I have to say, it feels really good to be up around, sorta, and back on the air. For those who were not aware, I spent the winter dealing with a major health crisis and am only now crawling out from under the rubble that was my former life. I’m ok and improving every day - but it’s been a long road and will be longer.
Because of that, I couldn’t make it out to the garden earlier, so there are no peas or early lettuce. I’m growing my own tomatoes, though, thanks to the intrepid efforts of my friend, the famed Ted Berger of the fabulous “Ted’s Reds” sweet potatoes, once a staple of the produce section at Mama Jean’s. He’s retired now but still can’t resist growing stuff. He took a rain-free day off from installing a new cover on his greenhouse to come and plant tomatoes, cucumbers, a few herbs and some winter squash at my house.
I can’t let the story move on though, before cautioning those who yearn all year, as I did, for a taste of a fresh spring salad, to not expect too much unless you’re growing your own or have enough mad money to afford a trip to a very good farmers market. I ignored that caution to my own peril just today. As I said, I grew no lettuce and had, as in every late spring, a deep yearning for the vegetables of summer. So, I said, “What the heck, I’ll just get something at the supermarket. It can’t be that bad.”
So, as I’m still not driving yet, I went online and ordered a classic romaine salad mix, some cherry tomatoes and some of those cute baby cucumbers - you know, the basics - from my neighborhood megastore. They arrived this afternoon and I immediately slapped together a fairly large salad, which I paired with a generous slice of leftover pizza. Nice, yes? Well no, not really. The romaine was the real thing, but the salad makers evidently thought a couple whacks with a cleaver would create those bite size pieces. It would if I planned to feed it to my horse. The dark green outer leaves were cut in one-to two-inch slices - just once, across the entire leaf, creating bite-size pieces about eight inches long. Next time I’ll know to use the kitchen shears. The cukes were another story - crisp, crunchy, no need to peel, a pure delight. But then there were the cherry tomatoes. Now I knew that tomatoes sold commercially are often treated with a gas to make them ripen prematurely, creating a good appearance but short on flavor. I expected that. What I didn’t expect was that they would not, in fact, be edible. When I say tough, you probably think extra chewy. No. You couldn’t bite into them. It took an effort of will to even pierce them with a fork. When I finally cut one open with a paring knife, the insides were no different from the skin. Had they not been so tiny, they’d have made passable shoe leather! I worked my way through the romaine and enjoyed the little cucumber. The tomatoes I threw in the trash. I don’t know what I’ll do with the rest. They’re not round enough to make good marbles.
Here’s my point: I have no wish to go back to the days before supermarkets and farmers markets, when we cooked everything on a wood stove and were thankful to have the wood. Let’s face it, were it not for the lifesaving twenty-first century medicines, I, for one, would just be dead.
But have we really come so far into the technological world where we’re happy eating pretend food made from pretend nutrients, cosmetically enhanced to make us believe they’re food?
To me that’s barbaric, a word those uptown folks with big disposable incomes tend to use to describe these spare, frugal, nature-savvy hillbillies down here in the hills. Some might think that cooking on a wood stove and growing your own beans is backward. But not if they’re eating real food from the bounty of nature; grown, picked and processed by human hands in God’s garden, not in some chemical factory, and not to feed the pockets of a few people who don’t even know that they can’t eat money. We may not be flush with disposable income or vacation on the Costa del Sol, but when it comes to elegant, conscious living from the pure bounty of the land, the hill folks of the Ozarks are rich beyond measure. It’s so good to be home.
