根据下列句子所给汉语意思或单词首字母，写出空缺处各单词的正确形式。1. The headmaster wants to have the opening speech d______ by our English teacher next month.2. Dr Yuan searched for a way to increase rice harvests without _____ (扩大) the area of the fields. 3. The problem is so ______ (令人迷惑) that few people can work it out. 4. There is a general ______ (信念) that things will soon get better. 5. The boy lifted the stone with all his ______ (力量). 6. Many of the young ______ (一代) enjoy foreign music and films.7. I know you don`t like her but try not to make it so ______ (明显). 8. A recent survey showed that 53.3 percent of China"s middle-class people were not s______ (满意) with
their physical and mental conditions.
9. World Expos have excited and______ (鼓舞) more and more people in the world.
10. By r______ (减少)excess emissions (过度排放) of greenhouse gases, we can put the low-carbon
lifestyle into practice gradually.
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根据下列句子所给汉语意思或单词首字母，写出空缺处各单词的正确形式。1. The headmaster wants to have the opening speech d______ by our English teacher next month.2. Dr Yuan searched for a way to increase rice harvests without _____ (扩大) the area of the fields. 3. The problem is so ______ (令人迷惑) that few people can work it out. 4. There is a general ______ (信念) that things will soon get better. 5. The boy lifted the stone with all his ______ (力量). 6. Many of the young ______ (一代) enjoy foreign music and films.7. I know you don`t like her but try not to make it so ______ (明显). 8. A recent survey showed that 53.3 percent of China"s middle-class people were not s______ (满意) with
their physical and mental conditions.
9. World Expos have excited and______ (鼓舞) more and more people in the world.
10. By r______ (减少)excess emissions (过度排放) of greenhouse gases, we can put the low-carbon
lifestyle into practice gradually.
根据下列句子所给汉语意思或单词首字母，写出空缺处各单词的正确形式。1. The headmaster wants to have the opening speech d______ by our English teacher next month.2. Dr Yuan searched for a way to increase rice harvests without _____ (扩大) the area of the fields. 3. The problem is so ______ (令人迷惑) that few people can work it out. 4. There is a general ______ (信念) that things will soon get better. 5. The boy lifted the stone with all his ______ (力量). 6. Many of the young ______ (一代) enjoy foreign music and films.7. I know you don`t like her but try not to make it so ______ (明显). 8. A recent survey showed that 53.3 percent of China"s middle-class people were not s______ (满意) with
their physical and mental conditions.
9. World Expos have excited and______ (鼓舞) more and more people in the world.
10. By r______ (减少)excess emissions (过度排放) of greenhouse gases, we can put the low-carbon
lifestyle into practice gradually. 科目:难易度:最佳答案
1. delivered
2. expanding
3. puzzling
5. strength 6. generation
7. obvious
8. satisfied
9. inspired
10. reducing 
解析知识点:&&基础试题拔高试题热门知识点最新试题
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We&went&for&a&walk&in&the&fields，my&mother，my&son&and&I．The&sun&was&shining，the&birds&were&（36）___；patches&of&green，big&and&small，light&and&dark，formed&a&beautiful&picture&on&this&piece&of&land&in&south&China．（37）___of&these&gave&us&one&thing，the&vitality（活力）&of&life．My&mother&and&I&walked&in&front，followed&by&my&wife&and&son．Our&（38）___suddenly&shouted&out．&A&mother&and&son&in&front，another&mother&and&son&behind．&We&all&（39）___．Later，there&were&differences&between&us：My&mother&was&in&poor&health，and&even&a&short&walk&would&make&her&feel&very&（40）___．So&she&wanted&to&take&the&main&road，for&it&was&wide&and&smooth，（41）___my&son&preferred&the&little&path&with&more&interesting&things．It&was&up&to&me&to&make&the&final&decision．I&tried&to&work&out&a&win-win&choice，but&（42）___．Finally，I&decided&against&my&son．So，I&said，&Let's&take&the&main&road．&But&my&mother&changed&her&mind．&We'd&better&take&the&（43）___path．You'll&have&to&carry&me&on&your&back&in&places&I&can't&walk&across，&my&mother&said&to&me．Then&we&picked&our&way&along&the&little&path&toward&the&flowers，the&trees，and&the&pond．They&were&all&bathed&（沐浴着）in&the&（44）___．When&we&came&to&a&certain&place，I&crouched&（蹲下）down&to&let&my&mother&get&on&my&back．My&wife&followed&my&example&and&（45）___our&son．Both&my&wife&and&I&walked&slowly&and&carefully&because&we&thought&we&had&the&whole&world&on&our&backs．
36．A．singing
B．falling
37．A．Some
38．A．daughter
C．student
39．A．shouted
C．laughed
40．A．excited
C．surprised
41．A．but
42．A．passed
43．A．little
44．A．moon
45．A．carried
B．encouraged
C．touched．
作业帮用户
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singing 唱歌；falling 下落；biding 等候 根据句意&The sun was shining，the birds were
_．阳光明媚，鸟儿在 _&推测，再结合选项，可知此处应选 singing
鸟儿在唱歌，答案为A37 C
根据上句句意&阳光明媚，鸟儿在唱歌；大块小块的新绿随意地铺着，有的浓，有的淡，在中国南方的田野上构成了一幅美丽的图画．&可知这里的一切都是美好的，所以这里应该选&全部&的意思，意为&这一切都使人想着一样东西--生命的活力．&故选C38 B 考查名词
一起散步的有四个人，我的母亲，妻子，儿子和我．根据修饰词&Our&可知，再结合选项可知，这里应该选&boy&，意为&我们的小家伙&答案为B39 C 考查动词
shouted 呼喊；cried 哭；laughed 笑 根据句意&小家伙突然叫起来：‘前面是妈妈和儿子，后面也是妈妈和儿子．&我们都 _&再结合选项可知，这里应该是&笑&的意思，说明儿子的话把我们都逗笑了．故选C40 B 考查形容词
excited 激动的；tired 劳累的；surprised 令人惊讶的
根据句意&我的母亲身体不好，走很短的路都会让她觉得很 _&可知，这里是&劳累的&意思，故选B41 A
根据句意&因此她想走大路，大路宽阔平坦；_ 我的儿子更喜欢走小路，小路有意思&可知这里表示转折的意思，故选A but42 B 考查动词
passed 通过；failed 失败；agreed 同意 根据&Finally，I decided against my son．最后，我决定委屈儿子．&可知他没有想出两全的办法，故选B 43 A
考查形容词
根据下文&Then we picked our way along the little path&可知此处应选&little&故选A44 C
根据上文&The sun was shining&可知，此处应选sun，故答案为C45 A
carried 拿，扛；搬运； encouraged 鼓励；touched接触；触动
根据&My wife followed my example&可知，妻子效仿我也背起了儿子，故选A
为您推荐：
我们在田野里散步，我的母亲，我的儿子和我．阳光明媚，鸟儿在唱歌；大块小块的新绿随意地铺着，有的浓，有的淡，在中国南方的田野上构成了一幅美丽的图画．这一切都使人想着一样东西------生命的活力． 我和母亲走在前面，我的妻子和儿子走在后面．小家伙突然叫起来：&前面是妈妈和儿子，后面也是妈妈和儿子．&我们都笑了．后来发生了分歧：我的母亲身体不好，走很短的路都会让她觉得很累．因此她想走大路，大路宽阔平坦；但是我的儿子更喜欢走小路，小路有意思．一切都取决于我．我想想出一个两全的办法，但是失败了．最后，我决定委屈儿子．因此，我说：&我们走大路吧．&但是我的母亲改变了主意，&我们还是走小路吧．我走不过去的时候你就背着我．&我的母亲跟我说．然后我们沿着那条路，向着那花儿、大树和池塘走去．它们都沐浴在阳光下．当我们到了一处地方，我蹲下来，背起了母亲，妻子也跟我一样，背起了儿子．我和妻子都是慢慢地，走得很仔细，因为我们觉得在我们背上的，就是整个世界．
本题考点：
考点点评：
做这样的题，应先通读全文，了解短文大意．然后仔细阅读，联系上下文再结合选项，选出正确答案．最后再把答案带入文中，认真检查一遍．
扫描下载二维码Buy Local * Eat Fresh * Live Well
The Alleged Farm is located in the Town of Easton, in the rolling hills of southern Washington County, New York. We farm on fields under continuous cultivation since 1788 and take our stewardship of the land seriously. For us, that means a commitment to sustainable practices such as crop rotation, controlled grazing, minimal tillage and the use of cover crops and compost in order to promote and maintain the health of the earth.
