Everything Tastes Better in NOLA

I think that choosing what to eat has been a point of anxiety for me throughout my life largely because I have always known so many people who identify politically through their diet. Vegans, vegetarians, gluten-free, locavores, and freegans have always been part of my social circle and the ways that this can break down into political fights, frequently of the 'holier than thou' order, is something I've always found to be exhausting and at this point in my life, this kinds of debates are thoroughly overdone. I was a vegetarian for a period of time, mostly because I thought (and still do) that it is one of the easiest ways for people to make an environmental impact through their food choices—the factory farms, the corn that feeds the animals in the factory farms, and the entire petroleum-based system of transit is certainly something that the environment (and people that live in the immediate vicinity of these facilities or downstream) could do without. Still, it seems like shouting into the void because the system is really massive and I don't harbor any illusions that my individual choices really put a dent into the bottom line of industrial agriculture.

This might be why Pete Singer, the author of The Ethics of What We Eat, promotes vegetarianism from a philosophical standpoint but still said that the meal that he ate that was prepared from materials taken from a dumpster was the most ethical meal of all—freeganism and dumpstering allow people to live on the excesses that capitalism produces. It also means that they aren't putting money of any kind into the system, which makes this kind of lifestyle a lot hard to fold back into capitalism. BUT I don't exactly feel like digging through dumpsters or like taking the risk that can sometimes come from eating food from dumpsters—also, it has been my experience that the very act of choosing to embrace freeganism is a mark of privilege. I've worked with various food justice causes over the past five years and it is really hard for me to ignore the fact that a lot of people go hungry in the United States by no choice of their own. It's even harder for me to shake the conviction that people who are poor should not have to scavenge food daily from dumpsters.

Labor issues are also really important to me and this drives me further away from 'the foods movement' because the fact that switching to smaller family farms would impact what little rights farmworkers have through OSHA is constantly ignored under the pretenses that the foods movement is 'doing good.' I don't want to insinuate that the foods movement is not 'doing good,' because I think that it is doing a lot of good. I do think, however, that whatever good the foods movement does has to include rights for farmworkers as more than lip service and as an integral part of their platforms. So I would make an effort to support something like the Domestic Fair Trade Association because it incorporates farmworker rights as required for sustainable production systems instead of as an ancillory fact.

As you guys can see, this is getting really long and I don't really think about all of these things every single time that I eat. In reality, what immediately impacts my decisions about what to eat centers around convenience, cost, and what I feel like eating. So I've been in New Orleans (where I'm moving when I graduate) the past several days and I've really been enjoying the food (and enjoying the food in New Orleans is unquestionably one of the biggest reasons that I'm not a vegetarian anymore). I've heard so many people say that the United States does not have a real food tradition—which is not true of New Orleans. I've enjoyed Fried Catfish Po-Boys (this is actually my favorite thing to eat) because they are really conveniently available at most corner stores and they are affordable—my friend and I split a 12 inch sandwich that we bought for $6. I've had boudin (because I can't visit southern Louisiana and not have any) which is not as conveniently available but is frequently found in the French Quarter for reasonable prices ($5 at Thirteen—a Marigny establishment with some of the few vegetarian options available in New Orleans). The barbeque here is amazing! New Orleans is also a heavy drinking city, so I'm still refusing to think about how much I've been drinking because it hurts my feelings. So today we decided that we should probably eat some vegetables (which you actually have to try to do here) and we made an enormous salad—none of the ingredients were organic because it's really inconvenient to find organic food here (although they are turning the old 5^th precinct police department into a co-op which will make organic food available in the 9^th Ward).