Soapbox

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Over-processed produce is disconnecting us from where food comes from.



The way it looked promised richness and flavor. Sharp green leaves, stemless, in a transparent plastic package with the words “organic” and “triple-washed.” It was something I’d never seen before: ready-to-eat spinach with no dirt, worms, or roots. In Colombia, my home country, produce always needed to be washed. Spinach, in particular, needed extra effort, because it was always sold as a whole. I usually soaked it in vinegar and lemon for half an hour to kill any parasites or bacteria. But in the United States, everything seemed easy, fast, and reliable—no soaking required. I bought the bag of spinach, and prepared a fresh salad with goat cheese and walnuts. In less than two minutes, it was on my plate. I chewed and chewed. But while there was a hint of spinach in whatever those leaves were, it was certainly not spinach. 



In Colombia, I lived in Bogotá, a densely populated and urbanized area. With reduced access to green spaces, I felt most connected to nature through food. Vegetables came from the earth and still carried the signs: roots that once absorbed nutrients, stems that transported water and sugars, bugs that had nibbled on the same leaves I would soon eat, too. Seeing all this reminded me that my food had been grown, not manufactured. It connected me to the farmers who had cultivated, cared for, and harvested it. I felt grounded when peeling, chopping, smelling, washing, and eating my produce. At the end of the day, I was manipulating something that came from the earth.



When I moved to New York City in 2022, I noticed how little people manipulated their food by comparison. Grocery stores sold pre-washed and pre-cut vegetables, and people just opened the packages and threw food on a plate and called it a meal. They didn’t need to bother getting their hands dirty, because their food was already chopped and sanitized. 



To me, this disconnect was clearly separating people from nature, making food’s origins feel unfamiliar. When people don’t see, feel, and taste the whole flavor of produce, they also feel less encouraged to eat it. A mango that once grew on a tree, appears nature morte—a dead nature—in a plastic container, more like a granola bar than fruit. In Colombia, produce tasted intense and complex. Spinach, for example, tasted bitter, earthy, and savory. A friend from Peru tells me she avoided fruit her first year in New York because it tasted too sugary and artificial. Another friend from Mexico will only eat pineapple, because she thinks other fruits taste as if they’ve been diluted in a water and sugar solution.



The University of Florida found the reason that fruits, like tomatoes, taste so insipid in the U.S. is because, in the pursuit of higher yield, disease resistance, and shelf life, the genes responsible for flavor were bred out. While unsanitized produce may be risky for gastrointestinal health, GMO and ready-to-eat produce isn’t necessarily always “safer,” either. Processing facilities or farms, for example, frequently wash greens with water and chlorine. While safe in small doses, regular consumption can pose health risks. Other additives, like preservatives or antioxidants, might also cause immune diseases and antibacterial resistance. 



It’s also just unnatural. A Colombian friend living in San Francisco tells me she once forgot about a bag of mandarins for two months. When she rediscovered them, they were still edible. “The mandarins were supposed to be spoiled,” she said. “What kind of component do they have to survive for months?” 



It is a universal truth that Western society is obsessed with germs. We fear bacteria so much that we do everything we can to isolate ourselves from it, no matter the source. But when it comes to food, are we truly that delicate—unable to tolerate mud on our fingers or on the ground beneath our feet? Is our obsession reinforcing the binary vision that nature is dirty and dangerous, and human creations safe and clean? And what are we robbing ourselves of in the process?



Research published in Communications Psychology found that the more people interact with nature, the more fruits and vegetables they eat. While this affects us all, it disproportionately affects some of us more than others: Access to nature and socioeconomic and racial inequalities in U.S. urban areas have long been related. Simultaneously, the more urban the environment, the fewer healthy food choices are available—especially amongst Black and Hispanic communities, who often have less access to green spaces. 



Community gardens and farmers markets help mitigate this gap. They also provide more affordable prices than grocery stores for organic and whole produce. I used to visit a community garden in Queens, where I learned how to compost and take care of the crops they had, allowing me to feel close to food again like I once did in Colombia. I have also tried to buy my produce in farmers markets that sell whole foods, rather than their chopped and sanitized counterparts. But access to these spaces is limited. Community gardens can’t produce the amount of food necessary to feed the whole city. Farmers markets are only in certain neighborhoods and on specific days a week, limiting access for working-class people. Not everyone has the privilege to eat spinach from the earth and not a bag.



