In a World Without Corn…

Corn and products made from corn improve the lives of Americans in thousands of little ways. Often,

consumers don’t even know corn is present, let alone know the role it plays. But if corn and its products

weren’t available, many common products would be less useful, more expensive, even unavailable. Here

are some examples of the little annoyances and bigger problems Americans would face without corn:

No frozen pizza! Freezing pizza is a problem, because the moisture in the sauce can migrate into the crust,

making it so soggy it’s unappealing to eat. Modified corn starch is used to provide a barrier that prevents

water migration and keeps the crust crisp.

On a low-fat diet? Say thank you for corn. Many low-fat foods depend on corn-derived food starches to

provide qualities that used to come from fats. Examples include everything from low-fat salad dressing to

baked goods and meat products.

Frustrating wallpaper. If you’ve installed wallpaper, you know how important it is to have time to adjust

each strip accurately. Repositioning is possible because the wallpaper paste is made with corn starch

modified to slow down its adhesive action.

Daily bread buying. Corn syrup prevents waste and saves consumers money by keeping bread fresh

longer. By retaining moisture, corn syrup keeps baked goods from drying out too quickly and going stale.

Brown lettuce leaves. Many fruits and vegetables start to turn an unattractive brown once they’re cut and

exposed to air. Citric acid, recognized as a safe food ingredient, can prevent browning…and much of the

U.S. supply of citric acid is made from corn sweeteners.

No coloring for kids. Whether playing with chalk on the sidewalk or crayons in school, American children

rely on corn. Corn starch is used as a binder to help such products hold together better when in use. It may

also be used to dust molds during the manufacturing process so that brand-new crayons pop out

undamaged.

Americans are sleeping with corn. A whole new family of corn products, marketed under the Ingeo

trademark, includes pillows and comforters stuffed with 100% corn fill and blankets woven from the Ingeo

fiber. Ingeo products are environmentally friendly because they take less energy to produce than many

synthetics and they can be composted back into natural components.

Drippy lollipops. Candy makers began using corn syrups in lollipops and other hard candies generations

ago because the syrups hold moisture and prevent drips.

Putting the “crunch” in snack foods. When Americans snack, corn products are more popular than

potato chips. In addition to corn and tortilla chips (20% of the snack foods we eat), other snacks

such as cheese puffs rely on corn ingredients to provide their crunch.

Packing, storing and moving with corn. Corn starch provides the adhesive to glue down every little ridge

in corrugated cardboard. Whether you’re taking delivery on a new appliance, boxing old clothes for the

church bazaar, or moving across country, you’re using corn.

Crystals in ice cream. As a box of ice cream goes in and out of freezers on the way home from the store

and in the kitchen, it’s natural for crystals to develop in it. Part of the role corn sweeteners play in ice cream

and other frozen desserts is to keep crystals from developing.

Ack, hack, cough, gag. Corn contributes in many ways to reducing pollution. Ethanol, used to reduce air

pollution, is probably the best-known example. Others include the use of corn starch in industrial filters to

reduce water pollution, and corn-based plastics like PLA (polylactic acid), which composts back into natural

components after use.

Want S’more? Not without corn! Marshmallows stay fresh longer because corn syrup keeps them from

drying out too quickly. Corn ingredients are also used to make graham crackers, which means you can’t

enjoy S’mores without corn!

What, no plaster board? As viewers of This Old House learned in one episode, corn starch, which helps

bind the gypsum filling together, is an essential ingredient in manufacturing gypsum or plaster board for

building walls.

For fact sheets that contain these and more ways the world would be different without corn, Contact Us.

The Field Trip is set to began in November and will continue for several months.

I will visit farms, intentional communities, and all-around awesome places in search of hope!

By Darci Pauser

This experiment will get students thinking about the breakdown (or lack thereof) of materials that humans produce. It also explores the concepts of organic and inorganic matter, as well as the presence of agents of decomposition such as moisture and microorganisms.

You will need:

One large yogurt container for each student

Soil from the ground (not potting soil! no microorganisms!)

All about 2cm by 5cm or so of:

Pieces of plastic (cut up plastic bag, cut up plastic cup)

Pieces of metal (bottle caps, coins)

Pieces of paper bag

Kitchen food scraps

Introduce the experiment through a discussion of trash. What do we use? What do we throw away? What do you think you throw away the most? Where does it go? Do you recycle?

