BODY. How Do You Use Food as Your FARMacy?
I tell just about every single one of my patients: “Food is the medicine we eat three times a day, whether we think of it that way or not.” This is more or less a riff off of the well known Hippocrates quote “Let thy food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” I so ardently believe this. After all, my roots in health and wellness stem from my attempt to blend food + medicine in undergrad with my nutritional sciences degree + premedical course load. However, it wasn’t until I started volunteering and interning on farms until I really understood what Hippocrates meant and my own volition in believing that food acts as our farmacy (either in our favor or against it).
As a population, we are generally trained to think that all foods are available all year long. Strawberries in the middle of a Buffalo winter growing up was a normal notion for me. Tomatoes had no season (also not taste). And why not have bananas on hand all of the time? I never thought too deeply about my food or where it was coming from.
Enter: my first post-grad experience working at Tenuta di Spannocchia in Tuscany. I maintain that I learned more in these four months of my organic farming and sustainability internship there than I did at my four years studying nutrition at Cornell. I learned how to grow food, harvest food and then put it all together with simple, whole ingredients for some of the best meals of my life. I learned what weeds were medicinal and where to go looking for caches of mushrooms. I learned the rewarding and monotonous work of picking hundreds of olive trees by hand, and climbing up into them as if I was wild and free 8-year old again. I learned that when organic, well-tended olives are harvested, their oil is like a bright green slime when pressed and that it has a bit of spicy aftertaste when fresh. I could go on and on.
This experience spurred me to pursue more experiences on farms of all kinds. I was hungry to know more about how people produced nourishing, nutritious food (and also have some of the most incredible meals). I had felt so disconnected from this my entire life, and there was something so satisfying in learning about and witnessing the miracle that the seed of one plant can be put in the ground and output a whole season’s worth of meals and nutrition. And also understanding what fresh food meant: 0 kilometers from the source. Never in plastic. And actually had flavor (cherry tomatoes in the middle of winter have nothing on a summer tomato plucked ripe off the vine).
My Challenge to You This Summer: try growing a simple herb in a windowsill, meet a farmer and support them through buying their labor of love, and understand for at least one meal: where does your food come from and how has it arrived to your plate? And yes, organic, local food from a farmer’s market may cost more, but don’t forget that it’s also doubling as your medicine. So make it count.
