The Wisdom of the Radish

by Lynda Browning

  The public’s penchant for all things baby explained my rough hands and aching back: harvesting these days was constant. (And whenever we weren’t harvesting, we were weeding or sowing new crops.) And we were just a small-scale farm—some would even nitpick that label and dub us market gardeners. We weren’t Stetson-style ranchers with five thousand head of dusty Angus cattle destined for Fourth of July barbecues. Surveying our pretty-in-pastels display, one might fairly ask, why did my back hurt so much for something so frou-frou? And just who was I growing this pretty food for, anyway?

  Definitely not for myself. I mean, we hadn’t purchased produce from the grocery store in months, but Emmett and I weren’t eating the picture-perfect market items. We ate what didn’t make it to the display table: scarred zucchini, sunburned tomatoes and peppers, split cucumbers. Or we ate the deflated leftovers from the once-glorious piles at the end of the day. None of this produce, being classified as “seconds,” could be sold at a grocery store, but it certainly tasted better than the majority of what grocery stores carry.

  So who does eat the best of what Foggy River Farm grows? Many of the customers who enjoy our produce are of the holier–than–Whole Foods variety. It’s too easy to satirize them: well-dressed and well-spoken; perhaps possessed of a small, fluffy white dog. The female of the couple has just concluded her morning yoga class and the male is trying to use his latest smart-phone application to see if our baby bok choy fits into his macrobiotic diet. But it’s easy to satirize us, too: the hippie twenty-somethings just out of college, trying to become “real” people by eschewing the intellectual and giving manual labor a go. The caricatures don’t mean much until you stick them together—at which point, one might wonder, what are the idealist hippie back-to-the-landers doing to save the world if they’re only selling pretty patty pans to the wealthy eco-literati?

  It’s a good question.

  “What are all of these called? And what’s your favorite kind?” a young mother asked me as she leaned over the squash display, toddler in tow.

  Emmett had momentarily disappeared, and I found myself scrambling to weigh zucchini, replenish the chard supply, and scoop handfuls of cherry tomatoes into cups.

  “I like the Romanesco; it’s an old Italian variety.” She peered at the squash, clearly not helped. “That green ribbed one,” I added, and jerked my head in the right direction. I was bent over, my head barely protruding above the display table, my hand deep in a box of Sun Golds.

  “Do you have more?” a second, middle-aged woman asked, waving the last bunch of chard in my face.

  “Yes, one second, I’m just helping another customer.”

  Market customers couldn’t get enough of our sweet Sun Gold cherry tomatoes.

  I finished scooping cherry tomatoes, poured two cups’ worth into a plastic bag, handed them to an older gentleman, and went to weigh his bag of zucchini. Chard woman looked irritated; I had a fleeting vision of shoving her into Foggy River Lake.

  The older man got my last two quarters, so in the midst of bunching more chard, I sold the young mother $3.75 of summer squash for $3.

  As I snapped the rubber band around the chard bouquet, the woman eyed it warily. “I don’t like the red kind, can you just give me yellow and white?”

  “Good news,” Emmett said, emerging from the cab of the truck. “My dad was able to shut off the water. Apparently the water system was somehow connected to our neighbor’s house, which is why it kept going when he turned off the valve in the vineyard. When the neighbor called Dad and said he didn’t have any water pressure, he figured it out. He’s going to go get a new valve and pipe right now, so we should have water by the time we’re done with the market.”

  Although it might have seemed that too much water was our current problem—and it very nearly was—it was also a problem to shut off all irrigation water. By the time we got back from the market, it would be 100 degrees F at the field, and our lettuces would be desperate for a drink.

  “Anyway, it seems like the tomatoes closest to the flood might get a bit too much water, but other than that we should be fine. And it will probably just take longer for them to ripen, so it’s not a big deal.”

  I was sorting through the chard bin for all the white- and yellow-stemmed leaves, and meanwhile chard woman had immersed herself in the zucchini display. She was picking out the tiniest squash she could find. She finally bought ten tiny squash for $2, plus a $1.50 bunch of chard (which she doublechecked, hunting for any red leaves prior to purchase). But she gave me two quarters, so I forgave her.

  Food is one of the few things on the planet that is both a pleasure and a necessity for the continuance of life. Sex is another, and perhaps housing. We don’t enjoy the air we breathe according to how much we pay for it; we don’t enjoy sex according to how much we pay for it, either, or at least most of us don’t. But gustatory delight often comes with a price tag. That which is bland (American cheese) is cheap; that which is flavorful (Gruyère) costs more.

  Of course, the distinctions don’t always fall along flavor lines. Bland, chewy abalone runs sixty dollars per pound, while tender, flavorful chicken can be purchased for a fraction of that price. More to the point, at our market stand, you can buy tiny, two-inch summer squash that sport giant orange blossoms: fifty cents apiece. Or, you could head over to the discount grocery store and buy a hefty, seedy, two-pound zucchini for a dollar. And this starts to hint at the difference between food as sustenance and food as pleasure. Why pay more for less? And on my side of the equation, why grow less for more money—why nip a zucchini in the bud at two inches when, given a few days, it will grow into a higher calorie, more affordable option? Isn’t that on some level wasteful, even frivolous?

