Living-Deliberately.com

Last night I dreamed that I’d learned how to bake the most amazing French bread…it had a crusty outside and a tender interior, at once pillowy and chewy and warm. In the dream I took them from the oven, smelled them, thumped them and heard the hollow reply. I wiped flour dusted hands on a coarse, canvasy apron. When I ate the bread, I think the crust was salty. For a hungry girl eating too much sushi and drinking too much coffee, this was a most tantalizing dream. Hedonistic bread indeed.

This morning the newspaper spelled the usual doom and gloom. Are all the papers around the country like this right now? This one, The Florida Times Union, seems to never fail to have some enormously dreary story, displaying the minutia of economic backlash, on the front page. “Attention! Attention! Read All About It! Times Are Tough!” (as if we didn’t already know?) It might be a story on how restaurants are scaling back on portions or beef…today it was lean offering plates and the Wheat shortage.

I wonder though. Food has been priced artificially low in the country for a very long time. We are a nation dependent on corn and wheat and their many created bi-products (Twinkies and Corn Flakes anyone?). And sure less wheat is being grown as farmers shift to corn for ethanol. But grains have been in surplus in the past and subsidies, resulting in farmers making more from their government check than a harvested crop, have been a real problem. So I wonder…is this rise in expense/decrease in supply necessarily a “crisis”?

Looking at native diets around the world, it doesn’t take long to find cultures that live quite healthfully with something other than corn and wheat as their daily bread. We can even look into our own country, where corn and wheat allergies are increasingly rampant, to find very healthy and happy people who never eat the stuff.

So what if flour costs more? It’s not as essential as gas or other food right now. Americans can probably eat less of it and be just fine. Yes, milk and oats and fruit and everything else is costing more too….I’m not saying there isn’t a problem. I guess what I’m questioning is if this particular change, which may just be a healthful one, is really dire and is really front page news.

I realize that I’m thinking out loud here rather than offering a solution. I’m considering. I know that while I kick and scream and cuss over how much money it takes to fill my gas tank, feeling duped by politicians and foreigners, I don’t have the same reaction to food prices. On the other side of the grocery store are farmers working very hard for their living to feed a public that mostly takes them for granted. It’s going to cost to eat, either in money or sweat and land.

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