yesterday’s perfect beauties at the Montecito Farmer’s Market
as I posted yesterday, this is what a fresh-picked, organically grown, local strawberry looks like – it’s not white and hard in the center – it’s juicy, fragrant and sweet!
Are the terms trouble-free and farming oxymorons? Inquiring minds want to know…………
I’m feeling a little bit soppy here and now – especially after spending the last 10 days surrounded by some of the most fascinating locales I know. My travels and exposures compel me here to share some little stories that I think are of note. These things well up in me naturally and I just have to get them out of my system, you know, they just bubble up and explode – kind of like the copious “oh my goshes” I inadvertently mutter every time I see a perfect flower or a hummingbird in flight — but I digress. It’s probably more than a pity that so many around me have to put up with my “issues” – but I know in my heart there’s always the delete and “unfriend” button…………
Don’t spray me!
So, I’m going to gush on a bit here.
To me, farming is among the most noble professions around, ever – and one so thoroughly taken for granted in this country. I’ve in fact, always been fascinated with farming, farmers and small-time truly devoted home gardeners alike. They take risks, toil with their hands and bodies and work ungodly hours like most of us wouldn’t ever dream of, let alone choose voluntarily. I’m drawn to the vistas of their land, their toil, their equipment and their heartfelt commitment to their task, year in and year out. What we get to eat each and every day, for most of us, so easily and bountifully and broadly, is nothing short of a miracle of collective cooperation, wisdom, skill, and luck – commingled with the fickle earth, weather and emergence and receding of pestilence, old and new and heretofore unknown. To say that we are among the luckiest people in the world in this regard is a vast understatement. We have markets and stores, small, large and gargantuan that are stocked with more than one choice of just about every single commodity. We walk in, pick out, pay for and walk out each and every day, often without a thought or a care in the world………… To me, this deserves a few moments of consideration, in every single season.
Two things are specifically on my mind today: One is that death and taxes are thought to be the only two entries popping up when scanning the broad swath of life’s great certainties. But, I have one to add to the list: if you want to truly know what you are eating, grow your own food……….
Two: I sadly confess that I am not immune to great degrees of self-deception – today and here, as related to my own food supply.
Not only have I been writing an article on strawberries for the upcoming issue of my dear friend Roseann’s publication – luckily that is all about recipes 🙂 (stay tuned), but I happened to drive through the city of Oxnard in Ventura County, California a few times over the past week or so. I come here often as Santa Barbara, right up the road, is one of my absolute favorite places in this country. It’s natural beauty along with the aura of serenity and paradise that it generates when you are there are intoxicating and addicting.
Butterfly Beach, Montecito
orange selections at San Ysidro Ranch
I come here, as many of you know, to seek out and pretend I’m fraternizing with, the plentiful hummingbird population (as you can see) that I find there (they’re not dumb) and to go to the copious number of Farmer’s Markets. Anyone who follows me on social media knows that. That same “anyone” knows I have a number of pet causes that I am more than passionate about – you might say I’m fanatical. Politics aside (let’s not ruin this), they include a fascination with the pollinators – bees, butterflies, et al, and various and sundry causes – mostly “environmental in nature” (pun intended) some related to the pollinators and some not. And so, this little story…..
When you are driving along on Highway 101 it’s easy to get caught up in the romanticism of seeing miles and miles of fields of ripening strawberries as you pass through this area of Ventura County. You’ve either just driven down along the stunning ocean views of the Pacific if you’re coming south or you’ve just left LA’s busy and exotic and storied surrounds.
I can’t remember the very first time I drove through Oxnard – perhaps it was around 10 years ago. There you’ll find the real meaning of strawberry fields forever – as John Lennon coined the song. This is where, by far, the country’s largest supply, about 85%, of strawberries comes from.