I don’t have a solution to this disconnection. But I do know this: We understand the world through our senses. The feel of a vegetable in our hands, the smell of it, the taste, reminds us we exist because of the earth, what we feed ourselves comes from the earth, and that our cells are built from the earth, too. Our bodies evolved alongside the earth. Our ancestors touched soil, grew food, harvested crops, and fed their communities with their hands. And it seems likely for our collective wellbeing that we still need to do everything in our power to do the same.

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Why I became more subscription-conscious (and you should, too). 



Soapbox is a series where people make the case for the sometimes surprising things they feel strongly about.



In my junior year of college, I wound up with a free subscription to a bunch of magazines, including Real Simple. To this day, I have no idea how it happened, and if my bank account or credit card had been charged at the time, I would have remembered. But it wasn’t. So, even though I hadn’t paid for them, for much of that school year, magazines would show up in my mailbox; and apart from Real Simple, I’d mostly ignore the rest. Unable to remember any other analog subscriptions prior—even if this one was free—we’ll say this was my first. Not one that belonged to my parents, siblings, or friends, that I might have made use of, but one that was truly mine. This was 15 years ago.



Post-college, I briefly lived with my brother and benefited from all his subscriptions, many of them digital. When I eventually began graduate school and moved out, I would acquire my own first digital subscriptions, too—although these, I actually signed up and paid for. Back then and soon after, the $9.99 for Spotify and $7.99 for Netflix didn’t feel like chump change, although it didn’t exactly break the bank. Either way, both seemed like a good deal. At least, a better deal than the price iTunes charged for individual songs and albums, and the cost of renting or buying individual movies from a store, or paying for cable. 



It’s been over a decade since I completed graduate school, and since then, in addition to my first two digital subscriptions (and my unintentional first magazine subscriptions), I’ve at some point or another (and quite frankly, altogether) been subscribed to Hulu, HBO Max, Disney+, Peacock, Paramount+, Tidal, various print and digital magazines and newspapers, multiple money managing and investing apps, CitiBike, Uber One, Zoom, YouTube Premium, Amazon Prime (#judgeaway), HUM vitamins, and more. This is all without mentioning the endless products I’ve bought online then temporarily and periodically subscribed to, whenever they’ve offered a discount for doing so. 



It’s an excessive and exhaustive list, but in my defense, having studied and then covered culture, some of these subscriptions were for work, and the cost was either free for a time or could at least be counted as expenses for my taxes. Others were arguably also because of work due to having less time to myself; during certain periods in my life, hunting for home goods in a store just didn’t seem like a good use of my time when I could just search for them on a database and have them delivered to my door. 



At a certain point, however, I gradually began to realize something much more fundamental had been lost in all the “convenience” I’d been paying for. I was becoming less conscientious of how my choices were not just directly affecting  my physical locale, but the people who live and work in it. Sure, in theory, I said I valued my neighbors, residents and businesses alike, but I’d make critiques about the changing neighborhood (“there goes the neighborhood!”) without implicating myself in those changes. More thoughtful and purposeful encounters with my community had been sacrificed at my altar of convenience. 



So, I began to unsubscribe, unsubscribe, unsubscribe. 



Looking back, my subscription-ending journey—or perhaps more accurately, subscription-consciousness journey—was a product, at least in part, of post-COVID lockdown reflections on what I really need and how I’d really like to spend my time. The excess of my subscriptions had started to feel akin to hoarding, and I needed to clear space, even if most of that space was intangible. There was also the lightbulb realization that has become more and more common amongst Millennials, that, despite our monthly investments in accessing various forms of media, we don’t actually own most of the culture that we consume. What’s more, should the companies that do own that media go defunct or be sold to entities that we may prefer not to do business with, we really wouldn’t have much recourse—except to unsubscribe.



This could mean years and years of playlists and TV shows and films that we would no longer have access to because they were never really ours to begin with, ultimately leaving us with nothing. And while I’m not interested in owning many things from culture, save for books and some fashions, I do think ownership of culture in its various forms serves more than capitalistic desire. Our things can be physical memories of what we love or once did, what has been passed on and gifted to us, and sometimes, reminders of what we saved and scraped for—emblems of hard-fought earnings. We are robbed of this when we choose to rent something out of convenience or compulsion instead of mindfully acquiring things that are truly meaningful to us.



