The Wisdom of the Radish

by Lynda Browning

  There are plenty of farmers hoping that the country’s newfound commitment to local production is a permanent shift. But customers have to be willing to participate in the local food system. Sometimes that involves a hatchet, but for starters, maybe just a rain jacket.

  Two hours later, the storm novelty wore thin. My pants were soaked through and my high-tech lightweight rain jacket had sprung a leak. I’d had the sense not to wear my traditional farmers’ market Chacos, but not the sense to wear rubber boots. Thus, my lone pair of decent-looking closed toe shoes had morphed into a disaster of overstretched wet leather. My wool socks squished inside them, and I couldn’t feel my toes, just a dull ache. (I might mention that when I was at sea, I was in the tropics. Warm and wet I can handle; cold and wet, not so much.)

  But Care was not the only customer who showed up in the rain. Other regulars stopped by, smiles plastered to their wet faces, and as long as we kept talking, we were all proud of our collective bravery. The people who came made a point to buy something from every stand. The market manager told us not to worry about paying our stall fee, and thanked us for showing up in the rain. Some of the other farmers packed up early and headed home, but Emmett and I figured that since we were here, we might as well stay until the bitter end. And if my fingers and toes were wet and freezing, that was hardly anything compared to the sense of adventure. We were all in the same boat, farmers and customers—and we’d be here holding down our end of the line as long as they kept coming. We weren’t at the bitter end just yet.

  Chapter 11:

  THE PRICE OF A RADISH (AND OTHER ROOTS)

  Radishes, Beets, Carrots, and Potatoes

  The last few minutes before market opening always pass like seconds. At 8:55 a.m., Emmett rushed around taping up price signs; I bunched bright stalks of rainbow chard, trying to strike a balance between efficiency and aesthetic.

  “Four minutes until market,” Emmett said, tapping his watch. “You know what they say—pile ’em high, and watch’em fly.”

  In other words: worry about getting enough bunches on the table, and stop obsessing over each individual bunch. Market stands, including ours, strive for beauty in bounty because customers gravitate toward it. No one will pick a last lonely piece of produce—or even select from a few stragglers—but everyone relishes sorting through a big pile to find the best item.

  I snapped rubber bands around the chard, placed the fifth bunch on the pile, and turned to the next green: Lacinato kale.

  “How much are we charging for radishes today?” Emmett asked.

  “Maybe we should come down to $1.50,” I said, “But I hate doing that.”

  “Well, we can stick to $1.75, and if people complain, drop a quarter. We don’t have that many bunches, anyway.”

  By 8:59 a.m., I’d bunched a few kales, thrown together four bags of baby lettuce mix, four of baby brassica mix, two of arugula, and I was working on the spinach. At 9:00 a.m., the start-of-market bell pealed: I was up to my elbows in green leaves, pulling spinach out of a harvest bin, tossing aside any stray weeds, and placing handfuls in bags.

  Thirty seconds later, I put the last bag of spinach on display and fielded a salad purchase. It was one of our regulars: one half of an arugula-loving gay couple. He grabbed one bag of lettuce mix, one of arugula, and a bunch of beets. “How much are your radishes again? I remember last week they were on the expensive side,” he said, in a friendly way.

  I didn’t mind him commenting on the price of our radishes: he was good-naturedly honest, and after all he was still buying other produce from our stand. He and I could agree to disagree on the cost, or I could take his advice to heart and drop the price a quarter or two—but he didn’t make me feel embarrassed about my $1.75 radishes.

  On the other hand, last week, when a well-clad woman toting a Starbucks cup picked up a bunch of radishes, asked the price, rolled her eyes, dropped the radishes onto the table, and walked off—then I felt embarrassed.

  I’d been thinking about the incident ever since. Her coffee cup in particular gave me pause. This woman was happy to pay $4 for a cup of coffee (nutritional value: nil), but balked at the thought of shelling out $1.75 for a bunch of radishes (replete with Vitamin C and potassium, among other valuable nutrients).

  Which explains why I’d been philosophizing about radishes all week—and yet still hadn’t come up with a solid answer to Emmett’s question. How much should we charge for radishes today? I supposed that it depended on the frame of reference. What you feel comfortable charging or what you are willing to pay comes down to which value—or valuation—system you subscribe to. And as a grower, my value system had definitely undergone a major shift from my days spent on the other side of the stand.

  One way we could determine our radish price was using simple Econ 101: Supply and Demand. We could charge the price that rested at the intersection of the supply and demand curves: just what people were willing to pay for the amount of produce on offer, and no more. In the real world, which doesn’t generally run according to economics graphs, this meant looking at our neighbors and charging what they were charging. (Or, if we wanted to get sneaky, a penny under.)

  There was a bit of a problem with this simple system, though. Should we charge what our neighbors at the farmers’ market were charging—or do we price our produce according to the supermarket sale at the Safeway across the street? Or at the health food store down the block? Was a radish just a radish, or were some radishes better than others? Was a farmers’ market radish that was not organically certified (but was grown organically) of higher quality than an organically certified Safeway radish that was probably trucked in from Mexico?

