Savoring Slow Food

I woke this morning to an overcast sky and gentle rain. As I took the dogs out to do their business, I moved my strawberry plant from under the eaves where it normally resides to a spot in my yard where it would receive a drink. Yesterday at the farmer’s market I got a basil plant for a dollar, so I placed it right next to the strawberry for company. Later today I will give it a new home in a larger pot.

Yesterday I spent a few hours at the Marietta Square Farmer’s Market. The tomatoes in my garden are still ripening and ones in the grocery stores still taste like cardboard. I decided the next best thing was to buy something fresh from a local grower and get out in the sunshine.

Well okay, it was hot out there. It's July in Georgia. But it was worth the trip. I ran across raw, unpasteurized honey, all kinds of decorative and culinary herbs, beautiful artisan breads, and even cups of worms (for your compost pile). But stand back for the tomatoes.

Heirloom tomatoes are a joy to behold if you’ve never tried them. There’s just one thing you need to understand about them. They are ugly. I was talking to one of the vendors, asking her questions about hybrids versus heirloom varieties, and an elderly woman paused next to me, surveying the Cherokee purples, the green zebras and the Brandywines. She paused though at one of the tomatoes the woman called an “Aunt Anna.”

“Is it a tomato?” she asked cautiously. I nodded. “Yes ma’am,” I said. “It just looks like a mango.” She nodded, listened a few more seconds to the conversation I was having with the vendor, then moved on.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder it seems. I got a few pounds of tomatoes from each vendor who had some. And with that, I made conversation with people who felt strongly about heirloom tomatoes, who were scientific in their approach to growing them, were communal in their approach to sharing them, and who made the commitment to come out to the heat of the farmer’s market every Saturday to make their living from their own efforts.

Those tomatoes were so good.

In two weeks I’ll lay my money down again, to get enough tomatoes to put up for the fall. I still don’t know how my tomato patch will produce this year, so I want to get a batch of them now, so I don’t miss them so much in January. This will be my first experience putting up vegetables in season, and hopefully not my last.

For now though, I’m enjoying the season’s harvest – fresh, local and ugly. It was a wonderful weekend.

For more information on Georgia Organics, I encourage you to visit this website: http://www.georgiaorganics.org/

And for more information on locally grown produce in your area, click on the Local Chapters link at this website: http://www.slowfoodusa.org/