Potato Farming Quotes

One day I was driving down the farm track in the pickup,with two of the little boys, aged about four or five, sitting beside me. One of them turned to me conversationally and said, "Baba, don't worry. When you get old one day you'll be sitting here where we are, and we'll be driving you around!

However, when we step into farm fields, the vegetation becomes very quiet. Thanks to selective breeding, our cultivated plants have, for the most part, lost the ability to communicate above or below ground-you could say they are deaf and dumb-and therefore they are easy prey for insect pests. That is one reason why modern agriculture uses so many pesticides. Perhaps farmers can learn from the forests and breed a little more wildness back into their grain and potatoes so that they'll be more talkative in the future.

The Agricultural Revolution was history's biggest fraud. Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful or plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo Sapiens, rather than vice versa.

My saxophone pulses out potato-sized notes, and when I play it my ducks dance like French fries in a Quebec winter. I make music for romantics and for elevators.

It smelled of repressed desire and unwanted potatoes.

Why Brownlee left, and where he went, Is a mystery even now. For if a man should have been content It was him; two acres of barley, One of potatoes, four bullocks, A milker, a slated farmhouse. He was last seen going out to plough On a March morning, bright and early. By noon Brownlee was famous; They had found all abandoned, with The last rig unbroken, his pair of black Horses, like man and wife, Shifting their weight from foot to Foot, and gazing into the future.

Bags of potato chips have so much air they could be used as cushions for suicidal skyscraper jumpers. That's called inflation, because you spend more money and get less product. But here on my duck farm, we know the value of a dollar—and that's why we don't accept them.

Even more precious is my manure. It’s critical to the potato farm, and I’m the only source on Mars. Fortunately, when you spend a lot of time in space, you learn how to shit in a bag. And if you think things are bad after opening the piss box, imagine the smell after I drop anchor.

Magic was precarious by nature, and potatoes were safe by comparison.

But no use worrying about tomorrow’s concerns when today has its own.

They had their feast, a happy family group, roasted wild pheasant seasoned with tarragon, stuffed with oranges, apples, shallots, and sage, cooked on a bed of carrots and potatoes, tomatoes. Peas and good brown bread from the oven, farm butter. Good friends, old friends

Because neither corn nor wheat grew well in the Adirondacks, the favored crop was potatoes ("Our food was mostly fish and potatoes then for a change we would have potatoes and fish," recalled one early inhabitant), occasionally supplemented by peas, rye, buckwheat, or oats.

A naturalist should look at the world with warm affection, if not ardent love. The life the scalpel has ended ought to be honored by a caring, devoted appreciation for that creature’s unrepeatable individuality, and for the fact that, at the same time, strange as this may seem, this life stands for the entire natural kingdom. Examined with attention, the dissected hare illuminates the parts and properties of all other animals and, by extension, their environment. The hare, like a blade of grass or a piece of coal, is not simply a small fraction of the whole but contains the whole within itself. This makes us all one. If anything, because we are all made of the same stuff. Our flesh is the debris of dead stars, and this is also true of the apple and its tree, of each hair on the spider’s legs, and of the rock rusting on planet Mars. Each minuscule being has spokes radiating out to all of creation. Some of the raindrops falling on the potato plants in your farm back in Sweden were once in a tiger’s bladder. From one living thing, the properties of any other may be predicted. Looking at any particle with sufficient care, and following the chain that links all things together, we can arrive at the universe—the correspondences are there, if the eye is skillful enough to detect them. The guts of the anatomized hare faithfully render the picture of the entire world. And because that hare is everything, it is also us. Having understood and experienced this marvelous congruity, man can no longer examine his surroundings merely as a surface scattered with alien objects and creatures related to him only by their usefulness. The carpenter who can only devise tabletops while walking through the forest, the poet who can only remember his own private sorrows while looking at the falling snow, the naturalist who can only attach a label to every leaf and a pin to every insect—all of them are debasing nature by turning it into a storehouse, a symbol, or a fact. Knowing nature, Lorimer would often say, means learning how to be. And to achieve this, we must listen to the constant sermon of things. Our highest task is to make out the words to better partake in the ecstasy of existence.

The sideboard would be laden with broiled chops, eggs, rashers of bacon and ham, potatoes hashed with herbs and fried in butter, bread puddings each in its own puddle of sauce, a platter of crisp radishes and pickles on ice, dishes of stewed fruit from the orchard topped with fresh cream-

Hypothetically, then, you may be picking up in someone a certain very strange type of sadness that appears as a kind of disassociation from itself, maybe, Love-o.’ ‘I don’t know disassociation.’ ‘Well, love, but you know the idiom “not yourself” — “He’s not himself today,” for example,’ crooking and uncrooking fingers to form quotes on either side of what she says, which Mario adores. ‘There are, apparently, persons who are deeply afraid of their own emotions, particularly the painful ones. Grief, regret, sadness. Sadness especially, perhaps. Dolores describes these persons as afraid of obliteration, emotional engulfment. As if something truly and thoroughly felt would have no end or bottom. Would become infinite and engulf them.’ ‘Engulf means obliterate.’ ‘I am saying that such persons usually have a very fragile sense of themselves as persons. As existing at all. This interpretation is “existential,” Mario, which means vague and slightly flaky. But I think it may hold true in certain cases. My own father told stories of his own father, whose potato farm had been in St. Pamphile and very much larger than my father’s. My grandfather had had a marvelous harvest one season, and he wanted to invest money. This was in the early 1920s, when there was a great deal of money to be made on upstart companies and new American products. He apparently narrowed the field to two choices — Delaware-brand Punch, or an obscure sweet fizzy coffee substitute that sold out of pharmacy soda fountains and was rumored to contain smidgeons of cocaine, which was the subject of much controversy in those days. My father’s father chose Delaware Punch, which apparently tasted like rancid cranberry juice, and the manufacturer of which folded. And then his next two potato harvests were decimated by blight, resulting in the forced sale of his farm. Coca-Cola is now Coca-Cola. My father said his father showed very little emotion or anger or sadness about this, though. That he somehow couldn’t. My father said his father was frozen, and could feel emotion only when he was drunk. He would apparently get drunk four times a year, weep about his life, throw my father through the living room window, and disappear for several days, roaming the countryside of L’Islet Province, drunk and enraged.’ She’s not been looking at Mario this whole time, though Mario’s been looking at her. She smiled. ‘My father, of course, could himself tell this story only when he was drunk. He never threw anyone through any windows. He simply sat in his chair, drinking ale and reading the newspaper, for hours, until he fell out of the chair. And then one day he fell out of the chair and didn’t get up again, and that was how your maternal grandfather passed away. I’d never have gotten to go to University had he not died when I was a girl. He believed education was a waste for girls. It was a function of his era; it wasn’t his fault. His inheritance to Charles and me paid for university.’ She’s been smiling pleasantly this whole time, emptying the butt from the ashtray into the wastebasket, wiping the bowl’s inside with a Kleenex, straightening straight piles of folders on her desk.

