Odd-Shaped Tomatoes

Organic foods! My father, 82, is very against organic foods and all “that hippie shit they stand for.” When he comes to my house, though, he absently reaches into the fruit basket on my kitchen table and bites into an organic tomato. Immediately, he gets a misty look. He tells me of summer days he spent on the Colorado high plains, working the fields. “I’d eat tomatoes like apples, straight off the vine, half the bushel gone by the time I got back inside. Oh, I caught hell for that!” he says, smiling, licking tomato juice from his lips.
He picks tomato after tomato from the basket, and this law-abiding military man becomes a young boy walking through fields, disobeying his parents because he just couldn’t help himself — the tomatoes tasted that good. I’m what he would call a hippie. I’ve protested every war he’s fought in. We’re often at odds, which is why I treasure these tomatoes; they are one of the few things keeping my father and me connected.
The man who planted these magic tomatoes is Jerry Monroe, the third-generation owner of the oldest organic farm in Colorado, the farm to which I belong as a member of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). CSA is a concept founded in Japan by a group of women who shared concerns about increases in food imports, weakening of local economy, the health dangers of pesticides, and the loss of local, independent farmlands. Rather than butt heads with big business, they worked together to form a direct relationship between farmers and individual buyers who sought healthy, locally grown food. This relationship, called teikei in Japanese, translates as “putting the farmers’ face on the food,” an appropriate title for a process that celebrates an increasingly scarce natural resource, the independent farmer. By way of Europe, the concept of teikei migrated to the U.S., landing at Indian Line Farm, 
Massachusetts, where it was dubbed CSA in 1985.
Like my father, I’m a realistic sort. I don’t think it would be fun to work on a farm; I think it would be hard work, too hard for my gym-developed muscles to handle. I am, however, a fierce advocate of CSAs and local produce. I don’t know exactly how I got this way. When I joined my local CSA, my motives were not rooted in political ideology. I had no intention of changing the world, undercutting corporate power, “subverting the dominant paradigm,” strengthening my local economy, or aiding the fight against hunger (all of which are direct benefits of CSAs and supporting local farmers). I was simply tired of grocery shopping. The whole scene got me down. I could go to a natural-foods store; I could go to Safeway; I could go to the local hippie co-op. It was all the same. Piles of food stared at me like bodies whose souls had vacated them. I was haunted by the way the red peppers curved at the waist, stretching toward one another longingly; by the way the bananas clung to each other and the Napa cabbage lay so quietly in its frilly bed, while its blue-collar cousin, the purple cabbage, sat boldly on the edge of the shelf, ready to topple and take off like a bowling ball if someone passed by too abruptly.
Okay, maybe there was some projection on my part, but the food looked empty to me. After all, most of it had traveled an average of 1,500 miles away from its home before reaching that shelf. I was a military brat; I empathized with the “fresh” corn and its lonesome, cross-country journey.
My grocery shopping woes were compounded by signs I saw plastered on telephone poles and streetlights in the parking lots: “Lose 40 pounds in 40 days. Guaranteed!” My father was active in three wars: WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. It bothered me that he had fought, as he says, “for the freedom of this country” and that this was part of what we were doing with that “freedom”: creating and marketing food for its lack of content, while people in other nations starved. What else, I wondered, were we touting for its lack of content?
As I entered the door of the grocery store, I had only a vague idea of where my “fresh, organic” produce had been. An incomprehensible machine in — I don’t know — Iowa, or maybe California, had methodically stabbed the seeds into the ground, and a computer-programmed pivot had watered the seeds until they began to grow. They grew very big, very fast, because they were designed by engineers to grow big and fast. Then whatever it was — let’s say a red pepper — was plucked from the vine and put to its first major test: Was it big enough? Did it have the right red-pepper shape? Did it successfully hide all signs of ever being subjected to weather or greedy insects? Indeed, my shiny pepper passed the test! Proudly, my pepper was then herded into a truck with many others peppers that looked just like it. After that, a tarp was thrown over the whole crowd, and together they made the big trip across America (passing many local farms on the way), where they were unloaded into a distributing warehouse, then loaded into another truck and carried to another warehouse, and so on and so forth, until my “fresh, organic” red pepper arrived in the store in Colorado, where it sat in the stock room for days. After a while, it was slapped with a price tag, then displayed under bright interrogation lights. No wonder it looked naked and scared as I fingered through and plucked my prized capsicum from the bunch. By the time I purchased my succulent red pepper, I was at least the fourth person to pay for it. The number of times it had been fondled before it became mine is anyone’s guess.
