by Brian Brett
The fig is a sensual fruit. It’s the oldest living tree whose planting date is known. The Sri Maha Bodhi of Sri Lanka was planted by King Tissa in 288 bc . Technically, the fig isn’t a fruit but a flower, and it is one of the kinkier plants in the kingdom of flora. If you want to get very technical, it’s not even a flower but a false fruit, a mass of flowers and seeds merging together; and, even stranger, it’s part insect, since it contains minuscule wasps that crawl inside and pollinate and die in its ecstatic embrace, every tiny thread pollinated by a wasp. It’s a meaty fruit indeed. And different varieties are pollinated by specific wasps, so I would suspect my uncles somehow brought the wasp eggs with them, accidentally, or a variety of wasp that already existed on the North American continent got along just fine with this green fruit from the mountain regions of Basilicata in southern Italy.
One of the encounters of autumn is the battle with the chattering Steller’s jays. Brilliant blue bandits, their obnoxious cries signal that the hazelnuts are ripe, and the race is on. As soon as Sharon hears them she sends me up the tree with the ladder, grabbing nuts while the jays scream at me, often from the same branch, and the dogs scurry below, happily collecting whatever falls in the fracas, then go running off to crack and devour the nuts themselves. Despite this melee we usually manage to save enough for winter. In a few years, as more hazelnut trees come to prime, we will have many nuts, and sell them. Even the strong beaks of jays can’t crack our almonds, so those trees give us both almonds and their fragrant pink blossoms. We lost one of my walnut pollinators to drought and thoughtlessness and had to replant it last year. It will take ten years to bear nuts, but I’m hoping it will pollinate its large partner sooner.
OCCASIONALLY PEOPLE ASK ME why, as I approach sixty, I’m still planting fruit and nut trees, some of which won’t bear for ten to fifteen years, if then. So I tell them an old Arab story I heard decades ago.
While the sultan was travelling he noticed an old man in a field, planting olive tree seedlings. This aroused the sultan’s curiosity, and he stopped to talk to him. “Old man, why are you planting olive trees when you won’t live long enough to see them bear fruit?”
The old man said, “Sire, I am planting for my children as my father planted for me.”
This made the sultan happy and he said, “Sir, if your fortune allows you to live long enough for these trees to bear fruit, bring the first bushel to me.” Then he travelled on and forgot about the incident until many years later an ancient man arrived at his palace, declaring the sultan had instructed him to bring a bushel of olives. The sultan remembered him, and when he saw that the farmer had actually lived to see the fruit of his labour he was so pleased he had the olives in the bushel replaced with gold. The old man left enormously grateful that his labour had earned him and his children wealth beyond their dreams.
The next day a young courtier purchased a bushel of olives in the market and brought it to the sultan. “What is this?” asked the sultan.
“When I saw you reward that old man with gold for his olives, I thought I would bring a bushel also,” the clueless young courtier replied. He was promptly stripped and whipped and tossed out in the street.
I have always understood that the continuum of time planted this garden for us to celebrate, and it would be shoddy not to enrich it for those who will arrive after I’m gone. During our years on Trauma Farm we have already created a living, growing wealth on this land. When the future arrives I would like its children to find themselves rich with grapes, persimmons, olives, walnuts, king apples, golden egg plums, dark wine and honey, cherries, sweet figs . . . .
11
WHO’S FOR LUNCH?
OVER THE HILLS and into the trees we ran. I was clutching an enormous sun-warmed watermelon. The farmer’s tractor grumbled across the field, its dust rising like a nuclear doom-cloud. Did he see me? I loved the taste of fear in my mouth when I ducked down the ravine, tripped on a root, and fell with a sternum-numbing thud beside the creek, my hands outstretched, as if offering the watermelon to the god of garden raiders, or at least my two friends, whose eyes widened as they watched me sail through the air with our stolen treasure. The backs of my hands slapped the earth—the watermelon cracked in half.
