Eating with the seasons

It started last year, my interest in eating locally and seasonally.  A dear friend gave me Simply in Season and ever since my interest has grown.  Last summer I read Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America and am currently listening to Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver on CD.  My impulsive nature wants to up and move to a farm!  Seriously.  Seriously. Every part of my soul wants to pa-rouse heritage seed catalogs, buy and plant them, learn organic ways of farming, work the land, till the soil,  raise heritage poultry and sheep, and collect the bountiful harvest.  Barbara Kingsolver makes it sound like just another day in paradise and though I realize farming has its difficulties and requires a supreme dedication of time and money it DOES sound like my paradise in my ideal world.  To know where all of your food comes from and to be part of the growing process from seed to dinner table is just so natural and sexy, wouldn't you agree?!   

Nothing tastes better than a tomato fresh off the vine or warm cucumbers just picked with a pinch of salt, un-peeled of course.  So although I am obviously in no position currently to start a farm, I have been devoting much of my thought life to how does this midwest suburbanite gal eat as locally and as seasonally as possible.  Local farmers markets are a good place to start and I am grateful to have one in the town I live in, albeit the produce venders are only available April through October.  Community Supported Agriculture (CSA's) are also something interesting to explore.  When I started reading Kingsolver's book my first question was what does one do in December through March in this midwest region where there aint no fresh local produce growing within a several hundred mile radius.  Kingsolver eventually solves this issue by suggesting canning and freezing the local produce you've grown or bought locally in the fall so that local vegetables and some fruit as well as meat are available during the winter months.I have never canned anything and it is something I will be looking in to this fall.  Any advice on how to can would be appreciated.  She continues to emphasize that there will be certain foods that will simply not be available 24/7 365 days a year.  That means my taste buds will have to wait for fresh tomatoes, salad greens, asparagus, and strawberries for example until the months I would pluck them fresh from the ground.  Scandal!  However, this doesn't seem like such a horrible idea after you've tried a tomato from Jewel in January that tastes little better than cardboard.  

Some may view eating in season as deprivation for middle class people such as myself who do have the means to buy whatever produce whenever they want.  Yet others may be thinking, but aren't we supposed to be eating 3-5 servings of fresh fruits and vegetables per day and how would one do that by sticking to an eating in seasons diet.  These are all good questions and will be addressed in future posts.  

Until then, here's a quote from Kingsolver's book to ponder:

If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country’s oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week.  That’s not gallons, but barrels.  Small changes in buying habits can make big differences.  Becoming a less energy-dependent nation may just need to start with a good breakfast.” 

(The quote is actually by Stephen Hopf, Kingsolver's husband who has written short essays that are intermingled with Kingsolver's writing throughout the book)