Commentary
The other day, my husband handed three zucchinis to a dear friend’s mother—freshly picked from our garden. They were perfect: not too small that they lacked flavor, not too big that they’d grown tough. Just right. She looked at them with such tenderness and reverence, holding them like something sacred. I’ve seen that look before. It’s the look of someone remembering when food was real.
She had grown up in Honduras, and in that moment, those zucchinis transported her back. I asked what she used to make with zucchini in her home country—curious, since my husband is Mexican and I know how it’s used in Mexican kitchens, but each culture holds different culinary memories and meanings. She told me, with the fondness usually reserved for family, about chicken broth with zucchinis and beef broth with zucchinis. She described scraping out their centers and stuffing them with ground beef, tomatoes, and corn. It was as if she were describing a beloved aunt or a childhood home—not a vegetable. That’s what real food does. It holds memory.
And yet, I’m struck by how rare that kind of memory is becoming.
Too many people today have never picked a vegetable from the earth. Too many children think food comes from a box, a freezer, or a drive-thru window. We’re rapidly losing our connection to what food once was—and what it still can be. When we lose that, we don’t just lose flavor or nutrition. We lose something deeply human.
My dear friend Andrea, who immigrated from Mexico and is now in her late 50s, used to walk the rows of my farm in California with such affection. She would gently stroke each tomato or squash like it was a newborn baby and whisper, “Muy bonita.” Then, with a sparkle in her eye, she’d describe exactly how she would prepare it: roasted, simmered, tucked into a tortilla. Food, for her, wasn’t just sustenance—it was culture, it was love, it was memory.
I have my own food memories too: picking blackberries along the side of the road with my grandmother, then baking them into pie; harvesting blueberries from the quarry in Maine and making jam that stained our fingers and our summer clothes. I remember shelling peas at the kitchen table while my grandmother sipped a gin and tonic and the radio hummed in the background. She also taught me how to can homegrown cucumbers into pickles, make dilly beans, applesauce, and rose jelly, and so much more. These weren’t just kitchen skills—they were lessons in self-reliance, beauty, patience, and seasonality. It was a way of life built around honoring what the land gave us.
That’s why I do what I do. I farm, I cook, I teach, I serve—because I want my children to have those memories too. I want them to know what real food tastes like, feels like, smells like. I want them to know the joy of pulling a carrot from the soil and the pride of eating something they grew with their own hands. I don’t want them to look at a zucchini one day with wistful longing, like it belongs to a time gone by.
We can’t keep replacing real food with boxed mixes and frozen shapes. Our relationship to food is deep, spiritual even. When we know where our food comes from—and when that place is close to home—we eat differently. We live differently. We become stewards, not just consumers.
Local food matters. Real food matters. And farmers matter. The ones who grow nourishing food in real soil, the ones we can know by name, shake hands with, and thank at the market or on the farm.
Let’s bring that back. Let’s raise a generation of children who see vegetables not as chores on a plate but as stories, as songs, as memories in the making. Let’s help young women fall in love with real food again, so they can pass that reverence down to their children—not as something nostalgic, but as something alive and thriving.
Because we deserve that. Our families deserve that. And our future depends on it.
