This week, a bit of a tutorial. Have you ever contemplated canning as a way to save some of your seasonal harvest for the forty weeks of the year when there’s not a fruit share?

If so, you’re not alone, as going homesteader is hip these days – or so I gather by a recent article gracing the front page of the weekend Philadelphia Inquirer on “21st Century Homesteading.”

Among other pastoral pursuits, the article highlights home canning: “Chris Scherzinger, general manager of Jarden Home Brands, maker of Ball and Kerr home-canning supplies, reports a 60 percent increase in sales from 2007 to 2009, the biggest hike since the 1970s. ‘The economy is certainly a factor,’ he says, ‘but so is the growing interest in gardening and fresh food.’” A poke around the internet turns up enthusiastic blogs such as (Philadelphia’s own) Food in Jars and Tigress in a Jam These are not your grandmother’s canning resources, with recent recipes such as Nectarine Preserves with Summer Savory and White Pepper and White Peach Sauce with Vanilla.

Well, if you’ve never tried canning and you’re interested in giving it a try, canning peaches (straight up, nothing fancy) is a great place to start. Forget Labor Day, or Back to School, the real harbinger of the end of summer is the peach finale. Just a few more weeks, folks, so get ‘em while they last. This realization set me in a bit of a panic this week, dropping everything for an afternoon or two so I could “put up” my personal stash of peaches for the winter.

Peaches are “easy” because they’re a high-acid food that you can raw pack. Translation: you can process them in a hot water bath (you don’t need a pressure canner), and you can pack them into jars without cooking them first, which saves you a step and some extra dirty dishes. Basic canning is not difficult; it just takes time and the ability to follow directions. The big concern in canning is preventing botulism. We can see, smell, or taste many problems caused by microorganisms in our food (moldy bread, spoiled milk), but this is not the case with botulism, and it’s no joke. The tiniest amount of botulism is deadly. But good news: it simply can’t survive in a high-acid environment, and this includes peaches. If this is your first time canning, please review the basics and make sure you’re being safe at the USDA’s Complete Guide to Home Canning or the Ball canning jar site, which has a useful FAQs section.

The best peaches to use are ones that are firmly ripe, probably about two days after you bring the fruit share home. Yellow or white or a mixture, it’s up to you. I found that about 6 medium peaches or nectarines fills one quart jar. You’ll want to prepare a syrup, which will help the peaches keep their shape, color, and flavor. You can use sugar or honey; I used a honey syrup that consisted of 1 cup honey to 3 cups hot water, and this amount was enough for six quart jars. The proportions for your syrup are flexible – even using water would be safe. For a light sugar syrup, combine ½ cup sugar with 2 cups water. For a heavy sugar syrup, combine 2 cups sugar with 2 cups water. Or you can choose any quantity in between.

Things you’ll need:
canning jars with (new) lids and screw bands*
a large pot big enough to hold your jars plus a few inches of water above them
a small pot large enough to contain your lids
a medium pot for boiling your syrup
a ready supply of clean dish towels
a skinny rubber spatula
peaches
sugar or honey

* You can reuse proper canning jars and the screw bands, but you should always use new lids. I prefer the wide mouth jars because they’re easier to fill and to clean. Either pints or quarts will work.

Things that are nice to have:
a canning rack (holds your jars in place during processing)
a canning funnel
canning tongs
a kitchen thermometer
several mixing bowls
lemon juice
whole spices, such as cinnamon sticks, cardamom pods, or cloves

Step by Step:

