I like eating greens. Spring greens, collards, kale, beet greens, fennel greens, turnip greens, brussel tops, you name it. Each June I relish the first few pick-ups of my CSA, eating much of the sweet and spicy salad mix before I get home. By the end of the year I’m sad to see them go—you might recall that last year around this time I shared with you the ritual end-of-season recipe for a “farewell to greens” salad. Well, this year something I thought was impossible has happened: I am absolutely sick and tired of eating greens. 

It probably needs no reporting that this has been somewhat of a tough year for gardeners and farmers in the Interior. The relentless cold and flooding rains of July really challenged growers, stunting brassicas and obliterating summer squash. For some, these challenges came in a season already strained by late spring snows and batches of failed starts. My own garden was effectively a write-off, and you could clearly see the signs of tougher times in the show vegetables at this year’s fair. So not surprisingly, the season has been tough on CSA shares as well.

It could be worse, far, far worse. The variety has indeed been narrower than last year, but quantity hasn’t suffered. One thing not mentioned by Layton in his excellent ER article last month, is that buying a CSA share doesn’t mean buying vegetables per se. Rather, it means investing in the crop season, supporting the farm and farmer for better or for worse. The community of shareholders accepts both the rewards and the risks, which in a tough year means that you take what you are given, so that the farmer doesn’t have to shoulder the burden alone. 

This is the sometimes-tradeoff of eating local: you can’t always get what you want. If anything though, that I’ve grown tired of greens speaks not to a shortcoming of my farmer, but to a shortcoming of my own. I’ve run out of things to do with them. Intuitively, I understand that this should be nearly impossible, as greens are perhaps the most versatile vegetable. They can be featured in everything from soups to sandwiches, quiches to stir-fry. I consider myself a decent hand in the kitchen, but having exhausted the six or seven options I have stored in my head, meals have increasingly become to feel like mini-research projects, with too much time spent poring over cookbooks and too little spent proving or rejecting the culinary hypotheses that result.

Needless to say, we’re not going hungry. My refrigerator remains full of fresh produce, with fresh bunching onions, snap peas, carrots, broccoli, and cauliflower. Yet these are all greatly outnumbered by the greens, and I’m just sick of them. I’ll keep eating them of course; we had greens for supper last night, and probably will tonight as well, maybe fried up Cajun-style in olive oil, garlic, and hot sauce. As always, I will be more than thankful for their sustenance and high nutrition; there are many people in this country and elsewhere who do not enjoy the privilege of fresh, safe, local food. But I find myself yearning in moments of gastronomical weakness, ready to offer my entire kingdom for just one plate of bright yellow summer squash, maybe roasted with some olive oil and parmesan cheese, or sliced fresh on a sandwich with tomato, mozzarella, and basil.

This sense of entitlement to food variety is a widely-occurring cultural premise with a deep history, and is perhaps the biggest challenge facing local food movements in America and elsewhere. Prototypical American consumers choose between the menus of others’ food cultures as if they were flavors of soda: Thai food Mondays, Italian Tuesdays, Meat loaf Wednesdays, Taco Thursdays, Fish Fridays. I won’t lie to you and suggest that we don’t have ‘taco salad night’ at our house. But I argue that this diversity is more or less a façade, little more than an imperfect surrogate for a lacking American food culture. Cuisine develops in a scarcity of ingredients, not a surplus—those within a food culture see diversity and options in their traditional foods that outsiders cannot recognize. Conversely, American culture demands an unprecedented diversity of ingredients, but relatively speaking does very little with them. There are hundreds of traditional curries in Indian cuisine, for instance, but in the world according to McCormick there is just one.

There is Tao to aligning your diet with the ebbs and flows of the environment, and a fine line between indulging in the occasional exotic and sheltering yourself behind a façade of food choice, surplus, and security that the industrial food system purports. In a good year, we taste the hot summer breeze in the sweetness of the tomato and the piquant of the chili. This year we’re weathering the cold and the rain through a steady supply of vitamin-loaded greens. But by no measurable standard are we going without. So I remain thankful for my greens, the food security they provide, and for the chance to be a part of a community that is interested in growing a new American food culture.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 15th, 2008 at 6:57 am by Philip Loring and is filed under Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.