If, as nineteenth-century French chef Antonin Carême so famously remarked, the cuisine of his day should have been most rightly regarded as a branch of architecture, today’s culinary fashion would be much more likely to send every aspiring chef scurrying straight for the nearest college of agriculture. There has been a revolution in American kitchens as a whole generation of cooks has discovered the startling idea that a great dish can only be built on good ingredients. On the one hand, this is welcome, in fact overdue. For too long we have ignored where our food comes from and what it takes to grow it.
Too often, though, in our conversations, the complex issues of agriculture have been reduced to easy catchphrases: organics, crop subsidies, corporate farming, genetically modified organisms, agricultural-industrial complex—often by people who have never visited a farm (or even planted a backyard garden). These are repeated like mantras until, like all mantras, the actual words lose their meaning.
“Eat local; eat seasonal.” How many times have you heard it? Certainly, it seems like an idea that should have been obvious to us from the start. After all, it is exactly what all good cooks have done since time immemorial. If it now seems new, it is only because we have spent the last couple of generations trying to forget it. This wasn’t so much a conscious effort as a slow accretion of bad habits encouraged by modernization. Comfort, ease, efficiency and economy are wonderful things in most cases, but their effect on cooking has been devastating.
At its heart, cooking is a primitive act and remarkably simple. You choose what seems tastiest, and then you try to make it better. Seems easy, right? Only until you try to do it yourself. Let’s say you want to make a peach pie. You go to the store and buy some fruit. You pick the brightest, reddest ones and stick them in your cart. You take them home, peel them and slice them, and then sweeten them with a little sugar and dust them with a little spice. And then you taste them. Nothing. So you add more sugar and you add more spice. And then you do that again. And still it doesn’t turn out the way you want. By the time you pull the pie from the oven, you might as well call it sugar-and-spice pie, because you sure can’t taste any peaches. So what happened? There are many possible culprits, stretching from the tree the fruit was grown on to your home kitchen.
This book will examine some of the possibilities. It will help you sort through the fruits and vegetables you find in the market (both super and farmers’), telling you how to select, store and prepare them. And it will shine a little light on some contentious issues by taking you right out to the fields and introducing you to the people involved.
The first thing you have to understand is that the whole idea of eating locally and seasonally is not based merely on some philosophical framework. It may indeed be good for the planet, but that is for greater minds to decide—I’m mainly interested in fixing a good dinner. And believe it or not, eating locally and seasonally is backed up by some very basic scientific principles.
Fruits and vegetables are not manufactured items that remain the same throughout their shelf life. They age and change just like the rest of us. Some of them even improve. Fruits such as peaches, tomatoes and some melons will actually finish ripening after they’ve been harvested—as long as you treat them right. Most fruits and vegetables, though, do not improve.
From the moment they are picked, they go into decline, long and slow in some cases and dismayingly rapid in others. Lettuces and herbs, for example, are really made of nothing but extremely thin sheets of plant material plumped up by water. As soon as they are picked, the water begins to evaporate and the leaves begin to wilt. To control that loss of moisture, we keep them cold (moisture loss happens faster with warmth), and we keep them in tightly confined spaces (these become humid quickly, discouraging the leaf from giving up more moisture).
Greens are just an extreme example of what happens to every fruit and vegetable eventually, even the hardiest ones. How many times have you found a carrot, lost behind some containers on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator, that has all the crispness of an overcooked spaghetti noodle?
The farther away from you something is grown, the longer it must spend in some truck or railroad car getting to you, and the greater are the odds that what eventually arrives will be less than what it could have been. The agriculture business has gotten very good at keeping food as fresh as possible along the way, but there is no arguing with time.
As growers and marketers try to come up with ways to beat the aging process, one favorite technique is picking fruit earlier. To understand why they do this, let’s look at the one surefire way to pick a perfect peach. All you have to do is go out into your backyard, find the one on the tree that is at the most perfect point of maturity and ripeness, pluck it gently from its branch, cradle it gingerly in your cupped hands and then walk quickly to your kitchen. Don’t run—you might jostle it. A peach like this is a treasure, a taste to remember all your life. Of course, this method works only if you live someplace with the right combination of soil and climate to grow great peaches—and if you happen to be a great gardener.
