I am halfway through Barbara Kingsolver’s book and I am convinced that, like her, I should eat only foods that are in season, which means in my region, no tomatoes in winter.

This way of life implies a lot of things. First it implies that I should only eat local stuff because different regions have different seasons. The Northeastern part of the United States does not have the eternal sunshine of California or the tropical weather of Ecuador therefore our farmers adjust to that reality and grow things according to what our climate and soil permit.

It also means that I should exercise a tremendous amount of restraint since while I wait for local Asparagus in early April, most people are already stuffing themselves with the green spears that are available in my nearby supermarket the whole year round.

It could also mean that to some of my friends and family that I am slowly turning Amish.

This was what actually happened last weekend when I told a friend about my plan:

So you decided to set aside all the conveniences of modern life and be Amish, he said.

No, I replied. With all due respect to the Amish folks, I am not. Besides, if I were, then I wouldn’t be blogging.

But what is this business of you having to wait for freaking August to have cucumbers? You can have it right now, he asked.

Well, our local soil cannot grow cucumbers in February. It just can’t. So the cucumbers that are in the supermarket now must had been harvested elsewhere and would had required a lot of petroleum to get into my table. Likewise, since it came from elsewhere, it is not fresh and tasty anymore, I answered.

I think you are turning Amish. Not that there’s anything wrong with being one, he snapped back.  But wait! Are you going to blog about this?

Yeah, but don’t worry about offending Amish folks online, I responded.

Our conversation however, no matter how weird, makes good sense. Perhaps as my search for real food continues, I am indeed turning into a kind of Amish foodie. You see, since I started this blog, I have been shunning fast food, heavily processed industrial edibles, conventional supermarkets, and soon, foods that are not in season. I have become a pre-industrial age eater. A throwback consumer. A retro kind of guy.

And yes, perhaps, I am really abandoning all the conveniences of the modern age when it comes to food. Well, I guess that’s my inconvenient truth. But that is truth that as of now, I will gladly embrace.

Notes: I also found out that even animal products go by the seasons! That explains why my meat and dairy co-op does not carry meat and dairy all-year round.

Here are some websites that are very useful in maintaining this lifestyle.

For fruits and veggies click here

For meats, dairy, and poultry click here

And if by any remote chance an Amish person with rebellious tendencies happens to find this blog and gets offended by my friend’s statements, I will gladly send him my friend’s contact information via pigeon courier and he can hack my pal to bits with his sickle.

What do you want to eat, something clean or something delicious?

I have been asked this question many times and very often my answers were non-committal shrugs. It is a trick question–and a discriminating one too.

If I opt for the clean option, then I am pretty sure that the questioner would, in no time, reduce me to a breathing stereotype like clockwork: A well-groomed guy with Republican leanings, who proposes love on first dates hoping to quickly level up from the realm of virgins to the plateau of sex studs; listens to John Denver and thinks that General Tso’s chicken is an actual recipe concocted by Chairman Mao himself that’s why it sucks; eats wonder bread, finds joy in acid wash comfort fit jeans, and sports a bouncy flaming mullet.

On the other hand, if I go for the delicious option, I might turn up more exciting: A rebel who eats risk for lunch and fancies himself as a sex machine who has the gift of contorting the human body to angles even a protractor would find difficulty to measure; a foodie who appreciates world cultures, eats anything in sight regardless of dirt or odor, dabbles in painting and poetry, finds revelation in the lyrics of a 14^th street subway folk singer, and bald as Telly Savalas.

This is why I shrug. I am neither of those types. I am just a caveman who wants a real meal.

So when I am presented with something believed to be delicious but obviously unclean and foul smelling, I think. Hard.

Enter, cheese.

There are two kinds of cheese in this world: The smelly and the clean.

The clean cheeses are packaged in nice yellow boxes with nutritional claims adorning the labels. Other clean cheeses are in re-sealable plastic containers of different forms and sizes: long sticks, big balls, flat squares, and shredded. These dairy products are industry clean and have passed all the required food safety tests with high marks. Most of these cheeses are soft and wholesome smelling. They go by monikers such as cheese sticks, cheez wiz, cheese food, processed cheese etc.

The other kind of cheese is from a different universe: The smelly ones. These seem like coming straight from the damp socks of the cheese makers. Putrid, hard, crumbly, and teeming with bacteria, these dairy products can scare off even malnourished rats.

Plus, the thoughtless thin cellophane packaging of these goodies doesn’t make it more appealing. The marketing doesn’t pull you in and the smell pushes you out.

The odd thing, though, is that these olfactory dilemmas are thrice more expensive than their clean cheese food cousins.

As I am writing this blog, I am actually confronted by this.

I am packing lunch and I have a bag of salad greens, some oil and vinegar, and a choice of these two kinds of cheese for toppings. On one side I have a grated cheese product that came straight from the refrigerated isle of my local Shoprite. On the other is a Gruyere from a nearby Whole Foods Market.

Under careful scrutiny, the cheaper grated cheese food has more ingredients than the Gruyere. It has milk, enzymes, cultures, color, dry milk, whey solids, anhydrous milkfat, polysaccharide, xanthan gum, carrageenan, potato starch, powdered cellulose, and natamycin.

The stinky cheese has four ingredients: raw cow’s milk, milk cultures, enzymes, and salt.

So, what I’m going to do is make two sets so I would know which one of the two dairy products is tastier in a salad. Of course, at the back my mind, I am thinking, well, aren’t they just the same with the other one being a signature version of the other? Well, I would know later. Also, I will share my lunch to my co-workers and ask for their opinion. I will blog the results later. Certainly I won’t tell them which salad has the more expensive cheese.

Would they be able to tell by how my food smells? Or would they look at my feet instead?