a man and his hoe

Looking at the food coming out of the garden, I wonder how we ever came up with the idea that food can be industrialized. I wonder about it when I cut open a cabbage I just picked. It is so different than any cabbage I find in the stores, even the local co-op. Store potatoes don’t have the deep flavor that the potatoes I dig out of the ground have.

Perhaps it’s that to have a cabbage that can endure going through the food industry, from growing in a field with thousands if not millions of other cabbages, to being picked quickly, industrial processes demand efficiency so industrial cabbages need to be picked as speedily as possible, packed, shipped through warehouses, trucked to stores, and stacked on shelves; such cabbages need to be tough and endurable.

Cabbage varieties that don’t go through the food industry can be sweet and delicate. Eating cabbage picked moments ago is sweet, crisp, and full of love. Real food can’t be industrialized, just like a parent’s love can’t be canned and sold on the shelf.

A blue whale is 30 meters, 98 feet, long. The green whale in the southwest corner of our property is longer than that, 31 meters, 103 feet, from where it was cut to the tip of the longest branch. Add the height of the stump, the upper branches which broke off when the tree fell, and the roots below ground, and the green whale resting in the corner of our property is a giant compared to the magnificent blue whales, a giant no Greenpeace film crew will ever want to document.

At one time, these branches were a hundred feet in the sky, where they waved in the wind and rested the feet of many a weary bird.

The green whale is now the home to a myriad of green plants, this fern included. They are to fallen trees what barnacles are to blue whales. Only beached trees don’t rub their skin on gravelly ocean floors to remove their green barnacles.