Those of us who live urban and suburban lives are largely (sometimes entirely) disconnected from the land and from the sources of our food. So it gives me a certain thrill to find a legitimate (and free) food source growing just a few steps from where I live in Miami Beach. I also found a banana tree in my neighborhood this year, full of fruit, but then someone cut it down.
It makes me think of how my parents and grandparents lived. My mother grew up in rural Oklahoma. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, she would walk home from school along a dirt road, and pick an onion out of the ground as an after-school snack. An onion!
My grandfather, at that time, was a sharecropper. Our family lived on someone else's farm and helped cultivate the land and the crops, and received compensation in the form of food they themselves had harvested. The stories passed down in my family about that time instilled in me, from a young age, an appreciation of what it meant to live off the land.
And it reminds me of places I've visited where people, even today, live closer to the land, closer to their food. Rural places, mostly, in Tuscany and Colombia and Canada and upstate New York. Places where it doesn't seem odd, at all, to walk outside and pick avocados or bananas or mangos or olives or apples from a nearby tree growing wild (or sort of wild).
However small and insignificant it may be in the larger scheme, this gesture — picking these avocados and bringing them home and washing them and setting them aside and waiting to see how long it will take for them to ripen — is a gesture of reclaiming my relationship to nature.
At some point this week or next (or the one after that) I will squeeze one of these avocados and know that it is ready. I'll enjoy it with a meal or by itself, and be satisfied knowing that at least this one thing in my diet didn't get trucked across the United States or shipped across the Gulf of Mexico, and I didn't pay $5 for a single piece of fruit at Whole Foods. And with this single piece of fruit, I'll be momentarily opting out of supporting the violent cartels that now control the $2.8 billion avocado industry in Mexico.
And it is also a gesture of remembrance, of how people survived before food became so industrialized, remembrance of a time and place when bringing home sustenance from a tree on your block didn't seem like something funny or anachronistic. It was just life.
For tens of thousands of years, this was just life. When nature offered bounty you took advantage of it, with gratitude, with delight, and with full awareness that it's only temporary. The avocados, the bananas, the trees themselves, and even you. All of nature moves in cycles, and nothing lasts as long as you think it will. There will be dry seasons and fires and hurricanes, or the bees will fail to pollinate the avocado tree one year, or someone will come and chop down the banana tree. And one day the reaper will come and chop you down too.
All of nature's bounty — which even includes us, no matter how far removed we've become from nature and from knowledge of our place in it — is temporary. Enjoy it while it's there, in whatever form you can.