1. Fill your large pot with your clean, empty jars and add enough water to cover them with about two inches of water. (Note: when the jars are filled, the contents will displace some of this water.) You can use a canning rack to hold your jars in place, or, if not, a trick I learned from the Italian grandma of a friend of a friend: cushion your jars with towels. You don’t want the jars to hit each other or the sides of the pot. Start heating the water. It’ll take awhile. You want to bring the water to about 140°, or when tiny bubbles just start to appear on the sides of the jars. Do not let it come to a boil at this point.
2. Place your new lids and screw bands in the small pot. Cover with water and bring to a simmer. Then just leave them in the hot water until you’re ready for them.
3. Make your syrup, and start heating it. You’ll need it to be at a boil when it’s time to fill your jars.
4. Prepare your peaches. You’ll want to slice and peel them. You can blanch the peaches in boiling water to help remove the skins, but I find that when they’re nice and ripe, it’s just as easy and less mess to simply peel them with a knife. I’ve found that a small, serrated knife works best. I like to cut the peaches into eighths or even smaller, so that they’re easier to pack into the jars. As you cut them, you can drop them into a bowl of water to which you’ve added a teaspoon of lemon juice to prevent them from darkening.
5. Pack your hot jars with the peach slices. If you’d like, you can add whole spices, such as cinnamon, cardamom, or cloves. Pack the fruit in as tightly as you can, then top it off with your boiling syrup, leaving a ½ inch of headspace between the liquid and the rim of the jar. To remove any air pockets, run your spatula around the inside edges of the jar, and correct the amount of liquid if needed to maintain that ½ of empty space.
6. Carefully wipe the jars with a clean, damp cloth; you especially don’t want any food to be left on the rims of the jars (where the lid meets the jar), or it will prevent a good seal. Place the lids on the jars and gently screw on the bands.
7. Place the jars back into the water bath. Be careful that the water hasn’t reached a boil while you’ve been filling the jars – a drastic temperature difference could make the jars crack. Make sure that there is two inches of water over the tops of the jars. Cover the pot, and bring the water to a boil (this can take awhile).
8. As soon as your water boils, set a timer: 30 minutes for quart jars, 25 minutes for pint jars. Make sure that the pot stays covered and the water stays at a full boil and completely covers the jars for the entire processing time.
9. When the time is up, turn off the heat. I like to let the jars sit in the water bath for a good ten minutes; if you take them out immediately, the contents can leak out of the lid, ruining your seal. Remove the jars to a wooden rack or onto a counter covered with a few dry towels, to prevent cracking. Let them cool, untouched. Check them to see if the center of the lid is down and stays down when you press on it. If so, your jar has sealed. If not, you should reprocess your jar, keep it in the fridge, or throw it in the freezer.
10. Enjoy your peaches sometime in midwinter, when the last apples have been eaten and the fruit CSA seems like a distant memory. It might be a far cry from feeding your family all winter from a cellar-full of jarred goods, but it’s one small, satisfying step towards being a bit more involved in your personal food system.

If this piques your interest, and you’d like to learn more, a few good places to start are Preserving Summer’s Bounty by the Rodale Food Center (where I got most all of this information) and The Complete Book of Year-Round Small-Batch Preserving: Over 300 Delicious Recipes by Ellie Topp and Margaret Howard, which is geared toward someone canning in rather small batches in the home kitchen.

Comments or questions? You can contact me at northstarerin@gmail.com.
Past, present, and future writings posted on my blog (link to: http://fruitsunheardof.wordpress.com/)

Most CSAs in this area offer vegetables, but there are also a few which offer meat, eggs, cheese, and fruit. I’ve even heard of a grain CSA, although that’s nowhere near us.

In the midst of CSA signups this spring, I received an email from a member stating that he’d like the “I Can Control Mother Nature” Share. Well, that statement gave me the chuckle I’m sure it was intended to give.

But what a concept, eh? The “I Can Control Mother Nature” Share would see us all getting exactly what we wanted when we wanted it. No worries about spring frosts, hail, or droughts. No concerns at all about biennial bearing issues. Taken to the extreme, it could mean getting Asian pears or heirloom tomatoes all year long….wow!

In many ways, that sounds like a mighty good idea. I can conceive of gorging myself on gage-type plums, nectarines, and Gold Rush apples day after day, year-in and year-out. For veggies, it would mean Swiss chard daily. I’m as addicted to each of those as I am to coffee.

My coffee addiction I can feed every day, usually with the same brand, although I do try new ones from time to time; they’re always Fair Trade certified and/or locally roasted. I’m currently SO into One Village Coffee, which I purchase at the Upper Merion Farmers’ Market, that I’m trying to figure the best way to source it over winter when market is done. I look forward to those two (or three) cups a day (morning and mid-afternoon) not only to feed my caffeine addiction, but as a comfort-food type of thing.

It’s kind of the same feeling I get when I eat some of those favorite fruits of mine, or eating my ‘green of the day’ (either kale, Swiss chard, arugula, mustard greens, or spinach). To me, they not only taste good, but they act as comfort foods to my soul. (Hey, better having mustard greens than Twinkies as a comfort food!)

