Monday, September 2, 2013

Day of labor


Inspired by Labor Day, I had a very productive one yesterday when I canned three quarts of fresh Ohio peaches and made a batch (below) of "Five-minute Artisan Bread" (recipe).


Having grown up on an island that imports about 98% of what its inhabitants consume, I had no idea of what peaches or tomatoes actually tasted like. I mean, I thought I did when I ate the wan fruits they sell there in supermarkets, acculturated into an American diet by the colonially inflected supermercados, which would only sell imported U.S. produce.

There were always the plazas del mercado, which are basically Puerto Rico's longstanding version of farmer's markets. But, unlike in the States, where these markets are nowadays inflected with the caché of the local production-consumption movement, in Puerto Rico the plazas del mercado were usually where the less affluent people shopped. There you could find the wonderful aguacates, ají dulces, panas (breadfruit), plátanos, and other staples of Puerto Rican cuisine, and it was where my sage Abuela Jo insisted on shopping. But when I lived there as an adult, I don't remember going to the plaza del mercado very often although, once married, my husband and I did frequent the one in our city. My mother has long shopped at a road-side version of a plaza del mercado where she finds the local produce that is mostly absent from the larger colmados where, instead of Puerto Rican-grown vegetables, you're more likely to find Dominican products.

In the same way that the tostones (fried plantains) I make here are a far cry from the ones I can make in Puerto Rico with local plantains, eating a peach or a tomato whose carbon footprint is as big as Godzilla's didn't give me any sense of what those fruits actually tasted like. I don't even remember being very concerned about locally sourced food when I lived in the States, both in Boston and in Washington, D.C., as an adult. It wasn't until I arrived in Ohio, with its vast farm lands, and while I spent more time with my husband's family, that I learned more about farming and about the advantages of eating local. I began to educate myself by reading anything I could get my hands on, including Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and began to fantasize about canning my own food, taking advantage of the delicious gift of fresh produce that living in Ohio gives us.

That's why my apparent canning successes this weekend have meant so much to me. Better late than never, and I feel that I am following in a tradition that, while not originally culturally my own, is an important one.

Meanwhile, while I worked with my hands, in preparation for resting on Labor Day, Hamlet gazed wistfully at the world outside, the world he is no longer allowed to partake in, with his paw on the screen door he can no longer open (it's now locked against such shenanigans), dreaming of the days when he was free and could go find the yellow cat to maul and be mauled by (which is the reason why his days as an outdoor cat ended). (Notice the split left ear, which resulted from his last mauling...)


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