The Wisdom of the Radish

by Lynda Browning

  The day after she died, I peered into the brooder and found the rooster—by far the biggest chick of the lot, a fat jolly fellow I’d dubbed Santa—unable to walk. His toes were curled up into balls, and he was half-shuffling his way over to the food trough.

  Since I’d spent the past week nursing two sick chicks, I hadn’t taken the time to hold each bird each day, like I had with the first bunch. So the second flock was flightier. When I opened the brooder lid all of the chicks spooked; the fat little rooster was bowled over onto his side by the onslaught. My heart broke just a little more and I scooped him up. At least I already had a hospital container ready.

  Have you ever gotten one of those fortunes that tell you too little, too late? At a rare dinner out, I was informed by a shattered cookie: For better luck, wait until spring.

  Fighting fate, I turned to BackyardChickens.com and found a possible solution: boots. While some farmers recommended culling chicks like Santa—the trait is most likely due to a vitamin deficiency in the mother hen, but could possibly be genetic—I was willing to do whatever it took to keep this boy alive. Up to and including fashioning chick boots out of cardboard and taping them onto the feet of the rooster in an attempt to straighten out his wayward toes.

  Like it or not, this tubby little rooster was teaching me something about my relationship with my flock. While he may have been just the next thing in a long line of problems, the challenge reminded me of one of the reasons why I was raising birds in the first place: to give them a good home and a nurturing protector. And if I was a lousy protector, I was going to be make up for it by being one hell of a nurturer.

  The average American chicken sorely needs a better life. More than 8 billion chickens are born each year26 into unnatural, degrading conditions. About 300 million of them lay eggs, while 8 billion others are bred for meat.27 Layer or fryer, they share in common a brutal reality: overcrowding, no access to the outdoors, de-beaking to avoid cannibalism, and remorseless culling of the weak. We have come to call this modern industrial agriculture. Before the 1950s, though, the poultry business was dominated by a different way of thinking: animal husbandry.

  According to author and animal scientist Bernard Rollin, “In husbandry, we put animals into the environment best suited for them to survive and thrive ... and then augment their natural ability to function with provisions of food during famine, water during drought, help in birthing, protection from predators, medical attention, and so on.”28 The traditional ethic of animal husbandry revolves around an unwritten contract between a farmer and his or her animals. A good husband(wo)man will care for the animals when they fall ill—or get curly toes—even if it is not economically profitable to do so. Rollin witnessed this attitude among Colorado ranchers who were experiencing an abnormally high number of calves being afflicted with scours, which is livestock-speak for diarrhea. “Every rancher I met had spent more money on treating the disease than was economically justified by the calves’ market value,” Rollin recounts. “When I asked these men why they were being ‘economically irrational,’ they were adamant in their responses: ‘It’s part of my bargain with the animal.’”

  In contrast, industrial agriculture places profit, productivity, and efficiency above animal welfare. If an animal is sick, it’s generally more economical to kill the animal than to expend resources nurturing it back to health. The average dairy, for instance, knocks off over 30 percent of its herd each year.29 If a cow’s milk production drops, or she contracts mastitis, a disease, or a physical injury, her time is up. This practice makes animals into little more than raw materials or production units—as opposed to the living, feeling creatures I saw darting across my brooder each time I lowered a handful of fresh feed.

  In a confinement poultry operation, Santa probably would have been immediately killed,f not given a chance at survival. In my operation, he was taking a little extra care and attention, but with a bit of luck he’d be on his feet again soon. The opportunity to treat chickens with respect and care—to practice good animal husbandry—is part of why I ordered these chicks in the first place. I wouldn’t eat factory-raised eggs, but I hadn’t given up on eggs altogether. By taking the responsibility into my own hands, I could ensure that the eggs I ate—and the eggs that my customers ate—were raised according to the principle of animal husbandry, which dates back all the way to the biblical tenet that “the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep” (or in this case, the chicken owner giveth all her waking hours for her chickens).

  If I happened to be in a positive mood—which, quite frankly, was less often than not—I could convince myself that my series of disasters up to and including Santa’s curly toes were just nature’s way of reminding me of my bargain with the animals. I was their caretaker.

