By Dana McMahan
FoodConnect Louisville
dana@foodconnect.com

My car sports one sticker that reads, “No farms, no food.” I’m concerned that many people who grew up, like me, in the 80s and 90s, have so little connection to their food. It wasn’t that long ago that people grew their own food, or knew the people who did.

My food came from the grocery store when I grew up, though. With a few exceptions when I was younger and my grandparents gardened, I ate any food any time of the year with almost no concept of what was in season or local.

One of the reasons I wanted to participate in a farm share this year was to learn how to eat with the seasons, and to develop a connection with the food and the people that grow it. It’s still too easy for me to think of this as a novelty though — when I wanted to make corn fritters last week, and the recipe required celery, I drove right from the farmer’s market where I’d gotten fresh corn to Kroger where I bought trucked-in celery.

For a better understanding of the process of seed to plate, I wanted to pay a high-season visit to Misty Meadows Farm, where Ralph and Kathy grow the food I’m eating this summer. I last saw it early in the year. Ralph encouraged me to spend a day working and I readily agreed when an unexpected day off my day job came up.

They’ve had a rough season. Too much rain early in the year has made the harvests late. Working hard to catch up with planting leaves less time for picking produce for their farm share and multiple farmer’s markets. I had “only” zucchini, squash, tomatoes, broccoli and cucumber yesterday in the share because they’d had so little time to pick. This is an entirely different way of looking at my food — considering things like rain three months ago in today’s food selection.

I was to go today, but Ralph warned me when I picked up my share last night that it would be 100 degrees today. “I can take it for a few hours,” I said. He warned again – it would be hard work setting the fall vegetables today.

I still wanted to go until I thought a little more about it. What feels almost like tourism to me — seeing a way of life that’s foreign to me — is an important day of work to a farmer. A “city girl” as Ralph calls me, worried about things like applying sunscreen, getting dirt under my nails and needing chilled bottled water, would only get in the way of serious work. Though my intentions are good, my presence would detract from what John Adams called the most noble work of all — farming.

After tossing and turning until 3 a.m. this morning I decided to cancel my visit. A lot of families will eat the food they plant today. I can play a part in that by staying out of the way.

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