In the symbiotic community of the forest, not only trees but also shrubs and grasses—and possibly all plant species—exchange information this way. However, when we step into farm fields, the vegetation becomes very quiet. Thanks to selective breeding, our cultivated plants have, for the most part, lost their ability to communicate above or below ground—you could say they are deaf and dumb—and therefore they are easy prey for insect pests.12 That is one reason why modern agriculture uses so many pesticides. Perhaps farmers can learn from the forests and breed a little more wildness back into their grain and potatoes so that they’ll be more talkative in the future. Communication

Most people no longer believe that buying sneakers made in Asian sweatshops is a kindness to those child laborers. Farming is similar. In every country on earth, the most human scenario for farmers is likely to be feeding those who live nearby--if international markets would allow them to do it. Food transport has become a bizarre and profitable economic equation that's no longer really about feeding anyone ... If you care about farmers, let the potatoes stay home.

A Girl's Garden" A neighbor of mine in the village Likes to tell how one spring When she was a girl on the farm, she did A childlike thing. One day she asked her father To give her a garden plot To plant and tend and reap herself, And he said, 'Why not?' In casting about for a corner He thought of an idle bit Of walled-off ground where a shop had stood, And he said, 'Just it.' And he said, 'That ought to make you An ideal one-girl farm, And give you a chance to put some strength On your slim-jim arm.' It was not enough of a garden Her father said, to plow; So she had to work it all by hand, But she don't mind now. She wheeled the dung in a wheelbarrow Along a stretch of road; But she always ran away and left Her not-nice load, And hid from anyone passing. And then she begged the seed. She says she thinks she planted one Of all things but weed. A hill each of potatoes, Radishes, lettuce, peas, Tomatoes, beets, beans, pumpkins, corn, And even fruit trees. And yes, she has long mistrusted That a cider-apple In bearing there today is hers, Or at least may be. Her crop was a miscellany When all was said and done, A little bit of everything, A great deal of none. Now when she sees in the village How village things go, Just when it seems to come in right, She says, 'I know! 'It's as when I was a farmer...' Oh never by way of advice! And she never sins by telling the tale To the same person twice.

The fact that no one made demands on her knowledge in her special field was lucky for Simochka. Not only she but many of her girlfriends had graduated from the institute without any such knowledge. There were many reasons for this. The young girls had come from high schools with very little grounding in mathematics and physics. They had learned in the upper grades that at faculty council meetings the school director had scolded the teachers for giving out failing marks, and that even if a pupil didn't study at all he received a diploma. In the institute, when they found time to sit down to study, they made their way through the mathematics and radio-technology as through a dense pine forest. But more often there was no time at all. Every fall for a month or more the students were taken to collective farms to harvest potatoes. For this reason, they had to attend lectures for eight and ten hours a day all the rest of the year, leaving no time to study their course work. On Monday evenings there was political indoctrination. Once a week a meeting of some kind was obligatory. Then one had to do socially useful work, too: issue bulletins, organize concerts, and it was also necessary to help at home, to shop, to wash, to dress. And what about the movies? And the theater? And the club? If a girl didn't have some fun and dance a bit during her student years, when would she do so afterward? For their examinations Simochka and her girlfriends wrote many cribs, which they hid in those sections of female clothing denied to males, and at the exams they pulled out the one the needed, smoothed it out, and turned it in as a work sheet. The examiners, of course, could have easily discovered the women students' ignorance, but they themselves were overburdened with committee meetings, assemblies, a variety of plans and reports to the dean's office and to the rector. It was hard on them to have to give an examination a second time. Besides, when their students failed, the examiners were reprimanded as if the failures were spoiled goods in a production process—according to the well-known theory that there are no bad pupils, only bad teachers. Therefore the examiners did not try to trip the students up but, in fact, attempted to get them through the examination with as good results as possible.

Indian farmers grow maize in what is called a milpa. The term means “maize field,” but refers to something considerably more complex. A milpa is a field, usually but not always recently cleared, in which farmers plant a dozen crops at once, including maize, avocados, multiple varieties of squash and bean, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potato, jicama (a tuber), amaranth (a grain-like plant), and mucuna (a tropical legume). In nature, wild beans and squash often grow in the same field as teosinte, the beans using the tall teosinte as a ladder to climb toward the sun; below ground, the beans’ nitrogen-fixing roots provide nutrients needed by teosinte. The milpa is an elaboration of this natural situation, unlike ordinary farms, which involve single-crop expanses of a sort rarely observed in unplowed landscapes. Milpa crops are nutritionally and environmentally complementary. Maize lacks digestible niacin, the amino acids lysine and tryptophan, necessary to make proteins and diets with too much maize can lead to protein deficiency and pellagra, a disease caused by lack of niacin. Beans have both lysine and tryptophan, but not the amino acids cysteine and methionine, which are provided by maize. As a result, beans and maize make a nutritionally complete meal. Squashes, for their part, provide an array of vitamins; avocados, fats. The milpa, in the estimation of H. Garrison Wilkes, a maize researcher at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, “is one of the most successful human inventions ever created.

How did wheat convince Homo sapiens to exchange a rather good life for a more miserable existence? What did it offer in return? It did not offer a better diet. Remember, humans are omnivorous apes who thrive on a wide variety of foods. Grains made up only a small fraction of the human diet before the Agricultural Revolution. A diet based on cereals is poor in minerals and vitamins, hard to digest, and really bad for your teeth and gums. Wheat did not give people economic security. The life of a peasant is less secure than that of a hunter-gatherer. Foragers relied on dozens of species to survive, and could therefore weather difficult years even without stocks of preserved food. If the availability of one species was reduced, they could gather and hunt more of other species. Farming societies have, until very recently, relied for the great bulk of their calorie intake on a small variety of domesticated plants. In many areas, they relied on just a single staple, such as wheat, potatoes or rice. If the rains failed or clouds of locusts arrived or if a fungus infected that staple species, peasants died by the thousands and millions. Nor could wheat offer security against human violence. The early farmers were at least as violent as their forager ancestors, if not more so. Farmers had more possessions and needed land for planting. The loss of pasture land to raiding neighbours could mean the difference between subsistence and starvation, so there was much less room for compromise. When a foraging band was hard-pressed by a stronger rival, it could usually move on. It was difficult and dangerous, but it was feasible. When a strong enemy threatened an agricultural village, retreat meant giving up fields, houses and granaries. In many cases, this doomed the refugees to starvation. Farmers, therefore, tended to stay put and fight to the bitter end.

