I don’t think I have ever felt more simultaneous awe and heartbreak than when I realized what food is actually supposed to taste and look like. So much supermarket produce and meat is a pale and lifeless mimicry of nature’s gifts. You eat a truly high quality, "heirloom" piece of fruit or meat and you suddenly taste these umami notes or sweetness that you’ve had before, but so much richer and more complex...

Most of all, it is nourishing. It dawns on you, then, that “flavorings” and colors are just there to mask how watered down and one-dimensional food has become, and how it misses its life-giving essence.

So you can eat and eat and eat, and never be satisfied or properly nourished, because so much food is just an imitation of what was once cultivated.

.

There is a local farm here in NL that feeds its chickens veggie and compost scraps + allows them to forage for insects, like God intended. The meat is orange, rich, and insanely flavorful. The umami notes and the creaminess of the meat remind me nearly of MSG-laden mayonnaise I have had, but if it actually tasted good, better, and "real." You can season this chicken with nothing but salt, and it tastes amazing anyways.

I don't know if this makes sense, but when I had this chicken for the first time, I felt like every other experience of chicken I had in life up until this point was a mockery. I have heard from older generations and people who grew up on farms that chicken meat is not supposed to be white and pale like the kind you find in supermarkets.

Many chickens I had in the US, even organic ones, were often pale, white, and injected with some sort of saline solution to counteract how flavorless they were. I have had so many independent experiences like this, like tasting a warm-climate fruit in its actual, local environment + season for the first time, and realizing its true flavor and nature. It makes me just wonder and yearn for the experience of eating and nourishing yourself with food before the soil was stripped bare. As if it were something natural, not special and rare.

That is what they took from us.