Published in edited form in Tulare County's Foothills Sun- Gazette, Jan. 8, 2014
For Christmas I received a new book, The Perfect Peach: Recipes and Stories from the Masumoto Family Farm by Marcy, Nikiko and David Mas Masumoto (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2013.) It is a beautiful book about beauty, the common ordinary beauty of the art of farming, about growing, cooking and eating food, about building a family on the land for generations. It is so profoundly the book we need right now that I can only read it in small doses. Every page contains something that makes me want to cry, and then quote.
The gift of the book, its importance, was accentuated by some news I received the day before. Christmas Eve day I ran into a friend at the post office, one of Lindsay's longstanding Japanese-American family farmers. I asked him how farming was going. "We're getting out," he said. Thunk. My heart fell to the pavement. Twenty acres was already in escrow; the other twenty will supply one brother who goes to a farmer's market in LA every weekend. "The small farmer just can't compete against the big guys any more," he said. "And none of the kids want to come back and farm, so why keep struggling?" My heart hurt, not just from the loss of this family farming this land, but also because we have not yet found any way to help save them.
The Masumotos' book, in a very delicate way, is about how to save our family farmers. It's a suggestion, an offering, like offering a recipe to a neighbor who admires your peach cobbler because it tastes better than hers. It reflects a keen understanding of all the forces at work unraveling the family farm fabric here on the east side of the San Joaquin Valley, and shooting through the holes with new-old yarn, reweaving a possible new future by holding to, and holding up, the essentials. Work. Knowledge. Love. Land.
Nikiko is the daughter with a Masters in Public Performance who has returned home to farm - and write, and hopefully perform. Her introductory words in "Learn to Love a Peach" show that she is every bit as artistically verbal as her father, and as strongly tied to the land as well. "Every harvest, I envision the path of each peach as it leaves the farm, travels, and eventually goes home in someone's grocery bag or rests on a plate at a restaurant. Maybe it's yours? When that peach touches your lips and nourishes your body, I hope you feel love. Not a plastic-perfect or one-night-stand love. I want you to feel a deep reverence for the food that binds us with one another and the earth. I want you to hunger for our stories. I want you to help make all people in our food system equal partners. I want you to love us, too."
Marcy is Mas's wife, whose Wisconsin German family moved to California where she grew up on a goat dairy farm milking the herd twice a day ("At least peaches take some of the winter off," Mas noted.) In "Lessons I Have Learned Cooking With Peaches," Marcy begins "When I first came to the farm, I tried to save every peach that dropped in the orchard, and every one that was not fit for packing and selling commercially. Finally, after years of painstaking cooking and preserving, I realized that there was no way I could save all the orphaned or special-needs peaches from our twenty-five acres of orchards!" I'll love her forever for those two sentences: when I first started working in orange groves, I had the same life-threatening instinct, but without the kitchen skills required. Marcy has become the specialist in varieties of peaches through this endeavor, and I can't wait to try their recipes this summer.
Mas, of course, is our own native spokesman for the family farm, our West Coast Wendell Berry with a slightly different way of speaking up. His first bestseller, Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm (1995) has been followed by several more volumes documenting the process of continuing to farm, despite the hardships some call impossibilities. But where he's really reached the public is through his once-a-month column in the Fresno Bee, where we hear what he's thinking about as he's thinking it and as it relates to whatever else is in the news and in our own lives. Keeping this farmer's voice available to the reading public is a gift to us from the Bee and from him. His insights about this culture we live in, and the one we're in danger of living without, provide a kind of lightning rod to those of us still trying to preserving farming in our future.
One place in the book where I recognize the Mas I know and love is in his essay "Ghosts of Farmworkers." More than twenty years ago, when he read his work at an event in Parlier for my Humanities project, one short piece was about picking peaches with a friend, a farmworker kid from school. Two decades later, his sensitivities seem to have increased, not declined. "The ghosts of farmworkers haunt my fields," he begins the essay. "My grandparents and parents were farmworkers, immigrants to a foreign land with a history of exploiting cheap laborers and then casting them aside and importing another source of strong backs and fast hands.... Because of our history, my father and I often worked side by side with laborers, sharing the sweat, yet acutely aware of our class differences.... Now I'm the farmer and live with this legacy and stain." He ends "The ghosts stay with me in the fields. Perhaps my contribution is to tell the story of the invisible. I know that one day I too will become a ghost."
This joint venture of the three Masumotos is more than a peach cookbook: it is an agrarian testimony from the heartland of California where family farmers are thought by some not to exist. The Perfect Peach is available at the Book Garden in Exeter, along with many other Masumoto books. To learn more about the Masumoto Family Farm. visit www.masumoto.com.
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Trudy Wischemann is a gluten-intolerant eater who is looking forward to adapting the Masumotos' recipes and writing about them this summer! You can send your peachy keen thoughts to her % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.
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