For reasons of time, inclination, talent or real estate, that is impractical for most of us. So we start to make compromises. The most basic one is delegating the growing of our peaches to someone someplace else—we don’t really know who or where. This is not bad. In fact, it is one of the great blessings of living in the modern age—our forefathers worked for generations so we wouldn’t have to labor in the fields. But at the same time, we have to recognize that in making these compromises, we have made sacrifices. And for every step that we add between ourselves and the soil, we move one step farther from that ideal peach and introduce one more opportunity for misadventure.
One thing that has not changed after all this progress is the essential act of growing. Plants work the same way whether they’re planted on your back patio or on four hundred acres outside Fresno. And even though we may have forgotten, growing food is not the same as manufacturing widgets. It is an endeavor that requires the right circumstances, talent and more than a little bit of luck. It is also an endeavor fraught with the potential for mishap. Bad seed, bad soil, bad weather—all are waiting in line to surprise the unlucky farmer. And then even after the fruit has cleared those hurdles, there’s always the chance that some lunkhead will pop a thumb through that lovely little peach in the warehouse.
We don’t usually think about these things, good or bad, when we go to the grocery store—they happen without our ever knowing about it. In the produce section, peaches simply appear as if by magic. But there is no magic. Good food comes through talent and hard work. And when something goes wrong, someone has to take responsibility.
That is usually the farmer. Any bad luck that befalls a crop is all his. So to protect himself and reduce his risk as much as possible, he, too, begins to make compromises. Maybe he chooses to grow types of peaches that are more resistant to disease or that produce more fruit—even if they don’t have the best flavor. Maybe he shades his farming practices toward growing more peaches rather than better ones. In commercial agriculture, there is precious little financial reward for flavor, but you do get paid by the pound (or, more accurately, the case). Maybe he picks the peaches a little early. Fruit that is in the warehouse never gets ruined by rain or hail, and if it’s a little firm, that only means it will ship better.
And so we may wind up with that flavorless peach. But who among us can blame the farmer for making those choices? Farming is, after all, a business, and one with a perilously slim profit margin. Forget what you pay for food at the grocery store. On average growers earn only about 20 percent of the retail price of what they harvest. And those farm subsidies you’ve heard so much about—the ones that guarantee farmers a certain price for their crops or even pay them not to plant? Those apply only to crops that are used for manufacturing—cotton, sugar, field corn and the like. There are no direct subsidies for fruit and vegetable farmers.
It’s no wonder that most people don’t realize these things. They’re almost encouraged not to. The produce department at a modern supermarket—the only place most of us come into contact with farming—is by design a place outside of nature, unbound from the laws of climate, location and seasonality. It is a place where you can find strawberries and grapes in December and apples and cabbages in July. It is a place where you can buy delicate greens in Phoenix in the summer and tropical fruits in Minneapolis in the winter. Indeed, it is a place where you would have trouble telling which of those cities you were in and what time of year it was without stepping outside.
The average shopper in an American supermarket enjoys a bounty that was beyond the dreams of even the richest and most powerful people only fifty years ago. Pineapples jetted in from Hawaii? No problem. Peaches and plums delivered from Chile in January? You bet. Tuscan black kale? It’s on sale. Literally. American agriculture is unsurpassed when it comes to delivering a lot of food at a very low price. The average American today spends less than 11 percent of his or her disposable income on food, less than in any other industrialized nation and less than half what our grandparents spent before World War II. (Still, a recent poll found that for an overwhelming majority of Americans, their biggest concern about food is that it costs too much.)
But at the same time, we cooks are stuck with the result, which frequently means that we’re forced to choose among fruits and vegetables that don’t taste like anything. What are we to do? How do we pick the best of what is available? The answer is both simple and complicated. Boiled down to its essentials, choosing the best produce means selecting that which looks most like it came out of your garden. Usually—though not always—this means picking what was grown closest to you, in terms of both location and season.
