If we are what we eat we should get to know what we eat

When I lived in Florida, I made a couple trips down to an unincorporated part of Miami, where my friend Christy's grandparent's lived. One of the best memories I have is of driving around her grandparents community on a golf cart, picking mangoes and coconuts. I wasn't doing it because I loved mango and coconut, I was doing it because it was fun to drive the golf cart (until Christy took that one corner too hard and Dean fell off the back...WHOOPS).

When we got back to her grandparents house, Grandma sliced open the mangoes for a snack, and...it was like that episode of "Seinfeld" when Kramer gets those mangoes and George says that eating them feels like a B-12 shot. They were absolutely unbelievable. Tart yet creamy, juicy and sweet. All weekend, I craved mango. when we left on Sunday, Grandma packed up a bag full of mango and my family devoured it within an hour of us getting home. I mean, standing up, shoving it in their faces, practically have a mouth-gasm over this mango.

I went to the store a few days later and picked up some mangoes, and, well, I was bitterly disappointed. They were dry...sour...not good.

A woman that I worked with in Florida had a grapefruit tree in her backyard. I can take or leave a grapefruit...until I had these grapefruits. They were loaded with seeds, so sweet that even the idea of sugar or splenda was overkill. They were so juicy that after I finished eating all the flesh, there grapefruit cup was full of juice. Mmmmmm.

The amazing thing about this food was that I knew where it came from, and it felt like I was eating the sun and the seasons. I swear I really could taste rain and sunshine in those mangoes and the 'cold' winter air of Florida that ripened the grapefruits.

The only time I came close to eating anything like that was a few months ago, when the senior citizens at my work brought us in bags of tomatoes from their gardens. They were warm, juicy, sweet, and once again, it was like I could taste earth and sun. The tomatoes at the store don't even hold a candle to the home-grown ones.

I suppose that in buying family packs of pork chops, bags of flash frozen chicken breasts and canned vegetables, it is easy to see how we've become so disconnected from our food. There's no really labor or love that goes into cooking it, and it's not that big of a deal if something goes to waste because there is probably more where it came from.

Until I ate fresh mango and home-grown grapefruit and tomatoes, I gave no thought to where my food came from other than the grocery store. I still scan the isles for whatever is on sale, be it meat, bread or vegetables, and that's what I buy. I currently do not have the luxury of growing anything, being that I live in a garden level apartment with no balcony or porch. I'm also broke most of the time, and although fresh vegetables aren't much more expensive that frozen, the spoil quicker. I am also pressed for time- my workday is nine hours long, and I usually don't even get in my car to go home till after six. So I favor flash frozen, microwavable, boil-in-a-bag, one step meals. I think I've done pretty good, considering my schedule, that most nights I put a hit, relatively nutritious meal on the table. If we do go out to eat, I always save some for lunch or dinner the next night. When I throw away food my brain tallies up exactly how much money that food cost that I am now disposing of. But I am not connected to my food. When I see a chicken, a real live chicken, I don't think about grilled chicken salad or KFC. When I see 'amber waves of grain', I don't think about loaves of bread or tortillas. Pictures of rice paddies do not bring to mind fried rice. As far as I am concerned, the biggest connection I have to my food is how much it costs and how long it will keep for.