Eating for Beginners Read online

  Richard believes most people are still unaware of the hidden price of conventional agriculture, which is never passed on directly at the market in the same way as the costs of growing on a small, organic farm. "The costs of growing organically are much more visible, more basic, more demonstrable," he told me. "With conventionally grown food, the cost is less easy to see. There's the public funding of the great western water impoundment projects to irrigate the desert, and there's the interstate highway system that supports trucking across an impossible distance. We've all agreed to pay these costs by levy." (In this I heard the distinct echo of farmer Joel Salatin, who told Michael Pollan something very similar. In The Omnivore's Dilemma Pollan quoted Salatin as saying, "Whenever I hear people say clean food is expensive, I tell them it's actually the cheapest food you can buy." Then he added, "With our food all of the costs are figured into the price. Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water—all of the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap.")

  As the sun moved across the sky above the hills and the guys in the barn finished pouring the concrete for the new floor, Richard grew passionate. "These little farms around here have to be farms again. You have a community again then. You share equipment and labor. You build an economy that is based on the dirt. And you have a hopeful alliance when someone in a town meeting says, out of fear and idiocy and boredom, that farming is dead." Hamden, he told me, was suffering from a kind of generalized hopelessness as a result of the poor economic conditions. "So I'm willing to deal every weekend with customers who want my organic food because it's good for their health, but I'm anxious that the real things get addressed. I keep trying to turn every conversation not just to local food but to the system we all support. When someone offers to support our farm by buying our goods, I'm happy but I try to steer the conversation to price, the value of organic food, and possibly even to the idea that they might consider some capital support of the farm."

  I couldn't help mentioning the guilt I felt at the supermarket over exactly these kinds of issues, the way I still sometimes debated about whether I should buy anything imported at all, or anything that I might be able to get a few days later at the farmers' market, even if it meant an extra stop on a busy weekend. It was sometimes hard, in those moments, to keep in mind what was at stake. But even as I expressed those concerns to Richard, I realized that my indecision was starting to fade. Much in the same way that Jules's birth had made the health issues real to me, the people and places I was visiting, applewood included, were making an intricate web of eating, environment, and community newly clear to me.

  Still, I couldn't see how it was possible to support every part of this web all the time, which I confessed to Richard. "I think there's a compromise and we all make it," he said in response. "New Yorkers live in one of the most efficient cities in the world. We can't compare. We heat the house all winter. Our driving efficiencies are poor. And I love to have oranges in the morning from Florida. I think trying to be aware and do the right thing..."—here he stopped cutting weeds to think for a second. "I don't think just these personal purchasing choices are all you're talking about. We're going to have to start advocating for farmers. That means asking our land grant universities to help us figure out how to grow good clean food. It means calling out the money to support clean agriculture in the New York City watershed. It means providing basic funding to the farms themselves—capitalizing land and major equipment. It means preservation of farmland with development easements and outright purchases."

  I thought of Cato Corner when he said this, of Elizabeth MacAlister's great pleasure in the knowledge that her land would be kept as it was in perpetuity. Part of helping farmers like her and Richard was, as he said, buying their products, which kept their farms operational. But it was also important to know why the buying mattered on a larger level, what that extra fifty cents or a dollar was going toward—saving a piece of land or perhaps even a whole way of life in a place like Hamden. "We've substituted fossil fuels and fake fertilizers and poisons for what any real farmer knows must be honored as a complex living system," Richard continued. "Everything is disposable, including the farmer and his labor and even the land. Organic farming systems are or certainly should be aiming toward a system of saving and recycling—fertility from natural sources, plowing down of unused materials to build the life of the soil, saving rather than spending or discarding, and honoring the human labor in the crop. We can grow the food we need to eat around the world, but the profit centers are going to be small and local, not large and conglomerate."

