Sprouting

Ever since reading “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” by Barbara Kingsolver, I have been conflicted about my food. As a vegetarian, I used to get a lot of my calories through beans, vegetables, whole grains, nuts… all the things women’s magazines tell you that you should eat.

Then one day I stopped being a vegetarian.

And how.

I went through a phase in which my diet was almost entirely comprised of meat, of any variety, the redder the better. I couldn’t stomach the thought of eating beans or salad and I would dismiss the vegetables on my plate as purely decoration. I ate bacon cheeseburgers and steaks and anything else I could chase down and put ketchup on.

After several months of this, I resolved to find some balance and began to try limiting meat and increasing my intake of other foods, especially fruits and vegetables.

Then I read “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.” In it, Kingsolver spends a year on a locavore diet. Her family tries to get everything they eat from within their county- or closer. She makes some outstanding points in the book, about the economy, the nutritional value of food that has travelled long distances, and the environmental impact of importing your bananas.

I was tempted to throw up my hands and go out for a bacon cheeseburger, but I decided to put some more thought into it. We started baking our own bread and paying attention to where our flour came from. We redoubled our efforts in the garden. We headed out to the farmer’s market for our produce and meat and found a local supplier of organic milk.

This worked well. We felt satisfied with our diets and to some extent, ourselves.

It worked well, until it didn’t. Winter in Wisconsin is not a good place to get fresh, local produce. But being committed to a locavore diet, I could not suddenly walk away from it either. We make good use of our food co-op’s discount bins, where they try to quick sell some of their more perishable produce. So, from time to time, I can eat bananas and mangoes without feeling guilty (because they were going to go bad, if we didn’t, see? We like, SAVED them and stuff.) But around this time of year, our local produce is limited to stored apples and a few root vegetables, and the trucked stuff can be pretty expensive. It means that everyone is casing the discount bins. And that means no more bananas or radicchio for us.

Then I came across an article about growing your own sprouts. What a brilliant idea! I picked up some seeds, soaked them overnight, and now we have a garden in a Mason jar sitting on our counter top. The best part is we don’t have to weed.

Before I get too ahead of myself, I will say that this is an experiment and it is only day three. We have not harvested them yet, and they are only just now starting to grow. Still, the idea of eating local greens in winter is exciting and satisfies my craving for life and growth in the gray snowy days of January and February.

Plus, they’ll taste great on my bacon cheeseburger.