The Village Idiot: Why did the apple cross the road?
Last fall, my big city cousin Bernice brought her 4-year-old son up to the farm for a visit. One afternoon we were out under the apple trees in the backyard taking in the mountain view. The ground was littered with ripe apples that had fallen off the trees. Little Billy reached down, picked an apple up off the ground and started to take a bite out of it. Mom knocked the apple out of his hand and snapped, “Don’t eat that! You don’t know where it’s been!”
As far as we know, that will be the only time in Billy’s life when he will know exactly where his food had been. Years ago, before Billy, Bernice had visited us at Christmas. Sue had boiled up some potatoes to go with the feast and she asked Bernice to mash them. Bernice looked in the pot and said, “I didn’t know mashed potatoes came from potatoes. I always thought they came out of a box.”
Since then, Sue and I have amused ourselves often at the supermarket by imagining food growing the way Bernice must see it. Large trees laden with boxes of frozen pizzas hanging down from the branches, just waiting to be harvested. Fields full of migrant workers picking cans of peas and string beans off the plants. Steaks and hamburgers being grown already wrapped in plastic and pre-priced at a spotless, odorless, stainless-steel factory called Beef City, where the food materializes from nowhere like Captain Kirk’s dinner on Star Trek.
Sometimes, though, even we are confused. In the produce department of our supermarket all the apples have little stickers on them that say “New Zealand.” They are wonderful apples, but we grow plenty of apples around here. Are we really expected to believe they can get apples cheaper from New Zealand than from around the corner?
Now that I’ve started noticing, it’s easy to find lots of strange, unexplainable long-distance food stories. Four big bulk tanker trucks come up my rural dirt road every day to collect milk from the dairy farms. And where does all that fresh milk go? One truck goes to a Massachusetts cheese factory, one goes to New Jersey for butter, one goes to Pennsylvania and one goes to Long Island. You might say to yourself, “Wouldn’t it be cheaper to have one truck take all that milk to one place?”
Oh, you poor, silly goose. You hopelessly old-fashioned twit. You will never make it in today’s high-tech world of agriculture. The whole idea of farming today is to grow the food as far away from where it is eaten as possible. That is why they sell Florida tomatoes in New Jersey, fresh swordfish in Omaha, Israeli oranges in Florida, Chilean wine in California, California lettuce in South Carolina, New Zealand apples in New York.
I used to think my farmer neighbors were laughing at me because I was a city person and didn’t know anything about where our food comes from. Now I think they’re laughing at me because I’m a city person and I don’t know anything about where our food is going.
Still, the thing with the apples bothered me. So I asked my grocery store manager if he could make the effort to buy local apples from now on. He looked at me like I was a communist. Possibly a Dixie Chicks fan or something.
“What are you trying to do?” he said, “Put the small family trucker out of business?”
(Jim Mullen is the author of “It Takes A Village Idiot: A Memoir of Life After the City.” He also contributes regularly to Entertainment Weekly, where he can be reached at [email protected].)