"Eating with the seasons is a way of honouring the abundance by going to meet it when and where it arrives. A world of produce warehouses and grocery stores enables the practice of having what you want when you want it. We force the food to come to us, at considerable financial and ecological costs, rather than following the practice of taking what has been given to us each in its own time."

Here's a little personal share in reference to this paragraph. A couple of years ago, my husband and I made the choice to only shop at locally owned and operated businesses for anything we needed for an entire year. No chains, no franchises, no big businesses!

Not only did it help us foster relationships with more people in our small community, taste the best family recipes, financially support the goods and service providers to do real things such as send their kids to hockey practice or music lessons, etc, but it also completely flipped how we ate with the seasons.

Where I live is very lush with stonefruits and grapes so in the summertime it was so easy to just grocery shop at fruit stands on the side of the road or farmers markets. But in the winter, all the food we had gotten so accustomed to eating year-round became unobtainable. The effort for us to conform our recipes to seasonal products was so minimal and we found new ingredients that we still use today that we hadn't tried as frequently before!

The moral of the story is that it's a lot easier for us (in our circumstance) to eat seasonal foods than it normally takes out-of-season foods to make their way to us!

Final note, I do want to acknowledge that not everyone has this privilege and that we just happened to be in the financial position at the time to afford this lifestyle. Big businesses constantly out-price local businesses and can sell pretty much anything cheaper, which makes shopping exclusively local (in my area) more expensive than using supermarkets. If you find yourself in a stable financial position to do the same, I strongly implore you to try it out and see how it benefits you and your local community 🖤

starts audibook Oh cool! Jeanette’s narrating. Loved her other self narrated book.

hears Jeanette dictate first 3 sentences of audiobook Oh… yeah I’m sure she is glad her mom died before this came out.