Waking Up
For all who are interested or perhaps don't read the Source, here's the full-length version of the article "Eating In Season" appearing in the Iowa Source this month:
I found spring this morning. Last night when I went to bed it was winter, and this March morning when I woke up it was spring. It seems fitting to me to meet spring this way, waking up together and together shaking the sleep from our senses. I knew it was spring by its smell. The smell of spring is the smell of the earth warming. It is the smell of sprouts, of the time before the plants become powerful and fragrant, when you can still smell the soil itself.
I found spring in gardening. I didn’t pay much attention to the soil or its smell or the seasons in general before my husband and I came back to Iowa to start our community supported agriculture (CSA) garden. I didn’t pay any attention to the land, though farming is what I came from and what I grew up with. When I began reading about the CSA concept, I came across glowing statements by CSA participants on how their CSA membership reconnected them to the land. I didn’t know what they were talking about, what they meant by “reconnected,” but it sounded good, so I quoted them in our CSA pamphlet. Only now am I starting to get the feel of “reconnected to the land.” It’s an awareness, of being conscious of how we feed ourselves. It’s knowing the land in a way that’s sadly overlooked by our modern food systems. What we put in our mouths nourishes our lives, and the soil is the start of all nourishment. More than that, being awake and aware is the only way we know we’re alive; eating is acknowledging life.
Gardening is elemental. Consider gardening for a summer, try it out, even if it’s only a two tomato plants and a patch of lettuce. Gardening brings on appreciation, which brings on awareness, which brings on wakefulness, which brings on life. If gardening isn’t an option for you, try the next best thing: a local CSA. I fell in love with the idea of CSA, or Community Supported Agriculture, as soon as I learned of it. In short, CSA growers sell advance shares of their harvest directly to their members. For a set price, CSA members receive weekly shares of produce throughout the harvest season. It’s a lot like owning your own garden. You get to experience the unbeatable taste of home-grown food. You get to see what vegetables look like before they’re all waxed up and packaged up for display and feel the energy that flows from vegetables that were hanging on the vine only 12 hours ago (it feels different from eating grocery store fare). You get to try varieties (unbelievably tasty varieties) that you can’t get in the store—varieties that are grown because they taste phenomenal and brim with vitamins and not because they ship well and ripen on the shelf. You get to support and know local growers who care about you and your family and who are stewards of the land we all depend on. You get to tour the garden during an open house, inhale the fresh smell of the ground that feeds you, and show your children how Brussels sprouts look when growing (I didn’t know how until I was 25).
Those are the obvious benefits of CSA, the benefits that first appealed to me. Every year I find more reasons why I like CSA, and this year, the year in which I woke up to spring and the smell of the land, I’m beginning to think that I missed the best point of all: Joining a CSA is like eating from a garden, and when you eat from a garden, you eat by the seasons. This is how I finally found spring this year, why I became aware of it. Spring signals the return to nourishing, tasty, garden-fresh food. It is in essence the return to life. The seasons are fundamental to life in the Midwest. When it’s winter, it snows and we wear coats and forget all about swimming at the lake or barbequing for the Fourth of July. Yet we eat as if summer never passed, with cucumbers, zucchini, broccoli, green beans, asparagus, and peppers proudly stacked along the aisles of our grocery stores. Over the last few decades genetic engineering, faster transportation, and better preservation technology have transformed our food delivery system so that now in Iowa it’s winter everywhere but on our plates.
What I learned from being part of a CSA is that while having year-round grocery store access to fresh fruits and vegetables seems like a good thing, it comes with a price, and in the end it puts us asleep, deadens us to the real costs of food convenience. We waste fuel and energy in transporting out-of-season produce to the winter states, and eating long-distance encourages large-scale gardening. This “industry” of commercial farming can be brutal on our soils and burn through petrochemicals. Even organic farms can be industrial, can mistreat their soils and their produce, and that’s one more reason to consider eating locally by the season—you’ll know exactly how your farmer treats the soil and the vegetables that go into your mouth.
And those are just the obvious losses that accompany our modern food systems. When we start to ignore the seasons, to deaden ourselves to the rhythms of growth, we lose even more. We lose:
Who we are. For thousands of years, our ancestors were connected to the food they ate—first through hunting and gathering and later through agriculture. From the vantage point of history, it’s been a very few years indeed since we lost touch with the growing process. Look how quickly we gave up our thoughts of the land! Gave up the sense of renewal that comes from watching the greens come up with the lengthening days and the fundamental privilege we have in not spending our time struggling for basic survival. Gave up shared heritage and community, transforming from neighbors discussing when to sow the fall lettuce to falling-in farmhouses and individuals who have no idea that lettuce leaves scorch in the heat of July. We continue to give up varieties of fruits and vegetables as we unwittingly mold to the restraints of our modern technology, eating Delicious apples and forgetting all about McIntosh apples because Delicious apples travel much better. We’re giving up the seeds our families labored to hand-save for generations past, the seeds they saved for us.
