More stuff about buildings and food

As I was putting some jelly on bread the other day, I got to thinking about how we get our food. Industrial farms use petroleum based fertilizer, harvest their crops with either huge machinery or often exploited migrant workers, process and store the food in refrigerated containers, ship it across the country to distribution centers, then it is trucked to stores to which we drive our cars (sometimes many miles away) to buy this “fresh” food. Even if what we are buying would naturally grow in our local environment, usually it is produced somewhere else and shipped to us. In most places, fresh, local food is hard to find except in local farmer’s markets. When in season, we are often lucky enough to get fruits and vegetables that actually taste like what they are supposed to. But we get so used to eating them all the time that we continue to buy them when they are out of season, usually bearing only a vague resemblance to the in-season product. Personally I am not a big tomato eater, but I certainly wouldn’t bother with those pale red balls available in the winter. I definitely avoid overpaying for tasteless berries in the off season, even though I miss them. We should be eating more naturally “processed” foods- jellies, nut butters, canned tomatoes, beans, etc. when they are not in season instead of paying too much for bad imitations that have been shipped half way around the world to our supermarkets. Hopefully these foods will someday be grown locally in large enough supplies so we can all taste them when they are perfectly fresh, then eat them out of jars and cans in the off season, or just remember how they tasted until they reappear next year. We want the real thing, but we just can’t get it, so we settle for a pale imitation of the fruit we remember.

How does this relate to buildings, and in particular, building green? Think back to how buildings were built in generations and millennia past – passive solar cave dwellings in the southwestern US that stay cool in the blistering sun and warm over cold nights; southern bungalows with wide porches to shade from the summer sun, open hallways for ventilation, and high ceilings to keep the living areas cooler. Examples of appropriate regional architecture can be found everywhere, but building professionals have ignored them for years, recreating English castles in the bayou, Mediterranean villas in the north, Cape Cods in the Pacific Northwest, and the list goes on. We build homes with flat roofs and no overhangs where there are torrential rains, practically guaranteeing building failure. We take homes out of their natural environment, ship them (theoretically) across the country to another climate and, poof, they start underperforming, just like the out of season fruit shipped across the country. Think of these incorrectly located buildings like out of season strawberries – they are pale imitations of buildings. We need to get back to the basics by working to keep both our food and our buildings in their natural environments. We will be happier and healthier as a result.