Tomato Farming Quotes

According to analyses conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 100 grams of fresh tomato today has 30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin, 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than it did in the 1960s. But the modern tomato does shame it's counterpart in one area: It contains fourteen times as much sodium.

Many of the Prego sauces—whether cheesy, chunky, or light—have one feature in common: The largest ingredient, after tomatoes, is sugar. A mere half cup of Prego Traditional, for instance, has more than two teaspoons of sugar, as much as two-plus Oreo cookies, a tube of Go-Gurt, or some of the Pepperidge Farm Apple Turnovers that Campbell also makes.

A can of tomato soup has many uses. One of them is as a projectile through a window. Next time, buy some Condensed Duck Juice.

All farms require a resident dreamer, someone to thumb through seed catalogs in the cold days of late January, imagining summer fields of squash and cucumbers, tomatoes and sunflowers. Fall harvests are the reward of winter dreams. Someone must decide where the next fence should be placed, or conceive of a clever new way to organize the market stand. On a farm, there's no shortage of little dreams needing to be dreamed.

On April 1st, 1957, a BBC news program ended with a three minute segment about a Spaghetti farm in Switzerland. In the segment, spaghetti (not being a popular dish in England at the time) was said to grow on trees. Many people believed the report and called the BBC to ask how to grow their own spaghetti tree. The response: "Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.

Many California farmers have transitioned from delicate crops like tomatoes to more robust nuts because they can be harvested mechanically. Overall agricultural employment in California fell by about 11 percent in the first decade of the twenty-first century, even as the total production of crops like almonds, which are compatible with automated farming techniques, has exploded.

The sweet taste, the crunchiness... it's the core of the cabbage chopped into thin sticks!" "Oh! And the sauce on it is puréed raw tomato!! I've had this tomato before too!!" "A... fully ripe tomato grown using the Ryoken farming method..." "It's amazing! This cabbage core goes way beyond a unique dish--- it's incredible !" "It's like we'd forgotten how spectacular the taste of nature can really be! A cabbage as good as this merits a cooking method that highlights the quality of the vegetable.

LIVE FROM THE PASTA FARMS, THIS HAS BEEN AL DENTE: The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) aired a documentary on its new show Panorama about Spaghetti growers in Switzerland-- on April 1, 1957. The joke broadcast showed Swiss spaghetti farmers picking fresh spaghetti from 'spaghetti trees' and preparing the spaghetti for market. It also mentioned that the pasta farmers had a bumper crop partly because of the 'virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil.' Soon after the broadcast, the BBC received phone calls from viewers eager to know if spaghetti really grew on trees and how they might grow a spaghetti tree of their own. To the last question, the BBC reportedly replied that they should 'place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.

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

And there were so many places to go. Thickets of bramble. Fallen trees. Ferns, and violets, and gorse, paths all lined with soft green moss. And in the very heart of the wood, there was a clearing, with a circle of stones, and an old well in the middle, next to a big dead oak tree, and everything- fallen branches, standing stones, even the well, with its rusty pump- draped and festooned and piled knee-high with ruffles and flounces of strawberries, with blackbirds picking over the fruit, and the scent like all of summer. It wasn't like the rest of the farm. Narcisse's farm is very neat, with everything set out in its place. A little field for sunflowers: one for cabbages; one for squash; one for Jerusalem artichokes. Apple trees to one side; peaches and plums to the other. And in the polytunnels, there were daffodils, tulips, freesias; and in season, lettuce, tomatoes, beans. All neatly planted, in rows, with nets to keep the birds from stealing them. But here there were no nets, or polytunnels, or windmills to frighten away the birds. Just that clearing of strawberries, and the old well in the circle of stones. There was no bucket in the well. Just the broken pump, and the trough, and a grate to cover the hole, which was very deep, and not quite straight, and filled with ferns and that swampy smell. And if you put your eye to the grate, you could see a roundel of sky reflected in the water, and little pink flowers growing out from between the cracks in the old stone. And there was a kind of draught coming up from under the ground, as if something was hiding there and breathing, very quietly.

Jess gazed at the apples arranged in all their colors: russet, blushing pink, freckled gold. She cast her eyes over heaps of pumpkins, bins of tomatoes cut from the vine, pale gooseberries with crumpled leaves. "You could buy a farm." "Why would I do that?" "To be healthy," said Jess. Emily shook her head. "I don't think I'd be a very good farmer." "You could have other people farm your farm for you," said Jess. "And you could just eat all the good things." Emily laughed. "That's what we're doing here at the Farmers' Market. We're paying farmers to farm for us. You've just invented agriculture." "Yes, but you could have your own farm and go out there and breathe the fresh air and touch the fresh earth." "I think that's called a vacation," said Emily. "Oh, you're too boring to be rich," Jess said. "And I would be so talented!

