Rejuvenation

I knew my romantic visions of farm work would quickly dissipate after a few months in the fields, but I anticipated the fault resting with an aching body. In fact, the physical rigor of this work appeals to me in a masochistic sort of way. Rather, my weariness of farming (to be expected at the height of the harvest from novice and experienced farmers alike) has grown more from mental exhaustion.

The work is tedious. Repetitive. Uninteresting, after awhile. One reaches a point at which he/she must force oneself to look up from the soil and stare flatly at the sky or the flowers or the butterflies to remember the beauty of the place. But even this is not enough to keep the spirit at ease in the harvest season, after months spent working day after day with the same three or four people. The thirteenth planting of lettuce. The umpteenth picking of equally tired kale. Another day of back-bending tomato picking. And still two-and-a-half months to go.

Admittedly, I've been struggling to retain sanity. More than once this summer I've crumbled. Other factors compound the stress, but the farm remains at the center of the web. Not once before starting this job did I expect to feel stressed out during the day. Growing vegetables, however, is anything but frolicking in the fields. Chaos regularly ensues, especially on harvest days (which, at this point in the season, are virtually every day) when the work MUST be finished--no stopping simply because it's 5:00.

Something else unexpected: The peaceful expanse of undeveloped acres that surround me offer little escape. It's quite the paradox, feeling trapped amongst rolling hills of country. But the isolation of rural life, even a mere thirty minutes outside of town, can constrict just as much as the buildings and roads of a city. I mostly enjoy living on the farm but imagine leaving your workplace only once or twice a week.

I remember Anton talking about the demands of this work during my first week at the farm; he said, "You've got to be here for something." At the time, that motive was at the forefront of my mind, but the exhaustion gradually buried it. Until this week. Today I worked market for the first time. I look forward to going every week as a customer, witnessing a community--a community that cares deeply about its local food system (Ithaca has the highest rate of CSA participants in the country--10% of Ithacans belong to a local CSA!)--come together and revel in artisan food and crafts underneath a gorgeous wooden pavilion on the bank of Cayuga lake. But today, standing behind a glimmering display of produce that I helped create made me feel like an artist watching people awe at her work in a gallery.

"Everything looks gorgeous!"

"These are the sweetest peppers I've ever eaten."

"Oh my goodness, the basil, the cilantro, these tomatoes--it all smells amazing!"

People walking past the stand literally gasped in admiration. As CSA members packed their share for the week and market customers opted for farm-fresh produce instead of retail food, I remembered that every week five other people and I grow clean, healthy, tasty food for about 1,000 people. "We are awesome," our crew leader Chris said the other day, referring to this accomplishment. We laughed at the crudeness of the statement, but, seriously, it's hard not to feel a cocky sense of pride. After witnessing the visible respect fellow community members have for our work, two-and-a-half more months doesn't seem so bad after all.

Sometimes I Want to be a Housewife

A couple of weeks ago, I bought Bringing it to the Table, an anthology of essays about farming and food by Wendell Berry. After studying the cover of the book (above) for a few minutes, I thought, This image would have probably offended me at one time. The antiquated picture depicts a woman in an ankle-length dress and apron coming from the kitchen to serve a table of men in overalls. Why was it that the women had to serve the men? is what the defensive feminist inside me, typically subdued, would have sneered.

In a way, such a comment wouldn't be out of character. In the memoir Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, author/farmer Barbara Kingsolver empathizes with today's generation of independent women who, after years of fighting to get out of the kitchen and into the workplace, would loathe day after day of nothing but housework.

But just a few months of farming has illuminated the reality of common life before grocery stores, a reality that actually makes this image, for me, somewhat idyllic.

My love for cooking brought me to the farm. I used to feel stifled in the kitchen because I didn't have this or enough of that when I was trying to follow a recipe, but on the farm, I have plenty of almost any vegetable or herb I could want. What I don't have enough of now is time or energy. Cook? After nine or even ten hours of physical labor? Start making dinner right after work, eat at 8:00, then go to bed? Meh. For the first couple of months at the farm, I favored peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or even pre-made cans of soup over energy-intensive fresh vegetables. Even Jen, the partner of our farm's owner and a professional chef, told me, "Yeah, Anton and I use so little of what we grow on the farm. It's ridiculous."

I often fantasize about Dylan leaving for the fields in the morning while I stay at home, set for a day of cooking hearty and healthy dinners or staging food for winter (preserving summer's bounty definitely has not found a spot in the weekly routine). I would have time to play with recipes and make everything--butter, yogurt, pasta and bread even--from scratch. I would let little of the produce left over from market go to waste and can, freeze, or dry as much as possible. I find myself romanticizing the housewives-in-aprons, who undoubtedly filled a crucial role in days past.

One of the paradoxes of the modern small farm is that it is not nearly profitable enough to allow time for kitchen work. I'm sure some small farm families manage the old-fashioned style of living in which the husband farms while the wife does housework, but they probably constitute a tiny minority of an already minute percentage of small family farms. The more common scenario rather: Both partners toil in the fields all day to produce enough for market or one partner has a job off the farm, leaving the house empty for the day. Perhaps there's enough time for a quick dinner, but quick food often partially relies on store-bought food.

