September 4 2008

Eggplant, Escarole, Garlic, Leeks, Melon, Oregano, Peppers, Hot pepper, Potatoes, Tomatoes, Cherry tomatoes

One of the advantages, allegedly, of belonging to a CSA is the bond it affords you with your farmer.  Whether or not this actually constitutes a benefit is debatable.  Certainly, most Americans have little interest in any sort of relationship at all with farmers.  And that includes the most basic one: eating the stuff farmers grow.  Knowing where your food comes from and who bears responsibility for it is somehow less enticing when you consume the sorts of things many people do.  Only a gung-ho industrial chemist could get truly excited about the provenance of a frozen microwaveable pepperoni hot pocket.

But what if you actually enjoy dining on fresh produce and take an interest in what it was up to before it got to your house?  Well, for a start you will probably end up in some NSA database and notice an odd little clicking noise when you pick up the phone and the occasional resealed envelope.  Real patriots insist on high fructose corn syrup in everything they swallow.  Apart from the loving attention of your government, however, you might also get a hankering to know something about the person who grew your meal.  You might even go so far as to join a CSA and get your produce from a particular farmer working a particular piece of ground. 

There’s a big difference, though, between eating the tomatoes some guy grew and knowing anything about the tomato grower.  Perhaps a vegetable intuitive could develop ideas about the grower based on such factors as variety selection, ripeness or packaging.  But you might be surprised by how many different sorts of farmers will for different sorts of reasons grow the same sorts of tomatoes.  I don’t know that anyone could really gain more insight into your nature from your tomatoes than from your palm or your aura or even your bank account.

So how do you get to know anything about your farmer?  Well, you could come out to the farm and meet him (coming out to the farm being one of the prerogatives of CSA membership).  But I suspect that even some of you who have tried that remain a little puzzled.  He is not the most effusive or confessional guy—even by farmer standards.   To help you out, I offer the following clues.

Judging by his appearance, he escaped from an asylum a few years back and has been living in a ditch ever since.  It seems he gets his clothes from the Salvation Army’s reject pile, has his hair done by a drunk car mechanic and is not on good terms with his razor. Most days you could scrape enough dirt off him to fill a good sized planter box and enterprising birds could scavenge quantities of nesting material from his head. He often fails to notice if he is bleeding, which he often is.  He mumbles in conversation, speaks to cats, yells at broken equipment and avoids the telephone when possible.  His tone of voice suggests irony or scorn even when he is reading a shopping list.  He will eat large quantities of whatever food you put in front of him at an indelicate speed and finish just about any meal with considerably more stains on his clothes, not that you would necessarily notice given the state of his clothes.  He is incapable of baking the simplest cookies and has odd ideas about the appropriate amount of garlic in any dish.  He thinks a chainsaw makes a fine birthday present. 

He also happens to have three tuxedo jackets (including a natty red one), an Italian ice cream maker, the complete works of Thomas Hardy, an eight burner stove, a penchant for growing esoteric crops, and a M.A. in English and Comparative literature.  He makes vegetable sorbets, writes absurdly complicated sentences (often stuffed with odd parenthetical asides), likes kohlrabi, and is proud to have cultivated his sons’ affection for Monty Python and good cheese. 

So there you have it; he’s just your average insane epicurean unwashed overeducated incomprehensible irascible vagabond red sorrel grower.  Of course, now that you understand what he is like you’re probably thinking you don’t really need that tight a bond with your farmer after all.  In fact, all of a sudden those hot pockets are sounding pretty tempting.  

Well, there’s nothing wrong with a hot pocket.  If you make your own.  You just need some bread dough, some decent mozzarella, a little grated Parmesan, a bit of minced oregano and garlicky sautéed eggplant and cherry tomatoes or some cooked escarole and hot pepper.  You could even make the hot pockets, freeze them and then heat them up again in a microwave.  Not that you would want to eat them after that.  Microwaves have a strange and unfortunate effect on bread, an effect that food scientists overcome only with the help of a battery of unappetizing additives.  The sorts of things that make you think putting up with a weird farmer might just be worth it if that is what it takes to get a steady supply of unadulterated food.  And maybe that’s enough of a bond, the food itself, the potato that is just a potato, a little of the field clinging to its skin.

And anyway, if you want to know more about your farmer you can always find clues to his character in those tomatoes.  White Tomesol?  Black Prince?  Rose de Berne?  Green Zebra?  Brown Berry?  Solid Gold?  Enough said.