I was trying to laugh and breathe simultaneously. My aching chest! I loved the panic on my friends’ faces before they shifted to delight, snatching the halves and scooping out fistfuls of the red flesh while I tried to suck back the wind whacked out of me. Soon I joined them, and we passed the shells, biting into our juicy, sticky chunks. It was so sweet I felt stoned on the sugar, or maybe it was the thrill of the run and the clearness of the air and the pale armour of a crayfish haunting the stones in the creek bed. Our elders always told us forbidden fruit is the best. We are hard-wired to the taste of the taboo.
I was a prince of garden thieves in my childhood. Plums were a great prize. We’d wait for a tree down the lane to ripen, and then one day, like raccoons that can sense you’re ready to harvest your fruit, we’d swarm the tree. For a few moments it would shiver with children, branches breaking, plums falling everywhere. Then we’d flee, screaming, our T-shirts bellied with plums. Strawberries, sweet tomatoes, raw corn—we’d raid them all. Carrots were another favourite. I’d just wipe the dirt off on my jeans. People grew real carrots then—fresh and young, they tasted nothing like those woody orange sticks in today’s supermarket. I look back upon those thieving years with a mixture of horror and bemusement at the greedy insouciance of a troubled child—and the lost tastes of an era when the tongue commanded and the food was uncontaminated.
Today, almost fifty years later, I will have a simple lunch again, though more civilized—bread and soup and greens and a handful of fresh everbearing strawberries. It seems so basic, almost boring, though the infrastructure behind this lunch is complex, prehistoric, and world-striding.
I make a notorious “bitter salad” that I seldom inflict on my friends, yet it thrills me. Its simplicity is its joy. Shallots, a serrated-leaf variety of endive—Tosca or frisée —though their seeds are also difficult to find in today’s shrinking seed catalogues. Perhaps some mizuna and a little radicchio. I slice the shallots thinly. We grow three varieties, each with its own taste, size, colour. Then I toss them among the ripped greens, add a vinaigrette, and sprinkle it with “raked” salt and fresh-ground pepper. It takes minutes to prepare, yet describing this salad makes it sound like a dish that would cost you a fortune in a pretentious restaurant. That’s because it actually is an exotic creation—the ingredients gathered from the fringes of the world. The salt from a Portuguese beach, the endive and radicchio descendants of the chicory of Rome. Mizuna is a Japanese variant of Brassica rapa. The shallots, like most alliums, are from the steppes of Asia. It’s a bunching onion, more tender, sweeter, and less hot than your average onion, which is why it entered my salad. The olive oil is from Italy, and the wine vinegar was made by a friend in Toronto who keeps a perpetual small keg in his kitchen and doles out bottles to his friends when they grow desperate.
We’ve already eaten all our Belgian endives, which we dig up every fall and behead and then plant with their crowns a foot underground. They sprout, pale beneath the earth, like bright bones, in the spring. Earth-blanched endives are outrageously tender, with only a suggestion of bitterness, and I eat them like candy, often scooping them out of the mud, wiping them off on my jeans, and devouring them raw in the garden, a child again.
But how difficult it is to be a child today. Deceptively beautiful yet potentially toxic fields and orchards can lure unsuspecting children with their poisoned fruit. Our orchard borders a relatively untravelled gravel road, though we’ve still had a couple of minor orchard raids. I’m grateful the neighbourhood children know us well enough to trust that our fruit won’t be sprayed, and I enjoyed scaring the piss out of them the one time I caught them. That’s part of the social role of a good farmer.
Even twenty years ago in Third World countries you’d encounter honest, tasty
produce like ours, but because of globalization the food supply is rapidly becoming scary worldwide. Eating in countries like China or Mexico has become a form of Russian roulette. Too many Third World nations are short on environmental regulations and enforcement, and toxins are slopped around indiscriminately; uneducated workers operate on the principle that if a little poison works well, a lot of poison will really do the job. Oddly, in impoverished regions, if the farmers are too poor to buy pesticides and fertilizers, their produce is clean.
