A Hippie and Her Food

 

My quest is a smaller footprint. Less waste. Less harm. My desire is to tread lightly in this space I’m borrowing from future generations. Oakland, California made that a touch easier. I drove less. The produce at my grocery store was local )less than 100 miles). Compostable and recyclable materials were so normalized that doing anything else was scandal.

I’m still shocked that Whataburger, a Texas institution, uses styrofoam cups for no discernible reason.

My nieces call me a hippie. They swear they don’t but my sister assures me they hippie do. I’m not offended. Even if the term doesn’t resonate with me, the sentiment it conveys does. I'm pro-tree hugging. Even as I know that individual choices have little bearing against a great tide of industrial waste and pollution I try anyway.

Some days there are compostable successes and other days there are plastic setbacks.

My apartment has a tumbler compost bin; of no interest to many but a definitive selling point for me. I keep a small bowl in my freezer and dump my organic waste into it until it is full and I can (bring it to room temperature to not disrupt the decomposition cycle) add it to the tumbler. It feels...complete. The missing link in a cycle of planting and eating and starting all over again.

Before I get to the compost bin though, I am trying mightily to avoid wasting food.

I cook. A lot.

If I’m in my apartment I’m more likely to cook than grabbing a quick bite from one of a dozen places within 5 minutes of my house. Something about the magic of pulling a meal together without having to put on shoes is so gratifying.

All that cooking leaves my produce bin flush with an array of vegetables and herbs. Right now I have fresh broccoli, cauliflower, kale, zucchini, sweet peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms, mint, parsley, and dill in my house. Oh, and cilantro. But I’ll get to the cilantro in a moment.

My newest cooking challenge is to juggle the things in my fridge in such a way that I don’t have to throw anything out. Sometimes that means cooking something I hadn’t planned on cooking, like roasted Japanese eggplant to go with my zucchini lentil fritters. Sometimes it means getting creative with a meal I’d already planned, like using the increasingly sad looking leek staring at me from the recesses of my fridge in my black beans (leeks are in the onion family so why the hell not). In those moments I proclaim victory over my compost bin.

Of course tonight, when I pulled out the cilantro I bought a few days ago, I was reminded that I should

have rinsed and dried it, possibly put it in a glass of water or at least wrapped it loosely in a towel. Instead I tossed it into the crisper still bound at the stems and a little moist. The slimy mess I retrieved when preparing the garnish for my dinner was...disheartening.

A single plantain mocked me from the counter-top. Pitch black, I couldn’t tell if it had gone the way of the cilantro or the leek. Not too soft, not oozy, it would be perfect or it would be disgusting there would be no middle ground. Luckily it aged, not like an avocado but like Ciciley Tyson, and was the final complement to my meal.

Sometimes the rotting of food is a slap to the wallet, specialty items returned to the earth prematurely. But these days, the price isn’t the point. One dollar’s worth of cilantro, a single plantain, won’t break my budget but the waste is no less salient...this was grown, watered, fertilized. Somebody picked this, exposed to the elements, at risk for COVID.

I purchase food to eat. I should eat it.