Efficiency Shouldn’t Be the Goal
On growing tomatoes and the insidiousness of work culture
If this were any other year, there’s so much I’d want to show you and tell you about. About the first roasted tomatoes of the season, bubbling under their blistered skins, devoured three days in a row for lunch or dinner because why would anyone ever eat anything else? About the pillow-soft figs, how the cracked and too-tender ones are the sweetest. About the sunset that drenched the sky in the same aching amber as the ripening peaches.
I’m two months in to my fourth annual stay at Myrtle Glen Farm in southern Oregon, and this time, my girlfriend Lauren is here to work with me. I’d want to tell you about that, about her grinning at me from her lopsided perch on the top branches of the Gravenstein apple tree. I’d want to tell you about the snaked patterns on the underbelly of the bark that split from the wood we chopped in the forest, the caterpillar the color of cucumber peels, the walk to the waterfall. The stupid-silly song we created at the dinner table with Dan and Micha, my friends, now also Lauren’s friends, and the owners of this place.
But now it feels wrong to share anything that’s not purposeful. Is it?
Last week’s Good Food Jobs newsletter included a list of ways (there are many) that “White dominant…
