This is what my friends brought: dug from their own backyards, a division of a fifty-year-old peony, irises, a wisteria vine, spicy sweetshrub, beebalm, hostas, datura, lilies, and a flowering vine whose name none of us knows. My parents brought an Aristocrat pear, a variety bred by an old friend from our hometown. A geographer friend brought Portuguese collards, another indulged my fondness for red-hot chile peppers. Rosemary and sage, blueberry and raspberry, fountain grass, blue sweetgrass, sunshine-colored roses, blue-and-white columbines, scarlet poppies, butterfly bush and “Sunset” echinacea—the color scheme of my garden is “Crayola.” Our neighbor, to whom we’d taken the tomato plant, dug some divisions of her prettiest lemon lilies. “Oh, well, goodness,” I said as I received each of these botanical gifts. “Well, look at that.”
I thanked my parents for having me, thanked the farmers for the food, thanked family and friends for the music, the dancing, the miles traveled, and the stunning good luck of having them all in my life. But I did not say “Thank you” for a plant. My garden lives.
* * *
Happy Returns
BY CAMILLE
Birthdays have always been a big deal in my family. Mom would cook exactly what we wanted for dinner and bake any kind of cake for Lily and me on our special days. Our only limit was the one-year, one-person rule: each year I could invite as many people to my party as the age I was turning. So, three kids at my three-year-old party, ten at my tenth. As you can probably guess, things got increasingly wild. At one point I remember asking, “Mama, when I turn thirty can I really have thirty people at my party?” I was shocked when she said, “Sure, absolutely.” Wow, I thought, excited already at the thought of that huge celebration. Now I just think it’s funny that I assumed I’d still be living with my parents on my thirtieth birthday.
Last spring when my mom turned fifty she broke her own rule, big-time. None of us minded. What could be better than a long weekend of live music, good food, and friends and family from all over? We spent weeks setting up for 150 guests and trying to come up with a perfect Plan B (which we never really did) if it rained. I was inspired to see so many people in the fifty-plus age group up and dancing well past midnight, grandparents included. I hope I’ll still be dancing—and breaking my own rules—when I’m that age.
Two of our friend Kay’s best recipes from that party are good ways to feature the early spring vegetables, and the only fruits you’re likely to find in May: strawberries and rhubarb.
ASIAN VEGETABLE ROLLS
2 oz. thin rice noodles
Drop noodles into boiling water, remove from heat, and let stand for 8–10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Drain, rinse with cold water, and drain again.
1 cup bean sprouts
10 soft lettuce leaves
1 cup carrots, finely shredded
2 to 3 green onions, finely chopped
½ cup mint leaves
½ cup cilantro leaves
8 rice paper wrappers (about 8 inches square)
Lay out noodles and vegetables in an assembly line. Heat a pan of water until it’s almost too hot to handle. Soak one rice paper wrapper in the hot water for 15–20 seconds, then take it out and lay it flat. Flatten out one lettuce leaf on top (this helps prevent other fillings from poking through the wrapper). Next, place a finger-sized bunch of noodles close to one side of the paper and roll that side over the noodles. Continue this same pattern for the vegetable fillings, laying each ingredient parallel to the noodles and rolling the paper over. After the mint and cilantro leaves have gone in, fold the ends of the wrapper in, then fold the remaining side over them to secure. Set roll on a platter, seam side down. Keep rolls moist until served, and separated so they don’t stick together (the wrappers will rip).
Serve whole or cut in half, with your choice of spicy dipping sauce. One simple option is to add a few tablespoons of rice vinegar and sesame oil to a half cup of soy sauce.
STRAWBERRY RHUBARB CRISP
3 cups strawberries, halved 3 cups rhubarb, chopped
½ cup honey Mix together thoroughly and place in an 8-by-8-inch ungreased pan.
½ cup flour
½ cup rolled oats
½ cup brown sugar (or a bit more, to taste)
¾ teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon allspice
1/3 cup butter
Mix until crumbly, sprinkle over fruit mixture, and bake at 350° for 40 to 50 minutes, until golden.
