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I had sort of forgotten about cucumbers until the first cucumbers of the summer arrived in our weekly produce pickup two weeks ago, when we got 2. The following week, as is wont to happen with cucumbers, the production exploded and my husband came home from the pickup with 4 good-sized ones and a whopper.

Maybe it’s because we haven’t had cucumbers since last summer, but these cucumbers have been a revelation. The other night our salad at dinner was just a plate of sliced cucumbers – no salt, no dressing, not peeled.  Just a pile of cucumber slices.  And we sat there greedily stuffing the slices in our mouths as fast as we could and in between bites rhapsodizing about cucumbers, and how they are underrated, and how, with apologies to sweet corn and tomatoes, cucumbers really ought to be recognized as the defining vegetable of summer.

It’s true that where I grew up, in the mountains of Southern Vermont, cucumbers were much more common than corn on the cob and tomatoes in the summer. There isn’t a lot of flat fertile land around there to plant corn, let alone corn that is not destined to feed animals. Sure we bought and ate some corn in the summer, but I didn’t discover the delights of really fresh sweet corn was until I was in college in the Hudson Valley. I remember being shocked at how sweet it was (did someone put sugar on my corn?!), and how you could eat it practically raw, with no butter. Likewise with tomatoes – the growing season at my mom’s place is so short that lots of the tomatoes ended up ripening wrapped in newspaper in the basement. Vine-ripe tomatoes were definitely a treat, but not one I got to eat my fill of until later in life (when my Columbia County garden produced county-fair-winning-sized specimens for weeks on end; it is, in fact, possible to get tired of tomatoes).  

Cucumbers, however, were often available in abundance: if not in our garden, in a neighbor’s for sure. You know how it is with these vine-y plants – once they get started, look out! And because cucumbers don’t have the status of sweet corn or ripe tomatoes, people would give armloads of them to you almost apologetically.

So I do have fond childhood summer memories of cucumbers. But these cucumbers from Roxbury Farm are far more delicious even than the garden-grown ones that I remember.  Their taste is distinctly melon-y* and so pronounced that you can savor a bite for several minutes after. They are firm but crisp (even the whoppers); the skins are tough but tasty; the seeds are sweet. In short, they are such good cucumbers that it seems a shame to even add salt. 

The memory of these delicious cucumbers was in my head as I was doing some reading this week. Sir Albert Howard’s An Agricultural Testament is a book I’ve read and heard about several times, most lately in the afternoon discussion at Polyface, which ranged into some far-flung philosophical, agricultural, and political territory. I made a note to actually find and read the book next time I got a chance.  And this week, an abundance of developing ideas in my head coupled with 90+-degree muggy summer weather seemed as good an excuse as any to a trip to the NYPL reading room (where I have whiled away many a hazy afternoon reading in government-funded air conditioned comfort. New Yorkers take note – here is a summer survival method much cheaper and more intellectually stimulating than the movies!). **

As inclined as we have become to dismiss the older works of recent agricultural history as relics, Howard’s work resonates uncannily.  Much of what he writes seems as if it could have been written last week – although of course this should come as no surprise. The development of land in monocultures and the use of chemical fertilizers was well under way by 1940, when An Agricultural Testament was published. (Liebig’s seminal book on agricultural chemistry, don’t forget, dates from 1840 – chemical fertilizers had been in development and use for nearly 100 years by the time Howard was working). So much damage had already been done to the world’s soils (the American Dust Bowl era springs to mind) and in the 1940’s Howard held out a not unreasonable hope that his work (and the work of his colleagues; he certainly wasn’t alone in pushing against monocultures and chemical fertilization) would have an effect on the way agriculture was practiced.

He makes as cogent case as any I’ve seen for the true costs of industrial agriculture:

If a cheap substitute for humus exists why not use it? … the use of such a substitute cannot be cheap because soil fertility — one of the most important assets of any country — is lost; because artificial plants, artificial animals, and artificial men are unhealthy and can only be protected from the parasites, whose duty it is to remove them, by means of poison sprays, vaccines, and serums and an expensive system of patent medicines, panel doctors, hospitals and so forth.  When the finance of crop production is considered together with that of the various social services which are needed to repair the consequences of an unsound agriculture, and when it is borne in mind that our greatest possession is a healthy, virile population, the cheapness of artificial manures disappears altogether.  In years to come chemical manures will be considered as one of the greatest follies of the industrial epoch (pp. 37-8).

