Easter Sunday was a lot warmer, prompting the resident rodents to partake in a little sunbathing.
When I zoomed in on this picture, the squirrel was resting his chin on his paws and had a decidedly satisfied expression on his face.
Who knew a squirrel could be satisfied? I'm feeling mellow towards the little beggars right now but that will all come to an end once they start eating my tomatoes in July.
This year we have begun an effort to eat a little less carbon-intensively. We'll never make it to within 100 miles (avocados, lemons, olive oil, chocolate, epoisses...) but we hope to reduce our carbon impact. We're getting our meats from local Mennonite farmers and in winter are trying to eat tender produce from closer-by places like California or Mexico rather than Peru, Argentina, or South Africa.
And we're doing our best to forego fresh herbs -- just recently we discovered that the fresh chives, basil, and rosemary on sale in our supermarket and labelled "Packaged in Canada" are grown in Colombia and Israel (ie., illegal West Bank settlements). Add the taste of egregious human rights abuses to the tang of carbon, and those herbs don't taste nearly as good as they used to. Think I'll wait until the garden comes back to life.
And so while we really shouldn't have asparagus until May, when tender shoots start springing up throughout Holland Marsh, it was too hard to resist it for Easter dinner. Mexican asparagus just does not taste as good as Canadian asparagus ... picked by Mexican migrant labour, mind you.
Everything, it seems, is a trade-off. I suppose the only way to truly eat ethically would be to produce everything yourself, or to have personal relationships with all your suppliers, so that you know exactly where everything came from and how it was produced. Something that isn't going to happen in Toronto. Or St. John's for that matter.
So maybe the best you can do is look at the labels, even when they're in fine print, and make each choice as it comes. And when you're worn down by the snow that is piled high around your house and you need a burst of colour and of spring, you can buy the damn flowers.
4 comments:
Happy Easter....
Your sunbathing squirrel should get together with my grouse who was sitting on the pipeline with his legs dangling......as for the 100 mile diet...you should try it while living on a rock in the North Atlantic. I'd be restricted to a bag of carrots. I try to do my part by buying close to home when I can and avoiding over packaging....when I can. Doesn't feel like enough though.
If I were your neighbor I would come over with my fresh basil prunings and rosemary clippings whenever you needed some. Oh, sorry, if I were your *neighbour.*
I can commiserate with gone to the dogs, having spent several weeks trying to find something fresh to eat other than root crops on the Rock! Those little hoop greenhouses are popping up everywhere. When I got home I ate lettuce like a starved bunny.
Yes, many's the "picnic" of boiled salt beef and vegetables that GTTD and I shared with our families just before heading over the hills to pick partridgeberries... ahh, summer fun.
Oh, that squirrel sure is cute!
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