Goodbye Eesti

Today is my last day in Estonia- I had a wonderful time, and like this country immensely, but as I'm heading off to Ireland, I won't be too sad.

Well, I came to learn about food and agriculture, and that is mostly what I have done so far. Estonia is a good example of a country that is not, in my opinion, in desperate need of an organic movement. My hosts would dearly love it if everyone suddenly thought organic and local were the sole way they chose food, and are trying to start up the trend. However, I'm struggling to understand why exactly they feel so strongly about this. Estonia doesn't need an organic/local food movement precisely because their food is already mostly organic and local. To be fair, I am looking at it from an American perspective, where factory farms, pollution, and corn rule. In Estonia, almost everyone has at least some of their food sourced directly from a small garden or farm and buys local packaged goods because that is what is available.

I asked Karen, my host, what she sees for the future of Estonian agriculture. She cited a food system that sounded a bit more like what we see in the US today. If she's right, then perhaps she and her minions are right to start this organic thing now, rather than wishing they did 20 years from now. The problem they are coming up against is that they want to add meaning to the words organic and local, so that it becomes a conscious choice, a valuable lesson for their American counterparts.

In other news, I spent a day foraging for mushrooms and blueberries in the forest. We cooked up our bucketful of chanterelles that night for dinner, after which I woke up at about 6am with the realization that something was very wrong. My hypothesis is that somebody picked a bad mushroom and I was the lucky person to eat it. Or the sheer volume of mushrooms I ate overwhelmed my system. The next day was, needless to say, spent in bed. It was interesting, however, that everyone kept offering me herbal suggestions rather than medicine. I drank some rosemary tea (didn't help) but eventually felt fine the next day. Mushrooms are now eaten with a wary eye.