back home

Tonight, before Thanksgiving dinner, my grandma asked me if I thought I would work on a farm again any time soon. I told her I think I've had enough farming for the time being.

It's sort of conventional wisdom these days, spread by "food writers" like Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver, that the more you know about the way your food is produced -- the more you appreciate how much hard work went into the meal you eat -- then the more you'll enjoy eating it. And I suppose this is true, up to a point. There's something very nice about finishing a long day's work, dirty and exhausted, and sitting down to a dinner whose ingredients you helped gather from the fields only a few hours ago. But there's also something very nice about waking up around noon or so, lazing around the house all day, and eating food produced entirely through someone else's hard work. Often, after I cook, I find that I have less of an appetite than when someone else cooks for me. And when I have known the carrots on my plate ever since I pulled them from the ground, caked with mud; when I have known the loaf of bread on the table since it was just a bowl of flour and a couple hundred grams of walnuts or olives... I wouldn't say that it loses any of its flavor, only that it loses the magic of appearing before you for the first time in fully finished form, as if entirely effortless. So it's great to know where your food comes from. It's also nice sometimes to be a little ignorant.

That being said, I did make a couple of pumpkin pies today. From scratch, no less. You may think that a pumpkin is only something that children carve at Halloween, or else something that comes only in pre-spiced, pre-pureed canned form. But it is in fact still possible, despite all the efforts of the industrial-food complex, to make a pumpkin pie from an actual pumpkin or two. It's not that difficult; it just takes a little more time. But I think it's worth it.

Here are some pictures from my month in Quebec:



Quebec City







Lina's farm and Mauricie







Montreal







I got back to Larchmont last night, after a ten-hour train ride from Montreal that turned into more of a twelve-hour train ride, on account of signal failures and passing freight trains (much of the route, apparently, is single-tracked). The train to Montreal is known as the "Adirondack," but I can't really tell you whether or not it passes through the Adirondacks, since the sun went down at about 4:00 and we spent much of the time before that moving very slowly or not at all, waiting for other trains to go by or for the customs officials to finish their examination. You know how the customs forms always ask you questions about what you did on your trip and what you're bringing back with you (including one question that rather amusingly asked if I was bringing back any "cell cultures, disease agents, or snails")? And you know how there's always the question that asks if you've visited any farms or been in contact with any livestock -- a very silly question, since who goes to a farm during their vacation? Well, I did, and, shuddering as I checked the "yes" box, I tried to imagine what kind of special examination they might put me through.

It ended up being nothing more than a cursory glance at my boots. Satisfied that I was not bringing any potentially catastrophic nematodes into the country, the customs official let me pass.

I'm in Larchmont until early February, and I can't really guarantee that anything interesting enough will happen to me between now and then to warrant another blog post. My parents have, for some reason, demanded that I do something productive with these two and a half months, so I suppose it's possible. So keep checking back every once in a while, if you'd like, and I'll certainly try to pick things up again once I go to India in February.

P.S. I've changed the settings so that now (I think) anyone can leave a comment, without having to sign in or create a Google account. If you were unable to post a comment before, try again and let me know if it works.

oui

Working at a farmers' market in BC -- trying to remember the price per pound of cauliflower or add $4.65 to $17.80 in my head or return the correct change to the customer -- may have been difficult. But at least it was all in English.

My plan was to leave the farm in Mauricie this past Thursday or Friday, but Lina told me she had signed up to sell bread at three markets that weekend -- one on Saturday, two on Sunday -- and she needed some help. I figured an extra couple of days wouldn't hurt, so I agreed to stick around until Monday (that is, yesterday). It was only after I agreed to help that it occurred to me that there might be a problem. "I don't know how much help I'll be at the markets," I said to Lina, "since I don't speak any French." She reassured me that it wouldn't be a problem; Aline, the German WWOOFer who speaks French fluently, would also be working at the stand, and I would mostly be there to keep her company. I said "Okay," hesitantly, and hoped that Aline would not want to go to the bathroom or anything for the six or seven hours the market was open.

While I was finding myself able to understand more and more of the French conversation that flew around my head all day long, and while I sometimes fantasized that I was close, very close, to being able to speak French myself, and one day soon it would all magically snap into place, I had to admit that a full grasp of the French language still eluded me. Okay, I hadn't gotten very far past "bonjour" and "merci." I had brought a "Teach Yourself French" book, but every time I picked it up and tried to study it, I found that I really didn't have the patience or focus necessary to learn more than a few words. It all seemed too much like work. Besides, there were much more interesting things to read; and if I read Madame Bovary (in translation, of course), then wasn't that sort of like a French lesson? Maybe?

At the market on Saturday, I let Aline do most of the interacting with the customers. This was fine because the first few hours were very slow. Lina showed up to deliver some fresh bread and relieve us at about 2 o'clock (quatorze heure, as the Quebecois say -- see, I'm almost fluent). I was nearly falling asleep, so we decided it would be a good idea to take a walk outside. It felt like... November, and November is a good month for sleeping but it's also a good month for a brisk refreshing walk. We admired the church (every Quebec town has its own beautiful stone church, built in the time when religion was the central force in French Canadian life; I think that nowadays the ratio of beautiful churches to practicing Catholics in Quebec is approximately one-to-one) and some of the more interesting houses. We went back inside for the last couple of hours of the market, and though the pace picked up slightly, only about two-thirds of the loaves were sold.

