There is an indescribable joy in eating from the earth. Plucking a low-lying fruit from a tree, biting into it with juice running down your mouth and your hands. Pure, real, unadulterated.

We’ve become so far removed from our food. The shape of food has been transformed to suit our sensibilities. Children often don’t know where fruits and vegetables come from, neatly piled up as they are in supermarkets. Meats are cut into shapes and packaged into individual portions, lest we remember their origins or the journey they have made. We don’t even consume our food with our hands anymore. When I was younger, we would wash a mango and then peel it with our fingers to bite into its juicy flesh. Now, I find myself neatly cutting it into cubes, picked with a fork and brought to my mouth. Yet, the taste does not seem to be the same.

This became stark to me this week. I’m currently in Sweden, a small town called Västerås on Lake Mälaren. Life is slow and predictable here. Evenings are spent cycling along marked tracks in the nearby forest and days languidly spent on the poolside deck as I read a book. No sights to tick off a checklist, this is slow travel at its best. A home exchange makes it sweeter, living like the locals do in an amazing seven-bedroom house next to a forest and a river.

One of the most amazing parts of staying in this wonderful home in this corner of the world is the greenhouse and the vegetable garden. Trees dripping with cherries, cucumbers growing faster than we can consume them. Salad is made every evening by foraging in the garden for lettuce and tomatoes that are ripe enough to be picked. And tomorrow’s menu is crafted based on whether the aubergine can be picked or should we wait another day.

I had forgotten how satisfying it is to know where your food comes from. Childhood memories of running into a sugarcane field to steal one or plucking a mango from the tall tree in a corner of my grandmother’s sprawling bungalow resurface without warning, bringing a smile to my face.

I can take my daughter to a thousand malls or buy her numerous experiences, but nothing compares to the thrill of waiting an extra day to see if the fruit is ripe for plucking or not. She resists, like any teen would, calling my fascination strange. Yet, I spy her watering the plants every evening, softly singing to them under her breath, lost in the moment.

As prosperity has grown, summer vacations in recent years have become fancier, fodder for name-dropping. When I tell folks where I am right now, they look at me quizzically, wondering why I’m not in Stockholm’s Gamla Stan or on a cruise in Norway. What was the point of going all the way to Scandinavia, they think, if I didn’t even go to the top 10 must-do sites in the country? But I don’t correct them. I stay content in the knowledge that somehow, so far from home and after decades, I finally had a summer vacation like my childhood. Unstructured. Slow. Delightful.

Here’s to slow travel. And may you one day discover the joy for yourself too.