Vegetable Farming Quotes

Food and medicine are not two different things: they are the front and back of one body. Chemically grown vegetables may be eaten for food, but they cannot be used as medicine.

Many of us who aren't farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard.

After Bajju delivered a few beaming salutations, we walked northward up the makeshift, winding path through protruding brush, not much but a few stones placed here and there for balance and leverage upon ascending or descending. Having advanced about hundred steps from the street below, a sharp left leads to Bajju’s property, which begins with his family’s miniature garden – at the time any signs of fertility were mangled by dried roots which flailed like wheat straw, but within the day Bajju’s children vehemently delivered blows with miniature hoes in preparation for transforming such a plot into a no-longer-neglected vegetable garden. A few steps through the produce, or preferably circumventing all of it by taking a few extra steps around the perimeter, leads to the sky-blue painted home. Twisting left, hundreds of miles of rolling hills and the occasional home peeps out, bound below by demarcated farming steppes. If you’re lucky on a clear day and twist to the right, the monstrous, perpetually snow-capped Chaukhamba mountain monopolizes the distance just fifteen miles toward the direction of Tibet in the north.

Over the last decade our country has lost an average of 300 farms a week. Large or small, each of those was the lifes work of a real person or family, people who built their lives around a promise and watched it break.

We're a nation with an eating disorder, and we know it. The multiple maladies caused by bad eating are taking a dire toll on our health--most tragically for our kids, who are predicted to be this country's first generation to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. That alone is a stunning enough fact to give us pause. So is a government policy that advises us to eat more fruits and vegetables, while doling out subsidies not to fruit and vegetable farmers, but to commodity crops destined to become soda pop and cheap burgers. The Farm Bill, as of this writing, could aptly be called the Farm Kill, both for its effects on small farmers and for what it does to us, the consumers who are financing it.

I know the pleasure of pulling up root vegetables. They are solvable mysteries.

One day we came home from some errands to find a grocery sack of [zucchini] hanging on our mailbox. The perpetrator, of course, was nowhere in sight ... Garrison Keillor says July is the only time of year when country people lock our cars in the church parking lot, so people won't put squash on the front seat. I used to think that was a joke ... It's a relaxed atmosphere in our little town, plus our neighbors keep an eye out and will, if asked, tell us the make and model of every vehicle that ever enters the lane to our farm. So the family was a bit surprised when I started double-checking the security of doors and gates any time we all were about to leave the premises. "Do I have to explain the obvious?" I asked impatiently. "Somebody might break in and put zucchini in our house.

Many bright people are really in the dark about vegetable life. Biology teachers face kids in classrooms who may not even believe in the metamorphosis of bud to flower to fruit and seed, but rather, some continuum of pansies becoming petunias becoming chrysanthemums; that's the only reality they witness as landscapers come to campuses and city parks and surreptitiously yank out one flower before it fades from its prime, replacing it with another. The same disconnection from natural processes may be at the heart of our country's shift away from believing in evolution. In the past, principles of natural selection and change over time made sense to kids who'd watched it all unfold. Whether or not they knew the terms, farm families understood the processes well enough to imitate them: culling, selecting, and improving their herds and crops. For modern kids who intuitively believe in the spontaneous generation of fruits and vegetables in the produce section, trying to get their minds around the slow speciation of the plant kingdom may be a stretch.

In order to be labeled organic, a crop must be grown without the use of certain synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, as specified by the USDA. Though produced with fewer synthetic compounds, organic vegetables are not necessarily tastier or more nutritious than their conventional counterparts. Also keep in mind that the certification process is often too expensive for small farms even though their practices may meet or exceed those set by the USDA. The smallest farms-those selling less than $5,000 worth of crops annually-may by law label their produce organic without being inspected or certified. Rather than rely on labeling, we prefer, when possible, to buy locally grown vegetables in their season.

Most people of my grandparents' generation had an intuitive sense of agricultural basics ... This knowledge has vanished from our culture. We also have largely convinced ourselves it wasn't too important. Consider how many Americans might respond to a proposal that agriculture was to become a mandatory subject in all schools ... A fair number of parents would get hot under the collar to see their kids' attention being pulled away from the essentials of grammar, the all-important trigonometry, to make room for down-on-the-farm stuff. The baby boom psyche embraces a powerful presumption that education is a key to moving away from manual labor and dirt--two undeniable ingredients of farming. It's good enough for us that somebody, somewhere, knows food production well enough to serve the rest of us with all we need to eat, each day of our lives.

Perhaps there is after all nothing mysterious in Zen. Everything is open to your full view. If you eat your food and keep yourself cleanly dressed and work on the farm to raise your rice or vegetables, you are doing all that is required of you on this earth, and the infinite is realized in you.

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.

I never worked on a farm, he told himself ruefully, but I think I know a vegetable when I see one.

Doesn't the Federal Farm bill help out all these poor farmers? No. It used to, but ever since its inception just after the Depression, the Federal Farm Bill has slowly been altered by agribusiness lobbyists. It is now largely corporate welfare ... It is this, rather than any improved efficiency or productiveness, that has allowed corporations to take over farming in the United States, leaving fewer than a third of our farms still run by families. But those family-owned farms are the ones more likely to use sustainable techniques, protect the surrounding environment, maintain green spaces, use crop rotations and management for pest and weed controls, and apply fewer chemicals. In other words, they're doing exactly what 80 percent of U.S. consumers say we would prefer to support, while our tax dollars do the opposite.

Modern US consumers now get to taste less than 1 percent of the vegetable varieties that were grown here a century ago. Those old-timers now lurk only in backyard gardens and on farms that specialize in direct sales--if they survive at all. Many heirlooms have been lost entirely.

But humans have deliberately selected which plants and animals shall live and which shall die for thousands of years. We are surrounded from babyhood by familiar farm and domestic animals, fruits and trees and vegetables. Where do they come from? Were they once free-living in the wild and then induced to adopt a less strenuous life on the farm? No, the truth is quite different. They are, most of them, made by us.

The effect is both domestic and wild, equal parts geometric and chaotic. It's the visual signature of small, diversified farms that creates the picture-postcard landscape here, along with its celebrated gastronomic one. Couldn't Americans learn to love landscapes like these around our cities, treasuring them not just gastronomically but aesthetically, instead of giving everything over to suburban development? Can we only love agriculture on postcards?

On both sides, they've failed us...of course, we know about the industrialists. Their corn syrup and cheese product. Their factory farms ringed by rivers of blood and shit, blazing bonfires of disease barely contained by antibiotic blankets. These are among the most disgusting scenes in the history of this planet... But on the other side...the organic farms, the precious restaurants...these are toy supply chains. 'Farm to table,' they say. Well. When you go from farm to table, you leave a lot of people out...I think more poorly of these people than I do of the industrialists, because they know better. They know it's all broken, and what do they do? They plant vegetables in the backyard.

Villages have an unmistakable charm. There is a subtle magic found in villages. The earthiness, greenery, and fragrance of flowers, plants, fruits, and vegetables growing in the field is breathtakingly inimitable. Sitting in the lush green fields, while gazing at the wide blue sky, amidst the farm animals and the simple houses in the background, is a joie de vivre.

