every day is a good day
We had company for lunch today. How often do you get to visit someone and enjoy a salad made from salad greens that were just picked? It’s a pleasure to be able to serve such fresh food to our guests. I also made mashed potatoes from potatoes I dug up just before I boiled them.
Recently, whenever I am out in the vegetable beds, the sweet scent of a mysterious flower floats through the air. The past few days I’ve wondered what is blooming. Today I found out. It is the popcorn I planted. The tassels of the popcorn have an enchanting, sweet fragrance. The fragrance is so sweet, I’m tempted to cut some tassels and put them in a vase.
Every trip into the vegetable beds is a voyage of discovery. You don’t have to look far to find beauty. Mother nature can’t touch a single square foot of land without leaving behind breathtaking splendor.
I had a laugh today listening to Ira Flatow on Science Friday today. He was interviewing Michael J. Sheehan about facial recognition. As I listened, it dawned on me that Ira Flatow must spend almost no time with animals. He commented how animal faces all look the same while human faces are very different. His comment made me laugh. Has this man not even looked at two dog faces side by side? He certainly hasn’t looked closely at a flock of chickens.
Near the post office is this long row of fifty or so trimmed poplar trees. Whoever trims them must spend a lot of time trimming them as they are always trimmed. Only, it turns out that it’s not a person who keeps these trees looking so neat. It’s a pair of cows. They go along the fence by the trees, nibbling at the trees and eating all the branches and leaves they can reach. In the process they keep the bottom branches of the leaves all trimmed to the same height.
The next time you are in the country and see a row of trees with their lower branches all trimmed neatly. Look for cows. They’re most likely the ones trimming the trees.
I watched a program on TV Japan called “Tameshite Gatten” which each week, looks at something people use all the time, and takes an hour to thoroughly explain it. This evening they were covering fresh soybeans, which are usually boiled in salt water, and are called “edamame”, which literally mean “beans on the stem”.
Many stores sell edamame, but they are usually sold precooked and frozen in the US. What was interesting about tonight’s show is that many in Japan will only buy fresh edamame that are picked that day. The reason for this is that within hours of being picked, edamame loose their sweetness. When picked fresh, the amount of sugar in them is a bit over 3%. But with three days of being picked, that level falls to nearly 2%.
It would be hard to find consumers in the US insisting on buying only beans that were picked that day, and refusing to buy beans that were picked three days ago. Why aren’t consumers in the US more demanding of the groceries they purchase? I often wonder about that. I’ve yet to see someone in a supermarket ask the grocer if the produce was picked that day or how many days ago it was picked. The same is true for eggs and meat. There seems to be no demand for fresh produce.
Plants are living things, and even after being picked, they still breathe. To breathe, they use up the sugars that are in them. However, since they are no longer attached to their root systems and to the ground, they aren’t able to replenish the nutrients they use to breathe, and their quality degrades.
Quick cooling and shipping produce in cool, oxygen and carbon dioxide restricted containers will slow this breathing, but with each passing day the quality of the produce degrades. It’s best if you can pick your produce at the time you make your meals. The question is how do we do this? What needs to change with how people get their produce to enable them to have produce picked just hours before eating it?