus, when thinking about my food choices of the last two days, I wouldn’t consider them exciting, as they are limited to apples, bread, water, tea, chicken breasts, rice, and Swiss chocolate (which I brought with me myself), but I know that I didn’t do as much damage to the environment, neither to myself, eating them. The biggest impact I assume has the rice, as for the basic staples I don’t shop at organic markets. I would assume it was industrially produced somewhere in the world and used high amounts of energy not just in its harvesting but also in its transportation.

To conclude, I do believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with the modern food production, as it puts a conscious consumer through so much trouble and costs. And as Michael Pollan points out in his New York Times article The Vegetable-Industrial Complex, it poses a threat to public health and national security. Consequently, I hope that there will be a movement to more local food production in the near future that embraces factors of quality over quantity that make good food choices easier and even available to a majority of the people. Not only will it be better for the environment, but also for individuals: at least in my opinion, when I know where my food is coming from and how it is grown, it always tastes better.