The Case for Eating Seasonal

Eating Seasonally, or emphasizing seasonal produce in your diet, means following the natural rhythms of plants in your meal planning. In spring you’d eat the foods that ripen in spring [think strawberries not pears], and hold off on fall foods [those pears] until, well, fall when they ripen. Sure, you can still find pears in the supermarket in spring, but chances are they were imported from halfway around the world, where the southern hemisphere is currently experiencing fall.

You consume fruits and vegetables as they ripen and are their greatest flavor and nutritional value. They also tend to travel shorter distances to reach you [and thus use up less gas to get to you] because they're not shipped from Chile in the dead of winter, for example, you're getting strawberries picked close to where you live in late spring when they naturally become abundant. Thus they stay on the vine longer before getting picked [due to shorter travel time], which means greater flavor and nutrition [funny how nutrition and environmentalism can be tied together, no?]

And, best of all, due to the funny principle of supply and demand, produce is cheapest when it is in season because there is more of it, and thus ... to do the healthy thing ... the environmental thing ... the tasty thing ... also happens to save you money.

What does eating seasonally look like? Here is a link that gives you a more complete list of which foods are most abundant what times of year.

Yes, this might mean that you can really only get strawberries for one or two short months out of the year, but oh, when you get them, they taste amazing. And once the strawberries leave, there are cherries, and then peaches and nectarines, watermelon and other melons, grapes, blueberries and blackberries, then apples and pears, then oranges and citrus, and next thing you know it is already March and you're anticipating strawberries again.

It is an opportunity to celebrate the bounty of each season in a way that showcases each flavor and texture, and generally increases variety in your diet by rounding out your palette, encouraging variety, allowing for creativity in preparing meals and searching for new recipes and food preparation methods that accommodate various produce.

Be adventurous! Who knows, you might just find a new favorite or two. This happened to me with kale and Swiss chard - I never tried them until I became reacquainted with a college friend who had slowly developed an interest in food and agriculture, and she introduced me to these two fine specimens. Now just ask my boyfriend, he thinks Swiss chard is my favorite vegetable. And while I'd take a ripe heirloom tomato any day, Swiss chard or kale comes a close second, especially in winter when there isn't a ripe, non-flavorless-pink tomato in sight ...

Staying Connected

I love writing letters. I really do.

There's something really soothing about taking half an hour to sit down with some stationery and a pen and devote the time to concentrating on your friend, your friendship, in a manner that has gone the way of the VCR and tape deck. Or, should I say, black and white television and X.

And in this multitasking world we live in, there's nothing nicer than receiving a handwritten letter, filled with a loved one's characteristic loops and slants and little scratch marks. I have some great friends who include little bits of love in every letter they send - photos, CDs, even earrings [those are not easy to mail!] Every time I receive one, I vow that I will be a better friend, will send correspondence more frequently, that I, too, shall include little bits of friendship right back, moments out of my day and handmade tokens of affection.

Sadly, I go through spurts of letter writing followed by long dry spells. I'm not sure what it is - lack of inspiration, tiring of the same old stationery [even though I have a drawerfull, there is never quite the inspiring piece when you need one. What's up with that?]

But I think it would also help to keep a little stationery kit on me at all times. Compact, holding a card or two, several sheets of stationery with matching envelope, a couple stamps, a pen. That way a quick note can be dashed off in the little crevices of life - in line for tickets, while waiting at the bus stop, at the laundromat.

I keep thinking that I want to wait for the start of a new year to renew my pledge to handwritten [on top of handmade and hand cooked ... are you noticing a trend here?], but really, why wait? I'm sure when 2009 rolls around I'll have difficulty enough paring down my list of resolutions [I chopped the list to 5 this year, and I don't know that I'm doing very well on that list so far]. And really, friendship shouldn't wait. So. Off to finish that letter to Jamie that I started while waiting for dinner.

Dreams

I rarely dream, or rather, I rarely remember my dreams, but last night I was woken up by couples fighting on the sidewalk outside my apartment, so I was able to retain brief snatches of this dream.

I dreamt I was talking to an elderly lady, maybe in her 80s or 90s, and we were discussing how much more disposable waste exists today. For some reason we were talking about KFC and their containers and such, and how their containers used to be made of a sturdy plastic that you could reuse, versus the flimsy plastic of today.

