Roots and bulbs

Been awhile since I signed in. In a rather exciting (but time-consuming) development, I recently secured a grant writing job with Action Against Hunger-USA, an international hunger-relief organization. Watch the web site on October 16 for the launch of a new campaign to promote Ready-to-Use Foods-- and a lead article in ACF's online newsletter, RESPONSE, that I wrote (with some editing by ACF's communications guru, James). Anyway, below is a post I wrote on the train coming back from a visit to New York City for meetings at ACF:

So who was it that first had the bright idea of eating root and bulb vegetables?

Really, think about it—prehistoric man (or woman) is exploring his hunter-gatherer options and looks at a perfectly innocuous plant growing like any other, and thinks, maybe I should pull this up and eat it. Doing so, he devours the plant stem and leaves—but he’s still hungry. Then he looks at the dirt-covered root —let’s make it an onion-- that he just pulled out of the ground in his haste to get at something edible, and has an epiphany. He could wash this (or maybe just rub the dirt off)—and eat it. Or, better yet, he could sauté it and serve it and add pizzazz and some B-vitamins to that woolly mammoth he just killed.

Somehow I can’t see it.

OK, so I’m getting a little carried away. A day spent harvesting and processing root and bulb vegetables—all of which have to be pulled out of the ground with more than a little effort-- will do that to a person. Seriously, would you ever think that something like this

could be cleaned up and put into a soup? (Those are leeks, by the way, for anyone who thought they were seeing really big scallions.) It takes a lot of people sitting around like this. :

(That's Matt, cleaning leeks.)

In addition to the leeks, we were also pulling and processing garlic (harvested weeks ago, then tied up and cured in the barn), carrots, and celeriac, otherwise known as celery root. That makes two bulbs and two roots, for anyone who's keeping score.

The celeriac was the real challenge—like many root vegetables, it has to be loosened with a shovel before you can even pull it out of the ground. Then it has to be cleaned—which we did sitting out in the field where we had harvested it, cutting off the muddy, hairy roots with a machete, then lopping off the green shoots, leaving ourselves with a big knob that looked quite similar to, but not at all like, a mandrake root. THEN we took the whole mess back to the barn and washed it, using high-pressure streams of water (more or less—this isn’t an industrial operation) to spray the celeriac to within an inch of its life, as the mud slowly loosened its grip and was slurped, not without protest, down the drain in the floor.

The leeks received basically the same treatment, although their roots didn’t provide such a tangled mess to scrape off. The carrots just had to be washed. Since they were bunched up, and the bunches were held together with a rubber band tied around the stalks, we didn’t even have to take the stalks off them.

As for the garlic, it also had its stalk cut off, and was peeled enough so that all the brownish, ugly-looking skin was gone and it, well, looked pretty. (Please remember that the farm belongs to a catering company.)

This post has been yet another attempt to explain why organic food costs so much.