  Or we could look at our radish price from a grower’s perspective. As a farmer, I have a distinct urge to charge people based on how difficult a given plant is to grow—and on whether or not it naturally replenishes itself. I’m happy to provide customers with big bunches of chard for $1.50, even though I’ve seen other stands charge $2 for half as much. Why? It’s simple. Our chard plants will replace the leaves we harvested this morning by next week, and aren’t likely to stop doing so anytime soon. Heck, if you drop by the field, I’ll give it to you free.

  Emmett washed and bunched French Breakfast radishes for market.

  On the other side of the spectrum sits the humble radish. Sure, it’s a relatively quick grower: ready to go in a month or so. But like all roots and tubers, after I pluck it from the ground it’s done. That bunch of French Breakfast radishes that I twist-tie together and place on the table won’t give me seeds, won’t resprout into a second radish crop, won’t do anything other than remove nitrogen and potassium from my soil.

  And that was the source of my radish angst. I looked at a bunch of radishes and thought: this is seven or eight entire plants. Seven or eight lives, if you want to get freaky about it. Was a quarter a plant too much to ask? (And really, what was the difference between $1.50 and $1.75 anyway, besides a sense of consumer pride?)

  But that was applying an external moral framework, I know. It even dared to suggest that a commodity possesses intrinsic value, as opposed to simple market value.

  There was one final valuation system we could consider—one that lay between the poetic farmer and the economist. It was based on fuzzy terms like quality, freshness, rarity, and even branding, but this system has weight in today’s market. It suggests that a radish is a radish—but some radishes are better than others, and they come from better places.

  First of all, there was the freshness angle. My radishes were plucked from the field that morning, placed under damp towels, and rushed to market; Safeway’s were probably picked last week and refrigerated ever since. And my radishes were an heirloom French Breakfast variety—elongated, pink, with white at the top—whereas grocery stores usually stick to the run-of-the-mill round, maroon sort. Furthermore, customers were more than welcome to come visit my field, where they could question me about my growing practices. I doubt a grocery store would be so accommoda
ting, because they probably have no idea who actually grows their produce. So my radish offered three things that other radishes didn’t: guaranteed freshness, heirloom status, and complete openness about the story behind the food.

  There were other, less tangible qualities about my produce, too. Shopping at the farmers’ market is a feel-good experience. I’m not ashamed to admit it: there’s absolutely a sense of charity, of supporting local farmers, in addition to the simple pleasure of attending a market—the music of the hometown band, the heaps of colorful vegetables, the artisanal cheeses, the aromatic bouquets of local flowers, the farmers who are willing to troubleshoot your backyard garden troubles or offer you tips for cooking summer squash. Many locals value this experience and the certainty that the produce they purchase is locally grown, knowing that the money they spend is going to a good cause. And for many customers, shopping at the farmers’ market becomes a social outing and even something of a status symbol, a place to see and be seen by friends.

  Even fuzzier, we already had customers who preferred our produce to that of other stands—or preferred us, or perhaps preferred our story of being young farmers just starting out. Part of that might have related to our “brand”—the real-life farm-startup adventures with which we regaled customers—but part of it did relate to tangible quality (and extra work on our part). We plucked our radishes at the peak of ripeness to ensure tender, crunchy roots, and we offered a variety of heritage radishes that customers couldn’t get in the grocery store. Long, slender, blushing French Breakfast bunches were heaped next to the pert, festive little bouquets of white, lavender, and mauve Easter Egg bulbs. So perhaps a radish wasn’t just a radish: there were radishes, and then there were fresh, local, heritage radishes, harvested when young and tender by young and tender (and slightly foolish) farmers.

  It was about this time—mulling cost over in my head and trying to justify our prices—that I started to feel guilty again. Like I was part of some sort of liberal farming elite. Here I was, hoping to feed my local community—but in order to make money, I was charging folks a premium for local produce.

  Who was, and wasn’t, willing or able to pay that premium? Mirroring the different value systems were different types of customers. There were those who treated the farmers’ market like a flea market, hunting around for the best prices. Then there were those who just walked around smiling, immersed in the experience, and bought whatever produce struck their fancy, from whatever farmer they happened to come across. And of course, there were the foodies, who usually had a farmer they’d frequented for years—and loved their piatta onions, or butter leaf lettuce, and bought it every week. But this sort also sometimes ventured around the market to find the best produce available, price be damned.

  The final sort of customer was the bearer of the WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) certificate, who zeroed in on stands—like ours—that had posted WIC signs. They were limited to the stands that were enrolled in WIC—a government program that gives low-income mothers certificates with which to purchase fresh food at farmers’ markets. Farmers weren’t allowed to give them cash change for the certificates, so we’d throw in more produce until the total came to an even dollar amount.

  Beets (taxonomically identical to chard) proved to be a good winter crop. They grew slowly but survived the frost.