No matter what anyone in North Star thought of my mom, everyone agreed on one thing: she was the best cook in the Texas Hill Country. She was known for her barbecue and fried pies. But she was most famous for one particular dish. The dish people people would drive hundreds of miles for was simply called the Number One. I imagine Momma was going to make a list of specials. The trouble was, she never got past the Number One. So there it sat at the top of the menu, alone, all by itself. The Number One: Chicken fried steak with cream gravy, mashed potatoes, green beans cooked in bacon fat, one buttermilk biscuit, and a slice of pecan pie With Brad's words ringing in my head about my vague culinary vision, I decide to make the Number One for tonight's supper. After leaving the salon, I drive to various farm stands, grocery stores, and butchers. I handpick the top-round steak with care, choose fresh eggs one by one, and feel an immense sense of home as I pull Mom's cast-iron skillet from the depths of Merry Carole's cabinets. My happiest memories involve me walking into whatever house we were staying in at the time to the sounds and smells of chicken fried steak sizzling away in that skillet. This dish is at the very epicenter of who I am. If my culinary roots start anywhere, it's with the Number One. As I tenderize the beef, my mind is clear and I'm happy. I haven't cooked like this- my recipes for me and the people I love- in far too long. If ever. Time flies as I roll out the crust for the pecan pie. I'm happy and contented as I cut out the biscuit rounds one by one. I haven't a care in the world. Being in Merry Carole's kitchen has washed away everything I left in the whirlwind of being back in North Star.

Winter comes, and our cupboard shelves in the snug stone cellar are an art gallery of crimson and green and brown and white jars. We have canned raspberries, blueberries, peas, beans, a few beets, some apple sauce from windfalls, grape jelly, fifty quarts of canned yellow corn, many quarts of beef stew and beef soup stock, also pork. A five-gallon keg of cider sits in the corner. In a wooden bin are twelve bushels of Green Mountain potatoes, and we have bought three barrels of apples. Our rutabagas, most of our beets and carrots are stored in layers of sand. There are bushels of onions and a hundred Danish Ball Head cabbages laid out on rough shelves.

Down the river from the struggling village, a tiny house sat at the edge of a massive forest, shrouded in the shadows of oak, pine, and flowering dogwood. There wasn’t much on this farm, the land hard and difficult to till, but it’s all they had. They grew potatoes, the tubers somehow able to survive, the father a scowling presence in all of his height and bluster; the mother always in another room, busy with anything else; the boy forever expanding the hole that grew inside his chest. (Hiraeth)

There is something about the first frost that brings out the caveman--- one might even say the vampire--- in me. I want to wear fur and suck the meat off lamb bones, and on comes my annual craving for boudin noir, otherwise known as blood sausage. You know you've been in France for nearly a decade when the idea of eating congealed blood sounds not only normal, but positively delightful. When I was pregnant, my body craved iron in silly amounts. I could have eaten a skyscraper. It's a shame that it's not on the French pregnancy diet--- forbidden along with charcuterie, liver, and steak tartare. It's true that boudin noir is not the sort of thing I'd buy at any old supermarket. Ideally, you want a butcher who prepares his own. I bought mine from the mustached man with the little truck in Apt market, the same one I'd spotted during our first picnic in Provence. Since our first visit, I'd returned many times to buy his delicious, very lean, saucisses fraîches and his handmade andouillettes, which I sauté with onions, Dijon mustard, and a bit of cream. I serve my boudin with roasted apples--- this time, some Golden Delicious we picked up from a farm stand by the side of the road. I toasted the apple slices with olive oil, sprinkled the whole lot with sea salt, and added a cinnamon stick and a star anise to ground the dish with cozy autumn spices. Boudin is already cooked through when you buy it, but twenty minutes or so in a hot oven gives it time to blister, even burst. I'm an adventurous eater, but the idea of boiled (or cold) boudin makes me think about moving back to New Jersey. No, not really. I admit, when you first take it out of the oven, there are some visual hurdles. There's always a brief moment--- particularly when I serve the dish to guests--- that I think, But that looks like large Labrador shit on a plate. True enough. But once you get past the aesthetics, you have one of the richest savory tastes I can imagine. Good boudin has a velveteen consistency that marries perfectly with the slight tartness of the roasted apples. Add mashed potatoes (with skin and lumps), a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and wake me in the spring.

Here we have filet of roasted halibut, caught this morning right here in Cape Cod Bay. It's pan-seared in a sauce of black garlic, blistered cherry tomatoes, and shishito peppers, both from Longnook Farms, served over a bed of coconut-lime rice with sautéed bok choy." She set the second dish down in front of Diana. "Here we have a confit of Maple Hill Farm duck leg and roasted duck breast in a balsamic-fig reduction, served over sweet-potato hash, with local roasted ramps.

First up were these dainty heirloom vegetables, speared like lollipops on a "fence" of fine metal pricks. "I'm not a minimalist by nature," the chef explains of this simple yet exquisite dish, "but sometimes the stuff we get from the farm is so perfect, I feel like I shouldn't do much with it: just vegetables, naked, with salt and a little lemon vinaigrette." Andrew and I plucked the carrots, fennel, radishes, and greens one by one, relishing the powerful flavor contained within each, along with the snap, crunch, and wholesomeness. So simple and pure. But it wasn't all so austere. We moved on to luscious potato gnocchi, fresh tilefish from Montauk, and my favorite, duck. Blue Hill gets its ducks from a local farm called Garden of Spices, where they're raised on grass, something that is rarely done in this country. "We cold smoke the legs for several hours- tenderizing the muscles from all that activity- and roast the breasts on the bone.

Until the industrial revolution, most wealth was held in land. Primogeniture was a powerful tool for aristocrats aiming to avoid fractionation among heirs, the outcome inflicted on Black and Native American owners—and on the Irish. Fractionation was in part responsible for the Irish Potato Famine and the resulting wave of immigration to the United States. Following the Popery Act of 1703, England did not allow primogeniture for Catholics in Ireland, so their farms fractured as generations passed. Plots shrank to the point that planting a diversified range of crops became impossible. Eventually, potatoes were the only viable, nutrient-dense food that could be farmed. When a blight killed that sole crop, there was no alternative. A million Irish people starved to death; an exodus of survivors came to America.

