Time Vampires

Not much has happened on the gardening front since my last post. Planning, reading and thinking yes, but no ground has been broken, no seeds have been purchased. The usual time vampires suck at my most precious resource and to be honest by the end of most days I’m so spent that even if I do find a little extra time, the thought of putting spade to earth isn’t appealing in the least unless, of course, we’re speaking metaphorically!

I’m currently reading two books, Michael Pollen’s In Defense of Food and Gardening When it Counts, by Steve Solomon. Pollen’s book in particular tends to get me following mental tangents. One such mental tour had me mulling the relationship between how we spend our time and how we eat.

Like anything else that we wish to “do well” eating well requires discipline which demands time and effort. You just don’t decide you’re going to start eating well one day and begin shopping at the "Eat Well” grocer the next. Besides the time you spend procuring and preparing nutritious food, "how" you eat it also takes time. One wouldn’t think that finding the time to eat well would be too hard but when you’re so harried that fundamentals like a good night’s sleep or finding intimate time for your children or spouse are overlooked, the temptation to reach for a frozen pizza can become pretty overwhelming. The real problem is that once we start basing our food choices on convenience we don’t use the time we free up well. A quick and easy dinner doesn’t mean more time with the kids or a more reasonable bed time, it just enables us to keep whittling away at outside commitments.

I bring this up because I’m increasingly beginning to think that the ready availability of cheap and easy calories is one factor fundamentally undermining the fabric of American family life. As a kid growing up, I remember sitting around a table and eating dinner most nights of the week. I can tell you that when eight people sit down to a meal you tend to store a lot of memories. One of my most vivid is the perpetual look of dismay on my poor father’s face as six kids gobbled up piles of food! I’m not sure of the rest of my siblings, but this always made me keenly aware of both the effort it took to put the food there and how fortunate I was to have parents who provided it. Anyway my point is that setting and clearing a dinner table where we ate together took time and effort. Time and effort that led to a greater appreciation of the food I was eating, the parents who provided it and the family I shared it with. Time and effort that I can’t imagine would have been spent if our meals routinely consisted of frozen pizza.