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Onions and Ramakrishna
Hi everybody: It’s pouring rain, the fields are a swamp, the goats are starting to kid, one ewe gave triplet lambs today, and I’ve got to start thinking about spring planting. I’m distracted. I look forward to writing a Ladybug Letter every two weeks but I just didn’t have it in me today, so instead I dug back into the digital files and found a letter I wrote back in 2003. I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. -andy on 2-17-09
E Pluribus Onion
Ramakrishna compared the ego to an onion. Peel away an onion’s rings the way spiritual experiences strip at the ego until finally, after all the layers are gone, there is nothing; no central core with an egoistic structure, and no onion either, just a void with no barrier remaining to a union with Brahma. I wouldn’t know, but it’s not for lack of trying.
I peeled an onion, a saucer-shaped cipollini Bianco di Maggio to be exact. After eight layers I was left with a tiny pearly white, tear drop-shaped piece of lily bulb. I broke it open – layer number nine – and nothing remained but tears in my eyes from the oxidized sulfur compounds released from the onion’s tissue by my violence. Is this a deep and metaphoric experience, I wondered, or have I just wasted an onion?
So I gathered the curled, juicy onion pieces together and tossed them in a bowl of cool water so they couldn’t oxidize any more and turn bitter. As cheap and ubiquitous as they are onions are not easy to grow, at least not organically, so I didn’t want to waste one. I have shed more tears over growing onions than I ever have from eating them.
To yield well an onion bed must be kept completely free of weeds. Allium roots are quite shallow and the plants can’t tolerate much competition. Without recourse to herbicides and soil fumigants organic onion culture can entail costly hand-weeding once the plants are too large for mechanical cultivation. Onions grow slowly, too, giving weeds lots of opportunities to sprout, and onions are hungry for fertilizer and thirsty for water. Onions demand full sun and perfect drainage. It is fair to say that onions are among the most self-centered and egoistic of the garden vegetables. Am I what I eat?
There was sourdough bread on the table in front of me and a cube of butter. Feeling a void at my core I spread some butter on the bread. I poured the bowl of onions into a colander and shook it to drain them. “Would Ramakrishna approve?” I asked myself as I cobbled the buttered bread with puzzle pieces of raw onion and sprinkled them with a pinch of salt. Not everyone appreciates onions they way I do. Some religious traditions in Hinduism hold that the Brahmin, Kshatriya, and Vaishya castes, or the priestly, warrior, and professional classes, should avoid “hot” foods like onions that lead to lustful thoughts. Jains supposedly don’t eat onions either, and neither did the priests or royalty of ancient Egypt. The slaves who built the pyramids ate onions, though, raw and cooked, with great frequency. “We can’t all have been Cleopatra in a past life.” I decided, and bit into my sandwich. Some of us are eternal peasants.
The onion I was eating was sweet and mild and hardly bit me back, but its aroma reawakened Ramakrishna to my mind. Funny how the onion Ramakrishna saw as a perfect metaphor for the illusion of individuality and the nothingness of the void should have been seen by ancient Latins as a symbol of wholeness. Our words onion and union share a common Latin root in unio, meaning unity. The successive layers of an onion wrapped up in a single round bulb do suggest unity, especially when compared to their alliaceous cousins, the multi-cloved garlics. And somehow, even if you can never spy the life force at the heart of an onion or see it moving between the layers of an onion as you peel them away when you plant an onion bulb it will give birth to more genetically identical onions, thus wrapping the past, the present, and the future of vegetal individuality into one silky tear-jerking ball.
Maybe it’s just the onion causing my mouth to water but I say onions are like the spicy, girly, back-up singers whose role on stage is to sway back and forth cooing sweet harmonies that allow some otherwise hunky but mediocre lead singer to sound good. What cuisine hasn’t been sweetened and enhanced by onions? Where would we be if onions didn’t add zest to American potato salad, or sugar to Pakistani dal, or bind together Chinese dumplings? If ancient Egyptian priests, Jains, Brahmins, warriors and Vaisyas can’t share in my onion harvest that just leaves more for the rest of us.
I swallow the last bite of my onion sandwich and feel full for a moment; full of onion, full of thoughts about the onion-eating pyramid builders that came before us. Peeling onions and looking for your ego can get anybody feeling hollow and teary-eyed, but gather up those aromatic scraps into a meal you can share with friends and you can transform the moment; people will be talking, glasses will be clinking, and spicy lilies will be shaking their hips and harmonizing in the background.
What did those ancient Latins used to say? E Pluribus Onion?
copyright 2009 Andy Griffin
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Onion Recipes, including Chinese Dumplings & Pakistani Dal: recipes Julia gathered in travels
pre-kids.
Baby Goat Photos we took today
A few Mystery Veggie Boxes at Incanto in San Francisco available for this Thursday, 2-19-09. Read More….
Know Your Weeds: Malva neglecta
Once upon a time marshmallows were made of the sticky juices squeezed from the pulverized roots of marsh mallow, or Althaea officinalis. Nowadays marshmallows are made from a viscous protein solution, like gelatin, that’s been whipped full of air and sugar, but the old name still sticks. The marsh mallow is a weedy relative of Gossypium hirsutum, the cotton plant, Althaea rosea, the hollyhock, and Abelmoshus esculentus, or okra. I don’t grow cotton, hollyhocks, or okra, but my farm is plagued with another mallow, Malva neglecta, or cheeseweed. If you try to pull a cheeseweed up it’s likely to break off above the ground, leaving the roots behind to re-sprout and leaving your hands slimy. The roots of most mallows are typically mucilaginous when you crush them. There’s even a mallow species that scientists have given the name Bastardia viscosa var. sanctae-crucis, or “the viscous Bastardia from Santa Cruz,” in vulgar English.
I know now that a number of different Mallow species have medicinal properties and are said to be good for soothing coughs and healing wounds. In fact, today’s confectionery marshmallow was originally conceived as a palatable delivery system for bitter medicine. One time, when I was traveling in Bolivia, I stayed with a farm family in a lovely hacienda far out in the back country of Tarija Province. When she learned that I was a farmer, the ama de casa was delighted to show me her lovely kitchen garden that took up the entire central courtyard. After lunch, she and her husband took a siesta, but I was restless, so after lying around for a while I decided to do my hostess a favor by pulling up the cheeseweeds I’d seen growing amongst her peppers. How was I to know that they were actually “yerbas curativas,” and very difficult to grow in Bolivia? When she woke up from her nap the good woman was dismayed– she said something about a bicho malo that always ate the malva seedlings before the plants could grow. I felt sad. We certainly don’t have that problem here. American bugs won’t eat Malva neglecta and neither will we. Meanwhile the drug companies get rich selling cough syrup and I pay farm workers to kill malva. It’s too bad I can’t make artisanal, medicinal “field mallows” for you all to roast at home, but the FDA would probably frown on that.
So why, you ask, is Malva neglecta called “cheeseweed” if it’s slimy, fibrous and tough?
MalvaCheeseweed has a schizocarp shaped like a cheese wheel. “Schizocarp” is fancy botanical talk for a fruit that splits up into pieces. The ten seeds that make up each cheeseweed fruit fall to the ground like rain when the plant matures and they remain vital in the soil for years. On bad days I think I can remember hearing a story on National Public Radio where some scientists discovered a ceramic jar full of seeds in an undisturbed Anasazi cave dwelling that was five thousand years old. Hoping to discover new facts about ancient agriculture, the scientists planted the ancient seeds. But only the Malva neglecta sprouted. This tale could just be my paranoia talking, though. So what can a farmer like me do to rid a plot of ground of mallow without resorting to powerful toxic chemicals that also defy the ages?
