by Jennifer Hattam, Istanbul, Turkey
Before I moved to Istanbul, I always thought of eating seasonally as a great idea in theory, but kind of a chore in practice. How were you supposed to remember if it was OK to eat asparagus in October or oranges in April? What if you really, really wanted to cook Brussels sprouts in the middle of June? But after going through the year watching artichoke vendors, cucumber sellers, or boxes of deep red cherries flood the city’s streets and then disappear again, I started to see how limitations could perhaps provide inspiration rather than irritation.
A few weeks ago, I decided I wanted to make a pasta salad for a picnic. I settled on a recipe for warm pasta salad with spinach, pomegranate, walnuts, and goat cheese because it sounded tasty and I thought all the ingredients would be easily found at my local shops. But I had forgotten; pomegranate season was over. Fortunately, a bright display of just-arrived strawberries caught my eye at the store and I decided to use them instead, to much success.
Appealing to the Idea of Indulgence
German parliamentarian Bärbel Höhn seems to be thinking along the same lines. “We live in a world where everything is available. What kind of indulgence is it if we can go to the fridge year-round and take out strawberries?” the vice chair of the German Green Party’s parliamentary group asked this morning at a panel discussion on eco-friendly lifestyle choices. “Wouldn’t it be more fun to say, we have a strawberry season in Germany in June and we go out and pick them on our own?”
Hearkening back to the bygone days (at least in most Western nations) when eating meat was “an indulgence and a social enjoyment,” rather than a big part of one’s daily diet, Höhn flipped the oft-suggested admonition to eat less meat on its head by adding, “Why shouldn’t we claim and demand our right to a Sunday roast that we look forward to all week long?”
Höhn’s idea that environmentalists have to “convert relinquishment into fun” in order to win more adherents was a theme that kept popping up at “The Great Transformation: Greening the Economy” conference organized by the German environmental foundation Heinrich Böll Stifung. more
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