Once I was shopping at the Bi-Lo in Trenton, Ga., when I was assaulted by the odor of freshly-baked chocolate chip cookies. Green light began shooting from my eyes, and slobber dripped from my newly emergent fangs. Helplessly, I was drawn by the aroma as a moth to flame, and I made my way over to the bakery counter trampling fellow shoppers and overturning display counters in my haste.
“May I buy just one of those chocolate chip cookies?” I asked the pleasant-looking woman behind the counter.
“No, hon, I’m not allowed to sell you one cookie,” she said. “So I reckon I’ll just have to give it to you.”
It was the kind of moment a fat girl remembers for the rest of her life. The cookie was perfect, the chocolate chips still liquid, and furthermore it was washed down with the milk of human kindness.
Now. Fast-forward four or five years. Bi-Lo had by then gotten in the habit of putting a dispenser of free cookies on that same bakery counter, which ruined my diet some days and some days did not. I am helpless before melty chocolate but cold and superior when confronted by those flinty sugar cookies with multicolored sprinkles. But whether I ate one or not, the cookies made me feel warm and loved, reminding me of my summum bonum cookie moment.
Then, one terrible day, a sign sprang up beside the cookie jar: “Free cookies for children 12 and under.”
I was embittered. If nothing spells lovin’ like somethin’ from the oven, I had to face the grim reality that Bi-Lo no longer loved me. I was too OLD. Geriatrics like me were good enough to write checks at the register, but could we have a cookie? No! Cookies were for the young and cute.
And that, Gentle Reader, is how I became a crusading journalist. It became an obsession with me to get that sign taken down, and that’s why I veered off the garden path in Bob’s Little Acre to detour down the cookie aisle. One column didn’t do it, so a couple of weeks later I had another shot. Here they are, in order.
Alas! Bi-Lo never reversed its ageist cookie policy. It just started putting the cookies somewhere safe, under the more cheerful message: “Kids! Ask our friendly bakers for a free cookie!”
So I lost, but at least they took down the obnoxious sign, huh? I really was on the verge of writing column no. 3 under the screaming headline:
TEAR DOWN THIS SIGN, MR. COOKIE CHEF!
Why You Should Grow A Garden (With Some Peripheral Comments on Cookies)
By Robin Ford Wallace
Do you know how to get rid of a tapeworm? You can do it in just three days.
On day one, eat a nice dinner, balanced, plenty of vegetables; and then eat a cookie for dessert.
On day two, eat another nutritious, home-cooked meal; and then have a delicious cookie to finish up.
On day three, have yourself yet another cozy little supper, only this time: No cookie. When the tapeworm pops his head out of your mouth to demand, “WHERE’S MY COOKIE?” you grab him and pull him out hand over hand.
But this is not a column about tapeworms. I just thought a little joke would be a pleasant way to lead into this week’s subject, which is:
Why You Should Grow A Garden.
A lot of times when people say “you” what they really mean is “I.” They say, “You know how great you feel when your hard work at last pays off and you’re finally awarded that promotion, or the Nobel Prize?” When of course you have no idea how that feels! Nothing like that ever happens to you; you are in fact lying in a ditch sullenly drinking whiskey and taking boozily inaccurate potshots at the repo men who are carrying off your washing machine.
Well, for heaven’s sake, there I go, doing it myself!
But when I say “why you should grow a garden,” I really do mean you. There’s no question about me. When the year turns to spring and gentle breezes carry floral perfumes to my hungrily snuffling nostrils, I can no more resist the siren call of dirt than you could walk by a plate of free cookies at the grocery store without reaching out and –
All right. So this time maybe I do mean me when I say “you.” For all I know you could walk right past that plate of cookies as flintily indifferent as one of those white-lipped medieval saints carved from cold and unfeeling marble, your hands folded primly on your grocery cart, your eyes trained dead ahead at the lettuce leaves in the produce section, your sanctimonious little brain thinking primly about something you recently read in the Bible.
Aren’t you special?
Anyway, I’ll try to stop mixing me up with you, but I’m warning you right now that we’ll never get through with this gardening column if you can’t stop obsessing about chocolate chip cookies. So let’s not say one more word about right-from-the-oven cookies so hot that the chocolate chips are an oozing glossy-brown liquid that sticks to your fingers and melts on your tongue like –
Well. This is not a column about cookies. The reason you should grow a garden is: it’s time to declare war on grocery stores.
Why? It’s a matter of maintaining the integrity of the food supply. The outside aisles of a grocery store contain real food: the dairy section has milk, cheese and butter; the meat counter, beef, fish, pork and chicken; the produce aisle, fresh fruits and vegetables; the bakery counter, bread and just-baked chocolate chip –
Ahem. But that’s just the outside. The interior of the grocery store is a vast wasteland of chemical-packed, ultra-processed, dehydrated, reconstituted, ascorbic-acid-added-to-retain-color, boxed, canned and plastic-wrapped corn and soy byproducts that don’t even look like food.
I was reading a newspaper article the other day about the new scientifically engineered cheeseburger Dorito. Teams of scientists have worked tirelessly to time-release the flavors so that you don’t taste the onion until a second or two after the pickle hits your tongue.
Gentle Reader, THAT’S – NOT – FOOD! That’s chemistry!
All right already (you might reply impatiently)! Everyone by now knows processed food is bad for you but nobody forces anybody to eat it!
Anyway (you might add accusingly), who are you to rant about Doritos when you can’t seem to write a full paragraph without mentioning chocolate chip cookies?
Also (you might conclude relentlessly), you can’t declare war on grocery stores! Didn’t you write in this very space in October 2007:
“I love the grocery store. Every summer I threaten to move in. Their air conditioning is better than mine, there’s food all around, and sometimes they give you cookies.”