  Just then Sybilla appeared, fresh off the school bus, blond and pixie-like, her face a miniature version of her mother's. "Hi, Chickadee. How was school?" Richard asked, giving her a hug before she climbed up the pile of gravel that would be added to the new barn floor. Then she invited me to the house to look at the newly hatched Monarch butterfly she had living in a wooden salad bowl with three more cocoons. Richard looked as if he had some work to do that didn't involve talking to an inquisitive visitor, so Sybilla and I went up the stone steps toward the house, accompanied by three dogs named Oz, Lucy, and Gizmo.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon with Sybilla, having a tea party and helping her try to feed raisins to her butterfly. I had asked Richard whether or not growing up on an organic farm made a difference when it came to his kids' eating habits, and his story was, if not quite as dire as mine, very similar to Laura's. "They both started out eating everything, and we thought it would continue," he said. "But school is a quick educator in how to refuse your vegetables. Our kids know they're farm kids and we let them know about the food. But they probably aren't a bit different from other kids in their preferences. We try to bribe them to eat vegetables. They may refuse to eat their Lucky Dog broccoli, but there's organic rice beside it on the plate. Except when they go to Wendy's with their grandmother or eat school lunch, they always have a wide variety of choices of local and organic food."

  Just knowing that even the children of organic farmers sometimes ate fast food was a huge relief. After our tea party, when Sybilla and I were put to work shelling fresh-picked tongue-of-fire beans for dinner, removing them from their ivory-and-maroon-streaked pods—beans that, I now suspected, neither she nor Asa would touch—I hoped she might offer up her perspective on farm life.

  "Do you like living on a farm?" I began, not quite sure how to interview a six-year-old.

  "Yes." This was the first of what turned out to be a series of responses as efficient as telegrams and delivered with the same declarative force.

  "Why?"

  "Because we have lots of yummy vegetables."

  "You like that?"

  "Yes."

  "Why?"

  "Because we can pick them ourselves and we don't have to buy them at the store." At last she was warming up!

  "Why is that good?"

  "Because we don't have to buy the not-organic ones."

  I wondered how much she really knew about organic produce, and if she had talked about it with school friends—was this a topic kids discussed at recess these days?

  "Do you have friends who live on farms?"

  "Yes."

  And then, before I could begin to craft a follow-up question wily enough to get this master of brevity to say a bit more, she spoke again, with all the studied precision of a politician trying to get a point across without naming any names.

  "Well, she's not really a friend. She's mean sometimes."

  Interview over.

  Dinner that night was all from the farm. The tongue-of-fire beans, which had been streaked like their pods when raw but were beige after cooking and had a mellow, nutty taste, were accompanied by fried white and purple potatoes, mixed salad, corn off the cob sauteed with garlic, and bread Holley had made. It was delicious; each vegetable on my plate tasted like a different facet of the same lazy summer afternoo
n (though I would learn the next day that there is no such thing as a lazy summer afternoon on a farm).

  Asa and Sybilla, I was gratified to see, stayed in their chairs only marginally longer than Jules would have (Holley diagnosed the problem as "showing off for the company"), and they hardly ate a thing. Instead, they spent a lot of time talking about The Wizard of Oz, which they referred to as "The Dorothy Movie." Later in the evening we all piled onto a futon upstairs to watch the last half hour of the film, and when it was over Sybilla tried to persuade me to sleep in her bed with her since the pouring rain had scotched my plans to camp by the river.

  Instead, I drove half a mile down the road to a motel. As I set my alarm for five-fifteen the next morning, anticipating exhaustion, my only solace was that Noah would probably be up about half an hour later, fielding demands for Cheerios and bananas—and for puffed cayenne rice, which he would not be able to produce.

  Puffed Cayenne Rice

  6 cups canola oil

  2 cups wild rice

  salt

  cayenne pepper

  1. Heat canola oil over medium heat in a deep, heavy pot until a piece of rice dropped in sizzles.

  2. Add rice to canola oil and deep-fry for approximately 5 minutes.

  3. Remove rice using a long-handled perforated spoon and place it on paper towels to drain and cool.

  4. Toss rice in a bowl or pan with salt and cayenne pepper to taste.

  Serves many, including one eccentric toddler, as a snack or a soup garnish.

