THINK GLOBALLY EAT LOCALLY

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Of course, no sensible farmer would have chosen my flood-prone land, and they're certainly better at what we both do. But they're also vulnerable to the weather. When I bought peaches at our local farmer's market in September, I mentioned to the grower that all my tomatoes had simply collapsed. He said, "Mine, too." In the narcissism of relief I said, "I'm so glad." I caught myself, apologized and said, "I thought it was me." He smiled for the first time since we began dealing with each other weeks earlier and said, "No. When fullgrown plants are suddenly hit with stress, they just collapse." I realized with relief that it wasn't my soil, my skills or wilt from the manure I brought in. It was the weather.

By restricting myself to eating the vegetables I grow, I'm constantly reminded that food is the generous outcome of a collaboration between our species and the rest of nature, not simply another product of industrial civilization. The lesson I learned from the realization that crops sometimes fail wasn't that regions can't be relatively self-reliant. They can be. It's just that if we eat locally, we sometimes have to adjust our choices and our appetites to what Nature decides to provide that year.

This leads directly to the second major lesson I've learned: We'll need to change our eating patterns - a lot - if we want to live by the seasons. Because I restrict myself to what I grow, I recognize that I narrow my winter choices more than most people would need to, but some hard truths would affect everyone. Fresh tomatoes are only available in my home July through December - when the last ones have ripened from green in my cold cellar.

Asparagus comes for one month in the spring almost anywhere north of the equator. And in winter I never have a lettuce salad unless I've been far-sighted enough to plant in the cold frame. It's encouraging to know that inventive farmers like Eliot Coleman are teaching other farmers to grow lovely winter greens in unheated greenhouses in chilly places like Maine, which means local limitations may be eased by inventiveness. But in some parts of the country, we're going to have to adjust to several months of more root vegetables than most of us are used to.

Seasonality, alas, is not what people know or have been taught. In this taste-blind country, we've been taught to think that a meal is a meal is a meal whether it's June or December. One example of this is the widespread conviction that the salad of iceberg lettuce and tomato is an essential food group year-round; another is the notion, encouraged by the California produce marketers, that five-a-day, even in December, means a banana, orange, bunch of grapes and a lettuce-and-tomato salad, rather than, for example, an Indian stew containing five winter vegetables in a single dish.

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