97/365 Grapefruit

In the bulletin, Fr. Miguel has been writing up a summary of his time in Haiti after the earthquake as a chaplain at a hospital there. I read most of this in "real time" on Twitter, but I still reread it. And read it again when I found the bulletin in the car the other day and I was waiting for children to get out of school.

This account was about Ash Wednesday and the things I expected to see: the grim situation, the tent city around the hospital, the desperation. That's not what made me think twice. And at the end of it, there's a paragraph where he admits that this was the day when he got lonely. I also expected that (although maybe not to have other people admit it--but it wasn't what caught my eye). I know what it's like to turn around and want to share something that just happened with someone you know, whether something great or something awful, and there isn't anyone there you know. So I understood, but that's not what grabbed me.

In this account, he mentions a meal he had there. Peanut butter, bread, and "the best grapefruit I ever tasted."

The best grapefruit.

I've had some good grapefruit myself, down in Texas especially. So that made me stop and read it again. And I thought about my friend Tiffany via Sophia's school and how she adopted a 5 year old boy from Ethiopia. "He won't eat mangoes here," she said the other day. "They're not even close to the same thing as back home." It also reminded me of Sophia's godmother Rachel after her stint in Nicaragua. She talked about worm burden (how many parasites can live in your gut before you can't handle it anymore) but she also talked about produce.

So many times as Americans, and especially as Americans who have never left the country (which I have not, I admit, and I know that I probably should but I hesitate for many reasons, mostly involving a dread of flying these days combined with living in a nation with amazing natural wonders that I love to visit), I think we miss something about the rest of the world, especially the majority of the world that is very poor.

It is so easy for me to think of folks living essentially on rice and wheat paste from government surplus bags of grain. That's what we read about. And I know there are many places where this is the staple. But the idea that someone from here, where the grocery stores are jam-packed with out of season produce all year round, could go on a mission to the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, right after a devastating natural disaster, and eat the best grapefruit he'd ever tasted is just sort of awe-inspiring for me.

I try very hard to eat locally and organically--the first is more important to me than the second, unless the first is unavailable and then I try for the second. And it costs a lot more to do this than it does to eat conventional produce and convenience foods and corn products. A lot more, frankly. I do it because food is better for you if it isn't heavily processed, and food tastes better if it is fresh and grown the right way. So it is unlikely that I will ever eat the best grapefruit Fr. Miguel has ever tasted. And I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here. But it got stuck in my head and there it remains. For whatever reason.