Every Main Street Tells a Story - Days 13 and 14.

So much time passes so quickly.  I have been both pleased and surprised with how easy shopping from Main Street has been.  Every day I get a slightly deeper understanding of my community, learn a little more of the local story, and foster now important relationships with a street full of hard working merchants.   But in many ways, my days are wholly unremarkable.  I expected this to be harder.  Two weeks in to this experiment, I expected to have daily things to say about one little struggle or another, one hard decision, one massive frustration.  In the absence of these things, what the heck do I write about?  I go out into the world, buy the food I need for dinner, go home, cook the dinner, and eat the dinner, just like millions of other people.  I don't want this to simply become a recipe blog.  Also, though the politics of food growing, buying, and selling are important to me, I want this to be a mostly apolitical project.  I'm not interested in preaching.  Everybody has to eat dinner, but I'm not about to tell somebody I don't know how to go about doing it.  I am confident, though, that if you're taking the time to read this blog, you're willing to start thinking about what kind of spendivore you are and what kind of vote you're casting with your food dollar. 
So what, exactly, is my point?  I confess, that I've lost sight of it a little and that it's been stressing me out.  I've worried that I'm not writing clearly enough about why I think this project is important.  Then again, I've been thanked by readers for not beating people about the face and head with MY MESSAGE.  Prattling on about it on Sunday during dinner - we had ordered in fried chicken - Dad Eater reminded me that this is an experiment.  It would not have been at all experimental if I knew all the answers before I started.  Thus far, I have discovered that some of what I thought were my most unmoving tenets of food buying went right out the window when, forced out of my comfort zone, I've had to do a little more research before making a choice.  It turns out that some of the things I knew I did not actually know.  Main Street taught me that.  I've realized that for most of my adult life, whenever I purchased a chicken, I was thinking only from the perspective of the chicken.  Now when I walk into the butcher shop, I look a man in the eyes and am learning there's more to the story.  My understanding of what it means to eat ethically is being completely rewritten.  Main Street had those lessons waiting for me.  And they were free.  What can your Main Street teach you?