The moment I launched this website I started down a path towards raw hypocrisy.
I had no idea at the time that this was what I was doing, and it certainly wasn’t my intention. Nonetheless, looking back over the past year+ of posting, it is clear that hypocrisy was inevitable.
I have these ideals, you see. And, if you are a regular reader, they are ideals you likely share:
- Homegrown or locally produced, beyond-organic fruits and vegetables.
- Humanely-raised meats and sustainable wild seafood.
- Stewardship of home, health and land through responsible choices, day-in and day-out.
- Support for small, independent businesses and alternatives to the market economy.
- Stewardship of my family’s financial resources through frugality and creativity.
- Increased self-sufficiency and the management of a productive home.
- Sharing of information and building of community through this blog and other outreach efforts.
- Total backyard (and frontyard!) vegetable domination.
Ideals are good, but life is messy. Life has a way of kicking ideals, and people who cling to them with too much rigor, in the balls.
It is a great irony that attempting to gas up and start a life of quiet, slow-ish contemplation and homegrown living is often a more exhausting, overwhelming, noisy and faster-paced task than we might like.
When the ideals of home-cooked, homegrown, earth-stewarding meals crash against the reality of chronic sleep deprivation and lives that are stretched too thin, take-out sushi in little plastic trays starts to look really fucking appealing. Six-thirty spicy tuna salvation, with a side of wasabi.
Sometimes Homebrew Husband picks up burgers or market sushi on the way home from work. Often this happens when I am hip-deep in my bliss, hands dirty in the garden, living life on garden time. I’m so busy growing our food I cannot be bothered to stop and actually cook some.
It happens.
It happens more that I’d care to admit, actually. And that’s where the hypocrisy comes in.
If I didn’t write about living life on garden time these inconsistencies wouldn’t be hypocrisies. I’d be quietly planting my broccoli and some part of me would be aware of the horrors of feedlot beef but I’d eat my feedlot beef burger anyway. These disconnects would be simple compromises.
But because I talk about how to grow your own food, run a productive home and cook the good stuff when you harvest it, that feedlot take-out burger is more than a compromise, it’s a failure.
It’s a failure when I see my recycling can full of those little black plastic trays and that fake plastic grass that comes with the take-out sushi.
It’s nagging guilt every time I buy a grocery item I could make myself, like beef jerky. It’s the conceit of an internal conversation rehearsing how I might justify that purchase, should I be caught.
I know this kind of thing is ridiculous. My readers wouldn’t want me saddled with the burden of upholding impossible ideals. But yet – and let’s be frank, here – no one reads this blog to learn about the mass market, entirely-non-grass-fed beef jerky I buy at Costco.
So we must admit, all of us, that there is a curated nature to the life-on-garden-time image.
This doesn’t bother me. It is good for us to seek out education and amusement that is inspiring, and that helps us achieve our own garden-time goals.
Besides, I enjoy writing articles that inspire readers to lift a shovel and grow a plant. I enjoy a good food politics rant now and again. I hope my readers come away from my how-to posts thinking they-can. That is the point of this whole sharing experiment.
And yet I fear that I contribute to lifestyle dysmorphia and make myself a hypocrite in the process if I do not periodically remind you, gentle reader, that my life – and yours, I suspect – is a giant ball of compromises.
I see this issue as a sort-of Venn Diagram. Let’s assume – and in my experience this is a very safe assumption – that everyone compromises on something, sometime.
If this is the case, we have three choices:
- Have ideals and stay silent. The repercussions of compromised ideals live only in your heart.
- Have ideals and speak out about them publicly, while privately compromising. The image of indomitability is preserved, but now the repercussions of both compromised ideals and hypocrisy live in your heart.
- Have ideals and speak out about them. When you compromise those ideals, speak out about that, too. Everyone will know that you are, for at least some small fraction of the time, a fraud. But you will be an honest fraud, honestly met. And if you are lucky – if I am lucky – a real conversation can begin.
Can we do this, friends? Can we get beyond the fear of others seeing us for the flawed and insufficient people we are and admit that sometimes just because we know better doesn’t mean we do better? Can our honesty convert hypocrisy to conversation?
Can we admit that in the great balancing game of life, sometimes things like sleep and sanity and not yelling at the kids win out over local, sustainable, frugal and organic?
