Market Letter October First (a whole new month!) | Sequatchie Cove Farm

So. I’ve tried to write this letter twice thus far. Once right after I
wrote the last letter and then once in my head a few days later after a
tough trip into society.

The first letter started with- “I’ve been thinking (I do a lot of that
in my spare time- along with cooking, arranging flowers, making glass
beads, and writing). I was thinking about what I wrote last week about
eating in season. This is obviously very important if you are a local
food eater. I realized that it is easy for me to say it’s easy to eat
only in season- I’m a farmer’s daughter. I’ve been doing it most of my
life and it comes naturally to me. I would have to try NOT to eat in
season and if I did that I would end up spending a lot more money and
feeling a lot less satisfied. But for some it is not so natural. Some
were raised eating what grows on the grocery store shelves- the ones in
the produce department where there is a tiny electrical thunder before
the mist comes out to spray the lettuce from California and the peppers
from Peru. I guess I’ve never thought about how HARD it would be to
re-train yourself to eat only what is coming out of the ground miles
from your own home. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like much and sometimes it
seems like TOO much. Too much of one thing and nothing of another. If
you want to eat pasta in April you can’t make a tomato sauce- you have
to get creative and make a cream sauce with wilted arugula.

Eating in season involves a total commitment. If you didn’t grow up on a
farm it is a conscious act. It’s like turning lights off when you leave
the room- if you grew up in a house where it was ok to leave lights on
all day and night but now want to save the mountain tops you have to
THINK about turning the light off every time you leave the room. It
takes a lot of effort. It also takes effort to simply learn when peppers
grow as well as squash and lettuce and beans and beets. It takes an
effort to even learn what part of the plant they are from. I remember
once a highly esteemed chef visited our farm for the first time and had
no idea whether blueberries grew on vines, bushes, or trees.

But eating right is a lifestyle and as with any lifestyle you have to
TRY. As a city girl I am learning many new things- I am learning if you
work inside all day you have to TRY to get some time outside. You have
to go out of your way to get the exercise your body needs- you have to
put on your shoes and go for a walk. It is way too easy to not do that.
It would be easy to be inside all day and go home and sit down and make
supper and go to bed and never have even had to come in contact with a
mosquito or smell the kudzu blooming (which smells like grape bubble gum).”

And then things got in my way and that is as far as I got. After the
previously mentioned undesirable trip into society I had a running
Market Letter in my head (this ran mostly when I was cooking pork neck
bones into stock, washing dishes, or roasting pounds of sweet peppers to
be skinned and covered in oil and put in the fridge) that started with this:

“Sometimes I just want to write a Market Letter in the style of a fifth
grade essay. I want the title to be ‘What I Love About Farmers’. Since
I’ve now gone this far I feel like I HAVE to share with you
‘what-I-love-about-farmers’.

Farmers work entirely for what they believe in- something that may seem
like a blessing and/or a curse-depending on how you look at it. I
sometimes find myself surrounded by people who work because they “have
to have a job”. That means they can clock in, work hard as heck for
eight hours a day, clock out, and go home and be done with it. Sometimes
they don’t even have to work hard as heck- and even then it stresses
them/us out. And farmers aren’t making the big bucks. We are lucky here
in Chattanooga to have so many farmers who are working all day and all
night (what good farmer doesn’t dream about their crops or animals
constantly?) simply because they believe THAT strongly in what they do
and only want to grow food to feed themselves and their community.

Farmers not only don’t have TIME to worry and talk about who has fake
eyelashes or who’s talking about who or who got spotted going into
Krystal’s on Brainerd Rd (it was ME, I have to admit- I had to use the
free WiFi to see if Food Inc was playing at the Rave (it wasn’t- this
was before the Great Showing at the Bijou)And guess what- I didn‘t even
get a chance to SEE it) but they just plain aren‘t interested. They are
dealing with life and death every day-whether it be that of plants or
animals. They are looking at the clouds and praying it doesn’t rain more
than it already has (or-depending on the time of the year- that it WILL
rain more. They are checking the chard plants and carrying buckets of
feed to the chickens. They are worrying about whether there is going to
be enough food for the CSA share or enough eggs for market. They are
making sure the pigs are healthy or the cows are connecting with their
calves. They are battling pigweed with hoes or washing mounds of
radishes. And they are loving every second of it (most of the time)
because this is the life the have chosen to live.

And all of that aside- they don’t even have to worry about being fit and
trim and healthy because they work outside everyday, breathe in the best
air, and eat the best food available in Tennessee. What could be better?

Of course I could think of a lot of things that could be better and that
is why I am not a farmer. But I would never give up eating the food that
is grown in such a way. I want to personally know every person that
raised the food I put into my body because I know how very important it is”.

So anyway. There is that. I would love to share what I’ve been eating
but as usual I have no more room. I am really excited about the season
change. Last night we ate one of the last tomatoes on a BAT
(bacon-arugula-tomato sandwich. It went like this- Sequatchie Cove bacon
(the real precious kind), Williams Island arugula, one of the few
Brandywine tomatoes hanging on the vine in my yard with Ashley from
Williams Island’s mustard, all on Neidlove’s Farmer’s Rye. After a nice
walk at Reflection Riding it was the perfect supper.

And the other day I had to make something in a super duper hurry and
whomped up some somen noodles tossed in fermented black bean paste with
sautéed delicata, ginger, peppers, and eggplant. I sliced the veggies
while I was waiting for the water to boil and cooked them while the
noodles cooked. It literally took that long.

But I will stop now. It’s not that I don’t have more to say- I just have
to go make some glass beads.

I hope you are all soaking up this wonderful weather. See yall at market!

Filed under: Local Food Letter, Local Food News on October 7th, 2009 |