This is the kind of thing that drives some people nuts. Those who live in areas that are, shall we say, agriculturally or climatically challenged point out quite correctly that this would mean eating parsnips and potatoes for half the year. But choosing the best local and seasonal produce is a goal, not a dogma. As long as you understand the reasoning behind it, you can make an informed decision, and what you choose to do is between you and your conscience—and the palates of the people you’re feeding.
Granted, this whole local and seasonal thing is something that comes more easily and naturally in California. In fact, there is a very good reason it began here. When I first moved to the state more than twenty years ago and began writing about farming from a cook’s-eye view, one of the first things that struck me was the intimate connection between the produce I found in the supermarket and the local weather. At first it came as a shock to realize that when we enjoyed one of those rainy spring weekends, it was hard to find good strawberries for the next few days. Like most Americans, I had never lived anyplace where much of the food in the store was actually grown nearby. In California it’s difficult to avoid that connection.
Although California’s “local/seasonal” orientation may be leading the way to better eating, there is no denying that the state is also a major part of the problem in the first place, because this is where much of the substandard produce in the supermarket is grown. Just as Hollywood dominates the film industry, so the rest of the state rules commercial farming. By itself, California produces more than half of all the fruits and vegetables grown in this country. The second-place state, Florida, grows less than 10 percent. California grows more than 70 percent of the national harvest of grapes, garlic, lettuce, strawberries, broccoli, carrots, lemons, plums, celery and cauliflower. For all intents and purposes, it is the sole commercial producer of a dozen crops, including apricots, dates, artichokes, avocados, nectarines and figs.
This dominance is not the result of some vast conspiracy, but a natural result of modern history. As any agricultural historian will tell you, the recent return to the idea of produce being supplied by local farmers is nothing new. Until the early twentieth century, this was the way all farming was done. Cities were densely packed and intensely urban. Each was surrounded by greenbelts of farmland devoted to growing the food that was needed to keep the local folks going. In those days eating locally and seasonally was a necessity, not a lifestyle choice. The great majority of what you ate had to be grown within a one-day carriage ride of your home. Furthermore, the person you bought the produce from was usually the neighborhood grocer—almost always an independent operator who owned his own store and contracted with local farmers for his stock.
Three separate but intimately intertwined developments changed farming in America, resulting in the great agricultural upheaval of the twentieth century. The first of these was a revolution in transportation, including the establishment of the cross-country railroad and the invention of the refrigerated railcar, as well as the building of local light rail for commuters. The first two allowed produce to be shipped from much farther away than a city’s immediate surroundings. Although we now consider this to be food’s fall from grace, at the time it was regarded as one of the best things that had ever happened.
When the first strawberries were successfully shipped from California to the East in the 1890s, banquets were held in every major city along the way to celebrate the event. Considering the likely condition of those berries—given the speed of trains in those days and the fact that they were refrigerated by means of ice piled into compartments on top of the cars (the trains would have to stop several times a day to get more ice)—we might wonder at the ecstatic accounts of this great advance. But then, of course, we aren’t forced to subsist on dried apples and cabbage for several months of the year as people back then were. The establishment of the national highway system after World War II sealed the deal.
As transportation brought the nation, and its fruits and vegetables, closer together, it also allowed the cities to disperse. Light rail lines and highways freed people from having to live within walking distance of their work. Thousands of souls, eager to break free of crowded city centers that were then decried as being rife with crime and disease, rode these commuter lines to rapidly developing suburbs. This was land that until that time had been fit only for farming. But then, as now, the price of real estate had almost as much to do with agricultural economics as the price of produce. Farmers, beginning a century-long pattern that continues to this day, took the sure money and sold off their land to developers, either quitting agriculture altogether and finding another—hopefully easier—line of work, or moving progressively farther outside the city, frequently only to sell out and relocate again.
At the same time that the country was being brought closer together—at least produce-wise—and farmers were getting chased farther from their original locations, the great agricultural fields of California’s Central Valley were being planted. Originally, this area was divided into huge tracts of land given as grants by the Spanish kings to those they believed were deserving of favor. Because little water is available for much of the year, the land had traditionally been used for running cattle. Cities—even towns—were few and far between.
