834: Do Americans Know How to Prepare Food From Scratch?

Late summer means produce at peak ripeness, especially peaches and heirloom tomatoes. Regular readers of my blog and subscribers to my newsletter have read of how my volunteering to bring overstock food from stores to places that give it to anyone for free has led to my getting for free amounts I can barely keep up eating that people turn down.

This episode shares a saga of my confusion and exasperation at people throwing away and not accepting perfectly good food. I don't want to take it but the alternative is to throw it away.

While it's tragic that poor people don't accept this bounty of nature and our broken food system, I'm concluding a bigger picture. I think a large fraction of Americans don't know what to do with fresh, unpackaged produce. They know how to eat apples and bananas. Even other fruit, let alone vegetables like zucchini or radishes, I think they don't know what to do with. I mean, you can pick up a tomato and eat it, and heirloom tomatoes have so much flavor, eating them is like eating gazpacho. Well, the flavor is subtle, so if you're used to doof like Doritos and Ben and Jerry's, you won't notice their nuance and complexity, but still, eating them takes no skill.

A couple recent blog posts on the topic:

• When did you last prepare a full meal from scratch, not one packaged product?
• More fresh juicy local peaches and heirloom tomatoes than I can handle, saved from waste by rich and poor alike

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