Somehow, when I travel, I always feel like that thoughtful sort of “time traveler” who could really send the world into a tailspin if he ever did anything to disrupt the flow of local time. I apply the principle to food and crossing the street. In other words, I try to fit in with the local cultural wisdom, eating in season with my neighbors and walking stoutly across the road, staring the Vespa drivers in the eye and never changing the speed of my gait, ever, no matter what. It’s fun. Really. I’d never be caught bringing home rock-hard winter tomatoes from heaven knows where in sight of my Lunigiana neighbors because, you know, “one just has to have a slice of tomato on one’s whatever or one is just going to die” doesn’t cut it in Tuscany. Yet.
Katie Parla exhorts you to do pretty much the same. Her latest article, When In Rome, Respect the Seasons pleads with you not to order foods that aren’t at their best. None of this, “By golly I’ve come 5200 miles to have carcofi (that were frozen and shipped from heaven knows where) and I’m going to have those, those, you know, Jewish ones.”
Pft, you could get lousy quality summer artichokes in the states, Buster. Or worse.
But it’s an odd concept, isn’t it? I mean, eating in a particular manner, sometimes against your will, so that other people’s culinary traditions can carry on.
For me, it isn’t a chore at all to pass on the out-of-season vegetables. I take the erotic approach to my vegetables and cooking methods. When I’m out in my shorts grilling in the summertime, say late August, and I catch a bit of a chill wind licking at my wiry and unsightly leg hair, I immediately start salivating.
No, not about the steak and the eggplant sizzling on the grill or the great panzanella Martha has made or even my leg hairs getting fluffed; I’m thinking of a hearty stew, or a chicken stuffed with stalks of rosemary baking away in the oven, filling the house with the smell of herb-scented roast meat, with other odors interleaved—the smell of roasted potatoes and the intriguing odors of intense white turnips taking on a tinge of brown as they get basted by the animated spatter of the chicken. Yes, with a long summer comes the pent-up demand for winter food and when the wind turns into a storm, it’s like a little foodie orgasm passing over you as you dig into your winter root vegetables after all that time lusting after them. I’ll bet the people eating incisor-busting tomatoes of January don’t have the same erotic feelings as they’re dealing with their fetish.
In any case, it’s obvious that not many folks care to put their desires on hold so they can taste the change of seasons upon their tongues and shiver erotically over the seasonal differences. We don’t like to pent up our demand. We want to take a recipe to the market from anywhere in the world and get the stuff we need to make it. That day. Period.
Besides, a market doesn’t like the demand being pent up either. So we appease the market by demanding crap tomatoes in January. It’s a kinda sad circle, isn’t it?
If you want to hear a marketer from Forbes and a Food writer duke it out over them golden apples, read Join the Great Tomato Debate: Tim Worstall of Forbes and Adam Smith vs. Me. The me is Barry Estabrook, author of Tomatoland. The marketer says the winter tomato market operates perfectly, providing folks who demand out of season tomatoes with tomatoes (from Florida!) at a price they’re willing to pay. He’s right. The foodie, however, is playing the “what about all the piles of poisons and fertilizer that has to be used to grow tomatoes in sterile sand and all the people who’ve been harmed by those poisons, all for a load of crap tomatoes” card. He’s right too.
Dangitall, this is hard. Eat right, folks. What else can you do?