Perspective

On a sizzling spring Saturday morning in late May, we were set up selling at the Taos Farmers’ Market, enjoying the sights and smells and diversity of the crowd. Everyone comes out for the market and it was garden-planting time so we were busy and had a line of customers. We had 70+ varieties of vegetable starts and over 100 kinds of culinary and medicinal herbs on any given Saturday – a double space to spread out, and the prime market location, right at entrance and visible to main road traffic. Customers were all in around the plants, touching, reading signs and labels, asking questions, tasting in some cases, lining up to pay for their selections so they could rush home and plant, plant, plant. One lady spent a good 10 minutes poring over the flats of zucchini plants (sold in 3.5” pots, 18 to a flat), looking for just the right one to take home with her. She eventually found it, waited in line, paid me, and trotted off happily into the crowd.

About 20 minutes later, there she was, back in line, zucchini start in hand! When she got up to the table, behind 3 or 4 customers, she glanced furtively over her shoulder as if embarrassed to be back, held the plant up between us, tapped the side of the pot, and asked “I can eat the squash off this plant, right?” Of course! I assured her – absolutely! – and told her to plant it up to the bottom leaves, water daily and deeply, mulch if possible, and call me with any more questions. I reassured her it was easy to do and delicious to harvest and enjoy. And off she went, happy as a clam, and presumably enjoyed zucchini all summer.

Now, when that woman asked me if she could really, actually eat the squash from that plant, I was about bowled over. Just amazed, and somewhat unraveled too. I kept my composure and didn’t show how shocked I was to be asked whether she could actually eat the squash the plant would produce. And I guess I’ll never forget that as it was a pivotal moment for me - to this day, I’m amazed and appalled that we, as a culture, as a society, have lost our ability to identify food in our environment. I’ve seen it over and over again – there are fruit-bearing trees, berry shrubs, edible flowers, and herbs all over Albuquerque (even on campus – there is a nice little herb patch outside the sub) and they are not cultivated for food. People don’t know what is around them.

I wonder sometimes how many people would starve surrounded food because they can’t recognize it if, for instance, there were a global collapse of some sort (it’s a popular concern, really)? The woman at the market was unsure if she had bought a plant that would produce edible zucchini – would she have grown the plant out, had zukes ready for picking, and hesitated then, unsure of whether they were the same food as she found in the grocery store? It strikes me as so true when we learn that by giving words to something, identifying our environment with linguistic symbols that have meaning to us, we truly are creating our realities. We don’t know until we do know. And thankfully she asked. Had she not, the zucchini-plant woman would not have had the knowledge to identify the fruits of her plant as food. She would have stayed in the dark, uncertain, without the words to identify the properties of the plant she had. Maybe some deep memory in her cells, her genes, would have tugged at her consciousness, whispering to her that yes, this looks like food, growing and alive. Maybe not.

We have been nourishing ourselves with live food, gathered and cultivated from our environment, for tens of thousands of years – how could we have lost that knowledge, the ability to recognize food, in less than 2 generations? What else around us are we not cognizant of? And how can we each stay “plugged in” to the natural cycles, growing seasons, that we live through every year of our lives? If everyone grew a little garden (even in their city yard, or on the balcony, or in a bare spot at the university) would we be more aware of our world and how it really supports us every day? Would we be grateful?