First, before planting, we pre-irrigate the field we’re going to plant. Mallow seeds sprout almost overnight once they’ve been refreshed with a drink of water. Then we plant our crop. Carrots take fourteen days to germinate, and onions can take ten. The first two leaves, or cotyledons, of a nascent malva plant look like a pair of tiny green valentines. After the mallow seeds have sprouted but before the crop we’ve sown has germinated, we pass over the weedy bed with a hand held gas torch. The mallow seedlings are tender and wilt to death at the merest touch of flame. There is no need to stand over the seedlings and incinerate them. Bigger organic farms use tractor mounted torches and speed down the field. You can think of this organic flame weeding technique as “roasting field mallows” if you want. Burning mallows down the rows is never as fun as roasting marshmallows over the coals, but one thing’s for sure; no matter how much Malva neglecta we’re able to kill there are always “smore” where they came from!
copyright 2009 Andy Griffin
lamb photos from new ones born this week: these have nothing to do with the article above, but they sure are cute! video of the same lamb batch (I’m just starting my video career, stay tuned for better footage in the future! -julia)
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Apocalypse Deferred
“What’s your ‘Plan B’?” a radio reporter asked business school students the other day. One young woman’s answer caught my ear.
“If things get bad enough,” she said, “my friends and I are thinking of getting a farm together.”
I’m not going to argue. I graduated in ‘81 with a degree in Philosophy and I’ve been “down on the farm” ever since. Society didn’t need youngsters lecturing on Nietzsche and Schopenhauer back then any more than it needs more business majors now. Now I’m fifty. I farm 60 acres of organic vegetables and I live at the end of a road with olive and lemon trees in my yard, plenty of firewood at hand, an array of pole-mounted solar panels in the pasture, two wells, a gun, and a diversified portfolio of stocks that range from goats, sheep and cattle to a single, colossal Gloucestershire Old Spot pig. If worse comes to worse I’m as ready as most people are. Have I learned all there is to know about farming? No, but my education in philosophy gives me the skills to act like I do, and my experience in the field has taught me lessons I won’t forget. So, going out to the young woman in the radio interview who almost has an MBA, and to all her friends, here are my ten cents about going back to the land.
.
First of all, don’t buy a farm. Snarled lines of credit are at the heart of this whole economic crisis, so getting a loan is difficult. Also, at least here in California, land prices are preposterous. It’s almost impossible to pay a land mortgage off with a farm’s earnings unless you grow marijuana. And trust me; you don’t want to start your farming career by growing weed. Yes, Cannabis was created by the same loving god that created apples, wheat, fish and cattle, but strictly speaking, pot is not a food group. If worse does come to worse and food is scarce you’ll feel stupid sitting in a barn full of drugs that stimulate your appetite. If it turns out that apocalypse is deferred, you can always sell drugs but that will spoil vegetable cultivation for you. One thing I’ve learned about economics from farming is that the more consumers need something, the less they’ll pay for it. I know growers that got started in the ‘70s growing marijuana who were never able to make their organic vegetable farms amount to more than money losing fronts for their drug sales. The development of their farming skills were stunted by their eventual dependence on easy money. The feeling of well-being and pride that comes from growing your own food will make you want to get better at it every year. Self-described experts disagree about marijuana, but I can tell you for sure that farming is addictive.
Secondly, and more importantly, buying a farm is not a good idea if you can rent one, especially for a first-time farmer. Mother Nature is the inscrutable, silent partner in every farming venture. She’s not like an exotic dancer down at the Bada Bing who’ll strip to the short hairs before Mustang Sally finishes blaring from the speakers. A piece of land reveals itself slowly. Even after years of working the same soil you’ll discover new possibilities and limitations. If you rent land you have the option to move on should it turn out that the soil, climate, or water don’t meet your needs. I met one couple, intent on raising grapes for their own winery, who spent seven figures on acreage before they discovered the ground they’d bought was plagued with soil pathogens that made organic grape production impossible. Now they rent their land to a vegetable grower and the capital they need to expand their winery business is tied up in real estate.
When you go to look for land to rent don’t allow the beauty or tranquility of a piece of rural property to sway your better judgment. Plants need good soil, plenty of light and adequate water to thrive, not beauty or isolation. The enchanting redwood forest that surrounds the sylvan meadow may stir the heart, but it probably hides swarms of hungry deer that eat your crops come nightfall. The isolated, ridge-top field with the mind expanding view may feed the soul, but when you need to get a flat tire repaired, buy diesel, or get your crops to market it will take you too much time. Matthew said of salvation; “For many are called but few are chosen.” When I think back to people I knew who dreamed of being organic farmers, besides the ones lured off the garden path by Mary Jane, the largest number failed because they tried to farm a piece of ground that they’d fallen in love with. A vision of Pomona seduced them and led them on, but they were never able to support themselves because the land they had a relationship with had too many “issues.” Mother Nature takes many alluring forms but she doesn’t have much pity for suckers.
Once you’ve found an affordable piece of ground to rent with good soil, water, and access, pay attention to kinds of farm equipment that your neighbors have. Being a peasant looks great on paper, but it’s a drag in real life to bend over when your back is blown out. As soon as you can, you’re going to want to buy equipment to ease your labors. Seriously consider buying the same kind of equipment as your neighbors have, or at least the same brand. The big farm down the road isn’t your competitor the way that Net Flicks is to a neighborhood video store. There aren’t many farms left, and the farmers in your area, both conventional and organic, make up your new peer group. You’ll need to turn to them for help and you’ll want to help them when they ask for it. Your tractor will break down, and when it does you’ll need to borrow or rent another one until it’s running again. Parts for an off-brand tractor can be expensive, hard to find, or difficult to get quickly, but if you have a common brand you can often scavenge in a neighbor’s bone yard for the thing you need. Then there are the tractor’s axels to think about.
I know a fellow who learned his farming up in the Sacramento area where fields are typically bedded up in sixty-inch beds after the fashion of the processor tomato industry. He moved down here to the coast where row crops are usually planted out on forty or eighty-inch beds but he never adapted his farming practices to our area. When his tractor broke down he couldn’t borrow his neighbors’ equipment because their tractors’ wheels wouldn’t fit his beds, nor could he rent a tractor, since all the dealers in the area have their rental units configured on forties or eighties and didn’t want to mess around with adjusting the axels. He went bankrupt, mostly because he drank too much, put his trust in the wrong people, and wouldn’t listen to his workers, but everything counts in farming and there’s no point in making your life any harder than it needs to be. My friend had the pride of standing out from the crowd, but he lost thousands of dollars and he couldn’t fall back on the generosity of his neighbors and borrow a tractor when he needed one. When it came time for him to sell his equipment nobody local wanted it.
When you’re not looking for good land or a used John Deere tractor, read about the crops you want to grow. Having a “green thumb” is not a talent or an instinct, it’s about paying attention. Plants want to grow. Discover under what ecological regimen the crop you’re interested in evolved under and try to create those conditions on your farm. Beware of hybrid varieties that have “evolved” recently under “laboratory” conditions. These crops may not be capable of yield under organic “field” conditions unless they receive the high nitrogen inputs and chemical crutches of their test tube “ancestors.” Beware, too, of the old-fashioned “heirloom” crops that were popular when your grandparents were infants. There may be good reasons these varieties passed from general use. Heirloom crops may not be very resistant to diseases in your growing region, they may take too long to mature under your day length conditions, or they may be pretty but yield poorly. In short, beware, as in “be aware.” Plant varieties that work well for your neighbors but experiment on a small scale with new or different crops, in case your neighbors are fools or are too stuck in their ways to change when new opportunities beckon.
Once you have a farm, don’t plant out the whole place at once. Managing a farm is a bit like making music. Take Trois Gymnopedies, by Eric Satie, for example. It’s a musical composition which contains thousands of notes. Every single note sounds beautiful, but the overall effect is easiest to appreciate if the pianist doesn’t play them all at once. Timing is everything, in the concert hall and in the beet field. On the farm you’ll want to keep some open ground to plant into if your initial sowings fail. You’ll want open ground for sequential sowings so that your harvests don’t come all at once. And you’ll want to keep some ground fallow to rest and recuperate for future crops. It’s true that nature marks the time for the passage of the seasons, but for finding the appropriate rhythm of your farm your abandoned MBA may come in useful; long term success in farming has as much to do with creating a steady, year-round cash flow as with getting close to nature. Spread out the planting, the harvesting, and the sales so you can do a good job and you’re not overwhelmed. “Less” is often “more.” One rule I keep is to never sow anything new until I’ve taken care of the crops I’ve already planted. Why throw good money after bad?
