I am procrastinating cleaning out the refrigerator.  It is Veteran’s Day and I should be honoring the fallen, thanking someone for their service, contemplating the horrors of WWI. Instead, I am tackling the recesses of our overstocked fridge and trying to salvage some food that is in peril of inflicting us with food poisoning if we don’t ditch it.

Thinking about the imminent stacking up of our excess of food on the kitchen counter turns my thoughts to food in general, and my visits last weekend to two very different but somewhat related food events.  And, finally, to the people who work to bring us our food.

First, I attended some presentations of the National Museum of American History’s annual Food History Weekend.   The theme was “the changing dynamics of regional food cultures in the United States.”  This fit in perfectly, I now realize, with my second food event of the weekend: my friend Jackie’s annual “Soup and Oyster” party on Cobb Island, Maryland, which features “scalded” oysters at the local firehouse as well as soups made by the hostess.

Regional food is usually seasonal, reflective of natural resources and landscape, and has a warm, homey and almost romantic connotation.  But, when you come to think about it more deeply, this food often represents someone’s backbreaking and highly uncomfortable work in its procurement.  Oyster dredging and tonging, for instance, was traditionally done in the cold months on an unforgiving body of icy water.

Farm labor to bring us our vegetables and fruits (the apples in the pie and the green beans in the casserole?) is no piece of cake either.   Picking your own apples on a crisp fall day for fun is one thing. Harvesting tons of apples for the commercial market is a whole other thing.  The harvest and processing of the food that conveniently shows up on our grocery shelves is its own battle, fought by countless seasonal and regional workers, who deserve our respect.

So, along with honoring veterans today, let us also honor those on the forefront of the fight to keep us fed.   Freedom from hunger is a privilege which the thousands of behind the scenes food workers laboring in the “trenches” of our farms, waterways, and processing plants work to make possible.  Unfortunately this doesn’t mean that hunger (like war, of course) isn’t still very much with us.

On that sobering note, it’s off to the fridge.