Shopping at the farmers market can be a contact sport. I don’t mean with the jostling crowds; I mean with the fruits and vegetables themselves. All that color and heft and tangibility: we just have to get our hands on it.
We can’t resist the taut water-balloon feel of ripe tomatoes, the suede-soft touch of peaches. We stroke an eggplant, rap a cantaloupe, run our fingertips across feathery carrot tops. We get in touch with our food.
In the garden it’s the same, only better. Tugging a homegrown potato from its bed, brushing off the warm soil—this is the physical knowledge of growing power. In the kitchen, we snap beans and score cucumbers. We mix in seasonings by hand.
And at the table, now more than any other time of year, we eat with our fingers—butter-soaked corn on the cob, juice-spurting bratwurst in a bun, and smiling wedges of watermelon.
Every summer I buy several quarts of black currants and make the liqueur called cassis. To get as much juice out of the berries as possible, I squeeze them by hand. There’s such messy pleasure in the burst of purple beads against my stained palms that the kid in me comes out and I finger-paint on the countertop— and gladly pay for it later in countertop-scrubbing time.
Some foods need a gentler touch. With delicate raspberries, the goal is to handle them as if you are not touching them at all. And have you ever picked thimbleberries? Native to North America, they grow in large wild swathes on Washington Island. Thimbleberries are so fragile that by the time you’ve gathered a cupful, they’ve turned to jam.
The lesson here? Good things can happen when you play with your food.
Visit our Eat Seasonal page to find out what foods are in season right now and enjoy these recipes by Terese that accompany this article:
Grilled Balkan Sausages with Feta Spread and Sweet Onions
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