  No, it isn’t, for several reasons. First and most importantly, specialty foods help small-scale local farmers earn a living. In turn, these farmers provide valuable services to the community that out-of-town corporate farms do not, such as food security; a reservoir of local knowledge; an infusion of dollars into the local economy; and fresher, more nutritive, and potentially more environmentally friendly produce.

  Second, I’m not sure that the branding of the farmers’ markets as an elite and frivolous place to shop is appropriate at all. While we do sell specialty baby produce, we also offer standard-size, competitively priced fare. In fact, much of the produce you find at our farmers’ market is being sold for equal or even lesser cost than the supermarket equivalent. The idea that everything is more expensive at farmers’ markets is a myth, perpetuated largely, it seems, by people who don’t actually shop at farmers’ markets.

  At our farm stand, we tried to strike a balance between specialty and standard items. Throughout the season, we pricechecked our produce at local grocery stores, and although we may not have been able to match the price of a bargain basement sale, we were consistently competitive with mid-range stores. And of course, some of the more unusual foods that we sold couldn’t be found at a store. If prices for these specialty items seemed high, it was because they helped to balance things out, reflecting a living (or almost living) wage for the farmer who grew them.h

  We were lucky to be able to sell our produce directly to the people who would consume it. Farmers selling products indirectly—that is, wholesale to grocery stores and most restaurantsi—earn so little per item that the scale of the farm must be massive in order to earn any money at all. If I made six cents for every dollar’s worth of produce I sold, I don’t want to even think about what my hourly wage would be—but that’s the way it goes for most farmers. The produce that they work so hard to cultivate is eventually sold to a customer for nearly twenty times what the farmer was paid for it. Under this system, my two-acre farm would be a patch of earth into which I’d pour money with a hearty negative return for my troubles.

  So in order for me to compete with the grocery stores, which have many advantages over the farmers’ market—variety, round-the-clock hours, out-of-season produce, refrigerators and misting systems—it
is exceptionally helpful for me to carry things that they can’t. Like itty-bitty squash with the blossoms still attached. Or unusual heritage varieties of summer squash, like Romanesco, which originates in Italy and is judged by many chefs to have the most flavorful flesh of any of the summer squashes. But like many heirloom varieties, Romanesco is not a widely produced commercial crop. When it comes to heirloom produce, my small size and local focus help me beat out the large-scale commercial farms, who don’t grow heirlooms for reasons ranging from transportability and rate of ripening to cost and availability of seeds. So baby foods and heirloom varieties—the things that critics love to brand as highfalutin—are important to the small farm’s ability to compete with megafarms and thus earn a living.

  And even our standard produce offered other benefits that the grocery store couldn’t. Our vegetables were picked hours before being set out on display; all else being equal, they were still fresher and nutritionally superior to the same vegetables from a grocery chain. Studies have shown that broccoli that has been in transit for two weeks has lost most of its vitamin C and almost all of its calcium, iron, and potassium by the time the time it gets to your plate.32 Plus, our produce had a personal story. We could talk about how and when our produce was grown; the faceless, farmerless produce stacked under the thunderstorm misters at the supermarket could not.

  It’s fundamentally silly to call local farmers’ markets elite, although an odd (and to my mind, rather mean-spirited) backlash has done so. Significant portions of our economy—the $247 million spent each year on golf shoes,33 the $2 billion per year spent on chewing gum34—rely on entirely frivolous pursuits, and yet we typically do not begrudge the jobs they create. Few jobs today directly result in the production of life-giving necessities. The talk show host who criticizes farmers’ marketers should apply the same level of criticism to his or her own job. Or, if a farmers’ market critic has ever bought a bouquet of flowers—which is an expensive, useless item that is already dead and will be more obviously so in a week—then he or she is acquiring a product much further out of the reach of poor Americans than my vegetables. One doesn’t typically accuse cell phone users of taking part in an elite hobby, yet for years human society functioned perfectly well without the ability to talk to a long-distance friend and order a latte at the same time. Humans have, however, always required food. And historically, that food has been grown by individuals from the local community.

  When push comes to shove, farmers’ marketers grow food for our immediate community. There is no task more essential. If you want to get slightly paranoid about it, grocery stores have one of the highest inventory turnover rates of any store; the entire inventory turns over an average of 12.7 times per year.35 In other words, if the food chain were disrupted, everything would be gone from grocery store shelves in less than a month; local farms and backyard gardens would offer the only source of nutrition. The frightening thing is there wouldn’t be nearly enough local farms to supply rural towns, let alone big cities. Even the tiniest towns in the middle of nowhere would struggle to find enough food, surrounded as they are by monocrops. A body cannot thrive on corn alone, especially if it’s livestock corn destined for feedlots thousands of miles away.