  Corn Off the Cob with Garlic

  6 ears fresh corn

  2–3 cloves garlic

  2 tablespoons butter

  salt and pepper

  1. Shuck corn and slice kernels off cobs into a bowl, starting at the top of each ear and cutting in a downward motion.

  2. Mince garlic.

  3. Melt butter over medium-low heat in a heavy frying pan large enough to hold all the corn kernels without losing any when you stir them.

  4. Add garlic to butter, and after a few seconds, add the corn kernels.

  5. Sauté for about 5 minutes, or until the corn looks a little toasted on the edges if you prefer it that way. Season with salt and pepper to taste and serve.

  Serves 5 as a side.

  6. Lucky Me, Lucky You

  HERE'S A THEORY you may not have heard before: working on an organic produce farm is like being in an episode of I Love Lucy. More specifically, arriving for work on an organic produce farm in the inky dark of five-thirty in the morning, without any coffee, and being stationed at the bean-sorting machine is exactly like being in the famous episode in which Lucy and Ethel go to work at the chocolate factory and can't keep up with the conveyor belt of chocolates. (Without any coffee. I should probably confess right now that Jules's third word, after "no" and "this," was "coffee.") But I'll get back to that.

  When the alarm woke me, I put on as many clothes as I could layer—it was about thirty degrees outside, and pitch black, but the rain had stopped at last—and drove over to the farm. This was after I attempted to open the door to the motel's main office, where the proprietor had assured me there would be coffee set up because "people get up real early around here," only to discover it was locked tight. Early can be a relative term.

  When I got to Lucky Dog, the only light I saw was coming from the farthest corner of the barn. Entering the old building, I made my way past various machines used for washing and sorting vegetables, to a small room that served as a makeshift office (dirt-covered fax machine, pens, invoices). There was Richard, wearing a big wool sweater and holding a steaming mug of coffee. "Good morning!" he greeted me cheerfully. "Hi," I said weakly, scanning the room for a coffeemaker that wasn't there. Richard must have brought his from the house, which seemed acres away in the damp, dark morning. I was going to have to suffer my caffeine deprivation in silence.

  The farm crew, all of whom were under the age of twenty-five and most of whom came from one local family—yet another way in which Richard was helping to strengthen the community—started straggling in. There was Micah, with curly blond hair and tattoos on his arms, who had discussed the potato harvest with Richard the day before; his fiancée, Alese, wearing pants with stars on the back pockets and newly pregnant with their second child; Alese's brother Kalan, whose wife, Kathleen, worked in the farm store with their six-week-old daughter in tow; Alese and Kalan's sisters Daniele and Ashley; and their aunt Val, who seemed to be about my age and was just working for a day to make some extra money. Richard was happy to have her because we had to pick, wash, and pack the farm's largest order ever—it was the heart of the harvest season and, he said, there was "almost unlimited demand" for his vegetables—by about four o'clock, when the driver from the produce distributor would show up.

  By five-forty-five everyone was there. Richard turned on some lights and posted me and three others along the sides of the bean-sorting machine to pick over four crates of the same tongue-of-fire beans I'd eaten at dinner the night before. The machine was like nothing I'd ever seen, made of green-painted metal with a big cylindrical spinning brush at one end of a long bed of corrugated metal. Switched on, the apparatus shook and rattled continuously while someone stood behind the huge brush and emptied crates of beans into a tray beneath it. The brush's bristles picked up the beans, dumping them at a steady rate onto the corrugated bed, where the vibration arranged them into lines in the grooves between the ridges, making it easier to spot and remove rotten, ugly, and broken pods. Propelled by the constant shaking, the sorted beans moved along the metal bed and fell from its end into waiting plastic crates.