I order the fragrant bison meatballs in a tart cranberry sauce to start, and then move on to other mouthwatering things- the roasted-vegetable platter sprinkled with just the right amount of herbs and pepper, and the honey-roasted rabbit, which practically falls apart on my tongue.

The Carmel is a lovely little river. It isn't very long but in its course it has everything a river should have. It rises in the mountains, and tumbles down a while, runs through shallows, is damned to make a lake, spills over the dam, crackles among round boulders, wanders lazily under sycamores, spills into pools where trout live, drops in against banks where crayfish live. In the winter it becomes a torrent, a mean little fierce river, and in the summer it is a place for children to wade in and for fishermen to wander in. Frogs blink from its banks and the deep ferns grow beside it. Deer and foxes come to drink from it, secretly in the morning and evening, and now and then a mountain lion crouched flat laps its water. The farms of the rich little valley back up to the river and take its water for the orchards and the vegetables. The quail call beside it and the wild doves come whistling in at dusk. Raccoons pace its edges looking for frogs. It's everything a river should be.

Thomas Jefferson presumed on the basis of colonial experience that farming and democracy are intimately connected. Cultivation of land meets the needs of the farmer, the neighbors, and the community, and and keeps people independent from domineering centralized powers. In Jefferson's time, [George] was the king. In ours, it's multinational corporations.

[from an entry by her daughter Camille] ...research published fifteen years ago in the New England Journal of Medicine: eggs from chickens that ranged freely on grass have about half the cholesterol of factory-farmed eggs, and it's mostly HDL, the cholesterol that's good for you. They also have more vitamin E, beta-carotene and omega-3 fatty acids than their cooped-up counterparts.

When they weren’t farming alongside the other Mohaves, the girls spent their first summer with the tribe gathering mesquite, collecting wild vegetables with the women, or swimming naked in the Colorado.

[on her Amish friends]I do know this family has borne losses and grief, just like the rest of us. But if they are generally content, must such a life inevitably be dismissed as mythical, or else merely quaint? ... It sounds like a community type that went extinct a generation ago. But it didn't, not completely. If a self-sufficient farming community has survived here, it remains a possibility elsewhere.

Organically grown fruits and vegetables are grown with all natural methods on organic farms and are far superior nutritionally. The big commercial farms use chemical fertilizers, pesticides and GMO seeds.

There used to be a middle class here – recently. We also get reports that in the past, Gazan flower shipments to Europe were delayed for two weeks at the Erez crossing for security inspections. You can imagine the value of two-week-old cut flowers in the European market, so that market dried up. And then the bulldozers come and take out people’s vegetable farms and gardens. What is left for people? Tell me if you can think of anything. I can’t.

Invention idea: Broccoli-flavored bubblegum. You know, for kids who won't eat their vegetables. Plus, it will make a great leftover snack when you're by the lake feeding ducks and you find some stuck underneath the park bench you're sitting on.

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.

The larger the corporation, the more distant its motives are apt to be from the original spirit of organic farming—and the farther the products will likely be shipped to buyers who will smile at the happy farm picture on the package, and never be the wiser.

At BearPaw Duck Farm, we want to help you lose weight by serving nothing but MoonPies, which have significantly less gravity than earthier foods such as fruits, vegetables, and SwimmingBird Soup. The MoonPies taste fake, just like the 1969 Apollo Lunar Landing.

We often view healthy eating as synonymous with restrictive eating, and we likewise view joyful eating as a guilty pleasure, something that begs for strict limits. I believe that real food allows us both the gift of nourishment, and the gift of pleasure, without unnecessary restrictions. Eating a diet of traditional foods helps us to develop a positive relationship with our food, not one born out of guilt and denial; rather, the traditional foods movement teaches us to purchase, prepare, and enjoy our food with intention.

Marketing jingles from every angle lure patrons to turn our backs on our locally owned stores, restaurants, and farms. And nobody considers that unpatriotic. This appears to aggravate Tod Murphy. "We have the illusion of consumer freedom, but we've sacrificed our community life for the pleasure of purchasing lots of cheap stuff. Making and moving all that stuff can be so destructive: child labor in foreign lands, acid rain in the Northeast, depleted farmland, communities where the big economic engine is crystal meth. We often have the form of liberty, but not the substance.

There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings. Along the roads, laurel, viburnum, and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveler's eye through much of the year. Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and fall people traveled from great distances to observe them. Others came to fish the streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and contained shady pools where trout lay. So it had been from the days many years ago when the first settlers raised their homes, sank their wells, and built their barns. Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens, the cattle, and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had been sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among children whoe would be stricken suddently while at play and die within a few hours. There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example--where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh. On the farms the hens brooded, but no chicks hatched. The farmers complained that they were unable to raise any pigs--the litters were small and the young survived only a few days. The apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination and there would be no fruit. The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire. These, too, were silent, deserted by all living things. Even the streams were not lifeless. Anglers no longer visited them, for all the fish had died. In the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles of the roofs, a white granular powder still showed a few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the fields and streams. No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of life in this stricken world. The people had done it to themselves.

Instead of hunting and gathering, instead of farming and harvesting in the area where we live, we are flying God’s fruits and vegetables around the planet, not eating foods designed for our terrain and climate. We are distributing, selling and consuming “fresh foods” (or so the package says) days and weeks after they have been harvested.

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

His wife, Electra, was a capable helpmeet, although—like himself— a dreamer of dreams and a private dabbler in romance. The first thing she did, after her marriage—child as she was, aged only nineteen— was to buy an acre of ground on the edge of the town, and pay down the cash for it—twenty-five dollars, all her fortune. Saladin had less, by fifteen. She instituted a vegetable garden there, got it farmed on shares by the nearest neighbor, and made it pay her a hundred per cent. a year. Out of Saladin's first year's wage she put thirty dollars in the savings-bank, sixty out of his second, a hundred out of his third, a hundred and fifty out of his fourth. His wage went to eight hundred a year, then, and meantime two children had arrived and increased the expenses, but she banked two hundred a year from the salary, nevertheless, thenceforth. When she had been married seven years she built and furnished a pretty and comfortable two-thousand-dollar house in the midst of her garden-acre, paid half of the money down and moved her family in. Seven years later she was out of debt and had several hundred dollars out earning its living.

Naomi: ‘And when we die we become an onion, a cabbage, a carrot, or a squash, a vegetable.’ I come downtown from Columbia and agree. She reads the Bible, thinks beautiful thoughts all day. ‘Yesterday I saw God. What did he look like? Well, in the afternoon I climbed up a ladder—he has a cheap cabin in the country, like Monroe, N.Y. the chicken farms in the wood. He was a lonely old man with a white beard. ‘I cooked supper for him. I made him a nice supper—lentil soup, vegetables, bread & butter—miltz—he sat down at the table and ate, he was sad. ‘I told him, Look at all those fightings and killings down there, What’s the matter? Why don’t you put a stop to it? ‘I try, he said—That’s all he could do, he looked tired. He’s a bachelor so long, and he likes lentil soup.

Emily picks up a fork and balances it on one finger. She looks at nothing but the fork. “I can eat vegetables and ride my bike and stop using plastic bags but I know I’m just doing it to keep myself from going crazy. The planet is fucked. There’s nothing I can do about that. But I’ll tell you what, I’m going to spend my life trying to save this farm. If anybody ever wonders what I’m here for, that’s it.