In turn, the Hadza have become so used to visiting scientists that hosting the researchers who observe them has become a way to supplement their income. Sadly, visiting scientists who want to emphasize how much they are studying bona fide hunter-gatherers sometimes turn a blind eye to the degree to which the Hadza’s way of life is changing as a result of contact with the outside world. These papers rarely mention how many Hadza children now go to government schools, and how the Hadza’s territory is almost entirely shared with neighboring tribes of farmers and pastoralists, with whom they trade and whose cows tramp all over the region. As I write this, the Hadza don’t yet have cell phones, but they are not isolated as they once were. Despite these limitations, there is still much to learn from the Hadza, and I am fortunate to have visited them on a couple of occasions. But to get to the Hadza is not easy. They live in a ring of inhospitable hills surrounding a seasonal, salty lake in northwestern Tanzania—a hot, arid, sunbaked region that is almost impossible to farm.13 The area has some of the worst roads on the planet. Of the roughly twelve hundred Hadza, only about four hundred still predominantly hunt and gather, and to find these few, more traditional Hadza, you need sturdy jeeps, an experienced guide, and a lot of skill to travel over treacherous terrain. After a rainstorm, driving twenty miles can take most of the day. Many things surprised me when I first walked into a Hadza camp mid-morning on a torrid, sunny day in 2013, but I remember being especially struck by how everyone was apparently doing nothing. Hadza camps consist of a few temporary grass huts that blend in with the surrounding bushes. I didn’t realize I had walked into a camp until I found myself amid about fifteen Hadza men, women, and children who were sitting on the ground as shown in figure 2. The women and children were relaxing on one side, and the men on another. One fellow was straightening some arrows, and a few children were toddling about, but no one was engaged in any hard work. To be sure, the Hadza weren’t lounging on sofas, watching TV, munching potato chips, and sipping soda, but they were doing what so many health experts warn us to avoid: sitting.

The coast of Austria-Hungary yielded what people called cappuzzo, a leafy cabbage. It was a two-thousand-year-old grandparent of modern broccoli and cauliflower, that was neither charismatic nor particularly delicious. But something about it called to Fairchild. The people of Austria-Hungary ate it with enthusiasm, and not because it was good, but because it was there. While the villagers called it cappuzzo, the rest of the world would call it kale. And among its greatest attributes would be how simple it is to grow, sprouting in just its second season of life, and with such dense and bulky leaves that in the biggest challenge of farming it seemed to be how to make it stop growing. "The ease with which it is grown and its apparent favor among the common people this plant is worthy a trial in the Southern States," Fairchild jotted. It was prophetic, perhaps, considering his suggestion became reality. Kale's first stint of popularity came around the turn of the century, thanks to its horticultural hack: it drew salt into its body, preventing the mineralization of soil. Its next break came from its ornamental elegance---bunches of white, purple, or pink leaves that would enliven a drab garden. And then for decades, kale kept a low profile, its biggest consumers restaurants and caterers who used the cheap, bushy leaves to decorate their salad bars. Kale's final stroke of luck came sometime in the 1990s when chemists discovered it had more iron than beef, and more calcium, iron, and vitamin K than almost anything else that sprouts from soil. That was enough for it to enter the big leagues of nutrition, which invited public relations campaigns, celebrity endorsements, and morning-show cooking segments. American chefs experimented with the leaves in stews and soups, and when baked, as a substitute for potato chips. Eventually, medical researchers began to use it to counter words like "obesity," "diabetes," and "cancer." One imagines kale, a lifetime spent unnoticed, waking up one day to find itself captain of the football team.

A milpa is a field, usually but not always recently cleared, in which farmers plant a dozen crops at once, including maize, avocados, multiple varieties of squash and bean, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potato, jicama (a tuber), amaranth (a grain-like plant), and mucuna (a tropical legume). In nature, wild beans and squash often grow in the same field as teosinte, the beans using the tall teosinte as a ladder to climb toward the sun; below ground, the beans’ nitrogen-fixing roots provide nutrients needed by teosinte. The milpa is an elaboration of this natural situation, unlike ordinary farms, which involve single-crop expanses of a sort rarely observed in unplowed landscapes.

them. Now farming became industry, and the owners followed Rome, although they did not know it. They imported slaves, although they did not call them slaves: Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Filipinos. They live on rice and beans, the business men said. They don’t need much. They wouldn’t know what to do with good wages. Why, look how they live. Why, look what they eat. And if they get funny—deport them. And all the time the farms grew larger and the owners fewer. And there were pitifully few farmers on the land any more. And the imported serfs were beaten and frightened and starved until some went home again, and some grew fierce and were killed or driven from the country. And the farms grew larger and the owners fewer. And the crops changed. Fruit trees took the place of grain fields, and vegetables to feed the world spread out on the bottoms: lettuce, cauliflower, artichokes, potatoes—stoop crops. A man may stand to use a scythe, a plow, a pitchfork; but he must crawl like a bug between the rows of lettuce, he must bend his back and pull his long bag between the cotton rows, he must go on his knees like a penitent across a cauliflower patch. And it came about that owners no longer worked on their farms. They farmed on paper; and they forgot the land, the smell, the feel of it, and remembered only that they owned it, remembered only what they gained and lost by it. And some of the farms grew so large that one man could not even conceive of them any more, so large that it took batteries of bookkeepers to keep track of interest and gain and loss; chemists to test the soil, to replenish; straw bosses to see that the stooping men were moving along the rows as swiftly as the material of their bodies could stand. Then such a farmer really became a storekeeper, and kept a store. He paid the men, and sold them food, and took the money back. And after a while he did not pay the men at all, and saved bookkeeping. These farms gave food on credit. A man might work and feed himself; and when the work was done, he might find that he owed money to the company. And the owners not only did not work the farms any more, many of them had never seen the farms they owned.

Our neighbor, Hugo du Toit, was a very handsome Afrikaner, who, with his two sisters, was a close friend of Louis Botha, the first Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, and also a close friend of General Jan Christiaan Smuts, the Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa from 1919 until 1924. He became a South African military leader during World War II. Although some accuse Smuts of having started apartheid, he later stood against it and was a force behind the founding of the United Nations. He is still considered one of the most eminent Afrikaners ever…. At his expansive farm house, Hugo had autographed photos of both men on his study wall. Parties were frequently held at my grandparents’ home and the thought of roasted turkeys and potatoes which Cherie had prepared, brings back warm memories of a delightful era, now lost forever.” The Colonial History of South Africa For many years South Africa was occupied primarily by Dutch farmers known as Boers who had first arrived in the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 when Jan van Riebeeck established the Dutch East India Company and later by British settlers who arrived in the Cape colony after the Napoleonic wars in the 1820’s, on board the sailing ships the Nautilus and the Chapman. For the most part the two got along like oil and water. After 1806, some of the Dutch-speaking settlers left the Cape Colony and trekked into the interior where they established the Boer Republics. There were many skirmishes between them, as well as with the native tribes. In 1877 after the First Boer War between the Dutch speaking farmers and the English, the Transvaal Boer republic was seized by Britain. Hostilities continued until the Second Boer War erupted in October of 1899, costing the British 22,000 lives. The Dutch speaking farmers, now called Afrikaners, lost 7,000 men and having been overrun by the English acknowledged British sovereignty by signing the peace agreement, known as the “Treaty of Vereeniging,” on May 31, 1902. Although this thumbnail sketch of South African history leaves much unsaid, the colonial lifestyle continued on for the privileged white ruling class until the white, pro-apartheid National Party, was peacefully ousted when the African National Congress won a special national election. Nelson Mandela was elected as the first black president on May 9, 1994. On May 10, 1994, Mandela was inaugurated as The Republic of South Africa's new freely elected President with Thabo Mbeki and F.W. De Klerk as his vice-presidents.

