Gardening makes eating worth it. I know that probably sounds totally bizarre, and it might even explain why I’m not over weight, but being one who is addicted to sugar and is trying so hard to stop, this statement is spot on. I use sugar like a drug. While I am using sugar, my body hurts less; I feel like I can relax and think clearer, and then when I’m done down my ice cream (my very favorite form of sugar), I go back to feeling absolutely disgusting. In fact, many times I even feel worse, because I over ate, or over dosed.
As a teenager, I marveled at the girls that could just down sugar without a second thought. I wasn’t worried about how much weight they wouldn’t gain, because that wasn’t a problem for me. I was wondering how in the world they could possibly not get sick from eating so much sugar. It wasn’t until I married my husband that I found someone like me. My sister-in-law has the same problem I do. We both get ill from eating too much sugar. Being different people, there are different types and amounts of sugar that will set us off, but we both understand the nausea that accompanies a poor choice of too much dessert or snacks or breakfast…
These all came from my garden and were wonderfully sweet.
So, back to my wonderful garden. Do you remember the day you learned that tomatoes are a fruit? And you couldn’t possibly imagine how that could be, because they’re not even sweet? No store bought tomato is ever going to be the sweet you think of when talking about fruit. It simply can’t happen. The tomatoes are picked well before they are ripe, and then shipped in a truck that ripens them along the way. A tomato that is not picked red off the vine will never be sweet. (And those tomatoes on the vine don’t count either. They just cut the vine and let the tomatoes ripen on a cut vine.) A tomato that is allowed to ripen completely on a vine that is attached to roots in the ground will be the sweetest tomato you ever eat. Not only that, it will be the reddest tomato you ever eat. (Unless of course you are eating an orange or yellow variety.)
And that is why growing a garden makes eating worth it for me. Cane sugar, the kind of sugar I have yet to give up, (Somehow I managed to give up the more heavily manufactured kinds of sugar/sweeteners.) plagues me with temptation daily. So, when I take a bite out of one of my home grown tomatoes, and revel in the delicious sweetness that I was not only able to produce, but am also able to eat without any of the ill side effects of other sugary foods, garden definitely makes eating worth it.
