Mindful Eating
Savoring Thai food, from the field to the dinner table
By Julianna Weaver
In a small suburb of Detroit, Michigan, there is a market very similar to those that can be found in the city of Chiang Mai, Thailand. Every Saturday morning during the summer months it is packed with local farmers selling fresh produce, and it is where my mother goes to buy fruits and vegetables for our family. I was lucky enough to grow up eating produce from the farmer’s market, but I never realized the importance of this until I studied abroad in Thailand. I spent six months at the International Sustainable Development Studies Institute (ISDSI) in Chiang Mai. In a course on agroecology I learned first-hand how eating locally is both environmentally and economically responsible.
One of the first activities during the course that influenced my thinking on eating locally was a full day dedicated to gathering produce and cooking a meal entirely from the field and forest around us. The students broke into groups, and we each had different tasks for collecting the necessary ingredients for the meal. The group I was assigned to was in charge of catching fish from a small pond next to the forest. We learned how to fish with a net, which was surprisingly difficult to do without getting tangled in it. Eventually, we caught several fish for the meal and began the process of cleaning them. Our Thai professor made it look easy to scale the fish, but when I reached into the bucket, ready to clean a fish for the first time in my life, I became uneasy as I watched it flop around. It took all the determination I had to scale, clean, and cut the fish to prepare them for cooking, but I wanted to participate in the whole process, no matter how challenging.
The final step was to mix the fish with spices and put them inside bamboo stalks to cook over the fire. When we sat down to dinner that night, it was the first time I knew exactly where my food had come from and had assisted in every step of the process. Being connected to the food all the way from the pond to the table was a unique opportunity to learn about sustainable agriculture. This meal was far more meaningful than any other I have eaten because of my personal investment in it.
During the second half of the agroecology course, I lived for two weeks with a family in Mae Taa, an agrarian community in northern Thailand. During my time there, I worked daily in the field with my host family. I learned the community was once composed of mono-crop farmers whose survival depended on the market demand for their goods. In addition to relying on the outside market, the people of Mae Taa also used pesticides in their farming, which they realized was contributing to the deteriorating heath of the community. The farmers of Mae Taa decided to organize their community to begin growing a wide variety of produce organically, thus cutting out the need for pesticides and their reliance on the world market. They are now truly sustainable. The farmers provide for themselves off their own land, and they sell their extra produce in a local, organic market in the city of Chiang Mai.
We accompanied our host families from Mae Taa to sell their vegetables at the market in Chiang Mai. Then we traveled to a nearby supermarket to compare its prices and selection of produce to those of the organic market. We found that despite the popularity of globalized supermarkets in Chiang Mai, local organic markets provide fresher produce at consistently lower prices. Another benefit of the local market is the personal connection to the farmer and the produce. It is a more meaningful experience to purchase a cucumber directly from the person who grew it than to purchase an apple imported from South Africa in a supermarket. Even in an industrial society there are ways to buy local foods, and the more consumers demand it, the more producers will provide it. As consumers, this gives us great power in the decisions we make about where to buy our food.
Subsistence rather than profit is at the heart of agrarian life. Thus, the focus in agrarian communities like Mae Taa is on the local market rather than the global one. Seeking out ways to buy local food is economically responsible because the consumer buys directly from the producer. Maintaining this direct contact between consumers and producers ensures there is no middle party taking a portion of the profits.
In a country like the United States, where food travels an average of 1,300 miles from farms to grocery stores, there is a disconnect between production and consumption. The consumer purchases a product without ever knowing where it was grown or what resources were used to create it. Buying food that travels such a distance is environmentally irresponsible because of the waste of oil and the carbon emissions that are consequences of moving it around the world. I now understand the absurdity of using resources to ship a product when it could be grown 20 miles away.
Industrial thought can lead to environmentally detrimental practices. In the push for production and profit, independent subsistent farms are lost to industrial mono-cropped fields. The farmers in Mae Taa saw both the physical health and the livelihoods of their community members deteriorating under a mono-cropping system. Since they have made the switch to sustainable organic farming, the people of Mae Taa don’t need to rely on pesticides, high production, or market prices. They can pick fresh fruits and vegetables from their gardens and harvest rice from their fields for every meal. They live off their land in an economically and environmentally sustainable way.
Eating locally is more of a priority in my life now that I understand it is both economically and environmentally responsible. After experiencing the strength of an agrarian community, I realize it is communities like Mae Taa I want to support, not industrial mono-cropped farms focused on making a profit regardless of their health or environmental impact. When I returned to the United States, it was with deeper awareness and conviction that I joined my mother to support local farmers at the market on Saturday mornings.
This bio was accurate at the time of publication: Julianna Weaver is a senior political science major at Kalamazoo College. She studied abroad in 2007 for six months at the International Sustainable Development Studies Institute in Chiang Mai, Thailand.