Eating for Beginners Read online

  It wasn't possible to wear gloves while cutting; within minutes my hands were wet and red and so cold they hurt. My fingers swelled and stiffened, and after every few heads I had to stand up (which made me notice how much the work was straining my knees) and warm my hands in the pockets of the jeans I was wearing under my plastic pants until they were usable again. (I didn't see anyone else doing this.) On and on we worked. It took twenty-four lettuces to fill a crate, and that day we filled forty-four crates—one thousand fifty-six lettuces, picked by eight people, in nascent daylight, in mud so deep in places that each of us got stuck in it at least once and had to step out of a mired boot and balance precariously on one foot while tugging at the boot until it came free with a loud sucking sound.

  It also took twenty-four bunches of kale, which was our next stop, to fill a crate, and we had twenty crates' worth of those to pick. There were three kinds—Green, Red Russian, and Lacinato, a darker green variety with crinkly leaves. Each plant was about as tall as the lettuce, but looked like a cabbage that had failed to form a head and instead had spread its leaves into a span as wide as two feet. Picking kale was different from picking lettuce because instead of chopping off the whole head you sliced off single leaves, gathering them in your free hand while you kept cutting with the other one. When you had enough for a full bunch—about fifteen leaves, depending on their size—you threw your knife into the crate you were, once again, dragging along, pulled from your pocket a plastic tag provided by Angello's, the farm's produce distributor, and used its rubber loop to band the bunch together.

  Each farm Angello's works with gets personalized tags with its name and location on the front and a motto and the farmers' names on the back. The back of Lucky Dog's tags read: "Lucky you, lucky me. Fresh produce from the Catskills. Richard and Holley Giles." After twisting its rubber loop around a bunch of kale—and then, as I'd been shown, taking a swipe at the ends of the stems with my knife to even them out while still holding them in midair—I paused for a few seconds to look around the vast expanse of leafiness, all destined to feed fortunate, appreciative people, and felt that Richard and Holley had gotten it exactly right. The very existence of their farm was lucky for everyone involved. I was somewhat giddy from exertion and hunger (not to mention caffeine deprivation), and an Emily Dickinson poem I had memorized in college popped into my mind:

  A little Madness in the Spring

  Is wholesome even for the King

  But God be with the Clown—

  Who ponders this tremendous scene—

  This whole Experiment of Green—

  As if it were his own!

  It wasn't spring, but I surely resembled a clown in my oversized, mud-smeared plastic pants, wielding a knife and surveying the acreage around me. This farm had fed me in the past and would again in the future, and I felt, at that moment, that it was at least a tiny bit mine.

  This feeling got me through another hour of cutting kale and then rainbow chard—great plumes of green with bright orange, yellow, fuchsia, and red stems at their centers, which we chopped and bound into bunches like the kale (though the plants were much taller so there was, thankfully, no squatting). Then it was time to climb back into the trucks, which we had loaded with our many, many crates, and return to the barn. I had no idea what time it was, but the sun had only just risen fully above the hills behind the fields. I couldn't remember the last time I'd felt so productive this early in the day (scattering Cheerios across the kitchen floor, I now realized, didn't really count), but all the same, I was freezing and thrilled to get back into the truck.

  Back inside the barn (a roof! luxury!), the crew unloaded crates of lettuce and Ashley began to dump the heads into black plastic troughs filled with water. She agitated them for a few minutes to loosen the dirt, then grabbed a dripping lettuce in each hand and handed them to Micah, who shook them a little and put them into white cardboard boxes we had assembled, marked with Lucky Dog stickers on which we wrote the variety of lettuce each box held. This was repeated over and over, until the one thousand fifty-six lettuces were all washed and boxed. Then Ashley moved on to the baby spinach, which was packed loose in plastic bags in three-pound boxes.