Health. The day I woke up to spring, I also woke up to this headline on the ABC News Website:
“Fruits, Veggies Not as Vitamin-Rich as in Past, Says New Data
Larger Fruits and Vegetables Mean More Plentiful but Less Potent Bounty”
The USDA has data showing that recently grown crops have up to 38% less protein, calcium, vitamin C, phosphorus, iron, and riboflavin than these same crops had in decades past. Part of this problem is that we’re eating out-of-season, consuming produce that never fully ripened in the field. In-season produce that is fresh and fully ripe contains more nutrients than out-of-season produce that is picked under-ripe so that it ships well. The problem goes deeper than that, to the very soil itself. Not only are we growing nutrient-poor vegetable varieties and harvesting them before their prime, but we’re growing them in nutrient-poor soil. While we sleep through the seasons we deaden our health. When our bodies don’t get the nutrients they require, our immune systems weaken, and we get sick, experiencing everything from more cases of the flu to diabetes or cancer.
Contentment. The people in our society aren’t getting full enough. It seems funny saying that, after listening to reports on the radio of the obesity epidemic in our country, of climbing rates of overweight children. Aren’t full tummies the problem? Not exactly. It doesn’t matter if the tummies are full if they’re full of the wrong food. Our bodies know what they need for optimal health, and when we don’t feed them the nutrients they need, they tell us we’re hungry. If we keep eating empty food, then we’ll keep experiencing the desire to eat, and we’ll never know fullness, and we’ll overeat. But there’s more than getting our nutrients to help us feel satisfied—there’s taste. In the culinary world, chefs and connoisseurs are beginning to bemoan the loss of variety, flavor, and nutrition that has accompanied our modern food system. There’s a complex, three-dimensional taste to fresh garden vegetables that you can’t find in a Big Mac or in January tomatoes. It’s this full-bodied taste that deep down we crave, and it’s this craving that drives us to keep eating even though we may not know what we’re searching for.
Every year I find more reasons to like CSA and this year it was eating in season. Eating in season brings us all closer to the land. I woke up to spring for the first time this morning and suddenly had a new insight into the name of my family’s CSA. We named it “Choice Earth,” thinking that this was a good name with many meanings: We’re growing on earth (soil) that is choice for growing vegetables. Our members are choosing to save the earth by supporting sustainable farmers. What I never realized is that “Choice Earth” also describes the choice I made when I came back to gardening. It was the choice of returning to the earth, to going back to the land, to the soil, to a home I almost forgot I had even known.
I found spring this morning. Last night when I went to bed it was winter, and this March morning when I woke up it was spring. It seems fitting to me to meet spring this way, waking up together and together shaking the sleep from our senses. I knew it was spring by its smell. The smell of spring is the smell of the earth warming. It is the smell of sprouts, of the time before the plants become powerful and fragrant, when you can still smell the soil itself.
I found spring in gardening. I didn’t pay much attention to the soil or its smell or the seasons in general before my husband and I came back to Iowa to start our community supported agriculture (CSA) garden. I didn’t pay any attention to the land, though farming is what I came from and what I grew up with. When I began reading about the CSA concept, I came across glowing statements by CSA participants on how their CSA membership reconnected them to the land. I didn’t know what they were talking about, what they meant by “reconnected,” but it sounded good, so I quoted them in our CSA pamphlet. Only now am I starting to get the feel of “reconnected to the land.” It’s an awareness, of being conscious of how we feed ourselves. It’s knowing the land in a way that’s sadly overlooked by our modern food systems. What we put in our mouths nourishes our lives, and the soil is the start of all nourishment. More than that, being awake and aware is the only way we know we’re alive; eating is acknowledging life.
Gardening is elemental. Consider gardening for a summer, try it out, even if it’s only a two tomato plants and a patch of lettuce. Gardening brings on appreciation, which brings on awareness, which brings on wakefulness, which brings on life. If gardening isn’t an option for you, try the next best thing: a local CSA. I fell in love with the idea of CSA, or Community Supported Agriculture, as soon as I learned of it. In short, CSA growers sell advance shares of their harvest directly to their members. For a set price, CSA members receive weekly shares of produce throughout the harvest season. It’s a lot like owning your own garden. You get to experience the unbeatable taste of home-grown food. You get to see what vegetables look like before they’re all waxed up and packaged up for display and feel the energy that flows from vegetables that were hanging on the vine only 12 hours ago (it feels different from eating grocery store fare). You get to try varieties (unbelievably tasty varieties) that you can’t get in the store—varieties that are grown because they taste phenomenal and brim with vitamins and not because they ship well and ripen on the shelf. You get to support and know local growers who care about you and your family and who are stewards of the land we all depend on. You get to tour the garden during an open house, inhale the fresh smell of the ground that feeds you, and show your children how Brussels sprouts look when growing (I didn’t know how until I was 25).
