Eat local or not at all.
Who’s your farmer?
No farms, no food.
Support your local farmer.
The slogans are many, and the logic is sound. We are what we eat, and the impacts of our food choices shape communities. Sustainable eating touts a host of significant ecological and economic benefits, and it also delivers dopamine, a substance more commonly discussed in the annals of addiction.
In modern America, addictive behaviors are condemned, and drug use is vilified. But the oft-lamented craving/consummation cycle might be a healthy part of human evolution, a useful path to human pleasure within limits. Before the large-scale manufacture of highly addictive substances and the incentivizing of their production and sale through the structures of capitalism, humans thrived by consuming the substances they desired. My round of seasonal eating exemplifies just such a hedonistic practice.
The process is sequential. I start salivating at the thought of that first perfectly ripened garden tomato, usually while trimming extraneous foliage away from the hard, green orbs in the greenhouse. Then, as that initial bite approaches, my desire grows. Oh, for the first taste! The pleasure from a luscious Krim? Hard to convey without multiple exclamation points and overdone adjectives.
My tomato consumption follows the script of any pleasurable experience: the thrill diminishes the more I eat. Over the weeks, as I gorge on tasty tomato after tasty tomato, the gustatory pleasure remains…but the sensory excitement diminishes ever so slightly with each subsequent ingestion. Neurologists call this opponent-process theory, the sad reality that we must ingest increasingly large doses of a substance to get the same pleasure.[1] This is true of tomatoes, just as it is for potato chips, ice cream, and even manufactured substances like fentanyl.
After my first tomato meal, and then another and another and another, I develop a bit of a tolerance to the tomatoes. I just had one. I can recall the flavor. My longing for tomatoes isn’t quite so high. Eventually, usually about six weeks into the tomato deluge, I reach satiation. I’m full up on tomatoes. I love the flavor – which I’ve savored at least twice a day for weeks – but there’s no anticipatory rush, no longing, no absence.
It is fitting that my satiation point usually coincides with the timing of a new anticipatory rush – for the crunchy sweetness of fall carrots, the richness of basil pesto, or the heat of freshly dug horseradish. I supply myself with a steady run of anticipation, consumption, tolerance and satiation, and then absence. After the seasonal round, my tomato desire has been reset, and I can once again experience maximum gratification from the anticipation-consummation process, awash in the blissful contentment of the pleasure cycle.
Just as returning to a particular environment or reenacting certain rituals can lead drug addicts to relapse, the smell of dirt rekindles my vegetable craving. Stoking that desire is a sure way to increase satisfaction at consumption. If strategically planned, I can live in a state of near ecstasy, going from one anticipation-consumption-satiation cycle to another as I move through the seasons from “tender greens are up” through “first tiny carrot” to the indulgence of pound after pound of tomatoes.
Vegetables deliver innumerable health benefits, so my tomato indulgence, my experience of extravagance and buzzed-out bliss, is accepted…and even condoned. In fact, the same cyclical process of anticipation, consumption, and satiation, all tied to the delivery of dopamine, drives creatives and world-class athletes and vegetable lovers alike. While universally condemned, addiction isn’t the problem, but rather the object of our obsessions, and the limits – cultural or systemic or weather-related – that force us to regulate our consumption.
Seasonal eating makes sense from the perspective of human biology, and I reap the bounty of cultural sanction. After all, I’m a happy, healthy addict.
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[1] Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in an Age of Indulgence, 2021.
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