What things do you recycle?

The students will probably answer bottles and cans and paper. Write them on the board and ask them what these objects are made of. What are bottles made of? Next to bottles, write glass and plastic. What is used to make glass and plastic? Explain that sand and oil are the raw materials used to make glass and plastic and write sand and oil on the board. What is used to make paper? Trees.

(the recyclable material “cootie-catcher” may be incorporated into this lesson)

Explain that trash items fit into two categories of organic (paper and food scraps) and inorganic (glass and plastic). Organic means “living or once living,” while inorganic is “nonliving”—it never lived at all.

You may show the students the book “Tracking Trash: Flotsam, Jetsam, and the Science of Ocean Motion” to prompt discussion on the ways in which scientists study trash.

Explain that you would like to see what happens to trash in the ground and in a landfill. Ask the students how they would do this experiment.

Suggest that the students bury different kinds of trash (organic and inorganic) in soil. Pass out the containers, and small cups filled with soil. Pass out a piece of each trash material to the students. Have them write down the materials in their experiment under “Organic” and “Inorganic” columns. Next, distribute another cup of soil to the students, covering all the trash materials. Finally, the students should moisten the soil with water, just enough to get the trash damp.

Ask the students what they think will happen to the trash. Will anything change in any way in one month? Will there be a difference in what happens to the organic and inorganic material?

Explain that in a landfill, there is a lot of trash and not a lot of soil, so the trash does not get much air—particularly oxygen, and this is called “anaerobic” (the soil provides an aerobic environment). Ask the students how they can perform an experiment that will show what happens to trash in an anaerobic environment. Suggest that they put the same trash in a sealed jar.

Distribute jars with lids, some soil, and trash material to each student. Have them record the items in their experiment and predict what will happen to the materials.

Water the open-air containers every week for 4 to 6 weeks.

At the end of the experiment, have the students dump out their containers to see what happened to each material. The plastic and metal should be generally unchanged, while the paper and food scraps should be decomposing.

Do not open the jars, but have the students observe what occurred in the jars compared to the aerobic environment of open-air soil. Discuss with the students the formation of methane gas from the rotting of organic material in an anaerobic environment, and the inability of nutrients from organic material to return to the soil in landfill environments.

Reflection Questions:

Why did the organic material break down? What helped it? (water, microorganisms)

Did you see any organisms in the soil? (can’t see microorganisms, but they may have seen bugs)

How long do you think it would take for the inorganic material to break down?

How can our landfills be improved? (compost organic material, recycle as much as possible)

Do you think we could live without landfills completely?

If a farmer wanted to grow food on an old landfill, what problems do you think she would run into?
How was the jar experiment different from the open-air one?

Why did we use sealed jars? (anaerobic environment)

What’s wrong with organic material breaking down in an anaerobic environment? (anaerobic bacteria produce methane)

How was the jar experiment different from the open-air one?

Why did we use sealed jars? (anaerobic environment)

What’s wrong with organic material breaking down in an anaerobic environment? (anaerobic bacteria produce methane)

I peeled myself out of bed on Sunday morning, stopped at Genova’s (an old and locally famous deli in Temescal, Oakland) to get sandwiches for lunch, and met with Jess at her house in El Cerrito. Her and her partner, Russ, have an awesome container garden in their backyard. El Cerrito switched from small recycling bins to large cans, so Russ goes around retrieving the old bins for use as planters. They come complete with drainage holes and everything, and provide enough room for several little rows of seedlings.

Then, Jessica and I were off to Vacaville, where the fog does not make it in the hot sun. Our little East Bay selves were roasting (just like the fate of them chickens).

Soul Food Farms is owned and run by Alexis and Eric Koefoed and lies just a couple minutes from the 80 freeway, but is flanked on one side by oak-speckled hills that give the feeling of seclusion. Alexis studied viticulture (raising grapes for wine), and bought the land for that purpose. Soon after, however, grapes took a downturn on the market, and Alexis and Eric sort of “fell into” chicken raising. The niche was there, and they reshaped to fit it.

Now, they have 3000 laying hens and 10,000 meat birds, as well as a couple llamas and dogs.

