Vegetables and How I Cook Them: Green Beans

Appears in
Ruffage: A Practical Guide to Vegetables
Ruffage

By Abra Berens

Published 2019

  • About

In The Pastures of Heaven, John Steinbeck told a story of a man wanting to woo a woman, so he remodeled his family’s parlor room based on an image from a magazine. He crafted the room to match it just so. In the time this took, the woman married someone else, and the man locked the door to the parlor, letting it wither, picture perfect.

I struggle with the romanticism around gardening, cooking, and general lifestyle media. It isn’t that the reality of what’s being peddled isn’t true; the room in the image is a real room. It’s that these ideals often lack the context of what goes into the production, leaving the reader with feelings of inferiority for not having achieved the perfect meal, room, or sweater combination. Never laying bare the costs, or at least the compromises, of production.