We are also committed to growing tasty and healthy crops. We believe that fresh local produce tastes better and that crops grown without the use of synthetic fertilizer and pesticide are better for you and for everything that lives on our farm. We do everything we can—from choosing varieties to choosing when to harvest a crop—to ensure that our customers receive the best possible produce.
If you want to try some of our produce—and we grow everything from artichokes to zucchini–you can join our CSA or visit our stand at the Glens Falls farmers' market. Individuals and businesses can also contact the farm to arrange purchases.
Thomas Christenfeld
The Alleged Farmer
Early Season Discount good through 2/28/18
Real food from clean soil at a decent price. Get a share in our CSA and eat well all season long. Every week, you will receive a generous array of fresh produce right from our fields. And not just any old vegetables. Sure, we grow the crops everyone recognizes, but we have varieties no store carries, things both old and new that we have chosen for their taste, their vigor and their looks. Deep purple Magic Molly potatoes. White Satin carrots. Mottistone speckled lettuce. Red Dragon napa cabbage, Cherokee Green tomatoes. Plus all sorts of celeriac, kohlrabi,
lemon grass, tatsoi, Thai basil, shell beans, cress, fennel, daikon.
In addition to all that produce, you get to know where your food grows, how it is grown and who grows it. That does not seem like a lot to ask for. After all, you are eating this stuff. But we have created a food system that largely tries to hide such information. It is far cheaper and more efficient to disregard such questions–for food producers, that is. Plus, who really wants to know how Hot Pockets come to be? But real food comes from real places and you have every right to know more about what you eat. That knowledge is built into the CSA. And if you have any questions about what we are up to, you are free to come out and see for yourself, poke around, ask questions, pick a pepper for yourself.
And if you sign up for a CSA share by February 28th, you get something else: our early season discount. That’s $25 off our share price–a week of vegetables for free–just for joining now. So join now and get a season of real food at a great price.
Thank you for supporting the farming this season and giving us time to grow your food and think our thoughts. We have enjoyed doing both, and we hope you have enjoyed the food from our farm.
This week’s share: Bok choi, Napa cabbage, Carrots, Garlic, Kale, Kossak kohlrabi, Leeks, Lettuce, Onion, Peppers, Hot peppers, Rutabaga, Sage, Green tomatoes, Tatsoi, Winter squash
I got an email yesterday from a yoga studio about their post-election meditation program. We like to think of our democracy as perhaps our defining national trait, but what could be more American than turning months of ugly campaigning into a marketing pitch for a self-improvement program? In some strange way it almost gives me hope.
And, to be fair, meditation might not be a bad idea. No doubt, we could all use a little quiet time when this is over. Not that we will get it. There is no quite time in this country any more.
Apparently, as soon as we have the ability to do some something faster we cannot resist. Speed has its advantages, particularly, say, if you are running away from a bear, going to fight a fire or steaming some fresh peas. It is a big help to have a barrel washer that significantly reduces the time we spend cleaning carrots, and the water wheel transplanter helped us get in six beds of garlic in surprisingly little time. In the past few days that has meant we spent a lot less time being cold and wet, which we appreciate.
But microwaveable scrambled eggs? Sure, only a fully developed, wealthy nation has the time, infrastructure and knowledge to come up with and market microwaveable scrambled eggs. So I guess we can be proud of ourselves. But honestly, why? Even if you shave 30 seconds off the time it takes to make scramble eggs out of eggs, in return you give up flavor, texture and any real say in what goes into your food. Can a little bit of your time be worth that? Some things are better done a little slower.
Such as expressing one’s opinion on current events. Maybe when something happens you have an instant reaction, a sense of disgust or anger or disappointment, or maybe you are just tired and hungry or stubbed your toe a moment before. Whatever. That feeling you have, you can attach blame and send it out to the world right away. Why wait to see if it passes? Why try to understand the context? Or hang on for further details? Or question the source? Or question yourself? Or stop and wonder why anyone else needs to encounter your every emotion?
I admit some events seem to call for swift condemnation. This, one says to oneself, this cannot stand. But will a few minutes of contemplation really diminish the force of that condemnation? Have you failed somehow while you sit there quietly getting your thoughts and facts and grammar straight?
It seems the answer for a lot of people is yes. Because a lot of other people have used those few minutes to get their reaction out ahead of you. You have lost the race. Yes, those instantaneous reactions are illiterate, illogical, ill tempered, but they still beat your thoughts out into the world.
I know we highly value competitiveness, but why don’t we ever compete to see who can thoughtfully enlighten other most effectively, who can best resist rising to an insult, who can quell their anger and calmly get on with something useful? Just getting somewhere first, that usually only matters in meaningless endeavors. Say you are going to fight a fire. Yes, response time matters, but rushing there in your pajamas while the slow poke members of the fire company collect their gear, that does not make you a winner or a hero or particularly useful in any way. It makes you an idiot.