Italy’s climate is well suited to growing a variety of crops. However, in such a mountainous country, flat and fertile land is in short supply. Wheat is the main cereal crop and is grown in the lowlands of central and northern Italy. Sugar beet, potatoes, and maize also are cultivated, and some rice is grown in the Po valley. The majority of Italy’s farms are small, averaging only 17 acres in size. Each farm is usually run by one family. Tractors and other farm machinery have become more common in the past 20 years, and bullock carts are now rarely seen. Since the 1950s the government has paid for ways to improve farmland by irrigating dry areas and draining swampy ones. Despite these problems, Italy is the world’s leading producer of both olive oil and wine. More than half the farms in the country grow at least some grapes, and each region has its own special wine. Fishing ports are dotted all around Italy’s long coastline. There are still some small, family-owned fishing boats. But the fishing industry is becoming more mechanized, with fleets of large boats.

I never get it when I see people waving their national flag, getting all weepy, singing some dirge about their homeland. Everyone sobbing for the old country (which is just a wet piece of peat moss) going on and on about how many generations back their people lived on this potato farm (said with an Irish accent) and how they loved it even though they’ve probably emigrated to another country. To me it’s dirt, to them it’s land: same thing. My people this, my people that. I have no real people except when I was in the mental institution and then it was full of them. They were my people, because they did not answer with ‘fine’ when you asked how they were. We didn’t need a flag.

Not far away lay the big cannons that had held Ulysses Grant at bay for fifty siege days while the citizens of the town ate rat flesh and clung to their long-cherished beliefs. How many had died in that lost cause? Dr. Tarver wondered. Fifty thousand casualties at Gettysburg alone, and for what? To free the slaves who built this house? To preserve the Union? Had Stonewall Jackson died to create a nation of couch potatoes ignorant of their own history and incapable of simple mathematics? If those brave soldiers in blue and gray had seen what lay in the future, they would have laid down their muskets and walked home to their farms.

Mark came home late one frozen Sunday carrying a bag of small, silver fish. They were smelts, locally known as icefish. He’d brought them at the store in the next town south, across from which a little village had sprung up on the ice of the lake, a collection of shacks with holes drilled in and around them. I’d seen the men going from the shore to the shacks on snowmobiles, six-packs of beer strapped on behind them like a half dozen miniature passengers. “Sit and rest,” Mark said. “I’m cooking.” He sautéed minced onion in our homemade butter, added a little handful of crushed, dried sage, and when the onion was translucent, he sprinkled n flour to make a roux, which he loosened with beer, in honor of the fishermen. He added cubed carrot, celery root, potato, and some stock, and then the fish, cut into pieces, and when they were all cooked through he poured in a whole morning milking’s worth of Delia’s yellow cream. Icefish chowder, rich and warm, eaten while sitting in Mark’s lap, my feet so close to the woodstove that steam came off my damp socks.

Steve just made himself another diamond sword to go with his shiny diamond armor, of course. Apparently he's been in the mines since last night to find the materials. Meanwhile, he's given me the job of farming. I've been out here all night gathering wheat, potatoes, and carrots while dodging creeper attacks. I've had to fix the field three different times last night because apparently creepers are attracted to produce. Steve needs to fall in a hole.   1:30pm

Harley Diekerhoff looked up from peeling potatoes to glance out the kitchen window. It was still snowing... even harder than it had been this morning. So much white, it dazzled. Hands still, breath catching, she watched the thick, white flakes blow past the ranch house at a dizzying pace, enthralled by the flurry of the lacy snowflakes. So beautiful. Magical A mysterious silent ballet in all white, the snow swirling, twirling just like it did in her favorite scene from the Nutcracker—the one with the Snow Queen and her breathtaking corps in their white tutus with their precision and speed—and then that dazzling snow at the end, the delicate flakes powdering the stage. Harley’s chest ached. She gripped the peeler more tightly, and focused on her breathing. She didn’t want to remember. She wasn’t going to remember. Wasn’t going to go there, not now, not today. Not when she had six hungry men to feed in a little over two hours. She picked up a potato, started peeling. She’d come to Montana to work. She’d taken the temporary job at Copper Mountain Ranch to get some distance from her family this Christmas, and working on the Paradise Valley cattle ranch would give her new memories. Like the snow piling up outside the window. She’d never lived in a place that snowed like this. Where she came from in Central California, they didn’t have snow, they had fog. Thick soupy Tule fog that blanketed the entire valley, socking in airports, making driving nearly impossible. And on the nights when the fog lifted and temperatures dropped beneath the cold clear sky, the citrus growers rushed to light smudge pots to protect their valuable, vulnerable orange crops. Her family didn’t grow oranges. Her family were Dutch dairy people. Harley had been raised on a big dairy farm in Visalia, and she’d marry a dairyman in college, and they’d had their own dairy, too. But that’s the part she needed to forget. That’s why she’d come to Montana, with its jagged mountains and rugged river valleys and long cold winters. She’d arrived here the Sunday following Thanksgiving and would work through mid-January, when Brock Sheenan’s housekeeper returned from a personal leave of absence. In January, Harley would either return to California or look for another job in Crawford County. Harley was tempted to stay, as the Bozeman employment agency assured her they’d have no problem finding her a permanent position if she wanted one.

In Belinda's dark Craftsman, we drank Riley's cocktails, then ate Belinda's impeccable entrées: roast vegetable lasagna, chicken piccata, shrimp and grits, roast pork with prunes. "This pork is amazing," said Jennie, present for the first time in weeks. "But I move that from now on, we don't have red meat or pork---not because I'm vegetarian but because those farming practices are so bad for the environment." In fact, I didn't cook pork or red meat at home (except for brisket at Passover) for precisely Jennie's reason. As a restaurant critic, I ate---or at least tasted---everything. And as a guest, I'd taken the no-asshole pledge and ate whatever my hosts put on the table, though I drew the line at eel. (Some things are too ugly to eat.) Murmured protests came from the meat-and-potato contingent (Charlotte, Belinda, Sam, and Adrian), but even they agreed that we could stick with chicken and fish. "And only fish on the safe lists---low-mercury, sustainably farmed," said Jennie. Adrian said, "Best quit while you're ahead, Jen.

. What? It’s not like the farmer was doing any farming! He’s even trading emeralds for people to bring him the wheat out of his fields! And I replanted all the potatoes I took!

