I'm not sure what it is with fruit and season. Even after writing an entire paper on the issues I'm still dumbstruck by how much higher the price of locally grown fruits or vegetables is. I have said it before, and I will say it again, the modern food system is not working.
People can tell me whatever they want officially, but organic and food grown closer to home tastes better. I can't eat regular tomatoes since I've had organic. And to think, that I refer to tomatoes grown in the most intrusive way possible as 'regular'. Every once in a while I come across either home grown or organically produced local fruits or vegetables and am reminded with brute, delicious, force of how good food can taste.
It took me a long time to adjust to food in Canada, and part of that adjustment was giving up certain foods because I could no longer stand the taste of them, and a new allergy, a response to most fruits and vegetables, that made eating painful. Once in while, I bite into a peach, a strawberry, a watermelon and all I can think bout is how delicious these were, picked right out of my grandparents back yard. The strawberries required no sugar, in fact most fruit had their own plentiful sweetness that even my child's tongue was satisfied with. I never had these things all year round, as far as I can recall, but I never thought about it that way. These were what you ate in the summer, and between school holidays and warm weather this made summer an ever more anticipated time every year. I still find myself looking forward to Summer with a special zeal, rarely rewarded by anything specific. Work carries on, so do responsibilities, but Summer still feels like the last day of school and I try to capture that childhood feelings by avoiding fruits out of season and waiting for the local fair to show up in my local fruit market.
I personally believe that getting used to season availability and less variety is inevitable in the future. Every major paper on the subject of agriculture has similar dire predictions. Long distance and high input requirements into food combined with growing demand of western like diets is eating up all fertile and available land, strains the water table, and produces increasingly lower nutrient food. We can't even imagine food at a higher price or a scarcity of food. There would be riots, anger, and yet we've all gone along with it, never willing to accept the price of cheap food and its real cost. I can only hope that the trend in the 3rd world, or at least some place in the 3rd world toward sustainable, traditional, and organic food production will hold strong and spread, and I hope that that industrialized countries put even more towards protecting small farmers and promoting local consumption. Otherwise, be it population, energy availability, or climate, we're all going to be in trouble in the next two or three decades.
y love hate relationship with you is about to intensify in the 'hate' direction.
g continues with the completion of one Outside-In sock. I must say that Socks that Rock always looks so yummy in a skein, but I find myself not always as delighted at the pooling in the finished product. I also absolutely have to figure out the right needle size for me for socks. I've had the hardest time knitting in the right gauge, always either too big or just a tad too small. I'm also quite sure that I'm done with sock knitting on wooden double pointed. At size 2.25 my needles start to look like tiny bows, and I've lost more than one needle in the process. So I am exploring some other options. Plastic just seems evil, so I'm on the look out of some metal needles. Romni is having a sale and I have yet to make use of it. I'm doing my best to keep myself at bay until I knit up all the new yarn I've bought over the last three years. Which, before you stare at me agape, is not actually that much.