Those are the obvious benefits of CSA, the benefits that first appealed to me. Every year I find more reasons why I like CSA, and this year, the year in which I woke up to spring and the smell of the land, I’m beginning to think that I missed the best point of all: Joining a CSA is like eating from a garden, and when you eat from a garden, you eat by the seasons. This is how I finally found spring this year, why I became aware of it. Spring signals the return to nourishing, tasty, garden-fresh food. It is in essence the return to life. The seasons are fundamental to life in the Midwest. When it’s winter, it snows and we wear coats and forget all about swimming at the lake or barbequing for the Fourth of July. Yet we eat as if summer never passed, with cucumbers, zucchini, broccoli, green beans, asparagus, and peppers proudly stacked along the aisles of our grocery stores. Over the last few decades genetic engineering, faster transportation, and better preservation technology have transformed our food delivery system so that now in Iowa it’s winter everywhere but on our plates.
What I learned from being part of a CSA is that while having year-round grocery store access to fresh fruits and vegetables seems like a good thing, it comes with a price, and in the end it puts us asleep, deadens us to the real costs of food convenience. We waste fuel and energy in transporting out-of-season produce to the winter states, and eating long-distance encourages large-scale gardening. This “industry” of commercial farming can be brutal on our soils and burn through petrochemicals. Even organic farms can be industrial, can mistreat their soils and their produce, and that’s one more reason to consider eating locally by the season—you’ll know exactly how your farmer treats the soil and the vegetables that go into your mouth.
And those are just the obvious losses that accompany our modern food systems. When we start to ignore the seasons, to deaden ourselves to the rhythms of growth, we lose even more. We lose:
Who we are. For thousands of years, our ancestors were connected to the food they ate—first through hunting and gathering and later through agriculture. From the vantage point of history, it’s been a very few years indeed since we lost touch with the growing process. Look how quickly we gave up our thoughts of the land! Gave up the sense of renewal that comes from watching the greens come up with the lengthening days and the fundamental privilege we have in not spending our time struggling for basic survival. Gave up shared heritage and community, transforming from neighbors discussing when to sow the fall lettuce to falling-in farmhouses and individuals who have no idea that lettuce leaves scorch in the heat of July. We continue to give up varieties of fruits and vegetables as we unwittingly mold to the restraints of our modern technology, eating Delicious apples and forgetting all about McIntosh apples because Delicious apples travel much better. We’re giving up the seeds our families labored to hand-save for generations past, the seeds they saved for us.
Health. The day I woke up to spring, I also woke up to this headline on the ABC News Website:
“Fruits, Veggies Not as Vitamin-Rich as in Past, Says New Data
Larger Fruits and Vegetables Mean More Plentiful but Less Potent Bounty”
The USDA has data showing that recently grown crops have up to 38% less protein, calcium, vitamin C, phosphorus, iron, and riboflavin than these same crops had in decades past. Part of this problem is that we’re eating out-of-season, consuming produce that never fully ripened in the field. In-season produce that is fresh and fully ripe contains more nutrients than out-of-season produce that is picked under-ripe so that it ships well. The problem goes deeper than that, to the very soil itself. Not only are we growing nutrient-poor vegetable varieties and harvesting them before their prime, but we’re growing them in nutrient-poor soil. While we sleep through the seasons we deaden our health. When our bodies don’t get the nutrients they require, our immune systems weaken, and we get sick, experiencing everything from more cases of the flu to diabetes or cancer.
Contentment. The people in our society aren’t getting full enough. It seems funny saying that, after listening to reports on the radio of the obesity epidemic in our country, of climbing rates of overweight children. Aren’t full tummies the problem? Not exactly. It doesn’t matter if the tummies are full if they’re full of the wrong food. Our bodies know what they need for optimal health, and when we don’t feed them the nutrients they need, they tell us we’re hungry. If we keep eating empty food, then we’ll keep experiencing the desire to eat, and we’ll never know fullness, and we’ll overeat. But there’s more than getting our nutrients to help us feel satisfied—there’s taste. In the culinary world, chefs and connoisseurs are beginning to bemoan the loss of variety, flavor, and nutrition that has accompanied our modern food system. There’s a complex, three-dimensional taste to fresh garden vegetables that you can’t find in a Big Mac or in January tomatoes. It’s this full-bodied taste that deep down we crave, and it’s this craving that drives us to keep eating even though we may not know what we’re searching for.
Every year I find more reasons to like CSA and this year it was eating in season. Eating in season brings us all closer to the land. I woke up to spring for the first time this morning and suddenly had a new insight into the name of my family’s CSA. We named it “Choice Earth,” thinking that this was a good name with many meanings: We’re growing on earth (soil) that is choice for growing vegetables. Our members are choosing to save the earth by supporting sustainable farmers. What I never realized is that “Choice Earth” also describes the choice I made when I came back to gardening. It was the choice of returning to the earth, to going back to the land, to the soil, to a home I almost forgot I had even known.
posted by Choice Earth CSA at 3:42 PM
1 Comments:
Just curious...what types of produce should we eat in the winter if nothing's seasonal? Frozen or canned stuff?
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