I am Thankful for Good Food

Tonight we ate wild mushroom and chevre pizza and drank wine while we chopped, steamed and sautéed food for tomorrow. This is part of our Thanksgiving tradition, and it reminds me how grateful I am to have excellent food choices all around me.

We get most of our food from a farmers market, but Berkeley has grocery stores with fabulous selections, whether we need local produce or products from other countries. Want fair trade organic 70% dark chocolate? Check. Want black rice? Check. Need half a gallon of whole goat milk? No problem. Recipe calls for saffron? Choose from five options. Our son gets to eat cardamom ice cream, persimmons, Asian pears, organic avocados, goat milk yogurt, and roast beets. What a lucky little guy, I think, as he throws half of it on the floor.

We used to live in an apartment building that had a needle exchange van visit once a week. The needle exchange offered free food to the clients and also to the people who lived in the building. We accepted the food because we were rather poor at the time, living in a mildewy studio in a building with evidently a high number of needle users. There was always cabbage, pasta, and day old bread. I often made braised cabbage and pasta with peanuts; this I remembered when I recently found the recipe that I used to use. We also would go to a bagel shop for a dozen day-old bagels which we would eat for lunch with freshly ground peanut butter. The food budget was low, but we never had to skip a meal.

Good food is all around us, even when we don't have much money to spend on it. It is easy to forget how lucky we are that there is an excess of food available to us, much of it affordable, and not all of it junk. I am thankful for the food choices I have, and I am thankful that my son can be exposed to such a wide variety.