It had been a while since I’d been able to pick a vegetable -or fruit- and eat it instantly, fresh. I have to go back to my trip back home to El Salvador last January, when I helped my cousin to pick some tomatoes to prepare lunch. On a rather hot morning the freshness of these simple raw tomatoes felt like a heaven-sent gift. Last Thursday, after a series of postponements, I finally saw the urban farm where I will be working this summer, and I had the opportunity to grab and eat some of the fruits and vegetables they have grown. Once a very commonplace thing to do growing up in a rural area in tropical climate, I had forgotten how close to the land it makes you feel. I was amazed at how new it felt; I was amazed at how real it felt.
There is an irreplaceable feeling of closeness, connection your food when you are able to harvest it yourself with no intermediaries – a feeling that is exponentially more gratifying when you have actually grown it yourself. This feeling comes from the satisfaction that we get from knowing – knowing what you are consuming and where it comes from. There is no uncertainty, and we all certainly like that. Realistically, however, it is very difficult to have this type of knowledge and experience if we are not farmers growing crops. The only option left for the majority of people, then, is to try to make informed decisions to the extent that they are capable of. And informed decisions are good, because knowledge is power, right?
Personally, as I’ve recently become more aware of and interested in what my food is and where it comes from, I’ve started to try to make more informed decisions about what I eat. Although it is challenging and I might not do it every time I go grocery shopping, I find myself asking more and more questions about my food. Do I know if it was produced under humane conditions?; how many resources were used up to produce it?; is it reasonable for it to be so cheap?; Am I selecting the most nourishing product? And many more. I have to admit that it feels quite empowering to be able to make an educated decision as to what goes into your body, but at the end of the day, as Mchael Pollan asserts in “In Defense of Food,” the choice is limited and predetermined by food scientists. It might be time to let our senses play a bigger role in our decisions about food. Regardless of how organic and nutritious a bag of peas from a supermarket might be, there is no comparison to the satisfaction, and closeness that you get feeling the cool moist dropping from the tip of the pod, from the “snap” as it gives in to your hand’s pressure, and from it’s fresh scent as you crunch it in your mouth. I look forward to a summer full of similar experiences in the middle of a city.
Fredy,
I really liked your post because I feel connected to your response about seeing an urban farm that youll be working on and feeling like the food is “real”. I too am working on an urban farm and feel insanely accomplished and connected to the food when it grows. Nothing compares to the feeling of eating something that you have personally grown.
Going through the long process of growing your own food makes you feel a sense of humilty and gratitude like you siad. I had never experienced that feeling of food humility and thankfulness because I had been mindlessly buying my produce at the grocery store but it is a completely different feeling while farming it yourself.
Thank you for such a great response that I could really relate to.
Madyson Martin
Fredy — I really liked reading this post, and I completely agree with you. Nothing compares to eating food that you have grown yourself.
The summer after my senior year of high school, I worked on an organic farm. If a tomato or peach was slightly bruised or imperfect in some way, we couldn’t sell it, so I got to take home a lot of fruits and vegetables at the end of the day for free. I have never eaten so well. I was always a picky eater when I was younger–if a carrot was shaped in a funny way, I wouldn’t touch it. But that summer I gained such an appreciation for imperfect foods. They tasted so delicious and, to use your word, they tasted REAL I loved to eat these foods and to experiment with vegetables I had never tasted (like kohlrabi or dinosaur kale), cooking new recipes with my family when I got home from work. Eating that summer truly was an experience. I helped grow the food that I ate, or at least knew the people who grew it, and so I felt extremely connected to it. The farm stand was always overflowing, and I would take home whatever there was available to me and cook the food myself, and then I would get to share it with the people I loved. This was of eating–seasonal, local, and organic–made me feel so healthy and happy.
I know that eating this way is a great privilege. Working on the farm, I was lucky enough to have the right job and enough time to do this. I now look forward to every summer because of the fresh food that it brings. I feel that in the summer, I let my world slow down a little bit and I allow myself the time to truly experience food.
I enjoyed reading your post, Fredy. It connected for me with last night’s brief discussion of Migrant Justice, and also with your reference to Pollan.
Pollan talks in Omnivore’s Dilemma about food that is “good to think.” His immediate context for that section was the inhumane treatment of animals in the industrial food system, and the way in which the more we know about the horrible lives of those cows, pigs, and chickens the less appetite we may have for consuming their meat. But in this post you touch on two other aspects of good food. One is food where the farmers and farm workers producing it have been shown to have a dignified and secure life. An ice cream cone is a treat that one can enjoy more if confident that the people who produced the milk have been treated fairly. This emphasis on the people behind the food can be, as the Milk with Dignity campaign asserts, a domestic version of Fair Trade. As you also say, we can also experience food that’s good to think on an immediate, sensory level–in the firmness, snap, and freshness of vegetables eaten right in the field where they have just been picked.