  For four days, I carried the baby rooster around in a small plastic box with me everywhere I went. The afternoons were sunny and warm; while I weeded the salad bed, he stayed in his box in the car. Three or four times an hour, his shrieks rang out through the cracked windows and across the open field. The sound let me know that he’d managed to get his clunky cardboard boots stuck behind him again—that he was lying rather pathetically on his fat belly, head tilted back to screech. I would go over, set him straight, and resume weeding. On the fourth day, after I’d already righted Santa a number of times, he started screeching again. This time, as I peered through the car window, I could see that he’d managed to hobble through his small water dish, soaking both of his boots.

  Since nothing was wrong from his perspective—by the time I got over to the car, he was quietly sitting on his damp haunches, head down in his jar lid of food—I could only assume that he was gloating over the fact that I had to cut a fifth pair of chick boots from my rapidly diminishing cereal box.

  On day five of boot camp, my toil was rewarded: I removed the offensive footwear and Santa walked. To celebrate, I went down to the feed store and picked up two more chicks to replace the two I had lost. This time, I chose a Light Brahma—a little black and yellow fluff-ball with feathered feet—and another Silver Laced Wyandotte. Emmett expressed some consternation at my purchases; in turn, I accused him of killing my joy. Feeling that I might have spoken too harshly, I named the Light Brahma Joy, and told Emmett she’d be his chicken. Besides, I pointed out, the two new girls would keep Santa company until he was steady enough on his newly flat feet to handle all twenty-seven ladies.

  It was nighttime and a full moon illuminated the hill behind the chicken yard. Some days it wasn’t so bad, this inland thing; the wind could almost be an ocean breeze, the undulating grassland the Pacific. We walked up the hill, laughing at the clarity of our moon shadows, the way they stretched out like atavistic giants, wobbling drunk over depressions before disappearing into the darkness of an oak tree.

  Three foxes materialized. At first I thought I must be imagining them, figment dolphins leaping in and out of a prairie sea. But Emmett saw them too: a mother, it looked like, with two kits weaving behind her.

  City Lynda would have cooed over these foxes, the striking setting, the wild moment. But at that moment, I was torn between reciting Wordsworth and throwing rocks. Thinking of the chickens, Country Lynda picked up a rock. I wasn’t raised to think of foxes and raccoons as enemies; I wasn’t groomed to be a farmer. I went to grad school, scribbled poetry in the margins of notebooks while listening to lectures on biology and ecology. But as much as I was an environmentalist—one who fully understood the value of apex predators in an ecosystem—I was also a farmer and livestock keeper. One who had a little bit of trouble letting go of that rock.

  But I did drop it. And with Santa healthy—in fact, handily beating the entire flock to the feed dish—it was in the realm of possibility that things would be okay. I still teared up thinking about the lost birds, and my caretaking involved an unprecedented level of paranoia. But the new flock grew on me. They earned names. The Silver Laced Wyandotte with the stripes running down her back became Skunk. The slightly slow, bottom-of-the
-pecking-order Ameraucana who liked to burrow under the other chicks became Dozer. The white chicken with blue feet was Booby. The Barred Rock, with her black bodysuit and white dot on her chest, was Tux—and she, not the new Buff Orpington, would carry on the spirit of Buffy, the first to fly out of the brooder just to see what was going on in the greater world. Later, she’d be the first to greet me at the coop and fly to my shoulder or stand on my foot, waiting to be picked up. There was our surprise Mo, too—a White Leghorn “she” that turned out to be a “he,” with a huge floppy comb (a Mohawk) and pendulous jowls far too big for his body. He became a chivalrous rooster, always hunting down tasty treats for the ladies or performing a courtship dance for them, flaring his white wings, head bobbing.

  And, of course, there was always Hope.

  Chapter 4:

  SWEET SAMPLES

  Heirloom Tomatoes

  I was experiencing unfortunate flashbacks.