  Meanwhile Val, Alese, and I were back at the bean sorter, this time grabbing green and yellow beans. With thirty-two crates of twenty-five pounds each to get through—thousands and thousands of beans—the task seemed endless. And yet, compared with being out in a wet field, it was heaven. Somewhere around the twentieth crate, Val turned to me wild-eyed and said, "This makes you feel like you could go insane." And while I agreed with her wholeheartedly, I was also starting to enjoy myself. I had survived the frozen fields, the swinging knife, the coffeeless morning. Soon it would be time for lunch.

  ***

  The midday meal ended up being a hurried affair in the hoop house attached to the office. The food was prepared by the mother of Alese, Kalan, Daniele, and Ashley, who came to the farm every day with Alese and Micah's three-year-old daughter, a little blond imp who had popped into the barn while we were sorting beans. But hurried didn't mean bad. There were deviled farm eggs, tuna sandwiches on Holley's bread, pickles, and a few other things I can't remember because I was too busy cramming them into my mouth with delight. We were going to embark on the muddy potato harvest that afternoon, and I wanted to be well fueled for it.

  After eating we went back out to the fields, to another patch of kale (there were eleven crates of it still to pick), which was next to a patch of collard greens. By this time the day was so warm that we shed our plastic pants and headed into the rows of collards and kale in t-shirts, jeans, and boots. I was sweating as I cut huge fanlike fronds off the collard plants, which were about three feet tall and resembled miniature palm trees, then banded them with tags and put them into crates. The afternoon was flying by, and Holley came out of the store to help us cut so that we wouldn't be any later with the produce order than we absolutely had to be.

  After the kale and collards, we were off to the potato field, row after row of them grown from seed potatoes planted into ridges of soil the previous spring. Richard had prepared for the harvest by running a potato digger, pulled by a tractor, over the field. The digger had turned over the soil and torn the potatoes from their vines; now our job was to dig them out of the dirt. (Larger potato farms use a harvesting machine that digs the potatoes, sorts them, and loads them into boxes, thereby avoiding the need for manual labor.) Facing the long rows, I could see some potatoes scattered on top of the dirt, but most of them were underground. The only way to get at them was to straddle a row on your knees and claw at the soil with your hands.

  "The thing is not to be afraid to get your pants dirty," Micah told me as he shuffled along a row on his knees, digging away. Down I went. From the first two feet of my row, I dug up about a dozen fingerling potatoes—the variety was called Russian Banana—which were a pale beige-yellow with translucent skin. The digging was like being at the beach as a kid, playing in the sand, and as I got into the spirit of it, I let go of any effort to keep even semi-clean. My nails were filthy and I kept wiping sweat off my face only to replace it with dirt, but the sun was shining and my crate seemed to fill quickly (potatoes, even small ones, are a lot bigger than spinach leaves).

  But then I dug my hand down into the most disgusting substance I've ever seen or smelled. It turns out that rotten potatoes under the soil decompose into something that has the color and consistency of cottage cheese and smells like garbage that's been left in the sun. Now this scent and the goo that produced it were all over my right hand. Looking at me from the next row, Holley said sympathetically, "I like to use a rock," and demonstrated, taking off the top layer of soil with a wide, flat stone so she could check for potato rot before digging with her bare hands. Wiping the muck onto my jeans—they were a mess anyway by this time—and adopting this method with a rock I searched out at the edge of the field, I moved up my row as fast as I could. The Angello's Distributing truck had arrived half an hour befo
re, and now I could see its driver coming across the field to help us dig. If he didn't get back on the road more or less on schedule to drop off the truckful of produce at the warehouse, he would get even fewer than his usual five hours of sleep.

  Up and down the rows we all went, digging, throwing potatoes into crates, hoisting full crates onto the truck parked on an unplanted section of the field. We had to come up with seven hundred pounds of potatoes. Hot and sweaty digging in the furrows, I found it hard to believe that a few hours earlier, which now seemed like a thousand years ago, I'd been freezing cold and longing for a hat. My arms were tired from carrying crates around and cutting and digging. My legs hurt from squatting and shuffling. I was in awe of the others, who did this on a daily basis.

