Freshness

I don't have a garden, but I do harbour secret "The Good Life" fantasies of growing my own food, even keeping my own animals. One day, one day. Until then, I have a couple of tubs in an outside area next to my flat where I grow a few things from time to time. Last night, I used some of my gorgeous home-grown spring onions (aka scallions) to flavour some rice (which I ate with some grilled chicken wings and piles of sauteed mushrooms, mmmm). I noticed that the home-grown spring onions were so much sweeter than the kind you get in the supermarket. Seriously, it tasted like I'd dumped a couple teaspoons of sugar in there. I've heard this before, that just-picked vegetables have a sweetness because the natural sugars in them haven't had time to turn to starch.

So, like Carrie Bradshaw, I couldn't help but wonder... is the lack of freshness in our food another contributor to the "obesity crisis"? Do we all crave fresh just-picked food of the kind we would eat if we were living off the land or hunting-and-gathering? Is our constant consumption of sugar our body's attempt to find that sweet taste it associates with freshness, goodness, high vitamin content? The sweetness we don't get from the weeks-old supermarket freighted veggies we eat all year? I, for one, will be filling up some more of those tubs with fresh produce, to try to get more of that good, sweet vegetable taste.