Feeling the Seasons on Your Tongue: Summer Week #20 – 10/22/25
(a beloved reprint to end the season just right)
One of my favorite parts of farming life is how the work I do and the food I eat connect me so directly to the natural world in which I live. This ability to connect ourselves to our environment through the foods we put in our mouth is something we’ve shared together throughout this season. Together, we’ve tasted June through October on our tongues.
If you close your eyes, can you think of a taste that takes you to late July? Early September?
I know it’s June when I taste my first cucumber of the season. I’ll be standing in the middle of rows of vines. I’ll scan to see if there are fruits looking ready for harvest. I’ll smile when I realize there are. I’ll lean down and twist a spiny cucumber off its prickly-haired vine. I’ll rub it on my pant thigh. It might be a little dirty, but that’s okay. I’ll sink my teeth into the warm, juicy fruit. I will close my eyes and savor the combination of the intensely flavored skin against the watery flesh. It will be the first time I’ll have tasted a cucumber since the prior September.
July to me tastes like green beans and baba ganoush.
August tastes like sweet corn, tomatoes, and pesto.
September is sweet pepper time. In every packed lunch, in every cooked meal, peppers, peppers, peppers.
To eat locally means to delight in a flavor you haven’t experienced in a long time. Eating locally means feasting on something during the time in which it’s available, especially if that window is relatively short. It means growing tired of eating something you’ve been eating so regularly, so intensely. It means to savor, and even perhaps feel sad, when you know you’re eating the last of something. Eating locally means waiting. It means anticipating. Then the first bite, and the cycle repeats.
To experience this cycle is a gift.
Not being dependent on just our local environment brings so many gains to the human experience. But nothing is without cost. I truly believe we also lose valuable parts of the human experience when we live our lives globally, within a material world where everything can be had in twenty-four hours.
To want, and to wait, to anticipate – these experiences prep the ground for joy. Missing something makes us delight in its reappearance.
The change of the seasons is one of the ways, even in a global world, that we all feel natural cycles and rhythms, waiting and savoring. Eating locally adds depth and joy to that experience.
It may not happen in your first season of eating locally, but eventually your understanding of time will have a new layer and feel to it. Right now you surely know the change of seasons through the changing feel of air on your skin. You may hear changes, with bird calls, leaves rustling, or the quietness of snow. You may also experience the moving of seasons through the colors you see, constantly changing outside. By eating locally, you’ll begin to sense the change of seasons, the passage of time through the tastes on your tongue.
Thank you for taking this journey with us and supporting our family farm this season.
Sincerely,
Farmer Cassie
