THE ALLEGED FARM NEWS
Endive (frisee or escarole), Garlic scapes, Lettuce, Root vegetable (beet, radish or white turnip), Scallions, Spinach, Mint
It is perfectly clear to anyone who gives the matter thought that illegal immigrants are the cause of nearly all the woes besetting this great nation. There’s the fact, just for a start, that they took away all the manufacturing jobs in this country—jobs responsible for creating a vast middle class that was the glory of all creation. As if that were not enough, they led us into a hopeless war by beguiling us into thinking that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and by taking away our ability to engage in any sort of sensible planning for the long-term occupation of a deeply divided Islamic nation in the middle east. They also created the mortgage crisis, what with their complex and risky financial schemes and total disregard for the possibility that housing prices might some day decline. They are responsible for significant amounts of air pollution, for getting us hooked on the super sized diet, for the rising price of gas, for declining sage brush grouse populations, for the ever increasing gap between rich and poor, for the shrinking of the polar ice cap, for electoral fraud, for Britney Spears, and, of course, for the embarrassingly ineffective play of the New York Mets.
In short, illegal immigrants are criminals, no different from your average armed robber or drug pusher. They break the law so they deserve what they get. And I am not talking about deportation. Oh, sure, it’s fun to raid the occasional meat packing plant, send a few truckloads back home. It’s good TV and good politics, and it creates jobs for honest hard working Americans. But we don’t really want to send them all away, not when they are willing to do the lousy essential jobs we won’t take, like picking and cooking our food and cleaning up after us. So let’s keep them here and call them criminals. That way we don’t have to feel bad about they way we treat them and they can’t do anything about it. A penny a pound more for picking Burger King’s tomatoes? Do criminals deserve wage hikes? Or safe working conditions? Decent housing? Health care? I don’t think so. Like I said, they get what they deserve.
And maybe some day we will get what we deserve when they take us seriously and stay home. Then who will pick our tomatoes? I can tell you it is not going to be easy to find enough Americans who want that job. Harder still to find enough who want it and can actually stick with it. It is not that we lack a permanent underclass willing to take low wage jobs. But we also have a steady supply of poorly paid service positions that involve little more strenuous than ringing up cheeseburger sales or mopping up a spill in aisle three. With jobs like that, few people will opt for long days of hard manual labor outside in the dirt. The simple fact is that most Americans would no walk across the street, let alone the country, to get a farm job.
This is a farming county. It is our largest industry by far. A significant portion of the land remains in agricultural production. We have an active Farm Bureau, a fully staffed Cooperative Extension, Ag. Programs and FFA teams in many of the schools, a feed mill and a fertilizer plant, and a successful land conservancy dedicated solely to protecting farmland. People around here grew up doing farm work. Eddie Lamb started field work at the age of 12. Brady and Jay Wolff took over the family farm when they were 18 and 17. Louie Marchaland remembers taking the horses out to cultivate the corn field (back then they planted the corn by hand, so they only grew one field of it) when he was a boy. And yet all the big farms near us have hired immigrant workers now. Not because they are looking for cheap labor. Because they are looking for any labor at all. These immigrants—Mexicans and Guatemalans—are the only people around here willing to do the work—to spend all day cleaning barns or all night milking cows.
It is sad and oddly heartening that so many people from other countries will go to so much trouble to come and do this necessary work, whether or not we let them through our borders willingly. And it’s lucky for us, because until we all start tending our own gardens we need their help. We might as well accept that and find some way to express our thanks other than a border fence, a bunch of vigilantes and a lot of blather.
I don’t know if you have any illegal immigrants in your house to prepare your vegetables. If so, you might want to tell them to do something with the spinach soon. I am not in the habit of telling members when to eat which things. If you don’t feel like having endive until next Tuesday, that is your choice. But I am afraid the spinach may not last. We had hail on Tuesday (not my idea, I assure you) and while the spinach is still tasty it is a bit battered.
Fortunately the endive (the frisee has narrow, branched, curly leaves; the escarole, broad ones) was growing in the greenhouse and so was not hit by hail. Well, I say fortunately, but I like endive. I understand that some people have a lower tolerance for bitter greens. All I can do is urge you to give them another chance. Let your illegal immigrants know that the inner, paler leaves make an excellent addition to a salad and that all of them taste good sautéed in olive oil with garlic and a little dried hot pepper. They could add some scallion too.
If you do not want more scape pesto (which freezes well, so even if you make it now you don’t have to eat now), have your illegal immigrants cut the scapes into green bean sized pieces and sauté them in a little olive oil with a fair amount of salt (fair to whom I do not know) over medium low heat until they start to soften and brown a little.
As for the mint, you could have some added, minced, to a salad dressing. Given the recent weather (we had four thunderstorms in a row Tuesday afternoon), however, I would be more inclined to steep it in simple syrup and mix one part each of the mint syrup (strain out the mint), lime juice and dark rum in a tall glass over ice. A tasty cocktail won’t dry out my fields or solve illegal immigration. But nothing else shows any sign of doing those either, so I might as well go sit on the veranda and ring for Manuel to bring me another drink.
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