But while the “I Can Control Mother Nature” Share sounds mighty appealing, I think I would tire of it. Part of the delight of eating locally-grown foods is the variety and the somewhat limited supply. It’s the surprise you get when the nectarine you just bit into is so gosh-darned sweet, juicy, and flavorful it hurts your brain….only to find out that the next one you bite into is even (impossibly!) better. It’s the first bite of a Hosui Asian pear of the year, when you realize that you absolutely forgot just how freakin’ good they are, because it’s been 10 months since you last had one. It’s digging into a plate of Swiss Chard that is so flavorful and addictive you’d swear the plant had been injected with MSG.

Sure, it would be great to be able to eat all of your favorites all of the time. But the ‘wow’ moments would wane. You wouldn’t experience that anticipation of waiting for the start of November because you know that’s when the Gold Rush apples would be coming on. Summer might not seem quite so fantastic if you could eat heirloom tomatoes and local sweet corn all year long. While I look forward to my routine two (or three!) cups of coffee a day, they don’t give me that sense of anticipation and sheer joy that eating seasonal food does.

As a farmer, I would certainly enjoy the “I Can Control Mother Nature” concept in many ways (the ability to turn off hail or hot weather would be a blessing). But as an eater, I’d like to keep things just the way they are!

You didn’t hear this from me, but the farmers’ market scene is a bit of a performance. I don’t say this to question quality or integrity, but rather to point out that there’s a lot going on behind the scenes. What you see on a Saturday morning, or in your CSA bag, is only the cream of the crop. That produce had to go through a lengthy audition process to make it out on stage. Only the highest quality produce makes the cut.

Behind the scenes is the not so glamorous side of agriculture: dirt, rot, bugs, and the tedious work of sorting through all that. In the packing room, we speak a language of “ones” and “twos,” “firsts” and “seconds.” The firsts are what you see, the seconds (as in “second quality”) find some other home – it might be apple cider, Asian pear butter, or the employee fridge. (Come to think of it – as a farmer, I don’t know that I’ve eaten “first quality” produce in nearly a decade, and I’m no worse the wear for it…) If there were such a category, I suppose the number threes would be the produce that doesn’t even make it to the sorting table. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say, fruits and vegetables will eventually go the way of all the earth, and they’re not all going at the same rate.

As a result, there’s more time than you might imagine spent in sorting, grading, and schlepping fruit around. Some things are “field-sorted” or graded as they’re picked. Others, like apples, are brought into the barn, and then sorted in a separate process. We spend hours at the grading table, giving every piece of fruit a once-over before it goes into the cooler. One or two of us feed apples into one end of the grader where rotating brushes give the apples a bit of a polish. They roll out the other end where one or two of us are inspecting each and every apple before it goes into a wooden crate. If we’re really cranking, there will be a fifth person to expedite the whole process and just move crates around as needed. If we were growing for the wholesale market, the station would also be outfitted with a sizing mechanism to sort the apples in increments down to the 1/8 of an inch. (And if we were really fancy – electronic sensors, computer software and digital imaging would take the place of human touch.) “Too small” apples would be rejected and the rest would be priced according to size. At North Star, there is still such a thing as “too small,” but since we’re selling directly to our customers, we can include more of those apples that are the perfect size for a quick snack or for a child. Sorting criteria fluctuate with the variety. “Too small,” “too green,” and “too ripe” can look entirely different depending on the apple variety.

While other points on the agricultural continuum, from planting to eating, have been glamorized or merely familiarized, this whole intermediate step that can include sorting, grading, washing, bunching, packing, stacking, loading, and unloading is nearly invisible. These are less captivating tasks, I know, but the only image of this sort of work that I can conjure up from the common imagination is that one “I Love Lucy” episode. You know, the one where Lucy and Ethel try out a job in a chocolate factory? . They’re at the conveyor belt, and the chocolates keep coming faster and faster… Well, I have those moments, too, when apples are spilling out of the sorter, faster than my brain can make the decision “one or two?” But, unlike Lucy, I can flip a switch and make them stop. (And, unlike Lucy, I don’t get to eat chocolate!)

In a world where the vast majority of our agriculture is out of sight and out of mind, there are, unfortunately, a number of invisible sectors in our food system. Joining a CSA is a great way to bring your food source a few steps closer. But you’re still not there on the farm with us day in and day out to see how we spend our time. Just like with any job, whether you’re creating spreadsheets, preparing annual reports, or sorting apples, there’s the mundane and nitty-gritty work that keeps everything rolling. And, behind the scenes are glimpses of some truths that used to be common sense to folks. Farming, like life, isn’t all number ones and sweet-smelling peaches. That whole “one bad apple spoils the bunch” business didn’t come from nowhere! And, hopefully, we’ll find it before it gets to you.

