Clean Energy: The Real Reason to Eat Seasonal and Local

If you let her, Mother Nature can table train you. She’ll teach you that the wisdom of being in the moment is as vital for your body as it is for your mind. So forget the calorie count and nutrition percentages. Ignore what some diet guru and the Federal Government say every other week, and put down those fruits from Chili and Ecuador. What matters most when you eat or plan a meal is GPS: where you are right now. The food that fuels your body should sync it to your time and place on Earth. Otherwise it gets off kilter, which invites dis-ease

Tablecloths, TV shows and touts can cover up but cannot change the true meaning of food. Eating is the act of fueling your body to produce energy. Being table trained—or intelligent, means every time you “fill ‘er up”, you calibrate that fuel to produce clean energy: qi or chi that flows through you unimpeded by dams, deluges or deficits.  It’s not rocket science. It’s just acclimation: letting your body “friend” its surroundings by eating local, seasonal foods that match it to the air, water, soil and bacteria pervading it.

Feng shui, the Chinese science of positioning, literally means wind/water. The motion of those two elements controls all energy on Earth, including what creates the climate and the resulting food supply, which controls the qi of human beings. Feng Shui is supposed to create a friction-free intersection of the physical with the invisible all around it, breaking barriers to harmonious energy. Its mantra, location location location, is typically applied to design, but Feng Shui applies to eating habits as well because food is the energy exchange from the outer world to your inner one. Eating is its intersection, which is frictionless when your body blends with its environment by ingesting edibles from it. That’s the secret behind eating local yogurt to protect your gut in foreign lands, and why ingesting farmers’ market food produced by local soil, water and air actually strengthens your immunity.

Like feng shui, Chinese medicine comes from Taoism, particularly its insistence that intuitive wisdom, the invisible voice that prompts us to do the right thing, rises from where we digest things: the stomach. It’s hard to argue against this when you instinctively reach for coffee to wake up and hot chicken soup to fight a cold, when you reflexively counter summer heat by eating lots of cold food and react to the chill of winter by turning on the oven to make slow-cooked, rich and fatty stews.

We just know these things like we know sun shines. And Mother Nature is forever cluing us to change our diet as the seasons change. Right now when sunlight has lengthened and the air warmed, she delivers asparagus, dandelion greens, fiddleheads, green garlic, mushrooms, nettles, pea shoots, ramps, rhubarb, and scallions for us to indulge in. These first responders to the reboot of solar power transfer the go-go energy that propels them to burst through thawing soil to you just when you need it most: to spring out of the cold, dark lethargy of winter. That’s why we speak of “spring tonic”, foods that fill our body with sunshine so that force is with us. This is science not poetry: their green color comes from chlorophyll, a medicinal marvel molecule that soaks up, stores then releases solar energy.

When we get too much of it, when summer’s heat bakes the body and sweating dries it up, Earth delivers watery foods: berries, melons, cucumbers and tomatoes to rehydrate the body. But even that cornucopia is not enough. Our sun-roasted joints and muscles need a lube job, so Nature increases enrollment in her schools of oily fish like salmon, bass, bluefish, mackerel and sardines. Don’t you somehow find you prefer fish to roast beef in August?

What’s more, almost every country on the sun-baked Mediterranean beats the searing heat with a tasty repertoire of what Turks call zeytinağlı, "olive oil food": summer vegetables steeped in oil and served hot or cold as a side dish, appetizer, snack, even meal. The best known is probably the Turkish imam bayildi, the eggplant dish famed for that name: “the priest fainted”, because, it’s said, he was overwhelmed by how costly all its olive oil must’ve been. Stuffed grape leaves (dolmades), ratatouille, bean plaki, that oily “salad” of green beans with tomatoes and dill known as fasolakia, even hummus, these are all deliberately intended for summer eating.

The chill of winter requires food that warms the heart. Yearning for heavy meats and their fat that heats the body as it metabolizes, we keep the fire going to slow cook by braising or roasting. We absorb the Earth’s minerals stored in all those root vegetables that grew slowly as they soaked them up. We help others keep their body heat by offering cookies and cakes made with spices known to warm the stomach: cinnamon, ginger, clove.  We indulge in foods that have been fermented, which miraculously adds vitamins they didn’t inherently possess: relishes, pickles, sauerkraut, aged cheeses, and the cacao bean turned into chocolate, the gift of choice to fire up the heart on mid-winter Valentine’s day.

Because historically dis-ease indicates a body alienated from its surround, Ayurvedic, Chinese and Greek medical systems consider time, place and age crucial to accurate diagnosis. Their pharmacy is ordinary food prescribed or prohibited according to yin/yang, “humors” (hot, wet, cold, dry) or body (small/cold, muscular/fiery, big-boned/phlegmatic)—all principles of balance, inside with out. Before the famous part of his oath, “Do No Harm”, Hippocrates said: “I will apply dietetic measures for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgment… .”  Mother Nature tries to train us to apply beneficial dietetic measures too, by providing lots of option for local seasonal eating—if only we’d notice.

 

Here's pasta of the moment, spring green: green garlic asparagus, fresh flat leaf parsley, garden peas and mint, created two hours after a visit to the farmers' market.