Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [152]
In the winter we tended more toward carnivory, probably in answer to the body’s metabolic craving for warm stews with more fats and oils. Our local meat is always frozen, except in the rare weeks when we’ve just harvested poultry, so the season doesn’t dictate what’s available. A meat farmer has to plan in spring for the entire year, starting the Thanksgiving turkeys in April, so that’s when the customer needs to order one. But the crop comes in, and finishes, just as vegetables do. When our farmers’ market closed for the winter we made sure our freezer was stocked with grass-finished lamb chops and ground beef, crammed in there with our own poultry. And we would now have fresh eggs in every month, thanks to Lily’s foresight in raising good winter layers.
People who inhabit the world’s colder, darker places have long relied on lots of cold-water ocean fish in their diets. Research on this subject has cracked open one more case of humans knowing how to be a sensible animal, before Little Debbie got hold of our brains. Several cross-cultural studies (published in Lancet and the American Journal of Psychiatry, among others) have shown lower rates of depression and bipolar disorder in populations consuming more seafood; neurological studies reveal that it’s the omega-3 fatty acids in ocean fish that specifically combat the blues. These compounds (also important to cardiovascular health) accumulate in the bodies of predators whose food chains are founded on plankton or grass—like tuna and salmon. And like humans used to be, before our food animals all went over to indoor dining. Joseph Hibbeln, M.D., of the National Institutes of Health, points out that in most modern Western diets “we eat grossly fewer omega-3 fatty acids now. We also know that rates of depression have radically increased, by perhaps a hundred-fold.”
In the long, dark evenings of January I had been hankering to follow those particular doctor’s orders. We badly missed one of our imported former mainstays: wild-caught Alaskan salmon. We’d found no local sources for fish. Streams in our region are swimming with trout, but the only trout in our restaurants were the flying kind, we’d discovered, shipped on ice from Idaho. And we weren’t going to go ice fishing. But instead of plankton eaters our local food chain had grass-eaters: pasture-finished beef has omega-3 levels up to six times higher than CAFO beef; that and Lily’s egg yolks would get us through. Steven threw extra flax seeds (also rich in omega-3s) into his loaves of bread, to keep the troops happy.
Legumes were one of our mainstays. Our favorite meal for snow days starts with a pot of beans simmering all afternoon on the woodstove, warming the kitchen while it cooks. An hour before dinnertime I sauté a skillet of chopped onions and peppers until they sweetly melt; living half my life in the Southwest won me over to starting chili with a sofrito. Apart from that, my Kentucky chili recipe stands firm: to the bean pot I add the sautéed onions and peppers, two jars of our canned tomatoes, a handful of dried spicy chilies, bay leaves, and a handful of elbow macaroni. (The macaroni is not negotiable.)
Winter is also the best time for baking: fruit pies and cobblers, savory vegetable pies, spicy zucchini breads, shepherd’s pies covered with a lightly browned crust of mashed potatoes. The hot oven is more welcome now than in summertime, and it recaptures the fruits and vegetables we put away in season. We freeze grated zucchini, sliced apples, and other fillings in the amounts required by our pie and bread recipes.
So many options, and still that omnipresent