Chisan-chisou

As I sat here eating a piece of red velvet cake instead of, say, the bland watermelon in my fridge or the half-ripe plums on the kitchen counter, I ran across an article about why kids in Japan eat more vegetables. The basic answer is that local, small-scale farming produces better tasting fruits and veggies. This philosophy of "grow locally, consume locally" is known as chisan chisou. It's part of the Japanese obsession with fresh, high-quality food.

For several years, my mom kept a vegetable garden in our backyard, as did my (American) grandmother and many other families in the little West Virginian town I grew up in. But then a number of years passed where we were just buying produce from the supermarkets, and truthfully, I didn't think much about it, until I finally made it back to Japan to visit my grandfather one summer. The thing I remember most about that visit (a little sad, I know) is how good the vegetables tasted. We ate corn on the cob, tomatoes, eggplant, cucumbers, daikon, and watermelon--all picked minutes before from the garden. Oh yeah, I thought, this is how vegetables are supposed to taste. I can't even begin to describe how much more flavor they had from the stuff I get in the States. The taste made eating vegetables fun.

My grandfather has been a farmer in Japan for most of his life. He comes from a farming family, as do most Japanese. Up until a few years ago, the field in the picture above would have been filled during the summer with all types of vegetables and melons. This, in addition to the acres of rice paddies he also owned and farmed. He's getting too old to do all the hard work himself, though, and my mom lives too far away to help him often enough, so he's more recently tended to succumb to the ease of pre-packaged foods. He still loves the taste of fresh vegetables, though, so when I was there in May, my mom and I helped him plant a few rows of his garden--cucumbers, eggplant, corn, tomatoes, watermelon, and beans. It's good for him to get out and take care of the plants and to have truly fresh-from-the-vine foods to eat.

It'd be good for all of us, I suspect.