  At last the digging was done, and we all walked back to the barn for what turned out to be one more episode of I Love Lucy. While half the crew started loading the Angello's truck with the boxes of produce, Alese, Val, Ashley, and I parked ourselves by the potato washer. The minute I saw the conveyor belt, I knew what was coming. At one end of the machine was a long water-filled trough that, after Micah dumped several crates of the newly dug fingerlings into it, became a kind of potato river. After soaking for a minute, the potatoes were pushed through the machine, which sprayed them with water, then brushed them, then sent them across a row of sponges to remove some of the water before dropping them onto a circular conveyor belt. We were stationed, as at the bean sorter, on both sides of the belt to pick out both potatoes with signs of rot (nothing so vile as in the field, fortunately) and very small ones, called "peanuts," which were set aside for sale in the farm store.

  The catch this time was that we had to take all the potatoes off the belt, even the good ones, and throw them into different crates at our sides. Peanuts, left. Bad ones, right. Perfect specimens, left, but lower down. The pressure was exacerbated by the speed at which the crates were being removed—as fast as we could fill them—in order to get the potatoes into boxes and onto the waiting truck. I had roasted, peeled, and sliced these potatoes many times at applewood, and never once had it occurred to me that people had sorted them by hand after crawling around in the dirt to harvest them. I had noticed that the potatoes were delicious, something I attributed in part to the fact that they had not been out of the ground very long or traveled very far to reach the kitchen, but I had never thought about what had happened to make that short trip between farm and kitchen possible.

  Finally the Angello's driver closed the back of his truck and drove off, and my fellow workers began to leave for home. I looked up at the clock, expecting to see that it was at least seven in the evening. It was five-twenty. As the crew disbanded, Richard and I walked up to the house, where we found Asa waiting at the back door. Sweeping his son into his arms, Richard grinned at me and said, "I wasn't sure you were going to work, but I'm sure glad you did." It was the only sign I had seen all day that he had been strained by the enormous order and the incredible effort to get it together in time for everyone to go home at a decent hour. He was used to it, after all. Even though we had harvested more than usual, the rhythm of the day had been more or less typical of a busy Wednesday at Lucky Dog.

  Driving back down to the city (something I really shouldn't have done considering how tired I was, but being around Asa and Sybilla had made me miss Jules), I couldn't stop thinking about how much food we'd harvested in a single day, how hard we had worked, and yet how good I felt. "There is work that is isolating, harsh, destructive, specialized or trivialized into meaninglessness," Wendell Berry wrote in his essay "The Body and the Earth." "And there is work that is restorative, convivial, dignified and dignifying, and pleasing. Good work is not just the maintenance of connections—as one is now said to work 'for a living' or 'to support a family'—but the enactment of connections. It is living, and a way of living; it is not support for a family in the sense of an exterior brace or prop, but is one of the forms and acts of love."

  This second type of work was what I had been doing, and what Berry said made perfect sense to me. After you've been digging in a potato field and eaten eggs from the hen-house next to the farmhouse you're sitting in, food seems, if only temporarily, very simple; so does supporting people who grow it carefully. And supporting them didn't mean I had to forgo the occasional bag of non-local carrots, which I bought when I had to because carrots were one of the few things Jules would eat. It meant making the right choice as often as possible, and accepting that that was all any of us could do. "I'd like us all to talk not about denying ourselves but about making changes," Richard had said at the weed pile the day before. "We have to make an investment in what we think is true."

  ***

  The day after I returned from Lucky Dog was a Thursday, when produce deliveries came to the restaurant. When I got there, the bounty waiting to be put away in the walk-in included seven boxes from Lucky Dog, the very ones I had helped fill just twelve hours earlier. Even this recently removed from the farm, the food looked entirely different. In the muddy barn, the potatoes and spinach and lettuces had seemed part of a natural cycle of work, weather, and consumption. Here, they just looked like vegetables.

