“When I was a young man in prison here we had cows and chickens and gardens. We could work in these places. Produced all our own food. Milk, eggs, butter, meat, vegetables, fruits. We were food self-sufficient doing a version of eco-conservation.”
But Lamar Alexander put a stop to all that, didn’t he?
“Yes, he did. But there was a lot of good in that program. People could work off their sentences much more quickly. There might’ve been some corruption, but there was also a lot more hope and interaction with the community as well as interaction with each other that was constructive. I came out of there a chef and I’ve been a chef my whole life since.”
My friend Orlando lives in the same apartment building as me. I can’t say we’re close, but we have had a few interesting conversations, the above being the most interesting. I now know that not only senior programs but the prisons and most food services that offer food to the poor or homeless are offering institutional food that was prepared in a giant factory. How can this possibly be sustainable? There must be someone getting a big payoff on the front end.
Many times, people think, “We must do something.” This is something. Therefore we must do it.
And then Iago comes along with the perfect solution. He and his friends can get rich off of our stupidity.
What in the world does this factory produced food actually accomplish besides making things more complex, more energy consumptive, and disempowering the people who are involved in whatever system it is? The seniors at the senior center continually complain about the food. It tends to be overcooked by the time it gets to us, and I must say if we had some people in the kitchen cooking for us, we could really have some great meals with simple food. There is even enough room in the parks to create a garden that would provide, at least fresh salads and fruits and vegetables.
So how can we make things more local, simpler, and less energy consumptive? It would take our entire city of people to start looking at where the money goes. All that money that is spent on producing factory produced food for us could be spent paying people to do far more local production.
There seems to be a dearth of decent jobs in this city that actually pay enough for people to be able to live here. I couldn’t. We have complexes where people both live and produce in the same exact area? People could have market gardens, goats, chickens. There could be a traditional clubhouse as well as a bar and some area where people can experiment with making useful products for their community. We could pay decent living wages. All this money merely needs to be redirected toward this purpose.
Orlando said, “You really do tell it like it is, Gma!”
What do you think? You can write to me at editorial@thecontributor.org.