Have a seat in a liberal restaurant, and you’re assaulted with all sorts of rules and information. No substitutions. Everything organic. They’ll tell you the name of the farm the lettuce comes from, the variety of tomato in the salad, and probably even the name of the hardworking chicken who donated the eggs. But they won’t ask you how you want your steak. They won’t ask you anything, actually. At liberal restaurants, they tell you what you’re going to have.

She too looked like a regular lady, living in the world- didn't seem particularly with it or excitable or stellar. But that chicken, bathed in thyme and butter- I hadn't ever tasted a chicken that had such a savory warmth to it, a taste I could only suitably identify as the taste of chicken. Somehow, in her hands, food felt recognized. Spinach became spinach- with a good farm's care, salt, the heat and her attention, it seemed to relax into its leafy, broad self. Garlic seized upon its lively nature. Tomatoes tasted as substantive as beef.

TELLING TIME Before she was old, she took canoe trips in the rain and buried her passions deep within nature poems. Ten years before she was old, her husband died and developers paid a mighty price for their dairy farm. She knew she was getting old, when rest stops in Iowa changed over to those crazy automated washrooms. When she was old, God helped with little things (growing tomatoes in her garden) but was missing on big ticket items (bringing her husband back). She knew she had lived too long when her grandson explained extinction to his stuffed polar bear.

You pay homage when and where you can. I love the smell of the bulb as the earth opens and releases it in harvest, an aroma that only those who grow garlic and handle the bulb and the leaves still fresh from the earth can know.Anyone who gardens knows these indescribable presences--of not only fresh garlic, but onions, carrots and their tops, parsley's piercing signal, the fragrant exultations of a tomato plant in its prime, sweet explosions of basil. They can be known best and most purely on the spot, in the instant, in the garden, in the sun, in the rain. They cannot be carried away from their place in the earth. They are inimitable. And they have no shelf life at all.

The Herb Farm reminded Marguerite of the farms in France; it was like a farm in a child's picture book. There was a white wooden fence that penned in sheep and goats, a chicken coop where a dozen warm eggs cost a dollar, a red barn for the two bay horses, and a greenhouse. Half of the greenhouse did what greenhouses do, while the other half had been fashioned into very primitive retail space. The vegetables were sold from wooden crates, all of them grown organically, before such a process even had a name- corn, tomatoes, lettuces, seventeen kinds of herbs, squash, zucchini, carrots with the bushy tops left on, spring onions, radishes, cucumbers, peppers, strawberries for two short weeks in June, pumpkins after the fifteenth of September. There was chèvre made on the premises from the milk of the goats; there was fresh butter. And when Marguerite showed up for the first time in the summer of 1975 there was a ten-year-old boy who had been given the undignified job of cutting zinnias, snapdragons, and bachelor buttons and gathering them into attractive-looking bunches.

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.

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.

Working with chocolate always helps me find the calm centre of my life. It has been with me for so long; nothing here can surprise me. This afternoon I am making pralines, and the little pan of chocolate is almost ready on the burner. I like to make these pralines by hand. I use a ceramic container over a shallow copper pan: an unwieldy, old-fashioned method, perhaps, but the beans demand special treatment. They have traveled far, and deserve the whole of my attention. Today I am using couverture made from the Criollo bean: its taste is subtle, deceptive; more complex than the stronger flavors of the Forastero; less unpredictable than the hybrid Trinitario. Most of my customers will not know that I am using this rarest of cacao beans; but I prefer it, even though it may be more expensive. The tree is susceptible to disease: the yield is disappointingly low; but the species dates back to the time of the Aztecs, the Olmecs, the Maya. The hybrid Trinitario has all but wiped it out, and yet there are still some suppliers who deal in the ancient currency. Nowadays I can usually tell where a bean was grown, as well as its species. These come from South America, from a small, organic farm. But for all my skill, I have never seen a flower from the Theobroma cacao tree, which only blooms for a single day, like something in a fairytale. I have seen photographs, of course. In them, the cacao blossom looks something like a passionflower: five-petaled and waxy, but small, like a tomato plant, and without that green and urgent scent. Cacao blossoms are scentless; keeping their spirit inside a pod roughly the shape of a human heart. Today I can feel that heart beating: a quickening inside the copper pan that will soon release a secret. Half a degree more of heat, and the chocolate will be ready. A filter of steam rises palely from the glossy surface. Half a degree, and the chocolate will be at its most tender and pliant.

farm-to-table focuses on those singular tomatoes and carrots without considering the entire harvest. It

farm-to-table focuses on those singular tomatoes and carrots without considering the entire harvest. It’s a way of eating that is ecologically expensive; it also tends to ignore all that’s required to produce the most delicious food.