We also aren’t the only ones both literally and figuratively footing the bill for our abundance of subscriptions: The obvious, of course, is that small, local businesses pay the ultimate price for our overreliance on the monopolies cannibalizing our choices. There’s an impersonal, persistent transactional relationship that develops when you constantly have things delivered to you via third parties. It’s not your favorite delivery person from your favorite Jamaican spot; it’s just the person that first picked up the order who you’ll likely never see again. It’s not the local hardware store owner that understands which tools work best for your apartment because they know other people in your building dealing with the same problem; it’s you endlessly scrolling through the best reviewed or highest quality or cheapest options online, hoping the tools you’ve chosen will get the job done. It’s missing out on a discount from the owner of the neighborhood craft and candle store—who unbeknownst to too many others, can also act as a notary—and choosing a digital coupon over a beautiful reminder that you’re part of a community.



Moreover, overconsumption inevitably leads to resource depletion, and in this brave new world where the latest AI technology permeates everything we do (sometimes against our will), even the climate-conscious among us are contributing to it negatively. Binge-watching or binging-anything-digital also has adverse health effects, including on our mental health and sleep, and we’re yet to fully grasp all of its socio-psychological effects, not to mention its contribution to our loneliness and isolation crises. 



When I think about the last 15 years of subscribing—and lately, unsubscribing—I’ve had to admit that like many of us who live during this time, I sacrificed more convenience for less community, ownership of important things for access to seemingly everything, and gave my contact information to a bunch of companies whose aim is to profile my habits and patterns with little care for how my day is going. Unlike my favorite delivery person at my favorite Jamaican spot, who never fails to ask. 



Today, I don’t have as many subscriptions as I once did, and for different reasons. I downgraded or fully got rid of some streaming services because I didn’t watch them enough and I felt the value didn’t match the price—especially as prices have hiked significantly in the last few years. My short stint with CitiBike was because quite frankly, I’m more of a walker and a subway rider—and I’ve accepted once again that biking regularly for transportation is just not something I enjoy. Meanwhile, while I’ve kept some print literature, I’ve ended other subscriptions or kept them as digital-only because they were starting to need their own storage space in my home—and I couldn’t lend or donate them fast enough. And of course, with subscriptions like Amazon Prime, I decided I could no longer live with the cognitive dissonance of having it while being opposed to its labor politics and the politics of its owner. (Unfortunately, this has also meant ending a more than decade-long affair with Whole Foods, which I unashamedly enjoyed as much as the farmer’s market I still frequent.)



I don’t think I’ll ever be subscription-free. I still have Netflix, and although Tidal had replaced Spotify in my life for many years due to its higher-quality sound, I missed my old playlists and collaborations on the latter and decided it’s one excess I can live with for now. But I’ve also returned to collecting vinyl again, shopping for most things in-person, and living with things taking as long as they need to get to me if I do order them online. Putting an end to the mindless and endless subscribing has made me more mindful of the things that I do want showing up in my digital and physical mailbox once a month. Because unlike 15 years ago with that accidental analog subscription, I’m making a conscious choice for them to be there.

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And it'll make you feel alive, too.



Soapbox is a series where people make the case for the sometimes surprising things they feel strongly about.



A few months ago, I found myself openly crying in the office. I wasn’t crying about something personal, or even something particularly emotionally complex. I also wasn’t crying over the usual slate of workplace drama (bad meetings, good news, big decisions, encroaching deadlines, staffing cuts, etc.), which I’ve admittedly cried about a million times before. No, this time was different: I was crying because I was streaming the Boston Marathon at my desk, and—after 26 miles, all of them occurring hundreds of miles away from the city where I work—the lead women were approaching the finish line.



If the idea of crying over running sounds insane to you, or if the prospect of spending several hours in front of a screen watching strangers run sounds like watching paint dry: I get it. Until a few years ago, the very idea of long-distance running as a professional sport that people followed and spectated was entirely foreign to me. Having grown up in Massachusetts, I was aware that Marathon Monday was a meaningful day for the city; but for me, it mostly meant that work and school would be canceled, lots of roads would be closed, and maybe some friends would be going to cheer their friends on while I enjoyed the day off. I felt no more emotionally invested in the race and its outcome than in a 4th of July parade. Going out of my way to watch a race happening in a different city, then, would never have occurred to me; it would have felt like closely following municipal elections in a city I’d never visit.



