Coming Up For Air

Plants need sun, air, and water—and so do eco-geek bloggers. We grow wan and weak sprawled across our sofas, our bellies encased by a layer of blogger blubber providing a built-in cushion for our laptops as we tap away under sickly fluorescent lights, exhorting everybody else to get out of the house and go grow heirloom tomatoes.

It’s one of the more ironic aspects of being a sustainable ag activist/blogger: how do you find the time to garden and cook when you’re so busy blogging about the virtues of cooking and gardening?

A glut of great stories crosses my virtual desktop everyday, and I stockpile links along with ideas on what I’d like to say about them, creating a stack of what The Ethicurean’s brilliant Bonnie Powell calls “mental cordwood.” On top of that, I am blessed to know all kinds of amazing folks who are doing incredible things to, you know, save the world, and I really want to help get the word out. So that goes onto the pile, too.

But sometimes, I just want to cook and garden. Last week, I spent entire days raking leaves (yeah, I’m kinda behind), sowing seeds, transplanting shrubs and pruning my apple trees and ripping out insurgent bamboo roots and cooking the shoots and generally playing hooky from the Internet.

And now, I’m at the Kellogg Food and Society Conference in Chandler, Arizona along with Bonnie and a bunch of my other fellow foodie bloggers and hundreds of other movers and shakers of the good food movement, including many of my heroes and mentors. It’s an overwhelming experience to be surrounded by so many folks who are dedicated to overhauling our crazy food chain, and, unlike Bonnie—who is far more disciplined than I am and has already managed to blog about the conference—I am too exhausted (though exhilarated) to write about all the stuff going on here.

But more importantly, as I write this, I have to choose between blogging and eating, because if I don’t shut my laptop and get dressed I’m gonna miss breakfast. Sometimes blogging has to take a backseat to, well, living.

Bloggers at the Kellogg FAS Conference

(Left to Right)

Tom Philpott from Grist, Elanor & Bonnie from the Ethicurean, Kat from EL, and Sam Fromartz from Chews Wise