But the twentieth century changed all that. New technology allowed irrigation to bring water to much of the land. Between the original families dividing and selling off portions of their land over time and ambitious investors from the East buying up acreage for speculation, what had once been endless acres of rangeland was transformed into family farm plots.
The railroad had a hand in this, too, particularly after buying up large amounts of land on the valley’s eastern side, where water was more available. This land was split up into even smaller portions and sold off at low prices to encourage the establishment of farms—farms that would need to ship their goods by rail. The railroads even established market towns along the main route where farmers could buy the supplies they needed—also shipped in by rail. To this day towns down the spine of the Central Valley are spaced evenly apart—just far enough for what once would have been one day’s journey.
What the Central Valley might once have lacked in water, it more than made up for in weather. California has one of the few examples of a true Mediterranean climate in North America. Temperatures are mild, and rains come almost entirely in the winter offseason. Summers are warm and dry—perfect for ripening fruits and vegetables with a minimum threat of disease. Even better, because winter temperatures are so moderate—January temperatures average 54 degrees—farmers can frequently get two, three or even four crops from the same piece of ground in a single year. Between the perfect weather and the huge expanses of land available for farming, the Central Valley was an agricultural paradise just waiting for the planting.
And plant farmers did. Between 1895 and 1945 California’s total fruit production increased almost 1,000 percent. Today the Central Valley alone, a 1,400-square-mile strip spread over just eight counties, accounts for as much as a quarter of the total agricultural production of the United States. Four of the top five agricultural counties in the country—Fresno, Tulare, Kern and Merced—are located in the valley, and the fifth—Monterey—is right next door.
Complementing all of this plentiful produce and the improved means of delivery, the grocery business went through its first wave of consolidations as the biggest local proprietors bought out their less successful competitors and expanded into their competitors’ stores. The great innovation here was the self-serve grocery. Up until that time, the fruits and vegetables in a store would be stacked behind the counter, to be fetched by the proprietor or an employee when the customer requested them.
Clarence Saunders changed all that when in 1916 he opened his first Piggly Wiggly store in Memphis and allowed customers to wander the aisles, selecting for themselves the things they wanted to buy. This not only proved to be cheaper than the previous method, but it also allowed more customers to be served in a given amount of time. The idea seems utterly commonplace today. (In fact, the idea of a store where you have to ask for someone behind a counter to give you a carrot, as if it were a prescription drug, seems ludicrous.) But at the time, it was so revolutionary that Saunders was able to patent it.
Another grocer, Michael Cullen, took marketing to the next level in 1930 by opening his first King Cullen store in Queens, New York, a true supermarket that measured 6,000 square feet—gargantuan for that time. (In 2005 the median size of a supermarket was nearly 50,000 square feet.) Cullen also took cost cutting to the next level. His motto—“Pile it high. Sell it low”—summed up the new approach with remarkable brevity. By 1936 Cullen owned seventeen stores.
The next year the venerable Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, a loose confederation of groceries founded in 1859, began making the first moves toward a real supermarket chain, converting many of its 15,000 smaller stores into A&P supermarkets. By the end of the decade, there would be 16,000 of them, and they would gross $1 billion.
A grocery chain operates very differently from an independent store—particularly when the ultimate goal is having the lowest prices. First of all, instead of having direct deliveries to every store, there needs to be a central clearinghouse for the produce to flow through. This adds a day or two to the transportation. Because supplying even a modest chain takes much more than any single farm—or even group of farms—can grow, the chain has to rely on middlemen at the supply end who can gather the produce of enough farms to ensure that the flow of fruits and vegetables is uninterrupted and adequate to serve several million customers. This introduces another level of bureaucracy to the produce distribution system. It means one more group making a profit, putting even more downward pressure on the prices paid to farmers, and it adds another day or more to the time it takes for fruits and vegetables to get from farm to table.
Maybe even more to the point, it introduces another level of risk-averse decision makers. Because when you think about it, farmers don’t really sell their fruits and vegetables to the people who eat them. They sell them to the people who sell them to the people who eat them (and often there are several more levels in between). Although great flavor is the quality we eaters hold most dear in our food, for everyone else involved what matters is profitability. And that almost inevitably means trying to achieve longer shelf life. When you’re operating on razor-thin margins, it’s painful to throw away food you’ve already paid for because it has gone over the hill.