The smart way to be assured of quality organic food is to join a community-sponsored agriculture (CSA) cooperative and buy a share in a local organic farm every year. Every week for an average of twenty-four weeks in the North, and all year round in the South, you share the harvest, which can include fresh vegetables, fruit, and free-range eggs, chicken, and lamb. (See the Resources section for information on CSAs.)

the hydroponic farms in the old buildings at the back of the Croft, the ones left over from before, the ones the old hippies used to grow their vegetables before the crash. When Grids took the Croft he put them all over to growing ganja, until he realized he could get a higher price growing herbs and spices—the things the Land Army didn’t provide through their tightly controlled rationing, the things everybody wanted. Illicit flavors, tastes, and smells.

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.

Hazel heads up the hill to the cemetery where generations of my husband’s people are buried behind a low iron fence, and for whatever reason I follow the dog. A plush vegetation is knitted over all the graves, and I think of how meticulously Joe’s aunt had kept things here, but this is not the summer for weeding. The cemetery is the highest point on the property and would have been the logical site for a house, the way it overlooks the trees and the barn and all the way to the edge of the lake, but those first settlers gave the best land to their dead, the very first a two-year-old named Mary. One by one they followed her up the hill until twenty-nine of them were resting beneath the mossy slabs, and there they wait for us to join them. That’s what life was like back in the day, you buried your children, your husband, your parents right there on the farm. They had never been anywhere else. They had never wanted to be anywhere else.

@K11, Urban farming; It’s something nice and warm for families and kids, but also references elements of the city. Urban Farming is very important for Shanghainese people because the city has lost its connection with nature. When you buy fruit or vegetables it’s just that - a product - for kids and us, we wanted to reconnect this with the amazing process of growing plants. People need this, urban farming connects people with their roots. In this way it’s also educational

I had to watch my uncle get strung up when I was a child,” she finally said after she returned from the faraway place in her mind. “The white man would only sell us the rotten fruit and vegetables from their bug-infested baskets. We had to collect that mess from the back of the store like we were a pack of wild mutts picking through garbage. My uncle had had enough of his apples having maggots crawling out of them, so he started farming his own vegetables for us to eat. The white man didn’t like that. Not. One. Bit. It’s amazing how their minds work. The way their minds work is the reason we call them devils because only a devil could think the way they do. They were mad about the loss of profit because they no longer had us buying the filthy rot they peddled. “My uncle produced such a high quality of fruits and vegetables that he had white folks coming to buy from him. It wasn’t too long after this started, those devils came in their white hoods and burned his garden to ash. Then they strung him up. We were forced to watch my uncle dangle from the neck while he pissed and shit himself. God will forgive my mouth saying it because he knows I only speak the truth. The evilness that resides inside the mind of those devils still exists in the minds of the ones who wear cop’s uniforms and judge’s robes. This is what our boys are up against. Our boys are at war! They freed us from our chains, so that they could lock us in their jails.

[from an excerpt by her daughter Camille] Living on the land that has grown my food gives me a sense of security I'm lucky to have. Feeling safe isn't so easy for people my age, who face odious threats like global warming, overpopulation, and chemical warfare in our future. But even as the world runs out of fuel and the ice caps melt, I will know the real sources of my sustenance. My college education may or may not land me a good job down the road, but my farm education will serve me.

When humans took up farming, they became more disruptive still. According to the paleoclimatologist William Ruddiman, the adoption of wet rice cultivation in Asia some five thousand years ago may have released so much methane into the atmosphere from rotting vegetation as to have changed the climate. “A good case can be made,” he suggests, that “the people in the Iron Age and even the late Stone Age had a much greater per-capita impact on the earth’s landscape than the average modern-day person.

I love my kids, and I’m so proud of them for everything that they have accomplished. My oldest child, Elon, is making electric cars to save the environment and launching rockets. My middle child, Kimbal, opened farm-to-table restaurants and is teaching children across the country to build fruit and vegetable gardens in underserved schools. My youngest child, Tosca, runs her own entertainment company, producing and directing romance films from bestselling novels. They all have different interests.

This book tells the story of what we learned, or didn’t; what we ate, or couldn’t; and how our family was changed by one year of deliberately eating food produced in the same place where we worked, loved our neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air. It’s not at all necessary to live on a food-producing farm to participate in this culture. But it is necessary to know such farms exist, understand something about what they do, and consider oneself basically in their court. This book is about those things. The story is pegged, as we were, to a

Yesterday I saw God. What did he look like? Well, in the afternoon I climbed up a ladder—he has a cheap cabin in the country, like Monroe, N.Y. the chicken farms in the wood. He was a lonely old man with a white beard. ‘I cooked supper for him. I made him a nice supper—lentil soup, vegetables, bread & butter—miltz—he sat down at the table and ate, he was sad. ‘I told him, Look at all those fightings and killings down there, What’s the matter? Why don’t you put a stop to it? ‘I try, he said—That’s all he could do, he looked tired. He’s a bachelor so long, and he likes lentil soup.

Michael Pollan: "The industrialization--and dehumanization--of American animal farming is a relatively new, evitable, and local phenomenon: no other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do." U.S. consumers may take our pick of reasons to be wary of the resulting product: growth hormones, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, unhealthy cholesterol composition, deadly E. coli strains, fuel consumption, concentration of manure into toxic waste lagoons, and the turpitude of keeping confined creatures at the limits of their physiological and psychological endurance.

I recently had dinner with George. We did not eat fish. Instead we ate at a wonderful Vietnamese restaurant. I had lemon-grass chicken with chile, and George had stir-fried vegetables. Both meals were excellent, and both consisted of foods originating far from Spokane. Although we didn’t ask the cook where the chicken and other foodstuffs came from, it isn’t difficult to construct an entirely plausible scenario. Here it is: the chicken was raised on a factory farm in Arkansas. The factory is owned by Tyson Foods, which supplies one-quarter of this nation’s chickens and sends them as far away as Japan, The chicken was fed corn from Nebraska and grain from Kansas. One of seventeen million chickens processed by Tyson that week, this bird was frozen and put onto a truck made by PACCAR. The truck was made from plastics manufactured in Texas, steel milled in Japan from ore mined in Australia and chromium from South Africa, and aluminum processed in the United States from bauxite mined in Jamaica. The parts were assembled in Mexico. As this truck, with its cargo of frozen chickens, made its way toward Spokane, it burned fuel refined in Texas, Oklahoma, California, and Washington from oil originating beneath Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Mexico, Texas, and Alaska. All this, and I have chickens outside my door.

Zane Nicholson believed in listening to his gut. At nine fifty-five that morning, it was telling him that today wasn’t going to be a good day. He glanced out the window at the rolling hills that made up the Nicholson Ranch and wondered if being a farmer would have been easier. Crops didn’t break through fences in the night and wander away. Crops didn’t try to be born breech. He could be growing corn. Or wheat. Wheat was patriotic. All those amber waves. He turned his attention back to his paperwork and shook his head. Who was he kidding? He was a fifth generation rancher. The closest he would come to farming was the vegetable garden the ranch cook grew out behind the bunkhouse.

