INAKA LUNCH

When you've lived in another country for as long as I have - especially in another countryside, where the traditions prevail - after a while you tend to become inured and no longer see the difference from the culture you were born and raised in; you lose the instinctive ability to compare, that you had when you first arrived.

So in order to maintain a reasonable spiritocultural balance, I've made it a habit to every once in a while force myself to look at the moment with all the original eyeball I can muster, such as I did at lunch today. After a morning of working in the garden I sat down at the table to eat and managed to observe how utterly different this looked (and was) from an American lunch, such as in a truck stop, The Four Seasons, a Nebraska farm kitchen, any one of the countless places that comprise a nation lunching.

Laid out before me on the table was a lunch comprising:

Brown rice with yuzukosho
Kinpira gobo (using mini-gobo)
Fresh mountain tomato, eighthed
Sesame tofu with wasabi and tamari shoyu
Stew of green beans, carrots and shiitake
Dessert: a piece of pear later

No meat, no dairy, no fat, no pesticides, lots of fiber, organics from our garden (beans, tomatoes, gobo-- Littlefoot got my September carrots in July) or from the local co-op; organic rice from the elderly rice farmer across the lake.

Delicious, filling, light, low cost, varied, visually nourishing (especially the tomatoes, and the green wasabi atop the amber of sesame tofu (talk about 'mouth feel'!) with dark-brown tamari poured over), not to mention a whole summerful of nutes, all sauced with a morning's work in the garden.

Way different from lunch at the Union Diner, as I recall.