Smith - Farm Fresh Flavors: Over 450 Delicious Meals Using Local Ingredients

T here is a movement afoot to develop a more personal relationship with food. A small but vocal minority has shouted hell no to the anonymous bread mill that delivers our daily bread. Many are concerned about the environmental degradation that institutional farming and food processing engender. The endless monocultures of chemically sustained corn and soybeans that carpet Middle America leaves our soils barren and require enormous petroleum inputs to sustain. Vast feedlots of cattle, hogs and chickens produce mountains of manure that pollute our waterways and groundwater.

Some are concerned about the questionable wholesomeness of the Western diet with nutrients processed out and complex and sometimes dangerous chemicals processed in. The Western diet has largely been reduced to various combinations of corn, soybeans and chemicals.

The welfare of factory-farmed and processed animals is also troubling, including the unseen cruelty they endure in order to be brought to our table. Cattle, hogs and chickens are confined in teeming enclosures and force-fed unnatural diets. These practices cannot be sustained and enlightened people are looking for alternatives. They are seeking a more intimate and significant relationship to the food we eat and the universe that produces that food. We have attempted to co-opt natural rhythms with science and need to return to sustainable consumption searching for a way to balance our food karma. A way of eating that allows us to join in a timeless cycle of natural renewal and to participate rather than exploit.

Part of finding a more connected way to cook and eat is dealing with abundance when you are blessed with it and scarcity when nature demands it. The traditional coming and going of scarcity and abundance linked us with timeless rhythms of nature, the earth and ourselves. We had to think and plan ahead. We had to treasure and conserve the abundance. We had to manage and endure scarcity. We had to take what the world gave us and it taught us discipline, reverence and humility. These lessons are harder to come by when we can get anything we want, anytime we want, already prepared, for a few bucks and a small amount of time. I think this convenience and plenitude has made our lives less interesting. We all eat the same things and we eat them all year long. We follow the same diets and talk about food in the same ways. We aren't forced to change our tastes at all. It is entirely possible and, way too common, for a person to eat the same breakfasts every morning, every day of their life. We eat Hot Pockets and microwave dinners and the same frozen vegetable blends in December, June and October. We don't cook anything fresh because that would require understanding and commitment; understanding what we were meant to eat at any given season of the year and commitment to using that food with good sense and integrity.