Once you start harvesting some crops will inevitably spoil before you can pick or sell them. When this happens, don’t feel guilty because “food is being wasted.” You’re a producer now, not a consumer. You haven’t “wasted” food until you’ve spent time or money to pick it, wash it, pack it, deliver it, and then thrown it away! The earth is like a bank account; vegetables that go unpicked stay with the earth– no withdrawal is made. Is oil “wasted” because it hasn’t been pumped yet? A crop taken from the ground is a loan from the soil that needs to be repaid with fertilizer that put nutrients back into the earth. If unpicked, unwashed, unpacked, unsold “food” bothers you, buy a goat, a pig, a sheep or a rabbit and feed them your overproduction. Then eat your animals in the winter when they’re fat from the excess vegetables you grew and you’re skinny from overwork.
Is there more? Of course there is. The harvest is the most important event in the world that happens every year, and I’m glad young MBAs are thinking about it. If I was a young business school senior, I’d start an apiary. Bee keepers don’t need to rent land because farmers like me want to share their land with bees and we may even pay the bee keeper for the pleasure. All you need to build bee hives is a hammer, some nails, and a saw. If you’re busted flat you can start your first colony by capturing bees when they swarm. Honey sells well in local markets because it has unique, therapeutic, anti-allergenic properties qualities. Honey keeps well, travels well, and you can even make it into mead. There’s always money in alcohol. How’s that for a “Plan B?” Happy trails, business majors. Fear not. We were made for the earth and she for us.
Copyright 2009 Andy Griffin
Orach Seeds are now available! comment below or email: julia at mariquita dot com. 1/3 cup seeds for $5 includes shipping and handling for US addresses.
Learn more about great cooking in SF: Cook with James
Red Greens
Orach, or Atriplex hortensis, is a leafy vegetable that I grow that is related to spinach. You can sometimes find this plant in seed catalogues listed as “Goosefoot,” or “Mountain spinach.” There’s nothing avian or particularly mountainous about orach; in fact, “hortensis,” the second part of its proper scientific name, means “of the garden” in Latin, but the plant does bear a close resemblance to the even wilder, more antique and weedier form of spinach called Lamb’s Quarters. Orach comes in one of two decorator colors, purple or green, but it always has a nice, mellow flavor. Orach is never found in the supermarket despite the fact that it is easy to grow, nutritious, colorful, and tasty raw or cooked, and you only rarely find it in farmers markets. Why? One reason must be that the orach seed that is commercially available is ridiculously expensive, and it often germinates poorly. But I also attribute the absence of this ancient vegetable in the modern era to poor marketing on the part of the farmers.
It’s foolish for a professional grower to even plant a crop without a market in mind so it’s important for any would-be orach farmer to first consider the promotional challenges facing Atriplex hortensis. “Orach” is a pretty weird word for a “common name” and not many people even know how to pronounce it. (Pronounce “orach” like Iraq with an “O” and you’re doing fine.) Then there’s the flavor to consider. Like spinach, orach is a member of the Chenopodiaceae family. In fact, almost any recipe for spinach can be comfortably and flavorfully be adapted to accommodate orach if people would only try it. Again I blame language for getting in the way of communication; consumers’ tongues would tell them the truth about orach if they would simply cease to shape names and concentrate on tasting the leaves instead. Here’s the problem.
The outline of an orach leaf can be construed to resemble a goose foot so orach is sometimes sold as “goosefoot.” The green form is called “Golden Goosefoot” and the purple variety is called “Purple Goosefoot.” These odd sounding English names have classical roots; “Cheno” comes from the Greek for goose, and “pod” means foot. Because orach was the first of this family to gain notice and acceptance it shares its scientific name with its more famous, contemporary green cousin. Unfortunately for orach, this “fowl” branding does little to add luster or sex appeal as a modern vegetable product. Insecure consumers respond to a name like “purple goosefoot” by letting their minds wander to all the places a goose’s foot is likely to have stepped rather than wondering if a gratin of the vegetable pairs up best with red or white wine. Humans have such odd inhibitions! Did you know that a now fabulously successful fruit failed with the American public when it was first introduced into the marketplace as the “New Zealand Gooseberry”? Geese again! But sales took flight when Frieda Caplan, of Frieda’s Finest Specialty Vegetables in the Los Angeles Produce Terminal, rebranded the sorry fuzzy brown fruit after the cute, but flightless Kiwi bird. Perhaps Frieda could reposition orach as “Purple Kiwifeet” and make a second fortune.
Or maybe I should garner a celebrity endorsement to spice up the glamour quotient for orach I grow the way the Nunes Company in Salinas called upon Brooke Shields when they wanted to promote their organic Iceberg lettuce products in 1989. (“Hi, this is Whoopie Goldberg for Mariquita Farm. Have you eaten your purple geese feet today?”) Back in the 80’s even Brooke Shields couldn’t convince the average organic consumer to buy much Iceberg lettuce but sometimes celebrity can sell food. Just look at how everyone but Adolph Hitler has worn a white moustache to promote milk for the Dairy Council. Orach has been eaten since Eden, and I’ve read in different herbals that the plant was mentioned in the Bible, though I’ve never been able to locate the verse. God’s word would be a fantastic endorsement.
In the meantime, spinach still has Popeye pitching its virtues, and the numbers don’t lie. In the first few years following Popeye’s conspicuous consumption of spinach, back in the cartoons of the 30’s, the popularity of spinach among America’s children exploded. Spinach’s Hollywood razzle dazzle wore off by the time I was a youngster in the 60’s but spinach remains a leader among greens. Don’t get me wrong. I love greens, but I think “purples” deserve our consideration too.
Spinach does best in a cool, coastal climate, but not all of us can farm near the beach, and orach thrives in hot, inland like zones, like Mariquita Farm’s Hollister location. It does well in the freezing cold too. I grew a crop of orach for seed this past summer, and a lot of orach seeds “volunteered” this fall after the rains. Temperatures sank into the high twenties this past week, but the orach grew beautifully through the frost, nonetheless. Spinach, by contrast, does terribly in the cold. And orach seems practically immune to the various mildews and molds that affect spinach so fungicide isn’t necessary, even for growers that use it. I have “issues” with fungicides, even if they’re organic, and we spray no chemicals, natural or otherwise on our crops, so orach’s vitality is very attractive to me. Winter, spring, summer, fall, orach grows easily. So why don’t more farmers grow it?
One reason that orach isn’t planted widely is the cost of the seed. I paid $126 for a pound of goosefoot seed three years ago and the germination rate was poor. Today I checked on the price and it had climbed to $185. Spinach seed is readily available and it’s a lot cheaper. Last year I decided to grow out a few orach plants and produce my own seed supply. Out of only 4 beds, 40 inches wide and two hundred feet long, I got four garbage cans of seed. Each orach seed was encased in a papery membrane. In masse, the orach seeds looked like breakfast cereal. I lacked the machinery to buff the membranes off and the seeds wouldn’t pass through my Planet Junior planters. So I improvised another way of sowing raw, unprocessed orach seed. I removed the plates from an Earthway brand seeder that normally act to calibrate the amount of seed that is spilled into the soil and let the oatmeal-like seeds spill out like rain. The first planting from my own seed germinated with astonishing vigor. John Bauer, a farmer friend of mine who is also a seed dealer, informs me that the papery husk that seed companies go to such lengths to remove from orach seed actually helps the seed germinate. Apparently, when the papery husks rot in the soil they release enzymes which stimulate germination. Not only did my own seed stock germinate better than “store-bought” seed, it produced a crop that was a deeper purple than the mother stock I’d purchased. Hopefully, this year I can convince the public to cook my orach and the colorful crops I grow will be like so many geese, laying me golden eggs.
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text and photos copyright 2009 Andy Griffin || all photos taken by Andy Griffin
** email us if you’d like to try planting some our orach seeds: we’ll send them to you for $5: that covers shipping and handling, the 1/3 cup seeds themselves are free. julia at mariquita dot com
photo key:
1) orach growing in our field
2) Popeye helping Salinas sell spinach
3) orach seed that Andy saved with the husks still on
another orach photo, and another.
a couple of orach recipes
Miracle on the Road to Oaxaca
Until the Aswan Dam plugged her up, the Nile River flooded every year, spreading her chocolate waters across the land of Egypt, and depositing the rich sediment of eroded topsoil from the heart of Africa, to fuel another year’s productivity in the fields.