Well, we have people all over this country running unprepared to perceived conflagrations, and it turns out all they can do when they get there is jump up and down and yell about how they feel. That has really been a big help.
One of the pleasures of real cooking is the way it makes you take your time, makes you build up a dish slowly, going patiently through the steps in a sensible order, intentionally melding disparate ingredients, working thoughtfully towards a composed, balanced, satisfying result. Cooking well requires preparation, patience, practice, knowledge, common sense, taste, discretion, generosity, effort. It speaks to our admirable desire to be productive and engaged and to our ability to find satisfaction in doing.
For me, farming simply grew out of cooking. I wanted fresh produce, and while I was at it I figured I might as well share the crops with others because that is what you do with food. Plus it seemed way better than having a job. In essence, growing your ingredients is just an extension of cooking from the finished dish back to the earth. And like cooking, farming’s satisfaction lies mostly in the doing, in the act of working towards making something.
And like cooking, farming takes time. There’s efficiency, but not haste or instant gratification. We don’t give in to passing whims, lash out at every frustration, vent and cry and stomp our feet each time the world reminds us we are not entirely in control. Which is perhaps why so many in the modern world view farmers as slow, possibly stupid creatures. No doubt, we often look that way out there in the field, plodding along in the rain and wind, quiet, absorbed, determined.
But what the world seems to have forgotten in its haste is that it is in just such conditions that actual thought thrives. Sure, we have fatigue and back pain and wet sock. A passing angry cloud can unleash destruction. Deer and bugs make it there business to thwart us. Farming is not designed for comfort and ease. But it is designed for reflection. The pace, the simple physicality, the repetition, the quiet, they all provide ample time and space to think things over. Out in the field, with your hands engaged, your knees on the earth, birds calling to one another from the hedge rows, you can play around with ideas, find intriguing connections, discover the humor in things that merely irk others. You can go at a thought or emotion from every angle, prod it, shake it about a bit, discard it silently.
I expect the modern world would say” so what? Where does that get you? ” But maybe the modern world should stop for a moment and take a look at itself and wonder if just maybe it is missing out on something. Like a little quiet time and a proper home-cooked meal.
Vegetable notes: Kossak kohlrabi was bred as a large storage kohlrabi. So you can put yours away for a while if you want. But it also happens to have particularly good eating quality. It stays crunchy even at a large size, and I think it’s a bit sweeter too.
I really don’t understand what rutabagas want. We have had little success with them in recent years, but for some reason they liked this hot, dry growing season. That is not what you expect from a hardy northern storage root crop. Or maybe it is. When my English relatives visited in the summer they always wanted to go out and sit in the sun on the hottest days. They burned themselves quite pink, of course, but they could not resist. So I guess those northerners just crave warmth. As for what you want to do with a rutabaga, you can chop it up and roast it, or mash it with a little cream and sage and nutmeg, or grate it with other root vegetables and make a sort of latke.
Tatsoi and bok choi (the dark and light banded greens) are closely related. You could certain cook them together. Or you could act like a fancy chef, give them different treatments and plate them up as Asian greens two ways.
This week’s share: Broccoli or Chinese broccoli, Cress, Daikon, Garlic, Lettuce, Onion, Peppers, Hot peppers, Pie pumpkin, Bel Fiore radicchio, Shallots, Sweet potatoes
I feel like it may be time to talk about the pie contest again.
Time in the sense, sure, that it will take place less in than two weeks so it is a topic much on people’s minds. Indeed, one might even say we have become a little fixated by it, obsessing over the smallest details, trying to finder deeper social meaning in every nuance, going over the potential ramifications of every outcome. So, yes, it is a timely topic.
But let’s take a step back and grapple with a more fundamental question. Why have a pie contest at all? What’s the point? Surely we could skip it, carry on as we have in recent times, and life would be fine, or good enough anyway, which is maybe as much as we ought to hope for these days. These contests, potentially so useful, so essential even, they just seem to get out of hand in the current cultural climate and bring out the worst in people. Maybe we should just try to like everybody’s pie equally.
And who really benefits from the pie contest anyway?
Well, I can answer that one easily. The farm crew. As the pie contest judges, we get to sit around and eat pie. True, we have to pay a little attention, enough to pass some semblance of judgement. But mostly we just eat pie. Which may sound a tad unfair, but let me point out that if you want in on this gig all you have to do is come work on the farm for the season. Yes, it is really that simple. It is surprising more people don’t avail themselves of this opportunity.
Actually, the winner of the pie contest benefits too because there is a prize. And I would like to think everyone who enters a pie benefits at least a little from having taken on the challenge. Plus, everyone else at the event gets to eat pie too. The judges try every pie, but we only have small slices so there is plenty left for all the noncontestant/non-judge attendees, who are free to pick and choose and savor their pie selection as critically or uncritically as they want. In fact, the only people who don’t benefit are the ones who don’t turn up.
But why pie? I am tempted to answer that with the question, why not pie? That strikes me as a much harder question to answer. I certainly don’t have an answer. As for why pie, well for a start I like pie. But more importantly, it seems like quintessential farm food to me. This view is largely shaped by being told when I was quite young about a family friend’s childhood on a farm in Indiana, where she and her mother made two pies every morning for breakfast. At least, that’s the story as I know it. Since she may well be reading this right now–she has won the pie contest multiple times–she may want to offer corrections. Not that it will matter. Having carried around this image happily for 45 years, I am not about to let facts get in the way.
It is slightly possible that this story even played a significant role in my decision to become a farmer. Who would not consider taking up a job that involves fresh pie for breakfast every day? Even if the pie were mediocre at best it might be worth it, and having had Jan’s pies many times, I know that farm baked pies are not mediocre. You can put up with a lot of frustration and pain in return for a regular supply of three berry pie.
I just forgot to marry someone raised on a farm and it turns out those pies don’t magically appear once you start plowing. I have had to make my own pies, but what with farming and all, I don’t have time to turn them out at nearly the rate I had hoped for, and never for breakfast. So I have had to come up with other ways to make pies come to the farm. Such as holding a pie contest.
To really live the dream, I ought to hold the contest at around 10 in the morning (while that might seem late for breakfast, keep in mind that in order to fully enjoy a farm breakfast you have to do a couple of hours of chores beforehand), and give extra point for people who supply a mug of good hot coffee. But I am a semi-reasonable man. I know that is too much to ask. By which I mean I might not get any entries in the contest at that hour, so what is the point? You don’t have to be a farmer to know that it is far better to have pies later in the day than no pie at all.
