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• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Sample Recipes
• Sample Reflections
• Praise for Simply in Season
• Meet the Authors
• Cathleen Hockiman-Wert’s Simply in Season Blog.
• Free Simply in Season Study Guide (PDF)

Sample Reflections from Simply in Season

In addition to recipes, Simply in Season contains reflections on the meaning and place of food in our lives—like the samples below.

Cultivating a healthy outlook

Vegetable gardeners get a double boost to their health: the fresh produce is packed with nutrients and the labor is good exercise. But gardening—whether foods or flowers—can also improve mental and spiritual health. Today horticultural therapy can be found in hospitals, domestic abuse shelters, nursing homes, mental health institutions, and prisons.

"For four years I have taught gardening skills to inmates at Western Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Md. They find great satisfaction in being able to contribute to the beauty of this place," says Wayne A. Yoder of Ridgeley, W.Va.

Once nothing but grass, the prison yard now boasts landscaping mostly designed, planted and maintained by inmates.

"This may be the most important rehabilitative function of prison gardening: showing inmates that they can make a positive contribution and give back to the society they have wronged in some way," Yoder says. "They learn that whatever they sow, they also reap. That goes two ways, and is always in season."

Picked with human hands

I’m just one of countless migrants who’s wasted years in the fields….I feel like [farmworkers will] never be noticed. I would be thrilled if someday the newspaper would say, "We would like to thank the farmworkers, the pickers. We appreciate the hours, the days, the weeks, they’ve spent harvesting our produce."

Migrants need to be recognized. Now . . . maybe I could be the one that makes everyone realize, "Lord, have mercy, those tomatoes I ate yesterday? Somebody picked them with their own hands."

Dora Medina, Faison, N.C., who spent most of her life as a farmworker but now owns a small restaurant

The last word/world

"It is said: Before the world was created, the Holy One kept creating worlds and destroying them. Finally He created this one, and was satisfied. He said to Adam: This is the last world I shall make. I place it in your hands: hold it in trust."

A Midrashic anecdote for Tu Bishvat, the Jewish festival celebrating New Year for trees

An endangered species: North American farmers

In Canada, farmers today make up about 3 percent of the workforce, or 2.4 percent of the total population. Less than one percent of the U.S. population are full-time farmers: a figure so small that the national census no longer lists the category of "farmer."

We all live in the country

"Modern American culture is fairly empty of any suggestion that one’s relationship to the land, to consumption and food, is a religious matter. But it’s true; the decision to attend to the health of one’s habitat and food chain is a spiritual choice. It’s also a political choice, a scientific one, a personal and a convivial one.

It’s not a choice between living in the country or the town; it is about understanding that every one of us, at the level of our cells and respiration, lives in the country and is thus obliged to be mindful of the distance between ourselves and our sustenance."

Barbara Kingsolver, author and environmental advocate