GETTING LETTUCE
The biggest difference between getting into an expensive SUV with expensive tires, expensive fuel and costly insurance (to say nothing of loan interest and depreciation) to spend an hour or so driving there and back through a smog of hazardous traffic salted with road rage to find a parking space in the vast lot of the megamall with the airplane-hangar supermarket where with money I earn at a job in an office I commute to daily I can purchase some expensive, inorganic, agribusiness-grown, Monsanto Roundup®ped and irradiated lettuce picked 4 or more days ago by a city block of a machine on the other side of the continent and shipped 3 or more days ago in refrigerated containers filled with antiripening gases and antifungal whatevers via expensive train and expensive truck also using expensive fuel and operated 24/7 by sleepless guys day and night across the nation to get the lettuce near where I can buy it and so support the vast vegetable infrastructure by having some salad for lunch, and just going right now, on my own two legs, out into the sunny afternoon of my organic garden that I have nurtured with my own two hands and getting some lettuce whenever I want it, is, apart from the sheer simplicity, untampered flavor, freshness, beauty and natural satisfaction of it all (to say nothing of the non-toxicity), is the refreshing absence of the madness so deeply ingrained in the former approach.
The biggest difference between getting into an expensive SUV with expensive tires, expensive fuel and costly insurance (to say nothing of loan interest and depreciation) to spend an hour or so driving there and back through a smog of hazardous traffic salted with road rage to find a parking space in the vast lot of the megamall with the airplane-hangar supermarket where with money I earn at a job in an office I commute to daily I can purchase some expensive, inorganic, agribusiness-grown, Monsanto Roundup®ped and irradiated lettuce picked 4 or more days ago by a city block of a machine on the other side of the continent and shipped 3 or more days ago in refrigerated containers filled with antiripening gases and antifungal whatevers via expensive train and expensive truck also using expensive fuel and operated 24/7 by sleepless guys day and night across the nation to get the lettuce near where I can buy it and so support the vast vegetable infrastructure by having some salad for lunch, and just going right now, on my own two legs, out into the sunny afternoon of my organic garden that I have nurtured with my own two hands and getting some lettuce whenever I want it, is, apart from the sheer simplicity, untampered flavor, freshness, beauty and natural satisfaction of it all (to say nothing of the non-toxicity), is the refreshing absence of the madness so deeply ingrained in the former approach.