If I’ve learned one thing picking fruit so far this season, it’s that if you complain to your co-workers who are working in the vegetable garden about having to eat too many peaches (to test for ripeness) they will not be sympathetic.

Aside from tasks like hitching the tractor (which is hard in a completely different way) picking peaches is probably the hardest thing I’ve done yet at North Star. Now, some of you may think that it’s just softness that determines if a peach is ripe. I’ve watched you squeezing all the peaches at the farmers’ market, trying to find the ripest. (You know who you are… I bet you’ve probably learned not to bother squeezing the peaches at the supermarket. You might try bouncing them off the floor, though!) For a few reasons, firmness alone is not how we determine ripeness in the orchard. For one, all your peaches would be dented – with dents that matched my fingerprints exactly.

OK, so color, then? Ripe peaches have a lovely red blush, right? Wrong again. Like firmness, color can be an indicator, but it can also fool you. The other day one of my coworkers happened up the peach row to bring me my water jug (which had apparently thrown itself off the trailer as I drove away on the tractor). It was her first time in between the rows of peaches this season, and she stopped a moment to look around. “Are these like 90% ripe?” she asked, studying the red-violet peaches hanging all around her. I told her that, no, I had actually completely finished picking that section. The trick with color is that it’s the undercolor you’re looking for – the color that develops behind that red blush. In other words, the background color that can range from cream to pale yellow to deep orange, depending on the variety. And the clincher is the color beneath that little stripe across the stem-end of the peach that is shaded by the branch – which of course you can’t see until after you’ve picked the peach.

But to complicate things even further, breeders have been working toward a peach with more and more blush and less and less undercolor. As Lisa explained a few weeks back in a North Star blog post, “In heirloom or old traditional varieties of peaches, the little bit of red blush they developed was a sign of ripeness. So, as people grew to equate ‘red’ with ‘ripe’ on a peach, fruit breeders did their darnedest to breed peaches that were as red as possible before ripening. To this end, we now have countless varieties of peaches that are practically all red, with little yellow (or white, in the case of white peaches) showing way before when they are truly ripe and ready to be picked.” Try staring at those for a few hours, trying to distinguish ripeness by color alone, and you’ll go a little cross-eyed.

Really, though, I’m working with a whole set of clues as to ripeness when picking peaches – firmness, color, size, degree of fuzziness, shape, and placement on the tree, all of which vary with variety. But the definitive factor is taste. Which means that I may be forced to take a bite (or two) out of a whole lot of peaches on a given picking day. Which, even if they’re still a little crunchy, is an occupational hazard that I’ve decided I can live with.

But you might still be wondering, along with many of our uninitiated farmers’ market customers: If your peaches are picked at the right time, then why are they still so hard? I like to think about it like M&Ms – “melts in your mouth, not in your hand,” right? (yeah, right!) Well, our peaches soften on your counter, not on the tree. When picking, we put so much effort into identifying those indicators of ripeness in order to make sure that the peaches have fully ripened (i.e. the sugars and flavor have fully developed) but they have not yet fully softened. This way, you get the peaches home in one piece (no fingerprints to speak of, mine or yours), and they’ll actually have a better texture when allowed to soften off the tree.

There’s a lot of science behind this ripening process – enzymes, metabolism, respiration, climacteric, non-climacteric, ethylene, starches converting to sugars… to be honest, it still befuddles me a bit, and I’ve been trying to wrap my head around it all. But the important thing is that, science aside, I still know what a good, ripe peach tastes like.

So, moving on to something special to do with those peaches once they’ve softened up for you…

If you want to go the traditional route, here’s what I’m convinced (with all due respect to the grandmas of the world out there) is the best peach cobbler recipe on the planet (Sweet Georgia Peach Cobbler), discovered in the Philadelphia Inquirer a few years back.

Or, for the less traditional route, grill them! I know this suggestion might raise a few eyebrows, but I have tried it, and it is fabulous. And, as one of the other market vendors gleefully announced the other week as she headed off with her white peaches, “I’m going to grill them. Because then you don’t have to make a pie!” It can be as easy as halving the peaches and throwing them on the grill until you see grill marks and smell caramelizing sugar, or you can go one step further and top them with vanilla ice cream or your favorite dessert sauce.

