Jul 28, 20202 min read

Let Food Be Thy Medicine {Week 11 CSA}

Hippocrates' famous words from over 2500 years ago echo today, and yet here we are, retracing our steps to that ancient wisdom.

Not to deny the miracles of modern medicine, but instead to take pause from the overwhelming whirl and obsession with technology and appreciate the much grander technology of Life itself. To reflect on the intricate perfection of the flower needing the bee, and the bee coming in at just the right time, being just the right size, to smother itself in pollen and effectively fertilize countless plants in the process.

Yes, this week we are pausing to appreciate the bounty of the land and its innate ability to keep us healthy, happy, and coming back for more. Plants, vegetables, fruits, seeds—they are all our allies for good health and vibrant living. But over the last several decades, they’ve sadly lost much of our attention. Many of us have grandparents, or at least great grandparents, who grew up growing their own sustenance gardens, or even Victory Gardens during WW1. But that fervor for self-sustenance lost considerable interest in the post-WW2 age of automation and convenience.

Luckily, the tides are turning and more people are growing their own food in America than we’ve seen in decades. Millennials, in particular, are showing interest in self-reliant food production (and wild harvesting, as we’ll visit later on), and the benefits are too many to count. Besides reuniting us with the healing capacity of getting our hands dirty and diverting our eyes from glowing screens, growing our own food keeps us in tune with seasonal foods in the same way that eating locally does.

How else would we find gratitude for nature’s infinite wisdom, if it weren’t for the deep

pleasure of eating a cooling, electrolyte-replenishing melon at the peak of

summer? Or the excitement over spring’s first asparagus harvests, as those delicious

spears brighten our meals and gently alkalize our bodies after a cold season of eating heavier, acidifying foods?

As we peel back the veils that modern food shipment create, giving us everything year-round, ripe and ready (or not), we attune to the precision that nature often presents. We recognize the deep gifts that a plant ally is offering us during a specific window of time, in our surroundings and in our lives.

People who spend a lot of time with plants often advise us to “just listen.” To slow and quiet enough to hear our own cells’ silent yearning for support from the plants holding exactly what we need. Often, it’s the very plant we tend to keep adding to our soups, or planting in our gardens. In the end, we are not as far from the wild as our minds might have us believe, and perhaps the more we lean into this the better we feel and heal.