food thinky

[coraa]

The organic produce box has had a couple of effects on our lives. One of them is, quite simply, that we eat more vegetables and fruit -- it comes to the door every week or every other week, and if I don't use it up, it's wasted money. So it provides a different focus to my meals: "Okay, this week I have shiitake mushrooms and bok choy and a red bell pepper... ooh, stir fry!" I might add meat to the stir fry, but the point of it is 'do something with the vegetables,' so I wind up eating more of them. Which is good for me, and good for the budget, because even fancy organic vegetables are cheaper than most meats.

Another effect is that I'm eating a wider variety of things. I check the box contents before it's delivered and can swap out things I don't want for things I do (neither of us, for example, is a big eggplant fan; a single small Japanese eggplant might get used, but a larger eggplant won't, so I switch it), but I try to let things-I-haven't-tasted-before show up at least once so I can see if I like them. That's how I discovered that we really like fresh fava beans, even though they're a giant pain to prepare, and, while I'd known I liked beets well enough, I didn't discover how much I -- and especially jmpava -- liked roasted beet salad (with roasted carrots and onions, topped with mustard vinaigrette) until we had a whole bunch of them to use up last winter. Now it's one of my favorite side dishes. We just discovered 'kiwi berries,' also called 'hardy kiwifruit,' which tastes like kiwi but is grape-sized and requires no peeling. Yum.

The most interesting effect, though, is the influence of 'buying local.'

Our organic produce box doesn't restrict itself to local stuff -- you can get organic produce from afar in it, too -- but you can choose how local you want to be: 'mostly local' or 'local only.' 'Mostly local' is what I did last year, from about January through mid-March, when local produce for Washington was potatoes, apples, beets, apples, potatoes, beets, potatoes, and the occasional turnip. (And sometimes winter greens.) But the rest of the year, I try to go with local-only (which has a fairly generous definition of 'local' -- within 500 miles of my address). And it definitely influences how I eat.

I find that I'm aware of seasons more. Tomatoes, well, of course I knew that tomato season is summer, but it was interesting to watch: in early spring, you could get tomatoes, but they were shipped up from Mexico. Later spring meant that you could get them from California. Early summer, they reached Oregon -- and started to show up local, since parts of Oregon are within the necessary radius -- but they were expensive. Later summer, they started to show up sourced from Washington, and the prices suddenly dropped like a rock. Prices are going back up for tomatoes... but they're dropping for broccoli. (Did you know broccoli was a cold-weather crop? I didn't, until I watched local broccoli drop by three dollars between July and now.)

So it wasn't just a vague sense of 'supporting the local economy' that prompted me to buy local and in season -- it was the fact that the prices were very different, and I could cut the grocery bill way down just by buying things in the proper season. (And yeah, I still buy things out of season -- especially in midwinter, but also if I just plain want fajitas and there are no bell peppers to be had yet. But it's sort of nice, and the limiter on what's available is actually a spur to creativity. I can think of all the things to do with green beans for four weeks, knowing that at the end of those four weeks, we'll be on to something else instead. And this is part of why it doesn't actually matter all that much to me whether buying local is 'really' effective, because, fundamentally, the political/environmental reasons are not the only reasons I do it. I also do it for the challenge, and for the aesthetics of the thing. Which is also why I don't mind too much giving it up in midwinter, when the game switches from Normal difficulty to Hard.)


So in March and April, we ate asparagus until neither jmpava nor I could look an asparagus in the face (quite a feat, given that we love asparagus), along with snow peas and sugar snap peas and berries. Then there were fava beans and green beans, and cherries, and peaches, and apricots, and tomatoes, and corn. Now there are still some of those, but you can tell it's autumn because we're also getting the acorn squash and butternut squash, the pumpkin (the kind for cooking), the apples and pears. It's an aid to meal planning: I look at the list, and immediately think: ooh, butternut squash soup. Pumpkin cheesecake? Corn and tomatoes, while they're still around....

Time to go decide what to eat next week.

Comments

[triath.livejournal.com]

Well said!

I've never heard of kiwi berries, they sound delicious!

Hee hee, now you can can whatever you can't eat. :]

[coraa.livejournal.com]

I hadn't ever heard of kiwi berries either, until I got them in a box. Yum. We've been eating them plain by the handful, like grapes or berries.

If you look for them, they might be under the name 'hardy kiwi' or 'Hardy Anna kiwi.'

[cwendy41.livejournal.com]

We started getting something called "baby kiwis" at work. I assume it's what you have. I didn't try them because I wasn't too sure how to eat them (the green skin looks like it needs to be peeled!), but I'll be sure to try some next week.

[morganlf.livejournal.com]

I'm telling you, the Three Sisters' Stew was amazing! We had it over eggs last night for leftovers. It's changed the way K. and I eat as well -- we're much more focused on veggies.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

It's definitely on my list of things to try -- I love all of the flavors involved, and, while Pav isn't a big fan of beans, something like that with a lot of other flavors and textures (and bacon) would probably be a good introduction. :D

The biggest difference is that I'm much more likely to start with the veggies and then figure out what meat (if any) to include, rather than the other way around. It's a nice change.

[rowr.livejournal.com]

oooh. I have been thinking about starting this up again, I used to do it back in the day but I was never able to eat it all.. now with two people, it's more of a reality! :)