MARYJANESFARM DESIGNER CAROL HILL SHARES THE STORY OF HER “ORGANIC CONVERSION”

As a “big girl,” I’ve often heard myself referred to as a “healthy eater.” In American terms, this usually means that you either have a real love of food, or you just plain eat too much. When I was growing up in the middle of the corn-belt in the ’50s, the current thinking about “healthy eating” was to eat three solid meals a day that included lots of meat, starch, fats and desserts, and good whole milk, which at our house came delivered by my Dad in a pail directly from the barn! And we always cleaned our plates no matter what. You knew that if you didn’t, somehow some small child in a country far away would starve because of it. Even though I didn’t have weight issues then, I can assure you that no little child ever starved because of me! (If we only would have known then that cleaning our plates really didn’t have anything to do with those starving children, but that more moderate consumption in our society would have gone a long way toward helping feed the rest of the world.)

As an adult, I continued to think of myself as a “healthy eater.” After all, I spent many years perfecting recipes, pouring over cookbooks, and cooking wonderful dinners for my family and friends. And when my son came along, I was very careful to use lots of whole grains, fresh vegetables and fruits, and avoid things like white sugar and soft drinks. I still subscribed to the “three squares a day,” but now they consisted of less processed food, no desserts, and never, ever more than two percent milk.

A couple of years ago, when MaryJane asked me to help with her magazine, I started to think about what “healthy eating” really was. I started learning about pesticides and what they do to your food and your body. I read the articles in the first issue of MaryJanesFarm about how washing your fruits and vegetables doesn’t get rid of pesticides and about how they’re linked to Parkinson’s disease and cancer. While working on my first issue of MaryJanesFarm, I read about Mad Cow Disease and went to the website we listed for more information, www.purefood.org. I go there regularly now, and tell my friends about it as well, but always with a warning: if you aren’t prepared to change the way you think about food, you might not want to look. It’s hard to continue to eat non-organic meat and genetically modified foods when you start to read about what really happens to the food we find on our grocery store shelves.

I also listened to MaryJane talk about the value of food, and how in our society we are conditioned to think that cheaper is better, and that somehow we are entitled to cheap food. We all like a bargain, don’t we? Why would we want to buy green peppers at the local co-op for $3.98 per pound, when we could pick them up at the super store down the road for 10 for a dollar? But, I started to learn that peppers at 10 for a dollar always come to us at the expense of someone else — it’s either the farmer who struggles to make a living competing with huge agri-business or the farm laborer who is exploited by that same megacorp. Then I started to think about the worth of our wonderful vegetables grown at the farm. When I see the beautiful pepper plants that are so lovingly planted in our little greenhouse, and see that each of those plants produces a precious few peppers, I realize that my 10 for a dollar peppers just translated into about five dollars for the whole row!

Okay, I got it — I had a new appreciation for the worth of vegetables, and happily paid whatever my co-op felt their beautiful organic vegetables were worth. But lurking in the meat case (yes, they carry meat, but only organic local beef, pork and chicken), was yet another lesson in food value. One night, I had a genuine craving for chicken. I’d been eating mostly fish from our local fish seller (actually, we have a traveling fish truck, The Fish Folks, that comes to town once a week with wonderful fresh fish from Seattle), and yearned for the taste of something different. Since my conversion to organic eating, I didn’t look in the meat case much, as I thought the prices for organic meat were extravagantly high. But in anticipation of a scrumptious chicken dinner, I thought I would splurge. To my dismay, there weren’t any of those handy packages of boneless chicken breasts I was used to finding in the supermarket. No packages of legs, thighs, or even cut-up half-chickens — only a whole frozen chicken! But I was determined, so I leaned in to see what it cost. Hmmm, seven dollars. All of a sudden something happened. I thought of the little Rhode Island Reds running around back at the farm, pecking and scratching in the flowers, leaving us beautiful little brown eggs. I thought about the joy they give us every day as we laugh at their antics. And even though I could still think of their kin as dinner occasionally, I just couldn’t imagine that their worth could be set at seven dollars! After all, one of those same chickens could produce an egg a day for most of its life. Well, I can’t say that I didn’t buy that seven-dollar chicken, but what I did do was portion it into four dinners, which I froze and ate sparingly with new-found appreciation.

Two years after I started really learning about food choices and food value, I’m happy to say that I’m now buying nearly 100 percent organic. And it helps to have a local Farmers’ Market. I still eat out occasionally, and when I do, I don’t think about whether or not it’s organic, as we just don’t have those choices in our small town. But I can say that when I go to the local grocery store for those non-food items that I can’t find at my local co-op, I can easily pass up every aisle except for the small organic section. Now I feel that I’m truly a “healthy eater.” Have I lost weight? Not yet … there is an astonishing array of snacks and desserts available even in a co-op, but I know that I’m well on my way to better health.