From Garden to Gullet: Doing Farm to Table at Home

There’s another great piece by Mark Bittman in the NY Times today highlighting research that suggests that getting Americans to mere eat one more fruit or vegetable per day would lower health care costs and save lives:

Each additional serving of fruit or vegetable would reduce mortality from cardiovascular disease by about 5 percent, to the point where if we all ate the recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables, we’d save more than 100,000 lives and something like $17 billion in health care costs.

I’ve been doing my part by growing herbs, fruits and vegetables in my garden at home. Here’s what I’m growing at the moment:

Kale, arugula, 4 varieties of tomatoes, 4 pepper varieties, basil, sage, rosemary, thyme, mint, shiso, kumquats, oranges, lemons, limes, persimmons, blueberries, and strawberries. Obviously everything is not at harvest stage at the same time, but the summer has been amazing.

Today, for lunch, I made an omelette with sautéed chopped shishito pepper, diced cherry tomatoes, basil and goat cheese, with a side salad of kale tossed with olive oil, sea salt and brown rice vinegar.

Few things in life are as satisfying as picking things from the garden, cooking them, and then eating them.