Or for something even easier, add peaches to something bubbly. White peaches and Prosecco are the key ingredients to the classy Bellini cocktail. Or, use whatever red or white you have on hand.

(Josh is a full-time seasonal helper this year)

Background: I grew up gardening with my mom.  We had a small veggie garden that consisted of 4 raised beds.  Just recently, my wife and I started a much larger garden with over 40 varieties of vegetables, herbs and fruits- this keeps us busy all summer long.  When we have eaten our fill, we can most of our extra harvest.  This way, we are fed almost all year!

Why are you working at North Star Orchard?: I love working at North Star Orchard, not just because Ike and Lisa are the best bosses, ever.  A supporter of CSAs and sustainability, this farm allows me to work someplace that I not only enjoy but share similar values.

What do you want to do when you grow up?: As I look towards my future, I see myself continuing to work in this field.  It may be hard work, but it is something that is important to me and my family.  Plus, who doesn’t like to literally enjoy the ‘fruits’ of their labor?!

Favorite farm job (so far!): My favorite job here on the farm is hoeing because it is so much fun.

Least favorite farm job: My least favorite farm job is gathering the kale. 

Favorite vegetable/fruit: I love Brussels sprouts, especially when they are sautéed with some garlic and olive oil (and cooked by my wife!)
Favorite ice cream: Mint chocolate chip- please note that I will accept ice cream donations willingly.

Poor Luther Burbank. The plant-breeding wizard created 113 new varieties of plums, 16 blackberries, 13 raspberries, 10 apples, and 35 fruiting cacti (just to name a few), and what he’s most widely recognized for is McDonald’s french fry potato, the Russet Burbank. This most ubiquitous potato didn’t even come along until after Burbank had sold the rights to his ‘Burbank’ potato (its parent, so to speak), but it proudly carries his name into more than 32,000 McDonald’s restaurants and a few other fast food joints as well, I’m sure.

It’s hard to talk about plums in this country without mentioning Luther Burbank. Around the turn of the last century, he was working with plums newly introduced from Asia, helping to popularize them and using them in his breeding program. The result was a significant shift in plum cultivation; his most famous variety, the ‘Santa Rosa’ plum, named after his adopted hometown, was a great fit for the evolving California plum industry. That said, the modern California plum industry may not have done a lot to warm our hearts toward the “new” Asian and hybrid varieties, which usually reach us in supermarkets back east as something resembling a mealy purple baseball. But I’ll vouch for a Santa Rosa plum, eaten dead-ripe off a tree in the California sunshine. That’s what Luther Burbank was working with, so I suppose we shouldn’t hold him responsible.

So, Poor Luther Burbank, with his unwitting legacy of french fries and mealy baseballs. And poor plums! Of all the fruits, they seem to be the most underappreciated in this country, and not without good reason. They really have suffered at the hand of industrial agriculture. Supermarket plums are just miserable. To boot, the sum total of our cultural knowledge of plums in this country seems to amount to the fabled Christmas plum pudding, dancing sugar plums fairies, and our grandmother’s prune juice.

I’ll leave the latter two alone, but what exactly is plum pudding, anyway? A peek into Escoffier’s seminal tome on “modern cookery” (published in 1921) reveals that plum pudding is a pretty involved affair, one in which you tie up your pudding, boil it for 5-6 hours and then light it on fire. The ingredients? The list includes beef kidney suet, breadcrumbs, apples, raisins, sultanas, currants, stout and brandy. No plums. Turns out, the word “plum” historically covered all dried fruits.

I’ve heard rumors that the Europeans, enlightened in so many ways culinarily (dare I mention the cheese course, a tradition of afternoon cake and coffee, or olive oil?), have a much greater appreciation for the plum. We should take note, because plums can be absolutely amazing. They come in a a staggering variety of flavors – sweet to tart – and colors – red, purple, yellow, green, blue, and every shade in between. There really is a variety out there for everybody, and if you’ve felt wishy-washy about plums up to this point, it’s time to try again. Because we grow so many different varieties of plums at North Star, there often are only one or a few trees of each kind. Since the harvest window of each is brief, most varieties make an appearance for only a week or two. Some have come and gone already for the season, so time is of the essence!

