***

As I cut up my third butternut squash in as many weeks, I wonder if this monotony is what sent the general public running into the jaws of the current food system. Another butternut squash? After I roasted the first and made it into soup, my weekly produce box purveyors handed me a second, and then a third. Do they want to be my last straw? I know it’s local and seasonal, grown by farmers treating humans and the land with respect, and yet I am resentful. Please, any other vegetable instead! I tried to branch out and make a feta-butternut dip and it was edible, but I kept feeling like I’d stuck my corn chip in for a scoop of salty pumpkin pie. Ew.

This is the real me. Unimaginative and staring balefully at beautiful, locally-grown, seasonally-appropriate, nutritious food. This angst is born out of choice, so I’m also selfish in this aspect. I don't need to eat the squash. I could cook and freeze it for later, when my desire for the butternut returns. Rifling through the fridge, I find eggplant, bok choy and zucchini. I could ignore the squash and buy some mushrooms to stir fry with the greens, or dig into my canned tomatoes and make something ratatouille-ish. It’s not that I have zero limits, but within my budget, I still have so many options because the supermarket offers a staid, industrially grown variety 365 days a year. If the butternut squash was all I had, it’s what I would eat. It would make me be more creative or submit to monotony. Probably both. 

Even when I was on WIC, the variety I could choose from at the grocery store would have shocked my Irish ancestors who ate potatoes until there were none. With my blue checks, I could choose between whole wheat bread or tortillas or pasta, cow’s milk or soy milk, cheese or tofu, and other foods I can’t remember. At the time, I felt the limits like a knife to my throat. After over a year on the program, I threw away my final few checks in a fit of immaturity and hyper-responsibility. My husband and I were making slightly more money. We didn’t need the assistance anymore, I thought.

For years I remained fully bought into the idea of food abundance being a marker of success, and that abundance looking a certain way: Condiments with punchy, aesthetically pleasing branding, choosing recipes without a thought to the seasons, baking a chocolate cake on a whim. The pleasure impulse is one I fully support, but I’m grappling with the entitlement that can drape itself around my desires. Who gets to bake a treat? Who labors to pick the cocoa beans that end up in my pantry as powder? The butternut squash that is in season, and grown according to values I want to live by, while still being affordable, is on my counter and all I’m thinking about is chocolate cake.

When I started to get into eating locally, I didn’t expect to find the seasons a dictator. Unyielding. But the seasons are also a sort of zen master, handing me koans I can’t parse. The past few generations of my family have worked hard to put me in a position to buy what I want, when I want it, even if it is from the bizarro abundance of the grocery store. I don’t respond well to authoritarian rule. My sensibilities chafe at the constraints found in really looking at how the food system is not reliable or fair and making alternative choices. But, in the end, I know the problematic authoritarians in my world aren’t the relentless squash.

Regarding the butternut is regarding my own reality, one that is more fragile and dependent than I’d like to consider. At least while I’m doing this pondering, I can joke with the ladies at the bakery where I pick up my produce box about the endless abundance of squash. We exchange ideas for how to cook it, and I pick up their fresh salt and pepper crackers to crumble into my soup. My once rigid definition of abundance shapeshifts and I feel relief.

xo Devin

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*I reviewed Upflow: Fictions by Diego Gerard Morrison for Tomato Tomato! Please give it a read. His previous books Pages of Mourning and Myth of Pterygium are both ones I return to, and I got to interview him for BOMB a few years ago.

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