Vegetable notes: All right, so I lied. Not only is not all kale for the last few weeks, but you don’t even have any kale this week. But you do have some Upland cress. It is related to water cress, but as you might guess from the name, does not grow in water. Like its aquatic relative, Upland cress has a distinctive peppery taste. You can add it to salad or add some leaves at the last minute to soup for a mildly crunchy accent, or puree it in chicken stock with some lemon juice and garlic.
You can use your pumpkin purely for decorative purposes if you wish, but it is a pie pumpkin, which means it was bred to have tasty flesh suitable for use in, um… well, something.
I have only grown sweet potatoes twice before, without much success. But they did a little better this year, so for the first time ever we get to hand some out. We have been curing them for a couple of weeks to bring out the sweetness (uncured, they are bland and starchy), which seems to have worked.
Some of you have normal head broccoli. I am confident you can figure out what to do with it. But some of you have Chinese broccoli, a bunch of thick stalks with blue green leaves and little florets. You can steam the whole thing, add a dash of soy sauce, a few drops of sesame oil, maybe a bit of chile oil, some crushed garlic. Or chop it and add it to soup. Or stir fry it with a lot of ginger and garlic and some thin slices of chicken or pork, perhaps some strips of pepper.
The daikon is the large white root. It is a giant Japanese radish. You want to peel it. The flesh is crisp and milder than a regular (from our perspective radish). You can just eat it raw or grate it and make a salad or steam it or pickle it.
This week’s share: Beet greens, Carrots, Garlic, Kale, Lettuce, Onions, Parsley, Peppers, Hot peppers, Radishes, Green tomatoes, Delicata and Jester winter squash
We have a farm worker in the house. I am not sure if that sounds like some sort of modern lifestyle boast or a call for an exterminator, but Alex has come for the last two months of the season and we had to put him somewhere. The only other immediately available option was our tiny trailer, and Alex is 6+. Putting him in there seemed cruel and maybe even physically impossible. So we took on a large just 21-year-old Texan roommate. Given that when Sam is home we have a large 20-year-old roommate, it has not felt too odd.
Well, probably odder for poor Alex, who has taken on two middle aged roommates rather set in there ways, one of whom also happens to be his boss. Of course, being 21, Alex is probably more adaptable. Not that it always feels that way when you are 21. While you have had less time to develop habits, you often feel more passionate about things. You will look back thirty years later and wonder how you could possibly have gotten that worked up over over matters that turn out not to matter, how you could have been so sure about your answers to unanswerable questions, how you could have believed so firmly in your understanding when everything around you reminds you how little you know. But at 21 you don’t know that.
Actually, Alex seems pretty flexible about life. He is willing to take chances, such as moving from Austin to live with old people and work as a peon. But he did arrive with certain habits. Well, some habits, a few books, a guitar, cooking pots, the clothes on his back and a lot of mason jars. He makes his kefir and kambucha and green tea in his jars, all part of his effort to eat properly. He avoids soy beans because they contain estrogen-like substances, cooks most things in duck fat, won’t eat commercial mayonnaise, and most notably, prefers to cook everything very slowly at a low temperature. His crock pot gets a lot of use. About once a week he will stick a chicken in the crock pot and cook it for a day or so (this past weekend he actually cooked one for three days).
Alex’s cooking led me to suggest to him the other day that he open a true slow food restaurant, an establishment at which you would place your order and then have to come back the next day to get your meal. It is a ridiculous idea, of course, but one that might work in certain cities. It has, at least, the merit of making diners give more serious contemplation to the work involved in producing their food.
Even elaborately composed plates in top restaurants, plates covered with splashes and slashes and dots of different reductions, with foams and delicate geometric constructions, with micro greens and petals arranged just so, plates that proudly speak of the care and effort the kitchen has taken on your behalf, even these plates don’t really tell you just how much work went into the food. While they trumpet the particular artistry of the chef, they tend to say little if anything about the guys up at dawn to prep everything, to peel and clean and simmer and skim and skin and scale, not to mention the people scrubbing and scraping and degreasing–deliberately not to mention because who wants to think about dirty dishes while eating an expensive meal.
So that suggestion (or even proclamation sometimes) that your meal was made from scratch to order just for you, it’s not entirely true. If it were, if nobody even touched an ingredient until you placed your order, you would be waiting a lot longer for your food to come to the table.
Or, more precisely, you probably would not be waiting. You would go to a restaurant that had done lots of the work in advance so you could get fed quicker. It is all well and good as an ethical and political principle to make people aware of all the work that goes into the food, but it is maybe not the greatest business plan. You would have to be strangely committed to your beliefs to run your enterprise that way.
Of course, as it occurred to me after joking with Alex about his alleged slow food restaurant, that’s how I run this farm. You pay me for fresh produce, and then you wait while I choose the seeds, wait while I start the seedlings, wait while a plow the fields, wait while I plant, wait while I weed and trellis and mulch and prune, wait until finally months later the crops have grown and ripened and finally we hand them out to you.
I sure hope you were not sitting there at the dining table the whole time wondering when you will be fed.
Vegetable notes: As promised, here is some kale. And some other stuff.
I know I said it would all be fall crops now, but we have managed to keep the peppers going under a row cover and there were still some tomatoes in the field house.
Not a lot of ripe tomatoes, obviously, but by this time in the season the ripe ones have started to lose their flavor anyway. Eating them just becomes a sad reminder of how they ought to taste. We actually pulled two of the tomato rows the other day even though they had survived the frost because there’s not much point in keeping them going longer. But they still had a lot of green fruits on them, so we picked those. Think of them as a different vegetable, something related to tomatoes, but not actually tomatoes.
I would recommend cutting them into thick slices, coating them in cornmeal, and frying them. You could serve them with a mayonnaise into which you have blended a roasted, peeled NewMex, a clove of garlic, lemon juice and parsley. You could also make a pureed salsa with them, which would be rather like a tomatillo salsa. Or you could slice them up, cover them with hot, spiced vinegar, and let them sit in that for a few days, and you will have some pickled green tomato that would go well with cheese or grilled meat.
This week’s share: Chard, Dill, Eggplant, Leeks, Lettuce, Highlander and Red Marble onions, Peppers, Hot peppers, Nicola potatoes, Sage, Tomatoes, Squash, Acorn winter squash
We spent all Monday preparing for the first fall frost. That involved taking in the last of some crops that would die in the freeze and protecting others from the cold. In other words, we were both preparing for and delaying–at least for a little while–the end of the summer growing season.
