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Beware the Green Shirts: The War of Tatsoi

editors | 25 December, 2009 11:18

By Amrit, Amrit@JournalofSustainability.com

My issue with tatsoi started, as well-intentioned things often do, earnestly and with true commitment. In my neighborhood, for 18 dollars a week I can get a large bag of seasonal organic produce from the local CSA group. I can even go on the internet and look up what Farmer John or Farmer Allison is harvesting up this week, and I can put on my worn leather jacket and trek over there with my nylon Hello Kitty grocery bag. For 18 dollars a week I can contribute to some honest social change. Of course, I have to pay in advance for several months of produce and I get no say in what produce I get. But I figured, that’s how social change works, collectively, and sometimes it’s like being 8 again; you have to eat what they give you.

 

It’s not like at my mother’s house there was much variety. She had two jobs and two kids and no man around much and we relied mostly on food stamps. So, after the free cheese ran out, we ate a lot of white bread and tomato sauce for dinner. We grew bloated on macaroni and cheese from the carton. Left to her own devices my mother had a way of reducing food to its simplest elements that today’s techno-foodies would have envied.

While she lacked a dehydrator, or even a liquid nitrogen set-up, she did have a spectacular vintage turquoise wall oven. When set at 450 degrees it could vaporize a meatloaf, reducing it to a quarter of its original size in the pan, while creating a moat of viscous grease around it. To accompany the meatloaf we had “special” fries which mother removed from the freezer and dumped into a straight-sided aluminum pan of boiling Wesson oil. Then she went over to the neighbors for a cigarette or to borrow some lunch money. The fries desiccated in the pot and became more and less than fries. They became the outline of fries. The essence of fries. They were the color of cedar and when we bit into them they shattered and were hollow, the insides have gone somewhere else to eat. So as kids, we actually craved salads.

By seventh grade it became apparent that one of us had to learn to cook and that one was me. My mother gladly surrendered the kitchen, the food stamps, and the remaining grocery money, and went over to the neighbors to drink freeze-dried coffee and chain smoke.

Back then I cooked with a passion that lack of funds and hunger supplied. I borrowed cookbooks from the library and read them like novels and I spent a lot of time with other people’s mothers watching them cook. Back then most people still cooked everyday. My great aunts who were holocaust survivors and great hoarders of food taught me to bake. So by ninth grade I was a pretty decent cook. We ate soups and pasta, and stir-fries and, most lovely of all, fresh vegetables and salad nearly every day. Salad that we drowned in Wish-Bone Italian dressing because it was exotic and cheap. And we mopped it all up with three-for-a-dollar loaves of Italian bread that was really just longer fatter white bread with a slick of oil on top, but we were well fed and had some control over what we ate.

Over parts of the next 10 years I would cook for my living, first as a short order chef in a very bad part of town where I actually saw someone’s brains get blown out at close range and then later at a crazy diner in New England where I made the largest Danish pastry known to man. “It’s our trademark!” the insane owner would exhort. “Make “em bigger” as I dumped cheese filling into each helmet-size Danish with an extra large ice cream scoop. I worked that job for two years until exhausted from the night shift and wanting to finish school, I went to work at a hospice where I never went near the kitchen. But for all these years I have cooked passionately for my friends and family and my interest in food, food that tastes like it was meant to, food that was cleaned and cooked with attention and love, has never wavered. I still cook every day.

In 2008, when the CSA came to town I was intrigued. The thought of doing good only outweighed by my insatiable appetite for greens made it seem so inviting, so cool, but still I hesitated. Maybe it’s me, my anti-social tendencies, or maybe it’s because I really didn’t want to join anything at all ever again, after being ejected from the Young Communist League for being an “eclectic cynic” in 1980. I was buying my produce from the local co-op, as I needed it, and it was organic and well priced.

But there was this girl, woman actually, and she sort of seduced me, and then I ended up taking over her share of the CSA when the next enrollment came around since her produce was rotting in her fridge and she felt guilty. She ate mostly cold cereal with milk. I should have seen the end in that. Since I cooked every night, she figured I’d be better off with her share. That way she could eat at my house even more. I wrote her a check and bought her out, after which she was pretty much gone from my life, except for dinner parties and an occasional near suicidal emotional meltdown.

My first week at the CSA was seemingly benign. I came home from work, went for a run, and at 5:30 I walked over to the CSA headquarter and signed in. I had that weird feeling I always get when surrounded by well meaning academics and tarted up vegans, like I need to tell a raunchy joke or eat a big Mac. Everyone looked very lean, scary lean, and even the farmers seemed, well, kind of sophisticated.