Alexis showed our group around, starting with the meat chickens. They come as chicks in the mail from a hatchery in Pennsylvania– the only hatchery in the U.S. that breeds this special French variety. The chickens were separated by age, which is calculated in weeks. At nine weeks, the chickens are “harvested” and sent to buyers, including Chez Panisse. A Sept. 2007 SF Chronicle article (“Raising Poultry the New-Old Way”) reported the chickens were harvested at 12 weeks. During our tour, Alexis emphasized the importance of harvesting at nine weeks, noting that this was the prime age for the best taste.

The same aforementioned Chronicle article discussed the balance between intimate, small-scale arrangement and industrial-like organization: “streamlining will help, but they’re wary of heading too far down the road toward higher production and efficiency.” Indeed, the chickens seemed much more organized than those at Green String, which, I think, is good for the chickens. Although, the structure did seem to highlight the purpose– these are for eating. It was slightly disturbing to hear people on the tour joke about how tasty the chickens were going to be, and about naming them before eating them. Like I said: reverence and respect.

And nine weeks does seem like a short little chicken life, but, you know, those chickens looked good— happy, I mean. Olive trees were planted for the double use of shade for the chickens and the fruit for pressing into oil. They obviously had no diseases and there were no sore, featherless spots that are the indicator of pecking and fighting.

The laying hens wander about the property and have a significantly longer life than the meat chickens. Alexis and Eric search about the property daily to look for eggs that have been laid in bushes and under trees— the prototypical Easter egg hunt. The llamas and hens hang out together under a big tree. There are no roosters, as Eric and Alexis said they cause too much drama and tension amongst the hens. Although, once, someone abandoned a little Bantam rooster on their property, and the humor of this one little rooster crowing everyday and surveying his harem of 3000 prompted Eric and Alexis to keep him.

That is, until the day he disappeared– a predator must have snatched him, Alexis said. Well, we’ve all gotta eat.

The front of my apartment building is donned with two plots of plant space, each around 10 by 25 feet. All the plants (except for what seems t0 be a volunteer cilantro plant in its flowering stage) are typical lets-just-cover-some-space landscaping plants. Granted, some of the flowers are gorgeous and much-needed, but even still, I held that this small parcel of earth could be put to work to satisfy some basic subsistence needs as well as psychological contentment. 

The plots are covered in life-suppressing mulch where the landscape plants do not grow. Upon observing some of these in-between places, I decided to utilize them for gardening purposes. In went my other lemon verbena cutting, in went a squash, some broccoli (i know, not the season, but my roomie sprouted them for whatever reason), in went a pumpkin (also, roomie, is it really the season?), and in went a tomatillo. At another interstice, in went a tomato transplant, in went melon  and bean seeds. The other day, in went three cukes and an eggplant. 

Back to the training cats to ride bicycles, the apartment manager came out to walk her dog and discovered me watering the newly transplanted tomato plant. She said accusingly, “What are you doing?”

“I’m planting a tomato plant!” I replied in an excited and naive tone. 

“But I don’t think this is your property.”

“It belongs to the building, doesn’t it?”

Shaking her head, “I don’t know, I don’t know, I will ask the owner.” I didn’t hear anything more about it, and so far, my babies are intact. I painted on a brick ‘Garden Please Do Not Disturb’ to mark one spot.

The owner of the building, by the way, is a faceless corporation. So nice to feed the usurers, while others do all the work (the managers– I am sympathetic despite the excessive grumpiness). 

When I left the farm to return to Oakland, I knew my gardening capabilities would take on this character, and that I would be forced to plant in the overlooked extra spaces that do not exist as one large swath, but rather as a collection of interstices that demand a different set of strategies of locale and care, and involve education (training, if you will) of the residents in new values and aesthetic standards.

Counterpulse, an event space in San Francisco for arts and culture, held a discussion panel Wednesday evening entitled “Local Remanufacturing Our Way out of the Depression.” The panel and discussion were a breath of fresh air in an atmosphere of fear of catastrophe. These are the people who are preparing for continuing economic breakdown and developing positive methods to build local economies.

Peter Berg of the Planet Drum Foundation, Neil Seldman of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and Kevin Drew of the City of San Francisco’s Department of the Environment served as speakers for the panel.

Berg began by discussing the export of recyclable materials versus remanufacturing recyclables locally. Local remanufacture is not only better on the environment, but also better on the local human economy. When we achieve a high level of recycling—say 75%—we’re actually achieving a high level of garbage separation. We are merely separating it so that it can be sold off to another country.

