Farm to Coffee Table
How ’Bout Them Apples
Apples are important. They are lodged in our throats and imprinted on our cell phones. They proxy in for the unspecified fruit Eve gave Adam, and pies made out of them are quintessentially American. My graduating class planted 14 trees of them at our high school, and 30 years from now, we hope to return with spouses and children, hungry for the fruits of our labor. And as I eat this apple, alternating bites with lines of prose, I savor all this historical, cultural, and personal significance even more than its sweet flavor.
Nothing would please me more than writing an article chronicling mankind’s fixation with the apple. That says a lot about me. Fortunately for you though, the apple is even more important as a commodity than an artifact, so this is the story of how one fruit might just determine the future of American agriculture.
Consider Agriculture
Few things make me happier than drinking coffee on the broken tailgate of Jake’s pick-up while the summer sun rises over the farm. Cutting heads of lettuce with one perfect, clean stroke is one of them. Picking wineberries from thorny bushes until the marginal cost of bloody hands catches up to the marginal pleasure of their sweet, tart taste is another.
The type of happiness I derive from these things is an intoxicating brand of exotic pleasure. Read the first sentence of this article again. Tell me it’s not weird. Tell me you didn’t roll your eyes. An Ivy League millennial—let alone an Indian boy from New Jersey—shouldn’t engage the farming idyll. And maybe that’s why I do. Farming is the closest I’ve gotten to a cocaine addiction. It makes up for years of absent teenage angst and rebellion in a guy whose badassery had been limited to talking trash at his third grade Field Day.
Retire Ronald
In 1963, President John F. Kennedy was fatally shot in his motorcade in Dallas, Texas. 1963 was also the year The Beatles released their first album, “Please Please Me,” which they recorded in a single day just a couple of months before its debut. And from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., told an audience of a quarter million about a dream that would soon seize many more.
But in the least likely of ways, the least likely of people—a weatherman from Washington, DC, who acted on children’s TV on weekends—changed the fundamental nature of American existence in 1963 with a more subtle magnitude than any of the events that happened that year. This man was Willard Scott, better known as an icon so widely celebrated that he gives even Santa Claus a run for his money, Ronald McDonald.
Plow Through The Stump
Life is simpler when you plow around the stump. You’ll avoid breaking a disc blade or two on your tractor. It’s cheaper and easier than buying a special attachment. And if the roots on that son-of-a-bitch are strong and deep—which they always are—getting rid of them can take forever.
But farmers tend to be meticulous aestheticians, and a stump in a row of tomatoes sticks out like a sore, unseemly thumb. Those who rightly have more urgent concerns than how their crops look should also note that the soil under and around tree stumps is so fertile that it might be worth breaking a couple disc blades.
The Ethical Case for Eating Animals
We were transplanting a row of eggplant as quickly as we could, trying to finish before it got too hot. With one hand, Jake was placing seedlings a foot away from each other with uncanny precision and with the other he was stopping Maggie the dog from prancing all over them. I was right behind them covering the roots with soil, crawling on my stomach along the furrow like a soldier through a trench.
Jake usually got philosophical when we transplanted—it probably had something to do with the wealth of intrigue offered by the task of putting plants into dirt. So I saw it coming when he asked me about halfway down the furrow about my thoughts on vegetarianism. Without looking up, I recited the religious and cultural implications of eating meat for certain people, talked about the potential health benefits, and said something about as vague and unsubstantiated as, “It’s the ethical thing to do.” He didn’t say anything for a while. But Jake was a high school teacher first and a farmer second, and his instincts as the former must have kicked in.