91
" Our gardening forebears meant watermelon to be the juicy, barefoot taste of a hot summer's end, just as a pumpkin is the trademark fruit of late October. Most of us accept the latter, and limit our jack-o'-latern activities to the proper botanical season. Waiting for a watermelon is harder. It's tempting to reach for melons, red peppers, tomatoes, and other late-summer delights before the summer even arrives. But it's actually possible to wait, celebrating each season when it comes, not fretting about its being absent at all other times because something else good is at hand. "
― Barbara Kingsolver , Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
94
" This is why we do it all over again every year. Fueled only by the stuff they drink from the air and earth, the bush beans fill out their rows, the okra booms, the corn stretches eagerly toward the sky like a toddler reaching up to put on a shirt... We gardeners are right in the middle of this with our weeding and tying up, our mulching and watering, our trained eyes guarding against bugs, groundhogs, and weather damage. But to be honest, the plants are working harder, doing all the real production. We are management; they're labor. "
― Barbara Kingsolver , Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
99
" I’m beginning at least to notice when I’m consuming the United Nations of edible plants and animals all in one seating. (Or the WTO, is more like it.) On a winter’s day not long ago I was served a sumptuous meal like this, finished off with a dessert of raspberries. Because they only grow in temperate zones, not the tropics, these would have come from somewhere deep in the Southern Hemisphere. I was amazed that such small, eminently bruisable fruits could survive a zillion-mile trip looking so good (I myself look pretty wrecked after a mere red-eye from California), and I mumbled some reserved awe over that fact. I think my hostess was amused by my country-mouse naïveté. “This is New York,” she assured me. “We can get anything we want, any day of the year. "
― Barbara Kingsolver , Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life