When I was little, tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches was one of my favorite meals. Even now, when the weather is right the mere thought of dunking a melty sandwich in steamy, creamy soup makes me weak in the knees.
As a little kid, it seemed to me that anytime the weather was yucky was a great time for tomato soup; any rainy, snowy, chilly day where coziness was paramount. But now that I’m older, wiser, and frankly, now that all of my thoughts about food have been ruined/enlightened/upturned by Ayurveda, I see tomato soup weather a little differently.
This past week we’ve had a few very moody, damp, rainy chilly days in Boulder. The chill wasn’t enough to impact the tomatoes still hanging on the vine – in fact, they loved this precipitation. So much so, that at the farm stand this week there were buckets on buckets of them. Tomatoes are IN SEASON, and THIS THIS THIS is tomato soup weather.
If our ancient ancestors had known the glory of tomato soup, they would have agreed. Because, friends, they wouldn’t have had the luxury of a can they could just pop open. Nor the convenience of commercial farms that grow tomatoes all year round in artificially perfect weather, with or without degraded soils. They didn’t have huge corporations with massive factories that pumped tomatoes into soup without a care for the environment, the ingredients or the care put into the soup.
But – depending on how far we go back in our lineages (say some 3000-5000 years or so,) they WOULD have had something we are only starting to revisit: two very important pieces of wisdom. One, is the knowledge that our bodies produce enzymes to produce foods that are in season, and that those same foods can get tricky for us to digest and assimilate when we eat them out of season. And two, the understanding that foods are all thriving beings with goals – just like us – of perpetuating their species. When they’re ripe, fertile, and in season, they MAKE themselves easier to digest so that we can eat them, poop them out, and help them procreate. But when their seeds aren’t ripe (like, er, almost all of those that you’ll find in a tomato soup can AND those on the grocery store shelves all winter long,) they make themselves very difficult to digest (to protect their seeds.) And this causes some issues for us. I share a few of those below.
The recipe I’m sharing with you this week is my absolute favorite Charred Tomato Soup. It requires an armload of fresh (preferably local) tomatoes that are going to smell like heaven when you cook them, a couple of alliums, and a handful of herbs that you may have in your garden, or at the very least would be easy to steal from the neighbors garden. It’s not a challenging recipe, and it doesn’t take much time but it does take a bit of forethought. I promise, promise, promise it’s worth it, and you – too – will never want to eat tomato soup out of a can again.
Our modern food economy and especially the nutritionists, dieticians and “experts” employed by this economy don’t want you to know that – yep – our bodies know what season it is.
It’s possible that this information isn’t widely known. After all, it sounds crazy, right? Aren’t our bodies just wandering around autonomously, acting independently of nature and doing whatever we tell them to do? Haven’t we figured out enough about science to have already engineered foods smart enough to navigate our digestive systems…or….
Um, no. And no.
Ayurvedic philosophy tells us that most of the ailments that we suffer from: indigestion, IBS, PCOS, painful periods, even cancer – relate back to our digestive systems. American society has higher rates of chronic disease and obesity than the average in the nations of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. We’re all developed, but the U.S. is the only nation with a commercialized food system as willing to unscrupulously plug our “foods” with non food items, and unlike in each of these nations, we don’t at large have connections to the people and places where our food is grown. This is not to say that commercial food systems don’t exist in these places, it’s just to say that we prioritize convenience over our own health, and the health of nature….almost every time.
And yet our bodies continue to function the way that NATURE tells them too (not the nutritionists.) We create different enzymes in the summer than in the winter, we require different foods, and while our schedules may not know the difference between a cup of canned tomato soup and a bowl of freshly picked and roasted tomato soup, our bodies certainly do.
If your body ever feels indigestion, bloating, gas, acid reflux, or if you experience loose stools after eating tomato soup, you’ve seen the evidence that this is true. (But, did you know that was what your body was telling you?) Now you do.
Plants change their digestibility as well.
During seasons when what they want is to be consumed, digested, pooped out and allowed to plant their seeds, they make their skins and seeds much more easy to digest. That time is now – when they’ve sat on the vine all summer, creating as much nutrition as possible and packing themselves with it.
In the dead of winter, when tomatoes aren’t receiving natural light, or when they aren’t experiencing the sunkissed golden evenings that make their skin blush, their seeds and skins stay very hard and indigestible.
These are the grocery store tomatoes that you’ll be convinced to buy in the middle of the winter to put on your sandwich and the like. They won’t taste like much, and they won’t have much nutritional value.
The tomatoes of now are also pretty sweet and don’t require much to make them easy to enjoy. But, it is still important that you remove the skins and seeds from your tomatoes and your soup. This helps to eliminate the lectins. Lectins are a biotoxin that the fruits coat themselves in to ensure that they aren’t consumed under unoptimal circumstances preventing their seeds from germinating. During the peak of tomato season, these lectins are less potent but no matter when we pick tomatoes, they still contain this biotoxin as a fail-safe.
Conventional soup doesn’t always remove the seeds or skins entirely, which can make these foods pretty tricky to digest, giving us a really uncomfortable eating experience. Making your own soup, and removing the skins and seeds can help tomato soup be the best damn thing on the planet again.
For as much as I want to instigate you away from eating tomato soup from a can outside of tomato season, I DO want to encourage you to have a melty, crispy, gooey grilled cheese with your soup. There’s a great reason these two go together so well: cheese and bread are sweet and soften the blow of the sour, acidic tomatoes in your soup. Together, the flavors harmonize and are easier to digest, hypothetically…that is, if there isn’t already cream or milk in your tomato soup which just turns the soup, and the sandwich, into a very difficult to digest gut bomb.
If you find that tomatoes are a little bit sensitive to the pitta in your system, you can add a small amount of feta cheese or other favorite cheese to your soup (or a splash of milk or cream,) OR make yourself a little grilled cheese sammie for balance.
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