Let’s use the publishing industry as a metaphor. If authors were pressured to write books more quickly so those books could sit on the store shelves for a longer time during the season in which they were published, you can see that compromises would begin to be made. “Mr. Faulkner, if only your prose weren’t so perfectly ripe, we could pay you 20 percent more.” Absalom, Absalom! Might have ended up as Great Abs!
When you combine a seemingly insatiable hunger for low-priced food, a vast fertile growing area ready to be tapped and the transportation network that links them all together, it seems inevitable that you wind up with something like the state of modern agriculture. As the focus on farming moved more and more away from the old decentralized model to the new West Coast version, folks left the farms in droves. In 1900 more than 60 percent of Americans lived in rural areas. By 1920 that number had dropped to 48 percent, by 1940 to 43 percent and by 1960 to 30 percent. Finally, by 2000 less than 20 percent of Americans lived in rural areas.
But that’s only part of the story. Those people who did stay on the farm saw their incomes plummet at the same time the prices of their farmland were skyrocketing. Between 1947 and 1987 agricultural land prices increased 75 percent, while real commodity prices declined 60 percent. To get out of this squeeze, farmers tried different things. Some of them got bigger, hoping to take advantage of economies of scale. (Between 1959 and 1969 the average size of an American farm increased 77 percent.) Technological advances in farming helped farmers produce more, as new techniques (including chemical pesticides, fertilizers and herbicides) allowed bigger harvests.
Many farmers also took second jobs. The percentage of farmers’ household income that came from jobs outside the farm increased from 30 percent in 1950 to more than 75 percent in 1999, as one or both partners took on outside work. And some farmers began looking for ways to get more money for the crops they grew. One way to do that was to move to higher-value crops. Instead of growing cotton or cattle, for example, they’d grow peaches or strawberries, or they’d find a more exotic niche, such as fresh herbs or heirloom tomatoes.
Another way to earn more for their harvests was to find ways they could take home more of the selling price of their produce. This usually meant selling directly to customers rather than going through a middleman. At first farmers did this by setting up roadside stands. This brought in much-needed cash, but sitting by the side of a rural road waiting for someone to drive by was a pretty inefficient form of marketing.
So the next step was finding a central point where farmers could gather and sell their crops. This idea was not new—most towns had had farmers’ markets into the 1930s and even later. But selling produce had become hard to do, at least legally. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, as fruit and vegetable farming became more institutionalized, more regulations were introduced specifying how produce must be packed, transported and sold. These regulations made it more difficult for farmers to simply load up their trucks and head to market. As a result, with only a few exceptions, farmers’ markets gradually faded from the scene.
In the 1970s, however, things began to change, thanks to a combination of a dwindling farm economy, a growing back-to-the-earth movement and counterculture marketing. In California and other places, it worked like this: food co-ops popped up in college towns, offering members a chance to beat conventional marketing by pooling resources and buying directly from wholesalers and growers rather than going through the supermarkets.
At the same time, a new breed of farmers—frequently growing unusual crops such as herbs or lettuces in quantities that would normally be too small for commercial sale—began peddling their produce to the co-ops. They found willing buyers. Frequently they were growing fruits and vegetables that their customers couldn’t get anywhere else, things that were considered exotic and therefore worthy of a higher price. Farmers may be conservative by nature, but there are always a few rugged individuals who are not afraid to try something new—particularly if there is more money to be made. And thus farmers were reintroduced to the rewards of direct marketing.
There was no single motive behind the resurgence of farmers’ markets in the mid-1970s. In New York, the greenmarket movement started as a way to save pressured family farmers and, not incidentally, to revivify some troubled Manhattan real estate (the Union Square market was one of the most important factors in that once scruffy neighborhood’s rebirth). In Northern California, the motives stemmed more from an in-your-face countercultural desire to circumvent the established food chain. And in Southern California, the first five farmers’ markets were organized by a religious charity to provide high-quality food to the poor. Today, whether by design or not, every market combines all of those goals in varying proportions.