The difference is an objective phenomenon of soil science; what we call "soil" is a community of living, mostly microscopic organisms in a nutrient matrix. Organic farming, by definition, enhances the soil's living and nonliving components. Modern conventional farming is an efficient reduction of that process that adds back just a few crucial nutrients of the many that are removed each year when biomass is harvested ... Chemicals that sterilize the soil destroy organisms that fight plant diseases, aerate, and manufacture fertility. Recent research has discovered that just adding phosphorus (the P in all "NPK" fertilizers) kills the tiny filaments of fungi that help plants absorb nutrients.

While Walter piled food on his plate, he and Atticus talked together like two men, to the wonderment of Jem and me. Atticus was expounding upon farm problems when Walter interrupted to ask if there was any molasses in the house. Atticus summoned Calpurnia, who returned bearing the syrup pitcher. She stood waiting for Walter to help himself. Walter poured syrup on his vegetables and meat with a generous hand. He would probably have poured it into his milk glass had I not asked what the sam hill he was doing. The silver saucer clattered when he replaced the pitcher, and he quickly put his hands in his lap. Then he ducked his head. Atticus shook his head at me again. “But he’s gone and drowned his dinner in syrup,” I protested. “He’s poured it all over—” It

in the mountains, and tumbles down a while, runs through shallows, is dammed to make a lake, spills over the dam, crackles among round boulders, wanders lazily under sycamores, spills into pools where trout live, drops in against banks where crayfish live. In the winter it becomes a torrent, a mean little fierce river, and in the summer it is a place for children to wade in and for fishermen to wander in. Frogs blink from its banks and the deep ferns grow beside it. Deer and foxes come to drink from it, secretly in the morning and evening, and now and then a mountain lion crouched flat laps its water. The farms of the rich little valley back up to the river and take its water for the orchards and the vegetables. The quail call beside it and the wild doves come whistling in at dusk. Raccoons pace its edges looking for frogs. It’s everything a river should be.

How did farming change how much physical activity we do and how we use our bodies to do the work? Although hunting and gathering is not easy, nonfarming populations like the Bushmen or the Hadza generally work only five to six hours a day.36 Contrast this with a typical subsistence farmer’s life. For any given crop, a farmer has to clear a field (perhaps by burning vegetation, clearing brush, removing rocks), prepare the soil by digging or plowing and perhaps fertilizing, sow the seeds, and then weed and protect the growing plants from animals such as birds and rodents. If all goes well and nature provides enough rain, then comes harvesting, threshing, winnowing, drying, and finally storing the seeds. As if that were not enough, farmers also have to tend animals, process and cook large batches of foods (for example by curing meat and making cheese), make clothing, build and repair homes and barns, and defend their land and stored harvests. Farming involves endless physical toil, sometimes from dawn to dusk. As

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.

For about 48 weeks of the year an asparagus plant is unrecognizable to anyone except an asparagus grower. Plenty of summer visitors to our garden have stood in the middle of the bed and asked, 'What is this stuff? It's beautiful!' We tell them its the asparagus patch, and they reply, 'No this, these feathery little trees.' An asparagus spear only looks like its picture for one day of its life, usually in April, give or take a month as you travel from the Mason-Dixon Line. The shoot emerges from the ground like a snub nose green snake headed for sunshine, rising so rapidly you can just about see it grow. If it doesn't get it's neck cut off at ground level as it emerges, it will keep growing. Each triangular scale on the spear rolls out into a branch until the snake becomes a four foot tree with delicate needles. Contrary to lore, fat spears are no more tender or mature than thin ones. Each shoot begins life with its own particular girth. In the hours after emergence, it lengthens but does not appreciably fatten. To step into another raging asparagus controversy, white spears are botanically no different from their green colleagues. White shoots have been deprived of sunlight by a heavy mulch pulled up over the plant's crown. European growers go to this trouble for consumers who prefer the stalks before they've had their first blush of photosynthesis. Most Americans prefer the more developed taste of green. Uncharacteristically, we're opting for the better nutritional deal here also. The same plant could produce white or green spears in alternate years, depending on how it is treated. If the spears are allowed to proceed beyond their first exploratory six inches, they'll green out and grow tall and feathery like the house plant known as asparagus fern, which is the next of kin. Older, healthier asparagus plants produce chunkier, more multiple shoots. Underneath lies an octopus-shaped affair of chubby roots called a crown that stores enough starch through the winter to arrange the phallic send-up when winter starts to break. The effect is rather sexy, if you're the type to see things that way. Europeans of the Renaissance swore by it as an aphrodisiac and the church banned it from nunneries.

They had this course you had to take, Oral Expression. That I flunked. 'Why?' 'Oh, I don't know.' I didn't feel much like going into it. I was still feeling sort of dizzy or something, and I had a helluva headache all of a sudden. I really did. But you could tell he was interested, so I told him a little bit about it. 'It's this course where each boy in class has to get up in class and make a speech. You know. Spontaneous and all. And if the boy digresses at all, you're supposed to yell "Digression!" at him as fast as you can. It just about drove me crazy. I got an F in it.' 'Why?' 'Oh, I don't know. That digression business got on my nerves. I don't know. The trouble with me is, I like it when somebody digresses. It's more interesting and all.' 'You don't care to have somebody stick to the point when he tells you something?' 'Oh, sure! I like somebody to stick to the point and all. But I don't like them to stick too much to the point. I don't know. I guess I don't like it when somebody sticks to the point all the time. The boys that got the best marks in Oral Expression were the ones that stuck to the point all the time—I admit it. But there was this one boy, Richard Kinsella. He didn't stick to the point too much, and they were always yelling "Digression!" at him. It was terrible, because in the first place, he was a very nervous guy—I mean he was a very nervous guy—and his lips were always shaking whenever it was his time to make a speech, and you could hardly hear him if you were sitting way in the back of the room. When his lips sort of quit shaking a little bit, though, I liked his speeches better than anybody else's. He practically flunked the course, though, too. He got a D plus because they kept yelling "Digression!" at him all the time. For instance, he made this speech about this farm his father bought in Vermont. They kept yelling "Digression!" at him the whole time he was making it, and this teacher, Mr. Vinson, gave him an F on it because he hadn't told what kind of animals and vegetables and stuff grew on the farm and all. What he did was, Richard Kinsella, he'd start telling you all about that stuff—then all of a sudden he'd start telling you about this letter his mother got from his uncle, and how his uncle got polio and all when he was forty-two years old, and how he wouldn't let anybody come to see him in the hospital because he didn't want anybody to see him with a brace on. It didn't have much to do with the farm—I admit it—but it was nice. It's nice when somebody tells you about their uncle. Especially when they start out telling you about their father's farm and then all of a sudden get more interested in their uncle. I mean it's dirty to keep yelling "Digression!" at him when he's all nice and excited... I don't know. It's hard to explain.' I didn't feel too much like trying, either. For one thing, I had this terrific headache all of a sudden. I wished to God old Mrs. Antolini would come in with the coffee. That's something that annoys hell out of me—I mean if somebody says the coffee's all ready and it isn't.

