Beets, Cabbage, Upland cress, Fennel, Garlic, Leeks, Lettuce, Onions, Potatoes, Pie pumpkin, Radishes, Rosemary, Rutabaga
I feel pretty confident the Tea Party folks have failed to interpret their namesake moment entirely accurately. Those earlier angry patriots were not really complaining about government or even taxation, let alone their leader’s putative religious beliefs or unfair regulation of the energy industry or attempts to improve the health care system or immigrants. They got riled up that day about a system of government that seemed to pay no heed to their interests and concerns.
To be fair, a kindred sense of impotence and injustice may well have helped set off our Tea Party. People fear, not unreasonably, that they have lost control of their government. Of course, a fair number of them simply dread the end of their unmerited racial and ethnic advantages, a position anyone with a moral sense might find less than entirely sympathetic. And a rational observer might puzzle over how the longing for a more representative and responsive democracy necessarily leads to a vituperative defense of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. But then rage has a funny way of skidding about and losing track of its target. Anyone who has spent time around small children knows that, knows how even the most justified juvenile outrage can quickly become a randomly destructive tantrum.
Come to think of it, you just need to spend time with people of any age to understand that. There are coherent factions of the Tea Party, but the general mood seems to be that of a person whose car has broken down late at night on a dark stretch of highway, and who in frustration gets a sledgehammer from the trunk and attacks the vehicle before thinking to call a tow truck.
As a mechanically incompetent farmer I understand full well that urge to bang on complicated machinery that won’t do you what you need it to do. I understand too the odd kind of joy one can take in such pointless demolition. But I also understand how short-lived that joy is, how quickly replaced by less captivating feelings. A little banging, carried off with a certain sense of restrain, has its merits. But you have to have a more constructive plan in addition to the hammer, some notion of how you are going to fix things. And coming up with such a plan requires, of course, a calm assessment of what is actually broken. We seem to be a long way off from that at the moment.
Perhaps we should try a different misinterpretation of the Boston Tea Party and see if that leads somewhere better. Instead of seeing the colonists as a bunch of spry Reaganite conservatives out to free the New World from the burdens of effective social programs, we might try imagining them as seriously motivated locavores. They objected not to the tea tax but the tea itself. A mass produced commodity of a multinational corporation with unhealthily close ties to government and a terrible record of worker safety violations, shipped unsustainable distances, dumped on the New England market at prices that put local artisanal beverage producers at a competitive disadvantage, the tea represented everything these 18th Century food activists objected to. Dumping the tea in the harbor was a blow against the tyranny of a food system designed at the behest of large companies solely for their own benefit and without regard to the welfare of the planet or vast majority of the people on it.
We can carry on the true rebellions these patriots started not by stomping around bitching about how hard it is to be white in this country, but by refusing to eat fast food or drink soda, by demanding that our grocery chains carry local produce, by lobbying Congress to end its ridiculous farm subsidy system, by insisting that we take the alarming rise in childhood diabetes as seriously as the financial interests of Pepsico stockholders, by forcing state and local governments to work to protect farmland, by besieging processors with complaints about the unnecessary and even dangerous ingredients they add to food, and maybe even by tossing a few crates of Lunchables into some nearby body of water.
All right, so that is a bogus version of history used as an excuse to support a wide-ranging program of protest at best only loosely related to it in any logical way. Mea culpa. But at least it would lead to people addressing some legitimate concerns in a direct way calculated to improve our lives, and I have to think the mass protests would not feature too many pointlessly offensive, racist placards. Plus the food at the organizing meetings would be good.
Not that we need the imprimatur of patriotic history to object to the ways food is made in this country. When a company spends millions of dollars to convince kids to eat deep fried chicken-tinged corn mush lightly sprayed with butane we don’t need to know if Madison would have approved to think something is wrong with this. When a meat packing company that abuses workers and produces tainted food because indifference to safety boost its income uses a portion of those profits to purchases the compliance of legislators and regulators, we don’t need to seek historical antecedents for our anger.
Except we aren’t visibly angry. Or not about this. About Socialism, sure, and Islam, and about having to help poor people get something to eat. Even as we learn more and more about the corruption of our food supply we cannot for some reason rouse ourselves to take to the streets. There are changes for the better. You know you are making headway when Walmart promotes local produce. But it’s a quiet movement. There’s no foodie Glen Beck getting people out, no vegetable-obsessed oil billionaire funding it. It mostly just consists of people sitting around the dinner table sharing a good meal. People like you.
You may not have realized that getting a share makes you a foot soldier in a food revolution, but nearly everything about a CSA goes against the dominant corporate food culture. Modern American food is a chemical and geographic mystery hiding behind a tag line, a clever simulacrum of something real designed for quick and thoughtless consumption.
The only real mystery about a CSA share is what on earth some of those crops are, like the weird little white and green root in this week’s box, which is a variety of daikon radish called Green Meat (though the flesh is actually white). Just treat it like a normal radish (i.e., with respect and courtesy). Or like the bag of greens, Upland Cress, closely related to watercress, and like its cousin a nice peppery addition to a salad. Or the big round yellowish root, which any Northern European could tell you is a rutabaga. It is like a bulked up turnip, a good keeper, and tasty cubed, tossed in oil and salt, and roasted with other roots (potatoes, beets, celery root, shallots) and a few sprigs of rosemary, or braised in a little chicken stock, or boiled and mashed.
Every foot soldier needs time out, and your tour of duty is nearly up. You get your last share of the season next week. For those of you who cannot quite break the vegetable eating habit we will offer various crops for sale after the season. We will deliver orders on the Monday before Thanksgiving (November 22nd). I will send a price sheet separately.
For those of you who need a little more time in the dirt or want to help get food to the hungry, we will have our end of season gleaning day on Sunday, November 7th, weather permitting. We will spend the morning, starting at 10:00, gathering some of the remaining crops to give to Community Action and Capital District Community Gardens, and then we will have a restorative midday potato repast. Bring sturdy shoes, gloves, kids, friends, and, if you feel so inspired, a potato-based dish.
With only one more week of shares, the time has arrived to return any of those waxed produce boxes you may have been hoarding. We have gone through a significant portion of our two pallets of boxes, meaning that around 500 of them are out there somewhere waiting to come home. We would love to have them back so they don’t go to waste and also because they represent a fairly significant investment for a small farm. So if you have a chance, please get them back to your site (or any of our sites, for that matter) before next Thursday.
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