I could get really spoiled after a meal like this:

Last night, it was my turn to cook. Carmelized garlic scapes and onions, zucchini, green beans, a gorgeous broccoli, ginger, and cilantro stir-fried in a miso-peanut-sesame oil-chili pepper sauce , served over organic buckwheat soba. Accompanied by a salad of arugala, lettuce, carrot, cucumber, garnished with raspberries and freshly toasted walnuts and hazelnuts. It should have had the season’s first local organic tomatoes, but I forgot about them until I was cleaning up after the meal. OK, so the sauce was my invention, and I know how long to cook each vegetable for maximum flavor. But the success of this meal didn’t really hinge on my cooking skills. It was much more about using almost entirely organic, local, and super-fresh ingredients. The lettuce was a few days old. The ginger was local and organic, but purchased in the fall and frozen, and the chili pepper was dried from our garden a year or two ago—but all the rest of the vegetables and fruit was picked either yesterday or today—and grown in my town, either in our own organic garden or the organic CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) farm we belong to. The nuts and sesame oil were neither local nor organic, and the peanut butter was ground locally but grown elsewhere. The miso and the noodles were organic but not local. Like most of our meals this time of year, it was somewhere between 60 and 80 percent local. By next year, I might be able to use local organic sesame oil; we’re growing sesame seeds this year. I do think I’m a good cook, and my stuff tends to attract interest at potlucks. But even a mediocre cook would have had a hard time messing up something with such wonderful ingredients, as long as he or she didn’t let the broccoli overcook. Really, it’s not that hard to eat like this. Most people, even apartment dwellers, have access to some place they can grow a bit of food, or to a CSA farm, or at least a farmers market. Make it a priority; the rewards are superb.