in my kitchen, around the farm
It’s that time of year when things really start rolling around here. Seems like the right time to revisit the “in my kitchen, around the farm” style essays. I’ll keep writing these as I have in the past, on Saturdays.
I’ve spent the winter furthering my excavation of understanding eating seasonally. When you grow all of your own food, seasonality is obvious. Since I live in Canada, most people would rightly assume there are no mangos or bananas about. Many might guess that winter leaves little produce, but there’s a lot more to it than that. I’m interested in living in congruence with nature as nature would offer itself to us without our manipulations. Then again, I’m trying to find a way to be nourished while also enjoying the pleasurable aspects of food while strengthening the health of my body. I shall endeavour to explain.
Over the last few years, I’ve learned a lot more about light and how, in some ways, it’s even more important than what we put into our mouths. It’s been, and continues to be, transformative in my understanding of the depths of our connection to the places we live and how profound the synchronicity between us and nature. We are truly, inescapably woven into each other. There is no nature to visit or “spend time in”. We were designed as a whole and removing ourselves from the natural world might just be the single greatest calamity in the history of man. The damage that has been wrought is immeasurable.
I don’t believe there’s a supplement or a eating regime that will cure anyone that lives indoors, surrounded by EMFs, never seeing the sun or grounding to the earth. It’s so integral and foundational to be outside, to see the sun rise and set, to spend as much of our waking days as we can out there, that without, we are merely managing symptoms. It’s as plain as that. Where food falls into that is in equal measure to movement.
There are different ways to understand the seasonality of food. We can know it as a story of connection, a deepening to living within scarcity and abundance with honesty and gratitude. Pleasure and sacrifice. These are spiritual practices that bring meaning into our lives in small, but profound ways. It takes discipline to resist the temptations of immediacy, let it be the comfort of lazing or the conveniences of a grocery store, but exercising the muscle of restraint builds bigger, shinier things within us. Our experience of pleasure deepens. What is a grocery store blueberry, trucked in from places foreign and removed, eaten in the snow of January telling our body? And what is its offering to us? A little bit of mealy sweet? Compare that to the sun warmed berry that has grown under the same light and seasons as you, picked at its nutritional prime, bursting with flavour and nutrients and resonance to your summer warmed body. Yes, there it is. You are primed for that berry and those apples and that crisp summer lettuce. It has to be because that’s what is. No machines, no greenhouses, no ships and planes to get it to your door. It’s there and so it’s right.
Sometimes people ask me “what about this diet” or “why don’t you like this diet, Dr. X says it will save planet earth” that type of thing. I am for the doctors and experts and health gurus that are humbled and in service to nature. Not that? I’m not interested. You might have already figured this out too, or if you haven’t, you likely will in time. It’s never an issue of figuring out what to add, it’s in figuring out how to blow away the chaff of modernity to find the fertile germ beneath.
I apply these principles to our farm animals, too. Back in the day, when megafauna still roamed, we ate primarily meat and that meat was quite fatty. Or at least there was a good amount of fat on it. There’s a reason that people hunt in the fall in the western hemisphere - that is when the animal is at its nutrient prime after having spent spring, summer, and fall on quick growing, high sugar grasses and fodder. That’s why we butcher our animals then. Before we did that, we bought all of our animal foods from farmers at that time - enough to last the year. We are capturing nutrients in nature’s time of harvest. But we don’t have megafauna anymore and that’s why industrialized beef finishes cattle in feedlots and raises mutated breeds of chickens like the Cornish X and feeds grain to milk cows. All of these practices are an adaptation to quickly get fat into these animals as fast and cheap as possible. It’s growth and marbling and size and production over all else.
I had an older friend showing me one of his 13 month old steers the other day. The animal was enormous and big bellied with a thick fat cover. He was on a high grain ration and almost ready to be slaughtered. The breed was a continental one, meant to get big and fat on grain. In fact, these animals do very poorly on a grass fed farm where a smaller framed, heritage breed animal may excel. I commented that we keep our animals for a minimum of three years and solely feed on pasture and hay in winter. He started explaining to me that feeding grain and corn isn’t as expensive as I think it is, in fact, it would be cheaper than “over-wintering” animals for a few years. He was right, of course, but he missed the point entirely. He and I are after two very different things.
What does this have to do with seasonality? Well, everything. It has to do with our understanding of our food and how it impacts us. It’s important to not only ask what’s important in our health but how the health of the things we consume affects us as well. We should know how the animals we eat are manipulated so that we can be more connected to what actually allows us to live, well or not, here on earth. If we lived as we once did, would we have these foods all year round? Does it make sense to drink milk and eat eggs in abundance throughout a growing year?
I’m certain there are not enough gigabytes on this digital universe to contain my thoughts and opinions on this topic, but I’m cognizant that this is supposed to be one of my Saturday “in my kitchen, around the farm” posts where I show you little experiments and delights and new babies and lessons learned. But I needed to set the stage a little bit. I wanted to start with this. Next week we’ll get to the pictures and the winter experiments etc…
For now, I will say that the over the last few years, we’ve come to spend our winters on an animal focused diet. In fact, that remains year round. We eat the most nourishing foods there is and that’s animal products from animals raised well on pastures but the vegetables and fruits change with the seasons. I did do the strict carnivore diet for a time and I credit it, along with other things, for the reversal with my struggle with chronic Lyme. Since adding some plants back in seasonally, we’ve continued to spend some of every winter eating solely animal foods. This winter we did that for about three months. It’s not an issue at all anymore. We feel good eating that way, but we also find there comes a time when we know we just want to add back in other foods.
When we weren’t eating just animal foods this winter, we were adding in my preserved and fermented foods. I “canned” my first food when my oldest daughter was a couple of years old. That’s about 29 years ago now. It was strawberry jam with honey and I thought I was a genius! Since then, I started canning all manner of things only to stop almost entirely, save some jars of summer fruit, over a decade ago now. I had decided that canning wasn’t very healthy after all and I was bitten by the fermenting, souring, culturing bug. If it wasn’t fermented, I wasn’t preserving it. Now I’ve come full circle.
I still love fermenting. I have a whole pantry dedicated to my bubbling homemade vinegars, pickles, and veg and fruit ferments of all ilk, but I’ve also come to really,