Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [104]
On a midsummer day in the packing house, vegetables roll through the processing line in a quantity that makes the work in my own kitchen look small indeed. Tomatoes bounce down a sorting conveyor, several bushels per minute, dropping through different-sized holes in a vibrating belt. Workers on both sides of the line collect them, check for flaws and ripeness, and package the tomatoes as quickly as their hands can move, finally pressing on the “certified organic” sticker. Watching the operation, I kept thinking of people I know who can hardly even stand to hear that word, because of how organic is personified for them. “I’m always afraid I’m going to get the Mr. Natural lecture,” one friend confessed to me. “You know, from the slow-moving person with ugly hair, doing back-and-leg stretches while they talk to you…” I laughed because, earnest though I am about food, I know this guy too: dreadlocked, Birkenstocked, standing at the checkout with his bottle of Intestinal-Joy Brand wheatgrass juice, edging closer to peer in my cart, reeking faintly of garlic and a keenness to save me from some food-karma error.
For the record, this is what Appalachian Harvest organics look like at the source: Red Wing work boots, barbershop haircuts, Levi’s with a little mud on the cuffs, men and women who probably go to church on Sunday but keep their religion to themselves as they bring a day’s work to this packing house inside a former tobacco barn. If sanctimony is an additive in their product, it gets added elsewhere.
The tomato room offered a 56-degree respite from the July swelter, but it was all business in there too: full boxes piled on pallets, in columns nearly reaching the ceiling. The stacks on one end of the room were waiting to be processed, while at the other they waited to be trucked out to nearby groceries. Just enough space remained in the center for workers to maneuver, carting out pallets for grading, sorting, and then slapping one of those tedious stickers on every one of the thousands of individual tomatoes that pass through here each day—along with every pepper, cabbage, cucumber, and melon. That’s how the cashier ultimately knows which produce is organic.
Supermarkets only accept properly packaged, coded, and labeled produce that conforms to certain standards of color, size, and shape. Melons can have no stem attached, cucumbers must be no less than six inches long, no more than eight. Crooked eggplants need not apply. Every crop yields a significant proportion of perfectly edible but small or oddly shaped vegetables that are “trash” by market standards.
It takes as much work to grow a crooked vegetable as a straight one, and the nutritional properties are identical. Workers at the packing house were as distressed as the farmers to see boxes of these rejects piling up into mountains of wasted food. Poverty and hunger are not abstractions in our part of the world; throwing away good food makes no sense. With the help of several church and social justice groups, Appalachian Harvest arranged to deliver “factory second” vegetables all summer to low-income families. Fresh organic produce entered some of their diets for the first time.
I grew up among farmers. In my school system we were all born to our rank, as inescapably as Hindus, the castes being only two: “farm” and “town.” Though my father worked in town, we did not live there, and so by the numinous but unyielding rules of high school, I was “farmer.” It might seem astonishing that a rural-urban distinction like this could be made in a county that boasted, in its entirety, exactly two stoplights, one hardware store,