Graceful Parenting in Austin

 Many years ago, I went to Portugal with my Grandma to see the small villages where
she and Grandpa grew up and meet my many cousins, all named Maria (Maria Elena, Maria Theresa, Maria Manuel, etc.) I went on walks in the village with my suitor, a young man my Grandma set me up with because of my embarrassing situation of being in my late twenties and still unmarried. (I was twenty-nine and my suitor was seventeen. His favorite band was the Spice Girls and he asked me what it was like to drive a car since he hadn’t learned yet. But, he spoke English, which is why my Grandma chose him for me.)

As we were walking along, he would pick fruit from a tree and offer it to me to eat. At first, I found this to be shocking.

Well, you see, it wasn’t farmed on a farm or packaged at all and I was pretty sure it hadn’t followed applicable regulations for cleanliness and shelf life. How could a person just eat a piece of fruit directly from a tree? How primitive is that? How safe could that be?

I know, I know, that is crazy. At home, I was so removed from any natural food source. My food passed through at least a hundred people and crossed several state lines from the time it left the earth until it landed on my plate. This had become the normal way of doing things and eating fruit directly from a tree seemed strange.

It hadn’t been that long. My other Grandma raised chickens in her backyard and if we got to her house too early, we might witness the messy and disturbing steps required for a live chicken to become Sunday dinner.

But two generations is enough, apparently, to loose a connection with food. I found it again, a little bit at a time, in Portugal. In a typical meal, the dinner salad was made from lettuce and tomatoes from the garden, the fish was from the guy that comes around in a truck selling the fish he caught that morning and dessert was a bowl of fruit, just picked from the trees in the yard. Everything tasted better. For all of the big volume and super convenience of food at home, I started to think that we had forgotten what food really tasted like.

It is ten-plus years later and I still shop at HEB and I don’t raise my own chickens, but now and then I like something fresh. So Baby Girl and I checked out the Austin Farmer’s Market at the Triangle today. There were vendors selling fruits, vegetables, cheeses and honey. There were natural products like soaps. There was a guy selling rotisserie chickens, regionally bred and never frozen, from the back of a van specially made to cook rotisserie chickens. (I wondered were a person might buy a van like that. Then I looked on the Internet and found them.)

There was a grassy area in the shade where Moms hung out with their babies on blankets. There was a water fountain that sprang from the ground and the toddlers were running and playing, getting wet and staying cool. It was a nice place to hang out.

I decided on half a chicken and some Fredericksburg peaches and had some of both for dinner. Yuuummmmm.

Not until I got married, many years after my trip to Portugal, did my Grandma stop asking why I broke up with my suitor in Portugal. He did speak English, after all. I’m glad I waited. And while I might not have picked the peach directly from the tree and the chicken wasn’t from my back yard, I got a little bit closer to real food today. Yuuummmmm.

More info:
Austin Farmer’s Market, year round, rain or shine
Wednesdays, 4pm - 8pm at 4600 Guadalupe
Saturdays, 9am - 1pm at 4th and Guadalupe