When Flury looked at the plants under a confocal microscope, which shines lasers that make the fluorescent dye in the plastics glow, he found particles had attached to the roots but hadn't penetrated them. So this is worrisome in that plastics might be accumulating around the roots we eat-carrots, sweet potatoes, radishes but it's good news in that neither a fibrous nor taproot system seemed to uptake plastic into the plant itself, unlike how crops readily soak up nutrients like nitrogen and iron. "The plant has probably an incentive to take up an iron particle, whereas a plastic particle will not be used by the plant," says Flury. This contradicts previous lab studies on wheat and other crops, like beans and onions and lettuce, showing that roots do take up plastics. Over at ETH Zürich, analytical chemist Denise Mitrano took a different tack, tagging nanoplastics not with fluorescence but with the rare metal palladium. And instead of growing wheat in agar, she grew it hydroponically, exposing the growing plants to the "doped" particles. She could then track the nanoplastics as the wheat plants took them up into their roots and shoots. "We didn't let the wheat go to grains, so we don't know if the nanoplastic would eventually get into the food source, but it did go up further into the plant," says Mitrano. However, she didn't see any big changes in the physiology of the plants, like growth rate or chlorophyl production. "But we did see that it changed the root structure a bit and the cellular structure in the root, which would indicate that the plant was still under stress.

I was enchanted as soon as I stepped off the train. As were the hundreds of others who got off the train with me who were now in the process of climbing into buggies and wagons, en route to the dozens of resorts, enclaves, and tent campgrounds in the area, where they would soak up the sun, get drunk on Cabernet, swim and picnic in the druidy redwood groves while reciting Shakespeare. I climbed into a wagon and was driven off by a Mr. Lars Magnusson to view the old Olson farm. We traveled a mile or so into the hills, past oak glens, brooks, and pools of water, past manzanitas, madrones, and trees dripping with Spanish moss. Sonoma Mountain was to the west; its shadow cast everything in a soft purple light. When we finally reached the farm and I saw the luscious valley spread out in front of me, I knew this was it. Greengage. It would be a home for me and Martha at first, but I hoped it would soon be something more. A tribute to my mother and her ideals; a community in which she would have flourished, where she would have lived a good long life. Greengage.The burbling creek that ran smack down the middle of the property. The prune, apple, and almond orchards: the fields of wheat, potatoes, and melons. The pastures for cows and sheep. The chicken house and pigsty. The gentle, sloping hills, mounds that looked like God's knuckles, where I would one day plant a vineyard.

More like a vault -- you pull the handle out and on the shelves: not a lot, and what there is (a boiled potato in a bag, a chicken carcass under foil) looking dispirited, drained, mugged. This is not a place to go in hope or hunger. But, just to the right of the middle of the middle door shelf, on fire, a lit-from-within red, heart red, sexual red, wet neon red, shining red in their liquid, exotic, aloof, slumming in such company: a jar of maraschino cherries. Three-quarters full, fiery globes, like strippers at a church social. Maraschino cherries, maraschino, the only foreign word I knew. Not once did I see these cherries employed: not in a drink, nor on top of a glob of ice cream, or just pop one in your mouth. Not once. The same jar there through an entire childhood of dull dinners -- bald meat, pocked peas and, see above, boiled potatoes. Maybe they came over from the old country, family heirlooms, or were status symbols bought with a piece of the first paycheck from a sweatshop, which beat the pig farm in Bohemia, handed down from my grandparents to my parents to be someday mine, then my child's? They were beautiful and, if I never ate one, it was because I knew it might be missed or because I knew it would not be replaced and because you do not eat that which rips your heart with joy.

The Bamiyan Valley below was carpeted by lush farming fields. Babi said they were green winter wheat and alfafa, potatoes too... It was autumn, and Laila could make out people in bright tunics on the roofs of mud brick dwellings laying out the harvest to dry... Beyond the village, beyond the river and the streams, Laila saw foothills, bare and dusty brown, and, beyond those, as beyond everything else in Afghanistan, the snowcapped Hindu Kush. The sky above all of this was an immaculate, spotless blue. "It's so quiet," Laila breathed... "It's what I always remember about being up here," Babi said, "The silence. The peace of it. I wanted you to experience it. But I also wanted you to see your country's heritage, children, to learn of its rich past. You seem some things I can teach you. Some you can learn from books. But there are things that, well, you just have to *see* and *feel*.

I Want More Cheese Jasper Van Dumpken was a twelve year old boy that lived on a farm. He had rosy cheeks, bright red hair, and a huge appetite. He ate rye bread with cheese and fresh milk for breakfast. At lunch, he usually ate macaroni and cheese. At dinner time, he ate a portion of meat and potatoes with lots of cheese of course. As you can see, cheese was Jasper’s favorite kind of food. Although Jasper’s parents weren’t particularly rich, they always had plenty to eat. However, because of Jasper’s craving for cheese they often ran out of it. His father would poke fun at him and ask him if he had a hole in his tummy, because he just couldn’t understand how he put so much cheese in there. One summer’s evening, Jasper climbed into bed with his stomach a little more filled than usual. He had stuffed himself with cheese curds all day. He felt a soft wind blow through his window and he took a sniff of the piny smell that came in from the tree nearby. That tree seemed to glow and he thought he saw beams of lights dancing under it. They seemed to be shaped like a girl. He laughed at the idea of it. Pretty soon though, he heard a voice whisper, “Come with us, there’s plenty of cheese.” Then again the voice whispered, “Come with us, there’s plenty of cheese.” Now Jasper was a very curious young man, and although something deep inside of him told him to stay put, he was ready for an adventure. So he put on his shoes and carefully climbed out his bedroom window. As he stepped out, he noticed three little women. They were absolutely beautiful and had wings that shined like fireflies. “Come with us and we will show you where we keep all of our cheese,” they said together. Their soft voices sounded like music to his ears. He wanted to try their cheese so he followed them to end of the forest. They told him to sit down. They disappeared and came back carrying all different kinds of cheese. Some that Jasper had never even tried before. Jasper ate until his poor little tummy ached. “Stop, please, stop! No more cheese!” he cried out. But the fairies kept bringing more until a huge wall had formed around him. Jasper was now trapped. He started to scream for help, but it was no use. He yelled until he was tired and fell right to sleep. Several hours later Jasper woke up, he rubbed his eyes and expected to see mounds of cheese around him. But instead he was back in his bedroom. Jasper breathed a sigh of relief because it had all been a terrible nightmare. From that day forward, Jasper never ate another piece of cheese again. Although he had once loved it, after that horrible dream, he couldn’t even stand the smell of cheese anymore.