But over the last few years, I’ve come to believe that spectating marathons is one of the most beautiful, life-affirming ways we can spend our time. Before I got into watching races, I’d never been a serious fan of any sport. I’ve long been a casual runner, who initially got into the sport out of a vague, begrudging sense of obligation to “fitness.” But then, I made friends who competed in—and sometimes even won!—local races, and who truly adored running on its own merits. Their enthusiasm got me hooked: When they sent me a pro runner’s Instagram post, I’d hit “follow”; when they wanted to watch a race, I’d stream it, too. Whenever we spectated together, they’d point out how everyone racing was quite literally on equal footing—what other sport, they’d ask, has total newbies and elite lifers competing in the same place, at the same time? Not to mention that races aren’t hard to follow. Unlike, say, baseball or football, whose fandoms seem to mandate memorizing reams of stats and plays, marathons have precious few rules to remember: Generally speaking, the first person to the finish line wins, making it incredibly accessible for both the casual and serious viewer alike. By the time the 2021 women’s Olympic marathon rolled around, I was the one texting my friends about whether they’d seen Molly Seidel’s groundbreaking bronze medal performance. 



Running asks very little of a viewer, but feels communal, and cathartic, and inspiring—feelings that are increasingly hard to come by in these particularly bleak and fractured times. It’s also just a joy to witness; and as I’ve become a more dedicated fan, I’ve come to appreciate its particular drama and intrigue. Watching as a mass of competitors thins out into a small pack of frontrunners; seeing the determination in runners’ faces as they decide when to make a break for the lead, only to sometimes get subsumed by the pack again; witnessing the absolute bliss of a first-time winner breaking the tape—all of it is, genuinely, thrilling.



I mostly follow the women’s division, in part because we’re living through an incredible moment for American women’s distance running. For decades, the sport was deemed unsafe for our supposedly fragile physiology, and women were barred from participating. The Boston Marathon has been run annually since 1897; women, though, weren’t officially allowed to compete until 1972. (This year, more than 12,000 of the approximately 30,000 runners were women.) Women’s participation in marathon running has increased steadily since the ’70s, but as the New York Times has reported, there’s been “a sea change in women’s running” in the last decade. Simply put: Way more women are running way faster than ever. Consider the U.S. Olympic Trials, which are open to any American woman who can complete a marathon within its wildly fast cut-off time (right now, that’s just under two and a half hours). In 2016, fewer than 200 women met that qualifying mark, as the Times reported; just four years later, that number jumped to over 500. (Meanwhile, the number of qualifying men during that time increased by fewer than 50.) There has never been a time where there’s more enthusiasm, community, or resources for women who want to push themselves to be the best runners they can be—and watching that magic take place at the highest levels of the sport has successfully turned me into a lifelong fan. 



Unfortunately, like all sports, it isn’t without its less uplifting aspects. The ever-higher ceiling for women runners has also attracted backlash from anti-trans campaigners, who have fought to keep trans women out of professional running, casting doubt on the biology of women they deem “too masculine” and making it near-impossible for non-binary runners to compete on their own terms. So much of what inspires me about watching women’s running—and being a runner myself—is about pushing past the assumed limits of our genders and our bodies, which makes the bigotry inherent in marginalizing trans runners feel, to me, particularly painful and incongruous. When I look to runners like Nikki Hiltz—a nonbinary middle-distance runner who represented the United States at the Olympics—and the scores of queer run clubs popping up all over the country: That’s where I, as a fan, see the true future of the sport.



Running is an individual activity, but watching (and, of course, participating in) a marathon feels like a community endeavor. Each fall, when the New York City Marathon takes over the streets of the city where I now live, I watch as the roads fill up with people across a wide range of ages, races, sizes, and abilities—all united by their participation in attempting a time-honored and miraculous feat. The sidewalks, meanwhile, are populated with ardent fans, casual viewers, young kids being hoisted on their parents’ shoulders, well-behaved dogs providing moral support; homemade signs that range from tried-and-true to weirdly topical; strangers offering racers water or Gatorade or high-fives—together, watching the sheer speed of the pros as they zoom past, making it all look elegant and easy. Even people who don’t care about running, or would never engage in the sport on their own time, quietly admit that it’s the best day of the year—and who am I to disagree? Just don’t come complaining to me when you suddenly find yourself glued to a stream of a race in a far-off city, crying over a total stranger as she crosses the finish line.

    [post_title] => Watching People Run Makes Me Feel Alive
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