This was not an experiment in deprivation. We just wanted to stop pushing pampered fruits and vegetables around the globe on our behalf, so we changed our thinking. Instead of starting every food sentence with “I want,” we began with “right now we have… .” Each season brought a new menu. We tried to celebrate asparagus in April and apples in September, rather than whining about not having apples in spring or asparagus in the fall, if you see my point. Our farmers here grow salad greens under row cover even in the snowy months, and in January we loved the pears we’d canned in cider last summer. It’s not as if we were chewing on acorns.
It’s funny that this is the first question most people asked: what did you have to give up? We shared that anxiety too, in the beginning. A consumer culture has trained us all to concentrate intensely on what we might be missing, rather than what we have. Unfortunately, that encourages a toddler-like approach to the world: “I want everything, right now, so I can put it in my mouth!” For many reasons, I believe it’s a useful family exercise to reorder this manner of thinking. In my lifetime I expect to face the end of many kinds of abundance we’d thought would last forever. Instead of dreading collapse, why not be inventive about adapting to a changing world? Why not begin finding ways to eat splendidly from our own local food economies, and giving them our business so they will be even better next year?