What I Learned as an Accidental Farmer
After a relatively ordinary career as a civil servant, I became an accidental farmer sometime in the winter of 2015. The transition was startlingly abrupt. I went from preparing cumbersome briefing books for congressional hearings in Washington DC to planting rows of zucchini seedlings about 700 meters above sea level on the tippy top of the Amalfi Coast in a small village called Agerola.
What started as a gingham dappled dream overflowing with Mason jars quickly became the Sisyphean reality of harvest, preserve, eat, repeat. At least the views were amazing.
Now as the world seems to steadily embrace social distancing amidst the recent COVID-19 pandemic, I find a surprisingly familiar muscle memory of food preservation kicking back into gear. It has been a while since I tilled the earth as civil servant contadina, yet the lessons I learned from my fellow farmers in Southern Italy are all trickling forth. Chief among them: resilience and self-reliance.
The daily battle against the natural entropy of food decay dominates the lives of most Southern Italian contadini (farmers) even today. As I first zealously planted rows and rows of San Marzano tomatoes that first year, it never occurred to me that at some point, I would also have to harvest and later eat them. And there was no way I was going to eat one hundred fucking kilos of tomatoes in the week it would take for them to rot.
My neighbor, an old lady named Sincera Rosa taught me how to can tomatoes. There was no time for cute Mason jars. We needed glass Peroni beer bottles — HUNDREDS of them. I didn’t have any lying around in my bare cantina (cellar), so I went to a nearby bar in our local piazza and asked for all of their discarded beer bottles. At the time, I had no idea that glass beer bottles were like gold in Agerola. You never throw them away. You save them for tomato canning season — because duh!
I batted my eye lashes and crooned, “grazie mille,” to Peppe the bar owner as he handed me a garbage bag full of old beer bottles.
“Bocca a lupo, good luck,” he wished me, raising his eye brows as I victoriously trounced through the piazza on my way to Sincera Rosa’s house where I would present her with my new loot. That was when I not only became the village idiot but I also learned that true contadini NEVER throw anything away. To include old beer bottles.
As we sterilized the bottles in a gigantic metal vat of boiling water called a bidone, Sincera Rosa slipped in a potato.
“When the potato is cooked, the bottles are sterile,” she explained to me.
Sincera Rosa and I boiled, peeled and pureed hundreds of kilos of tomatoes that September afternoon. She liked to remind me that throughout WWII, Agerola never faced the same hunger as the nearby city dwellers in Naples.
“The Napoletani came here and begged for the crusca (chaff) that we fed our cows.”
Later when I moved to Naples and recommenced my comfortable life as city dweller and consumer, Sincera Rosa’s waste not want not sensibilities gradually drifted away from my daily reality. Just as fully stocking my cantina with pickled eggplant and preserved tomatoes had once been my raison d’etre in Agerola, now I was back to my old tricks ordering genmaicha on Amazon and complaining about the paucity of avocados in the local markets.
In one week, Italy has not only shutdown but many of us across the world are panic buying toilet paper and hand sanitizer. Yesterday, as I gazed into my own fully stocked refrigerator, I imagined what Sincera Rosa would have to say about my current life of fleeting suburban abundance.
First, I am certain she would say, “who needs toilet paper when you have a bidet!” Well, point taken, Sincera Ro! On the scale of elasticity of demand that is survival, toilet paper really should not rank high.
Second, Sincera Rosa would definitely guffaw at the pounds of peppers and green beans in the fridge and scream, “get canning!” And while I may no longer have a root cellar as I once did, yesterday, thinking of Sincera Rosa I started roasting peppers, shucking peas, preparing brines and sterilizing Mason jars (yes Mason jars, because I have since returned to my natural state of hipster pansy.)
The familiar, repetitive routine of cleaning, sterilizing, brining and pickling restored a sense of order in our little household. Normally, Sauced & Found’s season would be starting now and we would be taking clients on culinary tours to meet proud farmers like Sincera Rosa and mozzarella pullers, vintners, fishmongers and pasta makers. We would be feeding guests unctuous Neapolitan ragùs and rum soaked babàs.
But for now, I am content to recall with fondness the lessons I learned as an accidental farmer under the tutelage of my old neighbor Sincera Rosa. In a land full of ladies like her, I am confident that tutto andrà bene in Italy after all.
