By Jeff Zillich
~ Yes, you can see the concrete slowly creeping, but we all still have the ability to teach our children to appreciate the rural life and where our food comes from.
Rivers picked blueberries this summer and now we’ll go see how Cranberries are harvested. I plan on wandering with him through an apple orchard to pick our own apples and decide which jar of fresh cider is the one we’ll tote home. He watched corn grow out the window of my truck on a daily basis without knowing it, and got to eat it off the cobb in the height of summer. “I wanna go to the farmers market” was music to my ears on Summer Saturday mornings, equally as important as “I wanna watch the wheel bus and the hill” regarding the grandest entrance in all of sports. My hope is one day when he travels to Pike Place market is that the joy on his face from seeing them throw the fish is equally matched by the sight of the vivid colors brought on by the fresh produce, all amidst that hazy gray mist that is so often present in Seattle.
Sometimes you don’t fully appreciate what your parents did for you until you attempt to pass family traditions along to your kids. My parents made it an emphasis that every breakfast and every dinner, we sat at the table as a family and had a meal. Food can be a celebrated gathering, and consuming it is the culmination of a long process, that involves more hard work than most appreciate. Someone had to plant that apple tree in Washington, grow that apple from WA, then someone had to pick it, then someone had to drive it across country, then someone unloaded that truck, then someone placed it on the shelf in the grocery store; all so I could purchase it, bag it up, bring it home, rinse it, slice it and place it before my son to eat. That process is often forgotten. And that’s just an apple. In the word’s of the late great Paul Harvey we should all “thank a farmer.”
It’s the little things that matter most in parenting, and those things in turn, turn into the big things.
***As a side note, Dad is gonna make some wicked cranberry reduction with those floating little gems.
On a recent food show, the statement was made, what separates us as a species from other primates is our ability to cook our food. No other species does that. Think about that. The fact we can cook our food separates us from every other species on the planet.
Life can always bring us blessings, if we seek blessings out of what we experience on a daily basis. While there’s been plenty of options to focus on the negativity swirling in 2020, I chose to make this an opportunity to refocus on family first and that process of gathering for a meal, honing my skills on a new hobby that brings me much joy, peace, love and deliciousness. It’s also reenforced my existing belief, along with firmly entrenching my belief moving forward of just how amazing all cultures and walks of life really are. Food is the ultimate cultural showcase and every culture should be appreciated and celebrated, while seeking out a comprehensive understanding of each culture. If we can’t come together and put down the hate over delicious food…then we simply have no hope, but I have a hope, and its that our embracing of each other feels like a cup of soup on a frigid day.
When Rivers uttered “Thank you for cooking me a delicious dinner Daddy” as we gathered for an early fall dinner, it felt like a warm embrace of a hug for my soul. The way things should be.
Just some Food (for thought). ~
Living the Dream 