Seldman later made the point that some believe much of the low-grade plastic actually ends up in an incinerator. Although to me, this would mean a reversal of the monetary exchange. Waste Management would be paying them to take the plastic versus them paying WM. Either way, we are recycling, but into a cycle that was bad to begin with.

Seldman also argued that we have in the United States a waste oligopoly. Allied and Waste Management are separate but in cahoots, because if they did merge, “someone might say something about it.” This oligopoly works to control recycling and build incinerators, to which Seldman is opposed. There are new forms of waste disposal being developed, he said, but these are essentially incineration in disguise. Plastics will be melted and the gas thus released is then burned, for example.

Seldman also proposed positive changes like a national tax on garbage, deconstruction rather than demolition, and the building of repair skills, such as in electronics. If there were local recycling, he argued, more jobs would be created: there are more jobs in recycling than in waste.

One proposal he rejected was that of requiring companies to deal with their own waste created by the consumers of their products. He claimed that this would eliminate unions, although did not explain why.

Kevin Drew’s comments concluded the panel. He spoke of the possibilities of local glass recycling, and even a revisiting of the returnable bottle. “I lived in a returnable world,” he stated, speaking of his experience with waste as a child. The One-Way Bottle, as he called it, is a new phenomenon.

Discussion was impassioned and pertinent, with questions being raised about reaching those outside the Bay Area Bubble, as well as the problematics of pollution caused by recycling facilities.

I give Counterpulse high marks for a timely and relevant topic, and engaging, smart speakers. I hope venues around the Bay Area continue to discuss and debate methods of rebuilding our local economy.

Check out Counterpulse.org

Also On:

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/03/12/18576369.php

I am motivated to participate in Green String’s Internship position because I foresee a future in which people will need to be knowledgeable on sustainable food production in order to subsist. Drastic changes in agriculture need to occur in order to avoid a complete breakdown of our food economy. I hope to make those changes happen, or at least prepare for that breakdown through my own personal enrichment.

My fieldwork on houseless train-hoppers while at UC Berkeley left a deep impression on my views of the world. My subjects’ critiques of housing, land, food, and politics were elegant and enlightening. They essentially abandoned all the social systems they deemed corrupt, instead choosing to live off the waste of an over-consuming society. Many of them had dreams to live on their own self-sufficient farms, although life on the streets seemed to me to make that dream far out of reach.

After graduating from the Anthropology Department, I continued study in housing and agriculture, researching sprawl, slums, and industrial crop production. I have been particularly influenced by the writings of Wendell Berry. His essays speak a wealth of truth for the present day, even though he was writing 30-40 years ago. Had more people heard his call to change, what would the world look like now? His writings are more pertinent than ever, providing guidelines for a synergistic relationship with the land and arguments against the destruction that industrial agriculture reaps on our most precious home.

I find myself swaying between extreme pessimism and excited optimism on these issues, for although the situation on our planet seems dire, I feel a seed of hope sprouting in the form of awareness and recognition of the seriousness of the need to reform our economies. Now, instead of environmentalists being perceived as “hippies” or “tree-huggers,” we are in a position to work together to literally save our planet.

A long-time friend of mine has been living in Hawaii for the past eight months, living and working on farms, and we often speak together about the growing feeling of apocalypse. There are many farms in Hawaii owned and inhabited by people who feel similarly about the possibility of an erosion of our food economy, and this belief intrigues me. I hope to eventually move to Hawaii in order to research the apocalypse communities that have formed there. What do these communities have to teach the rest of the country and world?

Sustainability defines a system that can regenerate and renew itself constantly and consistently. Human systems can be sustainable by learning from and harnessing natural regenerative systems. Places with a strong sense of community have a greater ability to be sustainable. Berry writes about transient professionals who, in order to be successful in their field, must never form a sense of community and must never consider a place their home, because that would prevent them from performing their various exploitative jobs. This was a stark contrast from my past research subjects who considered every place their home– hence they were not “homeless.” Knowledge of and participation in one’s community makes for sustainability because members can be aware of what products are available immediately around them.