  So what was the optimal price for a radish? It depends on which customer you ask or which farmer. Should it be enough for me to live comfortably or enough for a working single mother to purchase it? Should there be a sliding scale? Some people consider the dollar, bandied about in a free market, to be their sole value system. But we don’t provide emergency services only to those who can pay for them. People who can afford emergency rooms, firefighters, and policemen subsidize these services for those who can’t. Society realizes that some commodities are life giving and therefore priceless. And what is food if not life?

  Emmett was handling a transaction with a family friend, and another customer walked up. “How much for a bunch of radishes?” she asked me, peering at the price list to try to find it.

  I sized her up: a sweatpants-wearing, toddler-toting mom. “For you,” I say, “$1.25.”

  “I’ll take a bunch,” she said, “I love them with butter.”

  Radishes survived long after fall’s vibrancy had passed. Peppers and tomatoes had withered to the ground; corn leaves were wispy brown paper flecked with mildew, any abandoned ears shriveled and fuzzy inside. In the field, the radishes remained, accompanied by other survivors like kale, chard, beets, and broccoli. Frost tolerant, these lucky few would last the California winter into the next spring.

  The local farmers’ markets had closed with the proverbial whimper. In the last weeks, they had been more craft showcases than a place to purchase local produce. Even the farmers turned artisan, peddling garlic braids and handmade wreaths, wool blankets from their sheep, shellacked gourds cut into birdhouses. Most customers were more excited to start Christmas shopping than to start eating lots of kale, and who could blame them? To tell you the truth, we were excited to set our sights on Christmas and bid the farmers’ market farewell. ’Tis the season, and all that. We were tired and needed the rest. We were ready to have a few months where we could be normal people, sleeping in on the weekends, rising after the sun does, going outside on our own terms instead of the market’s.

  With the farmers’ markets closed, we were selling produce to customers whose e-mail addresses we’d gathered in the last few weeks before the market’s demise. We’d e-mail out the week’s availability to these customers, and they’d e-mail in their order. We harvested for them and left the produce in the basement with an honor system jar for collecting money.

  It was a Sunday, and Emmett asked me to help him harvest an order for the Green Grocer (a local grocery store that carries only foods produced within 250 miles of the store’s geographic location). They’d requested our radishes and arugula, so on a frosty, foggy winter morning, we drove down to the field. I was bundled up in jeans, a pajama shirt I’d worn to bed, and two jackets, a scarf wrapped around my neck and a wool hat pulled down over my unwashed hair. Emmett asked if I’d mind harvesting the radishes.

  When it’s cold and wet, I much prefer yanking out roots to snipping salad greens, so I began busily pulling up French Breakfast radishes, selectively harvesting only the largest specimens. As I moved down the row, Emmett called out and suggested that I start at the base of the row and harvest every single plant. “We have a lot of radishes ready right now,” he said, “so let’s just pull them all.”

  Emmett’s always trying to tell me how to harvest. Really, who crowned him the farmer king? Why can’t he just let me do things my way?

  I good-naturedly grumbled, but left it at that. Opting out of the argument rather than into it (a rare move on my part), I relented and restarted the harvest at the beginning of the row. As I pulled out the radishes with my right hand, I transferred them into a large bunch in my left, holding them by the greens for easy washing later. A flash caught my eye, and I noticed something strange around one of the bulbs.

  “Um,” I said aloud, “There’s a ring on this one.”

  As I was trying to figure out how a ring had ended up on a radish—and starting to realize that perhaps it wasn’t accidental—Emmett materialized by my side and asked me to marry him. I was unshowered, wearing clothes I’d slept in, with hands dirty from harvesting radishes. I said yes, or something like it. He picked me up in a great bear hug and spun me around the field. Everything so barren and empty, just the four rows of overwintering crops—but already tiny green stitches in the space that was ploughed under, wild mustard greens and bell beans sprouting that would be hip-high by spring.

  He put me back down. In the gray world, we kissed for a while.

  “Really?” I asked. “What made you decide now was the right time?”

  That day, Emmett explained, was the four-year anniversary of our first date. There was no Green Grocer order; Emmett h
ad made it up. And he’d placed the ring on a radish seedling three weeks earlier so the plant would grow up around the ring, holding it in place when I pulled it.

  And the timing—well, it just felt right. He was ready. I always had been.

  The next few hours before we started making the requisite phone calls were ours. We decided to celebrate by taking the rest of the day off. This was new territory, but we spent the afternoon at a familiar place: the fish hatchery at Lake Sonoma. We’d been there many times before, and had a knack for visiting when the museum and hatchery were closed and there was absolutely nothing to see. But it was winter, the river was high, and the salmon were starting to move. We stood on a bridge, lording over the dark pools of the fish ladder, squinting to try and catch sight of a salmon swirling in the current. After a while, we walked through the hatchery proper, out back to the blue grow-out tanks full of young salmon that would be released later in the season.

  A river otter slipped into one of the tanks, nabbed his pescetarian lunch, and, fish in mouth, shimmied out of the tank. He waltzed across the sidewalk and scampered back behind a “Wilderness Rehabilitation—Keep Out” sign. On the cement he left behind perfect wet paw-prints and a telltale dotted line of drops from the fish’s tail.