Crime Against Nature

At this time of the year, apple growers around here are out of fruit.

Conventionally-grown apples are at the top of every list of foods you should not eat, so today at the grocery store I bought four organic apples.  They were not cheap, and they probably came from out West somewhere, but at least I thought I was doing the right thing--safeguarding our health and supporting organic growers, wherever they might be.

Back in my kitchen, imagine my surprise when, about to take a bite of my apple, I noticed the little sticker on it.  It said:  Argentina.  My apple had traveled ten thousand miles from Argentina to Vermont.

From the orchard it had gone by truck to the farm house, then by another truck to the packing plant, and finally another truck to the airport, where it had been put on a plane.  It had flown over the dwindling Amazon jungle, over the Caribbean where the coral is dying, and then over endless  American suburbs to finally land in Albany, NY.  From there more trucks had taken it  through the farm country of Washington County to our supermarket near the border with Vermont.  Its last trip was in our gray Subaru.

I ate the apple anyway.  It was delicious, sweet and crisp, as good as the ones I grow myself.  But was it really worth all those trucks, and that ten-thousand mile flight?

Here I was, trying to do the right thing and ended up committing a crime against Nature.  I hope She understands that my intentions were pure.

I Go Ramping

Went into the woods yesterday, looking for ramps.  This spring has been so slow and weird that I had no idea whether the ramps would be up or not. 

Although the fields in Vermont are green now, the woods are still brown and bare.  Walking on last fall's carpet of leaves, I saw that only an occasional fern had poked through.  But then I went over a rise, looked to my left, and there it was, a whole regiment of ramps. 

That sudden sea of green in the midst of the dead brownness made me catch my breath.  I found a big fallen tree to serve as landmark--I've gotten lost in our woods before, so now I'm cautious when I walk off the path--and crunched my way to the ramps. Close up, ramps have that same  determined, optimistic look as other members of the lily family:  garlic, daffodils, hyacinths and amaryllis.  And they need a lot of optimism and determination, coming as they do before spring fully settles in.

I thrust my trowel into the wet ground and was immediately rewarded with a cloud of oniony-garlicky scent.  That lovely smell kept me going through the digging--as small as the bulbs are, they cling hard to the ground and aren't easy to pull up.  When the basket was half full, I called the dogs and headed home.

Tonight I will chop up the ramps, saute them in olive oil, and mix them into scrambled eggs.  And in the next few days I'll harvest more, and chop and saute and then freeze them for next winter, which I have never tried before.  But I'll have to hurry.  You never know with ramps--one day they're here and the next they've vanished.  Just like spring. 









(So sorry, everyone, to have had to turn word verification back on, but I was spending more time dealing with spam than writing posts.)