  In high school, a particularly cruel physics teacher forced me to construct some sort of bottle rocket launch pad. Lost as to how to accomplish such a task, I screwed up the courage to venture into the local hardware store. Blonde, bitter, and apparently hell-bent on playing up the role of incompetent female, I wandered lost amid hundreds of different types of nuts, bolts, and other small, shiny metal objects. At some point I even started humming Disney tunes. The crappy ones from Pocahontas. I was eventually rescued by my pragmatic female science partner, who had managed to find whatever small, shiny things we needed, but the trauma remains.

  Now I found myself in a different sort of hell. It was one with the temperature and humidity of a New Jersey summer, and approximately sixty different types of tomato starts, which were mysteriously mixed in with pepper starts and other small, bright green things. Different setting, same overwhelming feeling of failure.

  I was in the greenhouse of a wholesale nursery sheepishly buying tomato plants because, well, we nuked ours. I was well aware that real farmers grew tomatoes from seed and only fuck-ups bought them in six-packs. When we explained to the owner of the nursery that we were farmers, he was confused and figured we were buying the starts to resell at market. We had to explain that we were planning on selling the fruit, not the plants (in a couple of months, assuming we didn’t kill the plants first). And while no self-respecting farmer would purchase tomato starts, no self-respecting farm stand would be without heirloom tomatoes—that farmers’ market icon, that sure sign of summer, that nonspherical, nonconformist, tie-dyed, sweet and succulent fruit.

  That one we didn’t grow from seed. My ego was bruised and Emmett, cooing over tomato starts, wasn’t helping it.

  “Whoa,” he said, and pointed out a six-pack of Black Plums. “This tag says 7/11. Does that mean it was planted two weeks ago? The thing has to be six inches tall.”

  Our second attempt at tomato seedlings, planted a month before, had grown to only three quarters of an inch tall and only a few of them had managed to don a second set of leaves.

  I tried to shrug it off. “They probably jack them up with chemical fertilizers.”

  While my catty comment may have been true, it didn’t negate the fact that the ability to grow tomatoes from seed was a skill. And the one thing that could replace acquired skill (besides lady luck, who had thus far spurned us) was technology. This nursery had both: it was a family operation that has been churning out seedlings for years. And the voluminous greenhouse possessed an automatic ventilation system and an automatic watering system, which meant that the temperature and moisture content of the soil were regulated without human intervention. Even the size of the greenhouse was to its advantage: that much moist air, with the ventilation windows shut, could maintain a constant temperature through the cool nights.

  We were a bit more manual. Our advanced technology (typically preceded by, “Shit! The tomatoes!”) entailed frantically racing up the hill to yank the plastic cover off the hoophouse on a hot day, grabbing the hose, and guessing at the spray setting and length of time required to satiate the seedlings without over-saturating the soil.

  “Box Car Willie,” Emmett murmured. “What a great name.”

  We rooted around the platforms filled with tomato starts. Box Car Willie snuggled in flats with Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter, while Pruden’s Purple and Stupice bedded down on another table. Black Plum, Sun Gold, Striped German, Cherokee Purple, Sungella: we were new to the tomato world and could only guess at what sorts of fruits those mysterious names would generate. I put my money on the more creative monikers—the Box Car Willies, Striped Germans, and Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifters of the world. But more important than literary sensibility was size. We were hunting for the smallest, youngest starts. We didn’t want supermodels; we wanted toads. A leggy two-foot-tall tomato plant stretching out of a tiny plastic pot was distinctly inferior to a short, stocky plant. And if a seedling already had flowers, forget it. Fresh starts were best. They’d be most likely to take the transition of transplanting smoothly, and squat stalks were more able to bear the weight of mature fruit than long, thin vines.

  We picked out eighty plants. As we forked over eightynine dollars and pulled the car up to the greenhouse to load up the little green things, we felt a bit silly but excited at the thought of what was to come. We thought of the heavy, brilliantly colored fruit tucked in their rainforest of leafy vines. It was going to be one hell of a harvest.

