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By Root 864 0

with single-crop fields, utterly useless as wildlife habitat, doused heavily with fertilizers and pesticides. This approach is highly productive in the short term, but causes soil erosion and kills tropical biodiversity—including the migratory birds that used to return to our backyards in summer. Not to mention residual chemicals in your coffee. In contrast, farmers using traditional growing methods rely on forest diversity to fertilize the crop (from leaf litter) and help control coffee pests (from the pest predators that are maintained). Although their yields are lower, the shade-grown method sustains itself and supports local forest wildlife. Selecting shade-grown and fair-trade coffee allows these small-farm growers a chance to compete with larger monocrop production, and helps maintain wildlife habitat.

Independent certification agencies (similar to those that oversee organic agriculture) ensure that fair trade standards are maintained. As demand grows, the variety of products available has also grown to include chocolate, nuts, oils, dried fruits, and even hand-manufactured goods. For more information see www.transfairusa.org, www.fairtrade.net or www.ifat.org.

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STEVEN L. HOPP

I’ll now add my own cautions to this recipe: don’t scrape too hard, and don’t overbake. I confess I may have hoped for a modest flutter of kiss-the-cook applause as I set our regal centerpiece on the table, instead of the round of yelping and dashes for the kitchen towels that actually ensued. The whole thing collapsed. Fortunately, I’d baked it in a big crockery pie dish. We saved the tablecloth, and nine-tenths of the soup.

My loved ones have eaten my successes and failures since my very first rice pudding, at age nine, for which I followed the recipe to the letter but didn’t understand the “1 cup rice” had to be cooked first. Compared with that tooth-cracking concoction, everyone now agreed, my pumpkin soup was great. Really it was, by any standards except presentation (which I flunked flunked flunked), and besides, what is the point of a family gathering if nobody makes herself the goat of a story to be told at countless future family gatherings? Along with Camille’s chard lasagna, our own fresh mozzarella, and the season’s last sliced tomatoes, we made a fine feast of our battered centerpiece. If anyone held Dad and me under suspicion of vegetable cruelty, they didn’t report us. We remain at large.

A pumpkin is the largest vegetable we consume. Hard-shelled, firm-fleshed, with fully ripened seeds, it’s the caboose of the garden train. From the first shoots, leaves, and broccoli buds of early spring through summer’s small soft tomato, pepper, and eggplant fruits, then the larger melons, and finally the mature, hard seeds such as dry beans and peanuts, it’s a long and remarkable parade. We had recently pulled up our very last crop to mature: peanuts, which open their orange, pealike flowers in midsummer, pollinate and set their seeds, and then grow weirdly long, down-curved stems that nosedive the seed pods earthward, drilling them several inches into the soil around the base of the plant. Many people do realize peanuts are an underground crop (their widespread African name is “ground nut”), although few ever pause to ruminate on how a seed, product of a flower, gets under the dirt. In case you did, wonder no more. Peanuts are the dogged overachievers of the plant kingdom, determined to plant their own seeds without help. It takes them forever, though. Our last ritual act before frost comes is to pull up the peanut bushes and shake the dirt from this botany-freak-show snack food.

We were ready now for frost to fall on our pastures. We had eaten one entire season of botanical development, in the correct order. Months would pass before any new leaf poked up out of the ground. So…now what?

Another whole category of vegetable used to carry people through winter, before grocery chains erased the concept of season. This variant on vegetable growth is not an exception but is auxiliary to the leaf-budflower-fruit-seed botanical