The urban sanctuary I envisioned in Graber’s lab is coming to life. Our farm and others like it can transform urban communities from food deserts into living oases where fresh food is grown, delivered, and directly consumed. Now it’s time for pioneers and entrepreneurs around the world to expand this reality and bring a fresh revolution into our cities, one fish and one tomato at a time.

Mangos are my favorite fruit treat during spring and summer, but you have to know where to look to get good ones. Check out Hispanic markets and Indian grocery stores. The difference between a mango from Walmart and one from an Indian spice store is like the difference between a hard, pale, tasteless, pink tomato and a ripe, flavorful, farm-stand heirloom. You should be able to smell the mango at arm’s length.

I looked expectantly to the window but there were no plates lined up. Instead Scott, the young, tattooed sous chef, passed me a sliver of tomato. The insides were tie-dyed pink and red. "A Marvel-Striped from Blooming Hills Farm," he said, as if I had asked him a question. I cupped it while it dripped. He pinched up flakes of sea salt from a plastic tub and flicked it on the slice. "When they're like this don't fuck with them. Just a little salt." "Wow," I said. And I meant it. I had never thought of a tomato as a fruit----the ones I had known were mostly white in the center and rock hard. But this was so luscious, so tart I thought it victorious. So----some tomatoes tasted like water, and some tasted like summer lightning.

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.

Diana loosened a sliver of halibut with her fork and slipped it into her mouth. She closed her eyes, tasting the sweetness of the fish; the tart, juicy tomatoes; oil and butter and garlic and thyme. "Good?" asked Reese. His eyes were dark brown behind his glasses, and there was a deep dimple in his left cheek. She chewed and swallowed. "So good." He was still watching her, clearly expecting more. "I don't even like fish, usually. But this- it's so sweet! The tomatoes..." "They're from a farm in Truro. They turn into jam when you reduce them. They're my favorite," he said, voice lowered, like he was telling her a secret, or like he didn't want to hurt the figs' or the bok choy's feelings. "We source as many of our ingredients locally as we can. Our milk and eggs, our butter, our honey- everything we can get from around here, we do.

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.

One of the more interesting work-alignment tactics I came across while writing this book was that of Sheryl Woodhouse-Keese, who owns an earth-friendly stationery outfit called Twisted Limb Paperworks in Bloomington, Indiana. Woodhouse-Keese put her headquarters on a ten-acre farm (her house is at the other end), and started growing tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, herbs, melons, and so forth. But, of course, there turned out to be a huge overlap between people who wanted to work at a recycled paper stationery company, and people who are interested in small scale, sustainable agriculture. So, quickly, the farm “turned from my personal garden into an employee garden,” Woodhouse-Keese says. Now, many Twisted Limb Paperworks employees take their breaks in the garden while pulling weeds, and load up bags of produce into their trunks rather than stopping by the grocery store on the way home. While the employees don’t necessarily use the garden as a social outlet or place for meetings (as Woodhouse-Keese points out, it gets hot in the summer), its existence lets everyone fit gardening into their lives in a way that might not otherwise be possible given how busy employees at small businesses tend to be.

