Hard Squash, Eggs, and Fresh Fryers

I was browsing through the produce department at a local store, peering at the weird looking stuff on display and reading the signs to find out what it all was. Then I came to something I recognized, but the overhead sign stopped me cold. It said, “Hard Squash.”

In our garden we grow several kinds of winter squash and summer squash, so it didn’t take me long to figure out what “hard” squash is. I began looking around for the summer squash to see if it’s now called “soft” squash. With so much produce available year round, apparently today’s consumers no longer relate to winter squash and summer squash.

That reminded me of a college student who used to buy eggs from me, until her husband said he would no longer eat our eggs. Aghast at the idea that live hens laid the eggs he ate for breakfast, he had asked his wife, “Do you know where those eggs come from?”

“Where,” I asked her, “does he think supermarket eggs come from?”

“They don’t have chickens at the supermarket,” she said, “so he doesn’t have to think about where the eggs come from.” I was appalled to see she wasn’t kidding.

And then there’s the time I was showing our place to a couple and their college son. When we came to the chicken coop I said, “We’re having one of these for dinner.”

“Don’t tell me that!” said the son, stuffing his fingers into his ears. “I prefer to think chicken is born in plastic wrap at the supermarket.”

Well, what do you expect? At one time the big debate in Congress was over when a fryer can be labeled “fresh” and when it must be labeled “frozen.” To me, fresh is fresh and frozen is frozen. You don’t need a Congressional hearing to figure that out. All you have to do is look it up in the dictionary.

Before this country loses its sense entirely, it ought to be mandatory for every school kid to spend at least one summer working on a farm. Better yet, all schools should have a farm-to-school program like the one offered by the McMinn, Tennessee, school system, where food grown by high school students on a 10-acre farm is served at special events within the system’s schools.

Or at least kids should be let out of school to help with harvesting, as was once the practice. But today’s school administrators feel “school is too important to miss for the harvest.” Those very words appeared in a news release about the possibility of letting students out of school to help with the potato harvest in Maine.

I’ll bet the average school kid today can’t point to Maine on a map, let alone tell you which agricultural products are grown there. People would be a heck of a lot smarter about where food comes from if all students, rural and urban alike, would have opportunities to be involved with harvest.