How They Do It Here
By Kira Hamman
Where I live, in the Catoctin mountains of western Maryland, tomatoes are a given in the summer.
Gardens teem with them, farm stands overflow with them, and farmers’ markets sell them by the bushel.
But except in a few gardens, they’re exclusively hybrids – Early Girl, Better Boy, and the like – and they’re rarely organically grown, even in spirit.
If you are bold enough to broach the subject of heirlooms and compost with the elderly women who sell these tomatoes they are likely to snort in derision.
Customers around here aren’t looking for organically grown heirloom vegetables and are not willing to pay more for them, and therefore the stands could not stay in business without their cheap seeds and chemical sprays.
It’s easy for me, as a tomato gardener, to lose sight of the reality of the demands of the average non-gardening consumer. The consumer whose salary is not keeping pace with a rising cost of living in general and with skyrocketing food prices in particular. The consumer who is, in fact, supporting local agriculture and local business by buying locally grown vegetables at all, and is at least not shopping for tomatoes at Wal-Mart.
How much is it fair to expect of this consumer?
If only there were a way to convince the non-gardening public that buying sustainably raised food matters. In some places, they already know this. As a matter of fact, in some places it’s darn near impossible to buy conventional tomatoes. Why? How? What is different there than here? Is there a way to make people understand, no matter who and where they are?
I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I would like to think that the movement toward sustainability is gaining ground. I would like to think that someday soon people will start to realize that sustainable agriculture is not only healthier for them, and for the earth, but is in fact cheaper in the long run and frequently even in the short run.
I would like to think that things like rising food prices, dwindling fossil fuel supplies, and salmonella-carrying tomatoes will make people realize that buying South American tomatoes in January is not the best way to go. I would like to think those things, but I don’t know if they’re true.
What do you think?