Download these and all other Animal, Vegetable, Miracle recipes at www.AnimalVegetableMiracle.com
MAY OPENS UP MANY MORE POSSIBILITIES IN OUR WEEKLY MEAL PLAN:
Sunday ~ Grilled chicken, fresh bread, and a giant salad of fresh greens, carrots, and peas
Monday ~ Asparagus and morel bread pudding
Tuesday ~ Asian summer rolls with spicy peanut sauce, served with rice
Wednesday ~ Vegetarian tacos with refried beans, pea shoots, lettuce, spring onions, and cheese
Thursday ~ Cheese ravioli tossed with stir-fried spring vegetables, oregano, and olive oil
Friday ~ Chicken pizza with olives and feta
Saturday ~ Frittata packed with cheese and vegetables, salad, strawberry-rhubarb crisp
* * *
8 • GROWING TRUST
Mid-June
Twice a year, on opposite points around the calendar’s circle, the perpetual motion of our garden life goes quiet. One is obvious: midwinter, when fields lie under snow. Our animals need extra care then, but any notion of tomato is history. The other vegetal lull is in June, around Midsummer’s Day. Seeds are in the ground if they’re going to be. Corn and beans are up, cukes and tomatoes are blossoming. Broccoli and asparagus are harvested; peas are winding down.
It isn’t that we walk out into the field on June 10 and say, “Wow, nothing to do anymore.” There will always be more weeds. Everything could be mulched better, fed more compost, protected better against groundhogs. A thriving field of vegetables is as needy as a child, and similarly, the custodian’s job isn’t done till the goods have matured and moved out. But you can briefly tiptoe away from the sleeping baby. It’s going to wake up wailing, but if you need the rest, you get while the getting is good.
We had planned our escape for late June, the one time between May planting and September harvest when it seemed feasible to take a short vacation from our farm. If we’d been marketing to customers or retailers, this would still be a breakneck time of getting orders lined up and successive plantings laid out. Our farming friends all agree this is the most trying challenge of the job: lost mobility. It’s nearly impossible to leave fields and animals for just one day, let alone a week. Even raising food on our relatively modest scale required that we put in overtime to buy a respite. We mulched everything heavily to keep root systems moist, discourage weeds, and prevent late blight.
My favored mulching method is to cover the ground between rows of plants with a year’s worth of our saved newspapers; the paper and soy-based ink will decompose by autumn. Then we cover all that newsprint—comics, ax murderers, presidents, and all—with a deep layer of old straw. It is grand to walk down the rows dumping armloads of moldy grass glop onto the faces of your less favorite heads of state: a year in review, already starting to compost.
Believe it or not, weeds will still come up through all this, but it takes a while. With neighbors on call to refill the poultry waterers, open and close coops, and keep an eye on the green things, we figured on escaping for a week and a half. Our plan was to head north in a big loop through New England, up to Montreal, and back through Ohio, staying with friends and relatives all along the way.
We nearly had the car packed when it started raining cherries. We’d been watching our huge cherry trees, which every June bear fruit enough to eat and freeze for pies and sorbets all year long. This, plus our own sparse peaches, plums, Asian pears, and a local orchard’s autumn apples, were the only local sources of tree fruits we knew about, and we didn’t want to miss any of them. Our diet had
turned our attention keenly to fruit, above all else. Like the Frostburg man with his eighty-three mealy peaches and so forth, we wanted our USDA requirement. This winter we’d be looking at applesauce and whatever other frozen fruit we could put by ahead of time, at whatever moment it came into season. Tree-ripened fruit, for the local gourmand, is definitely worth scheduling your vacation around.
Last year, my journal said, the cherries had ripened around June 8. This year summer was off to such a cool, slow start, we stood under the tree and tried to generate heat with our heart’s desire. Then it happened: on June 15, one day before our planned departure, the hard red spheres turned to glossy black, all at once. The birds showed up in noisy gangs, and up we went to join them. Standing on ladders and the roof of the truck, we picked all afternoon into dusk, till we were finding the fruits with our fingers instead of our eyes.
