Grown in the Dirt - food from the backyard

In the last few weeks, I’ve feasted on our first strawberries of the season, out of our backyard patch. Our backyard strawberries are sweet, but they are not just sweet. With cool nights and days during their growing period this year, they are not the syrupy, sickly sweet of June, store-bought strawberries. They are a little tart, like blackberries. In my experience, store-bought strawberries are either a little sweet, or else they are limp, white and flavorless. But in our backyard strawberries, lack of sweetness does not mean lack of flavor. Our strawberries sucker-punch you: sweet, tart, and then a burst of sizzling, tingling tastes and sensations on your tongue. Eat one of these, and your tongue comes alive.

I had no idea food could be like this. I figured broccoli tasted like broccoli, cucumbers tasted like cucumbers, and fruit, living in New England, mostly didn’t taste that good. I always hated oranges, which were always tart and stringy, and peaches were always rock-hard and bitter. Apples were the only thing that had a season, and I figured that apples tasted pretty much the same anyway – some tart and juicy, others mushy and flavorless. I do have a memory of biting into a summer plum so juicy and delicious that I licked my fingers afterward – but no one connected the dots for me between “summer” and “yum.” As a kid growing up I dutifully ate my veggies, biting off the tops of broccoli crowns and shoveling peas onto my fork so I could get dessert. As a grown-up I continued to do the same, especially after it was pounded into my head that veggies were good for our health: cram as much flavorless lettuce into your salad as possible, for fiber, or gnaw on a tough carrot for a snack. Vegetables became like vitamins or medicine: hold your nose, shove it in your mouth, get it down your gullet – never mind the taste.

What I discovered when I started gardening (and eating organic food) is that a peach is not a peach, and that cooking is not always about dressing up food with some kind of sauce: salad dressing, roux, cheese, teriyaki. A few years ago, a friend convinced me to sign up for a local organic-food delivery service. It seemed expensive, but the food was incredible. Bananas were a sweet, creamy delicacy. Carrots crunched with sweetness. Peaches became something to eat standing up, at the cutting board, because they were too delicious to stop after the first slice. Then I got my own garden. The first time I ate broccoli from the garden, it was literally like a very, very slight pop-rocks style explosion happened in my mouth. I couldn’t wait to chew on more. Zucchinis had a slight sweetness to them, and a minerally after-taste that was intriguing. Cucumbers were crunchy and tasted like sparkling water – even a simple salad of lettuce and fresh cucumbers with a little bit of oil and vinegar became an exciting, flavorful meal. I’d always figured that cooking good food meant a mastery of many spices, a precise manipulation of ingredients. But with these fruits and veggies, cooking well stopped being my responsibility. A home-grown, summer zucchini does not need to be drowned in a cheese-and-bread-crumb casserole, but fried quickly in the pan and sprinkled with parmesan, it becomes a delicacy all by itself.

But where does the flavor come from? All our lives, we’ve been told what strawberries taste like: gum balls, chewing gum, breakfast pastries, Kool-Aid, Blow-pops, popsicles, iced-tea – if it’s colored pink, it’ll probably be called strawberry. But although these flavors resemble actual strawberries, mostly they taste like sugar. They taste like sweet. We’ve been taught to settle for sweetness so intense that barely any other flavor comes through (check out the sugar content on most “fruit juice” drinks and you’ll see what I mean). But real food, actual fruit, has so much more than sweetness. It has this complicated flavor that is no one thing – it starts on the tip of your tongue, tingles, sweetens, fills your mouth with a sweet burst of juice and works its way back – to a flavor that may be chocolatey, or reminiscent of dirt or clay, vanilla. We don’t even have a lot of words to describe flavors, but there is a complexity, a multi-dimensional kick, that “strawberry flavoring” developed in a lab can’t even begin to compete with.

