Food for Thought

Musings on eating seasonally, intentionally, and in community

For as important as food is to me, I’m surprised that I have yet to write about it here on The Conscious Consumer. 

I’ve hinted at it, with the origins of coffee to the tips I gleaned from a pie crust baking class, but I realized I haven’t talked about it in the broad sense.

It’s something I spend a lot of time thinking about—what to buy, what to cook, where I buy it, where it comes from, what I spend on it, etc. The possibilities are endless!

The majority of the time my food-related thoughts are routine-based, i.e. what groceries are we going to buy this week and what meals are we going to make. This is my least favorite kind of food thought. It’s mundane and task-based and tends to cause me stress. But where I love thinking about food is the meaning and experiences that surround it as well as our food systems.

I have sensed for a long time now that our food systems are broken here in America. And as such, I’ve steered toward trying to eat more locally, more in season, and therefore higher quality foods. It’s why I'm currently reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a memoir in which she details how her family started their own farm and ate only what it, or their neighbors' farms, produced for an entire year.

I’m about two-thirds of the way through it, and dated as it might seem given its 2007 pub year, I’m finding it extremely relevant still today. I don't have plans to start a farm anytime soon, and the concept of committing oneself to an entirely local, in-season diet (mind you, this means no chocolate since the cacao bean isn't grown here!) feels both incredibly challenging and a bit extremist to me. That said, her story and investigative journalism is causing me to look at my own food habits and see what I might want to change.

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Having lived in Portland, Oregon for nearly 10 years now, where local food is valued and a neighbor with chickens is not at all unusual in the city limits, I’ve grown to really appreciate and desire local, seasonal food myself.

The first time I tasted a “hoodie,” Oregonians’ nickname for the Hood variety of strawberries grown in the region, I was shocked. Shocked that one, a strawberry could taste this good, and two, that I’d been putting up with the over-sized, grown-for-mass-consumption fruits our supermarkets were passing as the same thing.

Now I find myself very rarely eating strawberries when they aren’t in season. I wait until late May comes around, watching my local farm’s forecast to see when they expect Hoodie harvest to begin. It only lasts a few weeks, but boy, is it sweet. I relish those things so much, looking forward to the short-picking season each year as a mouthwatering, symbolic transition from spring into summer. I stock up on however many I can pick in an afternoon, measured by the amount of patience I have until my limbs give out from squatting in the fields.

I usually save a few pints to make things with in the coming days and flash freeze the rest, putting those into yogurt or smoothies for the rest of the year.

I also have a few strawberry plants in the front yard, a thoughtful housewarming gift from my dad when I first moved in. Just this past week I spotted the season’s first flowers on one of the plants. It’s their fourth season and I’d been doubting whether they would fruit again, after having suffered a bit from some trampling last year. But alas! It looks like we’re in business and seeing that little flower pop up excited me more than you know.

I had a similar flavor revelation with tomatoes. I was never that big a fan of a classic tomato, opting instead for the cherry or grape ones, until I tasted a freshly picked heirloom tomato. I get it now, was the resounding thought that went through my mind.

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Have you ever heard the question, if you could take a pill for all your meals that gave you all the nutrients and calories you needed, instead of having to acquire or create every meal, would you do it?

This is such an immediate, hard no for me. I think the answer someone gives to this question says a lot about them and how they think about food. 

I was quick to judge anyone who answered ‘yes’ to this question, because I couldn’t understand why you’d want to forego all flavors and tastes of our life fuel, despite it being a chore sometimes.

As I think about it now though, I think the problem isn’t so much the ‘yes’ answer to this question, but rather the question itself.

It reflects back the essence of American food culture—which isn’t actually so much a culture as it is a lack thereof. Food as a means to an end, a distraction that gets in the way of constant productivity culture. Capitalism doesn’t have time for cooking and feeding oneself in a pleasurable way. It’s optimize, optimize, optimize. Optimize for value or optimize for time, sometimes both. Missing the mark completely with what food can, and in my opinion should, mean in someone’s life.

Kingsolver sums it up well in her book:

As a concept, our national cuisine seems to be food without obvious biological origins, chosen for the color and the shape of the sign out front: arches, bucket, or cowboy hat. That’s the answer to the question, “Where did it come from?”¹

Perhaps she and I are being a bit harsh here, but I think this is why I’ve been so reluctant to try the meal-kit services like Daily Harvest or Blue Apron. My version of that is buying something from the Trader Joe’s frozen food aisle and adding things to it to make it a full meal. As I write that, I am realizing that those two options really aren’t that different, but something about choosing and combining the ingredients myself with the TJ hack version feels better to me, because I’ve taken a more active role in the creation of my consumption. 

I loved this quote from Kingsolver too that so wonderfully captures the overlap between convenience and seasonality. She writes:

Waiting for foods to come into season means tasting them when they’re good, but waiting is also part of most value equations. Treating foods this way can help move “eating” in the consumer’s mind from the Routine Maintenance Department over to the Division of Recreation.²

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Speaking of recreation, a few months ago my friend Jenna asked me if I wanted to start a cookbook club. I’d heard of this concept before and without knowing what it fully entailed, I replied with an ecstatic yes! We just had our second official cookbook club gathering last night and it has me reflecting on food in an entirely different way than Kingsolver’s memoir. 

Food as a means of bringing people together. People who don't know each other all that well but, through the act of sitting around a table together, can engage in meaningful and thought-provoking discussions, peppered with food anecdotes along the way. (This is cookbook club, after all. You bet we talk about food!)

I really appreciate that we’ve all taken the time to prepare a dish, most of them being things completely new to us that we’ve never tried before. It’s a safe space, a forgiving crowd with whom to practice new recipes with. 

There’s often talk of what went well or what went wrong as people made their dishes. This was me during our first meet-up, an Italian-themed feast courtesy of Dan Pelosi’s debut cookbook Let’s Eat. I ambitiously chose an entree, Prosciutto and Mozzarella-Stuffed Chicken Parmesan, which seemed pretty straight forward upon reading the recipe. Little did I know that dredging the chicken would prove to be a herculean effort that resulted in me begging my partner for help.

As I recalled the stress that was trying to wrangle oversized chicken breasts in and out of their egg wash and breadcrumb baths without the mozzarella and prosciutto falling off, my fellow cookbook clubbers laughed when I admitted that I had solicited Pete’s help. My friend Hedy chimed in to share that she, too, had gotten help from her partner in overseeing her baking of the homemade bread she made for our appetizer Brie Bowl. If that isn’t true community and support in food, I don’t know what is! 

The menu from last night’s cookbook club.

There’s so much to say about food and this, I'm well aware, is only scratching the surface. Look forward for more to come on this in the future.

Tell me, what comes to mind for you when you think about your values surrounding food? I'd love to hear!

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1. Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver, and Steven L. Hop, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins, 2007), 154-155

2. Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver, and Steven L. Hop, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins, 2007), 30-31