So I'm out there in the rain, rain, glorious rain last night, balancing Barry Estabrook's excellent new book, Tomatoland, in one of my tomato patches so I can shoot a photo for you, and wondering if I'm ever going to have tomatoes this year. There are just a few hard green ones in my garden right now, which, of course, would be just right for Immokalee-Rhymes-with-Broccoli, Florida, where pretty much we're talking slave immigrant labor to pick tasteless immature fruits whose growing and working conditions sicken people, deform babies, and degrade the land and water, in order to feed America winter tomatoes.
"I'm worried about the tomatoes," I told my younger daughter. By this time last year, they were already lining the window sill.Estabrook says tomatoes used to be a luxury item, available only for a short, specific period of time and, therefore revered. Home gardeners know that feeling--we wait all year for the tomatoes. But my situation is particularly precarious because this year, for the first time in ten years, I didn't join a CSA (when you pre-pay a farmer at the start of the season and then get a box of seasonal crops each week) and I don't go to the farmers market. I'm trying to really use what I'm growing in my ever-expanding home garden, and to honor that bounty more fully. Yet that bounty does not look like it's going to include tomatoes, unless things change dramatically.
My younger daughter didn't even look up from what she was doing. "Life goes on, Mom," she said. "If we don't have tomatoes, we don't have tomatoes. We have other things." So wise, my daughters. But a year without tomatoes? Will this be the year without tomatoes?
Tomatoland reads like a wonderfully detailed, completely-engrossing, investigative news article, which is no surprise since it really started as an article in Gourmet magazine, which went on to win the 2010 James Beard Award. It reminds me of Outcasts United, in a way, which is the book resulting from the excellent New York Times article written by Warren St. John about Luma Mufleh and the Fugees in Clarkston, GA (to whom my friends and I are delivering our ten watermelons a week again, starting tomorrow). It reminds me of Ed Bruske's book about school lunch (see center column), based on his investigative reporting (the best in the nation) on that topic. (Oh, wait, he didn't write that book yet . . . ) And, you must know, it reminds me of many of Estabrook's other articles--about wild and farmed salmon, about farmed shrimp, about Kobe beef, about Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee, and more--all of which could eventually become their own books.
This same week, as I was reading Tomatoland, two other seemingly unrelated things happened. One, I went to a screening of Grow!, a movie by husband/wife team Christine Anthony and Owen Masterson, about the growing movement of young organic farmers in Georgia. Charlotte and Wes Swancy of Riverview Farms, whose CSA is the one to which I've belonged for the past few years, are included, and this just made me miss the weekly farm box more. Here's Wes from Anthony-Masterson's previous film, Farm! (Wes makes a simple yet profound statement that I haven't been able to get out of my mind--take the 17 seconds to watch it and let me know if it gets you right in the heart as well):
I've "known" Christine and Owen for a couple years, but this is the first time I met them in person, which was an incredible pleasure. My favorite part of Grow!, besides the gorgeous scenes of beautiful, passionate young farmers on their abundant land (and when Darby of Sun Dog Farms shook the basil, and when Wes walked with his dog down the lane like he did the time I visited him for the Edible Atlanta article I wrote about Charlotte and Wes years ago), was when the farmers said what their original intention during college was (and yes, just about all of them are college graduates). Three of them planned on going to medical school. One was heading to law school. None intended to be farmers.
Smart, well-spoken, charismatic, and committed, these increasingly connected and motivated young farmers (in a country where the average age of a farmer is 57), are barely getting by yet are treated like rock stars when they show up at farmers markets and farm-to-fork restaurants. Contrast this with the workers in Immokalee, or the fact that the state of Georgia is cracking down on illegal immigrants, starting July 1, and therefore many migrant workers simply skipped the state of Georgia this year, meaning industrial farmers are struggling enormously to bring in their crops. The governor of Georgia proposed filling crop-picking jobs with the thousands of convicts on probation who need jobs but can't find them. After day one on the job last week, many of these new workers simply quit because they couldn't make it in the fields.
"Conditioning, " I heard Governor Deal say on the radio. "They need conditioning in order to do this work."
I thought of that as I perused my tomatoes, or, should I say, lack of them. Conditioning. I'm conditioned to expect certain things, like an abundant tomato harvest. Yet that's not always how it goes. I looked around and noticed I have butternut squashes, not yet ripe, coming out of my ears. The garlic bed was ready for harvesting. Onions are everywhere. Lamb's quarters proliferate. The kale is completely over-achieving. The potatoes haven't stopped since late April. Pattypan, zucchini, and yellow squash plants have spread their arms everywhere. The Moon and Stars watermelons' spotted leaves are waving hello, and the cucumber plants' tendrils have grabbed on to anything and everything in their way for their rambunctious romp ahead. Both the beans and the sunflowers somehow made it past the chipmunks this year, and let's not even mention the ubiquitous mint. And so, yes, I have other things, and daily harvests that fill a basket more than make up for a weekly farm box delivery, and lead to teas and pizza sauces and fritters and pestos, if I just take the time to honor them.Yet, I still want tomatoes. Just not tasteless, pesticide-laden ones harvested by people treated like slaves.
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