My Facebook Notes Debut

I've just put a cake in the oven, this time an experimental blueberry coffee cake. The batter was lumpy, but I followed the recipe closely so I hope it works. I've taken a peek at it through the glass and it has risen nicely, due to the fact that it contains double the amount of baking powder than is usually called for in baked goods (2 teaspoons). But who knows how it'll turn out taste-wise. The ingredients were all-organic. Again, not by design but by accident. The fact that I've just baked a cake on a whim, using all organic ingredients, just shows how well the organic movement has succeeded in mainstreaming itself in the area I live in.

My late aunt who passed away two months ago was a great supporter of organic food and was lucky to have had the means to be able to buy organic, which is expensive in Malaysia, as it is everywhere else in the world, but particularly so over there. In a way, she was a pioneer within our extended family when it comes to this stuff. Sure, there are people like my grandmother, who live in the kampung and who pre-date the organic movement, who've been eating organic foods long before any of us had even heard of the concept. When it comes time to prepare a meal, my gran will simply pluck the herbs from out back, along with the vegetables. My grandfather (if he were to be alive) would kill a chicken, if need be. But now that he's gone I guess she would buy the chicken from the market, or a neighbour. It would still be organic, though, because the chicken would have come from someone in the kampung. The santan would come from her own coconuts. And she has fresh eggs for her cakes, and pandan leaves. There is an abundance of fruits --manggis, langsat, rambutan, buah pisang -- when the season comes around for fruits, so much so that she is often forced to make jams out of them because we can never eat it all, even if all the grandkids were there.

But the difference between people like my grandmother and people like my aunt and all the urbanites around me here, is that we have been cut off from the earth because of our lifestyle. We've been fed industrial foods because it's part of what it means to live in the economy we were born into. Those types of foods is what this economy has decided would be our fuel. Going back to the organic way of life is a big effort for people like us -- we have to actively search for green markets, and so on.

I want to start leading an environmentally just life somehow, because it kills me what we're doing to this planet. And I don't mean that in a bleeding-heart liberal way; I mean that in a practical way. I have no doubt that pretty soon there will be an environmental revolution, just like we had a political revolution 200 years ago, because the un-just way our economy has been structured will simply have to change. There's a disconnect between our economy and our environment, when in fact the one depends on the other in such an obvious way that it's bizarre how we don't seem to see it.