Can we embrace the half-way path, the better-but-not-best-path, and be kind to each other and ourselves as we bumble through our own compromises?
Yes, I think we can.
3
Great blogging. Truthy. One of the compromises I’ve made recently is carrots. I’m growing a token amount for the kiddo to play with. Stepping back from planting a big crop and buying the big bag of organic carrots from…. you guessed it, Costco. Sleep deprivation is an awesome drug. Time budgeting is a moving target.
Thanks Skip. You might like this post about those Costco carrots. 🙂 (Warning: quite a bit of potty talk in this one.) http://nwedible.com/2011/12/confessions-of-total-garden-failure.html
You have chosen a path, and are living your ideals to the best of your abilities. Every day, remind yourself to feel proud of your work and your choices. I know many, many people who don’t think as deeply as you, and who don’t even see that they can choose a different path.
I am so very glad to read this. I love the idea of an urban homestead, although I only have a few pots on a very tiny porch. When my husband and I buy our house I already have a wish list of fruit and berry trees, and plans for a rabbit warren. but i was a little scared about making that leap. Reading about someone actually living this life who still eats takeout now and again completely removes all apprehension I had! call it the best of both worlds. 🙂
At various times in my life I’ve had some very specific and rigid ideals. In retrospect I can see that the ideals I tried to live up to caused me serious guilt and anxiety when I was unable to meet them. For example: I was determined that when my children started school they would be ready to learn. I earnestly believed that goal required a daily commitment of time focused on the study of the alphabet and numbers. I was so cruel to myself, mentally, when my ideal day didn’t come off like I planned. Looking back, I see now that there was no need to treat myself the way I did. All the kids knew colors, shapes, letters and numbers when they started school. I had successfully prepared them to learn even though many days we had no time at all to play “school”. I have to believe that we could have had a lot more fun if I hadn’t felt so frustrated. It’s the same way with growing our food, baking bread, making cheese and yogurt, buying grass fed beef, raising chickens for meat and eggs. I have this “earth-mother” ideal in my head but oftentimes it doesn’t work out the way I envision it. I have to allow myself grace and understanding. I have to for my piece of mind.
I love you, I love you, I love you…..just the way you are……my sister in flawed homesteading.
Years ago I once kept track of the time it took to harvest, prep, cook, serve, and clean up after a lovely home grown meal, Somehow it took 4 hours (I know, I’m slow), and that didnt even include the planting, weeding, etc.
Then I got cancer, and it really opened my eyes. I realized that after I died, when my life flashed before my eyes, It would be 90% weeding and janitorial duties and very little family time, or real time, and all in the name of that perfect dream garden/life.
Fast forward 20 years, I’m still flawed, and getting my shit together is like putting an octopus to bed- 3 legs in and 4 pop out. The only way I could pull it all off is if there were 10 of me, and 3 of them would have to be gardening full time.
And I always wonder how everybody else does it…….FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU! But then I read your truthiness and it makes everything better.
Thanks…
I shared this article on my FB wall a few years ago and it recently popped up on my memories. I love reading it again. About 10-12 years ago I started “going green” and it sparked something in me and I soon began teaching others what I was learning, fast forward a decade and I’m now a Holistic Health Coach and Educator focusing on helping people reduce their toxic exposure and increase their nutrition, while living in the real world.
I remember the first time I got asked if I was a hypocrite (yes they used that word) because I was an environmental activist, but I had a spare refrigerator and freezer in my garage. At the time I was working at an environmental learning center where one of our focuses is teaching people to reduce their energy consumption. I immediately felt the need to justify my choice, I have nearly 4 KWs of solar panels on my roof, I was using the appliances to preserve a huge bounty from my backyard garden, so I was reducing food miles etc. That was probably the most extreme environmentally aware year of my life, I sourced about 90% of our food from sustainable local sources and produced about 50% of it in my own yard and still I wasn’t good enough of an example for some people.
It took me a long time to get used to comments like that. When I teach I make it perfectly clear that I’m not perfect, that just like them I have a million other things going on my life and there are times I just need to eat. I make good choices most of the time, but it takes effort and planning to make great choices a habit and sometimes we just need the path of least resistance and that’s OK too, just don’t beat yourself up about it and don’t stay too long.