Strange

I was whipping together basil chicken in the kitchen when a friend of mine pointed out that I could just run down to the Thai restaurant and pick up some fantastic basil chicken with all the veggies and a little spring roll. I smiled at that, not in the least bit offended that she thought that my basil chicken wasn't as delicious because that wasn't the point she was making. She was making the point that it would be more cost effective for me to spend $30 at the Thai place down the street than to go through all the trouble of going to the store buying what I needed and then coming home and making it myself.

Is that true? I don't think so. There is something compelling about chopping the vegetables, frying up the food, tasting it to make sure that there is just the right amount of basil and then laying it out on a bed of jasmine rice so that my family can eat healthy.

Even better is pulling the ingredients from your own back yard and doing it. Fresh broccoli, peppers, basil, carrots, zucchini, onion, garlic. Everything you can pick up from the grocery store, sure, but it means so much more when you do it yourself. The time and patience that goes into a good meal is also the same time and patience that goes into growing it yourself. It just takes a little more time and a little more patience and once you've established your garden, these meals will be second nature.

Once you've tasted the flavors and textures from your garden, the grocery store will not look so economical. Why spend 2.99 a pound when you can buy the seeds for much cheaper and just use a little elbow grease? The rewards are so much more satisfying than the rat race. And the only things you'll be buying from the grocery store will be the things you can grow unless you have the space for cows and pigs and such. I personally am profoundly happy for little kids all over the world that don't have to spend hours churning butter (yep, that was me) because of the electric ones that have recently come out in the last 50 years or so.

We live in a time when we have access to foods from all over the world and we can grow them in our back yards. Our ancestors brought over their staples from the various countries they came from and encompass those varieties with the varieties native here, that is just a stunning array of flavor, texture and color. We are losing them now, from the thousands to hundreds. Our palates have become placid and we are accustomed to singular lines of bred foods that are now becoming hybrids whose seed do not produce the same as the parent. Slaves to what someone else thinks is easy to ship, long lasting after harvest and quick growing. Where is the fun in that?

Space is a problem now. There are many, many more people here now than in the day of my great grandparents. Where my great grandparents had acres. My grandmother and uncles have acres, I have 3 acres that I'm about to leave for a back 40. Vertical gardening, raised beds, and indoor gardening are the keys to being liberated from foods that taste like plastic. When I moved to Atlanta from rural Louisiana, that is exactly how everything tasted to me when I was 12. I grew up eating foods right out of the garden, then I was confronted with huge grocery stores with tomatoes wrapped in plastic and apples coated in wax. My mother said I'd get used to it and unfortunately, I did.

But as I stood over my basil chicken chuckling getting a strange look from my friend, I just nodded and said "That is probably so," and left it at that.