What Does Our Food Look Like?

The other day, while walking in the Ravenna neighborhood of Seattle, I saw some asparagus plants in a sidewalk garden. They had gone to seed, their foliage turned feathery. It was a sight I hadn’t seen since I was a child, when my mother had a large organic garden that was our family’s main source of food throughout the summer. I remember the spears that sprouted lacy fronds and became a thicket each summer, more delicate than even a fern.

I wondered how many people had ever seen an asparagus gone to seed, so I posted a photo and asked the question. Though a few people guessed fennel or dill (not bad choices, really), there were also some who knew immediately what they were looking at. I imagine these folks may be gardeners—or, like me, grew up with a garden.

I was two years old when my mother bought a rather rambly old house out in the country with a small creek running through the property. It had originally been built as a summer cottage, as many of the old houses in that part of western Marin County were, and there was no central heating, just wood burning fireplaces. It was small and a little creaky, the kitchen floor sloped in one direction, but it sat on a rather large parcel of land with an old barn, another small cottage, and a couple of old fruit trees.

We moved out to the country and my mother—who was raised a city girl and used to live in Manhattan—began an entirely new life. She chopped wood for the fireplace, raised chickens for eggs, began composting, and planted a quarter acre organic vegetable garden—all while working full time and raising two small children on her own. At one point she even considered getting a goat.

I recently asked her why she made her life undeniably more difficult than it needed to be and she said simply this:

“I wanted to make sure that you and your brother knew that carrots came out of the ground and that eggs didn’t grow in those Styrofoam containers.”

I will always be grateful to my mother for raising me in the country, and I know it wasn’t easy. I am glad I had the experience of plucking raspberries off the stalk, delicate little fairy caps that I quickly gobbled up. I know what it’s like to pick corn and shuck it, to pop sun-warmed cherry tomatoes fresh off the vine into my mouth, and I know what it’s like to pick a million icky squishy plums off the ground so that they can be turned into jam (gross, really). It was wondrous in many ways, most of which I did not appreciate at the time, but it was also a lot of hard work. To this day I think of weeding and shudder. As much as I remember the pleasures of country life, there is a reason it’s taken me over two decades to finally get interested in gardening again (for another interesting perspective on a farm childhood, read Jennifer Jeffrey's account here).



And yet I am grateful for the education I received, for what I saw and experienced.

I thought about this recently when I read an article about a teacher working with children in New York City (for the life of me I cannot re-find the article, so please let me know if it sounds familiar to anyone, and forgive me if I've gotten the details wrong). One day the teacher brought in a bag of small potatoes and asked the students what they were. Rocks, the kids guessed, though they didn’t really know.

Have we gotten to the point where we no longer know what our food looks like?

This seems inconceivable, yet at the same time I am sure there are those for whom it is true, to one extent or another. I would wager money on the fact that my own two-year-old niece has never eaten a carrot that was not carved into fake “baby carrot” shape. I have friends who have only ever bought lettuce or spinach that comes sealed in a plastic bag. And one day, last summer, I watched a woman hold up a zucchini at the farmers’ market and ask the vendor if it were a butternut squash, something she said her daughter liked quite a lot. I wondered if she had only ever bought butternut squash in a bag, already peeled and cut into cubes.

This is one of the many reasons why I shop at farmers' markets, I like getting food closest to the dirt. It wasn't alway this way for me, I spent a good many years relying on those bags of spinach and lettuce as well. I even bought those sacks of butternut squash cubes—fast and convenient. It was a surprise when I began shopping at farmers' markets again and found my vegetables had a bit of dirt smeared on them. Yes, all this stuff needs to be washed more carefully, but it feels more honest to me as well, more authentic.

This is why every time I have the chance to tour someone's garden or visit a farm I go. I find it humbling and awe-inspiring to see small scale farming in action—to watch my food being raised. My recent fixation is trying to find if someone somewhere has done the metric on how much land is required to feed the average person. I want to know the shape and size of the resources we require.

And this is the reason why this summer I am attempting to garden on my own, for the first time since I was a child and helping out in my mother's garden. After years of not wanting to weed or hoe, I am turning over soil, studying seed packets. It's hard work, quite frankly, but it feels important. And the payoff is sheer delight—I nearly giggle at the idea of having fresh raspberries just steps away from my front door.

You may think me snobby in my opinions, elitist and superior, but I’m more concerned that we've come too far away from the roots of our food, literally and figuratively. Is it true that we don't know what our dinner looks like if it doesn't come wrapped in plastic and labeled? We former hunters and gatherers would make for pretty poor survivalists these days; how can you gather your food when you can’t even recognize it?

Some people may argue that it’s not important to know what our food looks like or where it comes from, that we’ve evolved beyond that stage to something more convenient and efficient. There are those who will say gardening for pleasure is the domain of the rich who have the time and access to land (how deeply ironic that is), and that the poor have neither. I recently heard the argument that we are a culture of specialization—we don’t work on our own cars, cut our own hair, or do our own dry cleaning, why bother growing or preparing our own food? Isn’t that stuff better left to the professionals?

Perhaps it’s just where I am right now in my life—returning to my roots, trying to live a life closer to the ground, thinking every day about sustainability—but I want to know these things. I want to know even more than I already do. I love it when I get to see some fruit or vegetable I've not before seen in the dirt.

Last summer I saw blueberries on a bush for the first time in my life.



And a large-leafed plant that turned out to be rhubarb.



Recently I saw a lacinato kale plant, also sometimes called dino or black kale, which I thought looked funny and not at all the way I expected. I was thinking something more like Napa cabbage, not this odd feather-duster of a vegetable.



And when my brother’s neighbor harvested the lettuces from his garden he gave some to my brother who shared them with me. I can’t remember the last time I saw a head of lettuce with the roots still on it.



And do you know what these little things are?



Soon they are going to be raspberries, picked off the stalk like little fairy caps and quickly popped into my mouth. And I’m hoping to share the experience with my niece, Alice. I want to make sure that she doesn’t grow up thinking that all berries come in plastic cartons, born somehow at the grocery store.

Maybe it’s not important to know these things—to be able to recognize our food when we see it growing—but to me it is. I'm not suggesting everyone run out and plant a garden, though it wouldn't be bad if we all did. If nothing else, we'd gain a greater appreication for the very hard work of growing our food—so says the girl who was working soil amendments into the new vegetable bed last night as the sun went down.

I may not know how to fix my car or cut my own hair, but when I see food growing I’d like to be able to recognize it.