Gian Pero Frau, one of the most important characters in the supporting cast surrounding S'Apposentu, runs an experimental farm down the road from the restaurant. His vegetable garden looks like nature's version of a teenager's bedroom, a rebellious mess of branches and leaves and twisted barnyard wire. A low, droning buzz fills the air. "Sorry about the bugs," he says, a cartoonish cloud orbiting his head. But beneath the chaos a bloom of biodynamic order sprouts from the earth. He uses nothing but dirt and water and careful observation to sustain life here. Every leaf and branch has its place in this garden; nothing is random. Pockets of lettuce, cabbage, fennel, and flowers grow in dense clusters together; on the other end, summer squash, carrots, and eggplant do their leafy dance. "This garden is built on synergy. You plant four or five plants in a close space, and they support each other. It might take thirty or forty days instead of twenty to get it right, but the flavor is deeper." (There's a metaphor in here somewhere, about his new life Roberto is forging in the Sardinian countryside.) "He's my hero," says Roberto about Gian Piero. "He listens, quietly processes what I'm asking for, then brings it to life. Which doesn't happen in places like Siddi." Together, they're creating a new expression of Sardinian terreno, crossing genetic material, drying vegetables and legumes under a variety of conditions, and experimenting with harvesting times that give Roberto a whole new tool kit back in the kitchen. We stand in the center of the garden, crunching on celery and lettuce leaves, biting into zucchini and popping peas from their shells- an improvised salad, a biodynamic breakfast that tastes of some future slowly forming in the tangle of roots and leaves around us.

For four hours, Andrew and I were presented with course after course of delightful creations, imaginative pairings, and, always, dramatic presentations. Little fillets of sturgeon arrived under a glass dome, after which it was lifted, applewood smoke billowed out across the table. Pretzel bread, cheese, and ale, meant to evoke a picnic in Central Park, was delivered in a picnic basket. But my favorite dish was the carrot tartare. The idea came, along with many of the menu's other courses, while researching reflecting upon New York's classic restaurants. From 21 Club to Four Seasons, once upon a time, every establishment offered a signature steak tartare. "What's our tartare?" Will and Daniel wondered. They kept playing with formulas and recipes and coming close to something special, but it never quite had the wow factor they were looking for. One day after Daniel returned from Paffenroth Gardens, a farm in the Hudson Valley with the rich muck soil that yields incredibly flavorful root vegetables, they had a moment. In his perfect Swiss accent, he said, "What if we used carrots?" Will remembers. And so carrot tartare, a sublime ode to the humble vegetable, was added to the Eleven Madison Park tasting course. "I love that moment when you clamp a meat grinder onto the table and people expect it to be meat, and it's not," Will gushes of the theatrical table side presentation. After the vibrant carrots are ground by the server, they're turned over to you along with a palette of ingredients with which to mix and play: pickled mustard seeds, quail egg yolk, pea mustard, smoked bluefish, spicy vinaigrette. It was one of the most enlightening yet simple dishes I've ever had. I didn't know exactly which combination of ingredients I mixed, adding a little of this and a little of that, but every bite I created was fresh, bright, and ringing with flavor. Carrots- who knew?

I am like God, Codi? Like GOD? Give me a break. If I get another letter that mentions SAVING THE WORLD, I am sending you, by return mail, a letter bomb. Codi, please. I've got things to do. You say you're not a moral person. What a copout. Sometime, when I wasn't looking, something happened to make you think you were bad. What, did Miss Colder give you a bad mark on your report card? You think you're no good, so you can't do good things. Jesus, Codi, how long are you going to keep limping around on that crutch? It's the other way around, it's what you do that makes you who you are. I'm sorry to be blunt. I've had a bad week. I am trying to explain, and I wish you were here so I could tell you this right now, I am trying to explain to you that I'm not here to save anybody or any thing. It's not some perfect ideal we're working toward that keeps us going. You ask, what if we lose this war? Well, we could. By invasion, or even in the next election. People are very tired. I don't expect to see perfection before I die. Lord, if I did I would have stuck my head in the oven back in Tucson, after hearing the stories of some of those refugees. What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive. You keep your eyes open, you see this damned-to-hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, "What life can I live that will let me breathe in & out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?" I didn't look down from some high rock and choose cotton fields in Nicaragua. These cotton fields chose me. The contras that were through here yesterday got sent to a prison farm where they'll plant vegetables, learn to read and write if they don't know how, learn to repair CB radios, and get a week-long vacation with their families every year. They'll probably get amnesty in five. There's hardly ever a repeat offender. That kid from San Manuel died. Your sister, Hallie "What's new with Hallie?" Loyd asked. "Nothing." I folded the pages back into the envelope as neatly as I could, trying to leave its creases undisturbed, but my fingers had gone numb and blind. With tears in my eyes I watched whatever lay to the south of us, the land we were driving down into, but I have no memory of it. I was getting a dim comprehension of the difference between Hallie and me. It wasn't a matter of courage or dreams, but something a whole lot simpler. A pilot would call it ground orientation. I'd spent a long time circling above the clouds, looking for life, while Hallie was living it.

They grew some of their own vegetables, but Semple was never in eighteen years allowed out into the truck gardens. Instead, he watched out the north window of the violent ward through the thick cyclone mesh and felt himself out there, going down the rows of corn, cutting suckers or tugging up the dark-leafed weeds, feeling the strain low in his back and hearing the dry rustle of stalks in the July wind; the sun reddening his neck and rills of sweat cutting lines through the dust on his cheeks; bent over, his hands green stained and sore, blistered and cut from the weeds and the sharp-edged corn plant leaves; feet hot and swollen in state-issue shoes cracked and dirty; but smelling it, the corn, the dirt, the hand-mashed weeds, the sticky white milk gumming and clotting his fingers; the smell on cloudy days when everything was heavy with the expectancy of rain and sullen with the summer heat, the smell denser then, making him straighten up, his nose high, waiting for it, for something, a man in silhouette against the background of corn, like all the other men in cornfields and gardens and on farms, even the men in cities between the buildings on crowded streets lifting their noses to the heavy clouds and feeling the expectancy of the rain, waiting for the first thick drops to sound against the corn, to strike his face. And then the gallop home through sheets of rain, ducking into doorways, newspapers over heads, laughter coming up out of the heart at this common happening, and men together, in doorways, cafeterias, kitchens, barns, tractor sheds, or even in the lee of haystacks, looking at each other happily with wet red faces because it was raining hard. Loving it and feeling joy from such a thing. He stood at the window and made it happen, even under a blue sky. And would, early in his eighteen years, turn front eh window expressing how he felt in snapping wild-eyed growls and grunts, his hands jerking out of control and his legs falling out from under him, thrashing between the beds, bumping along the floors, his contorted face frightening the other madmen into shrieks and fits and dribbles; happy, so happy inside that it all burst in one white hot uncontrollable surge; the two white-coated attendants coming with their stockings full of powdered soap rolled into fists to club him without marking him, knocking him into enough submission that they could drag him twitching still across the open floor and out to the restraining sheets.