As regular as the Nile’s rising waters, a seasonal flow of migrant Mexican farm workers heads south from the States, going home for the Christmas holidays. Like the Nile, they carry with them a load of riches to deposit from one end of Mexico to the other. Pick-up trucks and TV sets, kitchen appliances and talking baby dolls, chainsaws, mattresses and blow driers— anything that is more expensive to obtain in Mexico than here, will end up riding the river of people back home.
This yearly tide of travelers has spawned a parasite class of thieves, extortionists, and pick-pockets, who line the highways home. Crooks are crooks the world over, but among the various rateros who afflict the homecoming Mexican farm workers, the most reprehensible element is the corrupted law enforcement officers of their own government. Crooked cops and customs police invent a multitude of spontaneous impuestos, multas and cuotas to put an official seal on their bribery and highway robbery. For migrant farm workers, the border between Mexico and the US, where they pass the under the scrutiny of their own customs officials, may be the highest hurdle to cross on the race home, but it is hardly the last. Any fly-speck village can be the scene of a crude hold-up, and any innocent action on the road may be a pretext for detention, if some cop thinks he needs more money or a new toaster.
España, our tractor driver, discussed his upcoming trip before he loaded up his two pick-up trucks with his sisters and his accumulated wealth of household items and tools. At lunch break, underneath the shade of the elderberry trees, everyone had stories to trade about the trips home they’d made in years past. I heard the joy of homecoming, mixed with trepidation for what may be lost. Everybody on the crew had a war story about a trip home, but maybe because he was the one going home next, España’s story of a previous return was the best.
Eight years ago, when he’d last returned to Oaxaca, España had a little Datsun pickup truck.
“Oh yes,” everybody remembered the pick-up truck; “small, brown, a little beat-up, but with a decent motor.”
Eight years ago he was returning without much money, because it had cost him so much to live back when he was migrant, always moving from ranch to ranch.
“Oh yes,” murmured the other guys like a Greek chorus, as they ate their tacos, and drank their soup. “Not much money, but still more than if you’d stayed in Oaxaca…”
España was on his way home, still in Sonora crossing the desert, just south of San Luis Rio Colorado, when a highway patrolman pulled him over.
At this point there was a general rumble, heads nodded, and someone stopped chewing long enough to pronounce the verdict: “pinche parasito.”
The officer approached the pickup truck, eyeing the vehicle’s California license plates from behind his insect eye, aviator sunglasses. He bent over to speak through the window. “Señor Indio,” he announced, “You have been driving in a manner threatening to the safety of the Republic. “The fine will be $200 dollars.”
The taco eaters scoffed with contempt.
“…in twenties.”
There was a roar of outrage. Jose passed around a paper plate of pickled jalapeños.
España waited for a minute before resuming his narrative. “So I told the patrolman. ‘Señor Policeman, I don’t have $200. I have barely enough cash to buy the gasoline to get me to Oaxaca City.’” The officer listened with a stone face. He straightened up, pulled a wallet from his pants pocket— a wallet gorged with money— and he pulled out a crisp twenty dollar bill.
“Señor Oaxaquito,” said the officer, “Better that I give you some money,” and handed España the bank note.
Everybody cried out in disbelief, “Impossible!” “Increible!” “A miracle!”
“Ho-ho-ho,” Don Gerardo said. “España must have met the Mexican Santa Claus.”
copyright 2008 Andy Griffin
holiday note: Andy will rest over the holidays and he’ll be back with more great stories from the farm and beyond in 2009.
Going To Vacaville
On a recent camping trip in the Panoche Hills behind Hollister I ran into a charming buffalo couple so I took some pictures, including one extreme bison close-up that I sent to my friend, Mitzi, as a Thanksgiving Day greeting card. She wrote back, “That buffalo got pretty close, eh?” I wouldn’t want Mitzi to imagine that I’m some sort of adventurer or thrill-seeker, so I followed up with a clarifying letter that wandered in some interesting directions. Apropos of nothing, I send you all today an edited version of that letter, hoping that you might enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Here is the photo that prompted the letter, along with a less graphic, more scenic and sentimental picture of the Panoche Hills on a beautiful fall afternoon. 
Dear Mitzi: The buffalo gal in the photo was on the other side of the fence with her boyfriend. She seemed quite tame and sweet, but I’d never be so stupid as to crawl up a buffalo’s nose. I remember that back when I went to the University of California in Davis there was a fellow raising buffaloes for meat north of town along Highway 113, and right next to his buffalo ranch was a dairy. One day a buffalo bull got a whiff of a cute Jersey cow in heat and plowed down the fence that separated him from the cow of his desires. That’s the thing about buffaloes– a fence has to be of really massive construction before it serves as anything more than a mere suggestion of limits to a determined buffalo bull.
Mr. Buffalo was making whoopie with the whole herd of milk cows when the dairy farmer showed up. The farmer was horrified, of course, about the random mixed-race coupling going on, but he couldn’t convince the buffalo to give up his poly-amorous ways and go back home. The dairyman did manage to chase the bull out of his yard and on to the county road in front of his farm and then he closed the gate. Instead of being discouraged, the bull figured he’d follow his nose down the road and see how the situation developed. The country lane fed into another road, and then another, until the bull ended up trotting down an on-ramp onto southbound Highway 113, where he was soon challenging traffic and provoking a commotion.
The highway patrol officer who showed up to deal with the issue was a fine public servant, but he was no cowboy, so he radioed his commander for help. The commander was thinking that the officer might be hallucinating so he sent a CHP chopper over to investigate, and when the helicopter came in low for a look, the bull Bison spooked and ran down 113 all the way to where it merges with southbound I-80. It was only the beginning of afternoon rush hour, but the introduction of an angry buffalo onto the interstate played havoc with the commute.
I was at home studying Nietzsche at the time and my housemates were drinking beer in the living room and watching TV. “Hey, Andy,” they were yelling. “Get in here. You gotta check this out!” The Live at Five news people had picked up on the story and dispatched their own traffic copter to film the scandal from the sky, so we were treated to a great overhead view of thousands of honking, pissed-off commuters headed home at one mile per hour behind a buffalo bull who trotted purposefully down the centerline of the freeway, throwing a horn and an evil glance at anyone who tried to pass him.
More CHP officers made their way through the snarl of cars but they were helpless too. A 2000 pound buffalo bull does what he feels like, and this one felt like going to Vacaville. Not only were the officers constrained by their ignorance of wild bovine management, they were also now being watched live on TV by a million people. They couldn’t just shoot the beast or the animal rights activists would be all over them like flies on a cow pie. The slow motion chase went on and on as the buffalo headed south trailing cops and choppers like OJ’s white Bronco. Anchormen filled the airwaves with speculation and traffic backed up down 80 farther and farther towards Sacramento and the capitol dome. Someone at my house went out for more beer.
Eventually CHP headquarters decided to shoot the bull full of tranquilizer darts and the SWAT teams reached for their rifles. Bang, bang, bang. The darts worked. The bull fell over, asleep on the centerline, and the only problem that remained was what to do with a ton of living, breathing, stoned meat that could wake up at any minute and start thrashing around and bellowing. A tow truck made its way through the traffic jam and got into position. The errant bull was winched onto a trailer and tied down with a mile of rope. Then the officers whisked Mr. Buffalo home so he could sleep off his party in the security of an eight foot high corral made out of railroad ties. So much trouble and vexation, and all the bull wanted to do was meet some cows! But girls are like that; they cause all kinds of problems.