In California, establishing farmers’ markets literally took an act of government. State law, designed to smooth interstate agricultural commerce, required growers to pack their fruits and vegetables in certain ways, right down to specifying the kinds of boxes to be used. Furthermore, it forbade them from selling to anyone other than a licensed broker. In 1977, the year after the first New York greenmarket was founded, the California Department of Food and Agriculture, at the urging of then-governor Jerry Brown, introduced new regulations that would exempt farmers from these rules if they could prove that their fruits and vegetables were going to be sold directly to consumers through certified farmers’ markets. The original seven California farmers’ markets were located exactly where you would expect them to be—in the Bay Area and in college towns near agricultural areas: San Jose, Redding, Davis, Sacramento, Riverside, Santa Rosa and Santa Cruz. The idea caught on quickly, and only two years later there were twenty markets. Two years after that there were more than fifty. And so it went. Today there are more than 350 certified farmers’ markets in the state—more than eighty-five in Southern California alone. Many communities have not just one but several, held on different days of the week and in different locations, each with a slightly different mix of farmers.
The phenomenon is not by any means limited to California. Farmers’ markets have sprung up everywhere. From 1994 to 2000 the number increased almost 80 percent nationally, to 3,100. From 1987 to 2000 the amount of produce sold at them more than doubled, and from 1994 to 2000 the number of people shopping at farmers’ markets nearly tripled, to more than 2.7 million a year.
Granted, farmers’ market sales still make up a tiny percentage of the fruits and vegetables bought in this country—probably only a little more than 2 percent. But the impact of the markets extends well beyond direct sales. Consider this: During the 1990s, the period of greatest growth of farmers’ markets, American spending on fresh fruits and vegetables more than doubled. The average number of items carried by a supermarket produce department nearly doubled, too, going from 173 items in 1987 to 335 in 1997.
Of course, not all of this increase is because of the influence of farmers’ markets, but they do serve as points of introduction for many new items. Things such as heirloom tomatoes, specialty potatoes, salad mixes and fresh herbs were introduced at smaller markets, then adopted by the big boys. This should come as no surprise, since more than 70 percent of the farmers who sell at farmers’ markets also sell through regular channels, some of them even leveraging their farmers’ market credentials into higher wholesale prices. And fully 20 percent of farmers’ markets report having wholesalers shopping there on a regular basis.
Another niche product that started at farmers’ markets and has moved to the mainstream is organic produce. In fact, many shoppers believe that everything sold at farmers’ markets is raised according to organic standards. That is certainly not true, but it does offer a telling insight. The word “organic” has become for many people a kind of shorthand summing-up of a much more complicated set of attributes. These are probably best described by the scholar Julie Guthman’s phrase “agrarian dreams.” Often when people say “organic,” they think they are describing small farms that are family owned and carefully maintained, following a full complex of enlightened agricultural principles, including everything from crop rotation and the encouragement of beneficial insects to benevolent labor practices and abstention from any chemical pesticides and fertilizers. The reality is that the official definition of the word “organic”—the legal rules that must be followed before a producer can apply that label to his crops—doesn’t require any of those things but the last.
First, organic farms can be every bit as big as conventional ones. The organic salad king Earthbound Farm, for example, harvests a total of more than 24,000 acres (a combination of land that it owns and some that it farms in partnerships). Furthermore, according to an analysis by Guthman, conventional fruit and vegetable farms have no higher rate of corporate ownership than their organic peers. Contrary to what seems to be the common impression, roughly 90 percent of all farms in California are owned either by individuals or families, not by large corporations. As for the enlightened agricultural principles, about the only thing the law does is limit the kinds of chemicals that can be used to those that are derived by “organic” means.
This is not an inconsiderable thing, depending on how you assess the risks involved in the use of pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers. But it should be pointed out that in the more than ten years that the Environmental Protection Agency has been testing fruits and vegetables, less than 1 percent of all samples have turned up with chemical residues that violated the established standards. (Some scoffers like to point out that chemical residues also turn up on organically grown produce, but this happens much less frequently and at such low concentrations that it doesn’t really seem a fair criticism.)
