I have a slight obsession with vegetables.
On harvest days, I often feel the need to point out the most beautifully colored beets or the largest cucumbers to the farmers or the other interns. “Look at this one!” I’ll say proudly. You’d think after harvesting thousands of vegetables, the excitement would die down. Somehow, it never does.
Yesterday morning I parked my car at the Trenton Transit Center to catch the next train to New York. I asked the man in the lot how long I could leave my car there. Until twelve, he told me, and in my mind he automatically turned into my fairy godmother saying, “Be home by the stroke of midnight!” I stared at my feet. I was wearing cowboy boots, not glass slippers, and had packed a pair of flip-flops in my bag in case it got too hot. My bag was also full of vegetables from the farm. I was going to visit my former roommate, who is still living in our apartment, and I was bringing them to her for the homemade dinner we had planned to cook.
I’ve been a vegetarian for over two years. I cut meat out of my diet the day I learned about the treatment of animals on factory farms and never looked back. However, the problems with the meat industry in our country go far beyond cruelty to animals. From a health perspective, industrially produced meat is packed with antibiotics, hormones, and other harmful chemicals. Environmentally, avoiding industrial meat reduces energy consumption and greenhouse gas pollution.
My view on vegetarianism has always been that, in a society where people treated animals, human health, and the environment with respect, I would eat meat. After all, humans, by nature, are omnivores. If this is my view, shouldn’t that mean that I would eat meat if it was produced under these stipulations? I can’t give you a reason why I don’t eat this kind of meat, but it never used to concern me. It’s only recently that I’ve begun to see my vegetarianism as a bit hypocritical. Michael Pollan sums up the problem with vegetarianism in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and it’s gotten me thinking. Here’s a brief and nerdy summary of my newly forming thoughts on the issue:
The truth is that in a natural ecosystem, predator and prey balance each other out. Without prey for food, predators would die of starvation. Without predators, prey would become over-populated, run out of food, and thus, also die of starvation. If nature provides this perfect balance, it seems that the right thing to do, as human beings, is to fulfill our role as the predator. By eating local meat, we are also reducing the energy costs of importing protein that we need from other places.
I’ve been telling myself lately that, if given the opportunity to eat local, organic, and ethically produced meat, I would do it. I’ve been telling myself lies. Today, a CSA member and I got into a discussion about local meat. It just so happens that this CSA member buys lamb from a local organic farm and cooks it with mushrooms that he gathers himself, along with fresh veggies from the farm. It also just so happens that tomorrow night is the June potluck and that this member is planning to prepare this dish to bring along. Here is my chance.
The problem is that I know if I go to tomorrow’s potluck, I will avoid the lamb. When I think about lamb dinner, I can’t not picture a baby sheep. And when I picture a baby sheep, my natural omnivore instincts go out the window, because the last thing I want to do to that baby sheep is eat it. I can’t believe I just wrote that. When people ask me why I won’t eat lamb, I refuse to tell them it’s because I think lambs are cute. Michael Pollan would be ashamed.
How can it be that all of my sophisticated thoughts on meat-eating boil down to this?
Well, all I can say for myself is that at least those more complex thoughts exist. For now, that will have to be enough- and so will the vegetarian options at tomorrow’s potluck dinner.
Take a look at some crops from our harvest, plus my stylish new farming hat! Now if only the sun would come out so I can actually wear it.
On Tuesday afternoon it took over an hour to transplant one row of leaks. I was burning up with fever and barely had enough energy to push the plants far enough into the ground. I left early without making sure they were okay.
So I can’t stop picturing that scene from Gone With the Wind where Rhett figures out that Scarlet is lying to him about the success of her plantation. Just by looking at her hands he can tell that she has been out working in the fields and that she is acting like everything is okay to cover up the fact that she is only after his money- anything to save her beloved plantation, Tara.
Well, Rhett Butler, I guess you’d see right through me too. These are not “the hands of a lady.” These hands are scraped and tan, and mud is so stubbornly embedded in the pores that even when I scrub at them it refuses to budge. They are aching and tired, and for now, they’re ready to go to sleep until tomorrow. After all, tomorrow is another day.
If kale could talk, it would tell you how it grows in six neat rows in the back of the field on the farm. It would tell you how it’s best when eaten the day it’s picked, sautéed in olive oil or raw in salads. But mostly, it would tell you the story of the women who came to work at the farm today. It would tell you the story of two breast cancer survivors, one who relapsed twice after she thought she was cured. It would tell you about a painter who taught English in Thailand during the War in Vietnam and about an environmental lawyer raising a four-year-old son.
Wednesdays are workshift days at the farm. Every Wednesday, six CSA members sign up to complete two of their volunteer hours. Today, I pulled weeds in the kale bed along with the women who signed up. Today, what we didn’t know was that as we worked on our hands and knees in the mud, a man was shot at the Holocaust memorial museum in Washington D.C. And as the painter told us about the day she heard Dr. Martin Luther King give a speech about freedom, we were unaware that a white supremacist was being rushed to the hospital, so that doctors could work to revive him, after he took the life of an innocent man.
Working in the kale, these women exchanged stories of the things that had made them strong. The lawyer talked about her struggle to earn equality in a workforce dominated by men. The breast cancer survivor who relapsed twice talked about her fight through chemotherapy and radiation, proudly cancer-free since the year 2000. I don’t want to say I’m happy I had cancer, she said. She was glad, though, that something had come along that made her rethink her life, something that made her realize what was truly important.
It was their life experiences, I thought, that made them strong. I was the youngest in the group, and I secretly wished for a day when I would have more life experiences to share. But there was something about them that let me know that experience alone is not what gives people strength. There was a certain passion for life that they possessed, a passion that couldn’t be marked by time. The murderer at the museum was eighty-eight years old.
After two hours, the environmental lawyer stood up and looked at the three beds we weeded. The kale stood out neatly where we had worked. We covered a lot of ground, she said, and we smiled. She wasn’t talking about the kale.
Today it rained and water soaked my skin. We spent the morning harvesting for the afternoon member pick-up and after lunch I planted chives and sorrel in the herb garden. My hands were numb and my goulashes were covered in mud and by the time I left the farm at five the rain was still falling from the sky. I never appreciated a shower and a cup of tea this much.
