We have canned the last of the harvest this year, and what a harvest it has been: peaches,
pears, tomatoes, beets and finally apples (the last still yet to finish dehydrating). I have learned how incredible it is to eat food when it is in season and produced by local farmers, and how satisfying it is to harvest food right out of our garden and onto our plates.
If there is one single influence that I can credit my new found compulsion to eat local, in season food, it would be Barbara Kingsolver’s book “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle“. In her book she and her family describe their experience as homesteaders making the commitment to eat locally for one full year. Aside from inspiring words, she includes fabulous recipes including the tomato sauce recipe I canned this year. This quote from the bottom of page thirty one, describes exactly what it is like to eat out of season food.
The main barrier standing between ourselves and a local food-culture is not the price, but attitude. The most difficult requirements are patience and a pinch of restraint - virtues that are hardly the property of the wealthy. These virtues seem to find precious little shelter, in fact, in any modern quarter of this nation founded by Puritans. Furthermore, we apply them selectively: browbeating our teenagers with the message that they should wait for sex, for example. Only if they wait to experience intercourse under the ideal circumstances (the story goes) will they know its true value. “Blah blah blah,” hears the teenager: words issuing from a mouth that can’t even wait for the right time to eat tomatoes, but instead consumes tasteless ones all winter to satisfy a craving for everything now. We’re raising our children on the definition of promiscuity if we feed them a casual, indiscriminate mingling of foods from every season plucked from the supermarket, ignoring how our sustenance is cheapened by wholesale desires.
How, after reading that, can one go on to eat wilted asperagus at Thanksgiving, or apples
in the middle of June? The honest truth is that out of season food flown, shipped or driven from all over the continent arrives on my plate tasting like crap. It is normally pumped full of who knows what’s DNA so that it at least resembles what its in season counterpart looks like. Why would I want that in my body! I don’t want my children to grow up in this new pattern of seasonal disorientation. I resolve to know what I’m missing - who grows when and how to cook it.
I’ve included a photo of our full pantry - read the book, get inspired to eat a little closer to the season.