Ella has just started crawling…forward that is. She has been backing up for a while now. 

Baby Ella’s first locally grown apple. A nice Washington Honey Crisp. “Honey Crisp” reminds me of the name Honeysuckle Weeks. Heard of her? Besides having an amazing name, she is a British actress who did a smashing job playing Samantha Stuart on the BBC mini-series “Foyle’s War.” Such a great show. Did a lot of thinking while watching it, about rationing and Victory Gardens. I wish that I could convince everyone that we need to grow Victory Gardens once again. Cut down on oil consumption. Eat locally. Rely on your neighbors and community. 

Just 1 week shy of 9 months.

Green Peace video on GMO’s. See my follow up post about this video.

Lately I have been caught up in this fight against Genetically Engineered foods. The activist, the passionate mother (so new that it still seems strange to call myself that), the betrayed consumer, all of these sides of me have been active. E-mailing Senators, sharing posts on Facebook, etc. While this is important and even good and inspirational, I want to share some simple photos. Photos that speak much more loudly about the importance of good food than any rant or diatribe could. They leave me basking in the wonder and mystery of the gift of food and what it is like to discover it for the first time.

The journey began in Edinburgh. Down by the Firth of Forth on a cool evening in the south of Scotland. A football match (soccer game) ended and I some how managed to figure out the remote enough to change the channel, and, there he was. It was Jamie. Oliver. Talking to little British school children about where carrots come from. I was hooked. It was a jovial and hopeful program with plenty of addicting accents and cute kid’s humor, but what really got to me was how much I was learning about the food that I eat from this guy that I had never heard of.

Since then it has been a long and exciting journey. The next big step was (seemingly) randomly picking up a copy of “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” in a Barnes and Noble in Minnesota. We were about to fly to Santiago, Chile and I wanted something to read on the trip. I don’t know exactly why I picked it but it proved fortuitous. It added a level, a depth, a richness to that trip. I started to remember Jamie and Edinburgh and connect more with the food around me and my choices. I saw massive Dole distributing centers and found that I had never realized that I was eating fruit off-season from thousands of miles away. Here I was in South America reading about this very thing from Barbara Kingsolver.  

In the winter of 2010-11 we traveled with the express purpose of studying and focusing on food. From Ireland to Spain, from England to Morroco, and especially France, we ate, prayed, loved (never read it but saw the movie at the Casino on Catalina Island. I think that place would make any movie magical, I mean, they play an organ while you wait for the movie to start, come on! Loved it.), breathed, thought, talked, and ate more food. What a gift to think back over all of my travels and see a common thread. A progression of meaning and learning that started so long ago. I cannot wait to see what’s next.

Here are some gems from that trip to England and Scotland in 2005. It was so much more than a sightseeing trip. Thanks for the fun memories girls!

Here is the view from our digs. There is the actual TV where I first “met” Jamie. Not sure what Emily is doing in the bathroom, Holly must be watching “Coronation Street.”

Here is me with a giant horse on the Royal Mile, Edinburgh.

St. Paul’s Cathedral and really blonde hair.

Hitting the town…