I followed the  on the chalkboard at the entrance and I picked up my collard greens, my mustard greens, my potatoes, my green chili, my mizuna, my mixed greens, my onions and a giant Hubbard-y looking squash so big I could barely carry it home. I planned to dice the squash that night and roast it with sea salt and then bag it up and freeze it to use all winter in pasta or soup. Everything looked great.

Then came the last item, something I had never seen before, called tatsoi. It came with an instruction sheet, a bad sign, I thought. Then I walked over to the trade table where you can trade something you don’t want for something else you do want. It was piled neck high with tatsoi. They even offered to let me have some extra, so I took another bunch. It looked like a cross between mustard greens and spinach and I figured, “What the hell? It’s free.”

But tatsoi was like an exercise in going against all your instincts. Like when you meet someone and you just don’t like them or even want to like them but your monkey mind says “You don’t have any reason not to like Jane…I mean other people like her”, but when Jane smiles all you see are bared teeth and you want to run away. That was tatsoi for me. It was Jane without teeth.

I walked home in the dusk feeling self righteous and participatory. Holding my huge Hello Kitty sack of produce and my miraculous squash, I was mildly euphoric. Then, I tried to fit it all in the refrigerator. I left the tatsoi out. We regarded each other in the waning light. I don’t need instructions to cook food. I usually just ‘get’ food with an intuitive knowledge but I had a sneaking feeling, actually a miserable upload of anxiety regarding tatsoi. I just didn’t ‘get’ tatsoi. So I read the instructions. And I cooked the bitch in good olive oil and even so she tasted like something you’d scrape of the hull of a boat.

I love greens: collards, chard, mustard and dandelion. I crave and eat them all the time. But this was something different, not really a green, more like a foaming slime. I poured on some soy and I braved it down. And then quickly it came back up. I tossed the first bunch, literally, and then I went on-line to see where I had gone wrong. It could not be that anything that grew in the ground could be this revolting. I had no previous experience with anything this slimy that was not first blended at high speed.

Week after week, it seemed there was a pile of rejected tatsoi on the trade in table at the CSA and week after week my fellow do-gooders shamefully whispered how nauseating the tatsoi was and wondered why was it so ubiquitous. Finally, one night I wrote to the CSA asking if they would take supporters preferences into account before they planted next year’s crop given that like the parsley in that old joke, nobody actually ate tatsoi. It seemed a shame to see huge piles of it going to waste each week.

The next morning there was a reply in my email box from the CSA. I had a bad feeling even before I opened the email. But when I opened it was like watching a bad 1950’s documentary with that stentorian voice-over narration. I could just hear Farmer John who wrote on behalf of the CSA, and whom I assumed was really a tenured professor.

Instead of a reply I had gotten back a lecture on crops and farming. Now, it is notoriously difficult to assess tone in an email, but this one rang with sarcasm and patronage. It was didactic beyond endurance, but even worse, it was smug. Smug in that politically hectoring way that made me want to drive a Hummer over him.

Mr. John informed me that crops actually grow, you know, as in the ground, over time, so the farmer, at the mercy of “mother nature”, (just like a woman), had to actually, you know, plant the tatsoi in advance and so, could not account for the fickle preferences of the supporters and further, we should learn to like tatsoi because tatsoi was environmentally sound and a sustainable desert crop and no one else had complained and maybe, he implied, I needed professional help. Perhaps a hysterectomy.

Foolishly, with the heart and hope of an aging leftist I wrote him back explaining that even though crops actually grow in the ground, you know, that there was always, like next year, you know, and perhaps our preferences could be taken into account since it was like, you know, COMMUNITY supported agriculture, after all.

I attached a picture of the mountain of tatsoi on the reject table that I took with my cell phone. I stopped short of attaching a photo of the last tatsoi I had puked up.  I told him that I was nearly 50 years old and that I did not have to boost my “farm cred” by eating swill that no pig would choke down and I resigned from the CSA. I felt relief, no more smug academic pseudo-farmers, no more 25-pound Hubbard squash to dismember, and best of all no more paternalistic lecturing from “Farmer” John.

But I was wrong. In the morning, and for several mornings after, I received hate mail from Farmer John, analyzing my political commitment, my logic, and my future role in the greening of America. He wrote me until I blocked his mail, but not his grinding hectoring voice from my memory.

So now, when I think of tatsoi, I think of all the older men in my life who told me what I want and how I want it. How I should feel and how I should express myself. It’s always “If only you said x, if only you did y, I could hear you”, but the truth is the Farmer Johns can’t hear me anymore than the tatsoi can lying there evilly green and mucosal on the stainless steel table. Proving after all, that there really are some things that you just can’t choke down.

Copyright 2009 Margo Donaldson and the Journal of Sustainability

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