Newspapers usually describe globalization in purely economic terms, but it is also a biological phenomenon; indeed, from a long-term perspective it may be primarily a biological phenomenon. Two hundred and fifty million years ago the world contained a single landmass known to scientists as Pangaea. Geological forces broke up this vast expanse, splitting Eurasia and the Americas. Over time the two divided halves of Pangaea developed wildly different suites of plants and animals. Before Colón a few venturesome land creatures had crossed the oceans and established themselves on the other side. Most were insects and birds, as one would expect, but the list also includes, surprisingly, a few farm species—bottle gourds, coconuts, sweet potatoes—the subject today of scholarly head-scratching. Otherwise, the world was sliced into separate ecological domains. Colón’s signal accomplishment was, in the phrase of historian Alfred W. Crosby, to reknit the seams of Pangaea.

The eyes of a potato never close to go to sleep.

Food. Super!” Bess said. “I vote for that.” She drove the car to the restaurant, turned into its driveway, and parked in the rear. There was a side entrance so the three friends entered through this door. The first floor of the farmhouse had been converted into a charming, old-fashioned dining room. A pleasant-faced woman, who reminded Nancy of Hannah Gruen, showed them to a table next to a window. It overlooked a low hedge between the two properties. “We have no printed menus,” the restaurant owner said. “Tonight we have homemade vegetable soup, baked ham or pot roast, sweet potatoes, and some of my home-canned peaches with chocolate cake for dessert. Maybe you noticed my orchards. The peaches grew right here.” Bess sighed. “It must be heavenly living on a farm and raising all your own produce. Do you have chickens and cows and everything?” The woman, who said her name was Mrs. Ziegler, beamed. “Yes, everything.

Oh, so you like potatoes?” She rolls her eyes again. “Hardy har, farm boy.

In the course of researching, I learned that colonial Connecticut had been a major provisioner of the British West Indies plantations where slaves were growing and processing sugar in a monoculture that yielded huge profits to England. Connecticut-grown onions, potatoes, pigs, and cows were considered the best of the best on the Caribbean’s English plantations, and the sturdy white oak we grew also was highly sought after. The horses raised on farms in eastern Connecticut were shipped to the Caribbean in the tens

We were both dismayed by the freedoms the farmers were required to give up in return for the cash the government gave them. If you wanted to grow potatoes on your farm, for example, the Roosevelt administration would tell you how many bushels of potatoes you could grow and sell, tax free. Your tax-free potatoes, when they went to market, would go in a federal package, bearing a federal stamp, by permission of a federal bureau. If you wanted to grow and sell more potatoes than the law allowed, you had to pay a tax of forty-five cents a bushel. If you got caught bootlegging potatoes, you and your customer would be fined a thousand dollars. Get caught again and you went to jail—and your customer went as well.

Gabriel Solomon, our sandy-lashed, red-haired, soon-to-be-surgeon waiter, recited the night's menu: salad, broiled salmon, boiled red potatoes, sliced tomatoes and corn on the cob, all served family style. A vast slab of butter lay on a white plate next to baskets of bread- white Wonder bread and buttermilk biscuits, neither of which had ever touched our lips. There was a bottle of Hershey's chocolate syrup in the center of the table, a novelty for Jews who didn't mix dairy foods with meat. "The milk is from the farm's cows," Gabe explained. "It's pasteurized but it doesn't taste like city milk. If you'd like city milk, it will be delivered to you. But try the farm milk. Some guests love it. The children seem to enjoy it with syrup." Gabe paused. "I forgot to ask you, do you want your salad dressed or undressed?" Jack immediately replied, "Undressed of course," and winked. My mother worried about having fish with rolls and butter. "Fish is dairy," my father pronounced, immediately an expert on Jewish dietary laws. "With meat it's no butter and no milk for the children." Lil kept fidgeting in her straight-backed chair. "What kind of food is this?" she asked softly. "What do they call it?" "American," the two men said in unison. Within minutes Gabe brought us a bowl filled with iceberg lettuce, butter lettuce, red oak lettuce. "These are grown right here, in our own garden. We pick the greens daily. I brought you some oil and vinegar on the side, and a gravy boat of sour cream for the tomatoes. Take a look at these tomatoes." Each one was the size of a small melon, blood red, virtually seedless. Our would-be surgeon sliced them, one-two-three. We had not encountered such tomatoes before. "Beauties, aren't they?" asked Gabe. Jack held to certain eccentricities in his summer food. Without fail he sprinkled sugar over tomatoes, sugared his melons no matter how ripe and spread his corn with mustard- mustard!

peoples that made up the Meso-American empires had orchards full of avocados, coconuts, papayas, pineapples, prickly pears and a long list of others whose names don’t ring familiar in our ears. Their farms grew the father of our red tomato and a little green husk “tomato”; there were chiles, manioc, sweet potatoes, four kinds of squash, peanuts and at least five major strains of beans. Epazote was the herb of preference (as it is today), and there were huge quantities of amaranth and chia seeds to make into

I need your help, West,” he said quietly. His brother took his time about replying. “What would you have me do?” “Go to Eversby Priory.” “You would trust me around the cousins?” West asked sullenly. “I have no choice. Besides, you didn’t seem particularly interested in any of them when we were there.” “There’s no point in seducing innocents. Too easy.” West folded his arms across his chest. “What is the point of sending me to Eversby?” “I need you to manage the tenants’ drainage issues. Meet with each one individually. Find out what was promised, and what has to be done--” “Absolutely not.” “Why?” “Because that would require me to visit farms and discuss weather and livestock. As you know, I have no interest in animals unless they’re served with port wine sauce and a side of potatoes.” “Go to Hampshire,” Devon said curtly. “Meet with the farmers, listen to their problems, and if you can manage it, fake some empathy. Afterward I want a report and a list of recommendations on how to improve the estate.” Muttering in disgust, West stood and tugged at his wrinkled waistcoat. “My only recommendation for your estate,” he said as he left the room, “is to get rid of it.

True, there's an aisle devoted to foreign foods, and then there are familiar foods that have been through the Japanese filter and emerged a little bit mutated. Take breakfast cereal. You'll find familiar American brands such as Kellogg's, but often without English words anywhere on the box. One of the most popular Kellogg's cereals in Japan is Brown Rice Flakes. They're quite good, and the back-of-the-box recipes include cold tofu salad and the savory pancake okonomiyaki, each topped with a flurry of crispy rice flakes. Iris and I got mildly addicted to a Japanese brand of dark chocolate cornflakes, the only chocolate cereal I've ever eaten that actually tastes like chocolate. (Believe me, I've tried them all.) Stocking my pantry at Life Supermarket was fantastically simple and inexpensive. I bought soy sauce, mirin, rice vinegar, rice, salt, and sugar. (I was standing right in front of the salt when I asked where to find it This happens to me every time I ask for help finding any item in any store.) Total outlay: about $15, and most of that was for the rice. Japan is an unabashed rice protectionist, levying prohibitive tariffs on imported rice. As a result, supermarket rice is domestic, high quality, and very expensive. There were many brands of white rice to choose from, the sacks advertising different growing regions and rice varieties. (I did the restaurant wine list thing and chose the second least expensive.) Japanese consumers love to hear about the regional origins of their foods. I almost never saw ingredients advertised as coming from a particular farm, like you'd see in a farm-to-table restaurant in the U.S., but if the milk is from Hokkaido, the rice from Niigata, and the tea from Uji, all is well. I suppose this is not so different from Idaho potatoes and Florida orange juice. When I got home, I opened the salt and sugar and spooned some into small bowls near the stove. The next day I learned that Japanese salt and sugar are hygroscopic: their crystalline structure draws in water from the air (and Tokyo, in summer, has enough water in the air to supply the world's car washes). I figured this was harmless and went on licking slightly moist salt and sugar off my fingers every time I cooked.

