Vegetable-love

Last week I stood at the Saturday farmer’s market, goggling at the tomatoes. They were so red, round, and multitudinous, spread out on mismatched tables in the rainy fall. I wasn’t content with buying a few. I wanted all of them. Next on the spread came turnips, grapes, eggplants, peppers, apples, and onions, all of which filled me with free-spirited greed.

I looked at the produce in the same way I look at the Crayola 64-pack. Do I want violet, goldenrod, or olive green? Eggplant, tomatoes, or apples? All have their uses, and variety is their chief beautifier. I felt like Anne of Green Gables in the movie, when Marilla teaches her to pray. Marilla says she must humbly ask God for the things she wants. Anne, in typical Anne fashion, offers her own interpretation: “Dear Gracious, Heavenly Father, I thank you for everything. As for the things I especially want, they’re so numerous it would take a great deal of time to mention them all.” Much less, in my case, carry them across the street in a grocery bag.

If you had the freedom, flexibility, and opportunity to indulge in any good gift under the sky, what would you choose? I would buy the whole farmer’s market and spend my days eating fat tomatoes and allowing their juices to run down my elbows. That food is real food, yielded from a nearby plot of dirt. And as a stroke of genuine luxury, you may even get to hand your fistful of dollars to the person who planted it.

Sometimes I feel indicted as an extremist by my own vegetable-love. I do possess, in some buried closet, a plaque that certifies me as an herbalist—the result of several Saturday excursions during high school. My mother and I traveled to Geneva, N.Y., to meet with a crew of holistic supplement enthusiasts. Our instructor Jose taught us dietary remedies for ailments of every bodily system. You could say I drank the Kool-Aid, though really, I had stopped drinking Kool-Aid because of the sugar and dye. I stopped eating meat and dairy, too. Those extremities of restriction faded as my enthusiasm waned. But I did maintain a genuine passion for vegetables.

A half-hour perusal around the internet in matters of mainstream medicine versus holistic health can fill a person with sighs. Everyone has a different take on every problem from acne to cancer. And for many of us, the tension between the varied parties poses a serious difficulty. If you listened to everyone, you would never eat anything. My friend Grace Olmstead, writing at The American Conservative, brings a beautiful balance to this question, here. I encourage you to read her words, as she has said what I never thought of saying.

At the end of the matter, I chose the eggplant. I stood there in the rain, already thinking of slicing the food into beautiful rings. But as I walked through the rest of the market, I set the eggplant down and lost it. Which goes to show you—sometimes when you cannot balance your own loves, God does it for you.