60: (June 2025)
My husband and I have been eating a primarily vegan diet for three years now. We ‘cheat’ on various occasions by eating dairy products or seafood and fish, but by and large, we eat plant-based foods. It’s been a gradual journey into this way of eating, prompted both by wanting to choose foods that are less taxing on the environment and are also optimally healthy for our bodies.
That said, with the heat of summer well upon us, our decision to once again plant and tend to an enormous vegetable garden feels questionable. Bending over rows of vegetables in the hot sun to weed can feel rather unrewarding. Throw in an unseasonal amount of drenching rain that damaged tender seedlings, and seemingly microscopic insects that voraciously eat delicate leaves, and it can be very frustrating. Yet, the hope and vision of ripe tomatoes, plump eggplants, and fresh greens keeps me motivated!
Having some control over what we put into our bodies is empowering. It can be hard to buy foods that have not been altered in some way, be it by pesticides or various additives, such as sugar and salt, just for starters. The vegetables we grow aren’t enough to feed us all year, but I typically blanch and freeze a great deal of them, which keeps us in homegrown organic veggies for many, many months.
People often ask me if I feel different, ‘better,’ because of eating a plant-based diet. I can’t say that I do, but I think that’s because I’ve been mostly eating either a vegetarian or pescatarian diet for more than 30 years before becoming a vegan. All I can say is that at 67, I feel good and generally have a lot of energy.
So I plant and tend, and when the weather cools off in the evenings, I walk out to the vegetable garden just for the pleasure of seeing the plants grow. It’s a happy, peaceful place. I feel very fortunate to have a patch of earth for gardening and that my body still works well enough to help things grow. The promise of life emerging from the earth is enlivening. And within a few weeks or months, all that effort will turn into food. I can already taste the gazpacho!
40: (June 2005)
What do oil and hunger have to do with each other? Everything. I recently read The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: Waking Up to Personal and Global Transformation, by Thom Hartmann. It explains the connection between oil and hunger quite masterfully and has changed the way I think about the world and my place in it.
Essentially, it’s about how we are going to run out of oil in a relatively short time, probably within the lifetime of most of the non-elderly people currently alive. I had heard about this from other spheres, but this book brought it home to me. It clearly lays out the consequences of our historical and current rate of oil consumption, which has enabled us to produce food at an accelerated pace. This has, in turn, increased worldwide population dramatically, while at the same time radically altering the physical face of the earth.
We are now in a position whereby lack of oil ultimately means famine. Widespread famine. That stirred me much more powerfully than just thinking that less oil will mean less driving. Maybe it had to get to my stomach to wake me up to the reality and gravity of the situation. It had to hit me on a visceral level to make it move from an abstract concept to a potential reality.
I do not have the expertise to get into the specifics of the oil shortage or the possible energy alternatives. There are alternatives being developed, and we need to become educated about them and proactive about their use. But what fascinated me most about Hartmann’s book was that after a straightforward scientific explanation of the energy crisis in the first part of the book, the solutions posed in the latter half were primarily about changing our worldview. Global changes will not occur unless we are each, individually, open to internal transformation; that is, to changes in our expectations and in how we are in relationship with the earth and with each other.
I saw a documentary film on the oil shortage, and one of its conclusions was that we are going to have to “think small,” as in thinking locally; we must think locally in order to be responsible globally. Less driving, less waste, less buying. More involvement in growing our own food and buying locally grown products. Smaller schools, smaller homes. It sounded good to me. There is so much frenzy in our culture. Frenzy created by feeling the need for more: more variety, more opportunity, more space, more things. When anything gets out of balance, sooner or later the laws of nature come into play, and something happens to eventually bring things center again. Hopefully we can get to center without having to experience worldwide famine in the process.
60-40:
Here we are 20 years later, and I just heard on the news this week that there is an overabundance of oil in the world. Go figure. I’m not convinced that there has been that much global transformation with respect to our relationship with oil or alternative energy sources. If anything, it seems like as a whole, there is more consumption and a continued drive to make things bigger, faster, easier.
All I can do is my best to continue learning and trying to make small differences. So I garden, eat primarily plants, endeavor to reduce, reuse, recycle, etc. Small, individual acts, all local.
I walked out to the vegetable garden today for a few minutes to check on the plants and saw a deer staring at me from the edge of the pasture. I talked softly to her, and she stayed for a few precious moments before walking into the forest. I felt a kinship to her, connected by the fact that we both eat from plants that grow on our shared land — mine cultivated, hers anything she wants on the other side of the veggie fence! It was almost certainly she who I witnessed nursing her one-day-old fawn last month. The felt connection to this wild animal feeds me, brings me joy. Good food for the soul.
60-40 