They grew some of their own vegetables, but Semple was never in eighteen years allowed out into the truck gardens. Instead, he watched out the north window of the violent ward through the thick cyclone mesh and felt himself out there, going down the rows of corn, cutting suckers or tugging up the dark-leafed weeds, feeling the strain low in his back and hearing the dry rustle of stalks in the July wind; the sun reddening his neck and rills of sweat cutting lines through the dust on his cheeks; bent over, his hands green stained and sore, blistered and cut from the weeds and the sharp-edged corn plant leaves; feet hot and swollen in state-issue shoes cracked and dirty; but smelling it, the corn, the dirt, the hand-mashed weeds, the sticky white milk gumming and clotting his fingers; the smell on cloudy days when everything was heavy with the expectancy of rain and sullen with the summer heat, the smell denser then, making him straighten up, his nose high, waiting for it, for something, a man in silhouette against the background of corn, like all the other men in cornfields and gardens and on farms, even the men in cities between the buildings on crowded streets lifting their noses to the heavy clouds and feeling the expectancy of the rain, waiting for the first thick drops to sound against the corn, to strike his face. And then the gallop home through sheets of rain, ducking into doorways, newspapers over heads, laughter coming up out of the heart at this common happening, and men together, in doorways, cafeterias, kitchens, barns, tractor sheds, or even in the lee of haystacks, looking at each other happily with wet red faces because it was raining hard. Loving it and feeling joy from such a thing. He stood at the window and made it happen, even under a blue sky. And would, early in his eighteen years, turn from the window expressing how he felt in snapping wild-eyed growls and grunts, his hands jerking out of control and his legs falling out from under him, thrashing between the beds, bumping along the floors, his contorted face frightening the other madmen into shrieks and fits and dribbles; happy, so happy inside that it all burst in one white hot uncontrollable surge; the two white-coated attendants coming with their stockings full of powdered soap rolled into fists to club him without marking him, knocking him into enough submission that they could drag him twitching still across the open floor and out to the restraining sheets.

Companion gardening refers to the planting of different crops next to each other for strategic reasons. There are some very many reasons why it is done on the farm. Some of the reasons why this is done include:

ancient Spartans wеrе skilled agriculturalists. Тhеу tended tо farms thаt thеу usеd tо produce thеіr оwn livestock, dairy, produce аnd grains. А Spartan warrior ate а diet thаt mаіnlу consisted оf whоlе grain barley, whоlе grain wheat, fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, legumes, fish, quail eggs, chicken eggs, olive oil аnd meat. Sugar wаs unknown tо thе Greeks, sо thе Spartans nеvеr ate it.

It must be borne in mind, however, that, despite their destructive potential, floods are a natural part of both the hydrologic and the ecological systems of the West. Floodwaters carry nutrients and organic material that are deposited onto the surrounding floodplains, producing fertile soils. These soils have made California one of the most important agricultural centers in the world, generating $30 billion per year. More than half of the fruits, nuts, and vegetables consumed in the United States are grown on some 87,500 farms in California’s Central Valley. Nevertheless, residents in California and other regions of the American West continue to face risks from catastrophic flooding as they place themselves directly in the path of floodwaters, building their homes on floodplains that will inevitably be washed away in the next extreme wet year. To this day, cities sprawl onto the floodplains, housing developments pop up in the deltas, and homes are built on the edges of cliffs and canyons where landslides occur. Clearly, as Steinbeck indicated, society has collectively “lost its memory” of the earth’s climatic past.

THE ASPARAGUS of the world are disappearing.  Container ships of the vegetable are being hijacked every day.  Asparagus farms and even private gardens are inexplicably laid bare of Asparagus Officinalis.  People panic, the price of asparagus goes through the roof, and concerned vegans are wearing little plastic asparagus on their suits in support of the Liliaceae.

Most permaculturists are expert at understanding the relationships between landforms and water harvesting or between soil microorganisms and plant health. But when it comes to our human relationships, we often founder. Nurturing the vegetables in the garden is a lot easier than nurturing our connections to the people who decide where to plant the vegetables and who will water them.

the USDA prohibited farms that received grain subsidies from growing fruits and vegetables. This put the American government in the insane position of subsidizing the cost of fast food while actively prohibiting some farms from growing fruits and vegetables.

We can start all the organic farms we want, but we can't stop congress from declaring pizza sauce a vegetable.

Mary Johnson may have been the first African American woman. She arrived sometime before 1620 as the maid of a Virginia planter. Like white women, the black residents of the early southern colonies found opportunities in the general chaos around them. Johnson and her husband were indentured servants, and once they earned their freedom, they acquired a 250-acre farm and five indentured servants of their own. By the mid–seventeenth century, a free black population had begun to emerge in both the North and the South. African American women, who weren’t bound by the same social constraints as white women, frequently set up their own businesses, running boardinghouses, hair salons, or restaurants. Catering was a particularly popular career, as was trading. In Charleston, South Carolina, black women took over the local market, selling vegetables, chickens, and other produce they acquired from the growing population of slaves, who generally had small plots beside their cabins. The city came to depend on the women for its supply of fresh food, and whites complained long and loud about the power and independence of the trading women. In 1686, South Carolina passed a law prohibiting the purchase of goods from slaves, but it had little effect. A half century later, Charleston officials were still complaining about the “exorbitant price” that black women charged for “many articles necessary for the support of the inhabitants.” The trading women had sharp tongues, which they used to good effect. The clerk of the market claimed that the “insolent and abusive Manner” of the slave women made him “afraid to say or do Anything.” It’s hard to believe the marketers, some of whom were slaves, were as outspoken as their clientele made them out to be, but the war between the black female traders and their customers continued on into the nineteenth century. (One petition in 1747 said that because of the market “white people…are entirely ruined and rendered miserable.”) The

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.

Want to scale food production? Restorative ocean farms have the capacity to grow massive amounts of nutrient-rich food. Professor Ronald Osinga at Wageningen University in the Netherlands has calculated that a global network of sea-vegetable farms totaling 180,000 square kilometers—roughly the size of Washington State—could provide enough protein for the entire world population. A modest goal of five hundred twenty-acre farms would produce 120 million pounds of shellfish and in the range of eleven to forty million pounds of seaweeds, depending on the species grown—that’s a lot of food.

Pesticides are an increasing potential problem for our microbes and they take many forms. The most popular is called glyphosate (or Roundup), which stops vegetables and fruit sprouting or going mouldy once developed. It was invented by Monsanto in the 1970s and is probably the most commonly used chemical for farming in the world. In 2013 over 1.7 million hectares of land in the UK was sprayed with it, and the majority of non-organic breads (especially wholemeal) tested contain glyphosate residues. Traces of it are found in the blood and urine of cattle and even in humans living in cities. Even at sub-toxic doses it could be adversely affecting human health and, like most chemicals, contains potential carcinogens.4 We know it affects soil microbes, and much less is known about its effects on our gut microbes – but early studies suggest it is not good.5 We may prefer to let our fruit and vegetables deteriorate and change colour after a few days, rather than keep them chemically in suspended animation with adverse effects on our microbes. While there is little solid research on whether eating organic foods is better for us and our microbes, there are studies showing levels of pesticides in our bodies can be dramatically reduced within a week by switching to organic produce.

