(Nothing But) Flowers

And apples, and oranges, and more.

I’m visiting family right now in the house I grew up in since I was 5 years old, located in suburban San Jose, California. I arrived home a few days ago to see one of the branches of the peach tree in front of my parents house lying on the ground– it had broken off of the tree due to the weight of all the peaches on the branch. I’ve already made two fresh peach pies and have helped my Mom slicing and prepping apples from the trees in our backyard for freezing for fresh pies and cobblers during the winter.

The funny thing is that “local food” is sort of hip right now (I think its more than a fad, but an important political issue), but this is the sort of stuff I grew up with all my life. My parents did it both for economic reasons and because it is also what they grew up with. They both were raised on farms on the Azores Island of San Miguel, Portugal. I like knowing that they are just one of many other immigrant groups that maintain the food prepping traditions (i.e. eating local without calling it that) that they grew up with. And even more interesting to me is that they do this while living in an area that probably is just about as unsustainable as it gets, San Jose, CA: wide streets made for cars, not people, with stores far away from the residential areas. The streets here could be bike-friendly due to their massive width and bike lanes, if the distances weren’t so long between locations.

My parents don’t just freeze fruit: they grow some of their vegetables (favas, collards, tomatoes), my mom makes jams and cans fruits, my dad makes his own rough-around-the-edges wine partially with his own grapes, and long before locavores were heralding the benefits of of buying your own locally and sustainably raised meat, I have memories of going with my cousins to a farm in the Central Valley to pick out a cow for slaughter. We brought the meat back to San Jose to butcher and to make our own morcela (a type of Portuguese blood sausage). Granted, I think these memories *may* have contributed to my vegetarianism.  But it still cracks me up that this is something that made me feel *weird* growing up, but now it is something that hip, foodie urbanites and suburbanites attempt to do.