Food comes from dirt, not plastic bags, boxes, and bottles.

In my 20s and 30s, in Manhattan, I went to the latest gallery openings and clubs. I even showed my art there and hung out with world-famous DJs.

I considered what I did sophisticated and valuable.

Maybe because I’m older, maybe because I’m wiser, a main highlight of me summer these days is visiting the farm where my farm-share food comes from. I ate tons of tomatilloes and cherry tomatoes fresh from the stalk or vine.

There was a potluck lunch where they served corn picked that morning. I brought one of my famous vegetable stews, made with vegetables from that farm. People somehow brought a lot of store-bought cookies, brownies, chips, and so on. How they decided to bring store-bought processed junk to a vegetable farm, I don’t understand, but they did. I wonder if favoring cookies over vegetables explains how many guests were obese. The empty calories have to go somewhere.

Anyway, here are pictures of the farm. Years ago I wouldn’t have been able to name many of the plants, let alone identify they as edible. Now I can tell which each is and find them mouth-watering already, like the collard greens, squashes, tomatoes, kale, and so on.

I don’t know how a younger me would have seen going to a farm and picking carrots (one of the day’s activities), but me today values this day more.