Deeply Rooted

THE DOWNSIDE TO the garden philosophy is that it has created a bit of a paradox for the Podolls. One of the core values they aim to foster is community, and yet in the community of LaMoure County their belief in a farm system based in moral currency has often isolated them. Theresa says that when she brings up alternative ideas she can watch as a veil comes over the face of the person she’s talking to. David senses that many neighbors don’t even consider him a real farmer.

I once asked him if he ever thought to leave and go to a place where these ideas would be received better. He shook his head no, definitely no, as if the thought had never crossed his mind. “We’ve lived here for fifty-four years,” he said. “This is our home.”

And so they do their best to live like fish out of water. Over the years they have earned the respect of some neighbors, have even been told privately that what they are doing is the right thing. Others remain suspicious, even derisive. The brothers respond by not mixing much, staying on the farm most days and finding their companions in the community of organic farmers spread across the state.

Theresa takes a different tack. On a Tuesday morning in the end of July, I am following her through the roasting streets of town as she posts yellow signs announcing the LaMoure Farmers Market’s second season, which begins tomorrow. She buys tape at the drugstore and then uses it to post a sign on the counter. She hits the hardware store, the post office, the soft-serve ice cream shop, the tearoom, even Nogo’s Tapper, a dark bar with a deep stench of stale beer and unemptied ashtrays. As she pins a sheet next to the pool table, she laughs and says, “Yeah, I’m not sure this is quite perfect. But who knows? Maybe they’ll talk about it after they leave here and someone will overhear them. We might get a customer or two.”

Theresa posts the last sign at the first gas station in town, then realizes she wants to put one at the other gas station. So we return to the bar and reclaim the sign there, agreeing that it will be more effective elsewhere. As we go Theresa chides herself for not having made more signs, for not having made a list of where she wanted to post them, for not having put them up sooner. It’s the way she is: always thorough, but always wanting to do better.

Before the bar we went to Wanda’s, a diner where a few older farmers were drinking coffee and talking about engines they’d had in their time. Theresa wound around the counter to the bulletin board in back, which was crowded with signs announcing auctions and puppies for sale.

Theresa is known in town as being something other than a farm wife. She travels often, certainly more than anyone else on the farm and probably more than most people in LaMoure. As a director and then board member of various farmers’ nonprofit groups, she has spoken at meetings in England and California and has briefed the press backstage at Farm Aid in New York City. She and Dan joke that her frequent travel stems from her being almost completely stationary while growing up. Her Dutch-immigrant father was so driven as a farmer that during her whole childhood the family took only two trips: to Bismarck, the third biggest city in North Dakota, and to see an uncle in Manitoba, two hours away.

On her family’s seed potato farm near the Minnesota border, she grew up with pesticides as a way of life. She was warned to not breathe the white dust they used at planting time and had strict orders not to go into the poison shed. (This rule, of course, was broken. She and her siblings would sneak in there, take out the old herbicide barrels, and build forts out of them.) Theresa says she always knew something was wrong with the way they were farming, but it was not until college that she learned there were alternatives. During a lecture in ecology class her professor talked about organic farming, and she was so excited that after the bell rang she ran to find her boyfriend, Dan Podoll, and tell him about it. When he responded quietly that his family farmed organically, Theresa’s mouth dropped open—she couldn’t believe he hadn’t ever told her. Looking back, though, she gets it. In the early ’80s, you didn’t talk about it, you just did it.

When she and Dan were first married Theresa played a more traditional role of wife and mom, taking care of their two babies and making crafts at home for extra money. In those years her support for an alternative agriculture was more passive. She volunteered for nonprofits, helped with the farm, worked in the garden when she could. Years later, when she was pregnant with Neil, she took the job of director of the Northern Plains Sustainable Agriculture Society, a nonprofit representing and organizing farmers in Minnesota and the Dakotas. It was then that she found her voice and became an outspoken critic of conventional agriculture and the stranglehold it puts on farmers, families, and land in the Northern Plains. She still looks like a grown-up Dorothy from Kansas, but in casual conversation she will reference pointed facts and statistics and studies as easily as if she were speaking before a Congressional committee.

Since leaving the nonprofit in 2005, Theresa has been staying closer to home, in part to work on a master’s degree in community development at Iowa State University. Two years ago, she started the farmers market in LaMoure. Though it has become her project, it wasn’t her idea initially—an older woman in town with health issues wanted local produce and she knew Theresa could be convinced to fill the need. “I’m never someone to back down when a person asks, Do you think we can do this?” Theresa said. “I mean, when I hear someone say something can’t be done, it’s like waving a red flag in front of a bull.”

