recognizable food

Years ago, when I first moved to the country, a friend sent me information on how to find hormone-free meats. I wasn't as country-rural-savvy as I am now, because now I know that most ranchers you can buy from only sell hormone-free meat. Of course I didn't have an allergic child then whose every sweet breath and unselfconscious smile I wanted to preserve with all my might, and whose condition prompted me to research the whole-foods movement.

It took a while, but we've finally done it. I've already mentioned the 1/2 cow we bought in October from a local rancher. Someone I know personally, in fact. Furthermore, in fact, the cow was raised by a former student on grass I've probably seen driving to school and back.

Now, finally, on Tuesday, we are going to get our first food box from the local...I'm not sure what you'd call it. It's a gas station/convenience store/organic potato outlet and, I've just learned, a distributor of organic produce, bread, and eggs. A gal I work with was chatting about it at lunch one day. You sign up for a plan, and every other week on Tuesday, a huge cooler box full of organic produce shows up on your front porch. You set out the old cooler and they take it and replace it with the new one full of fresh food.

Food that shows up on your doorstep??? That's organic? And fresh? Hello.

A word I used in one of my last posts has stuck with me for a few days, now. Recognizable. I want my food to be recognizable. "Oh," she said, a smile playing at the corners of her mouth, "how delicious this roasted eggplant with basil and sea salt is!" "Yes, and what a lovely beef roast," he replied as the carving knife glinted in his hand. Recognizable, like that.

For a long time, long before Chloe, I've watched in amazement as people loaded up their shopping carts with food that comes in boxes of various shapes and sizes, or crinkly packages. I mean, LOADED--boxes and packages mounded over the top of the cart. The shoppers are usually leaning over the front bent at the hips, strolling along as if they'd had to allot their entire day to meander the grocery store for boxes and packages and their feet hurt; bowed as if crushed under the weight of all that mystery.

The crazy thing is that there are pictures all over the boxes telling you what is inside, food elements broken down, chopped, burnt, stirred, processed and MESSED WITH until they are long past their original form. "This box has oval-shaped brown things inside, I think," she mused--and how many possibilities can you think of that fit that description?? Even with the pictures, you still can't tell what the food is really MADE of. And reading the ingredients doesn't help, either.

I saw, when we got the lists for Chloe's restricted diet, that I was going to have to learn some new words, "code words" that really meant "milk" or "eggs" or "wheat" or "peanuts" which equal life-threatening distress for my child.

I can't imagine the amount of time it would tack on to a shopping trip if you had to read the long lists on each box and package of processed foods of what the stuff is actually made of. Was it Michael Pollan who uses the term "food-like substances" in his new book? Ok, reluctant disclaimer: I admit to eating food-like substances such as Cheez-its occasionally because I'm dumb and human and sometimes stressed, but I would never serve that to my family for supper or pretend to consider it a logical source of nutrition.

I digress, I see that my original topic was "food boxes" so I'd better get back to it. Recognizable. When you go to the produce section of the grocery store, you see oblong orange things and you immediately know they are carrots. Raw, unprocessed, un-messed-with. You see a crinkly purple spherical object and you know it's red cabbage as naked as the day it was born. And so on. No guesswork, no reading ingredients lists. A red pepper is a red pepper is a red pepper.

I love looking at a dish simmering on the stove and be able to pick out each and every ingredient I used: chicken, check. Potatoes, check. Corn, check. Tomatoes, check. In the bowl on the table: baby spinach leaves, check.

It is a Good Thing to know what one is eating, and an Even Better Thing to know that what one is feeding one's small, innocent, trusting child will not damage or kill her.

How Much Better, then, to have a box full of Recognizable Food show up at your doorstep every other Tuesday? And earn airline miles to boot???

If I could make Chloe understand that organic mangoes (and about seventeen other things) will show up on our doorstep tomorrow afternoon, without any effort on my part at all (besides calling with the payment info and directions to the house [a mile east]), I'd be thrilled because I know she'd be thrilled.