The Battle for Middle Earth and Middle Girth

San Francisco Bay was invaded last week by 58,000 gallons of oil and fuel after a container ship hit one of the supports of the Bay Bridge. Super FruitGuys Rebecca and Bridget jumped into action and brought fruit to the clean-up operations center at Fort Mason. It felt like the right thing to do but it felt like we couldn't do enough. On Saturday I walked down to the beach at Aquatic Park. The acrid-burned-tire-smell was strong close to the water and the orange floating booms cordoning off the cove seemed of Lilliputian scale and hopeless against the wide Bay. Congealed-snaking fuel floated in patches on top and globs of blackened tar landed on the beach like melted and mutant jelly fish. I thought of J.R.R. Tolkien's Fellowship of the Rings and his epic themes of the natural world versus the industrialized one. Health: be it environmental or personal, has evolved into a conscious battle.

A landscape architect on NPR described the shift from one of living in a natural world to living in a garden that now requires our thoughtful and conscious care. Americans no longer live in a world in which our work provides physical activity and we grow our own food. The last 60 years have brought changes upon our bodies and the environment that are hurting us both. In the 1940s it was virtually unheard of for a child born in the U.S. to get Type 2 diabetes in their lifetime. In 2000 the likelihood of that was 1 in 3. It's no coincidence that our personal health and the health of the earth are worrisome at the same time. So what can we do? The first step is to become more aware of our "unnatural" state and start to make choices - for our bodies and the environment - that begin to back away from that. Not that we need to go luddite, but little things like removing soda from your diet, changes to be less oil-dependent (use less energy), and always try to think of low-environmental impact and sustainability answers to questions for your business and personal life.

Check out this week's mix at: http://fruitguys.com/pages/in_the_mix.shtml

Enjoy and be fruitful!