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker calculates the average homicide rate among eight primitive societies, arriving at an alarming 14 per cent. This figure appeared in respected journals like Science and was endlessly regurgitated by newspapers and on TV. When other scientists took a look at his source material, however, they discovered that Pinker mixed up some things. This may get a little technical, but we need to understand where he went wrong. The question we want to answer is: which peoples still hunting and gathering today are representative of how humans lived 50,000 years ago? After all, we were nomads for 95 per cent of human history, roving the world in small, relatively egalitarian groups. Pinker chose to focus almost exclusively on hybrid cultures. These are people who hunt and gather, but who also ride horses or live together in settlements or engage in farming on the side. Now these activities are all relatively recent. Humans didn’t start farming until 10,000 years ago and horses weren’t domesticated until 5,000 years ago. If you want to figure out how our distant ancestors lived 50,000 years ago, it doesn’t make sense to extrapolate from people who keep horses and tend vegetable plots. But even if we get on board with Pinker’s methods, the data is problematic. According to the psychologist, 30 per cent of deaths among the Aché in Paraguay (tribe 1 on his list) and 21 per cent of deaths among the Hiwi in Venezuela and Colombia (tribe 3) are attributable to warfare. These people are out for blood, it would seem. The anthropologist Douglas Fry was sceptical, however. Reviewing the original sources, he discovered that all forty-six cases of what Pinker categorised as Aché ‘war mortality’ actually concerned a tribe member listed as ‘shot by Paraguayan’. The Aché were in fact not killing each other, but being ‘relentlessly pursued by slave traders and attacked by Paraguayan frontiersmen’, reads the original source, whereas they themselves ‘desire a peaceful relationship with their more powerful neighbors’. It was the same with the Hiwi. All the men, women and children enumerated by Pinker as war deaths were murdered in 1968 by local cattle ranchers.40 There go the iron-clad homicide rates. Far from habitually slaughtering one another, these nomadic foragers were the victims of ‘civilised’ farmers wielding advanced weaponry. ‘Bar charts and numeric tables depicting percentages […] convey an air of scientific objectivity,’ Fry writes. ‘But in this case it is all an illusion.

The main characteristic of Nature’s farming can … be summed up in a few words. Mother earth never attempts to farm without live stock; she always raises mixed crops; great pains are taken to preserve the soil and to prevent erosion; the mixed vegetable and animal wastes are converted into humus; there is no waste; the processes of growth and the processes of decay balance one another; ample provision is made to maintain large reserves of fertility; the greatest care is taken to store the rainfall; both plants and animals are left to protect themselves against disease.1

Find out whether the methods used to keep fruits and vegetables healthy will keep the earth healthy as well. Find out whether the living conditions and wages of workers at farms and processing factories are just or unjust. And then eat what is just and merciful, fast from what is unjust and cruel. This ethical approach to eating and fasting puts us in touch with our fellow humans and with the rest of God's world and leads us to become wiser stewards of God's creation.

The thing about major food manufacturers that you hardly ever hear is that they do already sell bona fide healthy products. Just not very many of them. Kraft’s Planters brand and Pepsi’s Frito-Lay division make bags and tins of nuts; ConAgra sells David’s sunflower seeds; Smucker’s makes peanut butter that’s nothing more than peanuts and salt; General Mills’s Cascadian Farms brand offers an array of frozen fruits and vegetables, as does Pinnacle Foods’s Bird’s Eye brand.

Acclimatizing to its customs and particular brand of bustle, he’d gotten a sense of Wewoka. Without the lens of a fever-induced vision, it proved to be a dense, vertical city of narrow, terraced streets with expansive walkways. Largely devoid of motor traffic, any point could be reached by foot in fifteen minutes. Pictures painted on the sidewalks provided a colorful trail. With a central street lined with shops bustling with commerce, the noise and smell were different from what he was used to. Wewoka had none of the overworked smokestacks from innumerable factories; much of the city was made up by parks. The air had a hint of ozone to it. A collection of buildings sprouted at the heart of the city. Gleaming green and metallic spires in the distance, the sun reflected from their solar panels. A mushroom-like structure drew in sewer water from its “roots” and funneled it to its dome. Solar energy evaporated the water, which was then collected and released throughout the streets, watering the surrounding green spaces. Photovoltaic panels lined solar drop towers. Titanium dioxide reacted with ultraviolet rays and smog, filtering and dissipating them. They had developed similar technology in Jamaica. Vertical gardens and vegetation covered the steep towers of housing units and work offices. The exterior vertical gardens filtered the rain, which was reused with liquid wastes for farming needs. A deep calm reverberated through the city, quiet preserved like a commodity. Desmond

Originally, all foods were “organic”—grown without synthetic pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilizers or hormones. Large-scale farming with chemicals began around World War II, around the same time that food processing exploded. Large-scale farming works against the natural cycles of the earth, relying on chemicals to produce big returns. This process has depleted much of the world’s soil of its minerals and nutrients. The resulting vegetable and animal foods are not only deficient in nutrients, but they are also full of pollutants and agrochemicals.

Young back-to-the-landers who had felt reassured by the "real" skills of growing their own food and building their own shelter were now also experiencing what their farm neighbors and forebears had long known: relying strictly on yourself and on the land for your livelihood puts you frighteningly at the mercy of chance. An early frost, a slipped saw blade, a hot-selling market vegetable suddenly passing out of vogue- one stroke of bad luck could be devastating. Many were shocked to discover that poverty- even romantic, "turned-on" poverty- was defined not by a lack of material possessions but by a lack of control. Mortgages and health insurance and the other systems their parents had counted on to provide stability suddenly made a lot more sense.

Dr. Tommy Mitchell sums this up nicely when he writes on the “no rain” subject as an argument we should avoid: The passage describes the environment before Adam was created. This mist may have been one of the primary methods that God used to hydrate the dry land He created on Day Three. Furthermore, while this mist was likely the watering source for that vegetation throughout the remainder of Creation Week, the text does not require it to be the only water source after Adam’s creation. Some argue that this mist eliminated the need for rain until the time of the Flood. However, presence of the mist prior to Adam’s creation does not preclude the existence of or the need for rain after he was created. Genesis 2:5–6 reveals that before the Sixth Day of Creation Week, God had watered the plants He made with a mist, but had not yet caused rain or created a man to till the ground. To demand that rain didn’t happen until after the Flood from this passage has no more logical support than to claim, from the passage, that no one farmed until after the Flood.

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

U.S. political debate insistently poses economic success and environmental health as enemies, permanently at odds. Loggers or owls? People or green spaces? The presumed antagonism between “Man” and “Nature” is deeply rooted in our politics, culture, bedtime stories (Red Riding Hood’s grandma, or the wolf?), and maybe even our genes. But farming at its best optimizes both economic and environmental health at the same time.

In the physical world, you can randomize your vegetables by joining a Community-Supported Agriculture farm, which will deliver a box of produce to you every week. As we saw earlier, a CSA subscription does potentially pose a scheduling problem, but being sent fruits and vegetables you wouldn’t normally buy is a great way to get knocked out of a local maximum in your recipe rotation. Likewise, book-, wine-, and chocolate-of-the-month clubs are a way to get exposed to intellectual, oenophilic, and gustatory possibilities that you might never have encountered otherwise.

