Priorities Big Food, Big Garden, Big Life


Eleven ingredients (not including those in the made-from-scratch vinaigrette dressing)

4 varieties of lettuce (oak leaf, butter crunch, some French red leaf, & some German sort)

Broccoli raab

Beet thinnings

Celery leaves & flowers

2 varieties of radishes (China rose & …?)

Yellow granex onion (an official Vidalia onion)

Micro-green flowers

Erika Johnson at Hot Air has a post concerning “food deserts” (so-called). Quoting from Bloomberg, Johnson reports that several large chain grocery stores have reneged on their commitment to opening “more than 1,000 stores selling fresh fruit and vegetables in underserved urban neighborhoods.”

Johnson says, “This is yet another example of nanny-state bureaucrats ignoring the laws of supply and demand and attacking the symptoms instead of the disease.” Agreed. She notes a NYT’s report of a study dispelling the correlation between food deserts and obesity. She then goes on to say,

Secondly, if there really aren’t many healthy foods to be found in these areas, it’s only because there isn’t a market for them. For whatever reason, people in these areas do not want to buy fresh-caught scallops and broccoli sprouts. The likeliest over-arching explanation is indeed low-income levels — having the time and money to plan, shop for, and cook nice healthful meals is a luxury that comes with prosperity — but spending taxpayer money to merely improve access to these communities’ foods isn’t going to change that.

[My emphasis]

I agree with her with respect to the market and government intrusion. But I take issue with her bold assertion. I believe it contains all of the correct words– they are just incorrectly ordered/connected.

Time. Money. Plan. Shop. Cook. Nice. Healthful. Meals. ~~Luxury~~. Prosperity.

Replace “luxury” with “necessities,” and here’s what I come up with.

Taking the time to plan, shop, and cook nice meals at home saves money and is more healthful, both necessities if one wishes to live a life of prosperity.

BAZINGA.

It’s all about setting Priorities.

3 Responses

They’d get a lot farther in their goals if they’d reintroduce “Home Ec” in junior high and high school. Young people today don’t seem to know how to cook. At _all_.

I don’t want to get into the long story, but my sister works summers at a Catholic organization that hosts high schoolers and college students for 2 week periods, during which they go out and work locally to make homes safe and insulated for those who can’t afford it. She runs the kitchen, and the young people take turns being her “staff”. Much of her job entails teaching them how to cook. Everything is from scratch. Her favorite story is how one young woman, on being told to make a cake, and then being told that they didn’t use box mixes responded with “You mean you can make a cake with the things you have in your cupboards”?

Well…at least she was aware that cakes could be made from box mixes. That’s a start, I guess.

A couple of years ago,I chatted with a lady in a supermarket who was in her 40s (I’d guess) who was looking for a pan. It seems that she’d decided to bake something and had no equipment – she’d never fixed anything that wasn’t just simply microwaveable. Yowzes.
Unbelievable. I _swear_ she was in her early 40s.