Just to set the stage a little here, when you live on the east coast where I do, you probably now consider the sight of family farms, even small ones, as somewhat of a novelty. Gone are the days when it was easily recognizable why NJ was named the Garden State. Now you pretty much have to go out searching for farming entities, and I do. For me, they are gifts to treasure. So many of the fabled and treasured farming communities that thrived in NJ and that gave our State some of its absolute greatest beauty were gobbled up by rising real estate values in my own lifetime. When 78 went through to Pa, the carnage was unbridled. What we lost was irreplaceable – housing developments and office complexes took over what once was pastoral acreage that farmers, when offered big cash, couldn’t refuse to trade for. To say that once you give this land up you’ll never get it back seems so obvious and almost trite but for people like me, engaging in backward glancing nostalgia of all those places is inescapable.
All of that makes the site of Oxnard, and in fact, the vastness of California farm country, near and far, a remarkable and eye-popping site. You have to look up into the sky and say thank you. It’s hard not to become almost teary-eyed at the site of this scale of production and, right about now, at one of our most favorite of all springtime fruits. But, at the risk of becoming a huge wet blanket so-to-speak, I have to tell you, I’ve become a jaded supporter of mass-scale fruit production. There is indeed an ugly underbelly here and, in view of the pending watering down if not demise of the EPA, I think we really have to talk about it. I’m certainly not the first one to bring up this topic, btw. Just take a look on google.
For people like me, the once trivial chore of going off to the grocery store has become significantly more complex over the last several years. I’ve become a label-reader, challenger, question-asker and all-around skeptic when it comes to food sourcing. I have as my mentor the wonderfully amazing Alice Waters and while I follow her closely, I admit I am not a true purist in the food selection genre. But, I do try hard to seek out and find as cleanly-produced food items as I can.
Over the past several years as I began to really delve deeply into my research and learning about food, I have to admit, it has been one eye-opening experience. I began to read up about pesticides, fungicides, and other mass-used chemical agents and their affects on our food chain. I particularly got interested in this when the bees got into trouble. But, closer to home, I became seriously concerned when I was advised to saturate our own hay fields with Round-Up in order to prepare to regenerate our own hay. This sent me into a tizzy of ruminating and steaming – about my own back yard. More on that in another post. Just rest assured we did NOT do that.
Some of the specialty crops that I adore, like strawberries, apricots, peaches and such, I began to learn, inch by inch, presented a huge dichotomy – one between my romantic dreams of the small-town festivals I read about that celebrated them as held in Italy, France, Austria, and bona fide reality. Small farmers celebrate their mostly home-grown crops of specialty, artisan and heirloom varieties of fruits and have for generations. Somehow, I deceived myself into applying this quality of production and pristine intent and output to what what we generally find ourselves ingesting in our homes and restaurants on a daily basis. And therein lies the sad invasion of self-deception. Sadly, I have been guilty of inadvertently applying my own swooning onto the production outputs I see in our own country – and this is a very sad mistake.
How we got ourselves into this mess is a long and drawn out story – mostly beginning in the post World War II era as many factors converged – the concept of convenience foods, the evolution of corporate conglomerates, corporate farming and the mass marketing by chemical companies and use of highly dangerous chemicals by farmers. As profit motive if not downright survival instincts kicked into many a farmer relying on his/her crops to sustain their way of living and their own families, they were all presented with the conscious or unconscious decision as to whether to “fumigate” or not. Expedience and practicality became the norm drawing more and more into the web of common use. To be fair, there were various levels of understanding of the down-stream (pun intended) affects of chemical agents and, as we continue to see today, in the absence of very serious major push back, marketing campaigns, lobbyists and market forces encourage/d the broad-scale use of serious pollutants, poisons and toxins. To deny that the bees have been decimated by spraying defies all logic and common sense. To see the downstream health affects in humans has been somewhat more cloudy and deniable to many to this very day.
Anyway, I don’t really want this post to be a major league downer so that it will send you into high anxiety every time you step inside your local Whole Foods, but I think it is fair to say we have to continue to discuss these matters and not put our heads into the proverbial sand, especially when we are facing the political headwinds coming from this current administration that wants to minimize the EPA footprint – however totally illogical that may seem to many of us.
