Читать книгу Enjoy: New veg with dash - Nadine Abensur - Страница 7

Like everyone who enjoys cooking and eating, I love using fresh produce. I like to know where it has been grown and even who has grown it. It awakens my palate and my enthusiasm for cooking every time.

I haven’t specified organic ingredients at every turn in the recipes in this book but I want to say it now, loudly and clearly: organic is best. The Chinese talk of Chi in food – life itself – and this is what I look for when I buy organic food. I simply feel that it has more life in it. It has been grown without the use of chemicals, in ways that aren’t harmful to the environment, and some recent studies have shown that it is likely to contain more nutrients than non-organic food.

By contrast, the food that appears perfect in supermarkets can seem dead. This isn’t surprising – it’s often been picked when underripe, to withstand a long journey, sometimes from the other side of the world, then kept in specially modified storage to extend its shelf life and pumped full of ethylene gas to force the ripening process. Some produce, including apples, pears and citrus fruit, is waxed to enhance its appearance. Then it is overchilled and often overpackaged. It’s no wonder it can feel pretty alien.

I know it isn’t always possible to buy organic but in both the UK and Australia it is easy to join an organic box scheme and, for a reasonable sum, receive a good selection of whatever happens to be abundant that week. Then there is the amazing growth in farmers’ markets, as more and more of us reclaim a vital connection to the food we eat. The produce sold at farmers’ markets is not necessarily organic but it will have been grown locally and picked when it is properly ripe and therefore at its peak of flavour. We’re back to the question of Chi. And to the possibility that we don’t have to rely solely on supermarkets any more, which is good news.

It’s an interesting irony how well farmers’ markets do in the city, wherever you are in the world. The further we go from Nature, the more we need to seek it out and enjoy it. This is not just a question of being ‘worthy’. There is the all-important taste factor. For example, I love my eggs to look and feel as if they’ve come from a hen (or a duck for that matter), not from a factory, date-stamped and coded, individually washed and unnaturally clean, buffed to within an inch of their life. The difference in taste between an organic egg and a battery-farmed one is so striking that if you have the choice, there is no choice. In organic eggs, the white is generous and firm rather than weak and watery; the yolk is bright, fresh and creamy, not floury and dry; the smell is clean and without the fishiness I’d come to associate with eggs. Organic eggs are the bee’s knees.

I may turn my nose up at many shop-bought things these days, but at a farmers’ market I’ll give everything a go, knowing it’s been made by someone who frankly wouldn’t bother unless they cared. Really, really cared.