Wheelbarrowing

Alongside the echoing green and swelling buds, every spring the Environmental Working Group releases its “Dirty Dozen” list.  These are the twelve vegetables and fruits with the highest levels of pesticide residue.  Note that it’s the twelve dirtiest, not the only twelve that are dirty. 

EWG’s 2024 Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce | Summary

Leafy greens, pears, peppers, green beans.  Nearly always at the top of the list is strawberries.  They sound less tasty when paired with chlorpyrifos, fludioxonil, and pyrimethanil.  They identified 209 different pesticides on the dirty dozen.  Science endlessly argues what levels are safe for consumption. 

The potential contamination of our precious bodily fluids is not all.  The EWG annually acknowledges that farmworkers invariably experience the brunt of the risk.  Many stay lathered in these fungicides and are subject to, among other things, extensive DNA damage.  The cost of neurological impairment in farmworkers’ children is not factored into the price of a quart of strawberries.  That’s a bitter aftertaste.

The technical argumentation over whether consumers intake of dangerous chemicals surpasses certain thresholds pales, it seems to me, beside the moral quandary of our sustenance depending on a sacrificial population of poisoned, unseen people.  It’s disgraceful that this is still the state of human affairs.  Modern conveniences are laced with inconvenient truths.

While we cannot totally extricate ourselves from the inexorable flow of economic externalization, when it comes to strawberries and green beans, we have a fairly clear path to rectifying this rapacious relationship with our nourishment.

Rather than measuring poison residue, we wheelbarrow compost.  Strawberries are often sensational.  No toxic spills.  Exploitation seems insane; creatures in this community are sweet and generous as the earth.  Our feasts are homegrown.  We serve and thank each other abundantly, sharing surplus.  Ours is not a banquet supplied by the unseen and unacknowledged.  Our waste is compost, in a regenerative cycle.

In reclaiming a right relationship, we triumph and grieve together.  We eat, we don’t consume.  While we don’t solve the world’s problems, we diligently work at the problems of a particular place on earth.  An unabashedly biased observer, I assert that, though most injustice remains intractable and we’re ever complicit, in this one essential way of life—eating—we have a way to live by love.  Why choose instead the devil’s bargain’s cheap, dirty dozen?

Feeling febrile

Feeling anew the resurgence of spring fever is somehow surprising every year.  I love the dormant season, slow as a tree, revolving around wood and books, and I hold fast to my hibernation.  With some fear and trembling, I anticipate the turning tide after winter solstice, soon and very soon to be carried away by the whirlwind lives of annual, ephemeral plants.

Then, again, like ever, spring swells with its glowing greens and hopeful buds.  The fever and the lengthening light melt away William Blake’s “mind-forg’d manacles.”  Life wants to live.  Eternal delight.  Songs of experience will come, but in spring we sing songs of innocence, joining all the excited birds.

Come and eat where birds build nests, where dirty is a good thing, the opposite of poison.

Language Arts

Congratulations to Clark!  A year ago, he set a goal of making it onto the podium for the statewide middle school Governor’s Cup.  Five categories are tested, and the top ten finishers in each category are recognized.  Clark decided he would master Language Arts and trained like a champion. He placed first in his district competition, then first in his region, and finally third place in the state championship.  He was awarded a huge trophy and shook Governor Beshear’s hand. What a great thrill to see a dream realized.

The day before his decisive test we read together Blake’s “The Lamb.”  It happened to come up on the test, and it sweetly sings an innocent spring song:

Little Lamb who made thee 

         Dost thou know who made thee 

Gave thee life & bid thee feed. 

By the stream & o’er the mead;

Gave thee clothing of delight,

Softest clothing wooly bright;

Gave thee such a tender voice,

Making all the vales rejoice! 

         Little Lamb who made thee 

         Dost thou know who made thee 

         Little Lamb I’ll tell thee,

         Little Lamb I’ll tell thee!

He is called by thy name,

For he calls himself a Lamb: 

He is meek & he is mild, 

He became a little child: 

I a child & thou a lamb, 

We are called by his name.

         Little Lamb God bless thee. 

         Little Lamb God bless thee.