Vacation Food

Every time my husband and I go on vacation in Northern California we wonder: Is the food better here? Or are we just happier?

While in San Francisco we ate kale plucked daily from Gospel Flats and eaten within hours. We bought it at a roadside stand where you just slip money into a box and walk away with a bunch of kale leaves in your hand. We ate Cowgirl Creamery Cheese made by a bunch of women in Point Reyes and thick, heavy delicious bread made by the Brick Maiden bread company next doors. Disillusioned lesbians living on a commune in one of the most beautiful places in the world?

I don't know. But their bread is so good I could live on it. (Last year I was so bewitched I made Jonathan drive to Point Reyes so we could visit the bakery and eat the bread out of the oven, but the brick maidens are shy and elusive. They bake their bread in a small clapboard house and deliver it for miles around. No one is allowed into the bakery. No one sees the women. Their bread is their message to the world.)



We ate pancakes filled with blackberries plucked minutes before by Theo and me, from bushes growing by the side of the read, the juice bleeding out in sweet purple stains all over the batter, the plates, our chins. We stuffed ourselves with fried oysters, hoisted from Tamales Bay within the day. Insane!

Our conclusion: the food really was better.

But it also made me realize: if you eat the freshest food, harvested right at the source, consumed within the day, everything is simple. No spices are necessary, no elaborate cooking. A meal of bread, cheese and a plum is the most delicious thing you have ever had. Throw in good friends and natural beauty and the ocean (that is the vacation part) and a bottle of cheap wine and could heaven be any better?

I resolve to buy more food that is locally grown. Not just for political reasons anymore, but for my tastebuds, my body, my link to my local environment

I hereby declare myself, as a bumper sticker in Bolinas put it:

Localvore.