Coming home in May, I hit the ground running. I couldn’t feel anything if I kept busy, so I became the most task-oriented person in town. The garden I planted at Samuel’s was overflowing with blooms. Gus’s class snacks were lavish Pinterest-worthy creations. My garden was incredibly tidy. All the little sprouts of weeds were targets for my suppressed emotions. Kill kill kill. I worried Jeffrey. I knew I was a shell of myself. I knew that he could see it. So I avoided him. He found me down in the garden one day. I had collected a heap of rocks that were left over from a landscaping project. Pulling them out, one by one from the back of the Rhino, I was laying a path through our large vegetable garden that would allow me easier access to our snap peas, beans, tomatoes, and cucumbers at the back of the garden. I’d pinched my hand between two large stones and blood caked my knuckles. “Talk to me," he said, hands shoved deep down in his pockets. “What are you talking about? I’m fine." I was angry. I’d wanted to talk months before. I’d wanted him to hold me in bed while I cried. I’d wanted him to not have been so difficult about getting pregnant in the first place. I’d wanted him not to disappear to go chop wood and then get resentful that I was doing the exact same thing. What’s good for the goose, right? I’d wanted him to know I was angry and then apologize. And these mantras of anger had been running around in my head for months. But then — “I’m sorry," he said. Jeffrey had finally seen me. We talked about our grief. We talked about how we both left like failures. We talked about how lonely we were. Suddenly, standing there with his hands in his pockets, Jeffrey was a different person. He was incredibly vulnerable. He talked to me about how much he valued me and that this was him home and that was worth any fight. And as we talked, he started helping me. He stood and went to get a whole bunch of rocks, laying pathways through the garden for me. Each path was a manifestation of what he was saying. We worked on this garden together.

Sicily--- Oranges, pistachios, and/or aubergine. Sicilian food a product of immense, diverse history. Have sardines! Try the orange cake. You'll find it all over, but there used to be a good one in Taormina. I shake my head in amazement. Somehow, it feels like Dad had been quietly guiding me. Tuscany--- Wild boar is good but tomatoes are better. Nothing else! Please say something with Chiara's tomatoes. I want to help her. Farm is a century old and sells some obscure varieties. Tomato salads, tomato bread soup, panzanella. And here too, Leo and I had organically found the path my father laid out for us. The notes on Liguria are less specific, but when I read his scrawled handwriting, I smile to myself. Liguria--- Was thinking about beans, but basil a good opinion. Oh boy, I cannot wait to show that note to Leo. Basil a good option! Leo. I sit and write with an open heart, not shying away from treacly memories of cut oranges shared in the sea. Pushing my cynicism to the side and allowing the love I have for food, for Italy, for my father, to run from my heart down my veins to my fingers and onto the page.

As we gather around the rough-hewn farm table made by my grandfather, I am reminded that my family has come together for generations in this same way. Summers were always our favorite times; we would eat outdoors under the shade of a tree - hand-rolled pasta with a sauce of fresh tomatoes and basil from the garden, cheese from my Aunt Carmella, olive oil sent by our cousin in Santa Margherita, and wine from our own jugs. After having our fill of food and laughter, we'd pluck ripe figs right off the trees, peel and eat them until the sun disappeared into the blue. I can still taste those summer days, and will always do everything in my power to re-create them.

We window-shopped along Court Street, the closest thing Brooklyn has to Manhattan, perusing the indie clothing boutiques, bookstores, and Italian bakeries, and stopped at Frankies 457 Spuntino, a casual Italian restaurant that every young Brooklynite loves, to pound fresh ricotta, gnocchi, and meatballs. Afterward, I dragged us ten blocks out of the way to hit up Sugar Shop, a modern-retro candy store I loved, to load up on malt balls and gummies. We strolled the magnificent blocks of Victorian homes and green lawns in Ditmas Park, as if suddenly transported from the city's whirl to a faraway college town, perusing the rhubarb, Bibb lettuces, and buckets of fresh clams at the farmers' market, before demolishing fried egg sandwiches on ciabatta at the Farm on Adderly, one of the boroughs now-prolific farm-to-table restaurants. We shared pizza at Franny's: one red, one white, both pockmarked with giant charred blisters from the exceedingly hot brick oven. In a borough known for its temples of pizza worship, before it closed in the summer of 2017, Franny's was right up there, owing to the perfect flavors oozing from each simple ingredient, from the milky mozzarella to the salty-sweet tomato sauce to the briny black olives.

HOW TO BUILD A TOMATO CAGE

mutagenic, and neurotoxic. If it is grown on an impersonal factory farm, the tomato will be lifeless and have no charm. If it is picked by an underpaid migrant worker who’s given no benefits and few worker’s rights, then the tomato is hypocritical and lacks integrity. If it is chopped by machine along with thousands of other tomatoes, delivered to a fast-food joint, and slapped together with a bun and meat from a cow who suffered even worse traumas, then our tomato is now suicidal, or even murderous, because it has lost its soul and has no reason to live. I think you get the picture.

described my tomatoes and growing process to Alan (the tomato guru). He thought I might be watering my plants too much. When I wailed, “How can anyone tell what the right amount is?” He said, “You let them suffer. Hold off on the water until they just start to wilt—and then you save them. Suffer and save.

