Last week was jam-packed with activities--trip to Chicago, a holiday party, book club, theater. I don’t sleep well when I have been out in the evening, so on top of all that human contact, I was exhausted. Somewhere along the line, I picked up COVID. Yesterday was a complete wash out. Today I had energy to do one thing, and that was get the seeds out of a pomegranate. This will be the topic of today’s post.
Around here, we usually see pomegranates in the grocery only
around Christmas. I look forward to it as a break from my usual blueberries or
red raspberries in my yogurt. I like to mix the pomegranate with raisins,
walnuts, and cinnamon.
Pomegranate fruits are weird. The placenta (where the seeds
attach) meanders all over the inside. The layers of seeds and their fleshy
exteriors are separated by fragile membranes that have to be gently peeled
away. I have tried various methods that I’ve seen celebrity chefs do on TV. I
won’t mention names, but cutting the pomegranate in half and beating the
outside with a wooden spoon to knock the seeds loose is a TOTAL FAIL. I don’t
know how said celebrity chef got it to work for the camera.
My method is to score the outside of the fruit at the bumps
and try to rip the fruit apart along the membranes. Then I flick the seeds off
into a bowl, separating the unripe white ones and the unpollinated black seed
remnants from the red ones. It takes time and patience. As a gardener, I do a
lot of this kind of thing—washing radishes, shelling peas, peeling apples—and I
have come to regard it as meditative. Today I thought about the pomegranate and
how our thoughts about food change over time.
Humans have eaten pomegranates for millennia, even though
they are fussy to prepare. In some societies, only rich people ate pomegranates.
Makes sense. They would have people to separate the seeds from everything else.
Many foods were fussy. When I think of the effort of loosening and winnowing
the husks from grains, it’s hard to believe they ever caught on. Taro root has
to be pounded and soaked overnight or boiled to get rid of oxalate. Olives have
to be soaked in brine to remove their bitterness. Shark has to be buried for
months so the urea will leach out (while the flesh rots—those Icelanders had to
be hungry). Native Americans dried meat and berries and mixed them with deer tallow
to make pemmican, a food staple that carried them through the winter.
It's hard for us to imagine spending so much time on food.
In the grander scheme, however, the primary occupation of humans was finding
and preparing things to eat until quite recently. Two hundred years ago, 90% of
Americans were farmers. Today, it’s 2%. Humans didn’t start farming until
10,000 years ago. I used to think that hunter/gatherers were always on the
brink of starvation, but recent research has shown that they were well-fed with
a nutritionally balanced diet. The world was their grocery. They knew every
plant and animal, knew what to eat and what to stay away from. With their knowledge
and the effort they took to hunt, gather, and prep came respect for the lives
that were sacrificed that humans might continue to live.
I had a co-worker who said all her food came through a
window. It almost sounded like she was proud of it. This is how far we’ve come.
We can’t even get off our fat asses to walk into a fast-food restaurant. We are
disconnected from where our food comes from and respect for the plants and
animals that die for us. It makes me sad.
I don’t begrudge the 20 minutes I give to the pomegranate.
No comments:
Post a Comment