While he does perhaps rather over-simplify the solution (along the lines of “if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail”; in Howard’s world the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything comes down to Compost and Compost Alone) the philosophy that he espouses – of creating a cycle of life and a therefore a living soil is still irreproachable. He argues strongly against the idea of soil-nutrition-by-the numbers:

The principle followed, based on the Liebig tradition, is that any deficiencies in the soil can be made up by the addition of suitable chemicals. This is based on a complete misconception of plant nutrition. It is superficial and fundamentally unsound. It takes no account of the life of the soil, including the mycorrhizal association — the living fungous bridge which connects soil and sap (p. 36).

He goes on to connect this to the nutritive value of crops grown with chemicals: “Artificial manures lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals, and finally to artificial men and women.”  This might seem like a leap of crackpot intemperance, but the philosophy behind separating nourishment into a collection of separable chemical “nutrients” sounds an awful like how humans have been taught, recently, to think of what they eat. This leap – from “food” to “nutrients,” is well discussed in Pollan’s latest, In Defense of Food. (“From Food To Nutrients” is in fact the title of Chapter 1, and it goes on from there in good form to indict the modern “science” of nutritionism.  Read it if you haven’t.)  It makes sense that as we have ceased to think of our soils as living working systems, we have begun to think of what is grown there as merely a collection of nutrients. A series of nutrients in; a series of nutrients out. And as we have ceased to think of our soils and farms as living systems, so have we come to think in the same way about our food and our bodies. Our modern medical system has evolved (at great cost) to treat what might be considered symptoms as diseases in their own right.

Whether or not organically grown vegetables can be shown to be more nutritious than those grown with chemicals is still a matter of debate***, although the idea that food grown in healthy soils will just be, well, healthier, has a strong appeal to common sense.  (“Garbage in, garbage out” has applications that range far beyond computer programming). But nutritional analysis is, given the context, beside the point here.  As Howard writes in An Agricultural Testament, “It is an easy matter to distinguish vegetables raised on NPK. They are tough, leathery and fibrous: they also lack taste. In marked contrast those grown with humus are tender, brittle, and possess abundant flavor” (p. 82).  Case in point my crunchy, delicious cucumbers. Case in point the sweet onions, the firm and sweet-nutty zucchini, the jewel-like (and delicious) baby chard we had eaten earlier in the week.  It is not necessary to risk sounding like a natural-food-obsessed nut in this case – anyone could taste the difference between my organic Roxbury Farm produce and what comes from a supermarket (via an industrial, NPK-driven farm).

One of the biggest takeaways from my recent visit to Polyface farm was Joel Salatin saying, “Nature’s ability to heal is amazing.” Something not to be missed about Salatin (successful businessman and rock star of modern agriculture that he is) is that he sees his way of farming as, first and foremost, the way to heal the land that he loves and live the way that he wants to.  In this sense, the beef and eggs and chickens and pork his land yields are more like handily consumable byproducts than an end unto themselves.  And this is not “healing the land” or “saving the world” in a fleeting summer-after-college-internship-before-I-go-get-a-real-job sense – it was a real conviction and something we could easily see, touch, and taste when we were on that land. 

Similarly, the tasty cucumbers from Roxbury Farm are about a lot more than just a delicious (or more healthy) meal. Like Salatin, Jean-Paul and Jody see farming as much more than a simple input-output production mechanism.  They see farming as a series of relationships – of wild land to cultivated, of soil to crop, of farmer to eater (and hence city to country).  A cynical view could peg Salatin, Roxbury Farm, and many of the newly minted CSA’s and vendors at the NY City Greenmarket as “smart capitalists” who are just responding to a demand created by the latest food fad of the urban upper middle class.  But it goes much deeper than that.  Farming in this way is a completely different mission. When Jody wrote on the Roxbury blog the other week, “We are creating new communities that are not bound by close geographical or economic confines,” it was not some woo-woo abstraction or a way to make privileged city-dwellers feel good about their food choices. Instead, she was making a real observation about the difference between buying food as a financial transaction (dollars for donuts) and the way in which CSA members support the farm (paying in advance for whatever the season yields). Whether or not we get dirt under our nails, we are involved in what the farm produces: it is what fills up our refrigerators (or not) every week.

People like Salatin and the farmers at Roxbury are doing something of fundamental importance to our society, as they dissolve the separation between “country” (backwards) and “city” (progressive). They blow the image of the farmer as an uneducated “hick” who couldn’t make it in the white-collar world to smithereens. And what they are doing is not just about making a tastier cucumber or a better chicken. It is not just about “saving the planet” or “eating healthy.”  It’s about all that, but it is also about liberating one of most fundamental relationships we have from the realm of the merely economic. And the cucumbers (did I mention?) are totally delicious.