Like the narrator of Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek, I have a resolute weakness for cherries. Annually I take Zorba’s advice on the cure; so far it hasn’t worked. All of us were smitten, filling gallon buckets, biting cherries alive from their stems. This was our first taste of firm, sweet fruit flesh in months, since the early April day when we’d taken our vows and foresworn all exotics. Fruit is what we’d been hankering for, the only deprivation that kept needling us. Now we ate our fill, delivered some to neighbors, and put two gallons in the freezer, rejoicing. Our fructose celibacy was over.
The next day our hands were still stained red as Lady Macbeth’s, but it was time to go, or we’d never get our trip. We packed up some gifts for the many friends whose hospitality and guest beds lay ahead of us: cherries of course, bottles of local wine, and a precious few early tomatoes we had managed to pamper to ripeness—by June 12, a record for our neighborhood. We threw bags of our salad greens and snap peas into a cooler with some cheese and homemade bread for munching along the way. If we waited around, some other task would start to fall on our heads; we could practically hear the weeds clawing at the president’s face. We hit the gas and sped away.
Farming is not for everybody; increasingly, it’s hardly for anybody. Over the last decade our country has lost an average of 300 farms a week. Large or small, each of those was the life’s work of a real person or family, people who built their lives around a promise and watched it break. The loss of a farm is a darkness leading to some of life’s bitterest ends. Keeping one, on the other hand, may mean also working in a factory at the end of a long daily drive, behind and ahead of the everyday work of farming.
Wherever farms are still living, it’s due to some combination of luck, courage, and adaptability. In my home state, Kentucky, our agriculture is known for two nonedible commodities: tobacco and racehorses. The latter is a highly capitalized industry that spreads little of its wealth into the small family farm; the former was the small farm’s bottom dollar, until the bottom dropped out. In my lifetime Kentucky farmers have mostly had the options of going broke, or going six ways to Sunday for the sake of staying solvent. I know former tobacco growers who now raise certified organic gourmet mushrooms, bison steaks, or asparagus and fancy salad greens for restaurants. On the bluegrass that famously nourished Man o’ War and Secretariat, more modest enterprises with names like “Hard Times Farm” and “Mother Hubbard’s” are now raising pasture-fed beef, pork, lamb, and turkeys. Kentucky farms produce flowers, garlic, organic berries and vegetables, emu and ostrich products, catfish, and rainbow trout. Right off the Paris Pike, a country lane I drove a hundred times in my teenage years, a farmer named Sue now grows freshwater shrimp.
If we could have imagined this when I was in high school, that our county’s fields might someday harbor prawn ponds and shiitakes, I suppose we would have laughed our heads off. The first time I went to a party where “Kentucky caviar” was served, I suspected a trick (as in “Rocky Mountain oyster”). It wasn’t; it was Louisville-grown fish eggs. Innovative cottage industries are life and death for these farmlands. Small, pioneering agricultural ventures are the scene of more hard work, risk-taking, and creative management than most people imagine.
Among other obstacles, these farmers have to contend with a national press that is quick to pronounce them dead. Diversified food-producing farms on the outskirts of cities are actually the fastest-growing sector of U.S. agriculture. The small farm is at the moment very busy thinking its way out of a box, working like mad to protect the goodness and food security of a largely ungrateful nation.
These producers can’t survive by catering only to the upscale market, either. The majority of farmers’ market customers are people of ordinary means, and low-income households are not necessarily excluded. An urban area in eastern Tennessee has a vegetable equivalent of a bookmobile, allowing regional farmers to get produce into neighborhoods whose only other food-purchasing option might be a liquor store. Though many eligible mothers may not know it, the U.S. nutritional assistance program for women with infants and children (WIC) gives coupons redeemable at farmers’ markets to more than 2.5 million participants in forty-four states.
Likewise, the Seniors Farmers Market Nutrition Program (SFMNP) awards grants to forty states and numerous Indian tribal governments to help low-income seniors buy locally grown fruits, vegetables, and herbs. Citizen-led programs from California to New York are linking small farmers with school lunch programs and food banks.
