On eating time

Spring is one of the best times to be a gardener. Throwing seeds into the ground produces perfect, two-leaved sprouts, which grow into seedlings, and I feast my eyes on the electric green of early romaine, carrot tops, and peppers. I put my lemon and lime trees outside after a winter languishing in the pale light of the front window, and they burst out in a shower of new leaves, each so green it feels like the tiny trees are breathing sighs of relief. Seedlings sprouting under grow lights are like secret indoor promises, filled with expectations for summer and fall.

Every daily tour around my garden makes me feel joy. I cheer on my plants, tell the rosemary to buck up, and take silent pride in my pruning as my roses begin their first bloom, dotting my yard with electric pink.

But gardening also gives me a new perspective on time. In spring, it feels like everything is happening. And yet, it’s all happening at a glacial pace. I planted carrots this year (I’m not optimistic). Even in my research, I know that I will not receive a carrot to put on my plate for another 70 days on average. More than two months. I’m also growing romaine, and watching tiny leaves slowly unfurl, stretching for the sun. A single bunch can take 80 days.

And yet, that same day, I pulled a carrot out of my fridge along with a bunch of romaine. I chopped it up and wolfed it down as a salad in less than half an hour.

I ate 70-80 days of sunlight, soil and water in 30 minutes.

How much time we all consume. Deer, wandering through my neighborhood and nibbling the freshest green shoots are consuming weeks of plant growth in a single bite. Squirrels storing nuts in the fall, only to forget them in the spring buried months of a tree’s work. A single chicken dinner has been slimmed down to just 8 weeks for a broiler chicken, but that’s 8 weeks of chicken meals, 8 weeks of eating grain, which took months to grow, in soil that took decades or hundreds of years to form. It’s eating time with compound interest.

It’s not just the time of the plants or the chicken. Recently, I’ve been saving the bottom inch of green onions (aka scallions) when I buy them from the store. After a few days in a cup of water, I plant them in a careful perimeter around my exposed garden bed. (Deer and groundhogs are far less interested in my red lettuce when they have to cross and stinky scallion fence first.)

Each scallion regrows from its little saved stub, usually over a few weeks. Cells dividing, stretching, growing every upward, starting all over again. Then, a recipe calls for four scallions, and I trot out, and cut one, or pull one up, and another, and another.

And I think, not only of the time it took to grow, but how much time someone took, probably a poor worker, bending over and over in the hot sun, pulling scallion after scallion from the earth, so I could buy a bunch of six for $0.99, and never think about the time, the effort it took. The time she took, the hours, and the pain in her back (farm workers should be paid a lot more than they are). For something I often use as an ingredient, a garnish.

How much time do we eat every day? How many days of growth, how many hours of labor, above and beyond what we spent just buying or cooking our food? How many minutes or hours are in our bites, in the cells and molecules that fuel us?

Today, as I ate my salad, I caught myself crunching a little slower, trying to pick out its individual flavors and textures. To taste the sun in the leaves, the soil. The work. To taste time.

(Those are my tulips up there. Yes, I am very proud.)

Where have I been?

• Well for the past few years I’ve been in a vaccine study for Lyme Disease! I didn’t write this but my colleague did, the results are out and it works! Not amazing, but way better than Lyme I can tell you. Perhaps I will put together a newsletter on the experience.

• I got to write a fabulously fun piece on treetop latrines, places where arboreal mammals go poo—in the branches of strangler figs. I must say it’s rather a comfort to know if you’re walking along on the ground…well poop’s not going to drop on your head.

• I also got to write a very fascinating and somewhat terrifying piece on peptides. These are small proteins that people are injecting for longevity, healing, muscle recovery, maybe more hair. The issue? They’ve not been approved for those things. Most haven’t even been tested in humans. People won’t trust a vaccine, but they’ll…do this.

• Finally, I got to review my colleague Roxanne Khamsi’s new book on genetic mutation! Yes, mutations can cause some scary things, but I found her take on them very comforting. Because mutations are a part of life.

Where have you been?

• If you haven’t heard enough about peptides, may I also recommend this one by Lisa Jarvis, noting that the FDA is poised to make it easier to get peptides…but not making any moves to ensure they are safe.

• The abrupt gutting of USAID left people around the world to literally starve. It also left thousands in the US without jobs, and an entire industry just destroyed. A year later many STILL cannot find work, some of the best, most educated and qualified people on the planet.

• An infection with measles is far, far more than just the measles itself. This mom came forward to talk about her daughter, who died from complications of measles 10 years after she had the disease. Vaccines save lives.