don't throw me away, please!

over the last few years i have become more and more aware of global coherencies, especially concerning food and its industrial production. i was raised in a working class family and i was always very aware of the fact that some people have more and some people have less - mostly because i always was at the "lesser" end of the stick. i was used to wear clothes that family friends had withdrawn from their closets. as a teenager this started to bother me, but i guess that was just typical teenage behaviour. still, i never considered our family as "poor".

i always admired the fact that everyone in my big family had good economic sense. nothing was ever wasted (might be a relic of the postwar generation). i am a bit of a hunter-gatherer myself, i have a pretty hard time throwing stuff away :). as far as economic sense is concerned our women where certainly cooking very economically in the kitchen. hardly a thing was thrown out. i have virtually never seen anything rotten in the kitchens of my mother, my grandmother or my aunts.

i have intuitively lived by this rule while i was in my parent's household. but when i moved out i became rather careless about my food and for a few years. i must have thrown out unbelievable quantities of rotten food because i was not able to propperly keep house. but after some years of juvenile flippancy i started to think again. i eat fruits an vegetables when they are in season. i don't have my strawberries shipped around the world. i even became very interested in more extreme alternative lifestyles contrary to the throwaway society. freeganism for example. but since i am not really attracted by hardcore lifestyles (not interested anymore ... being way past my punk/grunge teenage days) i figured i have to follow a more moderate path. of course, mangos don't grow in my backyard and i buy them in spite of that. but to me it's becoming more and more important to support local organic farmers and their products. i can not throw my money out the window either, i am not very wealthy after all, but i don't mind to pay a little more for my locally grown food. to me it's becoming more and more important to lead an economically and environmentally sustainable life. i still know that i will not waste any of my food and that i will not have it laying in my fridge till it starts to crawl out of there by itself. every cent is well invested.

and in the tradition of my "i-never-throw-anything away"-family it's time to rescue some plums i had in my farmer's box almost two weeks ago and send them to their final destination ... my stomache!

so here's my plum dumplings & plum compote: