Last weekend I finished reading This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader by Joan Dye Gussow, who grows all of her own vegetables in her yard on the Hudson River, 20 minutes north of NYC.
It's part memoir, part cook book and part treatise on eating locally. The ideas are challenging, but the memoir aspect makes it an entertaining read.
Like Farley Mowat, the Canadian naturalist who consumed field mice to prove that wolves were living on rodents rather than endangered caribou, I realized that I would need to eat locally myself to prove that a human being could do so. I never meant our food growing to be a demonstration that every New Yorker could feed herself entirely from her own land. That would have been naive. The effort was always intended to demonstrate what could be grown locally, provided consumers encouraged farmers to grow all the variety they could for their neighborhoods. I wanted to prove that eating locally was feasible, healthy, and even tasty--if northeastern eaters would learn to enjoy living on what nature allowed.
I think she makes a compelling case.
It's not only more delicious to avoid summer foods in winter, it's also more interesting to build meals around different foods at different times of the year. As anyone knows who has had the chance to feast in parts of Europe where the locals still eat seasonally, eating only foods that are in season can be a delicious adventure. . . .
Meal planning is simply more exciting and less bewildering when you wait for fruits and vegetables to come into season, east them steadily when they arrive, and say a reluctant goodbye for another year when their season has passed. When you've done this for a while, you lose your taste for out-of-season produce.
Now, we are far, far, far away from eating only foods that are in season. But she has convinced me to try parsnips--although I think I'm leaning more towards the parsnips sauteed with butter and not so much toward the parsnip pancakes with maple syrup. And I am eagerly awaiting our CSA (Community Sponsored Agriculture) vegetables this summer.
I also finished reading Labyrinth by Kate Mosse, which was loaned to me by a friend. It takes place in Carcassonne, which we visited on our trip to France. My friend described it as a "like Davinci Code only better written." It's also far less controversial theologically. A very enjoyable read.
3 comments:
Of course there is some controversy about whether Mowat actually spent all that time with the wolves.
Still, in theory I support the idea of local grown - although I too am far from the model. We did start planting our garden today though. And last time I bought grapes I chose the California grapes that had only traveled 1000 miles, instead of the Chilean grapes that traveled 5000 miles.
And it's not too appealing if we have to do the equivalent of eating field mice instead of enjoying our orange juice shipped up from Florida. :)
I am so jealous you have a CSA there! The only one here would require a weekly drive to another state to pick up my veggies...not happening.
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