I am really enjoying A, V, M because it is a wealth of information composed by an author known for her fiction-writing. What that equates to is beautiful, sensational thoughts like this:
"The main barrier standing between ourselves and a local-food culture is not price, but attitude. The most difficult requirements are patience and a pinch of restraint- virtues that are hardly the property of the wealthy. These virtues seem to find precious little shelter, in fact, in any modern quarter of this nation founded by Puritans. Furthermore, we apply them selectively; browbeating our teenagers with the message that they should wait for sex, for example. Only if they wait to experience intercourse under the ideal circumstances (the story goes), will they know its true value. "Blah, blah, blah," hears the teenager: words issue from a mouth that can't even wait for the right time to eat tomatoes, but instead consumes tasteless ones all winter to satisfy a craving for everything now. We're raising our children on the definition of promiscuity if we feed them a casual, indiscriminate mingling of foods from every season plucked from the supermarket, ignoring how our sustenance is cheapened by wholesale desires. (emphasis mine)
Waiting for the quality experience seems to be the constitutional article that has slipped from the American food custom. If we mean to reclaim it, asparagus (the first spring vegetable) seems like a place to start. And if the object of our delayed gratification is a suspected aphrodisiac? That's the sublime paradox of a food culture: restraint equals indulgence." (Kingsolver 31)
