This entry was originally posted at Community Cucina, the local food blog that I write (and reference in this post).
I just got off an amazing phone call. It was an environmental organizing phone call about the tar sands and how to stop the Keystone XL pipeline from growing any further. I heard from Kandi Mossett of the Indigenous Environmental Action Network, several members of the Energy Action Coalition, students taking time off from school to organize the climate movement, and Bill McKibben who is one of my long-time heroes and founder of 350.org. I'd forgotten how much hope and energy a single phone call, one in which you're one of 145 and don't say a single word, can bring. I used to get on these calls a lot as an organizer in college, but I'd taken a step back for awhile to work on my writing and pursue different things. I took my first step back into the fray tonight and it was awesome.
And horrifying. Just as I forgot how much hope we can generate, I'd forgotten a little about the despair. It's easy to overlook if your life is pretty comfortable, as mine is. I'd forgotten just how much work there is to do and how quickly we need to do it.
But what does that have to do with a cooking blog?
Well, the roots of this blog are in sustainability. I look to local farmers, foragers, and cheesemakers as much as I can as a way to celebrate the bounty of where I live and as a way to feed myself and those I care about clean, healthy food. Food that is essential to life, the food that nourishes us, makes us strong, helps us heal when we're sick, food whose origins I can trace, food that is safe. But we can't have safe, clean food without safe, clean water, which leads back to clean energy, with the tar sands and fracking foremost on my mind tonight.