I know, I know. Who would want to reuse stuff that came from KFC??? Have their logo branded everywhere, not quite sure you could scrub all the transfatty grease off the bottom of your new "tupperware." But it was the spirit behind the message that struck me.

We do live in a throwaway society, with "durable" goods that have a shelf life engineered into them, whether through intentional design that sets a clock ticking in your product the minute you start using it [ever wonder why 6-7 years is considered "good" for a laptop? With all those engineering students we graduate each year, surely one of them must have found a way to make sure the whole thing doesn't fall apart on you before 7 years is up. Or wait, maybe they don't want to, because then you wouldn't buy more and they'd eventually be out of a job. Or so the thinking goes. There are other business models that work, people!], or through planned obsolescence where your product becomes outdated and no longer syncs with anybody else [like Microsoft 98 ... you are almost compelled to update to XP/2000/Vista because everybody else is using it], or just through plain marketing that appeals to our side for something new and shiny.

At the rate we're going, and with other countries racing to catch up to our standard of living, just when will we finally realize that this Earth's resources were not intended for such strain? The thing about living in a cyclical ecosystem is that if we break these cycles, if we do not take steps to replenish what we have taken, eventually the system collapses.

We forget that we used to improvise. Make do. You don't always have to buy your way out of a solution with fancy gazebos or one-use-tools; you can improvise, you can create. Necessity is the mother of invention; "create" and "creativity" share the same root. Next time you need something, can you improvise a solution, use your creativity and imagination to use the resources on hand to make do, rather than going out and buying your way to a quick fix that leaves your house even more cluttered? Whether it's the metaphorical KFC containers of my dream or a household appliance, every little thing we do matters.

It's all in the weather

Last week when temperatures around here jumped a good 25F in the span of less than a week, I noticed an interesting phenomenon. There were more people out.

Not strolling leisurely through the sun, persay, but coworkers pausing in front of store fronts to savor the shade for 5-10 minutes, or people sitting outdoors for their lunch hour meal, or friends hanging out on the steps of apartment buildings after work hours had closed down for the day.

That sense of community, of seeing others out in the street, sitting in groups, watching life pass by - instead of rushing on to the next appointment, just another day in the harried life of a big city-er, that's definitely something I miss from China, or from most of the other countries that I've visited.

One hypothesis is that when the temperatures climb into the 90s and beyond, at a certain point it is just cooler in the shade and out-of-doors, rather than sitting inside with the fans whirring or the AC cranked up [high energy costs help here, too], and that's what I witnessed last week. Because let's face it, this is a cold, windy city, and often it is not physically comfortable to linger outside on most days [despite my attempts to the contrary when I take my morning walks or eat lunch in the park].

And so, for all that a spike in the temperatures may raise your physical discomfort [depending on your proclivity for skirts!], on a emotional, community-creating-community-connectedness level I welcome the heat. There's something about seeing people actually populating a neighborhood, of passing clusters of friends and neighbors as they shoot the breeze in the waning hours of sunset, that adds vibrancy to a city. Creates a sense of community, swells your heart with contentment that you, too, belong to something larger, something enjoyable, some place you can call home.

The best $4.50 I've ever spent

Well, maybe not ever, but it was pretty darn good.

Friday night Lisa and I sat down to make a batch of cupcakes. Yes, we were Betty Crockering it up and spent a good 10 minutes at the grocery store, weighing the ethical and moral dilemnas of knowingly creating potluck food that was filled with trans fats and chemicals with 5+ syllable names, but at the end of the day it was already 8PM and we had decorating to do!

With one tub of frosting and 3 food coloring hues in hand [yellow, green and blue, her red was still in the classroom], we individually decorated each and every one of those 23 cupcakes. And man, was it fun. Primaries, secondaries, tertiaries, bright colors light colors, shading ...

Stripes, swirls, pictures, modern art, spikes for those punk attitudes out there, school spirit to boot, plus a couple eggs thrown in for good measure [I was taking them to a potluck for a salmonella lab]. There was no end to the possibilities, and that's the beauty of it. Sometimes to have fun or to enjoy the pleasure of a good friend's company, doesn't involve expensive dinners or novel locales. Sometimes all it takes is a can of [albeit dubious] pre-made frosting, some popsicle sticks, and a lot of laughter.

Bring on the goofiness. And the imagination. And the future van Goghs.

Point Zero

Sometimes the hardest part is getting started.

Here's to things to come!