Eat Here Now

Each moment is ending, even as it arises

Growing up, I had no sense of what it meant for something to be in season—or out of season, for that matter. There was only the monolith of Publix with its speckled concrete floors and its chicken tender subs, its unwavering supply of Brussels sprouts and tomatoes and bananas.

But nothing natural is without its cycle. There were hidden asterisks to our year-round dietary stability: many of our foods had traveled long distances to get to our table—or had, perhaps, been refrigerated into dormancy and then hastily ripened with ethylene gas.

As a result, everything tasted a little bit like nothing—a dynamic that seemed, once I understood it, quintessentially Floridian: a land of endless summer where every home has air conditioning; a state whose huge swaths of once-uninhabitable wetlands have been since drained, filled in and covered over with cookie-cutter subdivisions. Florida runs on an economy of artifice, from Miami (the city with the highest density of plastic surgeons in America) to Disney World (which was also, incidentally, built on a swamp).

But zombie produce is not just a Florida problem.¹ Even here in Portland, you can find cherries and raspberries in winter—fruits that came into being more than 6,000 miles away in Chile. As

Tove Danovich

points out in Under the Henfluence, almost nobody remembers that eggs were seasonal, too, before the development of electricity. The hens took a break in the winter months until farmers began using artifical lights to keep their laying hormones switched on… forever.

When I first arrived in Portland, a friend—who had already been living here for several years—went on and on about the strawberries. You’re in for a real treat, they said.

It was November. I ventured, as I always have, to the grocery store.

?? I texted them, beneath a picture of a too-big strawberry with a bite taken out of it.

Oh not *now*, they texted back. In summer. You’ll see.

I did.

My friend was talking about Hood strawberries: tiny and deep-red and bred specifically for their high sugar content. They’re so sweet that, once harvested, they start to rot almost immediately. The first day they were available at the local farmer’s market, my friend brought me a pint.

“Oh my God,” I exclaimed aloud. The red-stained carton was empty in minutes.

Then came the raspberries, blueberries, and all manner of new and exotic blackberries: boysen, marion, cascade. I learned that year to spend hours in the sun on Sauvie Island each summer, plucking fruit straight from the vine.

My friend categorically refuses to buy fruit that’s not in season. I respect this move, but won’t falsely convey the same standard of purity. While this essay will publish on the first day of spring, at the time of this writing, it is still squarely winter. I have a plastic clamshell of blueberries in my fridge—product, the label tells me, of Peru.

Still, it has taught me something to live somewhere where seasonality is more readily apparent through my windows—and to eat, insofar as I can, according to the movement of those seasons.

Produce gives stations to the year, marks the motion of time in sections: strawberries come as early as May, hailing the arrival of warmer weather; then summer explodes with its bevy of berries—and cruciferous vegetables and salad greens and stone fruit. In fall, Seussically-shaped assortments of squash spring from bulk bins at the farmers market; at the next stall, onions are offered with their greens still attached, long bright handles on purple-white bulbs.

These days, I keep piles of dekopon oranges. I only seem to crave them in the winter months—exactly the months they’re available. I shuck their plump wedges from cellulitic skins, let them power me through the darkness with acidity and vitamin C.

Seasonal eating has taught me to take advantage of what is, while it is. Each piece of produce is an emblem of impermanence. You can’t save up life. Every kiss, every peal of laughter; each sweet moment is already ending, even as it arises. And—the real toughie—if you spend too much energy trying to capture it, you’re missing it anyway.

So I don’t fault myself for binging the huckleberries in driver’s-seat fistfuls after I’ve picked them, half-emptying the container before the drive home is done; for running back to the store for more oranges as soon as I run out. Each summer, I spend a triple-digit dollar amount on box after box of fruit ripe enough to bruise at a brushing.

It’s here now, and it won’t last. But once it runs out, the next thing: beginnings and endings the same door thrown open, over and over.

1. Arguably, it’s not a problem, but a privilege—in places where it’s tougher to get produce out of season, like Alaska, a bland, mealy pear might be preferable to no pear at all in the chokehold of winter.

---