Gathering Real Food
(Page 4 of 6)
April/May 2004
By Linnea Johnson
Check the classified ads in the local newspaper, especially during fruit and sweet corn seasons.
Contact your state's organic growers association.
Explore the back roads and watch for roadside signs.
Ask about local farmers at co-ops and natural food stores.
For a directory of grass-fed meat and dairy products, go to www.eatwild.com .
To find a nearby CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) subscription service, go to www.csacenter.org .
To locate farmer's markets, food co-ops and mail-order Real Food suppliers, go to www.localharvest.org .
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AN EXQUISITE WATERMELON
One hot summer day, two friends and I were happily driving our Pennsylvania farm stand circuit when we serendipitously happened upon a Customer Appreciation Day. Screeching to a halt and wedging our car into the herd of assorted parked cars, we saw tables and counters and flatbeds crammed with sample platters full of freshly harvested sweet red watermelon pieces, toothsome tomato bites on toothpicks, fluffy homemade ice cream samples, bits of homemade bread and rolls thick with fresh butter along with wee cups of delectable chow chow and other savory salsas and relishes.
Everywhere, too, were hills of colorful squash and eggplant, pecks and bushels of dozens of varieties of sunned tomatoes aside flatbeds of hefty melons and cantaloupes. There in the sparkling blue afternoon among the high summer welter of fresh, fragrant, ambrosial samples, appreciative, murmuring and mooing customers everywhere, we tasted the most delicate, crispest, juiciest and most flavorful yellow-flesh watermelon! Had we ever tasted anything like this before? We sampled and sampled and sampled no end.
Exquisite. Like nothing else. Ever.
Try as we might, we could not describe the fresh, sweet, succulent, crisp taste of the yellow melon, so we just had to buy enough not only for later gorging, but so that our other friends, too, could experience for themselves the "sweet juice of the sun in fresh, sweet, clean air" taste of this heavenly yellow-flesh watermelon.
I miss Pennsylvania, my friends there,and the farm stands, but I'm finding Real Food here in my new home, in Shawnee County, Kan., too. So far,I've followed a tiny sign I spotted along the highway to a wonderful greenhouse called the Henry Plant Farm.
A bank of greenhouses shelters an impressive selection of vegetable, flower and herb transplants, accompanied by bitty goslings scurrying about under wagons, a peacock croaking way up on a branch and braying happy donkeys munching in pens nearby. When I paid for my trunkful of plants at the cash register, I spotted a brochure listing a dozen or so other farm stands and pick-your-own orchards; I look forward to exploring a new route this year.
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