A Year Of Food Life

Just finished Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Have you read it? Do! It’s all about the rural life, food, and what it’s like to eat only things grown, raised, or made in your neighborhood. “Locavore” is what the kids are calling it these days.

Now, I’m not a hardliner on the subject of food. I’m longtime vegetarian, and I like eating the nourishment of simple folk. Fresh bread, a chunk of hard cheese, a pile of chopped greens—this stuff fills me up. No big deal. But growing and making your very own food (or knowing the person who did) is a concept I like. I want to knead my own bread dough. I want my kitchen to smell constantly of berry jam bubbling on the stove and big piles of basil about to become pesto. I want to sprinkle seeds in the spring and chop wood in the fall and potentially do all of it from a cabin in the woods ... But everyone’s gotta make that paper, right?

Anyway, a couple points I latched onto:

We should all spend more money on food and less on other, like, stuff. I mean, food—we’re gonna eat it! Let’s care about it and shit!

The school carriculum should teach kids where food comes from and how to cook, and we should def make those little people help us prepare all our meals. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll be able to cultivate a little health and gratitude.

The recipe for zucchini chocolate chip cookies.

Gardening rulez: “Nothing is more therapeutic than to walk up there and disappear into the yellow-green smell of the tomato rows for an hour to address the concerns of quieter, more manageable colleagues. Holding to the soft, viny limbs as tender as babies' wrists, I train them to their trellises, tidy the mulch at their feet, inhale the oxygen of their thanks.”