  I carried a box of spinach upstairs to the kitchen. Opening it, I flashed back to the cold, wet field, the number of swipes I'd made with my knife to fill a single crate (the box probably held a crate and a half's worth of leaves). I almost wanted to beg for mercy for the spinach. On some level, it seemed wrong to use up something I'd worked so hard to harvest. But of course, the work that happens on a farm is not the end, but the means to the real end, which is eating. As Wendell Berry put it, "Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth."

  As I was indulging in my philosophical reverie, David passed by, peered into the box, grabbed a few stems to munch, and asked, "Did you pick these?" When I nodded, he lit up. "Awesome!" Then he was gone, leaving me and Liza to devise a use for the spinach. "Since you picked it, you should cook it," she said as I continued to gaze into the box as though cooking and serving the baby leaves would be like killing a litter of puppies. "Creamed spinach," she said briskly. "Destem it and then I'll show you what to do."

  For the next forty-five minutes I stood by the box of spinach, taking out leaves one at a time and snapping off their stems before tossing them into a fish box. (Like many things in the kitchen, these low, rectangular plastic containers, called fish boxes because their tight-fitting lids made them ideal for storing raw fish in the walk-in, also served other purposes. This one made a perfect temporary holding tank for my spinach leaves.) With each snap, I turned and threw the stem into a nearby garbage can, until Liza caught sight of what I was doing. She came over with a quart container, which she wedged into a corner of the spinach box. "You're wasting a lot of time turning to the trash can," she said, somehow managing not to sound annoyed. "It's all about efficiency." Then she showed me how to save precious seconds by just dropping the stems into the quart container. Suddenly I had new insight into all the times Noah and I had thrown a dinner party and found ourselves chopping and sautéing and boiling—and arguing about why we were still doing it—at the very last second.

  Box of destemmed spinach in hand, I went to Liza for further instructions. "First we're going to make a béchamel sauce," she said. "Go get an onion, and put a fine dice on it." I did this and threw the onion into a pan of butter to sweat. ("This restaurant is not about nutrition," Liza told me more than once as we heedlessly pitched hunks of butter, which David bought in one-pound blocks, into pans. She meant that it wasn't about low-fat or "healthy" eating in the sense of dieting, though I'm sure there are more vitamins in a serving of Lucky Dog spinach straight from the farm than there are in many processed foods people eat in their quest to be healthy.) There was no room on the stove—a gigantic pot of something with apples floating in it was taking up three burners, and there were various other pans, including the ever-present pot of blanching water for prep—so we put the onion pan on the grill.
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  When the onions were translucent but not brown, I added enough flour to absorb the butter and the onion juices and cooked away the raw flour taste to make a roux. Then I added cream to make it into a sauce.

  With the béchamel done, I heated canola oil in a frying pan, then tossed in handfuls of spinach and some salt and left them there for just a few seconds, until the leaves were wilted. I was supposed to flip them, but the pan was heavy and I was far too chicken to attempt the casual, one-handed toss everyone else in the kitchen executed a thousand times a day. Instead of flipping I stirred, and in the stirring, lost some of the leaves as the spoon pushed them out of the pan. Within seconds my pan was surrounded by pieces of flaming spinach that had landed on burners that were turned on but not currently in use. Each one flared briefly and disappeared, all my hard work turned to ashes. The only thing worse than cooking the spinach you had picked by hand in the chill and dark for people to eat, I discovered, was incinerating it purposelessly.

  Finally all the spinach was sautéed (ratio of vaporized leaves to properly cooked ones, approximately three to twenty). We let it cool in a stainless steel pan and then chopped it up and put it in quart containers. To serve it, we threw a handful in a pot with béchamel sauce, heated it all up, and put it in a ramekin. When I tasted my first bite, it was redolent not only with the smooth flavor of butter and the earthy, mineral taste of the spinach, but also with memories of those green fields upstate. In that moment I felt as near to the earth as I had while cutting the baby leaves the day before.