On Seasons

Pairing seasonality with regionality for a more nuanced understanding of what eating local looks like.

There are many new readers here right now—welcome! To learn a bit more about me and my professional and personal background, see the post “On Myself.” My first book, No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating, is out now. You can watch the launch event, where I’ll be in conversation with writer Mayukh Sen at The Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn, on YouTube this Thursday.

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We’re exiting the time of year when food-tuned social media feeds are full of tomatoes. Red tomatoes, green, yellow, orange tomatoes, cherry tomatoes—tomatoes! The tomato is a respected vegetable (technically, yes, an edible berry) unlike any other, whose season is rejoiced in and regarded as a luxury. This is because a good tomato is very good, and a bad tomato is a depressing little pink mealy piece of misery. The difference is simply too stark to ignore, and it brings the people out to the farmers’ market in the hopes of a juicy one ready for an herby salad, cheesy tart, or soft mayo-laced sandwich.

Everyone who experiences a glorious tomato season in their region absolutely should rejoice, indulge, and eat them with abandon. But it also reminds me of an interesting wall that gets hit in terms of eating locally and seasonally, which is that the overarching food narrative can forget about regions.

“My hope is that as people start to identify the seasonality of some of these foods, that they also start to question the regionalism of that seasonality,” says Abra Berens, chef, farmer, and author of the cookbooks Ruffage, Grist, and Pulp. We spoke in May about her commitment to Michigan’s agriculture.

“You know, there's a cookbook that has a snarky comment at the back that's like, You know, don't buy a tomato in winter sort of thing, and it's like, Well, tomato season in Florida is in February,” she says. “So I think that that's the next level of nuance with it, I think, which I hope people get to. And I hope that once we clear the hurdle of understanding that food has seasons, then we can dive into that next level of learning with it, which all feels like a positive trajectory.”

In Puerto Rico, the tomatoes I’ve been seeing at the market have kind of sucked, whereas in cooler months, they’re robust and juicy, just like the ones of the Northeast’s August. At a recent local-food-focused vegetarian brunch I went to at the Atelier at Cocina Abierta, tomatoes were present just in the sauce of a shakshuka. What we’re rolling in at the moment are carambola (star fruit) and, somewhat hilariously to anyone who lived through the gastro-pub era, shishito peppers. I’ve been up to my eyeballs in shishito. (When asked at a bar recently if we might want to try their dish of shishito peppers, I responded with a perhaps too enthusiastic, “No!” I’m so against “cool” when it comes to food: if shishitos are growing well, we should eat them, right? Yet I’m still susceptible to these silly dominant narratives… about a pepper!!!)

No cookbook, no recipe can or should be for everyone, and so I think any sort of knee-jerk response of, “I can’t access this” shuts down the conversation just when it can get interesting. (I’ve discussed this endlessly—a recipe is a text, to be read and drawn from.) Instead of, “We don’t have this in my region,” the difference can be seen as an invitation to considering one’s own region, one’s own seasons, and how to map the available ingredients onto the flavors or textures one is trying to pursue. Having been a vegan baker, I learned early on that if I wanted to get a specific result from a dessert, I’d have to use a wide variety of tools and techniques to get there. I think this is useful practice for thinking regionally, as well as seasonally, about food while it’s still rather common to regard a temperate Northeastern U.S. or European climate as the standard. It’s a mental hurdle that, once leapt, can provide more thinking and perhaps more solutions to how to create resilient agricultural systems as we continue to experience climate change.

In Pulp: A Practical Guide to Cooking With Fruit, which is the third in Berens’ trilogy of “practical guides” that provide the reader with precisely the kind of ability to map recipes or flavors onto whatever they have access to, Berens runs into people’s expectations about what “regionality” means. While it’s easy for us in the U.S. to consider the regions of Italy, France, China, Spain, and India, and all the varieties of cuisines encompassed there, the United States, despite its massive size, has come to be considered monolithic. This is no doubt owed to the sameness of the supermarket availability wherever one might be, stocked as they are by industrial farms. But that means so much is missed.