Which is an accurate reflection of a farmer’s feelings about that first frost. You put a lot of work into your crops and you want to keep them going as long as possible. But you put a lot of work into your crops and you would not mind a break, especially from picking squash. So you have to choose what you really want to protect, and what you can give up on. Or sometimes you split the difference. For instance, we picked the eggplants down to a size we normally would not just in case, and then covered half the patch to see if we could keep the plants going long enough to size up all the fruit too small to pick, but we had a lot else to do before dark that seemed more important than trying to save all the eggplant so we left the other half to fend for itself.
While we worked to protect a lot of plants from the frost, we did nothing to help a lot of others. In fact, we looked forward to the freeze doing them in. I am talking, of course, of the squash. Well, them and the weeds. We still have a lot of fall crops out there, and when the frosts come and kill the weeds they do us a great favor.
Not, sadly, that all weeds are frost sensitive. But they certainly notice the change in weather. And most of them rush to produce as much seed as possible, knowing they will be out of luck if they put off that task any longer. They are certainly not bothering to grow much this late in the season. In fact, they have pretty well shut down for the year.
Except chickweed. Apparently at some point in its evolution chickweed looked around and noticed that all the other guys quit around the beginning of October and saw a nice opportunity for a low growing plant willing to put up with the cold. So now as the other plants drop their leaves and sunlight starts to filter through to the ground again, chickweed is there to make the uncontested most of it. It seems like a risky strategy, lurking about during the growing season while everyone else prospers in the long days and warm soil, just so you can have the bitter short days of late fall to yourself. But it works. And with a good root system in place from the late fall growth and a remarkable indifference to cold, chickweed’s also ready to grow earlier in the spring than almost anyone else. It will often carpet whole fields in March, long before even the dandelions have dared to pop up.
I find the chickweed incredibly annoying. Just when I think I am finished with weeds, it starts to spread, and if you let it go it grow into clumps you have to dig out with a shovel. It has a particularly fine time in the greenhouses, where it can grow all winter, and sometimes I have to tromp out through the snow (at least in winters when it snows) to go weed, which just seems wrong. But I also admire it’s guile. It’s hardly a prepossessing plant, and it lacks the brute force of pigweed or thistles. But it has found a simple trick that allows it to flourish: just sit and wait. It’s nice to see patience and modesty rewarded sometimes, and nice to see that someone else does not believe the growing season has ended just because some cold killed your summer crops. The chickweed just carries on, and so, for the moment, do we.
Vegetable notes: This is the last summery share of the season. Not that it is sumer any longer. But these summer crops in your box managed to hang on until now. After this it is all kale, which I guess actually does not sound like a threat any more. 10 year ago people would have groaned about having to eat this odd hippie roughage. But kale is having its day, and its imminent arrival might actually be cause for celebration in some households.
Well, it won’t actually just be kale for the rest of the season (the rest of the season being the next three Thursdays). We do have other fall crops, some of which may have fans of their own.
I am not sure we have had really heavy rain since July 1st. For the most part this has not been a huge problem. In fact, it is possible a lot of the time to forget just how dry it has been this season. But we are reminded from time to time. Such as when we dig potatoes. The plants managed to make a more or less normal number of tubers, but without much moisture those tubers never sized up. Not that Nicolas are huge potatoes, but they should not be this small. They still taste good (I think Nicolas are particularly tasty, and they have an excellent firm texture), but the yield is pretty poor.
Fortunately the peppers have not minded the lack of rain at all. I have been putting whole peppers on the grill to char the skin and then sticking them in a sealed contained in the fridge (where they keep for a couple of weeks) so that any time I feel like adding roasted pepper to a dish I can just pull one out and peel it and use it. Plus it is an easy way to deal with a pile of peppers if you are not sure what else to do with them.
This week’s share: Carrots, Cilantro, Endive, Fennel, Lettuce, Onions, Peppers, Hot peppers, Radishes, Shallots, Tomatoes, Delicata winter squash
Sometimes I get a paragraph or two into a newsletter and encounter the distinct feeling that I have already written more or less the same thing some previous year. A sense of deja ecrit, I suppose.
Naturally, given my propensities, having written down the phrase “deja ectrit”, I now find I cannot shake the feeling that I already put it in a newsletter at some point. Fortunately, however, I am reasonably confident that I have never before mentioned a feeling of deja ecrit about writing about having a sense of deja ecrit, otherwise I might get stuck in some kind of endless loop.
Whether or not I actually repeat myself–and if I were deeply enough concerned about it I could go back through old newsletters and check, which would provide me with an excellent excuse to procrastinate, but usually just seems a little too tedious–I do usually try to find a more or less new topic. The themes, I admit, tend to reappear. Bad weather, bemusement, funny amphibians, pain, frustration, dirt. But I feel like that’s what themes are supposed to do. Otherwise, they would not really be themes.
There’s one topic, however, I know I repeat year after year, and not just because writing more or less the same newsletter saves me a little effort at a point in the season when my energy has been sapped. Each season I take this opportunity to tell you about Landscapes for Landsake, the art show benefitting the Agricultural Stewarship Association, which takes place this weekend in Cambridge, because I think as supporters of a local farm you might be interested both in seeing a good art show in a lovely setting in the rural county where your vegetables are grown and in supporting an organization that shares your interest in helping to sustain local agriculture.
ASA holds conservation easement on farmland (including all of The Alleged Farm) in order to protect it from development and ensure that we maintain our agricultural land base in this region. Farms around here survive and thrive for a number of reasons, many of them particular to the farm, the method of farming or the product farmed. Perhaps it is business acumen or a deep understanding of animal husbandry or mechanical genius or marketing skills or management techniques or work ethic. But whatever else farmers need in order to succeed, they cannot do so without good dirt. And while there’s a lot of dirt in the world, good dirt is a limited vital natural resource. Especially good dirt in regions with a reasonable growing climate, a workable topography, the infrastructure needed to support farming, access to good markets and a strong farming tradition.
Washington County has all that, and for the moment farmers still use a lot of the good dirt around here to produce food. But there is no replacement for that dirt and no easy way to go back once you have built on it, so we need to protect it. And that is what ASA does. It works with farmers and landowners to remove the development rights from parcels of good agricultural soils in order to preserve that land for farming for good. That does not guarantee that all the farms around here will prosper, or even necessarily that this will remain a farming community. But it ensures that an absolutely basic requirement for farming success and sustainability remains available.
And that is good not just for farmers, but also for the people we feed, the people we employ, the people we buy from, the people who live around us and the people who come to see this beautiful place.
Vegetable notes: there were times this season i thought we might never have carrots. I have been seeding them all along, but a number of the seedings failed when we had no rain at all, and the ones that did come up mostly came up sparsely and have grown slowly, their development not at all aided by the deer who come and browse on the tops at night. I had not precisely given up on them, but I had stopped paying much attention. It seems neglect suited them. Maybe I should stop paying attention to a few other crops and see what happens.