Well, this article happened to rise to the forefront as I looked a little more closely at the ubiquitous California Strawberry production. But, really it is an invitation of sorts. Don’t we all need to be vigilant with what we feed ourselves and our kids? As I drove down Highway 101 again today with the car windows closed and no sign of active spraying in sight, I immediately felt and tasted a chemical residue in the back of my throat that then spread into and lingered in my mouth. This happened last week when I drove up and has happened before when I drove through these same spots. This to me is frightening. You are literally passing through Oxnard in about a 10-15 minute interval. You are not parked there. You are not living there. You are not working there in the surrounds let alone in the fields for seasons, years and lifetimes.
Yesterday, I happened to get to meet the daughter of the family that grows Harry’s Berries, a well-known organic grower from Oxnard. Her berries were purely exquisite-looking as you can see above. We got to chat for a little while and I asked about visiting their farm. She said they’re not open to the public but she went on to show me the article in Martha Stewart Living about their recognition in Martha’s American Made Honoree program. We bought 3 containers of her perfect strawberries and they are sitting at my feet right now as I fly over the Country back to the east coast. I was happy to find just one organic grower at the Montecito Farmer’s Market, something I didn’t find at the downtown market on Tuesday, nor at the Santa Monica market last week. It’s early in the season I told myself and more would abound as we inch toward peak production later in the Spring.
But, sadly I have gotten to wondering about the raw ability to grow organic fruit anywhere near Oxnard. I am in absolutely no way questioning Harry’s Berries own methods or integrity in their own farming practices. But, what I am wondering is how it could be at all possible to grow organic fruit when there is a constant cloud of chemicals hanging in the air around Oxnard. And so, here’s my obvious question: if you get a chemical residue in your mouth when you spend 10 minutes driving through on the highway in a closed car, then wouldn’t you have to wonder if every square inch for miles and miles isn’t saturated with chemical residue? There are articles to read online and sources to consult here. I’ll let you decide if you want to pursue this topic for yourselves.
My bottom line is beginning to come into focus. When it comes to your food, awareness is everything. Look, inspect, and question all sources. Petition your local representative to support the EPA. Tell growers you want more organic food. And, finally, grow whatever you can, whenever you can. Then you will know, with certainty, what you are eating, from whence it came and how it was or was not “treated”.
Yes, we do have a relatively short growing season on the east coast. But, we do try to make the most of it – stretching out the availability as long as we possibly can. We can tell our local markets we want more local and organic foods. We can tell our local farm stands to stop spraying their crops. We can stop the blanket saturation of soil with Round-up and like pesticides and fungicides. It may not be easy and it will definitely create a great deal of conflict in and around. But, don’t we all need to stand up and demand clean food?
So, as we Spring into Spring, take the time to ask, wonder, read and even badger your local suppliers of your food items – especially produce and especially highly-porous berries. Anyone who’s using blanket application of chemical agents on their virgin fields and their crops needs to answer for it – at least before it goes into my mouth. As the earth thaws over the next few weeks (well, it is actually 12F here this morning) and we begin to think about planting in our own back yards, let’s all try something new this year. Grow some lettuces in pots, plant a few pole bean plants, grab some heirloom tomato plants or start them from seed now. You can garden in pots or on a square yard if you have to. (In Positano they do it on cliffs – see my post). Wherever you can place just a small bag of soil, you an grow a tiny bit of your own food. And, if you’re like me, you’ll appreciate the difficult dilemmas your local farmer goes through every single year.
Most importantly though, every single time you step inside your garden center or big box store and ask for help against pests in your yard, make sure to ask for bee-friendly help. If they don’t have any, ask for help. Read about the commonly used chemical agents online. And, whatever you do, don’t use Round-up or Bayer products on your plants.
If you see people spraying in your favorite locales, ask them what they are using. And, if they are known toxins, ask them to consider using safe sprays. And, whatever we all do, approach mass-produced farm output with caution. Buy local and organic whenever you possibly can. And, if you have small children, be especially cautious on their behalf. In generations to come, I hope we get a lot better at educating ourselves and, like I have been, don’t be fooled that you’re being offered well-grown, clean products in your food stores.