Living In Season

One of the best things about living here is having access to fresh produce year round. The variety changes with the season. During the winter we can get things like cauliflower, broccoli, lettuce, green beans, bell peppers, carrots and tomatoes. Most of those are no longer available here in Mymensingh, though you may find them at a well stocked super market in the city. Now we are blessed with a lot of different gourds - anything from corrolla, a bitter gourd, to laow (front left), a fat watery gourd. There are new varieties of spinach, lots of eggplant, long green beans (at least a foot) called borboti, pumpkin-like squash, green papaya and okra. Being here and not having access to my favorite vegetables all year long and not having a large enough freezer to put them away for later has actually been a good thing. I have been challenged to improvise and try new thing in new ways. For instance, laow works very good in place of zucchini, as the boys and I discovered when we made chocolate zucchini muffins this morning. Green papaya is pretty good mixed with other squash in a Ragout dish. It's been really fun to go through my recipe books and figure out how I can improvise the currently available produce into that recipe. Who know, maybe another cookbook will come out of this. Either way, I am enjoying living in season. I have really been inspired by Simply In Season, a delightful cookbook put out by MCC. If more of us would live in season we could support our local farmers and there would be less of a need for things to be shipped in from elsewhere. When I think of all the fuel needed to ship things in, the energy needed to either can or freeze things, not to mention the loss of flavor that goes with that, I am challenged to make at least small steps toward change. I have never been a radical when it comes to things like this, but being here, seeing lines of desperate people who wait for hours simply to buy rice at a fair price, has really made me think. The poor here spend 70 -90% of their income simply on rice and many have cut back to one or two meals a day. The middle class is not far behind. When I think of the relatively cheap bags of rice stacked up in our grocery stores back home, where most people can afford to buy as much as they want, let it sit in the cupboard for a year and never appreciate the sweat that went into each grain, I know something somewhere has gone terribly wrong. Some people blame it on the ethanol movement, some on the growth of the meat-eating middle class of China and other countries. They say that the grain needed to fill an SUV tank with ethanol would feed one person for a year. They also say that that it takes 700 calories of animal feed to produce a 100 calorie piece of beef. While these are important factors to consider, it is also important to realize that our lifestyle, our choices, have a global effect, whether we are the ones with the SUV or not. Jesus taught that our neighbor is not necessarily the person next door to us, but is the person with the greatest need. We are all connected. We all have choices to make. And we all have the ability to bless others with our choices. We didn't reach this crisis overnight and we can't make it go away overnight but big changes start with small steps. How will you love your neighbor today?