Momento mori

The past two days have produced five jelly jars of grape syrup (intended to be jam), some blackberry vinegar, one pitcher of apple juice (squeezed from our own rustic apparatus) and innumerable jars of apple butter. Meanwhile we are eating tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, and chard from the garden along with the few remaining blackberries from the late bushes. All this succulent food makes you wonder (good and hard) what in the name of the gods is so terribly wrong with the food from the grocery store.

The flavors that we've been sampling seem to burnish the mouth with a rich complexity of sensation and are impossible to compare to the food fraudulence we are pretty much forced to consume the rest of the year. What, pray tell, is wrong with the world when food no longer tastes like food, taking on the qualities of recycled cardboard, instead.

Okay, I know this is an old topic. You can read countless books published in the past decade that will enumerate the heart-wrenching problems with food production in the U.S. but when the real hard-won harvest comes in, it is difficult to refrain from complaining in earnest all over again.

So, I've been setting a few flavor samples aside for the coming winter months as a momento mori of summer as well as the eating sensations that are lost to us by agribusiness. For some reason trying to capture these taste sensations reminds me of the smell-o-rama machine that produces the "olfactory banquet" in the movie Harold and Maude. And if you follow along with me on that theme, I suppose the rest of the grocery-shopping year would be likened to the odorama scratch-and-sniff of Polyester.