Weather Ain't the Way It Was Before
The long night of seasonal eating
I try not to be too much of a hardliner when it comes to edible ethics, in part because so many seem to fall apart under the scrutiny or stress-test of mass adherence. For many organic agriculture is a faith-based initiative, nearly impossible to verify yet difficult to semantically dispel, and what gets to be called a “local” food seems left open to local interpretation (is it 1 mile, 5 miles? Where do we draw the line?) Subscribing to any single approach is no guarantee that one’s edible ethics will be fully enacted, but consumers aren’t exactly free to disdain the attempt. To me, finding a larger system or ideology of food consumption to feels more responsible than broadly buying what you want at all times, with no consideration of its ethical or environmental footprint. But I also know that unless an ideology is going to give me a sense of personal and creative fulfillment in cooking, it’s almost never going to stick.
As a result, my approach to “seasonal” eating is motivated more by aesthetics than by an ethics of eating—I like waiting for the best summer corn and tomatoes, the stone fruits of the early fall, the bounty of winter citrus, the tender peas and greens of early spring, because it makes me feel like my tastes have to follow a pattern greater than my own appetite, and forces me to adopt an inventive rather than intransigent approach to cooking. It’s why I loved being part of a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) initiative when we lived in West Harlem, where I received a biweekly share of fruits and vegetables in exchange for writing recipes for the newsletter. Whatever each week’s box gave me, I’d have to find a way to make each item—from turnip greens to black radishes—into something worth savoring. I never used cookbooks as much as when I was cooking from a CSA each week, and I always had to scale my cooking into something that would take maximum advantage of each item at the height of its seasonality. On Tuesday evenings after pickup, I would go through my “put ‘em up” process, blanching and freezing greens, tomatoes, whole corncobs, then making huge batches of salsa, pickled vegetables, and pasta sauce as quickly as possible, leaving only a small portion of raw and vulnerable items in the crisper drawer. As a result, our freezer was always bursting with goodies: though I was never a big fan of zucchini, I knew that zucchini butter in my freezer was a guaranteed smash when served up on crusty bread with shaved cheese on top, and that a batch of pesto made with garlic scapes and shaved almonds never lost its bright green color or pungent aroma if made just after the scapes were harvested. I liked being beholden to the seasons, because it made my appetites feel more in sync with nature’s whims. As the famous forager and seasonal eater Euell Gibbons wrote, “My love affair with nature is so deep that I am not satisfied with being a mere onlooker, or nature tourist. I crave a more real and meaningful relationship. The spicy teas and tasty delicacies I prepare from wild ingredients are the bread and wine in which I have communion and fellowship with nature, and with the Author of that nature.” I like feeling that communion with nature, even if only in a brief, edible form, each summer, and saying goodbye to it as each vegetable slowly disappears from the harvest box.
Yet when harvests go awry—particularly when an entire batch of eggplant, onions, or squash are felled by a sudden storm or drought—I am reminded that my love of seasonal eating might be as much an invention as any other panacea of food consumption. How can you build a menu around summer berries when dry soil or unpredictable rains threaten to cut down the blueberry supply? When grasses don’t grow due to lack of rain, where does a farmer get their hay to feed their livestock? And when we do valorize an ingredient for its seasonality—for example, the wild ramps and fiddlehead ferns that only surface for a tiny window in springtime—does the enthusiasm for that ingredient kill off its endurance from year to year, especially as spring becomes more a memory than a reality? As students in my cookbook class this year presented recipes as seasonal and therefore sustainable, I always felt a slight itch to put an asterisk next to their framings, as if to say “Watch this space. Who knows what you’ll be eating next summer.” Whether that’s anticipatory dread or just a rational hedging of one’s alimentary bets, I can’t quite say.
With questions like these on my mind, I’m especially keen to jump into one of my favorite annual conferences of food scholars this week, to have a chance to hear directly from people deeply informed on these very complicated subjects. (Food being an inherently interdisciplinary subject, conferences like these are one of the few places where scientists, philosophers, artists, and activists get in the same room and learn from one another.) It’s a helpful reality check for me, because I find it too easy to live in the imaginative construct of an edible ethic—relishing what a particular food ideology makes me feel about myself, rather than what it actually constitutes or contributes. But to be shaken into something a bit more rooted in reality is welcome, and necessary, even in a time of momentary bounty.
Recommendation: It hasn’t been much of a week for pleasure reading or listening, but I was very gratified to catch the official Barbie trailer when it dropped earlier this week. From the first announcement of this project, I assumed that Greta Gerwig’s approach would exist somewhere between Being John Malkovich and The Lego Movie, using the notion of Barbie as a persona/way of being in the world to talk about the toxicity of contemporary consumerism and the value of imaginative play (something I’ve seen firsthand via my 3yo). But then I read this fabulous profile of Margot Robbie in Vogue by Abby Aguirre that dropped in a key paragraph:
The arc is partially inspired by something Gerwig read when she was a kid, in the 1994 bestseller Reviving Ophelia. “My mom would check out books from the library about parenting, and then I would read them,” Gerwig says. The book describes an abrupt change that happens in American girls when they hit adolescence and begin to bend to external expectations. “They’re funny and brash and confident, and then they just—stop,” Gerwig says. This memory bubbled up early in the writing and Gerwig found it “jarring,” the realization that this is where the story had to go: “How is this journey the same thing that a teenage girl feels? All of a sudden, she thinks, Oh, I’m not good enough.”
A Barbie movie that actually thinks about the crisis in women’s confidence, about the exact moment when imposter syndrome sets in? I knew I’d be seeing this movie with a glass of rosé, but now I’ll have to smuggle in tissues as well…
The Perfect Bite: We went out for dinner Tuesday night and had our first outdoor margaritas of the season—and it reminded me how much I love any kind of chile muddled into a cocktail, especially if it’s set as a counterpoint to other vegetal flavors in the drink. This brought me back to a wonderful cocktail called the Nightshade, which I’d enjoyed the last time I was in Los Angeles at Manuela, made with yellow bell pepper, yellow tomato, tequila, lemon juice, and three generous slices of fresh jalapeno (as well as what was muddled into it). This recipe appears to be a pretty good dupe of what I had, so now I’ll have to make a batch of it…
Cooked & Consumed: My cooking has been pretty uninspired this week, but I’m definitely bookmarking this rigatoni alla “zozzona” recipe from the New York Times for my first post-conference cooking project. It’s not exactly hot-summer food, but the notion of a messy, hearty pasta that lives somewhere at the intersection of gricia, carbonara, cacio e pepe, and amatriciana and uses fresh tomatoes is very much speaking to me. (Though I’d never turn down a plate of pasta from anyone, I have a strong preference for messy pastas, intended to be devoured with as much sauce-spattered gusto as possible.)