Eat With Me

Imagine grocery shopping in a garden. Instead of pulling your sweater closer against the intrusive cold of the produce aisle, your skin is warmed by morning sunlight as you pick a handful of strawberries to munch on as you peruse your options for breakfast. Your lips stain red as you hear the bawk of your chickens, announcing their presence to the neighborhood. Even in the silence of the early morning, you can sense hushed activity just beginning as your neighbors are awakened. One by one, they will shuffle out, rubbing their half-open eyes, grasping their warm cups of tea as they contemplate the possibility of pancakes, or frittatas. Soon, they will join you, but for now, you enjoy the solitude of dawn. 

Your gaze now turns to your own vegetable plot, one of many that creates the vibrant patchwork quilt of your community’s gardens. Instead of harsh florescent lights, your plants bask in faint sunlight. Vegetables coyly peek out from between green vines and leaves, announcing their ripeness with vibrant reds, oranges, and greens. You decide on an omelet, and with a crisp crunch, you break off a zucchini and a red bell pepper. Normally restricted to warmer parts of California, you give a silent thanks to the small hoop house surrounding your heat-loving plants—without it, the weather would never be hot enough for the plants to fruit. In San Francisco, you decide, the temperate climate is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a year-long growing season, but this limits your community from growing things that need temperatures below freezing, like your favorite Gala apple, and others that need a more tropical heat, like mangos. No matter though, as you remember the bounty of fresh produce your community receives every time the farmers from the central valley come in to San Francisco. Their visits are always welcome; bringing baskets of oranges and avocados, they stay after they deliver their goods to the general store, bringing out instruments to start an evening full of singing, dancing, and fun. Heading inside, you wonder when their next visit will be as you start up your solar power stove and watch as your family drifts in, coerced from bed by the smell of breakfast.

Fall weather isn’t drastically different from summer, but if you’ve lived in San Francisco long enough, even that ten-degree drop makes a huge difference in the amount of sweaters you’re wearing. It also makes a difference in the food you’re eating, and on a foggy day in November, you reach for the pumpkin you’ve been saving. As a large gourd, it has managed to stay fresh these past few weeks since the last squash harvest, but the promise of pumpkin muffins and bread has motivated you to roast it in the oven this morning. You won’t be able to eat it immediately—whole pumpkins take a few hours to cook the whole way through—but no matter, you’ll just toast a bagel scavenged last night from a local bakery. Food diving is crucial to the survival of your community (grains like wheat don’t grow well in the city, and take up too much space in an urban environment), but it’s more of an adventure than anything else. Groups take turns dumpster diving for perfectly fresh bagels and other baked goods, cutting out a portion of the food waste that San Francisco produces every day. Last night was a veritable gold mine of gluten and carbs—we found three whole bags of bagels and bread, stuffed to the top! We celebrated with a midnight snack, toasting to the bagel gods for our good luck. This morning, you wake your family in a hailstorm of bagels, swatting a few their way to start off their morning with a warm, welcome baked good.

In winter, grocery shopping is different, but just as convenient—in fact, you don’t even have to brave the outside. Your grocery store is your community’s cellar, and you clomp down the stairs to assess your options. It’s fortunate you enjoy canning, because your strawberries have become jam, and you can’t help but take a spoonful to snack on. The canning workshop your neighbor taught at the community center this past fall has definitely become crucial to preserving your excess produce; between your individual plot and the biweekly box of produce you receive from the community garden, you would be stuffed to your eyeballs if you had to eat every last butternut squash and Jerusalem artichoke before it spoiled. The sweetness of the jam sits on your tongue for a second as you think of the spring sun yet to come, and the fruit that follows soon after, but your daydreaming doesn’t last long. Your breakfast decisions are quicker now; motivated by your bare feet and the chill of the floor, you snatch a bag of flour along with a few eggs, baking soda, and sugar. That pumpkin you baked earlier in fall is now lined neatly in a row of jars to your right, and you grab one too—the last ingredient for pumpkin bread. Victorious, you scurry up the stairs to the warm of your kitchen. The heat of your stove helps warm your home, and you face your palms towards its glow, waiting once again for the wafting smell of the bread to awaken your family and start their morning.

This particular morning in spring, you decide to silence your alarm, and enjoy the cool breeze that filters through your open window as you curl up in bed. The blanket your best friend crocheted as your Christmas present for you rubs against your bare legs, and it reminds you of the bike ride you have planned with her later through Golden Gate Park. The two of you are going to visit the cattle living in Speedway Meadows; their herd provides your community with fresh milk, butter, and yogurt, as well as the occasional hamburger or steak. You can’t but help enjoy visiting their pasture, feeding them handfuls of grass while chatting with their caretakers. But that’s later; breakfast is now. Your grumbling stomach propels you out of bed and you scuttle over to your cabinet, measuring and pouring together flour, water, eggs, and milk for crepes. You coarsely chop a bundle of chard picked fresh yesterday (careful now to use enough—the huge leaves will soon cook down to smaller pieces) and sauté it along with onions and mushrooms for the filling. Topped with a generous portion of goat cheese, your breakfast is ready in minutes, perfect for your impatient stomach.

So really, grocery shopping has ceased to exist solely within the closest Trader Joe’s or Lucky’s. But this isn’t a bad thing at all—if anything, the fruits and vegetables are fresher, the bagels are free, and cooking brings your family and community together. Eating in each season brings new surprises and special treats; you look forward to the squashes of late summer and early fall, the preserves over winter, and the chard year-round. Eating is fun, not a hassle, and the breakfast that starts off every day is varied and delicious.