You are what you eat.

If it’s true that you are what you eat, then this week I’m blueberries, blackberries, cucumbers and new potatoes. It’s been a “bumper” year for all four, and my tongue is purple, my throat is cool and my belly is full.

Here at the tailgate market, a young girl has shown up with a large beer cooler from which she is selling cottage cheese cartons full of the fattest blackberries you’ve ever seen. And Karen and Johnny White are selling them by the gallon. The blackberries will be the first thing to sell out, and soon the young girl will be over in the music tent playing fiddle tunes with Cathy Arps to a growing and enthusiastic crowd of listeners.

As I eat a handful of blackberries I have traded Karen and Johnny for some of the largest new potatoes I’ve ever grown, I’m reminded, again, of the old medicinal adage “You are what you eat.” Like most precepts and folk wisdom, I’ve always wondered at the origin of this phrase and just how literally we are supposed to take it. Are we, literally, what we eat?

Common sense would lead one to believe that a healthy diet would produce a healthy person. But then, there are so many exceptions. People who can (and do) eat anything and are still slim, trim and vital, as well as those who eat well and are sick. But in the end, for most of us at least, I think that what we eat plays a significant role in our overall mental and physical health. How could it not?

Here at the Jackson County Tailgate Market we are mostly organic growers. We grow organically not because we can charge more for our produce (in fact, most of us are charging less than what you’d pay for radiated and chemically-induced produce at the supermarket), but because we believe in the old adage of “You are what you eat.”

We like the rich, sweet, even loamy taste of organically grown foods. And we like knowing what goes in and on the food we put in our bodies, of having some modicum of control over our lives. Those who buy our produce would seem to agree - even to the extreme of the many vegetarians we see each Saturday morning here on the back street in Sylva. These are folks who have abandoned the American obsession with eating meat for every meal and have taken to a lighter fare and are leaner and meaner for having done so - or so it would seem from outward physical appearance. There are no hogs being butchered or slabs of steak being sold here at the Sylva market, no “mad cows.”

The “blackberry girl” and I are having fun imagining that today we are blackberries. We stick out our tongues at each other as proof of our identity and tell blackberry jokes we have made up on the spot. Of course there are the obvious allusions to chiggers, briars and raccoon scat in our silly jokes, and we have fun passing the morning away with happy, childish banter.

A couple truck positions down from mine, a large crowd has gathered around the honey vendors from over in Almond, and much “bee talk” is going on. “Talk about organic!” I hear a loud male voice proclaim. And it’s true, the bees give us one of the most wonderfully and miraculously natural products known to man. “Ambrosia,” “food of the Gods,” “the land of milk and honey” are just some of the maxims that have been handed down to us over the ages. And, if it’s true that “man can not live by bread alone,” then could he, maybe, live by honey, alone? With these thoughts wreaking havoc in my head, I wander over to the honey tent, make my way to the display table and put a big plastic spoon of the early clover and wildflower honey in my mouth. MMmmmmmnn ... The blackberry girl is there in the honey tent, too. She has beaten me there and you can see some of her “free taste” oozing out of the side of her mouth and running down her chin. We smile at each other, knowingly. Now, we are honey!
The conversation and the tales at the tailgate market are as puzzling as they are endless, and as interesting as the food is good.

(Crowe is a writer and editor who lives in the Canada community of Jackson County. He can be reached at newnativepress@hotmail.com)

 

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