All right! I confess!
This is, too, a column about cookies.
To wit: A grocery store in town used to have a plate of cookies on offer at the bakery counter. I tend to be always on a diet or off it, so sometimes I’d take a cookie and sometimes I wouldn’t. No big deal.
But then the plate of cookies sprouted a sign: “Free cookies for children 12 and under.”
Which may have sounded OK to whoever thought of it – they’re providing a treat for tykes, right? – but every time I walked by it, it hurt my feelings again, because in my way-way-way-over-12 case it translated to:
“DON’T TOUCH THESE COOKIES, LARDBUTT!”
At first it just made me a little sniffy – “FYI,” I’d sniff, “very few children 12 and under have checkbooks and make the family’s food-buying decisions.”
Then I became morally indignant: “This is ageism! I’ll sue!”
But taking it to court would make it sound like I really had a chip on my shoulder, and I didn’t think the judge would take me any more seriously because it happened to be chocolate.
So instead, I began brooding malevolently, decided to declare war on grocery stores, and seem to have killed an entire garden column carrying on about it.
Well, it is spring, and time to roll in the dirt. Next time I promise to be more on-task.
But there’s such a thing as social justice, and sometimes even garden writers must put down the trowel and ask the hard questions, such as:
“WHERE’S MY COOKIE?”
END
Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.
Why You Should Grow A Garden (With Practically No Mention of Cookies)
By Robin Ford Wallace
This crusadin’ journalism biz gets to be a habit. You get so used to exposing corruption and righting wrongs, you find yourself doing it while you brush your teeth. Like the other day I got to delvin’ around and before I knew what hit me I had unearthed three bank frauds, two crooked politicians and a mistress in Argentina, when all I’d been looking for was some horseradish for my chicken sandwich..
So it was that in the last Bob’s Little Acre I sat down to write an earnest little treatise on Why You Should Grow a Garden and instead found myself passionately protestin’ discriminatory cookie policies at the Bi-Lo. So here I am back again to take another stab. Here goes.
Why You Should Grow a Garden:
Last summer I overheard a man talking about what nice tomatoes you could buy at this time of year and I was stricken with pity. Buy? Tomatoes? In the middle of summer, in the middle of the country? I figured this was some poor slob nobody loved, not even his mother.
Then I started thinking about that – who would I get tomatoes from if I didn’t grow them myself? I used to have a friend I’d trade off produce with, until one day she asked for something I didn’t want to give up. So I said no, she took umbrage, then she took revenge. Two years later I’m still reelin’ from the aftermath.
So reason No. 1 to grow a garden is: to avoid human contact. It comes out cheaper in the long run to buy tomatoes than to fool around with friendship, but home-grown are better and anyway gardens are lovely places to be alone in. If people do butt in it is the work of a moment to chase them away with your hoe, and persistent intruders, with only a bit more trouble, make excellent compost.
But seriously, the more important reason to grow a garden is: to save America.
A few weeks ago there was an article in the gardening section of our daily newspaper about Hispanic immigrants showing their neighbors how to grow food. These hard-working Latinos didn’t spend a lot of money on bagged soil or chemical fertilizer, the writer marveled; they just worked the earth with their hand tools until it felt “ready.”
Yes! I thought. Finally somebody who understood dirt.
Then, the very next week, the very same gardening section of the very same newspaper ran an article on growing tomatoes. All the advice was from a guy who ran a nursery in town, and his advice on tomato plants was:
Buy them from me.
Far be it from Bob’s Little Acre to offer discouragin’ words to that gardening section as it struggles arduously upward toward elusive mediocrity, but what do you expect when, instead of charging your advertisers for space, you let them write your articles?
Anyway, this was a nice nurseryman and as it happens I personally finance yachts for him every spring as I go barking mad in his wonderful garden center; so I could have forgiven everything except for his advice on the soil you need for growing tomatoes, which was:
Buy it from me.
Buy dirt? Hadn’t anybody paid attention the week before, about working the earth until it was ready? About gardeners being producers, not consumers?
Excuse me. I don’t mean to rant, but we’ve got a nation to save here.
America is a lot of things – a beautiful idea, a noble experiment – but one thing it also is that we shouldn’t forget is:
Dirt.
Countries are made of the stuff. The Irish affectionately call theirs “The Auld Sod,” and longtime readers of this space may remember my quoting Rupert Brooke’s beautiful, patriotic poem in my article on compost. If he died fighting for his homeland, he wrote, some corner of a foreign field would “a richer dust conceal… that is forever England.” Meaning, you see, Rupert, and I’m afraid that’s precisely what happened. But what the poem points out is that England is made of dirt, and that Rupert is made of England.
Closer to home, another poetic image I have frothed on about through the years is the notion of Walt Whitman’s presence in blades of grass, a conceit that always makes me gaze pensively at the bottoms of my Reeboks as I sit sipping the post-mow adult beverage. Dear Walt says “grass,” not “dirt,” but one assumes he got there through the root system.
Americans have come to think of dirt as coming in bags in just the same way they think of food coming in foil-wrapped geometrical squares you warm up in the toaster. When in fact processed food is like those bundled financials that poisoned our economy; if there is anything real in there it is too balled up in toxins to do anybody much good.
What can we do about it? Politicos carry on about getting back to “core values.” Well, you don’t get any more core than dirt. Real food comes from it, and gardening is all about rolling in it.
Anyway, if America is dirt and we are America, are we really prepared to let the only people who understand dirt be immigrants whose right to be on it is argued bitterly in every election?
So that is why you should grow a garden: it is your patriotic duty. I hope we’ve got that straight now. But before we go:
I still want that cookie.
END
Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.
No comments:
Post a Comment