Farmer's Market Season - touch, taste and smell the foods you're buying.

Eating With All Our Senses

One of my most favorite times of the year is the farmers’ market season. Nowhere is food more fresh and nutritious than when it comes from a farm nearby. And with your purchases you get a chance to support your local economy as well.

I also enjoy the personal touch when interacting with the farmers. But even more so, I love to see, touch, smell and taste the food I’m buying. You can’t do that with processed, canned, packaged or frozen items. All you get to look at is a photo on a label with only a remote resemblance to the actual content.

See, Touch, Smell, Taste –
Food Can Please Us in Many Ways

It’s a curious thing that we don’t taste our foods anymore before purchasing. We may choose according to visual appeal, picking the bright yellow banana rather than the spotted brown one, or the immaculate tomato over the one that’s soft and slightly wrinkled. But in any case, it is never the same experience as biting into an apple or a pear that has been harvested just a few hours ago.

It is a sad truth that most of us have lost touch with the food we eat, the region it comes from, the soil it grows in, the people who harvest it and who bring it to our table. We don’t have the time or energy to be concerned with all that. Like everything else, our food has to be instantly available and conveniently served.

Of course, the fact that we have almost unlimited food supplies in this country is an achievement of great importance and goes to the credit of the respective industries. But for us, the consumers, this also comes with a sense of loss and disconnect. There’s no longer a relationship between what we eat and who we are.

I myself have no background in agriculture. I grew up in the suburbs where there were no farms nearby. But almost every family in my neighborhood had a small garden in their backyard where they planted a variety of vegetables and a few fruit trees. I remember my mother lining up tomatoes on the windowsill to let them ripen in the sun. What we didn’t consume right away was preserved in glass jars for the winter months.

I learned at a very young age to distinguish between different seeds and watched with fascination the miraculous growth of beans and cucumbers. I almost think of it as good luck that my parents had to grow much of our produce themselves because they couldn’t afford to buy it in a store. These memories of my childhood still influence my relationship to food today.

I imagine that these early experiences have also generated my life-long interest in cooking. The very idea of preparing a meal from scratch still gives me great pleasure. I don’t ever consider cooking as a chore. I like the surroundings of a well-equipped kitchen. I like handling food – slicing, dicing, stirring, mixing – all of it. I like the look, the feel, the smell, even the sound of food when it pops and sizzles. I like knowing that it’s fresh and of good quality without having to rely on nutrition labels and expiration dates. And, most importantly, I like sharing my home-cooked meals with friends and family. Life would be much poorer without it.

True, not everyone has the time, skill or inclination to be such a “food enthusiast.” But I think that we cannot afford to be completely ignorant or indifferent in our relationship to food.

A healthy lifestyle requires not only some knowledge about what (and what not) to eat, but also how to enjoy food and appreciate its value. Eating absentmindedly in the office while working through lunch break, driving in the car or watching TV is not conducive for anyone’s physical or mental health – not in the long run anyway.

If we can’t take the time to enjoy a good meal or don’t value the food we eat, then all we do is stuff ourselves to eliminate hunger or fight boredom. On the other hand, if we allow ourselves to experience the pleasure and satisfaction that good food can provide, especially when shared with others, it can enrich the quality of our lives altogether.

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