Oh, the dead past that survives in me and that has never been anywhere but in me! The flowers from the garden of the little country house that never existed except in me! The pine grove, orchards and vegetable plots of the farm that was only a dream of mine! My imaginary excursions, my outings in a countryside that never existed! The trees along the roadside, the pathways, the stones, the rural folk passing by – all of this, which was never more than a dream, is recorded in my memory, where it hurts, and I, who spent so many hours dreaming these things, now spend hours remembering having dreamed them, and it’s a genuine nostalgia that I feel, an actual past that I mourn, a reallife corpse that I stare at, lying there solemnly in its coffin.

My family has a farm, so from time to time my folks send me loads of vegetables. But as a creature of a consumer society, I prefer store bought bread and chocolates.

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 [...] and therefore they are easy prey for insect pests.

That brings to mind Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, who surprised me when we were both members of a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He took that opportunity to announce that Unilever had adopted the goal of cutting the company’s environmental footprint in half by 2020 (this was in 2010, giving it a decade to get there). That was laudable, but a little ho-hum: many socially responsible companies announce global warming goals like that.8 But the next thing he said really shocked me: Unilever is committed to sourcing its raw agriculture material from small farms, aiming to link to half a million smallholders globally.9 The farmers involved mainly grow tea, but the sourcing initiative will also include crops for cocoa, palm oil, vanilla, coconut sugar, and a variety of fruits and vegetables. The farms involved are in areas ranging from Africa to Southeast Asia and Latin America, with some in Indonesia, China, and India. Unilever hopes not only to link these small farmers into their supply chain, but also to work with groups like Rainforest Alliance to help them upgrade their farming practices and so become reliable sources in global markets.10

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.

The creation of the WTO in 1995 made it easier for countries worldwide to export fruit and vegetable products to the United States. After the agreements enforced by the WTO went into effect, the number of countries exporting the top fifty types eaten in the United States increased by a third, to 110 countries that were exporting fruits and vegetables to the United States. In 2000, after the trade deal with China was approved, its share rapidly expanded. China is now one of the five largest exporters of these

The rabbinical form of Judaism that emerged from this movement emphasized literacy and the skills to read and interpret the Torah. Even before the destruction of the temple, the Pharisee high priest Joshua ben Gamla issued a requirement in 63 or 65 AD that every Jewish father should send his sons to school at age six or seven. The goal of the Pharisees was universal male literacy so that everyone could understand and obey Jewish laws. Between 200 and 600 AD, this goal was largely attained, as Judaism became transformed into a religion based on study of the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) and the Talmud (a compendium of rabbinic commentaries). This remarkable educational reform was not accomplished without difficulty. Most Jews at the time earned their living by farming, as did everyone else. It was expensive for farmers to educate their sons and the education had no practical value. Many seem to have been unwilling to do so because the Talmud is full of imprecations against the ammei ha-aretz, which in Talmudic usage means boorish country folk who refuse to educate their children. Fathers are advised on no account to let their daughters marry the untutored sons of the ammei ha-aretz. The scorned country folk could escape this hectoring without totally abandoning Judaism. They could switch to a form of Judaism Lite developed by a diaspora Jew, one that did not require literacy or study of the Torah and was growing in popularity throughout this period. The diaspora Jew was Paul of Tarsus, and Christianity, the religion he developed, seamlessly wraps Judaism around the mystery cult creed of an agricultural vegetation god who dies in the fall and is resurrected in the spring.

Of all the countries Fairchild had visited, Japan struck him as the most advanced on matters of horticulture. He learned about Japanese miniature gardens, the art of Japanese papermaking, and the superior qualities of Japanese fruits and vegetables that didn't grow anywhere else in the world. Wealthy people introduced him to foods of affluence, like raw fish, seaweed, and a bean cheese they called tofu. He thought it impossible to eat with two narrow sticks held in one hand, but after a few tries, he got the feel for it. It was in Japan that Fairchild picked up a yellow plum known as a loquat and an asparagus-like vegetable called udo. And a so-called puckerless persimmon that turned sweet in sake wine casks. One of the most unrecognized discoveries of Fairchild, a man drawn to edible fruits and vegetables, was zoysia grass, a rich green lawn specimen attractive for the thickness of its blades and its slow growth, which meant it required infrequent cutting. And then there was wasabi, a plant growing along streambeds in the mountains near Osaka. It had edible leaves, but wasabi's stronger quality was its bitter root's uncanny ability to burn one's nose. Wasabi only lasted in America until farmers realized that its close relative the horseradish root grew faster and larger and was more pungent than the delicate wasabi (which tends to stay pungent only fifteen minutes after it's cut). Small American farms still grow Fairchild's wasabi, but most of the accompaniment to modern sushi is in fact horseradish---mashed, colored, and called something it's not.

The murder of the Everglades...is insidiously subtle and undramatic. Unlike more telegenic forms of pollution, the fertilizers pouring by the ton from the sugarcane fields and vegetable farms of southern Florida do not produce stinking tides of dead fish or gruesome panoramas of rotten animal corpses. Instead, the phosphates and other agricultural contaminants work invisibly to destroy a mat of algae known as periphyton...the small fish that feed and nest there move away. Next to go are egrets and herons, the bluegills and largemouth bass, and so on up the food chain.

I grew up in a farming household where tsukemono pickles were a common topic of kitchen conversation. We would speculate whether the cucumber pickle might be ready or wish we had some of Mom's special long-fermented pickles--all we needed with a bowl of rice for a satisfying meal.

The baby boom psyche embraces a powerful presumption that education is a key to moving away from manual labor, and dirt—two undeniable ingredients of farming.

By current estimates, at least 50 per cent of North Americans do not consume the daily recommended amounts of magnesium. Changes in farming practices over the years are partly to blame. The magnesium content of vegetables, a rich source of the mineral, has declined by 80 to 90 per cent over the last hundred years. As far back as the 1930s, the alarm was being raised about the growing scarcity of magnesium and other minerals in food. The alarming fact is that foods (fruits, vegetables and grains) now being raised on millions of acres of land that no longer contain enough of certain minerals are starving us - no matter how much of them we eat. No man of today can eat enough fruits and vegetables to supply his system with the minerals he requires for perfect health because his stomach isn't big enough to hold them. The processing of food further depletes already scare magnesium, and ultra-processed foods that make up such a high proportion of modern diets in North America are seriously lacking in magnesium. To add to the problem, the mineral is depleted by many widely used prescription medications. But a major factor impacting magnesium status is the significant and rapid loss of the mineral from the body due to stress. All types of stress - workplace stress, exam stress, emotional stress, exposure to excessive noise, the stress of extreme physical activity or chronic pain, the stress of fighting infections - are known to be a serious drain on magnesium resources. The interaction of magnesium with stress works in two ways: while stress depletes magnesium, the deficiency itself increases anxiety and enhances uncontrolled hormonal response to stress. This creates a vicious feedback loop whereby stress depletes magnesium, but the ensuing magnesium deficiency further exacerbates stress.

Among this generation there was a real sense that all of the problems in agriculture could be solved with innovations created through scientific understanding, technology, and modern industrial muscle, if coupled with the same “can-do” spirit that had helped the Allies to beat the Axis powers during the war. It was an innocent time, with blind faith in scientific solutions to vexing problems. The skeptical questioning of technological fixes in agriculture that has become the norm, especially amongst the organic farming movement since the 1970s, was virtually nonexistent at this time.