Conscience

Day 63

23 July 2009

Today I managed to avoid going to the supermarket to buy food. I went to the Greengrocer, the Fishmonger (which were conveniently located next door to eachother), and the baker.

When I went into the fishmonger to buy some salmon, I asked if it was local. I was told that it was farmed. It looked and smelled fresh, and, as we later discovered, tasted good. That's saying something - I generally avoid eating fish because I don't enjoy it that much due to having to fiddle about with removing bones. I also don't really like the taste. But why have a fishmonger by the sea, and get farmed fish to sell in your shop? I'm not criticising the owner of the shop, really, but I don't understand why people can't just have what they're given the choice of having. Myself included. Salmon is one of the few fish I don't mind eating. I am OK ish with mackeral, which was local, but I tend to have an apathy towards eating fish. One of the other reasons is that generally, fishing is an over-subscribed resource which we need to curb before our aquatic friends no longer swim freely in our seas.

The Greengrocer had a lovely big watermelon, which my daughter kept pestering me to buy. I agreed in the end because we don't eat it that often, and hot summery days go hand in hand with watermelon, don't they? That lovely cool flesh, the sugary watery taste, the sticky hands, and digging out the seeds to make necklaces!

But watermelons are not exactly local to Purbeck, are they? Again, I'm not criticising the greengrocer, as he does sell a lot of locally-grown produce, but why do we take it for granted that we can eat the stuff that's been flown or shipped thousands of miles to get to our shops?

What is it about our culture that now expects to see the most exotic of foods on our supermarket shelves? Why do local small businesses feel they have to compete with the supermarkets to sell their produce, when there are people like me who actively seek out locally grown, seasonal foods to buy and avoid the supermarkets where possible?

The most annoying thing out of all of this is the food waste. My daughter, having tasted the watermelon she kept on at me to buy, decided that actually, she didn't like it. The fish suffered a similar fate - she got bored of eating half-way through her lunch and tried to leave her food on the plate without finishing it. I asked her to finish the fish, reminding her that the Salmon had died so that she could eat it, and to leave it was a waste and wrong. She ate it. Luckily we no longer waste much food, as we compost alot of our veg waste, and generally our plates are empty at the end of the meal. But I am finding I get a guilty feeling inside when I throw away meat or fish that didn't get eaten. After all, that animal or fish was killed so that we could eat a bit of it before realising we've got eyes bigger than our bellies.

Maybe we should have a bigger conscience and a smaller appetite.