I did not expect food to be the thing that changed most when we moved here. I expected the pace of life to change, the rhythm of the days, the way we related to time. And all of that did change. But the food — the actual substance of what we eat — that was a transformation I was not prepared for.
The first market
Our first Tuesday market in the local village was overwhelming in the best possible way. Not because it was large — it isn't — but because of the density of connection between what was on display and the people displaying it. An elderly woman with tomatoes still warm from her greenhouse. A man selling eggs from a cardboard box who knew every chicken by name. Chouriço made by a family two villages over, smoked over local oak, using a recipe that has not substantially changed in three generations.
I bought things I did not have immediate plans for, because the buying felt like the right thing to do — not a transaction so much as an acknowledgement. You are here, you grew this, I see you. That is something that never happened in a supermarket, not once.
The flavour problem
The first tomato I ate here made me feel briefly embarrassed about my whole previous relationship with food. I had thought I knew what a tomato tasted like. I did not. What I knew was a pale, consistent, geometrically perfect object that had been engineered for shelf life and visual uniformity. The tomato from the market was irregular, slightly split at the top, and when I bit into it, there was an explosion of something I can only describe as the actual experience of tomato — acid, sweet, earthy, alive.
I had thought I knew what a tomato tasted like. I did not.
Since then I have had the same revelation with eggs, with olive oil pressed from trees on the property of a man who sold it to us in a recycled water bottle, with potatoes dug up the previous day, with garlic braided and hung to dry in the way it has been done here forever.
How my cooking changed
When the ingredients are this good, complicated cooking becomes a kind of interference. The most interesting thing I can do with a tomato like that is eat it with salt and good olive oil. The eggs need almost nothing. The soup I make with whatever vegetables were good at the market this week is, consistently, the best thing we eat.
I used to cook to impress — elaborate things with many steps, designed to signal effort. Now I cook to serve the ingredients. It is a complete reversal, and it produces better food with considerably less stress.
The rhythm it creates
Shopping locally has also changed the structure of our weeks in a way I did not anticipate. When the market sets the rhythm — Tuesday and Saturday, those particular windows — you begin to organise your eating around what is available rather than around a predetermined plan. This sounds like a constraint. It is actually a kind of freedom. You stop making shopping lists based on recipes and start making meals based on what the season has produced.
In winter: root vegetables, cabbage, chouriço, eggs, the sturdy greens that survive the cold. In spring: the first asparagus, new onions, the small strawberries that appear suddenly and are gone in three weeks. In summer: everything. The abundance is almost incomprehensible.
What this has to do with health
I am convinced that this change — buying real food from real people, cooking it simply — has been more beneficial to my health than any supplement I have ever taken or protocol I have ever followed. The research on food quality, on the difference between industrially produced and traditionally grown vegetables and animal products, is substantial and growing. But research aside, my body simply feels different. Lighter. More consistent. Less inflamed in ways I could not previously have articulated.
I think the connection matters too, in ways that are harder to measure. Knowing where your food comes from, knowing the person who produced it — this is not sentimental. It is a form of paying attention to what you are putting into your body, and that attention changes the relationship you have with eating in ways that go well beyond nutrition.