These markets, by the way, are not like your typical farmers' market. These are Christmas markets, usually held in town halls or other public buildings (though Lina told us of one November market she attended that was held outside), featuring rather more inedibles than edibles. That is, lots of arts and crafts and knitted things and so on -- Christmas presents, I suppose, that unlike bread, will not go stale in the intervening month and a half before the big day. We did also make some Christmas cakes, expertly wrapped in green and red plastic, which are supposed to stay fresh forever on account of their high rum content.

Saturday went well enought -- I hardly had to utter a single word of French -- but Sunday's market came without the promise of relief. Lina had to attend to another market forty-five minutes away, leaving Aline and I to fend for ourselves. In the breaks between helping customers, I had Aline teach me some key French words -- "gouter" for "to taste," and so on. But when Aline inevitably decided she had to go to the bathroom, or take a walk -- who can blame her? the market was from 10 AM till 5 PM -- I was left on my own to deal with the customers.

I may not have picked up much French during my time in Quebec, but I have picked up the truly unfortunate habit of answering "oui" to every French question that I don't understand. Aline told me that "peut-etre" -- maybe -- was always a good answer, but somehow "oui" was the word that slipped most easily out of my mouth. Once, when I got particularly flustered, the woman from the next stand stepped over to answer a question. Fortunately, Aline's absences were always brief, and once she returned, I could go back to smiling mutely at the customers. What I lacked in language skills I tried to make up for in charm and sex appeal. I think I succeeded.

What else, what else? While I was at the farm, Lina put me to work developing a recipe for seasoning salt using the dried mushrooms she grows in the greenhouses. It wasn't very complicated -- a little bit of mushroom plus a lot of salt plus a sprinkling of dried herbs -- and the dust from the ground mushrooms spilled ominously out of the blender after each batch, so if I get emphysema in thirty years, we'll know why. But it pleases me to know that my mushroom salt will grace the kitchens of a few families this winter, perhaps adding the slightest mushroom aroma to some of their most cherished holiday dishes.

I switched the font on some of the labels for the farm products (the cakes, the dried herbs, the mushrooms, the marmelade) from Times New Roman to Garamond. It was all for you, Reed -- carrying your gospel of good font choice into the Canadian wilderness. Unfortunately, the only labels that Lina had were address labels, about one inch by three inches, and in order to accomodate all of the text for the ingredients and instructions and so on, I had to use a font size of approximately five points. But what they lack in legibility they make up for in beauty.

Anyway, Lina drove me to the Trois-Rivieres bus station this morning, and I took a bus into Montreal, where I am spending two nights before coming home just in time for Thanksgiving.

the price of fresh bread

The end of daylight savings time has restored sunrise to its proper place, one hour earlier. But no amount of fooling around with the clock, no leaping forward or leaping back, could possibly make a difference if you start your day at 3:30 AM, when sunrise seems more like a distant hope than an eventual certainty.

Lina, the owner of this farm in the Mauricie region of Quebec, starts baking at 4 in the morning. Well, that's not really true. She prepares the flours the night before, until about 10 o'clock. In the summer she does this every day; now, it's only three times a week. She sells 25 different kinds of bread, though she only makes 10 or 15 on a given night. In addition to the bakery, she grows figs, kiwis, lemons, and oranges in a heated greenhouse. She also grows mushrooms and makes a peppermint syrup that, when added to a glass of water, gives you a kind of cold cup of mint tea. She does this all without any steady, paid help, only the WWOOFers that come and go for a few weeks at a time.

I cannot imagine myself ever working this much at anything.

Lina is very easygoing and doesn't require that any of the WWOOFers get up early or stay up late to help with the baking. "I work eighteen hours a day," she told me over the phone before I came, "but I don't make anyone else work eighteen hours a day." But I chose to come to this farm specifically because of its bakery, and I wanted to come away from here having learned something about baking bread. If my only opportunity to participate in the baking came so early in the morning that it's really still night, then so be it. I would have to wake up early at least once in order to experience it.

It was easier to wake up at 3:30 than I had expected. At least, until I actually tried to get out of bed. But I pulled myself together and left my basement bedroom, came upstairs, and considered eating something but felt still full from the previous day's dinner. I walked a few steps through the frigid garage to the bakery at the back, already warm and only bound to get much warmer before the morning was over. Lina put me to work measuring ingredients and cutting up the dough into loaf-sized lumps. Not the most challenging work, but I watched Lina as she mixed the ingredients and worked the dough, all the while keeping track of two pans of loaves in the oven and never seeming to get the least bit stressed out. She must have made at least fifty loaves.

At around 6 or so, the other WWOOFer, Aline, came in to the bakery. I was feeling a bit weak from opening and closing the oven door and getting blasted in the face with hot air, and though I would rather have waited for the fresh bread, I took a moment to go over to the house, eat a slice off a slightly stale loaf and drink a few glasses of water. The sky was beginning to brighten outside. About time. I had already been up for two and a half hours.

Back to the bakery for more measuring, more cutting, sliding pans in and out of the oven, fingers crusted with a dry doughy residue. Then putting finished loaves into bags -- Avoine, Sesame, Grenoble, Fromage-Olive, Tomates-Basilic -- and bags into crates for delivery. We had breakfast -- ate nearly an entire loaf of fresh bread between the three of us. Then checking the number of loaves again, finding that one was missing -- but it was alright; only a delivery to a friend; could wait until tomorrow -- and packing the crates into the car. Lina drove off. The bakery was a floury mess but it could wait until later. The sun was as up as it was going to get on this overcast day. It was 8:30 or 9. Bed was a distant memory.