Smart Markets Lorton Farmers Market Now OPEN!

First of  all, I have a confession to make.  After what seems like an interminable winter, I was getting a little anxious for some seasonal fruit – of which there is very little available in this area right now.  I knew better than to seek flavor from California raspberries or Florida strawberries but I did want some color and acidity in my breakfast smoothie so I picked up a clamshell container of a new variety of strawberry called a Black Tie Strawberry the other day at Giant.  

The berries were large, similar in shape to Driscoll’s but looked redder throughout as if something had been done to enable true ripening on the vine rather than the red-on-the-outside, white-on-the-inside Driscoll lie.  When I cut into one, it was indeed redder on the inside and not nearly so firm.  Then I tasted it and it tasted like … nothing.  It didn’t taste like a berry of any kind or any other real fruit.  It was neither tart nor sweet, tangy or luscious.  It didn’t even taste like fruit-flavored candy.   

I was reminded all over again, against the odds at this point, that that is the point.  Big Food has now convinced us that as long as it looks like real food, it surely must be.  They have already convinced us that if something is salty, it’s good.  They’re not even trying for healthy or delicious anymore – just salty.  This applies to anything in the grocery store that is prepared including marinated meats, salad dressings, even cereals and soups, not just the snack foods and desserts.  If there is enough salt – which usually amounts to much more than our daily requirement per serving, then we will think it tastes good. That is has flavor.  Same with sugar.  There is sugar in almost every prepared food on the shelves – in foods that never include sugar if made in your own kitchen but for some reason must be sweetened up to be sold in a package of some kind.  And we thought Marie Antoinette was cruel – we would be much better off just to eat cake occasionally.  

Even the fruit is not safe from being fiddled with. If you routinely shop locally and buy seasonally, you know that no fruit in a grocery store can compare for flavor with its local counterpart – even apples and especially berries and peaches.  But the commercial food industry in this country isn’t through with us yet – and as long as they can cross-breed with impunity and jiggle those GMOs, we won’t even know what we are eating.  Those Black Tie strawberries have obviously had molecules of something other than strawberries added to them and I tried my darndest to learn more about their origins.  No luck yet but someone will let us know.  

There are great, readable books being written all the time by the guardians of our culinary culture and I read several of them over the winter.  There are also new documentary movies coming out to heighten our awareness.  I will revisit this topic again throughout the market season – you know I will – but what I am still looking for is grass-roots leadership to help save us from ourselves before all of the billions we have raised and spent on the treatment of chronic disease is totally undermined by our collective diets. 

It’s happening slowly but we need a greater sense of urgency.  And we need to focus on the young.  Got any good ideas?