New World

My grandparents were adults during the Great Depression. Both sets were blessed in that my grandfathers had jobs and because they were gardeners. My grandparents produced flower gardens that literally stopped people in their tracks, back in the days when folks still took drives without destinations on Sundays after church. As beautiful as the flower gardens were, the important gardens produced vegetables and fruit. I can remember helping them harvest corn, cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes, rutabaga, turnips, cabbage, carrots, beans of every type, squash, pumpkin, peppers, onions, chives, herbs, blueberries, strawberries and grapes. My paternal grandparents had an apple orchard. My maternal grandparents had grapevines.

My own parents followed in this tradition, only my mother blanched and froze most of her produce while my grandmothers canned. Summers were scorching and there was no air conditioning, but the canning went on despite the heat; pickles, jams, jellies, stewed tomatoes, beans, and carrots were put up for the winter when they would not be available. Fruits and vegetables were still seasonal commodities in my childhood. You didn't get watermelon in the winter. Apples came in fall. You'd find an orange in your Christmas stocking.

But in the summer, the air was redolent with the smells of canning, of salt and sugar and vinegar, tomato and onion, as various fruits and veggies took their turn in the harvest. In the summer a hungry child could drag a carrot from the earth, tug a cucumber from a vine or pluck off a tomato and taste the soil and water and sun that had produced them. They had smells and textures.

Men and women both gardened, but it was women who did the preserving. Such hot, hard work, but the shelves in the root cellar would slowly begin to fill. Sometimes they would buy a couple of bushels of peaches from down south, and make wonderful cobblers and jams and syrups. People truly ate the fruits of their labors.

My maternal grandmother made her own bread three times a week. A slice of homemade bread hot from the oven, slathered with butter (not margarine) and dotted with homemade blackberry jelly... or homemade strawberry jam... oh, my.

The thing is, while other people stood in bread lines or at soup kitchens during the Great Depression, both sets of my grandparents were able to feed their families- and less fortunate neighbors- from their gardens. They shredded newspapers for compost, they saved food scraps for compost, and leaves and grass clippings, and traded compost for manure with their neighbors who had cows or horses. The compost and manure were combined to feed the gardens that fed them. They understood the nature of want. They were conservative in the truest sense of the world.

I do not garden or can. I am entirely dependent upon the contents of my local grocery for my nutrition. And I begin to notice that tomatoes may be red, but they have no smell or taste. Most produce is mass produced, which means it is moderately palatable and moderately nutritious. These are the sacrifices required to have fruit and veggies "out of season"; the summer air is redolent of nothing but refrigeration. Maybe it is time to return to the Victory Garden, if only to rediscover- or discover for the first time, depending on your age- what a real tomato smells and tastes like.

I fear all produce is being hybridized to a uniform mediocre sameness for the sake of commerce; inbred for better resilience during shipping, for longer shelf life, for greater resistence to pests. When the last grandchild of the Great Depression has died, will the memories of summer produce pulled from the ground die too?