Escarole is popular in the Mediterranean especially in France 🇫🇷 , Spain 🇪🇸, and Italy 🇮🇹 . This versatile leafy green vegetable has a crisp crunchy texture, a distinctive taste, and a slightly bitter flavor.
Escarole also makes a great visual for what I refer to as real food. The head pictured above is from a Long Island farmer’s market and, as you can see in the bottom right photo, that outer leaf still has soil particles clinging to the outer leaves. That’s real dirt on the leaf – a gritty reminder that the escarole was recently harvested.
Health experts have been telling Americans for a long time to eat more vegetables. The USDA released MyPlate as part of the Dietary Guidelines in 2010. The graphic contains specifics on how to classify, count, and measure food groups. Escarole is part of the Vegetabls Group and further classified as a dark leafy green vegetable along with arugula, basil, cilantro, dark green leafy lettuce, endive, mixed greens, mesclun, and romaine lettuce. MyPlate however doesn’t tell me much about what makes food real to me.
So what does makes food real for me? I dig deeper into where a food is harvested, how it’s handled, to what extent it’s sustainable, whether or not it’s local and seasonal to my location, and to what extent a food has been processed before it hits my shopping cart or the bag I take to the farmers market. The closer I can get to the agriculture origins of the food I eat, the more “real” the food becomes to me.
VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW
Many of my fellow Americans can’t be bothered with what I call real food. Consider that escarole! It’s dirty and messy and heavy. Like all leafy green vegetables, escarole is mostly just big bag of nutrient rich water.
Real food always takes work. Sourcing, lugging, storing, planning, prepping, cooking – every step in the process is labor intensive. And to add insult to injury, real food usually costs more.
The food industry has provided a viable alternative – convenience. Given the amount of work required to eat real food every day, it’s no surprise that the women’s liberation movement and the rise of convenience products coincided.
Fast forward to today. The taste of freshly prepared #RealFood comes at a cost. And that’s a cost most of my fellow Americans aren’t willing to pay.