One of the interesting side effects of getting my food from a local farm through Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is that I have been made aware of what still is growing down here in Texas (zone 8b) in early December. Now for a Northern like me, when only the most well-constructed gardens in Zone 5 (like my favourite, the One Yard Revolution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jtw7pnqFeS4) is capable of producing anything fresh, which is to say not frozen or canned from the Fall, I am jazzed to get lovely golden beets with green tops that can be steamed, lots and lots of sweet potatoes (speaking of which, a shout-out to Wish to Dish for her recipe on her blog of a delicious looking sweet potato soup that I am trying out tonight https://wishtodish.co.uk/2017/11/14/sweet-potato-ginger-and-coconut-soup-vegan-gluten-free/!), also spinach, kale, fennel, broccoli, and, of course, jalapeño peppers!
In the not too distant future, if things continue going the way they are (Cassandra alert!), we will all be forced back into a much more local way of eating (my home state of Vermont has already a very vibrant locavore culture: http://seedstock.com/2015/05/17/ten-reasons-vermont-deserves-to-lead-the-strolling-of-the-heifers-2015-locavore-index/) which will make our instant gratification mindset obsolete, as well as force us to resurrect some of the lost home skills of canning, smoking, freezing, and drying fresh foods.
Again, my suggestion is to get out in front of this by practicing on a small personal scale a reduction in foods coming in out of season from very far away. Okay, coffee will clearly not be part of this experiment (!), but oranges and bananas should be. Incidentally, both fruits have recently been under attack from fungal and bacterial diseases: https://www.treehugger.com/green-food/biotech-breakthrough-hopes-save-bananas-extinction.html https://www.cbsnews.com/news/florida-orange-groves-greening-citrus-tree-killing-bacteria-disease/ which will make them much less available and much more expensive in the near future.
If you are interested in imagining what a life would be like based completely on food you raise yourself, please read Barbara Klingsolver’s beautifully written book: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Though Barbara and her husband Steven are professors, they both came from farming families, so they had some of the knowledge and traditions of farming available to them from their grandparents and parents.
I, on the other hand, come from at least four generations of urban peoples! My mother learned what little cooking she knew from her family’s cook, and my father did not know how to boil water. Happily, my husband (now my ex) and our daughter are good cooks. I am still struggling to learn the basics that some lucky children learn in their mother’s or grandmother’s kitchen. At my age (sixty-seven) I may not live to see the world change as radically as I worry it will, but still, it seems the wiser course to give up frivolous past times and concentrate instead on one of the basic necessities of life: the growing, cooking, storing, and, of course, eating wholesome foods.
Better Choices 