It’s also important to remember that the world of agriculture does not divide cleanly into black-and-white stereotypes of “pure organic” and “chemical junkie.” One of the larger benefits of the organic movement has been to demonstrate to conventional farmers the efficacy of many techniques they might not otherwise have tried. Today a huge number of farms fall into a category between organic and conventional, one that is called variously “sustainable” and “natural” and that incorporates many of the precepts of organic farming. These practices include things such as the use of soil-enriching cover crops, managing the weeds between the crop rows to encourage beneficial insects and even setting up birdhouses and bat houses in the fields to help keep bugs down. These farmers do reserve the right to spray when they believe it is necessary and as a result cannot call themselves organic.
Whether this gray area of farming is good enough for you is a personal philosophical choice. As for me, I prefer to take a fairly liberal view. I remember a farmer once pointing out to me that even though we have a tremendous problem with the overprescription of antibiotics, most people aren’t becoming Christian Scientists over it. It seems to me that you can pursue a moderate approach without having a guilty conscience. Some of the best farmers I know are organic, but more are not. And when they’re being candid, many of the ones who are organic will admit that their main motivation is hoping to be able to earn a little more money.
After years of going back and forth on the issue, I’ve finally decided simply to trust taste. This is only partly hedonistic. After all, a lazy reliance on the overuse of chemicals can give you mountains of perfect-looking fruit, but it can’t give you flavor. That can come only from careful farming.
If you decide that going organic is important to you, you should not begrudge the farmers charging more for their produce. Different crops adapt to organic practices in different ways. Grapes and potatoes, for example, are relatively easy to grow organically. But other things, such as peaches and strawberries, are devilishly difficult, and a farmer must be willing to lose a certain portion of his crops to disease, predation or physical defects. Estimates of exactly how much the farmer will give up vary but generally fall into the 20 to 30 percent range. This obviously means that a farmer will have to be able to realize a 20 to 30 percent premium for his product just to stay even with his competitors who are farming conventionally. Thus far—no matter what you may be paying at retail—organic farmers generally have had to settle for less than that at wholesale and in some cases have had to sell at a discount. A recent survey found that even at farmers’ markets, organic growers are having a hard time getting anything extra.
In the end, though, everything comes down to the simple fact that good cooking starts with good shopping. That, of course, is exactly what most shoppers find so frustrating. One of the ironies of modern life is that although we have more ingredients to choose from than ever before, much of it is not worth buying. In a way, you could say that we have been blinded by plenty. We have so many choices that we’ve forgotten how to select only that which is best. For even fairly sophisticated cooks, the produce section of the neighborhood grocery store is a place of mystery. That there is such lack of information about fruits and vegetables has always seemed to me to be deeply ironic.
Put simply, never has a civilization had so much easy access to so great a variety of foodstuffs at so low a price. But despite that rich variety, the quality of even the simplest things is often poor: tomatoes that taste like cotton; peaches that will never drip; strawberries that could bend a fork. This is the stuff most people try to make dinner from, and that’s why cooking frustrates them so.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Armed with some basic information about what to look for when you’re shopping for fruits and vegetables, how to store them properly when you get home and a few basics of preparation, you can cook well even with supermarket produce.
Let’s go back to that troubled peach. You know how it goes: You buy a peach at the market and take it home, the whole time anticipating the moment when you lean over the sink and bite into it. But when that moment comes, you wind up not with a gush of nectar but with a mouthful of meal.
What went wrong? Here are a few of the possibilities. In the first place, there is no such thing as a simple peach. There are hundreds of specific varieties, and some are better than others. Each comes ripe only for a brief period of the summer. Maybe what you got was a lesser variety. Or maybe it was picked too young. Like all fruits and vegetables, peaches accumulate sugar and flavor the longer they hang on the tree. There’s also another wrinkle with peaches: they must ripen as well as mature, and this happens on a separate timetable. Even if your peach was picked at the right time, maybe it was sold before it was ripe.
So which peach should you have picked? Well, aside from buying from a farmer you know and trust—always the best choice—there are ways to buy a good peach even at the grocery store (and you’ll probably be surprised at just how good a peach can be, once you know what to look for). That’s what this book is for.