One of my greatest concerns about human interaction with their surrounding community/environment is our disconnection from the sources of our commodities. In fact, most people do not even wish to know where their commodities come from, because the truth is too painful. Instead, people choose to blindly purchase and consume. For example, my aunt and uncle live in El Dorado Hills, a relatively rural area outside of Sacramento. My uncle purchased a side of beef from a neighbor who had slaughtered their own cow. My aunt found this disgusting, and regretted her husband’s newly acquired meat’s presence in the freezer. Why has it become easier to eat a dinosaur-shaped ‘chicken nugget’ than a side of beef from the cow down the street? Why are the nuggets not shaped like chickens, but instead an almost mythical and fantastical creature? Do we prefer our food to remain in the sphere of fantasy?

The issue of disconnection led to my decision to cease eating animal flesh and, as much as possible, all animal products. It is bad enough to have little to no control over the treatment of the horticultural products I consume, I do not desire the torture of animals in my belly. A stronger community would allow me to have knowledge about what is happening to the soil because of my need to eat, as well as what is happening to the animals who provide dairy, eggs, and meat. If people were forced to awareness of where these products originate, perhaps we would not be consuming so much meat and creating the issues of waste, land use, and hunger we have now.

I have strong commitment and motivation regarding agricultural issues, but I have much to learn, and am in need of a space in which to learn. Traditional schooling is possible, but also costly, and lacks the hands-on experience I desire. Currently, I am single and have no family or dependents of any kind. Now is the time to commit myself fully and deeply into a program such as this. I have a tremendous ability to get immersed in my course of study, but also need a community of peers with which to collaborate. Among the talents and traits I would bring to Green String are a keen and critical insight, an interdisciplinary sensibility, and a strong desire to contribute to and engage in a course of instruction.

Although not a religious person in the mainstream sense, I do believe that we are ‘all God’s children’ in that each one of us is always learning if we choose to harness it, and so always in a state of dependence. I feel that every experience I have and person I meet is an opportunity to become fuller and more engaged as a person. Participating in the Green String Institute would bring me closer to the person that I hope to be and to succeed in what I hope to accomplish.

Making sure what grows locally is eaten also shows and teaches respect for food. One comes to realize how silly it is that we feel we must buy everything we consume, when some can actually come into being without any human intervention whatsoever. 

There certainly is a bounty within the urban harvest, and this can come through actually picking from neighborhood fruit trees and mushrooms in parks, but also through saving excess from supermarkets, farmer’s markets, and restaurants that would otherwise get thrown out. Until the litigiousness of our society is lulled, however, the latter will remain largely illegal.

Urban and suburban foraging needs to become the way of doing things. Homeowner’s associations should not be allowed to prevent the planting of crops and fruit trees, community farms and gardens must be present in places other than the most food-conscious urban areas. A broad and sweeping change is needed in the role consumption of food and other goods nation-wide. Our economy counts on it.

Changing how we live and eat, one fig at a time

“Don’t worry about sorting them,” she says, dropping a handful into a paper bag. An alarming fraction of the fruits are mottled and a little wormy-looking. “We’ll do that tomorrow.”

Wadud, a bartender at Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse, has become obsessed with saving city-grown fruit from being wasted, which is why she heads out in the darkness, stripping smallish green orbs from the branches of this unassuming tree rooted in a patch of grass between the street and a concrete wall.

She’s also part of a growing movement of super-local eaters and activists interested in food not from the nearest farm, but from down the block. When she moved to south Berkeley four years ago from Ohio, she was struck by California’s ubiquitous fruit and by the way people let it rot, as if backyard apples and figs were something unremarkable.

She gathered the courage to knock on strangers’ doors and ask whether she might try one of their ripe plums, or sample a pear. No one refused; in fact, she says, people seemed relieved to share, as if the prospect of wasted food were a constant weight she was helping to lift.

Forage Oakland blog

So last spring, she created Forage Oakland, a blog on which she details her foraging adventures and where people can barter their excess backyard bounty, trading apples for figs and lemons for lavender.

The response has been enthusiastic – more than 120 people have registered, and now she spends her free time bicycling through East Bay neighborhoods, harvesting at one home and delivering to another. Wadud doesn’t pick anything without asking for permission – difficult at first for a born introvert. But now, the moments she spends with strangers and neighbors in their backyards, trying to thread a long-handled picker through tree branches to reach the highest-hanging fruit, are tiny revolutions against the anomie that is so common in urban life.

“People can live somewhere for years and never really know who’s next door,” she says. “But food binds us all, and it becomes this very simple way to connect.”

As food prices rise and interest in locally grown food intensifies, foraging has also become an inexpensive way to eat healthfully.

