Our weekly delivery of produce came today. I never know exactly what will be in the box. Today it was fennel, escarole, radicchio, pears, apples, red peppers, avocados, lemons and both standard colors of cabbage. A bit of a tedious list to read, but the point, for me anyway, is that it takes a bit of extra creativity on my part to figure out what to do with some of these things. My normal grocery store load would be lettuce, broccoli, sweet potatoes...definitely not fennel. Fennel has a tendency to rot in this residence. I tried. It rots. Same with cabbage. Rots. I know how to make sauerkraut. I have a fermentation pot that I made myself in my clay studio. It rots before it ever gets near that pot.
At the same time that my anxiety and anticipatory guilt rise as I lift each beautiful ill-fated jewel out of the box they came in, I still have hope. THIS time I won't let it happen. I will treat them well and create something healthy and lovely and full of fennel. I will do what I know and make cabbage, carrot, ginger sauerkraut, and it won't taste like sauerkraut and everyone will want to eat it, and it won't just be me stuck eating it for its probioticness. Food waste is such a huge issue, how is it that I am taking any small part in it? So many people are food insecure, and here I am so flippant.
My sister sent me a photo of a cabbage she let rot in the back of her fridge. She put it in a pot of dirt and it grew! My last purple cabbage is now in a pot of dirt on the back porch after languishing on the counter. I think it is growing!
Today, as I washed the produce, as I now do at every unboxing, I felt not only hope, but excitement over the challenge to follow through on creating something from these organisms that grew in a magical, complicated, vigorous push for survival. I washed them and placed them in the dish rack, toughest on the bottom, most delicate on top, and wondered why I was so excited about them.
It occurred to me that maybe I was feeling something in my ancient DNA. A sense of coming home after foraging for edible surprises from the woods. Of being an animal in nature, as more humans used to be, and gathering food as it was found. I realized that I was feeling the lazy person's sense of accomplishment after the hunt. This box, dropped on our front porch and left in the sun with ice packs to keep things fresh, gives me weekly satisfaction of a hunt well done. And I never need leave my house.
I have spent so much of my life piggy-backing on the experiences of others. In a tv culture, a society where so much of life is not lived through actual experience. I have watched the world on a screen, traded adventure for the security of a sometimes uncomfortable comfort zone, and picked up the produce box, filled with the surprises of someone else's venture, off of the porch every Tuesday.