Now that the market is up and running Theresa would like to pass it off to someone else, but so far no one has stepped up. In the meantime, she looks on the bright side. She says it’s fun, and that it’s exciting for her to have conversations about food in a place where the subject doesn’t come up very often. As she sells at the market, people ask her about the garden and respond with their own stories. When she tells them that the bread she’s selling was made with grains that she and her family grew and milled themselves, people are stunned. She says that last year the little old ladies would show up before the market opened and wait in line while she set up her stand, just to make sure they could get a loaf before she sold out.

The irony, of course, is that there’s wheat growing within a mile of any point in town. Most of these customers were probably raised on farms that grew it or at least next to those that did. But then, most of them, at least the elderly, also used to have a garden. Indeed, that’s why they come to the farmers market: they know from experience the difference between the food at the Super-Valu Grocery and the food sold here.

The market takes place on a stretch of grass right on Highway 13, the two-lane road that leads in and out of town. Selling goes from four o’clock in the afternoon until six, but on opening day Theresa arrives just after three o’clock so she can clean the area and still have plenty of time to set up. It’s a humid ninety-two outside and the prairie wind is blowing hard, restlessly, more nuisance than relief. She sets up her card table in the shade of a tree, beneath the tossing branches. On the highway a Buick Skylark slows down to a roll. Inside is an elderly couple, and the woman calls out the window to ask if the market is today. “Four o’clock!” Theresa calls back, smiling.

Before long a big black Ram 2500 turns in and backs up under the tree, next to Theresa’s table. The truck bed is packed with boxes of tomatoes, laundry baskets filled with cabbages, also peppers in three colors, dill, and some onions in a Tupperware bin. The driver is Denise, a redhead wearing a ball cap and a sleeveless shirt made of fabric decorated with horses, wind blowing through their manes. She and her husband raise horses on his family’s farm, and this year she’s supplementing the business by expanding her garden and selling at three farmers markets. Theresa is delighted to have her, since her own offering is modest: beets and beet greens in a bucket, green beans in a small cooler, twelve loaves of bread baked the night before. The only other grower, Angela, is a thin, pretty woman with wavy, gray-brown hair. She has a nice, also small selection: green beans, Nanking cherries, collard greens in Ziploc bags, and low-sugar apricot jam made from North Dakota fruit—“Not from California or Washington,” she will tell each customer. “They’re from here. They’re ours.”

Ten minutes before four o’clock, Theresa is helping Angela arrange her jams and Denise is moving the boxes of peppers and dill to a card table, deciding whether to move the cabbages and tomatoes to the grass or leave them on the truck’s tailgate. Theresa realizes she is the only one to have brought a scale, so she moves her table closer to Denise’s truck in order to share. This puts her beets in the sun, and immediately the tops begin to wilt, but there’s no time to solve that. As she’s moving, the Buick couple returns and parks. The husband is slow to get out of the car, but the wife makes the speediest beeline her old bones will allow. It is no deterrent that the market is only half set up. She goes directly behind Denise and starts picking through the tomatoes in the truck.

Within moments four cars arrive, then two more, all of them carrying elderly women with glasses and hearing aids and curlers in their hair, all of whom follow the first woman’s lead. There is a swarm around the back of the truck, and women are reaching over each other to get tomatoes, sticking cabbages under their arms, barely talking except to ask where the bags are so they can fill them up. They hand their loot to Denise, to Theresa, to anyone who doesn’t appear to be shopping, while others still at the boxes call into the air, How much are the tomatoes? Is there any corn? A man in a meaty pick-up slows down and yells out the window to ask if they have watermelon. The question passes person to person down the line to Theresa, who answers No, they’re not ripe yet without looking up. The tomatoes are causing a frenzy and in the rush Theresa weighs produce for Denise, who is busy trying to keep track of all the people trying to pay her. Her cash box is still somewhere in the truck, so as people hand Denise bills she holds up her pocketbook and makes change out of her wallet and coin purse.

Forty pounds of tomatoes and thirty minutes later, the lawn is empty. Theresa looks at her watch: 4:20. “Okay,” she says, “that was a rush!” For the next hour and a half people trickle through, mostly one at a time. They buy jam or beets, always tomatoes. By 5:10 Theresa sells out of bread. More people ask for corn and watermelon and are told it’s too early in the season. One woman asks for peas, and it is all Theresa can do to mask her amazement. A springtime crop, peas have been done for six weeks now; in this heat, they would be as limp as wet newspaper. “Well, no. No peas,” Theresa answers her, and the woman leaves. The wind continues to blow.