Copyright 2008 Andy Griffin
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Barack Obama’s national blogger has just moved to San Francisco post-campaign and is doing college essay tutoring for high school students. She can be contacted at sfcollegecoach@gmail.com for more information. Why this blurb here? Sarah’s one of my mystery box customers and I find her charming. She’s also currently looking for a fabulous ball gown for the inauguration, of course! -julia (Sarah says: I’m also doing plain old coaching for writing (essays, stories, etc.) and blogging lessons — after the new year, but people are certainly welcome to sign up now! I have an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Columbia University…)
Two restaurant events:
Serpentine is turning 1! Thursday Dec. 11th
Delfina is having a craft fair! Sunday Dec. 14th
Irrational Exuberance
I’ll be the first one to admit that I know nothing about economics, but the “Bush Stimulus Package” seemed like magical thinking to me. As I understand it, unemployment is up, consumption is down, and our credit is shot because we’ve been spending beyond our means so our government plans to rejuvenate the economy and guide us towards productivity by borrowing money and giving it to us to spend? This sounds to me like an alcoholic’s resolve to achieve sobriety through drinking. But, like I said, I’m no economist. I’ll also confess that I’m such a squint-eyed peasant that Wall Street seems to me like little more than the Vegas Strip without topless women. I’m not a gambling man. Farming gives me as much of a risk thrill as I need. But to make a long tale short, after I got my “Bush Stimulus check” I suffered a rush of irrational exuberance and spent all the money on stock. That story next, but first, a word about the karma of meat.
Some people say that it’s evil to eat meat, especially considering all the grain cattle eat that could go towards feeding the hungry. Other people say, “If God didn’t want us to eat meat he wouldn’t have made cows out of beef!” But I like to frame the debate differently; I say that cooking meat is the way nature allows us to eat grass. By profession I’m a vegetable farmer, but as a hobby I keep a flock of goats and sheep along with a tiny herd of Dexter cattle and I think of them collectively as my “meat garden.” My animals eat cull vegetables, like over-ripe tomatoes, under-ripe winter squash and deformed beets, but mostly they eat grass from the hillsides around my home that are too steep and dry for me to farm. Remember the Dust Bowl? One of the most profound and long-lasting catastrophes of the “dirty thirties” was that speculation in grain caused vast tracts of arid, marginal land in the western Great Plains to be ploughed down for wheat. When the drought came there was no turf to hold the soil down and it blew away. That land should have never been taken away from the Buffalo and the beef cattle.
When my $1,800 “Bush Stimulus check” came in the mail I didn’t feel moved to indulge in a spasm of patriotic consumption. Julia put the check under the mattress against the day we’d be hard pressed to meet our farm’s payroll obligations, and I went on with life. Then, when tomato season was drawing to a close and I could think again, I found myself surfing on-line cattle markets and fantasy shopping for a handsome bull. I found “Tuck” at Glennland Farm. Tuck is a young, red Dexter, and he looked perfect to meet the needs of my cows, Yoko, Twiggy, Kelsey, and Jezebel. I don’t mind buying stock as long as it walks on four legs. It’s hard to chew and swallow worthless paper certificates, but when worse comes to worse with the economy you can always cash in your livestock at the soup pot. So I called Wes Patton, the bull rancher, and made a date to drive up to Orland and bring Tuck home.
Dexters are small, old fashioned, Irish cattle. The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy lists the Dexter as a “recovering” breed, along with the Ankole Watusi, the Belted Galloway, and the Highland. I would feel lousy spending money our Government borrowed for me on mediocre plastic crap from China that would soon take up space in my local, unsustainable landfill. I would enjoy having a herd of Made in USA Buffalo, but since I live in California, they’d be hardly more pc than a bovine of European ancestry that was born and bred in the Golden State! Besides, propagating an heirloom breed of cattle seemed like a worthier use of tax money than a lot of things the government thinks up.
Dexter cattle were never improved for feedlot performance. They are at home in small farm settings and one of the attractive attributes of the breed is that they’ve maintained their vigor and thriftiness on the open range. (If you want to get a sense of just how much cattle have been manipulated by husbandry check out the pictures at this historical cattle site.) Even mature Dexter cattle are only half the size of some breeds of beef cattle. Being small animals, Dexters aren’t so hard for a farmer to finish on grass, thus eliminating the karmically-challenged modern beef steer’s need for a corn-rich diet. I don’t claim to be a professional grass-fed beef producer, but I do want to learn, and the best way for me to dip my toe in the pool has always been to fall in head first. One of my favorite magazines is the Grassland Journal. Just to keep things interesting, Dexters come in three decorator colors too; black, like Yoko and Twiggy, dun, like Kelsey and Jezzie, or red, like Tuck.
Once I’d made my appointment to pick up Tuck, who weighs between 700 and 800 pounds, I started to think about my pick-up truck. The more I meditated on the issue, the less I wanted to find myself stalled alongside I-5 with a smoking engine and a trailer full of small, angry bull. The mechanic at Branciforte Auto who tuned up my truck helpfully pointed out that my tires were balder than Mahatma Gandhi, Kojack, Winston Churchill and Sinead O’Connor. So I bought four new Dunlop mudders from Pasilla’s Tire Service in Watsonville. The Pasilla family lives right across the road from our vegetable farm in Hollister and I wanted to honor the spirit of the stimulus package by spending the money locally. Then I inspected the tires on my livestock trailer. They were a scandal! I couldn’t believe they hadn’t blown already, so I went to Young’s Tires in Pajaro, because Young’s is always there for me when my tractors or delivery trucks need new rubber, and I bought four more tires for my trailer.
I was thinking that the only thing worse than breaking down with a trailer full of bull would be to break down in the dark. I tanked up on gas, headed north, and spent the night in a fleabag hotel in Williams, near Orland, so that I could make it to the ranch early, load up fast and get all my driving done in the daylight. The motel wasn’t free either. By the time I’d got back home with Tuck and turned him loose among his new girl friends I’d completely sizzled my way through my 1800 “stimulus” dollars. Now I’m looking at my fences, wondering how much barbed wire I ought to buy in order to keep my portfolio of stock from exercising their own fits of irrational exuberance and running off into Driscoll’s organic raspberry fields. It will take more than economic magic to keep my little herd at home, eating, breeding, and gathering interest. I’m still skeptical about how stimulated I feel because doubt and suspicion is the way of my people, but if I manage to sell my first grass-fed steers and at least break even, I won’t be squinting quite so hard. In fact, I might honor the spirit of the stimulus package by spending the profits for a few more cows.
Photo essay:
1. A pair of amiable Buffaloes I met a week ago at the Douglas Ranch in the Panoche Valley behind Hollister.
2. My own little herd of Dexter cattle gathered around the water trough.
3. Yoko, showing the black pointed horns typical of traditional Dexters.
4. Heifer Jezebel looking cute in dun.
5. Kelsey mooing.
6. Tuck, making a splash in red.
7. Portrait of the farmer as a Future Farmer of America during High School years, showing a steer at the King City Fair circa 1975
copyright 2008 Andy Griffin
all photos taken by Andy except the last one.
My Blogroll
I’m a naturally crabby person, sullen, argumentative and prone to paranoid conspiracy fantasies, so to maintain some balance I like to associate with up-beat, positive, can-do kinds of people. Here are some of the people I like to keep up with on-line.
1. Rebecca King Ardi Gasna means sheep cheese in Basque. I met Rebecca’s mother at one of our “U-Pick” days at our field several years ago. We had a pleasant conversation and she told me about her daughter who was the chef at Gabriela Restaurant in Santa Cruz, but had a dream of someday being a sheep rancher and making sheep cheese. I agreed that it was a wonderful dream. I’ve got dreams too. I’d love to make cheese. I’d also like to create an incredible living labyrinth garden employing only antique rose varieties, I’d like to be the curator of a cactus and succulent garden like the Huntington Gardens, I’d like to travel with my donkeys from Death Valley to Mt. Shasta, and I want to learn Latin, but do you see me doing any of it? Then I heard that Rebecca had bought some Friesan Dairy sheep and was leasing some grazing land from my friends Bob and Jeanne at Deep Roots Ranch. Out of the blue I got an invitation from Bob, Jeanne, and Rebecca to bring my sheep over for a shearing. The sheep industry has suffered such a precipitous decline in California over the last fifty years that it is very difficult to find professional sheep shearers any longer. But Rebecca had hired one to come down to the central coast from Mendocino. The more sheep the shearer had to trim, the cheaper the charge would be per sheep. So I took my sheep over to Deep Roots and finally met Rebecca. That morning, by coincidence, was the day the State Inspector came to advise Rebecca on what she would need to do to get the permits to milk sheep and make cheese. Months passed, and I ran into Rebecca in front of a cheese plate at a barbeque at Love Apple Farm . The cheese was Rebecca’s sheep cheese and it was delicious. It turns out that after Rebecca found out how much money she’d have to spend to build a facility that could pass muster for the CDFA (California Department of Food and Agriculture) she knew that she’d have to buy a ranch to justify the expense and make her investment secure. So she did, with help from her family and California Farm Link. How many women do you know (or men) who can move effortlessly from a hot kitchen to a world of white tablecloths and crystal to a sheep pen? Rebecca’s blog follows her progress putting her dreams in action. Today’s photo essay captures a few moments from a visit Julia and I had with Rebecca at her ranch.
