Growing Trust
(Page 3 of 7)
June/July 2007
By Barbara Kingsolver
How delusional are we, exactly? Insisting to farmers that our food has to be cheap is like commanding a 10-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 get that. 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 place. They can educate consumers about a supply chain that’s as healthy or unhealthy as we choose to make it.
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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.
FRESH, FLAVORFUL FOOD
Ashfield, Mass., is as cute as it gets, even by the standards of small town New England. Downtown is anchored by a hardware store with rocking chairs on the front porch. The big local social event where folks catch up with their neighbors is the weekly farmers market.
I didn’t know this when we arrived there to stay at a friend’s house. We brought our cooler in with the luggage, planning to give our hostess some of our little fist-sized tomatoes. These carefully June-ripened treasures would wow the New Englanders, I thought. Oops. As I started to pull them out of the cooler I spied half a dozen huge red tomatoes, languidly sunning their shapely shoulders in our friend’s kitchen window. These bodacious babes made our ‘Early Siberians’ look like Miss Congeniality. I pulled out some blackheart cherries instead, presenting them along with an offhand question: um, so, where did those tomatoes come from?
“Oh, from Amy at the farmers market,” she said. “Aren’t they nice?”
Nice, I thought. In the third week of June, in western Mass, if they taste as good as they look they’re a doggone miracle. I was extremely curious. Our host promised that during our visit she would take us to see Amy, the tomato magician.
On the appointed morning we took a narrow road that led from Ashfield up through wooded hills to a farm where Amy grows vegetables and her partner Paul works as a consultant in the design and construction of innovative housing. Their own house is pretty much the definition of innovative: a little round, mushroom-shaped structure whose sod-and-moss roof was covered in a summer pelt of jewelweeds. It was the kind of setting that leads you to expect an elf, maybe, but Paul and Amy stepped out instead. They invited us up to the roof where we could sit on a little bench. Ulan the dog followed us up the ladder stairs and sat panting happily as we took in the view of the creek valley below. Part of Paul’s work in dynamic housing design is to encourage people to think more broadly about both construction materials (walls of stacked straw bales are his specialty), and how to use space creatively (e.g., dog on the roof). I couldn’t wait to see the gardens.
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