You don’t know any of that? Don’t feel bad. Most people—including chefs and even grocery store produce managers—don’t either. Foodies now have no trouble at all explaining brunoise (and even pronouncing it correctly) or expounding on the differences between the Maillard reaction and caramelization. Yet many are completely in the dark about the very ingredients they’re so expertly chopping and browning.
Not long ago I engaged in a brief online spat with a noted New York restaurant critic who was complaining in February about the terrible quality of the California strawberries at her market. “Lady,” I felt like saying, “if you want to know who is to blame, look in the mirror.” If you continue to buy out-of-season, out-of-state strawberries, growers will continue to sell them. Knowing how to choose, store and prepare fruits and vegetables is not a matter of magic or even of science. It’s nothing more than learning to recognize a few clues and then paying attention.
We are living in an unequaled time of unparalleled plenty, even though it sometimes seems that the only thing American agriculture has not been able to deliver is that which is most basic—flavor. But things are changing. Finally, we’re beginning to look seriously at where food comes from, how it’s grown, how it’s marketed and how it tastes. The successes of organic produce and farmers’ markets—no matter how misplaced our faith in them sometimes might be—speak volumes about the desire for food that has flavor and that has been grown in a way we regard as wholesome.
Less commented on but perhaps more important, their successes speak to the willingness of some food shoppers to pay a premium for fruits and vegetables that meet those criteria. Even five years ago, after suggesting the possibility of farmers’ markets to mainstream growers who were complaining about low prices, I would get the equivalent of a kindly pat on the head. Those markets were very nice for hippies, the growers would say, but they weren’t for real farmers. Today I’m seeing some of those same guys selling their produce at the markets, and they seem happy as clams handling all that cash. (To be sure, all the growers at farmers’ markets are not created equal. Even there you must be choosy about what you buy. It’s just that the potential taste rewards are so much greater.)
When you start with good ingredients, you finish with great dishes. Furthermore, the better the raw materials, the simpler the recipes can be. Trying to coax flavor out of mediocre ingredients takes a lot of work (and, frequently, a lot of sauce). But start with something that already has flavor, and your work in the kitchen is mostly done. Braise it in a little butter, give it a squirt of lemon for backbone and there you are. You did hardly anything, but everyone thinks you’re a genius.
Although trying to cook with the seasons can initially seem like a straitjacket, you’ll soon find benefits you never suspected. It sounds paradoxical, but you’ll find yourself cooking with more ingredients than you ever had before. One of the problems with having anything you want whenever you want it is that it is tempting to settle on only the few things that you know you like and never branch out. But why settle for a miserable peach in the dead of winter when you could have a wonderful mandarin, orange or grapefruit? By abstaining from those few favorite things except when they are at their very best, you’ll discover a whole world of flavors that you may never have suspected existed. Even better, you’ll find that when it is time once again to try those peaches, they will taste even better than you remembered.
An added benefit is that you’ll be saving money. Transportation comes at a price, and so does the scarcity that is the nature of out-of-season fruits and vegetables. Wintertime peaches flown in from Chile not only have little flavor, but they also can cost the earth. When you buy them at the right time of year, however, when the local farmers have filled the markets with them, these fragrant treasures go for pennies. They’ll even be cheap enough that you can afford to buy the very best. And that’s the time you want to pick a peach.
My selection of the fruits and vegetables in this book was dictated partly by the importance of the ingredient and partly by whim. I didn’t include some vegetables and fruits—celery, for example—because I simply don’t find them that interesting. I left out apricots because there aren’t any good fresh ones left. Unless you happen to be at a very select farmers’ market during the few weeks of the year when the local Royal Blenheims come in (if they come in), you’re better off using dried apricots. (Most modern commercial apricot varieties were selected for drying anyway.) By contrast, I did include figs and persimmons, even though they can be hard to find, just because they are among my favorite fall fruits and I can’t imagine doing a produce book without them.
Notice that seasons don’t break cleanly on the calendar. Their occurrence varies according to location and weather. Whereas cherries are considered a spring crop in many places, they don’t ripen until mid-July in others. And even in the same location, there may be as much as two or three weeks’ difference from one year to the next.