2. Offal Good By some standards, Chris Cosentino is considered an “extreme” chef, since he embraces the art of cooking meat as a challenge to use the entire animal. Of course, there shouldn’t be anything “extreme” about not wasting part of an animal’s life. Chris’s blog shines a light on a side of the world that a lot of cooks– and eaters– don’t want to deal with, which is too bad, because we would all be healthier, mentally and physically, if food and our food infrastructure was understood holistically. Chris also takes the waste products of the restaurant business seriously, and is the most disciplined chef I know when it comes to recycling packaging. I like to keep on eye on what Chris is up too.
3. Hastings Reserve This blog is put out the University of California field station where I grew up. Things were different then, of course. When we first moved to the Hastings Reservation in the late spring of 1967 we were on an RFD route, which sounds for “Rural Free Delivery”. The postman delivered the mail, but he also had things like butter, flour, ammunition, nails, and handkerchiefs for sale out of the back. Our telephone system was a party line with half of upper Carmel Valley listening in, and nowadays they’re in the blogoshere. I moved away from Hastings after high school and my parents left when my father retired, but the place and its mission of environmental education remains close to my heart.
4. Susie Bright My friend Susie Bright is a university brat, just like me, but while my father was on his hands and knees looking for native plants, Susie’s father, William Bright, was digging in to native languages. Dr. Bright was also Carlos Castenada’s major professor. My mother tells me that when I was 12 years old I asked for a copy of Gudde’s 1000 California Place Names for my birthday. Later, Susie’s father rewrote this book and republished it as 1500 California Place names, having added a hundred California Indian names to Gudde’s list, and I bought that one too. It combined my interest in language and my love of California all in one package. It was perhaps inevitable that Susie and I would eventually meet. Susie has a very turned-on life and it shows in her writing and blogging. Susie is sharp, witty, snotty, topical, and eclectic and can zoom between erotica, politics, and food in one paragraph or tie them all up in one package. Susie is my first stop for news beyond agriculture into pop culture, and I look to her for guidance about writing and editing.
5. Edible San Francisco Bruce Cole is the editor of ESF. Edible San Francisco has given me a forum for my writing and I’m grateful and proud to have my essays published by this magazine. I like the company I keep between their covers. Though I live in Santa Cruz County and farm in San Benito County, my heart spends a lot of time in San Francisco and so do my trucks! We sell our produce to many San Franciscans, chefs and “civilians” alike, and I like to participate in a small way in the cultural life of the City. San Francisco is my adopted city, and I enjoy being a “San Francisco” writer.
6. Tablehopper from Marcia Gagliardi Marcia is a funny, spunky writer and I count on her to keep me “posted” on all the comings and goings in the San Francisco restaurant scene.
7. Xasáuan is a Native American name for the region we know today as Big Sur. If part of my heart is in San Francisco, then much of the rest of it is in Big Sur. Every once in a while my divided heart is even able to guide my feet down the road to Big Sur. Ever since I was a child and my father would take me with him on trips around the wilderness that lies between the Hastings Reservation and the Pacific Ocean I’ve loved the Santa Lucia Mountains. Usually I can’t travel, so I enjoy life on my farm and make a virtual visit to Big Sur by dropping into the Xasáuan Today. This site was extremely useful to follow the progress of this past summer’s wildfires.
8. The Ventana Wilderness Alliance is a group of committed citizens that advocate, work and lobby on behalf of the Ventana Wilderness. Our government– by the people, for the people, and of the people– can’t do every thing that the people want or need, so sometimes the people just have to step up and do it themselves. The Ventana Wilderness Alliance does its best to keep an eye on its own little corner of the world by fixing trails and following the twists and turns in the Federal Government’s policies that affect our local watershed.
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more Rebecca Sheep photos
Daisy Chains and Milkmaids; An Open Letter to Michael Pollan
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not dissing you. But…
Ok. If I ever have the fortune to meet you again, I’ll buy you a drink, or maybe even a whole meal. I owe you. Nobody else, besides Alice Waters, has done so much to promote the sort of small-scale, sustainable farms that people like me are trying to create. Take our CSA program, for instance. CSA stands for community supported agriculture. The basic idea is that a community of people who want local farms to survive put their money where their mouths are and support those local farms by underwriting their production costs. In return for their faith and investment, the farmer pays them back with weekly “share boxes” of the harvest. The consumers get food they can trust and they get to know that they’re doing their part to preserve the vitality of their own local foodshed. And the farmer? Well. Besides having committed customers to count on, CSA means that we can do an end run around the banks, and these days, when a gun in hand isn’t even enough to get a loan from a bank, that is some powerful ju-ju. But, Michael, you know all that.
CSA is a hard sell to consumers used to buying food in a supermarket. My wife and I have run a CSA for eleven years now, and every week since the beginning I’ve written a newsletter to my vegetable subscribers to explain what we’re doing on the farm. Little by little our CSA program grew, mostly because of the vegetables and the service we offered, but partly because I was getting the word out. I was on the radio four times a week in our local area, I wrote for newspapers, I answered every phone call I got from every reporter in a prompt, civil and informative manner. I entertained school groups, and basically worked my ass off to promote local, organic, sustainable agriculture. Over the years I saw measurable, incremental success. Then you published An Omnivore’s Dilemma. Public interest in our CSA surged, and the number of our subscribers doubled. Poof! A wave of your wand and our farm went from being economically marginal to truly sustainable overnight. So no, I’m not dissing you. But still….
Oh, and I shouldn’t forget the impact you’ve had on farmers’ markets. I don’t do the Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market anymore, at least in part because our CSA program sustains us now, but if I had a dime for every person I met at market who was turned on to fresh, local, organic, sustainably produced food by you, I could buy myself a bucket of caviar from Tsar Nicoulai inside the building. Which brings me to fancy restaurants. When In Defense of Food came out I noticed a whole new wave of excitement from the public, including professional cooks who were invigorated about rethinking their approach to food and their commitment to helping the small-scale, artisan producers that supply them. About 85% of my income comes from our CSA program, but the other 15% comes from restaurants in San Francisco, and their well-being is important to me. The cooks that support us are happy about what we do, and they count on the patronage of thousands of consumers, some of them who are definitely going out to eat at establishments that they know are pushing a local, organic, sustainable agenda. These are exciting times to be involved in food, and you’ve had a lot to do with building that energy, so what’s not to love about your work?
I’m thinking now about the article you wrote recently for the New York Times titled Farmer in Chief. (Everybody should read this. It’s an open letter to the President Elect on the subject of agricultural policy.)
I read it and was I was amazed. It is the most cogent, comprehensive, wide-ranging essay I’ve ever read about agriculture in a paper, and I have to read all the ag rags. You tie together America’s oil addiction to our health, our diet, the farm environment, our landscape, our national security, world hunger, and global climate change. Your essay is easy to read, but dense in meaning, and almost every single paragraph could easily serve as a jumping off point for a whole article of its own, or even a book. You’re not content to merely bitch and moan, either. You offer concrete suggestions for a comprehensive, holistic cure for the catastrophe that confronts us; the re-solarization of farming and the re-localization of food. You make sense. Plants and animals need only the sun and each other to grow, so why have we invented a system that eats oil and spews CO2? I’ve been waiting for someone to say these things. My attempts to write about oil or food security have attracted no attention. You are a magnificent writer and a great intellect, and you’ve chosen to focus your efforts in an arena where you can create positive change, which is why I was sad to see what you didn’t say in your article.