Surely, this isn't the worst aspect of modernity known to the world, and I'm hesitant to excessively sentimentalize traditional ways of living. But part of me wishes that I didn't have to feel grateful for the existence of grocery stores.

A Tribute

One of the many intangible miracles of food is its ability to act as an agent of memory. I have never forgotten the origination of what I deemed in the previous post as my mom’s meat sauce; in fact, long before I wrote that entry, I wrote a piece during my junior year of college that awards proper credit for the creation of the Zonetti family tomato sauce. The following is the first half of the piece:

The Italians of my father’s family share many features—short height, raucous voices, and flamboyant gestures, to name a few. But when I think of the quintessential trait that binds us all, I think of sauce. We like sauce a lot. We like sauce so much that it’s a crime to leave dirty streaks of red coagulating on your plate after you’ve finished your homemade pasta; acceptance in the family requires swabbing your dish with a piece of crispy-on-the-outside-soft-on-the-inside Italian bread to absorb the previous remains. My grandfather once scolded a newcomer (my mom) to the family who, innocently trying to help my grandmother clean up after dinner, nearly washed the sauce platter used to hold the spaghetti. “What are you doing?” he exclaimed, frantically seizing the dish and grabbing a piece of bread. At home, store-bought sauce is illegal and cause for scoffing and/or chastising if spotted in the pantry.

When I was born, my family wasted no time with my Italian baptism; they introduced me to the sauce as a toddler, just after my teeth had developed, at the weekly Sunday night family dinner. My parents placed me in the high chair in my grandparents’ dining room and set in front of me a dish with my grandfather’s made-from-scratch spaghetti smothered with my grandmother’s homemade tomato sauce. Then the two of them along with Dad, Aunt Lisa, Uncle Joe, Aunt Mary, and Uncle Gary crowded around me, wide-eyed, leaning forward, as Mom fed me my first bite of the family meal. Will she like it? Will we be able to accept her into the family as a true Zonetti?

The recipe for this sauce originated with Patty, or Nanny as I called her, my paternal grandmother. Her mother, who came from Northern Italy, had made a light, chunky, and watery tomato sauce. As a married woman in America, Nanny would diverge from this recipe and create a thicker, smoother, meatier sauce; through trial and error, she worked to establish this keystone family recipe. I was the first-born grandchild, so my potential aversion to the sauce would have betrayed not only Nanny but also every member of the family, all of whom inhaled her heavy, unsweetened, slightly tangy creation. And so my family waited for me to swallow that first bite. Will she disappoint us?

Not in the least. I eagerly opened my mouth for more and have savored the dish ever since. Nanny died when I was four, ending the tradition of weekly family dinners. But several times throughout the year, the family reunites to celebrate. The memory of Nanny dwells in pouring her sauce over pasta from the same luxurious glass spout that once graced her table and which now rests in my parents’ hutch, used only for this special meal.

Farm luxury

We shit in a bucket that we must empty medieval-chamber-pot-style every few days. In the loft of a barn, we co-reside with dust, fleas (thanks to the feral cat and her five kittens who have learned what cat food is), a bat that occasionally flies into our room, bees that have colonized the central beam of the roof, and relentless mosquitoes. We wake up at six o’clock every morning to work a ten-hour day of planting, weeding, seeding, and/or harvesting fifteen acres of organic produce. We often do the same activity in the same position—kneeling, bending, stooping, standing, lifting—all day. We work in one hundred degrees, thirty degrees, sun, rain, and snow. We shower once, maybe twice a week. We earn minimum wage and receive no overtime pay. Farm life, for all its surface beauty, is difficult.

But then, there are the evening hours. Watching the sun cast its dying glare over the fields that are our backyard. Listening to the frogs on the banks of the pond commence their choral croaking. Sitting. Drinking. And, of course, there is dinner.

How fortunate we are to enjoy regular meals made almost entirely of organic food produced right outside our window. Last Friday, I snatched some of the first ripe tomatoes from the two 144-foot-long hoophouses in an eager frenzy to make fresh tomato sauce. I grew up in an Italian family, and there is no food that makes my knees weaker than my mom’s meat sauce (it is the only dish that I could not refuse during my two years as a vegetarian). I made some recipe revisions: I used local, grass-fed Italian sausage instead of store-bought beef chuck roast, some fresh basil, oregano, and parsley instead of the generic dried Italian seasoning, and, most importantly, I replaced canned tomato sauce and paste with the real thing fresh-from-the-vine. But I maintained the integrity of mom’s execution—first browning the heavily salt-and-peppered sausage in some olive oil, then removing the meat, adding the crushed tomatoes with a bit of water and the herbs, bringing it to a boil, placing the meat in the sauce, and finally letting it simmer.

To serve, I tossed it with some whole-wheat penne alongside a fresh sauté of just-picked yellow and costata squash with kale, and a glass of 2006 pinot noir from the Willamette Valley in Oregon (not local, but it was a gift). The wine was smooth and the sauté was crisp, but the sauce was bold—a medley of flavors independent yet harmonic. And oh, the tomatoes—how can I possibly go back to canned now? We finished with a simple dessert of newly-ripened raspberries from the field and dark chocolate. Engrossed in gustatory pleasure, we hadn’t talked much through the meal, but Dylan, holding a berry, appropriately punctuated the experience by saying, “This is why we do it.”