I think I was 21 years old. I had just moved back to central Ohio from Roanoke, VA, where I was going to college. I couldn’t afford to buy groceries in college; I ate nothing except cereal and plain noodles. After staying with my parents for a few months to get settled back in, I found a roommate and an apartment. It was July, and I was standing in the supermarket, in the produce section, attempting to purchase some nectarines. I took a perfect-looking nectarine in my hand. It felt strangely hard, considering its red-stained, peachy exterior. I brought it to my nose, closed my eyes, and inhaled. Nothing. I started to feel dizzy, and confused. What was this thing? Where did it grow?
I was still feeling shaky, but nonetheless, I took the nectarine home and cut it open. It was hard, and the inside was brown and holey, as if it had been frozen at some point and the sugar had separated from the pulp.
A week later, I was in the same supermarket, thinking of bringing home some tomatoes. All of the tomatoes were hydroponically grown. I started looking around, desperately trying to find someone to commiserate with, but everyone appeared to be happily picking out creepy, unnatural fruits and vegetables to take home to their families. "But it’s July in Ohio!" I wanted to scream. "10 miles west of us, millions of tomatoes are growing outside on vines, waiting to be eaten, still warm from the sun, sliced and spread with real mayonnaise and sprinkled with salt! Who even knows where a hydroponic farm IS around here?"
I was naive.
I found a special kinship when I read Jacques Pepin’s The Apprentice, because he was confounded as to why Americans found Alice Waters so fascinating. She uses locally grown, seasonal produce? In northern California? Umm, okay. (I have nothing against Alice Waters, I plan on being her someday, wearing long linen sheaths and quietly talking about eating raw turnips. It's just sad that we need an ambassador to eat produce that actually tastes good.)
You see, I grew up in the country. We had a cow for milk, chickens for meat and eggs, fruit trees, a cider press, grape vines, and a huge garden where we grew everything from loofah sponges to sweet corn to broccoli and back again. I had never even had produce purchased in a store, with the exception of citrus and pineapple, both of which I was allergic to as a child. What you didn’t grow, someone else did. Zucchini would overtake your garden and when your friends and neighbors said they didn’t want anymore, you bagged it up anyway, and put it on their porch when they weren’t home, so at least you didn’t have to see it go to waste.
My mother’s pride and joy was her asparagus patch, which had taken years to cultivate and reap the rewards. I loved to pick asparagus, even if I didn’t, at the time, necessarily care to eat it; asparagus, in case you don’t know, grows right out of the ground, looking just like an asparagus spear. You just snap it off and take it inside to the waiting pot. (no trimming, no peeling!)
I remember growing cauliflower; every other day you have to go out and tie its leaves up over its head, so that it stays white. And sweet corn; my father would dig one long trench and I would crouch down, with a paper bag of seeds and a kitchen knife. You planted three seeds and then set the knife down to measure where you would plant the next three seeds. I remember growing, at one time or another, broccoli, cauliflower, sweet peas, string beans, sweet corn, popcorn, pumpkins, watermelons, zucchini, radishes, spinach, cabbage, leaf lettuces of all sorts, strawberries, raspberries, asparagus, turnips, kohlrabi, beets, loofah gourds, carrots, sourgham, onions, garlic, chives, dill, and cucumbers. Besides that we had peach, plum, cherry, apricot, plumpricot and apple trees and grape vines that grew green and red grapes. I am sure there is more that I am forgetting, but I close my eyes and I can still see the layout of the garden and fruit trees.
I know that not everyone can live this way or grew up this way. When I was growing up, I went to a private school in a rather wealthy suburb of Columbus, and I always felt out of place and strange. My friends simply couldn’t relate to the way I lived. They had never had to reach their hand under a hen and gather eggs, or milk a cow, or plant corn, or pick asparagus. They had never canned fruits or made apple butter in a giant copper cauldron; they had never slaughtered a chicken and then picked its feathers, or wrapped meat, fresh from the slaughterhouse, from a cow that was grazing in your pasture yesterday.
But now that I am an adult I am so thankful that I was raised this way. We should never forget that we aren’t very many generations away from a time when nearly everyone lived this way, or lived close to someone who did.
And so, primarily for selfish reasons, I became an advocate for sustainable agriculture. I am incredulous that my so-called foodie friends have never eaten a sun-warmed tomato! And so, for your own good, go out and find your local farmers. Now is the time of year to sign up for CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), a service where you pay a farmer, and every week they deliver (or you pick up) a sampling of what they have grown that week. Local Harvest is a great resource to find local farms.
Many of the farms require a few hours of service on the farm. Get out there and do it. Learn to respect where your food comes from. Okay, I’m finished preaching. Now I just have to wait for tomato season.
