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If money can buy you similar or superior

Growing our vegetables ourselves, next to the front door of our tiny cottage, thus permitting instant kitchen availability when ready to pick and seriously cutting down on farm-to-table times, not just convenient but conceivably healthier in many ways, over the years has taught me a lot about life in general too, offering tools to deal with its highs and lows, freeing up excessively cluttered headspace by reinstating organized thoughts and other therapeutic benefits that extend far beyond, clichéd of course, but valuable regardless.

The ever humbling non-manufacturability of it, carefully constructed growth schedules suddenly going south for no apparent reason, versus our stubborn refusal to ever give up on that ideal nevertheless, consistently striving for improvement, it’s all very inspirational to me.

Such a comparison with real life patently lacks all credibility, with our beloved microcosmos still very much relying on pretended self sufficiency where we mask miserably unsuccessful harvests unabashed with store bought equivalencies, a luxurious safety net to make failure sad but not unacceptable, and yearly repeatable apparently, little do we learn. The everything-tastes-better-when-homegrown-argument doesn’t cut it in the end if money can buy you similar or superior, even though the current pandemic did add a layer to that rationale.

It occasionally feels like a big scam we are fooling ourselves with, a hobby spiraled out of control in need of reality adjustments, but this is when psychology kicks in. If nothing else, the sense of miraculous achievements, the intrinsic connection with food before it reaches our mouths, having closely witnessed its full evolution, is worth all the effort we have put in.

The only to-die-for pasta sauce, I tricked myself into believing, calls for our own tomatoes and ditto basil and garlic, a great quality olive oil and a lot of time to slowly simmer. Although sunless lately, we still had some growing in our garden, enough for one last wave-and-say-goodbye-for-now pasta party yesterday.It’s all downhill from now on, starting with the homegrown but canned stuff, absolutely inadequate for all winter. But let’s pretend.


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Trying to make ones life sustainable is more than a personal choice and almost automatically leads to a multitude of decisions you have never even thought of before. On this website we share what works for us, or woefully no longer works, obviously without claiming the same for you.

We hope that our journey towards a supplementary comprehensive celebration of nature’s beauty might just clear a pathway forward for you too, perhaps challenges a revealing reconsideration, or simply provides for an equally indispensable diversion.

Can we change the world through food? We believe we can and we support Slow Food, a global movement of local communities and activists across more than 160 countries. Together we defend cultural and biological diversity, promote food education and the transfer of traditional knowledge and skills.

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