The red earth of Cuba, where the American embargo has restricted oil-based fertilizers and pesticides, vibrates with life. It reminded me of mescaline trips in the sixties. I’ve never seen such verdant gardens so laden with giant vegetables, hand cultivated and healthy. Using real ingredients, the cooking in Cuba is plain yet wholesome. Only as income and trade routes improve do farm recipes grow as complex as ours.
Mike Byron says his family moved to this island during the Depression with eleven chickens. They were so poor they couldn’t eat the eggs but sold them for money for essentials. They made a deal with a neighbouring farmer to dig his potatoes, and for their labour they got enough potatoes to eat. They also milked the farmer’s cow while he took his crops to market off-island, and were paid with the milk. So they survived their first year on potatoes and occasional bounties of milk, along with whatever produce and fruit and venison they could scrabble up. When considering farm food and the multiple paths of human history it’s so easy to generalize, and idealize, assuming that American and Old World local farmers or Chinese peasants or corn-eating Navajos lived healthier lives than we do today.
I look at my aesthetic salad again and start to feel embarrassed, so Sharon takes over. We don’t often lunch together except during family events but she’s here today, sweetening my bitter creation with tomatoes and herbs, a salad we can both enjoy, and I’m being pushed aside like an old and frail ewe being edged out of the feed trough.
Though we have conflicting tastes on a very few occasions, at least we haven’t joined the tracksuit-wearing porkers trolling today’s supermarkets, loading their carts with cardboard vegetables, tasteless meat, colourful boxes, and cans of processed junk cranked up with preservatives and additives—and the terrible triad of salt, sugar, and fat. We live in an era when people are so confused about nutrition that British mothers were recently caught concealing chocolate bars in their children’s clothes after the schools banned junk food. The ignorant mothers feared their children “wouldn’t get enough to eat.” The era when children actually stole vegetables has gone with the dinosaurs.
Not only are hybrid vegetables in the stores relatively tasteless, they are also diminishing nutritionally along with their soil, as a result of single-cropping (the large-scale farming of only one crop rather than growing mixed and rotated plantings), which depends on oil-based chemicals and treats the soil as an engineered growing medium. Several recent studies demonstrate that some vegetables in Britain have lost one-quarter of their magnesium and iron and almost half of their calcium. Distance between the grower and the eater also depletes flavour and nutrition in produce after it’s harvested—except for a few rare plants or fruits, such as winter apples, that need storage to reach their prime. Today’s food is being shipped bizarrely around the world. West Coast hothouse tomatoes are sold in New York, and the salad greens of temperate Vancouver are imported from China or Mexico. Retailers prefer pretty vegetables and fruits that can be stored and shipped. It’s cost-effective, even if they taste like cardboard. During the last fifty years we bought with our eyes, not our stomachs, until the local-food movement and the recent gourmet revolution in America combined forces.
SEVERAL YEARS AGO SHARON and I served a meal in honour of a visiting Italian poetry professor. Another guest complimented our cooking and asked the professor what he thought of the food. The professor snorted extravagantly: “It’s easy to cook a meal like this.” Our friend was aghast at his cavalier remark, but I laughed because I knew exactly what he meant. He was a true epicure. “How can they go wrong?” he blustered on, realizing his words had been misinterpreted. “Our hosts have real food, vegetables and fruits straight from the garden, meat from their land. These are the ingredients of the best meals. Only a bad cook could ruin them.” He was right, and so very Italian.
I try not to gather our produce until we eat. We are fortunate to live in a climate where we can grow crops year-round, though we have to cloche the more delicate winter greens. This good fortune allows me to go out on a cold, dark evening and gather the precious leaves of mizuna, gai lin, mei king choi, and carrots under their mulch of seedless canary grass. We also grow and store good winter root vegetables.
My favourite vegetable is cob corn in September. I eat it raw in the garden, a leftover childhood habit. The traditional varieties are now known as “cow corn” because they’re used to fatten up the unfortunate cattle in feedlots. We still grow old-fashioned cobs, though they’re becoming extinct because the seed industries are eliminating most varieties from the market. The new, small-kernelled super-sweets are too much like mushy candy for my taste. They don’t have enough texture and density; Sharon is addicted to them, however, and we have to plant multiple varieties to satisfy us both. Corn is also determinate, which means each variety ripens in a certain number of days, so we grow early, mid-season, and late corn, ensuring a continuous supply and a few torchy discussions as we trade off favourites during seed ordering.
