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One Person’s View of Sustainability Print E-mail

March 3, 2010
Denise Simmons, Corporate Chef


The buzz word ‘Sustainability’ has been around for some time now.  I sometimes feel that businesses are making up the rules of what’s sustainable, or what sustainability means, as they go along…mostly to sell more of their product or services.

I like to think of the sustainability movement as a desire to go back in time to a simpler era, having gained the knowledge & experience of what it’s like to live post industrial revolution.  Sustainability to me, as corny as it sounds, brings to mind Little House on the Prairie.  Life was simple; you took care of your land, because it took care of you.  You ate what you produced, and canned or dried products when they were in season so that you could have enough food to make it through the long winter months.  I don’t ever recall an episode of the show where they imported peaches from Chile so that they could enjoy a fresh peach in January.  If they had a taste for peaches during the winter, they went to their pantry & opened a jar of peach preserves, grown on their land & canned in their kitchens.

My hope for the future is that we continue to move back to a way of eating similar to that era.  Let’s not have planes, trains & automobiles burning fossil fuel & trailing greenhouse gases in their wake so that we can have a strawberry grown in South America in the middle of winter.   I’ve had those strawberries…they’re picked weeks before they’re ripe, gassed to keep their color, then packed, shipped and delivered throughout the world over the next three weeks…and they taste like sour cucumbers!  Wouldn’t we rather open a jar of strawberry preserves, and enjoy a fleeting memory of being back in warm summer, with the sun shining on us as we pick the berries we used to make the preserves.  Or am I just a romantic who thinks long dresses & bonnets are cool?

 

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