Food links us to our past and provides context in our present. Tonight I cooked corn, grown by my mother on land that has belonged to my father's family for over 60 or so years. My uncle plowed the land, my mother planted the seed and hoed the rows and watered the corn (not to mention the other vegetables she grows) and when it was time she picked it, shucked it and cut it off the cob, to be placed in the freezer until I retrieved it, brought it the 200 miles or so from Abbeville to North Charleston and cooked it in a cast iron frying pan, the way she has done for these 50 some odd years. In another pan, a birthday gift from my father thirty some years ago, I browned hamburger for tacos, a food never served in my childhood home. I sliced and diced tomatoes, grown in that same garden and picked by me two days ago. And I ate the tacos, with the tomatoes on top, and the corn in a plate that once held food prepared by my father's mother, my granny, grown on that same land. This was an obvious link to the past.
Just now, I finished squeezing the pulp from a big bowl of muscadines, picked by me, my mother and my aunt from vines in her pasture, two days ago. I put the hulls in freezer bags, ready for pie, and the pulp in another, ready for cooking into juice for jelly. They wait now in my freezer, linking the future to the past and to today. None of this is important, of course. It's just food, after all.
But here's the thing. I know where the corn and the muscadines and the tomatoes grew. I know who tended the plants, who watered and hoed and cared for them. And more than that, those are the foods of my childhood. My grandparents, my mother's parents, had a farm too, although it has passed out of family hands now. There were muscadines and scuppurnongs and figs and pears and apples in late spring and early fall. Green beans, corn, butterbeans, crowder peas, okra, squash, all grew there. In the spring there were strawberries. And in summer, tomatoes, glorious red full-flavored tomatoes, like nothing you buy in the store, and with apologies to all those Johns Islanders, like nothing I ever got from there. My mother still grows those things, and she has introduced fruits to my father's farm that weren't there before, the apples and plums and figs. Her pear tree this year is full of green pears, which are crisp and sweet and juicy in your hand as you take big, crunchy bites of them, fresh from the tree. And the pecan trees are loaded with green hulled pecans, waiting for the colder weather to turn brown and drop from the tree, ready for pies and cakes and toppings for the sweet potatoes she is now digging from the garden. I can eat home grown food every day of my life. I know when certain foods are in season and when their growing time has passed and it is time to eat from the freezer or the jars.
I don't really have a point here, I guess, unless it is that we are too accustomed to food in packages and cans, in neat little bins in the produce section. We forget whether they grow in the ground or on a vine, on a bush or a tree. We don't know what pesticides or herbicides are used to facilitate their growth, and how that leaches into the groundwater. I don't shop at Whole Foods, I shop from my mother's garden, and I am wealthier for it. My father used to talk about how much it cost to grow all this stuff, but he never stopped growing it. My mother keeps doing it. And one day I hope to grow food in that same earth. Meantime, I love that I can eat it.
Just now, I finished squeezing the pulp from a big bowl of muscadines, picked by me, my mother and my aunt from vines in her pasture, two days ago. I put the hulls in freezer bags, ready for pie, and the pulp in another, ready for cooking into juice for jelly. They wait now in my freezer, linking the future to the past and to today. None of this is important, of course. It's just food, after all.
But here's the thing. I know where the corn and the muscadines and the tomatoes grew. I know who tended the plants, who watered and hoed and cared for them. And more than that, those are the foods of my childhood. My grandparents, my mother's parents, had a farm too, although it has passed out of family hands now. There were muscadines and scuppurnongs and figs and pears and apples in late spring and early fall. Green beans, corn, butterbeans, crowder peas, okra, squash, all grew there. In the spring there were strawberries. And in summer, tomatoes, glorious red full-flavored tomatoes, like nothing you buy in the store, and with apologies to all those Johns Islanders, like nothing I ever got from there. My mother still grows those things, and she has introduced fruits to my father's farm that weren't there before, the apples and plums and figs. Her pear tree this year is full of green pears, which are crisp and sweet and juicy in your hand as you take big, crunchy bites of them, fresh from the tree. And the pecan trees are loaded with green hulled pecans, waiting for the colder weather to turn brown and drop from the tree, ready for pies and cakes and toppings for the sweet potatoes she is now digging from the garden. I can eat home grown food every day of my life. I know when certain foods are in season and when their growing time has passed and it is time to eat from the freezer or the jars.
I don't really have a point here, I guess, unless it is that we are too accustomed to food in packages and cans, in neat little bins in the produce section. We forget whether they grow in the ground or on a vine, on a bush or a tree. We don't know what pesticides or herbicides are used to facilitate their growth, and how that leaches into the groundwater. I don't shop at Whole Foods, I shop from my mother's garden, and I am wealthier for it. My father used to talk about how much it cost to grow all this stuff, but he never stopped growing it. My mother keeps doing it. And one day I hope to grow food in that same earth. Meantime, I love that I can eat it.
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