Two stories:
I went to a local farm recently to pick strawberries. We drove about 10 miles outside town up to a plateau called Greenbluff and after some poking around, found a farm with several fields of U-Pick strawberries.
My friends and I went to the small shack by the fields and picked up our flat, white-slatted crates with handles to carry the berries. We elected to walk to our field instead of taking a ride in the rigged-out tractor. I guess people didn't want to walk by the strawberry fields for 300 feet to get to their strawberry patches. Whatever.
We picked merrily for an hour and then decided we'd had our fill and our crates were full of berries, so we decided to call it quits. We walked back (all the way!), retrieved our wallets and went to the shack to pay.
And then standing there, without even thinking, I turned into Obnoxious American.
I began asking the lady questions about the berries. Are they organic? Have they been sprayed? When was the last time they were sprayed? Oh, so you did spray then? Do you remember the type of spray? Was it a light spray? A heavy spray? I couldn't stop.
All of this was transpiring as I was paying for my berries, the most luscious amazing berries I had eaten in over a year. Instead of saying, "THANK YOU! You have given me back the sensation and flavor of eating this most amazing of all fruits!" .... Oh no... no, instead of doing that nice, civil thing, I made her instead feel like an outlaw on her own farm. I can still see her meekly saying, "The plants were in a pre-bud stage so no fruit should have been been actually sprayed..."
Who the hell do I suddenly think I am?
I read "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and now suddenly everyone is a suspect in my own personal Food War, including the local farmers? And who am I to talk? I've eaten strawberries from California so electrified with pesticides that the seeds are glowing. And I still ate them, and they still tasted like cardboard. So here I am, grilling a local farmer on why they sprayed once in February?... In the snow?? I was so sick of myself, truly, walking back to my giant car, the irony not lost in the least on me as I spent a few more gallons of gasoline to get back to the city.
Two weeks later, I am at a produce stand. It's a large one up on 40th and Regal, full of amazing fruits and vegetables, much of it organic. I'm standing and selecting things when Annoying American's cousin shows up, Snotty Bratty Blond American.
She began peppering the attendant with questions. Is this local? What do you mean then by local? Is it from here? How far away is the farm? When will you have things here that are really local? Is this pepper I'm pointing at in this fridge - right here, come here - is that local? Are you sure?
I stand holding my lovely organic peaches and sigh. What first-world assholes so many of us have become. We love to have what we want when we want it and how we want it. We read something once and proceed to assault everyone with our flawed, puny knowledge while at the same time, demanding that new thing, instantly.
I wonder sometimes if everyone that has a small business is someday just going to call it quits. That the business owners that have to deal with the general public, someday they might just say, "You know what, screw this." And then, when there are no more stores, in all of our snottiness we can enjoy the One Store. You know, the megastore that has replaced all other stores, located somewhere we'll never go, where you just order everything online and the people on the other end are as rude to us as we are to them.
We won't ever have to worry about getting our shoes dusty walking down strawberry rows or wondering if our fruit was lightly sprayed. We can pick out exactly what we want, perfectly, and have it delivered right to our houses, our hermetically-sealed caves of wonderfulness.
It will be what we have been asking for all along, and it will be what we deserve if we can't figure out how to remember to keep loving the people around us more than what new thing we think we need to make our lives more amazing, more perfect, more eternal.
I am so tired of myself and too much thinking... I'm off to eat some strawberries.