So where does the flavor come from? It comes from the dirt, and the ground, and all the other ways plants take in nutrients. I realized this the first time I tried to grow cantaloupes in a bucket near my garden. We had a rainy June that spring, and then an even rainier July, but by the time August rolled around I had a softball-sized melon hanging off the vine, giving all the indications of being done growing. As I sliced into the skin, I had no idea what to expect. Before that summer, I thought cantaloupes grew on trees, in orchards. I had no idea they could come out of the garden! The flesh inside was a pale peachy color, not the deep pinky-amber color I’d get on the next couple of melons. The complexity was there, and sweetness, but only faintly. The flavor was wet, water, washed out. Holy Canolli. This fruit tasted exactly like the summer we’d had so far. If I’d been a cartoon character, a lightbulb would’ve gone off over my head. All of a sudden I understood why wine had good years and bad years. It’s flavor does not depend on a secret family recipe, but on the country, region, vineyard and, in some cases, the side of the orchard where it grows. Hot and cold weather, moisture, and the type of soil growing the grapes determine its flavor, and its price. Good soil, with its mix of living organisms, fungi, worms, microorganisms, and insects, helps the plants produce chemicals that burst with flavors we humans have adapted to love. Wine afficionados struggle to find words for these flavors, just like I did with my strawberries. They use words like fruit, oak, tobacco, vanilla, or smoke to describe flavors created by something grown in the ground.

For the first time, that summer, I understood the link between the taste of what we eat and the way that it was grown. I had always seen organic food as a rich person’s penance for guilt-free eating. But non-organic, or chemical food, is grown in sterile soil – instead of living organisms, interacting with each other, just three nutrients, NPK, made out of petroleum are dumped into the ground. It is enough for the plant to survive and create fruit, but a far cry from the nutrient-packed food humans have evolved to eat, and to love. The most delicious meal I can remember eating recently was not in a fancy restaurant, but at home, last summer: a burger made from farmer’s market grass-finished beef, creamy, buttery home-grown potatoes, boiled, and lettuce, carrot and tomato salad, lightly dressed. It might be the least fancy meal imaginable – salad, potatoes and burger, but it was honestly the best thing I’ve eaten in decades. Normally we make food yummy by adding things: sugar, salt, and fats in large proportions. Now, to be “healthy” we trick our body with fat and sugar substitutes and think we are doing all right. But with this meal it was not the preparation, or loads of butter or sour cream on top, that made it delicious – the ingredients were delicious all by themselves. My potatoes tasted like heaven with just a pinch of salt. Because of the way they’d been grown, with just sun, water, air and kitchen-scrap compost, they became something my body really, truly desired.

Which brings me to the spiritual practice of eating what you grow. I, for one, have no connection to Foxy lettuce from the supermarket – I have no idea where it comes from, or how it is grown, and I’m not sure I care all that much. But my food tastes like everything I’ve put into it: three years of improving my garden’s soil with compost, fish emulsion fertilizer, and compost tea; the hours I’ve spent weeding, mulching, and staking out plants; and most of all the patience I’ve kept, for the last three months, as I watched the plants grow from tiny seeds into a full-grown, food-producing plants. I love the idea that in some weird way, I’m eating all the work I did – and it tastes delicious. It also involves a certain amount of faith to plant a little slice of a potato in mid-April, hoping that it will magically multiply into ten or fifteen good-sized potatoes in July. It seems almost like arrogance, and a little bit like magic. I can never believe it when the first tomatoes and eggplants start coming in July, or at mid-summer, when I turn my potato-pots upside down and a dozen bright red or blue tubers are there, nestled in the dirt like Easter eggs. I am so proud and excited I show them to everyone who comes in the house, and cook them for everyone I can, trying to demonstrate to them the magic of home-grown edibles. And since I started growing garlic, onions, potatoes, and herbs there comes a time mid-August where I find myself able to make whole meals out of my backyard produce – and I really can’t believe it. After a life-time of getting food in supermarkets, I just fed my whole house a gourmet-quality meal with food I created out of basically nothing. I can’t imagine the faith, and fear, that would be part of anyone’s life who was really, truly a subsistence farmer, with no food-market safety-net to support them. No wonder some of our strongest religions were born when humans started depending on agriculture to survive. And next winter when I grab beets, onions, potatoes, cabbage – some of the vegetables most likely to survive the winter in a root cellar – and add dried dill to make borscht, I will imagine my own female ancestors in Eastern Russia, using the products of their summer kitchen gardens to keep their families fed all summer long.