This book is absolutely so cozy!! I don’t usually read non-fiction, but was super excited to read this one! I am already loving just how joyful the author is; it feels like a breath of fresh air

”Eating with the seasons is a way of honoring abundance. By going to meet it when and where it arrives. A world of produce houses and grocery stores enables the practice of having what you want and when you want it”

My mom once said to me, "I only eat food that comes from the store, not from the ground." When the shock subsided and I could finally form words again, I asked, genuinely curious, where she thought the food from the store came from. She told me that she knows it comes from the ground but she doesn't have to see it so it's different. Different in the same way that people couldn't fathom killing a cow but would happily eat a burger. (I'm not judging, nor am I absolved of the hypocrisy - I eat fish). But the point is we are so far removed from reality that we could never even fathom not having our favorite foods available every single day of the year. And yet there is still such a terrible scarcity mindset. "If I don't buy it now, if I don't have it now, I may never get the opportunity to again!" This way of life carries over into every aspect of our lives and creates an atmosphere of constantly living for the future rather than living for what we currently have.

I just started the audiobook, which is read by the author, and I find it really lovely that you can hear her turning the pages while she reads. There's just something so cozy about it to me. Like being read a bedtime story.

"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 🖤

Out of all the horrors happening in Nickelodeon, I’m glad there was one good thing that happened and that is Jeanette finding a friendship with Miranda. Her mom warped her perspective of female friendships with misogynistic stereotypes; women are backstabby, jealous and competitive. But at the very least, there was one person Jeanette could trust and rely on.