huckleberrygypsy's Profile

Maybe its dumb, but I sometimes eat fruit or homemade salads on flights, and the hand sanitizer is really just for cutting any sugary juice left on my hands or a bit of salad dressing (not because I'm a hyper paranoid germaphobe...) when the fasten seat belt sign stays on the whole flight (and I usually fly redeyes) and it seems inconvenient for every one around me to have to get up so I can go wash my hands.

Somewhere along the line, someone told us that we were entitled to cheap food. The bottom line is, REAL food costs money. Food should not be where we cut corners on our budgets, unless we've already cut every other aspect of our budgets and we're still broke.

I used to sell baked goods at a farmers market, and got to know a few farmers, this is what I learned:

The farmers were up early in the morning harvesting the food they brought to market. When we pay a slightly higher price, we are buying ourselves maybe even a whole week of extra time to use that produce up, not to mention that it was ripened on the ground, and flavorful, rather than jostled halfway across the country in a cardboard box and maybe not even ripe by the time we buy it, a week later, as so often happens at most stores.

The farmhands that wer'e paying, probably don't live in nice Apartment Therapy inspired homes. The ones I met slept in the back of their 1979 farm trucks, the ones they carried the produce to market in, or lived in a run down trailer parked on the farm land.

I came back a year later to the market where I had worked, and THREE of the farms had shut down due to financial trouble. Farmers with organic produce were being overlooked because the consumers cared more about labels than farming practice. Its amazing how if people would have taken the time to understand that the only difference between two farms was the money to pay for certification, maybe those three farms would have made enough money to pay for certification, and we would all rejoice that one more small, local farm found a way to succeed.

Its hard to spend more money on something when you can get it cheaper somewhere else. But I'll say it again: REAL FOOD COSTS MONEY!