Sustainable Tarpon Springs - Happy Turkey Day!

Although ‘Happy Turkey Day’ has become culturally synonymous with ‘Happy Thanksgiving’ - it has never been a phrase to resonate with me personally.  I have been a vegetarian since my high school years, and I am now a vegan so I think of a Happy Turkey as a Living Turkey.  Beyond that, I still felt a deep appreciation for the day reserved for collectively giving thanks and recalling everything it took for our ancestors to come to the New World.  Actually remembering to be thankful seems to be an important tradition to retain - no matter if one partakes of the traditional foods or not.

We also owe a deep debt of gratitude to the Natives of this land who had the compassion to help us survive the first years of settling in this strangely new and wild land.  I’m certain they were meat eaters, but they also had a very different relationship to the wild life that surrounded them.  They felt as connected to all creatures as they did to the Earth, and nothing was ever wasted but was part of a grand cycle of life and death that extended into their spirituality.

In 2012, with most of our Thanksgiving shopping being done in corporate grocery stores, we’ve all but lost connection to the process of raising or growing our own food, or even observing the cycles of nature responsible for growth.  Without considering where our food originates, how it was grown or raised, the distances it travels to arrive at the stores where we shop, and whether it is really ‘food’ or not, the realities elude many of us.  If you have the chance to see any of several documentaries about this process, it is truly an awakening that can change your life forever.  Food, Inc. was one of those recent films exposing the nitty-gritty of the current ‘corporate industrial food complex’, including the exploitation of resources, soil, and farmers.  Eating anything spawned from this system is not worthy of ‘thanks’ but instead should be cause for deep concern at every level.  

Some of us are old enough to remember a Chiffon margarine commercial that ends with ‘It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature’ and a resounding crack of thunder!  Looking back on that advertisement, it seems prophetic.  We think we can fool Mother Nature, but in the end, we may have created an environment where we cannot survive.  Mother Nature will revive, but will we?  Perhaps this is the year for a New Year’s resolution - starting NOW - that we will become more connected to our food sources, as never before.  

This Thanksgiving, my wish for us all is a revival of appreciation for the process of natural food growth - from the miracle of seed germination, to the wisdom of cooperating with nature to create systems where pesticides aren’t needed.  And the realization that whether or not we choose to eat meat, we should know what kind of life that animal had, and own a deeper sense of accountability for our entire relationship to food.  A simple such goal will change us forever!  It is the most vital consideration in becoming sustainable.  May our next Thanksgiving have at least 10% of food that is locally grown, where you know your farmer!  Yours Truly wishes you a meaningful, heartfelt, and beautiful Thanksgiving!