century ago, the typical Iowa farm raised more than a dozen different plant and animal species: cattle, chickens, corn, hogs, apples, hay, oats, potatoes, cherries, wheat, plums, grapes, and pears. Now it raises only two: corn and soybeans.

We have pretzels and mustard. We have doughnuts. And if we really, really like you, we have chips and dip. This is fun food. It isn't stuffy. It isn't going to make anyone nervous. The days of the waiter as a snob, the days of the menu as an exam/ the guest has to pass are over. But at the same time, we're not talking about cellophane bags here, are we? These are hand-cut potato chips with crème fraîche and a dollop of beluga caviar. This is the gift we send out. It's better than Christmas." He offered the plate to Adrienne and she helped herself to a long, golden chip. She scooped up a tiny amount of the glistening black caviar. Just tasting it made her feel like a person of distinction. Adrienne hoped the menu meeting might continue in this vein- with the staff tasting each ambrosial dish. But there wasn't time; service started in thirty minutes. Thatcher wanted to get through the menu. "The corn chowder and the shrimp bisque are cream soups, but neither of these soups is heavy. The Caesar is served with pumpernickel croutons and white anchovies. The chèvre salad is your basic mixed baby greens with a round of breaded goat cheese, and the candy-striped beets are grown locally at Bartlett Farm. Ditto the rest of the vegetables, except for the portobello mushrooms that go into the ravioli- those are flown in from Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. So when you're talking about vegetables, you're talking about produce that's grown in Nantucket soil, okay? It's not sitting for thirty-six hours on the back of a truck. Fee selects them herself before any of you people are even awake in the morning. It's all very Alice Waters, what we do here with our vegetables." Thatcher clapped his hands. He was revving up, getting ready for the big game. In the article in Bon Appétit, Thatcher had mentioned that the only thing he loved more than his restaurant was college football. "Okay, okay!" he shouted. It wasn't a menu meeting; it was a pep rally! "The most popular item on the menu is the steak frites. It is twelve ounces of aged New York strip grilled to order- and please note you need a temperature on that- served with a mound of garlic fries. The duck, the sword, the lamb lollipops- see, we're having fun here- are all served at the chef's temperature. If you have a guest who wants the lamb killed- by which I mean well done- you're going to have to take it up with Fiona. The sushi plate is spelled out for you- it's bluefin tuna caught forty miles off the shore, and the sword is harpooned in case you get a guest who has just seen a Nova special about how the Canadian coast is being overfished.

In the symbiotic community of the forest, not only trees but also shrubs and grasses—and possibly all plant species—exchange information this way. However, when we step into farm fields, the vegetation becomes very quiet. Thanks to selective breeding, our cultivated plants have, for the most part, lost their ability to communicate above or below ground—you could say they are deaf and dumb—and therefore they are easy prey for insect pests.12 That is one reason why modern agriculture uses so many pesticides. Perhaps farmers can learn from the forests and breed a little more wildness back into their grain and potatoes so that they’ll be more talkative in the future.

Willard had worked a minor miracle sorting the books. They had discarded everything written in a language that no one could read— “For,” as Imogene said, “even if it lays out all the solutions in plain text, none of us would be able to tell”—and set aside many books they seemed highly unlikely to be useful. “If it turns out that the secret was hidden in A Brief Treatsie on the History of Potatoes, I shall be very cross,” Hester said. “You may blame me,” Willard told her, “and I shall retire and take up potato farming to make up for it.

Nostalgia for the U.S.S.R. is an important feature of Russia today, and a political factor not to be underestimated. Long before Donald Trump's clarion call to "Make America Great Again," Vladimir Putin had uttered the unofficial slogan of his reign, "We shall be as respected and feared as the U.S.S.R." This rhetoric was employed from the first steps he took on coming to power. I thought it laughable and was sure it wouldn't work, but I was wrong. It is a banal thought, but the human brain really is designed in a way that means you return in memory only to what was good in the past. Those who feel nostalgic for the U.S.S.R. are in reality nostalgic for their youth-a time when everything was still in the future, when you played volleyball on the beach in the company of friends, and in the evening drank wine, grilled kebabs, and had no worries about crime, unemployment, or uncertain prospects for the future. Even such archetypally Soviet absurdities as being sent to "dig up potatoes," compulsory work in the fields to which schoolchildren, students, and the workers of city enterprises were dispatched in the later years of the U.S.S.R., are remembered as merely a distraction, pretty awful but fun. At the time, having to dig up frozen ground, "helping the collective farm workers save the harvest," irritated everybody and only demonstrated the total failure of the Soviet agricultural system. But who remembers the rubber boots that pinched, the dirt under your fingernails, and the sense of the utter pointlessness of the labor, when it is all eclipsed by a picture in your head of a female classmate smiling dazzlingly at you from the neighboring plot.

laboring ewe and unborn lambs to the wolves. On Vermont hill farms like ours, most of which were self-sufficient by economic necessity well into the twentieth century, another live birth would have meant hope for a family that faced spring with little left but potatoes and cabbage in the cellar. The peaks surrounding our farm tell this story—Scrag, Stark, Mount Hunger—while Shepard Brook drains their slopes to the Mad River.

Once a year, on St. Bride's Eve, my father came home from his day's work, carrying a load of green rushes on his shoulders. At the door he would stand for a moment with his feet on the threshold and say these words: "Saint Bride sends her blessings to all within. Give her welcome." Inside my mother would answer, "Welcome she is," and at these words my father would loosen the shoulder-knot and throw his burden on the floor. Then he made crosses from the rushes, wonderful crosses they were. It was said that my father was the best at that kind of work in all the countryside. When made, they were placed in various parts of the house and farm. They were hung up in our home, over the lintel of the door, the picture of the Holy Family, the beds, the potato pile and the fireplace. One was placed over the spring well, one in the pigsty, and one over the roof-tree of the byre. By doing this the blessing of Saint Bride remained in the house for the whole of the following year.