As is often the case for us on Sundays, we didn’t put much effort into preparing dinner last night. We warmed up leftover pot roast, sweet potatoes and carrots. It was a simple, basic and delicious meal. But it had one small addition that made the meal memorable. Just before we sat down, I went out to the garden and got a fresh tomato, washed it and cut it into wedges. The flavor was wonderful. I saved a couple of slices for dessert.

I am really not much of a gardener. I don’t enjoy weeding and sometimes let my garden get ahead of me. I tend to pick up seeds and plants from local sources, but I don’t do any research into the sources of those seeds and plants. I live a busy life and travel quite a bit and sometimes my garden is neglected. Still there is great pleasure in producing at least a bit of the food that we eat.

We were late in planting our garden this year – not late for our place, but late for this particular year. We had such a warm spring, that the entire month of May could have been used for the plants to grow, but having seen late frosts in past years and being busy with other things, we didn’t get our garden in very early. That means that even though the weather has been great for tomatoes, we are just beginning to harvest the first fruits. The plants look healthy and are pretty large for this time of the year, so there is great promise for a steady stream of tomatoes until frost sets in sometime in the fall.

I have read various articles on heritage and heirloom seeds, on brix testing for flavor density and other ways that are used to measure and compare various tomatoes. I’m sure that if I took time to study these reports, I might be able to improve the flavor of my tomatoes. It would be a good challenge, but probably a task that will wait until retirement – or be left to someone else. I’m all in favor of pursuing flavor. I think that the comparison between a home-grown tomato and the ones that are available in the supermarket is dramatic enough that I don’t need a refractometer to determine which tomatoes taste the best.

Food, of course, is important to all of us. Our lives and our health are dependent upon the food we eat. And there is more than a small amount of unhealthy eating going on in our community. Sometimes I have the opportunity to go shopping with someone who is receiving a bit of assistance and I am often struck by the food choices they make. In the stores of our community the highest quality and freshest foods also cost the most. When you are trying to squeeze the most food out of a very limited budget, you end up with quite a bit of over-processed food. Of course there are ways to stretch a food budget that seem obvious to me, but are unknown to some of the people with whom I work. I think of dried beans as a staple for a budget diet. They are inexpensive, easy to store, and once you learn to soak and cook them properly, they will produce a filling and flavorful meal. That assumes, of course, that you have access to a kitchen – or at least a burner and a pot to boil water. Another food that we have used to make our grocery dollars go farther is peanut butter. But the price continues to rise. The least expensive brands are filled with sugar and other items that make them less nutritious that some of the more expensive brands. All you need for good peanut butter is peanuts. The ones that have a whole list of ingredients are to be avoided in my opinion.

My list of grocery shopping tips is probably not helpful for anyone else since so much of food shopping is about taste. But the experience of shopping with others points out a balance that we need to achieve. We need to make food available and affordable for all the people of this earth. This means that a lot of people simply will not have access to the most expensive items. Modern production agriculture is the direct result of well-meaning people working very hard to find ways to produce more food to feed hungry people. The result is a system of agriculture that consumes a lot of fertilizer and fuel and produces food that requires an extensive transportation system to distribute it from the farm to people in distant cities.

I delighted in reading Barbara Kingsolver’s “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” about eating locally. The ironic part of the book for me, however, was that in order to make their one-year experiment of eating locally work, their entire family moved from New Mexico to Pennsylvania. The fuel they consumed in the move wasn’t considered as part of the cost of their food. Figuring that in changes the equation. I’m thinking that a year of trying to garden and eat locally would be different for their family if they were to try the same adventure in Bridger or Oglala, South Dakota. Something tells me that we’d bump into them at Wal-Mart before the end of the year. And quite a few of the families with whom we work don’t have the luxury of a healthy book advance to fund a year of pursuing a specific eating discipline, unless you count commodities as a food discipline.

Good ideas need to be adapted to fit in the real world. At this point, most of the debates about ethical eating are taking place among people who have a lot more choices than are available to the residents of Shannon or Ziebach counties – home to some of our nation’s most impoverished families.

So I don’t pretend to have the solution to the challenge of food and eating. I think that all of us are guilty of making poor choices about food from time to time. I don’t have a single plan that will fit every family and situation.

But I do have the memory of that tomato that is lingering hours after I ate it. And I have the promise of many more tomatoes in the next few months. It is enough to keep me dabbling in the garden and continuing to think about the choices about food that I make.

Copyright © 2012 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.