Some customers stop to talk. One woman tells how her husband was diagnosed as diabetic and has taken up a new diet: veggie burgers instead of hamburgers, plus lots of vegetables. She beams as she talks about how much weight he has lost, how much healthier he seems. A teller from the credit union shows up before 5:00 and is delighted to see that Theresa still has bread for sale. As she puts two loaves in a bag, Denise jokes how her husband refuses to eat wholegrain bread because he’s convinced it’s made from “screens,” the weed seeds and other trash screened out of wheat after it’s harvested. This leads to a conversation about white bread—“air bread”—and how you can’t find it without high-fructose corn syrup these days; how you can’t find anything without high-fructose corn syrup these days. Angela mentions a woman she knows who serves her kids soda at dinner because it’s cheaper than milk. The rest of the women look aghast.

As the clock nears six o’clock, Theresa, Denise, and Angela agree that it’s okay to pack up a little early. It has been slow for a spell now, and the wind and the heat have sapped what energy they had to spare. They trade some of their remaining vegetables and pack up their tables, and at a few minutes past the hour each woman is in her car, leaving.

As we drive back to the farm Theresa assesses the market, saying it was a good turnout for the first day of the season. She saw a lot of devoted customers from last year as well as some new faces. Plus, she believes the crowds will only grow as word travels—and as sweet corn comes into season. She’s candid that for her, the market is more an act of community service than a moneymaking opportunity. In fact, between gas and little expenses like bread bags, it actually ends up costing her money to participate. Last year she found herself up before sunrise just to fit the work into her already busy schedule, digging carrots in the mud and groaning to herself, Why am I doing this? But she is convinced that the community needs it, and that all the talk in the world is useless unless people like her actually do something about the things that need to change.

By the next day at lunch, the farmers market sign at Wanda’s restaurant has been covered up by flyers for the Ladies’ Country Club Card Marathon and a demolition derby. To be fair, this is the busiest bulletin board in town. The only posting whose space seems to be sacred is a Farmers Cooperative Creamery Association calendar from 1972, whose theme is “dessert-a-month.” It’s permanently opened to June, month of the Lime Loaf, a white frosted cake with blue-green crème between the layers.

Wanda’s used to be part of the local creamery, first the co-op’s egg storage room and then a café called the Dairy Bar. When the creamery closed in 1974, the café stayed on under a series of new owners. Last year it changed hands again, but it remains a classic small-town luncheonette. The décor is country kitchen, with green-and-white Formica counters, matching green stools, and ruffled curtains the color of cooked spinach. The menu is familiar: hamburgers and cheeseburgers, corn dogs served on a plate. Egg salad and potato salad, both the bright yellow of a legal pad, are available by the pint. For dessert waitresses scoop ice cream hidden in a silver freezer. At any given time you can find at least one group of men assembled around the U-shaped counter or in one of the booths, drinking coffee from bottomless mugs and talking about the weather, maybe playing cards. By the door is a hat rack (where they do in fact hang their caps), and next to it is a framed poster of a cow printed with the motto: COWS MAY COME AND COWS MAY GO, BUT THE BULL IN THIS PLACE GOES ON FOREVER.

There is a Wanda’s in every small town from here to Ohio that’s big enough to have a restaurant. Or rather, there’s a place like Wanda’s in all those towns; that’s the draw: it’s not a chain. For locals it feels like a private social club, but even for outsiders the place feels personal, intimate in a way that McDonald’s inherently is not. I seek them out any time I’m on the road, and I’m not alone—there are legions of travelers throughout the country who scour the blue highways for diners and cafés and trade their tips with other devotees. The food is important, especially pie, but what matters most is the experience. People are hungry for authenticity.

It was strange, then, to have the Podolls point out to me that in all those diners, all that food—the hamburgers, grilled cheese, ice cream, corn dogs—is exactly the same. A cook might bring individual talent to the Sunday special, but the ingredients were all hauled in by a truck from U.S. Foodservice, which stops at every other joint along the way to deliver the same array of foodstuffs in cardboard boxes. In the walk-in at Wanda’s you’d find a case of half & half from Glenview Farms, on its carton a woodcut image of a barn and silo. Under the counter would be a box of Hilltop Hearth Saltines, its logo a shock of wheat. Both are brands owned by U.S. Foodservice. Both trace back to Columbia, Maryland—before that, who knows?

It is possible that corn from LaMoure ended up being fed to the milk cows that produced the half & half, or that it was processed into the high-fructose corn syrup used in the crackers. But even if so, it would be nearly impossible to know. Just as these foodstuffs arrived in cardboard boxes from a distant place down the highway, so did last year’s harvest disappear into anonymity the moment each farmer emptied his semi at the grain elevator. At this point nobody even questions it. Ever since the gardens disappeared from the farmstead, farmers have not concerned themselves with food in the small sense of feeding themselves. They are too busy feeding the world.