Thoughtful food, for thought

Here’s a list of what’s in tomorrow’s Community Supported Agriculture [CSA] box for us:

• MAGENTA LETTUCE
• MILAGRO LETTUCE
• GREEN ONION
• SORA RADISH
• SNAP PEAS
• GREEN BEANS, and
• SUMMER SQUASH

As usual, we’ll be splitting the contents with the Daughter Person and her family. Meanwhile, the Better Half is baking some of my favorite apple cookies so we can use up a handful of small apples that, even after sitting on the counter for more than a week, are still too firm to comfortably eat. (She wasn’t thrilled with my idea of baked apples and I was equally enthused with her idea of applesauce. I love the way we compromised.)

farmers markets: alternative to CSAs

Photo by J. Harrington

I didn’t set out to eat healthier as the reason we've joined various CSAs over the years. I wanted to support the development of local food systems and keep as much of our food budget as possible out of the hands of corporate ag, the folks who bring us biofuels and Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). Eating healthier has been a pleasant unintended consequence, aided and abetted by the Better Half’s culinary skills.

We’re also members of two food coops plus, with the Daughter Person, purchase locally raised beef, pork and “lamb” by the whole or half or quarter animal. We don’t completely avoid big box and local chain grocery stores, but we’re doing what we can. Now, if more “farmers” would act on this information: Better farming techniques across the world could lead to storage of 31 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide a year, data shows we might begin to enjoy a “win-win” scenario. (Our CSA farm is organic / restorative.)

One of my go to climate scientists manages to frequently annoy me by, as I see it, giving a pass to too many folks who aren’t helping with the lifting needed to limit and adapt to climate’s weirding effects. Katherine Hayhoe recently suggested on social media:

If you’re convinced we’re doomed + there’s nothing anyone can do about climate: ❌ Stop doom-scrolling & get off social media 😳 Don’t attack or hinder others doing their best to help 🐾 Adopt a pet in need of a home 🌳 Spend as much time as you can in nature ❤️ Focus on love

I'm often tempted to follow the first point; need to work more on the second; we’ve already done the third twice over; need to increase the “as you can” in point four; and work much harder on the last one. Maybe I should adjust my annoyance sensitivity, since I seem to be more in agreement than opposition to Professor Hayhoe’s guidance. Then again, who was it that claimed consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds?

Onions

By William Matthews

How easily happiness begins by   

dicing onions. A lump of sweet butter   

slithers and swirls across the floor   

of the sauté pan, especially if its   

errant path crosses a tiny slick

of olive oil. Then a tumble of onions.

This could mean soup or risotto   

or chutney (from the Sanskrit

chatni, to lick). Slowly the onions   

go limp and then nacreous

and then what cookbooks call clear,   

though if they were eyes you could see

clearly the cataracts in them.

It’s true it can make you weep

to peel them, to unfurl and to tease   

from the taut ball first the brittle,   

caramel-colored and decrepit

papery outside layer, the least

recent the reticent onion

wrapped around its growing body,   

for there’s nothing to an onion

but skin, and it’s true you can go on   

weeping as you go on in, through   

the moist middle skins, the sweetest

and thickest, and you can go on   

in to the core, to the bud-like,   

acrid, fibrous skins densely   

clustered there, stalky and in-

complete, and these are the most   

pungent, like the nuggets of nightmare

and rage and murmury animal   

comfort that infant humans secrete.   

This is the best domestic perfume.   

You sit down to eat with a rumor

of onions still on your twice-washed   

hands and lift to your mouth a hint

of a story about loam and usual   

endurance. It’s there when you clean up   

and rinse the wine glasses and make   

a joke, and you leave the minutest   

whiff of it on the light switch,

later, when you climb the stairs.

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