Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [108]
As simply as that, a year of planning and family labor turned to red mush.
Our growers had been warned that this could happen—market buyers generally don’t sign a binding contract. So the farmers took a risk, and took a loss. Some of them will try again next year, though they will likely hedge their bets with Delicata squash and peas as well. Courage, practicality, and making the best of a bad situation are much of what farming is about. Before the tomatoes all rotted away, Appalachian Harvest found a way to donate and distribute the enormous excess of unpurchased produce to needy families. The poor of our county were rich in tomatoes that summer.
“We were glad we could give it away,” one of the farmers told me. “We like to be generous and help others, that’s fine, that’s who we are. But a lot of us are barely making ends meet, ourselves. It seems like it’s always the people that have the least who end up giving the most. Why is that?”
In Charlottesville, Asheville, Roanoke, and Knoxville, supermarket shoppers had no way of knowing how much heartache and betrayal might be wrapped up in those cellophane two-packs of California tomatoes. Maybe they noticed the other tomatoes were missing this week, those local ones with the “Healthy Farms, Close to Home” label. Or maybe they just saw “organic tomatoes,” picked them up, and dropped them into their carts on top of the cereal boxes and paper towels. Eaters must understand, how we eat determines how the world is used.
They will or they won’t. And the happy grocery store music plays on.
* * *
Canning Season
BY CAMILLE
When I was a kid, summer was as long as a lifetime. A month could pass without me ever knowing what day of the week it was. Time seemed to stretch into one gigantic, lazy day of blackberry picking and crawdad hunting. My friends and I would pretty much spend our lives together, migrating back and forth between the town swimming pool and the woods, where we would pretend to be orphans left to our own devices in the wilderness. School was not on our minds. Our world was green grass, sunshine, and imagination.
Then August would roll around: a tragedy every time. “Already? How can this be?” I would ask, shattered by the terrible truth that I needed a three-ring binder and some #2 pencils. It’s not that school was a bad thing. Summer was just so much better.
August is rarely announced to kids by a calendar. For some of my friends it was the shiny floors and fluorescent lights of the department stores with their back-to-school sales that brought the message. For me it was the bubbling canning bath and the smell of tomatoes. In my family the end of summer means the drone of our food-dehydrator is background music, and you can’t open the fridge without huge lumpy bags of produce falling out and clobbering your feet. Every spare half-hour goes into cutting up something to be preserved: the beans and corn to be blanched and frozen, the cucumbers sliced and pickled, the squash frozen or dehydrated or pawned off on a friend. And then there are the tomatoes. Pounds of them roll down from the garden each day, staining every one of our kitchen towels with their crimson juices. We slice little ones by the hundred and lay them out on the stackable trays of our food-drier. We can the medium-sized ones, listening afterward for each “ping” that tells us the jar lid has properly sealed. The rest go into big, bubbling pots of tomato sauce.
I’m sure this sounds like a hassle and mess to those who have never done it. But for us it’s an important part of summer. Not only because the outcome is great meals for the rest of the year, but because the process is our way of saying good-bye to the sunshine and pace of summer, and reflecting on what the season gave us. August’s busy kitchen