Spring into Greenmarkets

Embracing The Return of Local Produce

Au marché, where French women observe the arrival of springtime most seriously: nothing is more meaningful than our choice of what to consume as the grip of winter yields. For centuries French women felt springtime's anticipation even more keenly than they do now. Since the Middle Ages, the predominantly Catholic population observed a Lenten fast. Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) was less the bacchanal staged in New Orleans or Rio and more what it was conceived to be: the last day that meat and other foods, including eggs and dairy, could be enjoyed before the forty-day period of abstinence between Ash Wednesday and Easter. Those would-be French women who have balked at the rigors of my Magical Leek Soup weekend, might do well to consider the virtues of traditional French ways. During Lent, not only did one forgo the richest foods, but those young enough to endure it took only one daily meal, at the end of the workday. (Charlemagne, by imperial prerogative, took his at 2 p.m.; it's good to be the king!) While I, a latter-day French woman of Huguenot extraction, would hardly prescribe a regimen so severely penitential, it does suggest to me a reason why traditionally French women don't get fat. Like a prolonged version of the Magical Leek weekend, the Lenten fast would reset the body's dials, making it more alert to the tastes it can enjoy and, eventually, more appreciative of those that for a time it had to forgo.

Come the fêtes de Pâques (Easter), everything enjoyed in celebration was consumed more mindfully. Meanwhile, probably not a few excess winter pounds had been shed. (The psychology of this cultural and spiritual discipline is very different from the tedium of dieting, a decidedly modern perversion by which we try to subtract the meals we've already eaten.) After the fast, every food of springtime, from the fresh vegetables to the spring lamb, must have tasted like the first. The body accustomed to less finds that indeed less is more. In fact, a body conditioned to enjoy less will naturally find excess unpleasant.

The market is my own lesson in patience as spring approaches. The time of pears and apples is all too slowly winding down; I'm getting a bit bored with citrus fruit and bananas. And although global agribusiness can today summon forth the fruits of the hemisphere enjoying its summer in the midst of our winter, it's somehow not the same as receiving what comes into its own locally, in sync with all else that is changing around me. I find myself longing to switch gears with my menus and start planning the first brunch outdoors. The march of seasonal produce that begins in spring, while not quite the equal of summer's bounty, is more than enough to whet my appetite for the feast of freshness to come: the first peas in their pods, the first fiddlehead ferns, the first bunch of crisp spinach. Honestly, fresh local produce is nothing like what the transnational conglomerates bring to your supermarket hub. The local version registers true colors and oozes with subtle flavors. It is produced by people who will look you in the eye when they sell it to you. And it is picked and sold when ripe! Now, we don't live in Eden and not everything can be as we would have it. But whatever else you eat, if you make it your business to find some fresh local produce every week, the rewards of its flavors will make the simplest dish satisfying in a modest portion.

I do recognize that this is easier said than done. A couple of hundred years ago, when virtually everyone was a farmer or lived near one, it was easy to acquire these seasonal blessings. Times change, but together with all the improvements to our lives we have inherited a global obesity epidemic. (It seems a cruel truth that people are growing fatter everywhere they aren't starving.)

However much I manage to enjoy nature's bounty, I cannot ignore the impoverishment relative to my childhood, when my father, a white-collar worker and an avid gardener in his spare time, surrounded us with extensive fruit and vegetable plantings. Come spring, before every meal we would gather ripe fruit and vegetables. After dinner it was a family ritual to walk to the garden and admire nature's work. Not that I remember needing one, but this evening stroll was an anti-stress pill par excellence and never failed to put me in a proper frame of mind for a good night's sleep. The twenty-first century paradise we have tried to create can't hold a candle to such satisfaction, but if nature is no longer at our door, we must go looking for it.