Fewer Ding-Dongs, More Plums

Our big sister is a nurse.  This makes for uncomfortable pauses when we reflect on those hypocritical little things every person who ever gives health advice knows they do – eating refined sugar, for example, would be one of our personal favorite hypocritical little vices.  Yes, we know.  It’s bad for us and we ought to give it up.  We’re getting there.  Getting bees so we can harvest our own honey will help, but in the meantime… dessert is just so yummy.  Is that our fault?

There are other uncomfortable pauses Sister Carol causes us, as well.  Recently, after linking our thoughts on contamination in drinking water supplies to Facebook, she chided us that she can’t very well preach “Hydrate! Hydrate! Hydrate!” to her clientele if hydration is, itself, adding unhealthy elements to the mix.

While we would like to see everyone purchase a distiller for their home (there are a wide variety of models available if you search popular sites like Craigslist, EBay, Amazon.com, or other online overstock sites), we recognize that for some, compromise will just have to be the order of the day.

While waiting for that perfect day to arrive when all new homes and apartments come equipped with solar panels, passive heating and cooling elements, wind turbines, electric car recharging outlets, and full-service water distillers, we hope to focus on things we can all do to improve our own health in the face of an increasingly toxic world.

We have written before about the advantage of either growing or buying locally produced fruits and vegetables.  This ought to be the centerpiece of an overall plan to eat healthy.  Note that eating healthy is not the same thing as “going on a diet”.  Eating healthy is a lifestyle change that reminds us to pay attention to etymology – the lifestyle change we are recommending is that we must change to a style of life which involves, for lack of a more effective way of putting it, not putting so much crap in our bodies.

There’s a reason Mother Nature does not produce any equivalent fruit or vegetable to the filling of a Hostess Ding-Dong.

There is a maxim in the Taoist writings of ancient chinese medicine:  Eat nothing which does not rot, but be sure you eat it before it does.

This is good advice vis-à-vis Ding-Dongs, but it applies equally well to fruits and vegetables, canned goods, and even dry goods like legumes, flours, etc.  This ties nicely to the suggestion we have made before about Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) agreements, or buying from farmer’s markets, or from grocers who are supplied primarily from local farms.

It is easy to see that the particular produce we consume is better when it is in season, but how do we eat a balanced diet following this advice?  This is a trickier question than many dieticians and locavore purists give the questioner credit for, because it strikes right at the heart of the most difficult question faced by those who live in quest of “fresh”. 

Anyone can eat well when it’s the middle of a harvest season.  Right now in Texas, we have corn, tomatoes, peppers, squash, beans, zucchini, early peaches, blackberries, and who knows what all else just picked and sitting on the counter waiting to be turned into scrumptious meals which are good tasting and good for you.

But what about in the middle of winter?  We get kale, and carrots, and….?  Where does the vitamin C come from?  If it isn’t from preserves, where does it come from?  There is plenty of readily available citrus on the typical grocer’s shelves, but… it all comes from miles and miles away.

This requires research on the part of the consumer.  You have to know your local environment, you have to know what you are capable of producing yourself, and what local growers are capable of producing for you.  Then there are the questions about innovations – some of them, like hothouse tomato farms, seem harmless enough.  We enjoy fresh locally grown tomatoes year-round in the Brazos Valley thanks to places like Millican Farms where their greenhouses don’t seem to know when it is too hot or too cold to grow tomatoes.

But what about other innovations, like Texas apples?  The chilling requirements for apples are generally well outside of the ranges met by most Texas orchards; hybridization techniques, however, have created several varieties which can produce fruit here.  But the red varieties often fall to the ground before being ripe due to the late summer heat; in addition, the quality leaves much to be desired, because the best apples all ripen in cooler fall temperatures, which sometimes never happen at all for most Texas gardeners.

It is good for a fruit and vegetable gardener (or “wannabe farmer” as our daughter calls us) to take a page from the playbook of our more decorative floral friends.  A good perennial bed has a wide variety of plants, some of which are in bloom at any given time throughout the year.  It may not be possible to get complete year-round production for each group in the food pyramid, but the better a stab you make at it, the healthier your overall diet will be. 

For some things, like vegetables, there are readily available guides of what to plant when, and getting year-round veggies in Texas is not a great mystery.  But fruit is a different puzzle altogether.  Here is what Myrtle’s place has in terms of fruit production, for those ever vital vitamins:

• May/June:  Blackberries and plums.  We grow Brison and Brazos blackberries, an early harvest and a mid-season harvest variety.  The plums are still a year away from production, but when we start harvesting, we will not be needing to purchase any additional fruit at this time of year.
• June/July/August/September:  Figs.  Most years, we will also have melons, either small watermelon, or honeydew and cantaloupe.
• August/September/October:  Pomegranates.  Because of their leathery hides, pomegranates actually store rather well, too.  We don’t yet know how long, but if we can stretch this crop into December and January, we will be exceptionally pleased.

That just leaves us with the deepest darkest winter to cover for fruit; until further notice, we are afraid we are going to have to rely on citrus from the Rio Grande Valley, which is several hundred miles away.  But all things considered, that is a far cry better for the environment than importing from Chile or Argentina.

Before we leave you to scramble for your local zone charts to see what comes into harvest in your area when, a brief note about canned goods:  there are people who manage to avoid them completely.  We are not yet among them, but we hope to someday be in that illustrious group of venerable foodies.  Why?  Because minerals leach from cans, and they are frequently not the good kind.

One of our favorite episodes of the televsion show Northern Exposure found the intrepid chef cum secret agent “Adam” mocking Dr. Joel Fleischman for his canned seafood; Adam’s palatte may be more sensitive than the typical consumer’s, but not by that much.  If something tastes metallic, chances are it is metallic.  There are probably better ways to get your iron than from a can of stewed tomatoes, that’s all we’re saying.

So, in summary, no Ding-Dongs, and eat what’s in season!

(Where did I put those Ho-Hos….?  Sister Carol hasn’t been by to throw them out yet, has she?)

Happy farming!