Jane's Medicine Tree

Veggies At Whole Foods Market

Desperate for an abundance of organic veggies and fruits I drove out to the local Whole Foods.  So far in our little suburban adventure, I haven’t really connected with the Farmers Market scene.  While a great deal is available at these markets (and there are many in the Bay Area), I don’t get the sense of ‘local growers’ there (at least, not in my admittedly limited experiences).  Vendors from all over California sell at these markets — which is certainly fine: we are still making that important direct connection of buyer to farm.  But I do miss that experience of buying from friends and acquaintances from my community — a community that was 12 miles long by 4 miles wide on Vashon (and included a few great off-island vendors) or that was perhaps of a 35 miles radius as it was at the Joseph and Enterprise, Oregon Farmers Markets.   Here my sense of local growers is a little more disperse.  Certainly I consider the vendors from Marin County, or Half Moon Bay, or Watsonville, or even Salinas to be included in my definition of “local”.  And I certainly welcome the grass-fed beef sellers from Fresno.  So my sense of local stretches, grateful that I am for any organic, life-affirming food that I can buy from people who actually produce it and who care deeply about what they do.

Anyway, having missed the Farmers Market this morning, I headed out to Whole Foods.  I’ve done most of our shopping on foot at a supermarket downtown.  But while I enjoy buying my foods and goods directly in my walking community, I’ve been only sporadically inspired by the veggies I can get there, and so we really haven’t enjoyed very much in the way of greens and veggies for awhile.  Actually not since last fall, when the Wallowa County’s Farmers Markets finished for the year. It’s hardly worth eating the listless greens that end up in most supermarkets!  But stepping into Whole Foods was a different story from our veggie deprived lifestyle.  Such a beautiful and lush display of veggies and fruits of all sorts!  And many of the fruits featured were from farms that fit my Locovore definition of local.

... and more veggies

Spring greens, arugula, sugar snap peas, oh my!    I want to shove my hands into the salad mix, and snap those pea pods right there, and nibble on those jewel-bright baby carrots with their cheerful green lacy tops dangling.  At the same time, my synapses feel like they are snapping and popping like a crossed electrical wires.  Gazing at the bin of arugula, I flash to the populations of arugula that volunteered in my herb garden every winter, the delicate peppery flavor of those leaves ready for me to pluck at any instant to nibble as I headed out to the chickens or just for a wander in Plain Old Farm.  Here in Whole Foods the sugar snap peas lying on top of each other and side by side in the bin remind me of the poor de-limbed logged trees out in rural Washington, in their huge piles awaiting to be carted off and processed who knows where.  I recall the sugar snap peas on the bushes, tendrils and white flowers and leaves and those cheerful surprises of ripe pea pods ready to pluck from the vines, snap in half and pop pod and peas into one’s mouth.

So, while I eagerly gather up sugar snap peas here in Whole Foods to take home and share with my family, I’m also longingly aware that these sugar snap peas are not the whole story.  In a supermarket, and even at the Farmers Market, we the buyers are not a participant in that whole plant’s life.  Even more, we are not part of that plant’s ecology.  We know nothing about the California poppies that intermingled with my arugula, taking over from the arugula as the spring progressed.  We know nothing about the children thrusting hands into pea bushes in their eager questing for nature’s surprises in those ripe pea pods.  We know nothing about the hens that wandered various parts of the Farm, pecking at kale forests and other greens going to flower and seed.  (and these delighful hens each with their own persnickety personalities bear no relation to the de-feathered chicken breasts, thighs, drumsticks, and headless whole chickens in the meat department).

My mind spins with “What the hell are we doing here?  Why ever did we leave?” immediately followed by gratitude for the good food that is before me right now, and a sense of purpose and peace.  Yes, I love having bought and drunk raw whole milk from friends in my communities on Vashon and in Joseph, where I could actually meet the cows and learn their names.  And I am grateful and delighted to find raw whole milk available here in Whole Foods (for how long though?  Legislation by folks with no understanding or wish to understand real food continues to erode our basic rights to unprocessed humanely and wholesomely raised food).  So my sense of local and real stretch and wriggles and expands.  I’m grateful today that I can buy these delicious nectarines and handfuls of arugula and my jar of raw milk, all from California, a big state to be sure.

At home I check my email and our friends from Plum Forest Farm on Vashon have sent their list of produce available for sale this week at their farmstand.  The list is short compared to what Whole Foods offered. But I know the farm, and from our experience farming I know how each of the veggies listed leafed and blossomed and produced, and what it’s like to dig them from the soil or pluck or pinch them from the plant.  And I gaze at our Plain Old Farm website, currently on furlough til we start up anew in the hemi-demi-semi future.  It’s all fine though, really.  I am stitching my worlds together, and that includes celebrating the freshness and life-affirming nature of the food of right where I am in whatever form it takes.  When I walk the aisles of markets that truly are committed to nourishing food, good for us and good for the earth, I find myself wandering the paths of Plain Old Farm.

Plums from our backyard. The plum trees are volunteers that have taken over part of the yard in the past decade, so the plums have been a delicious surprise.