  Unfortunately, I enjoy the concept of tomatoes far more than the actual fruit. You simply couldn’t ask for a more sensual piece of produce. Round, ripe, firm yet yielding—squeezing a tomato is about as close to squeezing human flesh as one can get. (For all the jokes made about melons, they’re hard and unfriendly, nothing like the real thing.) And consider the color: while melons hide their brilliance inside dull rinds, tomatoes let it all hang out, lustrous and naked.

  But while I’m drawn in by their soft skin and vibrant blushes, I confess that my love affair with tomatoes runs only skin deep. Because I was raised primarily on meat and carbohydrates, the texture—in particular the sliminess surrounding the seed pockets—is a deal breaker.

  I can’t deny, though, that the flavor of the tomato is excellent. To enjoy the balance of sweetness and acidity without the troublesome texture, I used to partake of sauce and ketchup only. (Don’t scoff: According to the USDA under Reagan, ketchup is, in fact, a fruit.) My gateway dish was the lightly broiled tomato, halved and topped with parmesan and bread crumbs; from there, I got hooked on totally raw bruschetta (with plenty of garlic, basil, and balsamic) and eased my way slowly into salted sliced tomatoes (balsamic and a fork mandatory). I still can’t bite into one like an apple—even the sweetest whole cherry tomatoes are difficult for me to pop in my mouth. But as shrimp and lobster literally induce my gag reflex, I readily admit that my palate is handicapped.

  In all fairness to the tomato, my culinary caprice doesn’t deserve any historical support. And yet a cautionary attitude toward the fruit does have precedent—plenty of precedent. In 1820, the legend goes, a man named Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson made a brave announcement: at high noon on September 26 he would stand in front of the Boston courthouse and eat an entire bushel of tomatoes. People gathered outside the courthouse to watch the spectacle, awaiting the silly sop’s imminent death. After all, this man was about to consume not one but twenty or so of the poisonous fruits. The townspeople were shocked—and, let’s face it, gravely disappointed—when Colonel Johnson lived to tell the tale.

  A family of five in Hawking County, Tennessee, wasn’t so lucky. On an ordinary day in 1963, the Mason familyg settled down for a midday dinner of split pea soup, pasta with meat sauce, and the season’s first sliced tomato. According to firsthand accounts, minutes after three of the family members sampled the tomato, they found themselves staggering across the room—which had, oddly enough, begun to ebb and flow around them—hit by waves of nausea. The son drove them to the hospital. There, the father swatted imaginary swarms of insects while the mother battled vio
lent, whole-body convulsions, and all three suffered dry mouth and dilated pupils—all from a single slice of a seemingly innocent fruit.30

  Of course, the tomato’s history didn’t commence in 1820, and the legend of its toxicity goes back hundreds of years before Colonel Johnson allegedly rendered a not-guilty verdict with his compelling argument at the Boston courthouse. Like Paddington Bear, tomatoes originated in darkest Peru. Wild tomatoes—of which ten surviving species have been identified by botanists—populated the Andean highlands. Sporting small yellow flowers that matured into small yellow fruit, ancestral tomatoes bear little resemblance to today’s multicolored behemoths.

  From Peru the tomato apparently made its way—how, we don’t entirely know—to Central America. There the Aztecs dubbed it xitomatl (“plump thing with a navel”) and did something brilliant: they combined the proto-tomato with peppers and corn to make the world’s first salsa, a culinary achievement not to be taken lightly.

  From there, the saga of xitomatl is just too entertaining to pass up. Spanish explorers, in the process of annihilating Central American Aztecs, picked up a few xitomatl and brought them back to Europe. Some historians believe they came with Cortez after he took over Tenochtitlan (present day Mexico City) in 1521. Others point to Christopher Columbus for his obvious schoolchild cachet. But as is the case with most of our history, no one really knows how precisely it happened; we just know that tomatoes somehow made their way to Europe. More precisely, we know that the first documented record of the tomato was penned in 1544 by an Italian physician/botanist elegantly named Pietro Andrea Mattioli. You can almost hear the word “tomato” in his name, can’t you? And yet Pietro Mattioli renamed the “plump thing with a navel” the “golden apple,” or pomi d’oro. This later became simply pomodoro, the modern Italian word for tomato.