  For this process to work, though, the people watching the flow of beans needed sharp eyes and incredibly fast hands. I have pretty good hand-eye coordination, honed by, among other things, an abiding love of Ping-Pong, but this was a challenge I found daunting. We stood by the machine, two to a side, watching the beans shimmy and shake their way along the metal bed. To my uncaffeinated eyes, the magenta-streaked pods went by at a rate that was almost impossible to keep up with, even with four of us grabbing at them every few seconds. To look away for even a moment broke my concentration. Sometimes two of us would reach for the same pod, fumble it, and end up letting it move on to fall into the crates. As I focused on snatching beans, the world around me dropped away. After about fifteen minutes I was comfortable enough to start grabbing with both hands—right, left, right, left—throwing the bad pods to the floor without looking down, and doubling my efficiency. A panicky adrenaline rush kept me going, and with it came an eerie sense of déjà vu. I had never worked on a produce farm before, or even visited one, and yet this whole setup seemed familiar.

  This was my I Love Lucy moment. The grabbing, the comedic desperation—I could almost hear a laugh track in the background. This train of thought led me, naturally, to wishing the beans were chocolates—if I was going to be humbled by a conveyor belt, it should at least have candy on it. And that distraction, in turn, led me to let a few flawed beans go by. Still, the surreal humor of the comparison eased my early-morning weariness. By the time we finished sorting the tongues of fire, light from the rising sun had begun to show in the barn windows.

  It was almost seven A.M. when we all put on insulated boots into which we tucked billowing plastic pants—mine were bright yellow—to ward off water and mud and grabbed knives to take to the fields. These knives were about seven inches long and an inch and a half wide, and while they weren't razor sharp, they were definitely capable of doing some serious damage. Nevertheless, most of us dangled them casually from our wrists by the loops of string that ran through holes in their handles, as though they were no more sinister than a pocketbook or a yo-yo (the others stuck them casually in their back pockets, blade down, which terrified me). I wondered, as I had so often in the applewood kitchen, if anyone was worried about handing me a tool I was obviously unequipped to use. But, just as at the restaurant, this thought was swept away by the plain fact that there was a lot of work to be don
e and no one had time to worry about me. I had two arms and two legs and I could hold a knife, therefore I was worth taking a gamble on.

  Sloshing around in our pants and boots, we climbed into two white trucks and drove a little way down the road to some land Richard and Holley were renting in order to grow more crops. It was windy and freezing when we got out, and I noticed enviously that Ashley was wearing a hat. The green fields were faintly iridescent in the day's first light as we hauled plastic crates between the neat rows, spread out one or two people to a row, and started cutting baby spinach leaves. Baby spinach grows very close to the ground, an inch or two high at most, so I had to either bend down over and over as I cut leaves and tossed them into my crate, or else sit in the mud, which was so cold that I could feel its chill through my plastic pants even though they kept me dry. I chose the former. Bend, slice, up. Bend, slice, up. I'd never noticed before how small baby spinach leaves were, or how many it might take to fill a crate. Hundreds? Thousands? Bend, slice, up. Bend, slice, up. Usually nothing bothered my back, not even carrying Jules up and down the four flights of stairs to our apartment many times in a single day, but now it was killing me. I felt like an urban greenhorn. It wasn't even fully daylight yet and already I was aching.

  After the spinach we moved on to lettuce. There should be an entire book—and not a seed catalog—about the names of lettuce. Over the course of the next hour, we picked Berenice lettuce, Cocarde lettuce, Magenta lettuce (which was a sultry burgundy color and stood out in a dramatic dark swath in the otherwise verdant field), Vulcan lettuce, Galactic lettuce, green and red Salad Bowl lettuces, Nancy lettuce, Red Cross lettuce, and Pirat lettuce. Each head was crisp and beautiful. Each head was also drenched in unbelievably cold water from the overnight storm. I began with Vulcan, great green-and-red heads that bloomed like roses at the center. They grew taller than the spinach, so I was able to squat rather than sit or bend over in the mud. I grabbed each head at the stem, cut it off at the base, removed a few bad outer leaves, and put it in the crate I dragged along as I shuffled sideways to the next lettuce, still squatting.