Love thy neighbor … more than tomatoes?

A source of bounty? of disease? Image by gregor_y via Flickr

We love our field-fresh summer tomatoes, and for years farmers in the northeast have been happy to oblige our taste. But as I wrote a few weeks ago this year’s tomato harvest was at risk. Late blight, a plant disease that usually appears late in the growing season, had exploded with early virulence. Now that August is here, it is clear that the risk has become an actual agricultural disaster.

Due in part to this summer’s soggy cool weather, blame for the disaster must be placed squarely at the front door of big-box stores and their greedy imperative to sell as much as possible as cheaply as possible, regardless of the damage they do to their customers. As Dan Barber, the owner/chef of the Blue Hill restaurants, points out in an excellent piece in the Sunday NY Times titled “You say tomato, I say agricultural disaster” the:

… killer round of blight began with a widespread infiltration of the disease in tomato starter plants. Large retailers like Home Depot, Kmart, Lowe’s and Wal-Mart bought starter plants from industrial breeding operations in the South and distributed them throughout the Northeast.

via OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR – You Say Tomato, I Say Agricultural Disaster – NYTimes.com.

Barber’s piece emphasizes how the home gardener, the natural farmer, and the industrial agricultural producer can all be thought of as being “one very large farm.”

When you start a garden, no matter how small, you become part of an agricultural network that binds you to other farmers and gardeners.

via OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR – You Say Tomato, I Say Agricultural Disaster – NYTimes.com.

He goes on to describe some educational and technological options that can help avoid similar disasters in the future. He advocates for extended Extension services so that eager home gardeners can acquire more of the expertise farmers spend a lifetime accumulating. He urges people to raise from seed or buy starters from local growers, not nationwide chains–a starter plant that travels thousands of miles to your big box store is no different than having your tomato travel that distance.  Naturally breeding tomatoes for blight resistance is also on his agenda.

But there is more that can be done.

In addition to home gardeners realizing they are all on “one very large farm,” the rest of us who buy and eat vegetables grown by others need to realize we are all part of one very large farm-community; even if you are not even an informal grower your life is still firmly planted in the soil.  The centrality of the larger community was underlined in an exchange this morning with Jim Hyland who runs Winter Sun Farms, an innovative winter CSA, “although the local farms are the focus of this growing local system, it is the eaters and buyers of their food that will set the deep roots for a regional food network to flourish.”

Part of being in this community is holding sellers responsible for what they do. Another part is identifying with our farmers. They are not doing this to us, we are in this together. The American myth that we should be able to have anything we want anytime we want it–if we have the money–needs to be replaced with an ultimately more satisfying appreciation for local connections. A local corn relish rather than a trucked-in tomato salsa, even if you love tomatoes as much as I do, seems a small price to pay for keeping communion with neighbors, friends, and the farmers who feed us.