Actually, I have not paid the peppers much heed recently either, and they have done well too. In this case, however, I left them alone because we had done a lot for them early on in the season and they were happy and healthy enough not to need any more help from me.
The assortment of hot peppers in your tomato bag goes potentially (different bags got different mixes of peppers) from fairly hot Jalape?os to extremely hot habaneros (shiny yellow, orange or red) to potentially lethally hot Bhut Jalokias (crinkly red/orange). Keep in mind that however hot the pepper is, it is less hot at the tip and much hotter up at the stem end, particularly around the seeds.
You can, of course, do what you want with your Delicata squash. but I think the easiest way to cook it is to stick it in a 400 degree oven whole and roast it until it is completely soft. It steams itself in its skin and then you can just scoop at the flesh.
This week’s share: Bok choi, Shell beans, Cabbage, Garlic, Onions, Parsley, Peppers, Hot peppers, Squash, Tomatoes
In case you are wondering, I do not spend a great deal of time thinking about what vegetables feel like.
Well, I suppose I do in a way care about their well being. Whether they are the warm enough, well fed, properly hydrated, have enough space, are safe. But I don’t know that I would actually talk about their well being in terms of feelings. I don’t spend much time worrying about their emotions. For all I know, our tomatoes feel grumpy and resentful all the time. But as long as we get decent production and good flavor and can keep the diseases at bay well into the season I don’t care.
It’s funny that having put that in words it almost sounds cruel. How can I be so indifferent to the emotions of all these plants under my protection, plants that are only on the farm because I forced them to be and that put all their effort into serving me? The relationship sounds a little abusive. My stated indifference sounds maybe a tad uncomfortably reminiscent of the sort of thing plantation owners used to say.
Except that I am talking about vegetables. I do not doubt there are farmers who actually talk seriously about their vegetables’ emotions, who believe some kind of universal spirit courses through all living things, who hear mother earth crying out in anguish over what we do. But, as you may have surmised, I am not one of them. Are plants more sophisticated than we think? Certainly. Is mankind’s existence tied to other living systems around us? Unquestionably. Do my tomatoes have emotions? No, they do not. As I like to remind my crew from time to time when things go wrong or they get too caught up in some task, these are just vegetables. You don’t have to take them that seriously.
All of which is one giant aside since what I meant all those paragraphs ago is that I don’t devote much of my day to contemplating the textures of my produce. I don’t sit around running my fingers over the various crops, admiring the rough skin of a melon, the smoothness of a pepper, the slight fuzziness of turnip leaves, the ridges on chard stems, the papery outer layer of onions. Not that texture is unimportant. In fact, in some crops it matters as much as flavor. But for the most par the texture just comes as part of the crop. All we can really do is mess it up by picking a crop at the wrong time or failing to cull the mutants or storing it improperly. If we decided we wanted a crunchy tomato or a lettuce with a pulpy interior we would be out of luck (or at the very least in for years of bizarrely selective breeding). We are pretty much just trying to let the vegetables be themselves.
I save most of my worries about texture for the soil. Soil texture matters a lot, and it is something I can affect, for better or worse. More often for worse, I fear, but we keep trying to improve (the soil and ourselves). We have had the greatest success in the field houses, where we have dug in huge amounts of compost and have irrigation so we can keep the soil moisture from going too far in either direction. All that organic matter and steady moisture help promote soil life, which is crucial.
Good soil texture is a little harder to achieve out in the fields. We have to deal with a number of soil types, with drainage issues, with shallow bedrock, with inconsistent rainfal–this year has gone from more or less nothing for weeks at a time to five inches one afternoon and then back to almost nothing, with odd winters, and with our own growing needs, which do not always coincide precisely with the right moments to work the soil. Work clay ground or till through a wet patch at the wrong moment and you will end up with some awful lumps for the rest of the season. We have some lumps.But we keep trying, keep putting in drain tile, keep adding compost, keep turning in cover crops, keep hoping we will at least make things a little better.
I dream of acres of dark dirt that feels soft and little springy when you squeeze it in your fist, almost like a sponge, but crumbly too, and loose enough that you can plunge your hand into it–loose enough that plunging your hand into it feels good. Find a patch of dirt like that and you will probably find a farmer there down on his knees just running the dirt through his fingers, staring blankly off into the distance, smiling a little.
Vegetable notes: Shell beans are dried beans that have not dried. Well, that or they are green beans that have gone too far. The point of green beans–from the bean’s perspective–is to provide a place for the plant to form seeds. Wait long enough and any green bean will turn from a tender. juicy vegetable into a leathery pod full of seeds. Leave it even longer and the pod and seeds will dry out and be ready to wait until the right conditions arrive for sprouting. Or for being cooked, which takes a while because the beans have dried out and don’t easily soak up moisture again (so they don’t rot before they have a chance to sprout). Pick the pods, however, when the seeds have formed but not dried out, and you have shell beans, which take a lot less time to cook and have an excellent texture that’s hard to get with dried beans in less than half a day in a slow oven. To cook your beans, take them out of the pods and cook them in well salted water at a gentle boil for about half and hour until just tender (you can vegetables, herbs and/or spices to the cooking water–such as garlic or bay leaf or hot pepper–as you see fit). You can eat them as they are or add them to a soup or have them cold. I like them best cold in a salad with a lot of onion, some garlic, some roasted pepper and parsley.
The large green pepper in your share is either a Newmex (paler green and pointy) or a Poblano (dark green). In your tomato bag you have Japaenos and a Biquinho, a very mildly spice, fruity Brazilian pepper.
This week’s share: Arugula or mustard, Celery, Edamame, Lettuce, Onions, Peppers, Satina potatoes, Squash, Thyme, Tomatoes
Well, I have covered taste so it must be time to move on to another sense. How about sight?
Does it really matter what your food looks like? Well, we obviously care about it. In fact, we seem to care about it a great deal. The food industry spends a huge amount of time and effort and money on appearances, everything from worrying about irregular tomatoes to finding the proper placement of pepperoni on frozen pizzas to the minute tweezered readjustment of flower petals on a plate of crudo as it makes its way to the restaurant patron. Food stylist is an actual career choice, and food scientists work as hard on the look of what they engineer as they do on taste and texture and aroma. Food shows and magazines, unable to convey other aspects of their subject, more or less fetishize the look of ingredients and dishes. At my mother’s suggestion, I watched a piece the other day about a leading French chef who at the height of his career gave up on cooking flesh in order to concentrate on fruits and vegetables. I saw a lot of beautiful dishes with fanciful names and sometimes surprising combinations, and a lot of flawless produce being handed over to the chef, and I heard a great deal about the chef’s passion for the right gesture in the kitchen (like many things, it sounds almost compelling in French and slightly ridiculous in translation), and I learned more or less nothing about how any of the food in his restaurant is actually made or what it is like to eat it.
