What Do a Blind Date and Food Fight at Fenway Park Have to Do With Sustainable Farming?
Monday, August 4, 2008 at 11:19AM 
Late yesterday afternoon, I turned on the TV, hoping to catch the
end of the Red Sox-Oakland A’s game. There was a rain delay, however,
and to fill up the time, the station was broadcasting something called “Sox Appeal.”
It struck me as the Red Sox’ equivalent of reality TV, in which twenty-something guys and gals are filmed together in blind-date situations, all while taking in a game at Fenway Park
Now, why am I telling you this? I’m not a big reality TV show expert, or fan, but there was a segment that caught my attention for reasons you’ll soon understand.
In this segment, one fellow, web designer Dave Sawyer, was meeting three different blind dates for ten to fifteen minute introductions, so he could decide who his “winner” was—the one he would most like to have a followup date with.
The second woman he met, Kate Walston, was identified as a yoga teacher who prefers “healthy lifestyles,” a 26-year-old woman who has just launched some kind of health-related business.
As Dave and Kate were chatting, and she was telling him about her interest in healthy food, he asked her what she liked to eat at Fenway. She answered that she always packed her own food when she came to Fenway. A woman after my own heart. Here I thought I was the only person in Red Sox Nation who refused to eat any food served at Fenway, and not just because it’s outrageously priced, and here was this healthy and happy looking young woman saying the same thing on the Red Sox' own television station.
While this intriguing conversation was going on, though, the two other women (one of whom had already had her blind date with Dave, and the other was to be his third blind date) were plotting. They decided to embarrass Kate by sending an order of French fries, chips, and margaritas to the table, and watch her struggle with how to handle the situation.
A waitress arrived with the goods, and Kate was obviously surprised, but surprisingly cool. She took the fries and, rather than simply picking at them to look like a good sport, grabbed the bowl and began passing the fries out to other fans seated around. At that point, the show’s announcer interrupted the film with a bell signaling she had screwed up. “She could have eaten a few fries. It wouldn’t have hurt her,” stated the announcer.
Kate also left her margarita untouched, and when her time with Dave was up, she went up to the next date, one of the plotters, and said, “The margarita is for you.”
She made it clear she knew she wasn’t going anywhere with Dave afterwards, and was relieved about that.
Maybe I’m just a bad sport as well, but I sensed that much more was going on here than intricate reality show maneuvering. Sox Appeal had inadvertently become caught up in one of the great American divides, over food and health. If you’re a mainstream American, you don’t worry about junk food, or any food. You go along, eating your chips and fries, and let Big Pharma cure what ails you.
If you oppose that, you’re not just a stick in the mud, but un-American as well, and you deserve to be humiliated. Credit to Kate—she not only wasn’t humiliated, but coolly stood up for her principles.
I guess I was sensitive to the episode on this particular afternoon because I had just spent a chunk of the morning at a place called D Acres Farm having a wonderful locally produced breakfast of fresh eggs, potatoes, kale, and buckwheat pancakes—all in exchange for a suggested contribution of $10.
It’s a farm run by a nonprofit organization that seeks to educate people about the benefits of locally produced food and the waste created by the factory food system via transportation, packaging, and additives.
It’s run by a dozen idealistic hard-working young people whose main immediate challenge is that the wet summer has created a shortage of hay for the two oxen (pictured above) which help in clearing woods and planting crops at the farm. Maybe the confrontation at Fenway Park just came at the wrong time of day for me.
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