Horn of plenty

Excerpt

You people come into the market—the Greenmarket, in the open air under the downpouring sun—and you slit the tomatoes with your fingernails. With your thumbs, you excavate the cheese. You choose your stringbeans one at a time. You pulp the nectarines and rape the sweet corn. You are something wonderful, you are—people of the city—and we, who are almost without exception strangers here, are as absorbed with you as you seem to be with the numbers on our hanging scales.

Does every sink grow on your farm?

Yes, ma'am.

It's marvelous. Absolutely every sink?

Some things we get from neighbors up the road.

You don't have no avocados, do you?

Avocados don't grow in New York State.

Butter Beans?

They're a Southern crop.

Who baked this bread?

My mother, A dollar twenty-five for the cinnamon. Ninety-five cents for the rye.

I can't eat rye bread anymore. I like it very much, but it gives me a headache.

Standing in the cafeteria line on the final day of the first Cornucopia Symposium, Robert Rodale explains that they would have …