From Planting to Plating

For decades now, I have enacted this small ritual again and again as the seasons spin by. Many of my wishes were uttered over backyard or store-bought fruits, others in certified farmers markets, where the tree-ripe fruit and vegetables first show up. But lately, more and more, I find myself whispering in restaurants. First fava. First white nectarine. Oh, first Persian mulberry . . . And by the way, I wish to live another year . . .

This, I believe, is a very good sign.

Cooking and farming are both deep arts; they’re cumulative; they involve amassing vast amounts of knowledge; and both must be practiced for a long time, with often mind-numbing repetition, season after season, plate after plate, in order to know things as deceptively simple as how to make a straight haricot vert or how to cook a finger-size squash with a big old basil leaf.

As chefs and farmers work together, with flavors, variety, seasons and natural cycles, the dining public is fed on a more profound level. Eating seasonally, consciously, is a direct connection to the Earth. When we eat the last strong fava, and the first season’s apricot, we’re right up against what is: the fleeting nature of life, the constancy of change, and also the reassuring, faithful recurring turn of the seasons. If, however briefly, restaurants now provide us with these short, simultaneous bursts of flavor and reality, well, this is one more inarguably good thing in an otherwise increasingly troubled and complicated world.