Even so, a perception of organic food as an elite privilege is a considerable obstacle to the farmer growing food for middle-income customers whose highest food-shopping priority is the lowest price. Raising food without polluting the field or the product will always cost more than the conventional mode that externalizes costs to taxpayers and the future. To farm sustainably and also stay in business, these market gardeners have to bridge the psychological gap between what consumers could pay, and what we will actually shell out.
Grocery money is an odd sticking point for U.S. citizens, who on average spend a lower proportion of our income on food than people in any other country, or any heretofore in history. In our daily fare, even in school lunches, we broadly justify consumption of tallow-fried animal pulp on the grounds that it’s cheaper than whole grains, fresh vegetables, hormone-free dairy, and such. Whether on school boards or in families, budget keepers may be aware of the health tradeoff but still feel compelled to economize on food—in a manner that would be utterly unacceptable if the health risk involved an unsafe family vehicle or a plume of benzene running through a school basement.
It’s interesting that penny-pinching is an accepted defense for toxic food habits, when frugality so rarely rules other consumer domains. The majority of Americans buy bottled drinking water, for example, even though water runs from the faucets at home for a fraction of the cost, and government quality standards are stricter for tap water than for bottled. At any income level, we can be relied upon for categorically unnecessary purchases: portable-earplug music instead of the radio; extra-fast Internet for leisure use; heavy vehicles to transport light loads; name-brand clothing instead of plainer gear. “Economizing,” as applied to clothing, generally means looking for discount name brands instead of wearing last year’s clothes again. The dread of rearing unfashionable children is understandable. But as a priority, “makes me look cool” has passed up “keeps arteries functional” and left the kids huffing and puffing (fashionably) in the dust.
Nobody should need science to prove the obvious, but plenty of studies do show that regularly eating cheaply produced fast food and processed snack foods slaps on extra pounds that increase the risks of diabetes, cardiovascular harm, joint problems, and many cancers. As a country we’re officially over the top: the majority of our food dollars buy those cheap calories, and most of our citizens are medically compromised by weight and inactivity. The incidence of obesity-associated diabetes has more than doubled since 1990, with children the fastest-growing class of victims. (The name had to be changed from “adult-onset” to “Type II” diabetes.) One out of every three dollars we spend on health care
, by some recent estimates, is paying for the damage of bad eating habits. One out of every seven specifically pays to assuage (but not cure) the multiple heartbreaks of diabetes—kidney failure, strokes, blindness, amputated limbs.
An embarrassing but arguable point is that we’re applying deadly priorities to our food budgets because we believe the commercials. Industrial agriculture can promote its products on a supersized scale. Eighty percent of the beef-packing industry is controlled by four companies; the consolidation is exactly the same for soybean processing. With such vast corporate budgets weighing in on the side of beef and added fats, it’s no surprise that billions of dollars a year go into advertising fast food. The surprise is how handsomely marketers recoup that investment: how successfully they convince us that cheap food will make us happy.
How delusional are we, exactly? Insisting to farmers that our food has to be cheap is like commanding a ten-year-old to choose a profession and move out of the house now. It violates the spirit of the enterprise. It guarantees bad results. The economy of the arrangement will come around to haunt you. Anyone with a working knowledge of children would see the flaw in that parenting strategy. Similarly, it takes a farmer to understand the analogous truth about food production—that time and care yield quality that matters—and explain that to the rest of us. Industry will not, but individual market growers can communicate concern that they’re growing food in a way that’s healthy and safe, for people and a place. They can educate consumers about a supply chain that’s as healthy or unhealthy as we choose to make it.
That information doesn’t fit in a five-syllable jingle. And those growers will never win a price war either. The best they can hope for is a marketing tactic known as friendship, or something like it. Their task is to communicate the consumer value of their care, and how it benefits the neighborhood. This may seem like a losing battle. But the “Buy Cheap Eats” crusade is assisting the deaths of our compatriots at the rate of about 820 a day; somebody’s bound to notice that. We are a social animal. The cost-benefit ratios of neighborliness are as old as our species, and probably inescapable in the end.
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