Between May and October of last year, the 27-year-old didn’t buy any fruit from the grocery store or farmers’ market. By then, she had made a map of forageable food sources in her neighborhood in south Berkeley.

“Making dinner, I’d check the map to find rosemary for the roast chicken,” she says. “Or if I wanted tea, I’d go over to Miles and Cavour (streets) and get lemon verbena. It’s more exciting to eat when you have this immediate connection with your food.”

Sustainable living has always been important to Wadud and was part of the reason she packed up and moved to Berkeley after graduating from the College of Wooster in Ohio with an urban sociology degree.

For example, when her boyfriend won a trip to Rome last year, her first thought was not what to pack, but rather, “What’s going to happen to the persimmons? Who’s going to harvest the persimmons? That’s my dilemma. It’s why I lie awake at night.”

Trading walnuts

Berkeley graduate student Georgia Seamans stumbled on Forage Oakland when she was surfing the Internet, looking for a recipe for nocino, an Italian liqueur made from walnuts.

She left a comment: “There’s a walnut tree on my block. Hopefully the squirrels will let me share in this year’s bounty.” Wadud wrote back offering walnuts, and in return Seamans gave her garden herbs. “We’ve been trading ever since. Our last trade, I gave her some end-of-season tomatoes and I got some hachiya persimmons.”

Those persimmons may have come from Boston transplant Diana Sherman, whose backyard tree hangs heavy with hachiyas. Their goopiness and delicate taste make them hard to give away in large quantities, she says. Last year, most of them ended up in the compost bin. “It was our first year here,” she says of the home in Oakland’s Westlake district that she shares with her husband. “The persimmons ripened just as we moved in, and we were totally drowning in them. We really didn’t know what to do with them.”

Not money-making gig

Chez Panisse regularly buys foraged foods for its gourmet menus, but for Wadud, capitalism and Forage Oakland have nothing to do with one another. Foraging, as she practices it, requires creativity, a certain do-it-yourselfness, and a willingness to share. Trading cash for goods requires none of those. It’s a way to say a little something about the world as she imagines it could be, instead of the world as it is.

“She’s not making any money, and she’s probably never going to make any money for this,” says San Franciscan Iso Rabins, who is in the midst of launching a foraged-foods business using a community-supported agriculture model, in which customers would pay a set amount to receive a weekly box of locally foraged foods. “She spends her whole day riding her bike around, picking fruit and giving it away to other people. It’s totally noble.”

There are similar projects, like Oakland’s People United for a Better Life in Oakland, or PUEBLO, which hires urban teenagers to pick produce and deliver it to senior citizens who have limited access to fresh fruit. Other Bay Area groups like North Berkeley Harvest and San Jose’s Village Harvest Project connect homeowners with too much fruit with volunteer parties who are willing to pick and take the gleanings to local food banks. Portland, Ore., Philadelphia, Chicago and Boston are among the other cities with similar programs.

“There’s a whole revolution,” says Matias Viegener, one of three Los Angeles artists who started a public fruit mapping project in 2004. When, calling themselves Fallen Fruit, they started posting fruit tree maps online and leading foraging tours through their Silver Lake neighborhood, they seemed unusual. “But in the last year,” Viegener says, “it’s kind of boomed. We often get to trees we know and they’ve been picked bare.”

New vision for city

Each of these projects, including Forage Oakland, issues a challenge to reconsider the city as a plentiful and generous place.

“This is not idealistic,” Wadud writes. “Rather it is necessary, pragmatic and creative – especially in times when much of the world is suffering from lack of access to healthful and satisfying fresh food.”

On a daytime foraging mission in Oakland’s Temescal district, she wheels her bicycle past a narrow home to a giant, hidden backyard, where pears and apples litter the ground. The air is heavy with the sweet stink of rot, but there are plenty of perfectly good specimens still hanging in the trees, and in another corner of the yard, oranges are just beginning to ripen.

She gathers pears and apples into two bags – one to leave for the trees’ owner, in thanks for allowing her to pick, and one for Forage Oakland, to be exchanged for something else.

“It’s overwhelming,” she says. “There is just so much fruit.”

E-mail us at datebook@sfchronicle.com.

