The 10 meter diet

I like organic farming because it forces me to be in touch with myself and the things I eat. At Camiliano- the vineyard I've been working in for the past few weeks-  it was only me and three other guys pruning 7 hectares of land with no machinery to short cut the process. I just sat there in the soil spending time with each plant and I never felt rushed. My hair would get all messy from the dust flying around me and my hands were rough from scraping the sides of the branches so many times, but it still felt good. Sometimes I would  imagine these tiny green specks becoming grapes, then squished and turned into wine. And I'd think about who might be drinking it- maybe a boy ordering it at a restaurant to impress a girl on a first date,  maybe a group of girlfriends coming back together from college on the holidays. Or maybe if you're Italian then it's what you have at every meal. Either way, I like that when I'm sitting here in the soil I am doing a piece in the stage of producing something that could help to bring people together.

Here they really stressed the whole cycle of life thing and embracing diversity and unpredictablity  in every plant. So that means every bottle of wine might be be a little different because they are not trying to standardize anything. There white wine is cloudy which have never seen before, but it tastes like it isn't trying to pretend to be anything. Most of food in this region the same... I was shocked to find that we could eat meat raw here because the cow was butchered that day and I could see the farm across the road. They laughed a lot when I told them that was illegal to sell in Canada. Tommasso kept explaining that cooking in Italy is simple and incredible because the ingredients are so fresh- you don't need to add a ton of spices and extra toppings because you actually want to be able to taste what's underneath it. I want to be able to cook like that, but it's hard when so much of what we see and buy is imported. Bananas are picked before they are ripe because they need to be shipped in time to get to the grocery store thousands if miles away. It makes me miss Zambia, when we lived by a "10 meter diet" I walked out my front door and I had mangos, avocados, maiz and fresh tomato at my fingertips.

I am off to learn new organic farm in Reiti, just outside of Rome.  I think they have some veggies gardens, some goats, and a pretty cool vegetarian restaurant for Agro tourists. No more raw meat and homemade wine for me, but I'm still excited to see another way of producing food the right and more sustainable way!

Also, if you are interested in learning about some cool things happening in Toronto related to this stuff, you should check out and follow a site that my friend had started here: http://www.foodexplore.ca/