A letter from the editor.

WHEN I LOOK AT THE EGG and bacon on the cover of this magazine, I smell breakfast. Everyone knows an egg is a symbol of spring—fertility, life, the Earth—but it’s also a symbol of...well, breakfast.

Breakfast, however, has become if not a symbol, a prime example of the shortcuts we take to keep up with the fast-as-lightening pace of life. It’s the meal most often eaten on-the-go, in cars, while searching for the car keys, on the driveway as we walk to the car. Cereal bars, frozen waffles, breakfast sandwiches from gas stations.

The irony of it is that breakfast is probably the easiest meal to prepare—making it the world’s fastest “slow food.” Crack a couple of eggs into a skillet, and three or four minutes later you’ve got yourself a self-contained meal of protein, with an unctuous yolk that makes a mighty fine dipping sauce. Admittedly, three or four minutes are quite precious when you’re trying to assemble lunch boxes while simultaneously ironing a shirt and finding last night’s homework. Sometimes there simply isn’t time.

But that’s where spring comes into play again. It’s the season that invented “Stop and smell the flowers.” It’s the season with Mother’s Day, the single best day of the year for breakfast (and brunch) eaters, especially if you’re a mom. And it’s the season when the garden comes back to life, and fresh local fruits and vegetables return to the fore.

All that reminds me of a segment I saw on 60 Minutes a couple of years ago, where renowned local-foods chef Alice Waters skillfully made the most simple, most wonderful breakfast for reporter Leslie Stahl. It was slow food in real time: She oiled an old-fashioned large metal spoon, cracked an egg into it, and cooked it over the fire in her kitchen hearth. Then she served the egg atop a rustic slice of bread and a salad of chopped garden vegetables. It was enough to make the usually objective Stahl dizzy with glee. And it was the kind of moment that made me excited to garden, excited to cook, and, frankly, excited to install a kitchen hearth (which, incidentally, didn’t work out).

But even without a kitchen hearth, and even without the weather of California—where Waters and her restaurant Chez Panisse are based—we in Central Virginia can prepare meals from the garden with such simplicity and such respect for the ingredients, you’ll swear they had to have been more complicated.

Alice Waters even says so. Recently when I interviewed her for another publication, she talked at length about the abundance we have here. “I think it’s a misconception that more grows in California,” she said. “The growing season is longer, yes, but the variety is extraordinary on the East Coast. I think in Virginia, we can reconnect again. There are so many farms that are being revived right now. I can taste things that we haven’t thought to grow out in California—whether it’s a special kind of shell bean, the flavor of the animals, or the breeds of various pigs. Thomas Jefferson is a great inspiration to me. The plants in his garden were the pleasure of his life.”

And to take that pleasure and carry it into our kitchens is what this is all about.

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