A great deal of this effort is carefully designed to shape our habits, to incite a deep irrational desire to consume one product or another. Hyping the look of food and creating standards for how things should look serves the food industry well. But it would not work if it did not affect us. The food industry may have done a lot to direct our responses, but it did not create them. It has simply played on our existing instincts. We may not fully agree from one culture to another what looks good to eat, but I have yet to hear of a culture that could not give a damn about the appearance of its food.
There are solid reasons to care about the look of your food. An accurate recognition of what will nourish you and what kill you is certainly useful. Recognizing ripeness and rot matters. In practical terms, certain shapes and sizes are just easier to work with, and some degree of uniformity increases efficiency–and efficient food production makes life a lot easier and frees us up to do all those things that cows, having to chew all day to live, just can’t find time for. In addition, the senses tend to commingle in our brains, and thus aesthetics can enhance the dining experience. We take greater pleasure in our food when eating something of a pleasing appearance.
So we have a natural interest in how our food looks. That’s fine and good. But when our notions of what counts for good looks are shaped by others we ought to wonder a little about their motivations. Does the food industry have our best interests in mind when it chooses how to lay out those pepperoni slices, when it defines how a tomato should look, when it tells us what luxury looks like? Well, to be fair, I don’t think the industry wishes us ill. That just happens as a side effect of the way they do business. It’s nothing personal.
I think by now most of us have some idea that plenty of dubious substances can go into processed food for reasons that make absolute sense in terms of marketability, transportation, shelf life and cost, and a lot less sense in terms of health (human and otherwise) or taste. And a number of those additives are there for broadly aesthetic reasons.
But there’s another aspect to the food industry’s aesthetics we tend to think about less: uniformity. We have been well trained to expect things to look the same very particular way all the time. Surely one of the appeals of nationwide chain restaurants is their predictability. Same decor, same menu, same shape, same everything no matter where you are. Apparently, we find comfort in such predictability.
And the same predictability has for the most part applied to produce too. Your basic grocery store produce section offers what seems like a wide array of choices, but in fact it is a shockingly narrow selection, and it’s pretty much the same narrow selection everywhere across the country, which is odd given that this is a huge country with a wide range of growing conditions and traditions. There’s no reason every tomato should look the same in every store.
They should not even all look the same in one store. And I don’t just mean that you should have a range of varieties to choose from, though you should definitely have that. Even your basic medium sized red tomatoes should vary a little more from one fruit to another, as they actually do on the farm. Yes, big tomato farms (J.G. Boswell grows around 20,000 acres in California) get pretty decent uniformity with growing techniques and plant genetics, but the uniformity we encounter is most fully achieved in the packing house, where huge sizing and color sorting machines ensure that we never have to encounter the vagaries of nature. And that’s an operation you can only run when you produce on a vast scale. The produce you see in the grocery store–the produce we have been trained to see as looking the way produce should–is a testament to the scale and industrialization of farming in this country.
Small growers simply cannot afford to sort and cull that way in order to create that level of uniformity. And frankly I am fine with that. If I wanted industrial uniformity I would be manufacturing something, not growing food. Sure, I prefer to have good yields of good produce, but even when I do my job well and the weather and deer cooperate, there’s still variability in our tomato patch. Of course, that has something to do with us growing about 50 different kinds of tomatoes, but also has something to do with the nature of tomatoes. This has been a good year for tomatoes not because they have all come out the same size and shape, but because tomatoes taste better in hot, dry years. The weather has helped concentrate the flavor or varieties that we chose in large part for their superior flavor. For their looks too, but for the diversity of their looks, for the fun of discovering the broad range of ways a tomato can be a tomato.
So does it matter what food looks like? Yes, of course it does. But we should figure out precisely what matters and why for ourselves. Having someone else shape your preferences for their own benefit ought to leave a bad taste in your mouth.
Vegetable notes: A quick edamame refresher course. To prepare the edamame (the small, hairy pods in the bag), just drop them into well salted boiling water for a few minutes, until the pods are just tender (not crunchy, but still with some solid texture). After that you can just pop them out of their pods and snack on them, or maybe shell them and toss them on a salad.
Satina potatoes have a dense flesh that is excellent roasted or pan fried, and works well for potato salad (it does not crumble when you dice it). You could roast and peel some peppers and grill an onion, dice them, and toss them with the potatoes, some thyme and a mustardy vinaigrette.
Or you could cut your peppers into thin strips, sauté them over medium high heat in a good amount of olive oil until they start to brown a bit, then turn the heat to low, add a thinly sliced onion, salt, pepper, lemon juice, thyme. maybe a dash of smoked paprika, and let the mixture cook until the onions are almost starting to melt. It is good hot or cold.
This week’s share: Beans, Cilantro, Escarole, Garlic, Lettuce, Onions, Peppers, Hot peppers, Squash, Tomatoes
We were talking about synesthesia the other day, and trying to imagine–unsuccessfully–what it would be like to hear taste. To us that seemed the hardest conjunction of senses. Which in a way is odd because taste certainly seems to overlap with the other senses fairly easily. To smell taste, of course, is simple. Indeed, it is hard to separate the two. And when you do you discover how limited and unsatisfying taste alone can be. To feel taste is not much harder. It has definite textures. To see taste requires a little more of an effort, though think of the vibrant green of a fresh salad leaf or the rich orange of a sweet potato and you realize perhaps it is not so difficult after all. But to hear taste? What would a lime sound like? How does the sound of a fresh carrot compare to the sound of a roasted one?
There are specific sounds that go with foods. The distinctive crunches of that fresh carrot and a potato chip, the sizzle of meat on a grill, the snap of a bean. These sounds may help bring tastes to mind, but they are not actually related to taste so much as to texture and temperature. You only get from the sound to the taste via another sense. Taste itself seems to remain pretty quiet.
In fact, though, the world these days is full of the sound of taste. Or at least some attempt at the sound of taste. I am talking about all the food verbiage. Yes, I understand that we do not generally think of words and sounds as the same thing, and the link between a word and a sensation is complicated. But I also spent long enough in school steeping in a cauldron of French literary theory–or was I the cauldron of liquid and the theory the agent supposed to flavor me? And if so, which part of me is vessel and which liquid? And does this image of infused knowledge suggest a passive approach to learning or is it merely a playful reminder of my English heritage? Such are the puzzles with which we literature majors wrestle. But I digress– to understand the culturally systematized randomness of language, the fragile and fraught link between the sound of a word and the thing it is supposed to mean.
