Mr. Jamie Roach is an actor, playwright, and facilitator focusing on creating works that help people connect. Elevate sat with Mr. Jamie Roach to ask about the inspiration behind The Morality of Broccoli and find out whether he’s really a fan of this member of the cabbage family.
Mr. Jamie Roach will be performing his one-man show for Elevate audience on December 10th. Get your tickets to The Elevate Winter Series Part 2: Health of Our Planet, People & Pocketbooks here.
ELEVATE: Can you tell us a little bit about what inspired The Morality of Broccoli?
Jamie Roach:
I think I often feel powerless when it comes to environmental injustices. The only power I feel is as a consumer and so I try to be as conscious of a consumer as possible and I feel like when I walk into a grocery store I instantly get flared with a lot of neurotic thinking, overthinking, because there’s so many choices to make.
Choosing between being healthy for yourself, healthy for the planet, being conscious about how products are grown, and who grows it. There is so much that is connected when it comes to the grocery store.
There’s so many labels, and ingredients, and things you have to sort of root through and figure out as you’re shopping. I thought “This can’t just be me?!”... So that’s why I wrote this play. I just wanted to this whether this phenomenon is something that other people are also dealing with. The piece is an exaggerated version of my weekly trip to the grocery store.
Jamie Roach The Morality of Broccoli.
Photography by: James Delhauer
ELEVATE: Without getting into specifics, can you tell us a little about the show?
Jamie Roach:
It’s about a person who is about to go on a date, a real live date in 2020, which is a big deal this year. They’ve been talking for a while and this is the first time they’re meeting up. This character is going to cook a meal for his date and goes into the grocery store for what should take ten minutes. It’s supposed to just be a quick stop-in before going home to cook and get ready, as the date is already on their way. And so, the play is just about the plan going awry, as soon as the character enters the grocery store they are bombarded by thoughts of how to be a conscious consumer, their tight budget, and the timeline they are working with. All this compounded with the fact it’s 2020.
ELEVATE: 2020 has certainly been challenging...
Jamie Roach:
We’ve had food shortages, supply chain challenges, there will be a lot of folks interested in how we are telling this story that explores environmental health, environmental health justice, consumer consciousness, and things of that nature. 2020 has magnified the grocery store and made it essential, the grocery store workers we are relying on to continue to supply the groceries. We have all become so much more aware of how connected we are and our dependence on grocery stores, who are dependent on farms, who are dependent on farmers, and there’s a chain that we sort of ignore until it becomes essential.
ELEVATE: What are some struggles you have with grocery store choices?
Jamie Roach:
This story doesn’t stray very far from my own neuroses. Broccoli is totally my favorite vegetable, I’ve always loved it and you’ll see in the story all the love and challenges of shopping for broccoli and leafy greens come out in real life. One of the struggles I’ve had is non-organic lettuce that is out of a box vs. lettuce that is in a box which is three times washed and organic. Generally it’s harder to find the organic varietal of the lettuce that is out of the box, and you have to wash it. And I know that sounds absurd because it only takes five minutes… But I have not yet figured out how to wash lettuce so that it’s not soggy afterwards. Like there’s a magic washing system that happens with the organic one in the box and yet all the plastic is so bad for the environment! But it’s so much easier to get. It’s organic, it’s ready-to-go, it’s not going to get soggy. That’s a real dilemma that happens in the play, but it goes deeper, there are a lot of rabbit holes that are taken in the course of trying to figure out what to do when you are weighing time, price, and all of the things.
ELEVATE: What questions would you like the panelists to answer after they watch your play?
Jamie Roach:
I’ve been thinking a lot about farm workers this year, as they continue to be the heroes that they are and how they are really essential workers. So I’m curious about farmers rights. I’ve done some research but there’s not as much information out there that I would like to see around that.
And then, also just how to balance things? I don’t want people to leave the play thinking “Oh yeah, it’s really hard and it’s not worth spending all of that time trying to be a conscious consumer”. I don’t want that to be the take-away. There’s got to be a balance when weighing time, money, environmental impact, impact on farmers, and the essential workers at the farm. How do we tie all this together in a way that we can find some balance? And have some grace around it as we try our best.