“Especially since 2020, I’m thinking a lot about what we lionize in the food world and also how that can very quickly become an extraction economy,” says Berens. “And so, sure, I love eating pineapple, and things like that, but it's not a part of my region. It's not for me to write those recipes because I just eat it. I can cook with it, too, but allowing some space for there to be that gap for someone for whom that is a part of their canon feels important.” And how much richer it is to learn about how to cook with pineapple, with carambola, from those who have the full context—from farm to technique to plating.

To me, the best thing about reading Berens’s cookbooks is that, because of her experience as a farmer, she minces no words about the significance and difficulty of the labor, economics, and systems governing food production. Her concerns about local, seasonal, and regional food in Michigan are different from mine, being based in Puerto Rico, and I learn from her all the same. Other books that help one cook with their regional seasons and think about what a year looks like, food-wise, are Nigel Slater’s Greenfeast collections: Autumn, Winter and Spring, Summer. These are plant-based recipes that are indispensable as inspiration. 

As I’ve written before, we can’t wish ourselves out of the tangle of a globalized food system where those of us in affluent places living affluent lives—I love fashion writer Aja Barber’s reminder, “You’re somebody’s rich person in this system” and writer Millicent Souris’s expansion on that regarding restaurants—are able to access basically whatever we want at all times. But we can mindfully move toward regionality, even when that doesn’t include the juiciest tomatoes when everyone else seems to be eating them.

“One of the statistics that I love to bring up is that Michigan is the second most agriculturally diverse state in the continental U.S.,” says Berens. “It really comes as a surprise to people—it came as a surprise to me and I'm from here. I think that anything that helps people understand the breadth of food experience feels really positive.”

This Friday’s From the Kitchen dispatch for paid subscribers, will be an edition of From the Desk Recommends… where I focus specifically on reading I’d assign in a food writing class and why. It’ll be an ongoing series, with this first one focused on the fantasy of Italy. The following Friday, I’ll be running a Q&A with a nutritionist about my foray into yogurt and why common non-dairy options kind of stink. See the recipe index for all recipes available to paid subscribers.

News

My book received wonderful reviews in The Atlantic and Yes! Magazine. There’s a Vogue Q&A. For LitHub, I contributed to their Craft of Writing series on the topic of grounding big issues in the food system in the personal, day-to-day of eating. I talked to Radio Canada, so French speakers may read the piece, titled “Le végétarisme, des hippies à la culture populaire,” here.

I’ll be doing back-to-back lectures in Boston on Tuesday, September 19: First, speaking to Knight Science Journalism fellows at MIT about how scientific research influences how I write about plant-based food for an omnivorous audience. Then, as part of the Pepín Lecture Series at BU Food Studies, talking about how the book came to be and what influenced how I write it.

Reminder that my book tour kicks off in Brooklyn on Thursday. The event is technically sold out, but you can watch the livestream here at 7p.m.

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I have, oddly enough, another book out now, but only in Spain. Col&Col editor Lakshmi Aguirre emailed me early in the year (or late last year?) to ask if I’d like to have some of my essays (many of which originated here) translated into Spanish for publication as part of a new series of slim volumes on gastronomy. I leapt at the chance, and the finished project—titled Desde mi escritorio, out this week—is gorgeous. Please be on the lookout for it if you’re in Spain!

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Through the end of the year (perfect for holiday gift-giving, if I do say so myself), my capsule jewelry and cocktail pick collection with Philadelphia-based By Ren will be available for purchase. Each item is handmade to order.

Reading

I was restored to myself amid book release anxiety by Joanna Biggs’s fantastic A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again. I’m going to sit with it and revisit it again, as I’d like to write about it around my birthday in November.

Cooking

I’ve been doing many riffs on Ria Elciario’s sticky sesame tofu, most recently subbing chili crisp for gochujang because we’d run out. Love it. Searing portobello mushrooms for vegetarian steak night.