Since joining the CSA, however, my relationship with food has become more trusting, more intimate. On Thursday mornings, the Monroe farm truck backs into my suburban driveway. Jacquie Monroe — blonde hair, jeans, and T-shirt — hops out, followed by her two kids, Alana and Kyle. We chat (What’s been going on in your life? Not much; how about yours? — things like that) and then we commence with the work at hand. Jacquie stands in the bed of the truck and peels back the canvas from the produce, and my nose — nay, my pores — are filled with the scent of fresh garlic and onions and broccoli and cauliflower and beans and lettuce, and oh, I swoon. I’m 10 feet from the truck when this culinary bouquet saturates me, and it occurs to me that I’ve never smelled anything like this in any grocery store. I don’t have to press my nose to the cantaloupes in Jacquie’s truck to see if they’re fresh. I can smell them from 10 feet away, the sweet scent permeating the air like — like what? Like fresh, just-picked-this-morning, bright-orange-and-meaty, extra-juicy, can’t-help-but-eat-it-now cantaloupe.
By the time my produce makes it to my driveway, I know exactly where it has been. Jerry planted the seeds that were either handed down through three generations of farming on the same land in LaSalle, Colorado, or purchased new from catalogs, not Monsanto. Jerry, Jacquie, Alana, and Kyle watered the seeds. One of the CSA working-members picked the produce, divvied up the harvest into potato sacks, and loaded the sacks onto the truck.
By the time I haul the gunny sack into my kitchen, chunks of loamy earth fall on the floor, reminding me that what I eat depends on just that — large chunks of undeveloped earth. The onions and garlic I get from the farm are not round balls; they have long green tops, great for soup stock, and the garlic is waxy, the skin nothing like the dry parchment I once thought encased all garlic. When I pull the bulb apart to extract a clove, garlic juice drips out. I had to look at my members’ newsletter to identify an oddly shaped golden mound as cauliflower. I learned later that commercial farmers hide the florets of their cauliflower from sunlight to assure a uniform color (white), and that the golden color of my cauliflower assures me of more nutrients absorbed from the sun.
Granted, the food I get from the farm often looks sallow, splotchy, and ill-formed. That’s what I love about it. My produce is renegade! It is so lusciously, succulently, and nutritiously ugly. The beets are like a kid’s rock collection, different sizes and shapes, some round and plump as a heart, others as long as carrots. Some potatoes are like skipping stones, others like large river rocks. Inconvenient for cooking? Maybe. But compare that to this inconvenience: Much of this food would have been tossed into the trash bin if Jerry and Jacquie had continued selling to the natural food stores in the area. Only certain sizes, shapes, and colors meet the “high standards” demanded by grocers. They do not test for nutrients (up to half of which are lost 72 hours after a piece of produce is picked, organic or not). They do not test for toxicity. They test for uniformity of size and color. Diversity does not make a beautiful display, and a beautiful display is what opens the floodgates of the insatiable urge to buy. Food in America is most often not about hunger.
According to Jerry, about 25 percent of all commercial produce in America is thrown away in the field because it is blemished, scarred, crooked, or off-color. Another 25 percent is then tossed during the grading process, which bends to the whims of food fashion. For eons, Grade C and smaller potatoes were tossed into dumpsters due to their inadequate size. Recently, however, someone noticed that Grade C taters are downright delicious — more delicious even than expensive Grade A’s. Thus, the birth of a trend; when you order “new potatoes” on the menu at your favorite gourmet restaurant, you are eating yesterday’s trash — and paying more for it.
Americans, by and large, select their food based on the unwieldy, abstract notion of physical beauty. It’s as if we were scoping the produce for a one-night stand, when what our bodies really need from food is a healthy, long-term relationship.
It may be true that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone, but I think there’s a more slippery version of the same truth: You don’t know what you’ve lost ’til you find it.
My father picks up an organic tomato from my fruit basket, and the world returns to him. Through this food, we are 
connected.

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See BK Loren’s biography here.

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Want to Join a CSA in Your Area? The Internet is a great tool for this. Between the following two sites, you should be able to find a CSA near you and sign up today:
localharvest.org/ Local Harvest searches nationwide and posts an abbreviated list of produce and meats offered by each CSA.
organicconsumers.org/purelink.html Organic Consumers searches by ZIP code, then connects you with your local CSA’s webpage.
When your CSA basks in an overabundant harvest, so will you. Check out uga.edu/nchfp/, a helpful page on safe methods of home food preservation: canning, freezing, dehydrating, making jam — you name it. It’s a great way to eat locally year-round.