Damn it! 

Our tomato crop is way down this year from
last.  In 2007 our garden produced more than 230 pounds of
tomatoes that we canned, dried and froze, and enjoyed all the way up
through the middle of July of this year.  But with less than a
measly 125 pounds from this year’s garden, I was starting to
panic.  How would I fill the gap?  Would I have to resort to
buying canned tomatoes in the grocery store?  

One night over dinner, we were sharing our disappointment with
our garden mentors, Nancy Turner and Dave Cain. They also had a much
smaller crop of tomatoes this year than they had in previous
years.  While I sat there wringing my hands over where I was going
to get more tomatoes, Dave said, “I guess we will just eat less
tomatoes this year than we did last year.”  

That comment stopped me dead in my tracks.  Here I am a
committed Localvore and I just didn’t get it.  Despite the fact
that I have learned to eat seasonally and that I allow what comes from
our garden and our local farmers to dictate what we will have for
dinner, I still had a sense of entitlement to a larder full of tomatoes
despite the challenging growing conditions that we faced this year.

For as long as I can remember, anything that I have wanted has
been available to me.  I have never had to imagine a world
without… tomatoes.  That is the way I was brought up; it is the
way most Americans were brought up.  And it is preached to us
daily in the media and by our leaders.  Dick Cheney reinforced
American entitlement to the entire world when he proclaimed that, “the
American way of life will not be compromised” in 2001 shortly after
September 11th.  

What has this attitude gotten us?  Much of the world sees
us as greedy and self-centered.  Our addiction to the new American
way of life of more, more, more has put the country into financial
turmoil.  And, countless studies reveal that we are not a terribly
happy lot of people.

Yet, every time we go into the grocery store, our “right” to
whatever we want whenever we want it is confirmed with strawberries in
February, asparagus in November and a variety of fresh tomatoes year
round.  When I suggest to people that they just don’t eat leafy
green salads in the winter I often get a reply like, “but I want to eat
a salad everyday.”

And I wanted my tomatoes, but the natural world that we live in
just didn’t give them to me this year.  I am embarrassed to admit
that this is a fairly new concept to me – not something that I learned
in business school or in corporate America, but from my garden and Dave
Cain.  As we have learned with seasonal and local eating, the less
abundant something is, the more you appreciate what you do have. 

Sometimes less really is more.