The sugar in corn begins turning to starch as soon as it’s picked. That’s why the hybrid super-sweets are grown for the public, because these can store for several days and still taste sweet, but a good cow corn, which has texture and density, is their equal when fresh off the stalk. Though I’m not fanatic enough to set up a corn pot on a propane burner in the garden next to the plant, shuck the cob on the stalk, and dip it into the boiling water, I’ve considered it.
IN TODAY’S ESCALATING FOOD debate, the slow-food and environmental movements have begun to spread a false mythology about traditional food in the same way that pan-nativism has occasionally created false impressions about ecological Natives and “recalled” traditional practices. There was a time when people lived as the land gave. Before farming, hunter-gatherer societies around the world spent the greater part of their days gathering food, since preservation was difficult. It took hundreds of thousands of years to learn how salt could preserve flesh and produce, in tandem with drying or smoking. Salt turned the abattoir into a strange kind of commercial temple, and in some cultures the abattoirs actually became temples. Salaam, the Arabic term for peace, derived from a word for negotiations over salt.
Wheat and barley in the Mideast, beans and corn and squash in America, rice in Asia—each began whittling away the permaculture that was the original history of our species. All of these are annual farm crops. They demanded the breaking of soil, the retaining of seed, and storage of the crop, which eventually required an infrastructure.
Thus began the transition from hunter-gatherer societies toward stable villages and small farms. Agriculture allowed human populations to grow beyond what wild land could sustain. It also created a need for crop storage as a survival tool against natural disasters like droughts and harsh winters. Once you begin storing produce and supplies, you need record keeping, and thus writing came into its own. The ability to keep records and communicate over long distances as well as record history allowed the unecological, exponential growth of our species, creating additional farms, villages; then cities arrived—filling up the planet while we contrived the impossible dream of endless growth, our tools and technology evolving faster than our social structures and brains. This is a mightily generalized history of 3 million years, and like most generalized histories it is dangerous. But sometimes we get so wrapped up in the details we forget the whole. If we consider the time our species has spent on earth as a single day, twenty-three hours were expended in hunting and gathering, about fifty-nine minutes on small farming, and one minute on
industrial agribusiness.
THE SOUP FOR OUR lunch? Well, that’s a history which needs telling. I look at it steaming on the wood stove. Is a soup just a watery stew? Did it originate, like tea, when the first leaf fell into a earthenware pot of steaming water? Did someone throw too much water into the first gruels, and was he too hungry to wait for them to boil down? Or maybe gruel came out of a broth of grains boiled down. Or did the soup arrive even earlier, a cave mother scooping up the last of the cold greasy boar and brilliantly deciding to melt the fat off in a gourd full of hot water in the warm ashes? Human history is the history of soup, among many other histories, and the variations are beyond cataloguing.
When I first met Sharon she was an uneven cook with a tendency to torture a beef bone and some noodles into a gelatinous soup. What can I say? She was from Thunder Bay. After I introduced her to the idea of terroir, food grown naturally in its region, and to the ethnic cuisines that enthralled me, her natural intelligence caught on quickly, and she soon became the master of our dinners, though she still has dangerous tendencies to invent recipes before she looks at a cookbook—a practice that leads to delicious new combinations, although it can also give me crossed eyes and much hamming of a death by poisoning. One of the pleasures of our relationship, for me, has been the opportunity to introduce her to fine cooking, and then watch her surpass me.
Born of this new generation spoiled by global trade and travel, we make Thai tom yum soup, Mexican chicken broths with chickpeas, and creamed European soups, vegetarian or with meat. We often cook together, and this can lead to differences of opinion, sometimes amiable, sometimes not. I tell her cooking is a contact sport, a statement that usually gets me the evil eye.