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Earth Day has once again come and gone, We can’t say we did much of anything to celebrate, because, frankly, we didn’t. However, watching Food, Inc last night got us thinking about Agriculture, consumerism and their intersection with Earth Day.

We don’t claim to be experts, nay we are relatively uninformed consumers, like most consumers. We can’t recite facts that form the basis of our philospophical approach to food, and until we do enough research we can really only draw on our experiences, observations, and offer our personal preference/opinion based on these. We can probably, nay, easily, consider ourselves something of a pair of conscious consumers. Out of curiousity, we read the labels of pretty much any product we buy at the grocery store and, intrinsically, want to know more about where our food comes from and try to be conscious of where it goes (not talking about defecation here, rather composting food waste and recycling anything and everything we can).

Ninety percent of the problem is that it is very difficult, nowadays, to know where our food comes from and what goes into the production of the food.

All throughout the journey documented in this blog, we had so many opportunities to gather food directly from the source. Granted we constantly on the move and we were largely exposed to elements making it easier to find the source, but it seems In every country we visited, we saw so much variety in the crop rotation even right up to the border of massive cities like Vienna where we were able to collect some onions from a field directly outside of its borders. For the first time, we got to see up close the harvest of a carrot field; pumpkins harvested for the seeds and oil. Cabbage and lettuce; leeks, beets, and tangerines galore.  Products that we eat on a regular basis but never see grown.

We were inspired by how many people’s gardens we encountered along the way were used in as productive a way as possible. More often than naught, any tree or shrub planted was a fruit bearing variety. Personal vegetable gardens were status quo, bee hives, too. Even for large apartment blocks in urban areas, there is often provided garden plots a few blocks away or on the out skirts of town.

We spent last week house sitting for Chad’s parents in rural Ogle County. We got the bicycles out and went for some long rides on the country roads. The whole time we kept thinking of Czech Republic and all of the apple trees lining the roads. They were everywhere and good apples too! Anybody can come and pick the apples, doesn’t matter. As we pedaled along we dreamt of being modern day Johnny Appleseeds and planting up Big Mound Rd. with apple trees all along it, but surely the county would mow over it, no?

We see so many new houses and old houses sitting on fertile land, and yet the land is draped in its entirety with turf grass. One could rather easily plant some raspberry bushes, an apple tree, and till the soil and plant some onions, tomatos, lettuce, all sorts of vegetables that can be eaten while in season or canned for later use, just like many of our grandparents used to do.

This ties directly into something that We have been trying hard to stick with, and really enjoy; Cooking! We love to cook, Jowita actually just pulled a loaf of bread from the oven and unveiled her latest homemade yogurt flavor – mint!! Topped it with homemade granola and there you go, a great homemade breakfast. By preparing our own foods we can have more control over the ingredients and helps us create healthier meals that meet out caloric and gustatory needs/desires.