Today, I woke at seven. Simon meowed me awake. We had a Rigo day today, with Rigoberto, the farm manager. I ate oatmeal with cinnamon, and half a grapefruit with honey at breakfast, showered and dressed. We all walked to the farm stand, the seven of us interns. Seven now. We went to an onion patch to weed and hoe. I was confused at first. I couldn’t find the onions. Julia gave me a bit of a lesson about it, but I was still having a hard time. I would try to pull the weeds and the onions would come out, too. Rigo came along. Ug, I knew I was doing it wrong. But he taught me. He showed me how to put my fingers near the base of the onion so that it would stay in place while I pulled the weeds near it. And how to chop up the earth near the plant, suppressing the weeds around it.

I felt like I was leaving the ground very bare around the plant. M felt the same way. Bob certainly does it differently. I suppose that means he has taught us well, if it is difficult for me to bear to do it any other way. I tried to tear some of the weed material apart and place it on the bare ground. We took a break. I had an apple and chocolate. I didn’t realize how much I had missed fruit, sugary fruit, until I bought some at whole foods yesterday. Rigo spoke with Julia a lot about his experiences crossing the border. I could understand only some of it, but Julia filled us in a bit afterwards. After that conversation, I felt like working very close to the others and talking, which I don’t always feel like doing. Sometimes it’s nice to work off on your own and be with your own thoughts when doing this type of work.

Rigo has a wife and children in Mexico, but he’s been working in Sonoma with Bob for 25 years. He said that at first, it was lonely being here. Now, his brother and son work with him, although he doesn’t get to see his son much, as they work on different farms, and his son goes to school at night, not coming home until 11 p.m. They start work at 6:30. Rigo said that there is this idea in Mexico that if you come to the U.S., you will make a lot of money fast and it will solve all your problems, but that when you get here, it’s not exactly true, but you keep coming back out of hope for a better future.

He goes back to Mexico about once a year. He takes an airplane there, but getting back in is another story. First, he walks three days in the desert in a group of about ten. They travel in groups because there’s a higher chance of making it across—at least a few will usually make it. There are bandits in the desert on both sides of the border. They have guns and they will take everything you have. Even the police are bandits sometimes. If the bandits don’t think you’ve given them everything, they will tell you to take off your pants. Rigo has a special pocket in his underpants to hide money. It’s like a game, Julia recounted, because they don’t really want you to take off your pants, for some reason. Julia didn’t quite understand why. Maybe because you may have a gun. Rigo said that he can tell whether or not they are really willing to kill you for your money.

After making it across the border, he must stay at a house for a few hours, to make sure the police are not coming for him. I am guessing this is what he has to do to protect the coyote, because after this, the coyote comes to pick him up (coy⋅o⋅te: a person who smuggles Mexican nationals across the border into the U.S. for a fee). He has to pay coyotes a lot of money. It costs almost nothing for him to go to Mexico compared with coming back.

He has five acres in Mexico that his wife and younger children work. His dream is to have an avocado orchard, and grow many varieties of avocadoes. He began working in the U.S. to have money to buy a truck. He bought a truck and other equipment with the money he’s made here, but will he ever get to live that dream? There must be people who can help him. There must be organizations in Mexico to help small farmers.

To me, this is just crazy—these are people. For 25 years, Rigo has worked here, growing food, feeding us, and feeding our children, and for 25 years, Rigo has had to endure the pain and loneliness of living far from his family. I cannot imagine having to walk three days in the desert. How do you survive that? How do you prepare for that? I especially cannot imagine doing that over and over again, to where it becomes simply part of your life. All this, and Rigo always has a smile on his face. He always has a positive energy.

On the way back to the farm stand, we rode on the back of Rigo’s ATV. I laid down on the trailer bed and watched the clouds as we bumped along. It did not even seem that I was moving, because the smeared clouds stayed in place, until the power lines passed above, moving together, then farther apart, intersecting and separating from one another. Andrea wanted to take a group photo of us all with Ross and Ross’ old truck, so we rode in the back of Ross’ truck to the top of a hill after lunch. The grass on the hill was such a rich green—almost neon. We had a lesson with Bob Schaffer on soil. He is such a good speaker.

At dinner, Melissa told us that she had just found out that her cousin’s two-year-old had been in a car accident and was “brain dead.” So little. I will be praying for her and for Melissa’s cousin. Lyle’s dog had puppies today, and after dinner, Melissa found out that she had one more puppy. She said, “I’m glad that puppies are being born.”

“Puppies are always being born,” I replied.