Ethics of Eating

This is Brenna from Hiram House Camp. I had a few thoughts after listening to Barbara Kingsolver's conversation on "the Ethics of Eating." I think it was very ambitious and pretty brave for her to take on the task of feeding her family solely from what they could produce, in a year, by hand. Her ambitions and views seem to center on the idea that, as a culture, we have no sense of how wasteful our consumption is and that "if we can afford it it's ok to buy it" and the solution to this is to become aware of what we do, what it really costs, and to change how we, on a small scale, live.
I agree with her on a lot of counts; that we've "forgotten" to ask where our food comes from, and that food production is better, ideally, on a local scale, and thus less wasteful. She seemed to remark that it's also a cultural affliction (no regional sense of food culture, like India, Italy, Mexico. Is that so?) However I often find myself caught in a debate over whether systemic change can truly be affected by individual lifestyle choice; in other words, is growing your own food going to substitute for direct political action? I think what we as VISTAS are doing certainly goes into a larger than individual scale, and into the political sphere, so this is an interesting read. From Orion magazine: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4801/.