From Broadway to Beet Grower

As I walked into the kitchen yesterday, my aunt was chopping beets for dinner. Laying off to the side were a pile of the greens about to be tossed in the garbage. I asked her if she usually uses beet greens and with a shrug she told me that she didn't even know they were edible. "Not edible!!" I laughed, "Beets greens are so scrumptious." I quickly washed them and cooked them with some tofu for lunch.

Two years ago, I couldn't tell the difference between a beet and a rutabaga. I grew up as a typical city boy on the fifteenth floor of my apartment building and commuting to high school everyday on a subway. With the exception of summers at Eisner camp in the Berkshires, the only green space I had growing up was Central Park. I knew that my food came from supermarkets and restaurants, but had never stepped foot on a farm.

In the summer of ‘06, I spent three months as a Jewish organic farmer at the Adamah program in south western Connecticut. I lived, with a dozen others, in tents in the woods and "commuted" by bike to a nearby farm. The only car we had was a big old pickup truck that we ran on bio-diesel that we brewed ourselves. Together we farmed four acres and grew thousands of pounds of organic vegetables.

Before that summer, I had never done anything like growing my own food. It was amazing to find that by simply performing manual tasks like planting, weeding, watering and harvesting, I was able to grow significant amounts of food. A quarter of a potato can yield almost a dozen new potatoes. A carrot seed the size of a point of a pin can grow into a foot long carrot. I know that science can explain plant growth, but there is also an incredible wondering in farming that feelings like I am partnering with G!d. Every morning Jews around the world say the prayer Ahavah Rabah, which stresses how much G!d loves us. I had mumbled it hundreds of times, but before grew my own produce, I don't think I ever felt that love. The psalmist wrote, "you open your hand and satiate all living things according to your will" (145:16), but I never understood it before staring at the beauty of a squash blossom that I myself had grown.