I’m standing at my kitchen counter, eating carrots that were pulled from the ground this morning. They’re crooked, and have little root hairs emanating from their knobby sides. There’s dirt in their cracks.
I didn’t grow them — they are from my CSA box, which I pick up weekly from a local farmer named Sophie. CSA stands for community-supported agriculture, and I’ve never felt the community part of that more than when I stop by a neighbor’s house to grab our food for the week.
I guess I should wash these carrots, but I don’t. You know how dogs recognize when they need to eat some grass for their digestion? I feel I need to eat this dirt. I know who tends this soil; I know how they treat it, which is as gold, as a newborn baby, as the rarest hothouse flower. It’s valuable, and Sophie knows it.
I don’t mean to, exactly, but I eat the whole bunch, except for two carrots I save for our daughter. The sour-sharp radishes are next. I’m eating on instinct here. My body hasn’t had food this fresh in months.
My husband wanders in. He notes without comment the carrot-less bunch of greens on the cutting board. He gets out a knife and silently chops them, adds some wilting basil from the fridge, smashes a few cloves of garlic and some red chili flakes, and drowns the whole botanical offering in good olive oil. It’s a carrot-top chimichurri, and we drizzle it on everything we can think of: some stale bread, a bit of cold roast chicken. It’s intoxicating.
I have a chronic — and sometimes debilitating — illness. I noticed two years ago, when I first joined the CSA, that my condition receded substantially during the summer and early fall, coinciding with the farm season here. The next year, the same thing happened. And this year, I look forward to it happening again. At least, I hope it will.
In previous decades, summers have been my worst season. The heat, the bright sun, the frenetic energy of the humans who’ve emerged from our long, cold, and rainy winters: it all serves as the perfect recipe for days of agony in a dark room.
I think Sophie’s food has been healing me. I think the grains of soil from her farm, which I refuse to wash from the roots, carry microbiota that colonize my family’s bodies, fed by the fibrous matrix surrounding the sweet plant sugars that make this parsnip, or that turnip, the best I’ve ever tasted.
I think in the winter, my microbiome is cauterized by synthetic chemicals from the plastic-wrapped food I eat, from the sugary sodas I drink to calm my raging nausea, from the gases used to ripen the lifeless fruits I’ve chosen under fluorescent lights inside a giant warehouse that stinks of artificially-scented laundry soap and floor cleaner.
I think in the summer, my microbiome grows back with the influx of fiber and dirt — the Earth itself, unadulterated by the unnatural — and I heal.
I want everyone to have this. I mean, to be able to feed their family something that was pulled from the earth the same day. Food that was grown in chocolate-cake soil, nurtured without synthetic chemicals.
It’s none of my business, I know, what people eat. And any thoughts I can formulate around this are based in the astonishing privilege inherent in being American.
To reach as many as possible, our local farms offer payment plans. They accept government benefit stamps. They offer work-trades so you can get free produce by working at the farm. And they donate vegetables and fruit to the food bank.
Even when you pay full price, as I have, the food is so much less expensive than what’s available at the supermarket. From what I can see in a quick bit of research, farm shares are available across the US.
I think, here in this country, if you know about this, if you know why it’s worth it, you can likely find a way to get it.
Outside the US, perhaps similar models exist. But only if you live in a place where farmers and farmland are valued, where armed conflict does not threaten them, where the rain still falls.
Because I live in a place that is blessed in these ways, I consider it my duty to support Sophie and those like her.
And now that I’ve tasted what her earth provides, I’ll find a way to get that food for my family — and that feels like another duty, one I am grateful to owe them.
We met our neighbor Ahmad today. A Kurdish man from Syria, he’s an ironworker, and has set up an outdoor shop in the breezeway between his house and his garage. Last week, he had a massive iron gate sitting in his front yard. It was gorgeous, and as long as a delivery truck. This week, it’s gone, but he’s been working on curved bars of 1/8-inch thick steel, which he’s developed a new technique for, because no metal press in our town can handle that heavy gauge.
He ran an ironworks in Aleppo. Now, he makes custom gates in my small Oregon city. He seems happy: buoyant, proud of his craft. He was able to bring his wife and two teenage sons over from Dubai, where they’d been living for a decade.
My husband, who is Turkish Greek, asks about Ahmad’s fig trees. He wants to grow every variety that will set fruit in this decidedly non-Mediterranean climate.
Ahmad says Wa at-tīni Wa az-zaytūni. By the fig and the olive. Do you know this?
He tells us it’s from the Qu’ran. The prophet Muhammad swore by them; tini: fig, he says, zaytuni: olive. And now, you must always plant figs with olives.
As he’s speaking, he’s clicking and zooming on his phone screen. There’s no hesitation in his movements. He has swiped and scrolled to this location on Google Maps a hundred times.
His voice cracks as he recites the verse, and I glance up at him. His eyes have welled up. He clears his throat.
Here, he says. Here is Aleppo. He zooms in and scrolls. This is the road to Türkiye. Here, Russian army; here, and also here, American army. Here, Syrian army. Everywhere: the army.
Pointing at the screen, he says, Here, this is where everyone whose farms were lost has made homes, out of tents. And tarps. You see the blue tarps?
And indeed, we do. We see the blue tarps and the white-canopied tent city of this massive refugee camp. The magic of instantaneous satellite technology pulled from Ahmad’s back pocket.
They have no cell phones here, he says. It’s a no-media zone. It’s not like Gaza-Palestine. No one will see what happens here.
When the men come to the tent in the middle of the night, he says, they hold a knife to your throat, what do you do? You have a wife, daughters, and they are holding their knives to you, what do you do? The men will take your family.
My cousin— he starts. He pauses, glances up from the screen at me and clears his throat again. So, the figs. He looks back down and scrolls west on the map. Endless fields of brown desert studded with green appear. Here, he says, these are the olives. And here, all around the fields, the fig. Always the fig.
Ahmad particularly loves his Desert King fig tree, and is curious about the Olympian we grow. So, we’ll be swapping cuttings this summer, the Syrian fig and the Greek one. Like them, the two good men standing in front of me are exiles far from their Mediterranean homes, making lives and families in the fertile soil of what is now called Oregon, dark earth fire-tended by hundreds of generations of Kalapuya families before us.
These men will grow figs for their kids, and although olives are probably hopeless here, we’ll plant one just to see. Sophie the farmer will care for the land with her particular brand of magic and tenderness. And I will do my best to taste it all.
If you want to learn more about CSA/farm shares in the US, here’s one place to start. https://www.localharvest.org/csa/
And as it’s Mother’s Day in the US, it’s a good time to give thanks to our planet home, the beautiful, life-giving mother of us all. 💚
This is so moving Rebecca -- thank you
A beautiful and moving story about people, the land, what the Earth produces--carrots, figs, olives (all good)--and why there is such a strong connection to the bounty.