A bit of a plum primer for those looking to make up for lost time…

There are many, often confusing, categories of plums. Here are some highlights with examples of North Star varieties in parentheses. (Some of which have passed already for this year; some you can still keep an eye out for.) For our purposes, there are two main, overarching groups of plums: Asian or “Japanese” plums and European plums. Japanese plums originated in China, but western botanists first caught wind of them in Japan, hence the name.

Asian (or Japanese) plums (Vanier, Purple Heart, Redheart) – The type of plum you’re used to seeing in the supermarket. Often larger and tarter than European plums with a clingstone.

Burbank plums (Burbank, Elephant Heart) – These were bred by Luther Burbank from Asian plums and are usually large, round, and red or purple.

Damson (sometimes used to refer to Italian plums) – Named for Damascus and originating in Western Asia and Eastern Europe. Especially tart and astringent, and so generally cooked with plenty of sugar.

Gage (Greengage, Golden Transparent Gage, Rosy Gage, Oullins) – Gages are round, very sweet European plums.

Italian plums – Refers to egg-shaped plums with a dark purple skin and yellow flesh. One of the most popular plums for baking.

Mirabelle plums (Geneva Mirabelle) – Tiny and very flavorful plums (think small cherries) originating in France, usually cooked.

Prune plums – Any dried plum can be called a prune in English, but “prune plum” usually refers to oval, black-skinned, freestone plums with an especially high sugar content, which allows them to dry well.

Plums don’t technically ripen off the tree, so it’s important that we pick them at the right time, once their sugars have developed. Once you get them home, however, they will continue to soften and sweeten up a bit. If you keep them in the refrigerator, you can delay this process, bringing them out at will and they’ll be perfect in a day or two or three (depending on how soft you like your plums!). You might enjoy trying your plums at different stages of ripeness to see how the flavor and texture evolves. As my favorite plum, Purple Heart, ripens, it develops a rich, spicy flavor that tastes like cloves. And I ate a gushy-ripe Oullins plum the other day that reminded me of coconut. Then there are the ripe (some might argue over-ripe) Santa Rosa-type plums that taste just like banana!

One more note: You might notice a white film on your plums that appears to go away when you rub your finger across the skin. This “bloom” is just the naturally-occurring wax on the skin.

If you can’t keep up with your supply of fresh plums and you have a dehydrator, plums are also excellent dried. Relinquish those bad prune associations, I dare you! I dried quite a few last year and enjoyed adding them to hot cereal and muffins all winter long for a dose of tartness, which can be hard to come by in winter. And if you’re into that sort of thing, plums can also be preserved in alcohol. I’m guessing, though, that once you discover or are reacquainted with what real plums taste like, the only plum supply problem will be not enough.

Sources:
The Penguin Companion to Food, Alan Davidson
In the Sweet Kitchen, Regan Daley
“Luther Burbank, Plums, and CA Horticulture” Cynthia Houng

What is it about fruit? It’s so much more alluring than vegetables, and apparently it’s been that way for a very long time. There is a fervor about North Star fruit that is just not there about the vegetables (except, perhaps, the tomatoes, which are, after all, a fruit). There is a wild-eyed excitement about the first plums, the first peaches; the first CSA share might contain for true converts the first tree fruits they’ve had since that last Gold Rush apples disappeared from the fridge sometime mid-winter.

These fruits are raised in the finest gardens, just picked from their local sites. There are sweet-sweet-luscious, full-spouting-fragrant, aromatic-and-perfumed, red fresh-peeled-and-juicy round-eyed lichees from Fuzhou. And from Lanqi District there are sour-sour-tart, shady-shady-cool, soft-limp-green, nurtured-to-the-full, springtime cymbidia with the leaves still on. From Songyang District are supple-supple-soft, quite-quite-white, frost-frozen persimmon cakes soaked in honey and covered with sugar powder. From Wuzhou Prefecture comes juicy-juicy-tender, glitter-glitter-bright dragon-twined jujube balls kneaded in sugar…
– from the Chinese drama Pai-hua t’ing, circa 1250, translation by Stephen H. West

This attraction must be in our blood. We’ve evolved to seek out fruit. In his exploration of human appetite, Michael Pollan explains the draw toward sugar: “Like most other warm-blooded creatures, humans have inherited a preference for energy-dense foods, a preference reflected in the sweet tooth shared by most mammals. Natural selection predisposed us to the taste of sugar and fat (its texture as well as taste) because sugars and fats offer the most energy (which is what a calorie is) per bite.” (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, p. 106) And when that sugar is in its natural form as a “whole food” such as a piece of fruit, it’s delivered in its own package of fiber. It’s good for us – our body knows how to process it. It’s the artificial and concentrated forms of sugar (like sodas) that don’t exist in nature that give us trouble. Yet they’re tempting for the same reason that a good peach is so irresistible; our brain is hard-wired for sugar. We know very well that the deep-fried oreos on the boardwalk are a bad idea, but they’re just so good…

