Reading "A Veggie Venture" today, I found a wonderful praise of the people who bring us our food in America, inspired by shelling black eyed peas (a 17 minute meditation).

How far we've come from the source of our food sustenance. Sure, I bought these from my local farmers market - I even 'walked' to the market. But what I didn't do was:

• Leave my homeland and family seeking personal freedom or economic opportunity
• Cross mountains and rivers and prairies to find affordable farmland

Follow the link to read the entire essay (and recipe)!

Was it the "Little House" books that started my awareness? Alanna, who writes the wonderful blog Veggie Venture, lives in St. Louis, where those settlers often passed through. Here in New England we are reminded by the stone walls and the rocks that are still in our soil how hard those early farmers had to work to grow food for their own subsistence, let alone to feed a village or have enough for the markets in town.

The need to return to the soil is strong. In recent times, people grew Victory Gardens during World War II. In the 60's, communes and "back to the land" inspired me to grow my own garden, as big as a neighbor and I could handle. (Where were the men?) Rodale's Organic Gardening magazine was an inspiration, along with Ruth Stout's book on gardening "without an aching back." Moving into the world of selling commercial produce made the garden redundant, but now that we're no longer suppliers we are again consumers. We are happy to support the CSA's and farmers markets that have sprouted and multiplied, putting us close to the soil again, one step removed. Support them -- we need them!

My toothpaste and DNA

Jay has had DNA testing done as part of the Genographic Project
out of a desire to look into his family's past. It took them back to the Rift Valley 50,000 years ago, up to 20,000 years ago in Europe. Fascinating as this is, it leaves a lot of time blank. Ultimately we want our ancestors to tell us about ourselves. Now he's working back from the known present, learning a lot about people still in memory. Wonderful stories, interesting relationships -- there's a rich history in a relatively short time.

I am thinking about this now because I have found an amazing fact: 10% of all toothpaste goes unused (thank you, Ideal Bite)! I immediately followed their lead, cut open my apparently empty tube, and there it was -- all that potentially wasted toothpaste (and it was the good stuff, Neem TP from Organix South). Of course I rescued it...there's something in my DNA, no doubt, that won't let me waste: toothpaste, or water, or the blank sides of papers... At least it gives me an inborn urge to save the Earth!