Most of the ingredients she cooked with came from the tiny farm immediately behind the restaurant. It was so small that the Pertinis could shout from one end of it to another, but the richness of the soil meant that it supported a wealth of vegetables, including tomatoes, zucchini, black cabbage, eggplant and several species that were unique to the region, including bitter friarielli and fragrant asfodelo. There was also a small black boar called Garibaldi, who despite his diminutive size impregnated his harem of four larger wives with extraordinary diligence; an ancient olive tree through which a couple of vines meandered; a chicken or two; and the Pertinis' pride and joy, Priscilla and Pupetta, the two water buffalo, who grazed on a patch of terraced pasture no bigger than a tennis court. The milk they produced was porcelain white, and after hours of work each day it produced just two or three mozzarelle, each one weighing around two pounds- but what mozzarelle: soft and faintly grassy, like the sweet steamy breath of the bufale themselves. As well as mozzarella, the buffalo milk was crafted into various other specialties. Ciliègine were small cherry-shaped balls for salads, while bocconcini were droplet-shaped, for wrapping in slices of soft prosciutto ham. Trecce, tresses, were woven into plaits, served with Amalfi lemons and tender sprouting broccoli. Mozzarella affumicata was lightly smoked and brown in color, while scamorza was smoked over a smoldering layer of pecan shells until it was as dark and rich as a cup of strong espresso. When there was surplus milk they even made a hard cheese, ricotta salata di bufala, which was salted and slightly fruity, perfect for grating over roasted vegetables. But the cheese the Pertinis were best known for was their burrata, a tiny sack of the finest, freshest mozzarella, filled with thick buffalo cream and wrapped in asphodel leaves.

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!

Because, sir, he is making the best use of the resources available to him, including his skill set. He might be terrible at farming, but he is good at fixing and maintaining equipment. If he used his off-duty time to grow crops, we would only have one more unskilled farmer. With the arrangement he has devised, his plot of land is being put to its best use, and his skills are being used to make people who are farming more productive by providing them with reliable equipment. Specialization of labor is key to an efficient economy; everyone does what they do best. Eventually, sir, we will need to establish a form of currency; this barter economy of people trading corn for tomatoes and so on, is inherently inefficient.

Have a salad at every meal. Once you adopt this habit, lunch or dinner without a raw vegetable seems incomplete. If you tire of lettuce, there are lots of leaves: watercress, radicchio, endive, escarole, dandelion, purslane. Try salads of shaved fennel and orange slices or lightly cooked vegetables, as in celeriac remoulade. At the farm, we have a plate of sliced tomatoes at every summer meal.

I told her one of the few stories that she'd told me of myself as a child. We'd gone to a park by a lake. I was no older than two. Me, my father, and my mother. There was an enormous tree with branches so long and droopy that my father moved the picnic table from underneath it. He was always afraid of me getting crushed. My mother believed that kids had stronger bones than grownups. "There's more calcium in her forearm than in an entire dairy farm," she liked to say. That day, my mother had made roasted tomato and goat cheese sandwiches with salmon she'd smoked herself, and I ate, she said, double my weight of it. She was complimenting me when she said that. I always wondered if eating so much was my best way of complimenting her. The story went that all through lunch I kept pointing at a gaping hole in the tree, reaching for it, waving at it. My parents thought it was just that: a hole, one that had been filled with fall leaves, stiff and brown, by some kind of ferrety animal. But I wasn't satisfied with that explanation. I wouldn't give up. "What?" my father kept asking me. "What do you see?" I ate my sandwiches, drank my sparkling hibiscus drink, and refused to take my eyes off the hole. "It was as if you were flirting with it," my mother said, "the way you smiled and all." Finally, I squealed, "Butter fire!" Some honey upside-down cake went flying from my mouth. "Butter fire?" they asked me. "Butter fire?" "Butter fire!" I yelled, pointing, reaching, waving. They couldn't understand. There was nothing interesting about the leaves in the tree. They wondered if I'd seen a squirrel. "Chipmunk?" they asked. "Owl?" I shook my head fiercely. No. No. No. "Butter fire!" I screamed so loudly that I sent hundreds of the tightly packed monarchs that my parents had mistaken for leaves exploding in the air in an eruption of lava-colored flames. They went soaring wildly, first in a vibrating clump and then as tiny careening postage stamps, floating through the sky. They were proud of me that day, my parents. My father for my recognition of an animal so delicate and precious, and my mother because I'd used a food word, regardless of what I'd actually meant.

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