But there’s more to this scenario in which we’re drawn towards fruit. Someone told me recently that our sense of smell inhabits a portion of our brain “older” than that of language. In other words, our sense of smell evolved before our capacity for words. Which explains why we sometimes feel such deep and instantaneous associations of smell and memory. Since smell and taste are so closely related, perhaps the same is true for our experiences with food? Why is it that as an adult, we hold onto cravings instilled in us in childhood, both for foods like tomatoes from our grandmother’s garden and for really absurd foods like Tastykakes?

But it’s also a visual thing. When all the various fruit varieties are spread out at market, the display almost overloads the brain circuitry. Something primeval kicks in, and for a moment, all you can see is that fruit. Last week, I heard someone say “oh my god!” as they rounded the corner and stopped in their tracks, confronted suddenly with two levels deep of radiant Red Haven peaches and EasternGlo nectarines. That kind of abundance is rare and fleeting in nature, and if you’re hunting and gathering your food, you had better stop and take notice. The colors in particular catch our attention; reds, oranges, and yellows are cues of ripeness, of a transformation of carbohydrates from an undigestible form to a digestible one. (Prof. Stanley Ulijaszek, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Oxford University, ‘What’s the natural human diet?‘ 22 January 2010)

At market, on more than one occasion, I’ve seen children, too young yet to use words, burst into tears at the sight of our fruit, up on the market table and out of reach of their stroller. From experience (or from evolution?), they know they want that Asian pear, and they can’t have it fast enough. Their parents really have no choice but to quickly buy a small pear and hand it over. (Perhaps another form of evolution at work?)

So, if this is your first season of the fruit CSA, get ready. Because once you’ve tasted really good fruit, there’s no turning back. It’ll ruin you on supermarket varieties. Since you’ve joined the CSA, you’re probably already disillusioned with the standard offerings of fruit, so it’s no surprise to you that the peaches are picked way too early and the apples are stored in special holding facilities for up to an entire year. People are so surprised when they taste fresh, ripe fruit, sadly because it’s often a flavor that they haven’t experienced ever, or at least for years. I had literally not eaten a good plum until I was twenty-six years old, and it was a revelation. Juicy, tropical, layers of complex flavors unfolding in my mouth… Those ‘aha’ moments can convert you into loving new foods and introduce you to a whole new world of flavors. Treating yourself to all this fruit for the next twelve or fifteen weeks may appear to be purely an act of pleasure, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the taste factor of the CSA is actually more important than that. After years of delving more and more deeply into the realm of farm-fresh foods, my tastes have literally changed. What I perceive as “food” has changed as well. I really do notice a difference between foods that are fresh, alive, and tell a story about place, and lifeless and lackluster foods that traveled to me via tractor trailer and conveyor belt.

If you have children, you’ve probably already tried to convince them of this: you can train your taste buds. It’s important that we know what a summer apple tastes like versus a fall apple. It’s important that each one of us has our favorite plum variety of the season. In agriculture as in natural ecosystems, biodiversity equals health. If our taste buds are conditioned for a narrow range of foods, then we’ve been conditioned to support monocultures and industrial agriculture. If the only tastes we can distinguish are a Granny Smith apple from a Red Delicious, then our palate is supporting mega-orchards of just a few varieties bred for standardization, storage, and shipping. But if we can appreciate a Pristine apple in July and a Gold Rush in November, knowing that if we were to travel to Vermont or to North Carolina that different varieties would be on the menu, then our palate is paving the way for a more sustainable and biodiverse agriculture.

As Wendell Berry has famously written, “…eating is an agricultural act. Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth. Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture. They think of themselves as ‘consumers.’ If they think beyond that, they recognize that they are passive consumers. … Eaters… must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.” Luckily for us, eating from a more sustainable system tastes good. Good enough in some cases to elicit poetry, or at least some fanciful prose. After all, I’m willing to bet that those “sweet-sweet-luscious” thirteenth century Chinese fruits were picked on some pretty healthy farms.