When a restaurant critic waxes eloquent about some overwrought fish appetizer he has encountered at the chic new farm to table small plate Asian inflected Ecuadorean gastropub, he is trying to find the word sounds that will somehow transport the delicate and surprising flavor of that dish to his readers. And these days our culture seems to be awash (again with the liquid imagery) in such attempts to convey flavor through words, with everyone capable of sharing restaurant reviews, innumerable TV food shows and herds of chatty celebrity chefs and food activists loose on the land.
With all that going on, you would think we might have found a way to convey taste in words. But I feel that if anything we are getting worse at it. With all the competition, people are finding every more eloquent ways to talk about food in order to make themselves stand out. But the result, it seems to me is mostly just noise, noise that tells us a fair amount–usually something less than entirely flattering–about the pretensions of the writer and little about the food. At best, food description engages in a sort of triangulation method, throwing out a set of comparisons–it is south of mozzarella sticks, west of fried chicken, and just over the border from a dorito–and leaving you to try to figure where in this uncertain terrain the food might lie.
Perhaps we all need more practice talking about food, more time to develop an accurate vocabulary. And perhaps we all need more time to practice tasting, to really think about what we are sensing to we can find the right words for it. But maybe it’s a hopeless effort and there is no good way to convey tastes through some other medium.
And maybe it is a pointless effort too, since we can convey tastes by offering people the food itself so they can experience the taste directly. I don’t really feel the need to write poems about tomatoes so you can experience their pleasure in allusive words. I prefer just to give you some tomatoes that I have chosen to grow and let you actually eat them. I think this is partly what makes sharing food so powerful, that it is the only true way to communicate with one another about something so crucial and enticing. It’s like singing in a group or holding hands or looking at a sunset together. So maybe sometimes we could all shut up about the good food we are eating and share it. That would really say something.
Vegetable notes: Once again you have an extra crop in your box, either artichokes or husk cherries or edamame. We do not grow large quantities of any of these. The deer love edamame (they mowed down half the crop this year, even after I sprayed in with repellant twice) and they are a little finicky anyway. Husk cherries grow wild in the field so they should thrive in this climate. But they don’t always thrive, and some years we get hardly any fruit. As for artichokes, well, they don’t really belong here at all, and the deer will eat them too if they find them. It would probably make more sense for us not to grow these uncertain crops. But we like them, and growing them on a small scale amuses us. And it amuses us even more when we have enough to hand them out to you.
As for everything else in your box, it probably looks reasonably familiar by this point in the season and I have no great new ideas about what to do with any of it. But if any of you have come up with exciting new dishes that you would like to share, please let me know. Or to put it another way, I start to run out of energy around this point in the season so if you would like to help me fill up this space that would be great. Not as great as having you come and help weed the carrots, but I have learned to be realistic about what farm tasks people are likely to want to do.
This week’s share: Chard, Cucumber, Dill, Lettuce, Onions, Pepper, Adirondack Red potatoes, Shallots, Squash, Tomatoes
Maybe having both kids in college has turned my thoughts to my own undergraduate career. Or what I can recall of it. Which is not intended as a less than totally subtle comment about my wild college days. I just don’t remember a lot of it. For instance, I cannot account for nearly a quarter of the classes I took. And by cannot account for them, I mean I have no memory of them whatsoever. Not even the course title or the area of study, let alone what I might actually have learned. As for the ones I can bring back to mind, there’s often little left of them. My class on Russia has been pared down to the facts that they had small domestic animals they could keep in the bottom floor of their houses to help heat the house, that the temperature zone and fertility zones don’t overlap in ways conducive to feeding the population, and that they had some internecine struggle, though who precisely or when or why I cannot say. My course on justice, if I remember correctly, centered largely on the question of which track workers the conductor of a run away train should hit. And all I can come up with from the psychology class I took–was it on personality?–is an anecdote the professor told about a psychologist convincing his son to jump off a chest of drawers trusting that he would be caught, letting the boy fall, and admonishing him not to trust people. It is a good story, but I cannot help feeling that we may have covered other topics too in the course of the semester.
So much knowledge lost (note that I am giving myself undeserved credit for having gained it in the first place). Not that much of it had a direct application to what I do most of the time. The loss probably does me little professional harm. But still, it is nice to know things, even when they have no purpose. In fact, sometimes that just makes the knowledge more satisfying. You come out with some odd but pertinent fact and somebody asks, “how do you know that?” and instead of tediously explaining its application to your work, you can just shrug modestly, suggesting that you know all sorts of things just because.
I don’t mean to say there’s no point in knowing things for work. I really prefer to deal with people who know what they are doing, and ideally care enough about it to have a deeper and more engaged understanding of it than strictly necessary. And that applies to pretty much every job. Obviously, someone designing a bridge should have a solid grasp of structural engineering, and someone working on your brain should really know anatomy and surgical techniques. But I also prefer car mechanics who are really into engines, hardware store owners who ask what I am trying to do help me figure out which fasteners I actually need, bee keepers who are passionate about insect behavior, carpenters with an architectural sensibility, welders who enjoy building equipment, seed dealers who breed their own varieties.
I even, I now know, want suit sellers who take their work seriously. I had to buy a suit the other day. No, I have not changed the dress code on the farm. I need it for a wedding (of a former farm worker). I do not like shopping or suits so I was really looking forward to the outing. I told the woman helping me what I needed, she immediately pulled a jacket off the rack that fit, and then pants that fit, and a white shirt that fit, all the while chatting pleasantly, no choices offered or needed, everything on sale, and in less than 15 minutes I had escapes with exactly what I had come for. In a few seconds she had gauged my size and temperament and found the clothes and demeanor to fit them. I would not say I enjoyed the experience–after all I had to spend money and ended up with a suit–but I deeply appreciated her craft.
Still, there’s only so much I want to know about suit or bolts or intake manifolds. To make that suit shopping truly enjoyable would have required something more than professionalism and pleasant chat. The suit lady might, for instance, have recommend a book, leading to a discussion of modern novels, leading to a discussion of the publishing industry and then perhaps the history of printing, including some observations about its role in Moorish Spain, leading to a chat about Arab influences on Europe, leading to various Balkan recipes, leading to a discussion of Slavic history and then of the teaching of history and the quality of history text books in this country, and of books in general, leading to a book recommendation. Then she would have rung up my purchase and sent us on our way with a suit and some interesting new knowledge.
But perhaps I am inclined to this view simply because almost everything I was ever taught has little to do with what I do. I took biology 35 years ago, and while a remember understandi}