You write, “Post-oil agriculture will need a lot more people engaged in food production– as farmers and probably also as gardeners.” You say this will create “tens of millions of new green jobs.”
I read that, and paused. So I read your essay again. You never mention farm workers.
It’s different to be a farm worker than a farmer or a “green worker.” I know. I was a farm worker for years before I ever became a farmer. I understand “green worker” to be someone employed in the emerging green technologies and practices. To me, “green” sounds “whiter,” than farm labor, almost “white collar.” But even if everyone with a yard ripped it out and put in a garden it would still take millions of farm workers to keep our agriculture going, and right now an overwhelming number of them are from Latin America, and most of those are undocumented. These “aliens” have no legal right to work to feed us, and yet we count on them every day. Farm workers are seemingly invisible, even apparently to you, and whatever exposure they do get is usually when they’re invoked as scapegoats by right-wing talk radio hosts who should know better than to spew invective with their mouths full.
It’s an interesting oversight, but I can’t imagine you left the farm workers out intentionally. The role of the farm worker is simply too much of a symptom of and poetic metaphor for of the chaos of our food system for a man of your learning not to notice. The industrial corn economy and the fuel-centric worldwide distribution system that gives us such cheap grain and meat in the US is an engine of destruction for small-scale farms and semi-communal ejido farms in Mexico. It is precisely because Mexican peasants can’t afford to buy corn and beef in their own country, or compete with multi-national food corporations and sell their produce to their friends and neighbors in Mexico, that they come here to work. Changing our food policy is key to unlocking the dungeon that is our immigration policy.
I keep reading that the US is having an economic crisis right now, and I can hardly believe it, because my own little farm stays busy. People have to eat; they don’t have to subscribe to cable, buy an RV, or go on a vacation, so farms are the last businesses to see the effects of a slowdown. I’ll know this country is in some deep shit when I see people from the suburbs ride out to my farm on their bicycles three or four days running to beg for work. I’ve seen that plenty of times from Mexican farm workers, but in the years I’ve spent in the fields I’ve never seen one native-born citizen come looking for a “stolen job.” In fact, one of the things that make the politics of immigration so toxic is that the screaming and howling comes from a poisoned place in our minds, totally divorced from the facts on the ground.
Let me show you some pictures. I carry my camera with me all the time, and when I see something that interests me I shoot. These are pictures of harvest crews in the Salinas Valley flying the Mexican Flag from their mobile porta-potties. Most of these pictures I took yesterday in the strawberries, but a few are from the lettuce fields, and stored in my computer I’ve got scads more, taken all around the Salinas and Pajaro valleys on various farms over the last several years. I took the pictures, in part, because I always fantasized about putting them on a cd and shipping it off to Rush Limbaugh.
“Look, Rush!” I’ve wanted to say. “Do these people look documented to you? They’re working in the fields farmed by big Republican corporate donors. The guys that pay the guys that pay these farm workers put Reagan signs on the edges of the fields in the 80s, Bush signs in the 90’s and 00s, and now there are McCain signs out there. So stop all the squalling about kicking the aliens out, or stop eating the food they pick! Better yet, go on a politically correct diet and eat only what you can verify yourself has been picked by legal workers! And don’t count on the smooth assurances of compliance to all local, state and federal codes from the corporate farm owners! Does it sound like too much work to verify the political status of your food? It’s actually really easy— just buy only food that’s been shipped here from another country, because when the foreigners that pick the food are in another country they aren’t illegal aliens, are they? You’ll be able to swallow your Argentine steak with pride! That, or you could buy a steak from a cow that was killed in the US and put your considerable rhetorical talents to promoting a comprehensive reform of immigration that takes our dependence on foreign workers into account, starts treating them like guests and stops treating them like shit.”
I’d be happy to confront “El Rushbo,” in a no-holds-barred grudge match, which is why I was sad to see that you didn’t connect the dots between the consequences of our food policy and the distress of our Mexican neighbors to the south and down the street. You’re usually the guy in my corner. Maybe you just want to be heard, and you didn’t want to screw up the impact of your piece by raising up evil spirits. Your essay was framed as a letter to the President, or Farmer in Chief, and you know that nothing sours political discourse in America so much as the mere breath of a word like “dependence.” We Americans are hell on wheels about our independence, but nobody wants to hear about our dependence on millions of Mexican nationals. Even bringing up the subject of our dependence on others is enough for some people to brand you “Un-American.” (I loved how you framed sustainable values in your essay as “true conservative values.” and I dug the stuff about the White House Lawn too.) And speaking of Un-Americans, I’ve got a funny story for you.
One of my dearest and oldest friends from all they way back when I was 14 is Porn Queen, sex educator, activist, dancer, writer, and general feminist loud-mouth, Nina Hartley. (She had a part in Boogie Nights, if you’re a Hollywood film buff) Anyway, Nina has always encouraged me to write and she laughs at my stories. So one time, when I wrote an account of a young couple that had slipped across the border illegally she wrote me to tell me the story had moved her, and she asked to feature it on her web site.
“Of course,” I replied.
As kids, Nina and I used to sit together on the school bus and talk about all the great things we would someday do. Today, she has a much wider forum than I, (She’s like the Michael Pollan of swingers with books, videos, and lectures on college campuses.) so I was pleased she liked the piece I’d written. I was happy she wanted to share her spotlight with me. I see myself as a frontline missionary/fighter in Alice’s Slow Food Jihad, and I relished the opportunity to witness to the sex crowd. Later, when Nina told me that she’d received hate mail when she posted my story I was charmed. My piece was matter-of-fact about the ongoing reality of illegal immigration and I’d chosen to present the young couple in a human, not an alien, light. Just this once I’d shown up my Porn Queen to be a little naïve. In Nina’s line of work, hate mail comes with the territory.
“But organic farmer-writers?” she said. “You guys are loved, aren’t you?”
“Sure we are,” I told Nina, “as long as we stick to the established narrative.”
It’s true.You wanna talk dirty? Golden showers, daisy chains and milkmaids are triple x, but if we start talking about who picked or slaughtered your food and we’re going to be taken as truly obscene. Maybe that’s why you didn’t include the farm workers, Mr. Pollan, out of decency. Next time? The drink offer stands.
copyright 2008 Andy Griffin
Michael Pollan’s article that Andy is writing about
Andy’s article about spinach archived on Chez Pim (thanks to Pim for archiving this!)
Andy’s account of a border crossing
Andy’s oil article that got hate mail
Flags photo essay with 4 photos of various fields
Michael Pollan’s website
Chez Panisse Foundation
Tomatillo de Milpa
| The tomatillo is related to the tomato in the same way that you and I are related to Baboons; we share certain physiological and behavioral traits with our primate cousins, but we can’t cross. Tomatillo fruits look like immature green tomatoes but they’re wrapped in a papery husk. Both plant species are in the Solanaceae, and like tomatoes, tomatillos are used throughout Latin America to make salsa, and they’re fried, baked, used in soups, or sliced thin for salads or sandwiches. The cultivar of tomatillo I usually grow is called Toma Verde. The seed is easy to get, the plants are vigorous, the harvest is generous, and the plump fruits have a pleasant sweet / tart flavor. Yet in spite of Toma Verde’s impressive list of domestic virtues, Ramiro Campos told me it was an insipid excuse for a tomatillo. “Wait until you taste salsa verde made with the tomatillos de milpa that grow wild on our ranch in Jalisco,” Ramiro said. “You’ll never grow Toma Verde again!”Ramiro worked with me when I was a partner in Riverside Farms, and he and his family lived with me. There’s a flat one-acre field with decent soil below my house. Ramiro proposed that we go in as partners and grow a garden on it with the foods he missed from Mexico. If I donated the field to the project and the tractor to work the soil, he offered to do the sowing and cultivating. We’d split the profits equally.
