Shopping in a small, local organic food store a few days ago, I had a strong sense of traveling in the groove of life lived decades ago in Bunbury, Western Australia. The smell of late season cabbage, turnips, and beets mingling with the rose hips, licorice root and hibiscus in herbal teas and the earthy aromas from bulk bins of nuts and grains took me back to the Seventh Day Adventist store and vegetarian restaurant in Perth where we would occasionally shop and eat. So many years later, this experience felt familiar; more focus on the food being good for you than good to look at. Truth be told, I trust the food in this kind of store more…it hasn’t been waxed or stickered and mostly hasn’t been shipped thousands of miles to reach my shopping basket. Some of the produce doesn’t look great…but it’s February in Pennsylvania.
Looking for local fresh veggies in February is a challenge in Pennsylvania, but in recent years, more nearby farmers are growing some of the basics in hothouses through the winter. Fresh salad greens at this time of the year are a gift because I grew up knowing the seasons for fruits and veggies as we tended and depended on our garden and orchard. We didn’t eat strawberries in the winter. It just wasn’t a thing then. So I’m hyper-aware that if I’m seeing berries in the supermarket in March, they are coming from California, Florida, Mexico, or even further south and their nutritional value suffers from the long roadtrip.
When I returned to California from Australia in the late ’70s, I was seduced by the notion that you could buy anything you wanted in the supermarket at any time…you could eat strawberries all year…and that seemed a wonderful advancement. Slowly I started to realize that the ginormous strawberries didn’t always taste like strawberries, and that tomatoes purchased in winter were flavorless. Somewhere in my brain, while I had been seduced by convenience, I had known that there was likely a trade-off for access to summer produce during the rest of the year. Eventually I read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Wendell Berry’s “The Pleasures of Eating,” and other writings, and had to confront my unease to understand that I wasn’t lucky to be eating summer produce in the winter. Instead, I came to feel a bit spoiled and completely out of touch with the world of food production. I had put my farming knowledge on the shelf, temporarily….
I’m doing a bit better now. Jayne and I freeze and can as much as possible during the summer. We’re finishing last summer’s frozen corn now and look forward to fresh corn in a few months. The strawberries and blueberries from Jayne’s garden last year appear in our breakfasts on a daily basis. I just went out to the garden and saw that the strawberry plants are just beginning to peak through the mulch covering them. It’s still cold out there; we won’t have fresh strawberries here for quite some time yet. But when they arrive, they will be delicious.
Just so you know, though, I’m not totally reformed. After a longish period of time of depriving myself of avocados, a fruit/veggie that I love, but which I have no chance of ever eating in Pennsylvania if I refuse to buy produce shipped more than a few miles, I gave in and decided I could buy some…occasionally. I do enjoy them, but when I hit a bad one, I don’t fuss, because I know they have come a long way to be on my plate and that a perfect avocado is really more than I should expect.
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