We had a celebration at my house this week, one that promises to become an annual event. It was the celebration of the first tomato. When I moved in to my new house in June, I hastily bought four tomato plants and created a small garden, the first promise of more elaborate gardens to come. The planting was late, and only in mid-August did the first tomato slowly ripen to a rich red. How tantalizingly it hung there on the vine, first green, then yellowish, then pale orange, then deeper orange and deeper orange — but for a long time, it seemed, not quite red. Then, finally, last Tuesday, pure red at last! We picked it with pomp and the reading of poetry, garnished it with basil and oil — then reveled in its sensuous home-grown flavor, so utterly distinct from the tasteless pseudo-tomatoes typically available in grocery stores. First Tomato will remain a delicious memory.
What elevated this tomato into an Event was not merely that it was the first of a new garden, but the fact that tomatoes, as the products of living plants, have their own times and seasons. There is no special joy in grocery store tomatoes, which, even if they had flavor, are routinely available 365 days a year. Home-grown tomatoes, because they come in their own sweet time, create contexts of meaning.
Throughout all history up until the last few decades, everyone's diet had a seasonal rhythm. In Southern Appalachia, greens came in the early spring, then peas and other spring vegetables. Strawberries appeared in May, blackberries in June. July, August, and September were the months of the corn and bean harvest and of fresh tomatoes and watermelons, and later in the fall there were nuts, squashes, and persimmons. Meat, dried beans, and stored grains made up the bulk of the winter diet, though the careful gardener knew how to extend a fall crop of greens long into the winter.
But these rhythms, which once gave texture and tempo to life and provided cause for anticipation and celebration, have long been broken. Processed food, which makes up the bulk of our diet, has no seasonal rhythm and is available on demand, constantly. Even "fresh" produce of virtually any variety, is now available year round, trucked in from Mexico or California, or shipped up from Chile, New Zealand, or Brazil—the only seasonal variation being a fluctuation in price.
What is true of the food supply generally is also true in particular for the food of restaurants. The fast-food restaurants, of course, get their stocks from regional or national suppliers which standardize it so rigidly that it varies not at all from franchise to franchise or season to season. But even those locally-owned restaurants which offer changing menus usually buy from a few corporate suppliers, such as Robert Orr/Sysco or IJ, which may truck in just about any food from just about anywhere in just about any season.
Perhaps this constant availability of everything has contributed in some measure to human happiness, but nearly all now take it for granted and many find it blasé. Correlatively, celebrations of the seasonal rhythms and harvests have nearly all lost their meanings.
However we assess its effect on the meanings of our lives, this much, at least, is clear: this vast supply of exotic and luxurious foods is procured at great environmental cost. The energy required to transport and refrigerate all this food is tremendous, and most of it is generated by the burning of fossil fuels, with all the attendant effects of global warming, pertroleum pollution, acid precipitation, smog, and noise.
Eating with the seasons provides, by contrast, not only cause for celebration, but a wellspring of health. Seasonal produce is locally grown, ripened in the garden or on the farm, transported only short distances, and consumed while still fresh. Such food clearly enhances the health of the body and of the land. It is not unreasonable also to suppose that it improves the health of the spirit.
The celebration of First Tomato was in fact, a kind of sacrament, an opportunity to recognize that the ultimate source of our food is not the grocery store or the companies that put those annoying little sticky labels on our fruit, but the Sun and the Soil and the Rain.