A Fruit in Vegetable Clothing and other Mysteries

A selection of Heirloom Tomatoes

“A book is a garden carried in the pocket.”
- Proverb, (Arabian or Chinese, depending on where you look)

I have a nightstand full of books. They are stacked precariously like the tea cups on the Mad Hatter’s tea table. It’s not that I don’t have bookshelves, but these are books that can’t be put away, not just yet. These are books I’m in the middle of, books I intend to read and books I have read and mean to put away, but just can’t. In the latter group is one by Barbara Kingsolver entitled Animal, Vegetable, Miracle . It is on my nightstand for a reason.

If there is anything that will put me to sleep faster than a non-fiction book, it is a non-fiction book about healthy eating. In fact, the only thing that will put me to sleep faster than either of those is a book about how we are all wrecking the earth one plastic cup at a time. “They” have a point, I explained very responsibly to my fourteen year old, as I tossed out the styrofoam dinner plates. If we aren’t careful, global warming will kill us all.

Or at least, I told him, it will kill you. Just before the asteroids hit. Or the sun implodes. Of course you won’t know about the sun imploding until about eight minutes after the earth is incinerated, but that is a whole other blog.

So Animal, Vegetable, Miracle has been on my nightstand for a couple of years, waiting for that one special after ten, where no amount of indie music filtering through the Nano or infomercials beaming into the bed can bring on the night.

A few weeks ago, restless and cranky, I picked up my secret-weapon-against-insomnia book and started turning the pages. I knew the minute I read the word “locavore," that I would be snoring loudly, long before Letterman's Top Ten.

Turns out Animal, Vegetable, Miracle not only did not put me to sleep, 12 fruit trees and a backyard garden later, it is still on my nightstand, this time right at the top of the rickety stack. Who knew tomatoes were fruit? (only thought of as vegetables because the Supreme Court ruled them a vegetable and therefore subject to tax back in the 1800’s). Who knew that your Thanksgiving turkey has been selectively bred into a bird unable to reproduce the way nature intended and to have a breast so heavy that it would be unable to stand even if it were to survive beyond the five month slaughtering point? Who knew that vegetables and fruits in the supermarket are genetically engineered, not for flavor, but first for resistance to disease, then for imperishability and lastly for good looks? Who knew that Kiwi’s have a season? Well they do, and unless you live in the tropics or New Zealand, they don’t have a season in your area. When you eat them you may as well imagine the 10 gallons of smoking, choking diesel it took to get each one to your table. Talk about your carbon footprints! I feel better about my plastic cups. Ok, not really.

But this isn’t a book about guilt and cocktail party killing lines. Kingsolver took on a personal challenge, just to see if it could be done. She and her family chronicled their attempt to eat locally for a year on produce and livestock they either raised and harvested or slaughtered themselves or that they could obtain from roughly 100 miles around them.



Should we all do that? Can we all do that? Can we eat what is in season and grown locally and not succumb to the Columbian banana in Chicago or the Chilean seedless grapes in Fort Lauderdale? Probably not. But if the president’s wife can plant a vegetable garden in the backyard of the White House, I can probably grow a tomato or two in my backyard, and that’s a start.

If nothing else, after reading Kingsolver’s book I decided I wanted to water something I can eat! And, if the trees and garden yield as much as I think they will, let’s hope that what ever I’m watering back there, the neighbors will want to eat too. Otherwise some of you will be getting packages of produce for Christmas. Just sayin…


Barbados Cherry like the one in my backyard now

Woodstock, more than just a small yellow bird

So there's going to be another Woodstock movie?  I missed it, the real Woodstock I mean.  They didn't have much of an advance team.  Just word of mouth and no mouth near me had the word. What were we doing? How could we have been so tuned out?   We were busy.  We had a lot going on, getting ready for our first year of high school, hanging out at the beach but never actually on the sand, mailing letters in anything but envelopes to our best friends, who lived down the street, watching the war on TV over our TV dinners, sharing beads and secrets and record albums.  I was 14 in 1969.  I had no idea.  My friends had no idea.  Their friends had no idea.  We thought sneaking out in the middle of the night to hang at the Royal Castle was the epitome of cool. Even if we had known about Woodstock, we'd never have gotten there. Partly because at fourteen we had no wheels and partly because even if we'd convinced my mother to drive us, Woodstock didn't happen in Woodstock.

My mother could follow a map with the precision of a cartographer. She would tease out the most obscure location from any collection of cryptic, creased and sometimes greasy lines and symbols, be they Triple A issue or penciled on the back of a wet restaurant napkin. But for all her navigational talent, she was also rather literal and goal oriented and if we had set out that August to find Woodstock, then we darn sure would have found Woodstock! And we still would have missed the defining event of my generation because Woodstock, the concert, was held more than an hour and a half over the Catskills in a town called Bethel Woods New York. I can only think that as a generation so determined to find itself, we could have used a little more Geography, and a lot less Film as Literature on our college syllabi.

My youngest son will be 14 on Monday next.  No chance of him missing the Woodstock of his time.  Anything important is on cable, dish, Yahoo, ITunes, Twittered, texted or blogged.  Oh, and we still have phones, sort of, though no one actually speaks into them anymore. The thought of my son and half a million of his Facebook friends turning up in person for anything seems rather remote to me. There were no cell phones at Woodstock in 1969, no Starbucks, no hair gel.  Just a lot of people face to face, on a farm, in the mud, listening to music and getting stoned, because mud and manure and people up close are much better tolerated stoned.  They say it was the largest gathering of people anywhere in history. They say it was all about peace and love and goodwill and of course, music. Was it one of those things that can only be idyllic in retrospect?  I dunno.  Go see the Ang Lee movie or better yet, catch the Michael Wadleigh documentary on VH-1 and shoot me an email.  I'm kind of --- busy.