It’s Supermarket Season

It’s February in New York, the time of year at which most upstanding food publications run paeans to parsnips or odes to the versatility of the cellared carrot. Indeed, only a few years ago, I, too, might have used this opportunity to rollout a full-throated appeal to braving the Northeast tundra in order to pick up three watermelon radishes and a rutabaga, or a plea to consider the turnip, as that’s all a principled locavore can eat for the next 87 days. Instead, I’ve been pushing a cart through the vegetable department of my neighborhood Key Foods, ogling the pyramids of lemons, crates of ginger, and boxes of baby spinach.

And last month, as fires raged far away and snow slipped outside my kitchen window, I roasted gleaming, Twizzler-red bell peppers that I’d found for $1.99 a pound, dousing them in oil and vinegar. Among the professional cooks, orange-wine-swilling writer types, and Brownstone Bernie-backers with whom I tend to dine, seasonal cookery is religion, the producers marketplace is church, and only nonbelievers doubt the virtues of a $3 peach or the quest for a particular heirloom chile.

It’s that the buyout represents an act of devotion to a sustainable food system that might just save us all—even though stocking up on spigarello. Caraflex cabbage when we should be giving up burgers and butter is a bit like retweeting Greta Thunberg when we should be marching on Washington. And so, I’m here to acknowledge, with no small amount of guilt, that I love winter, not because it reveals those with Job-like devotion to my flock’s doctrine, but because it’s the season of sin—it’s the season of the supermarket. The Brussels sprouts might not be affixed to the stalk, but they’re so preternaturally large that trimming them is a goddamn pleasure.

You’re not quite sure where it all comes from or how it arrived, but it’s always there for your blasphemous convenience. I love winter, not as it reveals those with Job-like devotion to my flock’s doctrine, but since it’s the season of sin—it’s the season of the supermarket. I grew up in suburban New Jersey, where my favorite fruit was the Crunchberry, but thanks to Jeffrey Steingarten’s The Man Who Ate Everything and a few months lurking on eGullet’s discussion forums, I emerged from college a starry-eyed foodie wannabe.

I moved to New York City in the aughts, when faddish restaurant menus name-checked the source for virtually every Hakurei turnip and Thumbelina carrot. Cookbooks of the era pumped out so much produce propaganda—virtually every other page was a photo depicting chefs ogling bunches of rainbow chard or back-clapping overall-clad men whose weathered faces and dirt-stained fingernails evoked communion with the earth—that it seemed contractual.

My eventual job, helping chefs write cookbooks, only cemented my fervor for the growers marketplace, inculcated as I was by people who received daily deliveries of bronze fennel and purple pole beans, trawled beat-up folding tables for Brandywines and Yellow Beauties so ripe they were near bursting, and got their kicks lacto-fermenting okra to preserve the summer’s bounty. Soon my enthusiasm hardened into zeal, and I became excessively excited about ramps, scoffed at the thought of cookery asparagus too far from the vernal equinox, and never scheduled meals before visiting the marketplace—the better to let whatever vegetables were at their peak dictate dinner.

Most of us, I imagine, do what we must to endure the months of vegetative desolation that stretch from the last sighting of curly kale to the emergence of rhubarb. But for this eternally conflicted cook, my shame is compounded by the members of my former congregation.

When every cold-weather party includes red kuri and honeynut squashes, each winter Manhattan bistro menu features Brussels sprouts. Obscure chicories , and Food Instagram seems suspended in a state of perpetual autumn, it can seem like everyone in your milieu is Dan Barber–ing dinner except you. That is, until you remember that it’s 27 degrees and the arable land within a 300-mile radius is as barren as Mitch McConnell’s soul. Unreachably high standards beget failure, failures beget surrender, and next thing you know, your happy place is behind that cart in a timeless void where bundles of asparagus and pints of blueberries coexist with butternut squashes and grapes, to hell with Mother Nature.

Where you can indulge your desires and resist submission to the tyranny of the orbiting earth’s axial tilt—unless, of course, what you crave is a decent tomato, strawberries that are red all the way through, or a livable planet.