Vegetables Galore

I adore the smell of fresh-picked tomatoes, their aroma a heady mix of sweetening juices and green vines. Each morning now, after I hang the bird feeders and release the geese for the day, I pick fresh tomatoes ... zucchini ... green beans. The tomatoes reward me with a brief, fleeting scent of aliveness. I raise the fruit to my nose and suck in the smell. It lingers briefly, staining my fingers with freshness.

Ironically, I seldom eat raw tomatoes (I’m allergic). One or two a season is enough for me. But I love to harvest, clean, pare, and cook the wide variety of fruits and vegetables that hang, plump and lovely, from the vine.

Yesterday’s day-long chef duties produced summer tomato soup, spaghetti sauce, kale-walnut pesto (from Farmer John’s cookbook, “The Real Dirt on Vegetables”), and the beginnings of a vegetable stir-fry. There is a deep sense of accomplishment in picking and preparing vegetables planted with your own hands and harvested through the ache of your own back. And, as we all know, the flavor is exquisite, unlike anything found in the fresh produce department at the local grocery store.

One of my t’ai chi chih students, a substitute teacher in Washburn, WI, told me a story last year about the transformative effects of growing your own food. Many Washburn High School students, she said, regularly left school grounds to head downtown for lunch at local restaurants. Then the school started growing its own garden. Each class was assigned specific vegetables to nurture to maturity. Now students eat lunch in the cafeteria. In no small way—perhaps in a life-changing way—they remain at school to savor the fruits of their labors.

I was reminded of this story when I read “Food for the Soul” in the September 2009 issue of Reader’s Digest. It tells the tale of Liz Neumark, a caterer in New York City, who created the Sylvia Center, a program designed to help city kids experience unprocessed, wholesome food from seedling to simple summer soup.

Neumark invites school children to her organic farm in upstate New York to collect eggs from the chickens, repot seedlings, pick vegetables, and then sample a collaborative cooking effort. The program is named after her youngest daughter who died from a weakened blood vessel in her brain at age six and it’s meant to show kids where real food comes from and how it tastes straight out of the earth.

Her hope is that when children plant, weed, harvest, and cook their own food they will be inspired to make different food choices. And her efforts are being rewarded ... last year a young girl who participated in Silvia Center saw a zucchini at the market and asked her mother to buy it, promising, “I’m going to make you breakfast in bed tomorrow.”

As I sat out on my deck last evening, dusk settling upon me, knife in hand, cutting board in my lap, and a wide circle of vegetables around me, I remembered my mother. I may have been unimpressed watching her sit in her lawn chair snapping beans when I was a child, but I can envision her clearly now. My memories of her pride in her garden and the many hours spent weeding, harvesting, canning, and freezing linger.... These days we share the same chair.