Eating well: Nurturing the life within us
By Mary Ann McFadden October 3, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

Chatting with Melissa at La Buena Vida bakery while holding my warm, freshly baked seeded whole wheat bread, I learned that times are hard for small businesses in downtown because people can’t park their cars to shop. That set me thinking about the good life and how many of us have come here to live differently.

After 10 anonymous years in New York City, I love walking to shop at the little stores in town and in my neighborhood. I love walking up the hill to the Jardín to see what’s going on, to check my mail, to buy a few grocery items and, if it’s too much to carry, I catch a cab for home.

In these times of corporate world food domination, it’s such a pleasure to know where my food comes from and to eat it fresh. The shopping here can be a social event because the owners of small businesses still work there and they care about customer satisfaction.

It’s a great pleasure to eat some of the wild foods the country people bring to the markets each day. I love making juice from the fresh cactus fruit. I buy it unpeeled and handle it with tongs, cutting it open with a knife and fork and scooping out the deep red pulp and seeds with a large spoon to put in my juicer, usually with an apple or some cucumber or grapes to thin it. The tiny cactus hairs are still in the skins, though you can’t see them, so be careful.

I love making tacos with the lovely squash blossoms a vendor sells on the corner. I disinfect them first, as I do all my fresh things, then clean them of the green bits, chop and sauté them with onion and garlic in olive oil, just quickly, and pop them in a tortilla. Add anything: cheese, beans, avocado, salsa, let your imagination be your guide.

This time of year you also see fresh huitlacoche, the corn fungus that one normally only gets in a restaurant, and usually that’s from a can. Fresh huitlacoche, also sautéed with whatever you like, is nutty and delicious in an omelet.

These foods are pure and incredibly nutritious, and nobody I know at home is lucky enough to get them. The folks in the US (unless they shop at farmers’ markets) are stuck with extruded doodles and poison pot pies made weeks or months earlier by the millions and packaged and frozen and shipped and . . . you get the idea. Of course, you can find that stuff here, but why not treat yourself to the best? Why not live a little? Food, real food, fresh and delicious food does not easily lend itself to the mass production model of the Big Box stores. So they alter the cucumbers genetically to make them straight, instead of curved, not for us who eat them, but for the Wal-Marts who want them machine-picked, hauled in boxes thousands of miles and laid in nice neat rows. God knows what they do with the other vegetables, but they do it. This saves money for the big stores and the cheap products seem like a bargain. But with what we now know and are beginning to learn more and more, the medical costs of eating genetically altered foods are likely to catch up with us sooner rather than later. It’s a false economy to go cheap on food.

Then there’s the shopping for food. What’s your hurry? Studies have shown that walking on cobblestones is good for the brain, especially the aging brain. You’ve come this far, so why not try a new way! Take the bus to town, walk around, shop, sit a while in the park, chat with the storekeepers, then take a cab home with your living groceries around you, one of the real people, with real food. It’s a glorious morning in San Miguel and you're living the good life!

Community Sponsored Agriculture

Community Sponsored Agriculture, or CSA, is a concept that’s been around for a few years and now we’re about to have it for ourselves here in San Miguel. The idea is that you pay by the year, by the quarter, by the month, or by the basket, with the larger purchases at a better price. Whatever fruits and vegetables the farm has ripe and ready are delivered to your door once or twice a week. The farmer has a regular income and the customer benefits by getting a regular supply of local organic food in season.

Las Glorias del Huerto, an organic farm just beyond the Atotonilco monastery, is owned by Luis Suarez and his family. Suarez spent years in business, he told me, but when he married at age 48 and had children, he began to think differently about what he wanted for future generations. He developed a social conscience, he says, and became interested in the environment. He began to want to contribute, to live in nature. “If we don’t do anything, life just goes away,” he pointed out as we walked along the rows of lettuce, broccoli, spinach, beans, chard, radishes, carrots, onions, pumpkin, fava beans and fresh herbs of all kinds.

The farm currently supplies organic produce to some of the best restaurants in town, among them La Finestra and Landetta. Suarez delivers to his private customers twice, and sometimes three times a week. For a one-person basket, the price is 120 pesos, and for a two-person basket it’s 180 pesos. For that amount in the US, you can get four cardboard peaches, a dead head of lettuce and some limp green beans under plastic.

Yet, if you look for it, the CSA concept exists even in New York City. I was shocked, a few years ago, to bite into my first apple in ages that was still alive, and slowly chewed it in shock at how I’d been depriving myself. I could feel the vitality, I swear it, going down into my body and spreading out into my cells. I wasn’t just filling myself, I was nurturing the life that was in me.

For more information, or to order your fresh selection of vegetables, call Luis Suarez on his cell phone: (415) 111-8198. If you speak only English, talk to his wife at (415) 155-9558. Las Glorias del Huerto donates its unsold vegetables to Don Bosco Orphanage and the rest goes into the compost pile.