  And if the diverse foods we offer can be labeled elite, they can also be called traditional. They’re the taste of the home garden—which, before food production became a standardized commercial activity, was the purveyor for peasants as well as palaces. A peasant could harvest and fry up male zucchini flowers—those flowers on the plant that are for pollination purposes only, and will never turn into fruit—as easily as the king’s chef could. But since luminous orange squash blossoms are extremely perishable, they can’t be commercially produced. As the logic goes, if an item can’t be commercially produced, it will be more expensive; therefore, it’s foodie food, not real people food.

  To which I say: Please. These blossoms are fifty cents apiece. You’d be hard-pressed to find anything in the checkout line of the grocery store priced at fifty cents. And if you did, I’m guessing that first of all, it’s on sale—and is likely being sold at cost. And secondly, no human hand ever touched it—your fifty-cent edible trinket is the product of an advanced factory system in which one human oversees a host of machines employed to perform the fundamental human task of making food.

  But if you forgo your candy bar to buy one of my squash blossoms, you are employing me to feed you, to take loving care of a small plot of ground just down the road, and to know the essential hows of food: how to grow it, how to harvest it, and how to cook it. You’re paying me to carry on tradition, and you’re paying me to carry knowledge that some day you might require, should you ever decide to plant squash on your own. (Though the ingredients of edible trinkets are closely guarded trade secrets, farmers tend to be far less monopolistic. We sell starts in spring for customers to plant in their own gardens, and we’re always ready to answer questions about backyard growing.) I’m your personal farmer, providing you with the same quality food that humans have grown for hundreds and even thousands of years.

  The heirloom Armenian cucumbers we grew and sold at the market couldn’t be found at an average grocery store.

  So if certain farmers’ market produce is slightly more expensive than grocery store fare on a per-calorie basis, that’s because the cost reflects the effort of a diversified growing process. Grocery stores can afford to not make money on certain items because a sale brings in customers, and encourages them to spend more money on other profit-making items (particularly processed foods). If I took this approach, I would be working sixty to eighty hours a week for nothing.

  Well, I guess I’d be working sixty to eighty hours a week for the privilege of squash rash, cracked fingers, stained hands, an achy back, and a bad tan. For too few showers, filthy fingernails, and torn pants and shirts.

  I may have missed my five-year high school reunion, but I knew where my peers were. Business school, law school, med school; at banks and firms and start-ups in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. If you measure success in salaries, cars, and clothes, I am hardly elite; in fact, I lose handily. Stock options and IRAs aren’t part of my job description. I don’t own a suit. At the moment, I was living off of savings and the generosity of my boyfriend’s parents, hoping that some day two risks would pay off—the financial risk of starting up a farm business from scratch, and the far more terrifying risk that my first multiyear relationship could also be my last. That maybe, after four years of dating and three of living together, we would make it official—so that when customers searched for the right word to describe Emmett, I wouldn’t have to fill in with that all-too-shallow word “boyfriend” or the awkward “partner,” which may have had an appropriate denotation but connoted a strictly professional relationship, the presence of a cowboy, or the existence of a gay lover, none of which applied to us.

  Instead, I remained the would-be farmer’s long-term girlfriend. And my odds for an imminent change of status didn’t seem good. Granted, we had, in private, told each other that we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together, but at some point the rest of the world needed to know this. Sure, we’d started to appear in one another’s family photos, and it was generally assumed that when we were invited to functions, our other half would be coming along for the ride. But words matter, and few are so public as husband and wife. There’s something about marriage that says: I choose you to be my family, I choose you to be my home. And there’s something about society that recognizes and even honors this choice despite all cynicism and pessimism to the contrary.

  It pissed me off that I wanted to marry him. I was never the girl who dreamed of marrying the boy, and in fact I really never thought much about marriage—aside from a deeply rooted desire to avoid my parents’ disastrous version—until now. But while I didn’t want to “get married” per se, I wanted to marry Emmett. I very nearly proposed to him at a remote hot spring on the Olympic Peninsula after a hard hike up a mountain, when the li
ght was soft and the whole green world empty of humanity. I told him that later in New Zealand, one late night in our van, hoping that maybe he’d get the hint.

  Emmett got the hint just fine, but he wasn’t ready and didn’t really see the need to marry. You know, since we were already planning on spending the rest of our lives together anyway. Besides, he didn’t really want to find himself in the awkward position of being the first of his close-knit cousins to marry. Why this position could be considered awkward, I hadn’t the slightest idea, but Emmett’s never been one to draw attention to himself.

  I glanced over at Emmett, counting the bills. It was noon. For the time being, I’d pack up the remaining produce, save some for the local food pantry, and feed the rest to my flock of awkward teenage chickens. That night I’d dip squash blossoms in batter and fry them up for supper, with a side of sautéed beans: peasant food. When I climbed into bed, arms itching and shoulders stinging with sunburn, I’d realize he was no longer an aspiring farmer. I’d roll over and say goodnight with the traditional blown kiss; he’d catch it, send one back. And I wouldn’t have to wonder what I actually accomplished that day. Every part of my farmer’s body would already know.