“We don’t have much water,” I said. “If we raise a crop, but we can’t clean our clothes, then where’s the profit?” “Someday you’ll visit us at our ranch in Jalisco, Andrés,” Ramiro said, “and you’ll see how much we can do without water.” We walked to the fence and looked out across into the field that spread beneath us. “See how the field is slightly dished?” Ramiro said, pointing. “This field catches rain. A foot down the topsoil turns to adobe, and adobe holds the moisture for a long time. If we’re careful when we sow, the crops will root into damp soil and follow the moisture down as the water table recedes in the summer. I’ll keep the field clean, so we don’t lose any moisture to weeds.” I didn’t have much to lose. Ramiro’s uncle came back from a Christmas visit to Jalisco, and he brought tomatillo de milpa seeds from plants he found growing wild in the huerta and a sack of garbanzo beans. Ramiro plowed the field in the second week of February, and hilled it up in rows. Half the rows he sowed with garbanzo beans and half the beds he left blank to soak up more rain. He planted trays with tomatillo seed in my greenhouse. When the weather permitted, he cultivated the field with the tractor, destroying the weeds that had sprouted between the rows of emerging garbanzos and loosening the soil. The garbanzos grew green and lush and set the first flowers. Ramiro called on his brother, Renato, to come and help him weed the rows. Then the two of them transplanted out the young tomatillo de milpa plants. By the middle of spring the garbanzos began to set seed, two beans per pod. Ramiro could hardly wait for the harvest. “Nothing tastes as much like spring as fresh garbanzos,” he said. “Shell the beans while they’re still tender and plump and fry them in a little butter until they’re bright green. Wrap them in a tortilla with a little salsita and some scrambled eggs, and you’ve got lonche.” “I’m sure glad I didn’t sign on to do the labor for this project,” I said. “With only two garbanzo beans per pod, and only ten pods per plant, it’s going to take you and Renato all month to pick dinner.” “We don’t pick the beans, Andrés,” Ramiro said. “We harvest whole plants, and make huge bunches. Then we pile the back of the pick-up high with them. When the housewives walk down the street and see the mountains of fresh garbanzos in the truck, they’ll crowd around. You watch! They buy the bunches, and they pick the beans.” I admired Ramiro’s campesino logic, but I needed to know more about the Mexicana ama de casa. “What kind of a value is that? Women don’t have time to shell beans. How many beans are there per bunch, anyway?” “When you come to Jalisco, you’ll understand,” Ramiro said. “It’s hot during the spring at the ranch. And after they pick the garbanzo beans out of the bunch, the women take the leaves and put them in large clay jars. They fill the jar with spring water and set it outside.” “We call that ‘sun tea,’” I said. “No,” Ramiro said. “The sun’s to hot. You want to put it in the shade. The garbanzo leaves exude an acidic nectar that infuses the water with a most delicious tang. When we come back to the house after a day in the sun— don’t talk about cerveza— there’s nothing healthier or more refreshing than cool garbanzo water!” Ramiro picked the first garbanzos and his wife, Amparo, prepared a meal to show off the harvest. Part of me will always be disappointed when I eat in a Mexican restaurant because the meal, heavy as it is may be with meat and beans and corn, never floats through my memory the way Amparo’s fresh guiso de garbanzo does. It’s true, too, what Ramiro said about garbanzo water. On a hot afternoon in the fields, a thermos bottle full of cool garbanzo water beats a six pack of cerveza any day, because you can drink long and deep, and you’re left satisfied, with a clear head. But what about the tomatillos de milpa?
“It looks like a lot of work to prepare them,” I said. “The small size of the tomatillos de milpa doesn’t come at the cost of flavor,” Ramiro said. “All that’s missing is the muddy taste of irrigation water. You’ll see.” We built a fire in the yard and laid a comal on the coals. When the comal was hot, we peeled away their papery wrappers and spread the tiny tomatillos de milpa across it. We toasted them until the skins split with the heat. Amparo laid cebollas de rabo verde, or “green-tailed onions” around the edge of the fire to roast. She threw a handful of serrano peppers on the comal. When everything was ready she got out her mano y molcajete, or mortar and pestle. She mashed the roasted onions and tomatillos together with salt and a little flame blistered serrano chile, and served up an autentico salsita verde del rancho to complement the beans and potatoes in a brace of perfect taquitos. “Riquissimo!” I said. “The tastiest! And the profit?” That was a sore point. From a financial point of view our partnership hadn’t been much of a success. After Ramiro and Renato had harvested the garbanzos, they’d gone to town with a pick-up load of huge, leafy-green bunches. The Jaliscana amas de casa crowded around the pick-up with their arms outstretched, hungry for a taste of home. But they balked at his prices. “A dollar fifty a bunch? Why, I never paid that much in that much for garbanzo in the tianguis at home!” Ramiro ended up giving half the bunches of fresh garbanzos away to the workers on our farm.
It’s one thing to sell tomatillos for a dollar a basket if you can fill the basket with five plump, sweet/tart Toma Verde fruits, but it’s entirely different if it takes fifty tiny, sweeter and tarter tomatillos de milpa. The cost per hour for labor to harvest remains the same, no matter the size of the fruit. For tomatillo de milpa to be as profitable as Toma Verde, they’d have to cost ten dollars a basket. Ramiro had paid Renato out of pocket to help pick the tomatillos de milpa, and on top of that, he paid Chupina for the time she spent trying to sell the tomatillos de milpa on the street corner. Ramiro was cross, but I was smiling. “We’ve profited equally,” I said. Ramiro scowled. “Hey, we’ve both profited,” I said. “Now I know how good food on the ranch can be, and now you understand why I worry about the cost of labor all the time. Not because I want to— but because I have to! Amas de casa are the center of our universe, but they’re thrifty.” “Amparo isn’t thrifty enough,” he said. That was true. One of the problems between Ramiro and Amparo was her credit account at Joyeria Don Roberto. I changed the subject. “On the ranch in Jalisco, where money is scarce, picking wild tomatillos de milpa in the huerta is a necessity born of poverty, but up here, where there’s more money, it’s time that’s scarce, and eating like a campesino is a luxury!” Ramiro got the last laugh. When their daughter, Jesica, reached school age, Ramiro and Amparo returned to Jalisco so she could get a proper Mexican education. Ramiro bought a ranch with the money he earned in California, and now he raises goats and makes cheese. His offer to host me when I travel to Jalisco still stands, and one day I’ll make the trip. But no matter how novel Jalisco will seem to me, some things will be familiar— like the tomatillos. Every spring in the field below my house where we once planted out our Jaliscano garden, Ramiro’s wild tomatillos de milpa sprout like weeds among my herb beds. It’s my business descision to grow Toma Verde, but Ramiro might say it’s my own damn fault if I choose to eat them. copyright 2008 Andy Griffin photos above taken by Andy in 2008 photo legend: #1: our home ranch that Andy refers to: with a fall tomatillo weed lovingly cared for by Manny. #2: a molcajete with toma verde on the left, and the heirloom, smaller ‘de milpa’ tomatillos on the right. #3 a spring tomatillo weed that’s carefully not weeded by Manny and crew. The comal link was my google work: and the first photo that came up was ours: a homemade comal with tortillas and cebollas de rabo verde, or spring onions. This comal is made from an old tractor disk. It’s great for parties in the yard! Tomatillo Salsa 2 pounds Fresh tomatillos Remove husks from tomatillos, wash throughly, dry and halve or quarter. Combine tomatillos, onions, chiles, and garlic in a non-reactive pan. Over med-high heat bring to boil, stirring frequently. Reduce heat to low and simmer, uncovered, for 20 mins. Cool a little or a lot then put into blender with cilantro and lime juice, blend away, salt to taste, and you have some GREAT salsa verde Mexicano. |
I considered Ramiro’s idea carefully. All I have had for water at my 
When the tomatillo harvest came Ramiro put Renato’s wife Chupina in charge of sales. He and Renato loaded my pick-up with crates of tomatillo de milpa and drove Chupina, down to the corner of Porter Drive and San Juan Road in Pajaro. An excited crowd of amas de casa crowded around the pick-up truck and admired the baskets of tiny tomatillos— “
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