strawberries for pumpkintown

The first fifteen of my fortysomething mile trip from a hill in Pumpkintown, South Carolina to a Whole Foods on a highway is dotted with signs advertising knives and produce and local peaches. It is possible to purchase less savory items, but my locavore’s eye is attuned to all things edible. In late March backroad produce stands feature boiled peanuts (plain and Cajun style), double yolk eggs, the occasional greens, and raw milk. Depending on which road you take, you can pick up strawberries. Local, fresh strawberries! These tantalizing, ruby treats embody a classic omnivore’s dilemma. Giddy from calculating their food miles (less than 10!), I momentarily forget their sordid, chemical past to indulge in their ephemeral promise of the taste of summer. Instantly sobered by their lack of flavor, I ponder possible causes (growing technique? timing of harvest? variety?).

Most of the Whole Foods journey is littered with signs for everything I don’t want to eat offered by a bevy of restaurant chains I don’t wish to patronize. Lunch counters serve up meat & three (side dishes) & copious sweet tea. Hamburgers for $1. I can’t think of a single item in Whole Foods that I’ve bought for one dollar. Then again I’m not the type that can put one apple in my basket. I push a cart. It is mounded with food because I’m not as good as I’d like to be at living off of local eggs, a bunch of roadside collards or mustard greens, and boiled peanuts during the lean months.

I am slightly obsessed with food and am a bit of a food hoarder. Fortunately I am also an avid mountain biker, paddler, and hiker. I sometimes wonder whether my outdoor pursuits fuel my food preoccupations or merely enable them. It is my love of food, appreciation of the growing process, of quality, taste, of the experience of eating, and the urge to support growers that try to do the right thing in a hard business that brings me to this contradictory experience that is Whole Foods.

While I am grateful for the access to organic, healthy foods that this large grocer provides, foraging in the gleaming aisles obviously can’t compare with time I’ve spent in community gardens and on organic farms, or learning to eat to the rhythm of the markets when living in Lyon, or even rooting around for the last of the fall apples in the dustiest, dimmest produce shack in South Carolina.

My latest trip to Whole Foods felt a lot better. The unease, the underlying sense that this isn’t how we who are fortunate enough to have choice and opportunity should be eating (e.g., buying collards from California in the Carolinas), was assuaged by knowing that soon I’ll be eating more connected to my bioregion.

Tis the season for farmers markets and roadside stands. Tis the time for Victory Gardens. Grow your own and weed your way to independence from fossil fueled foods. We revive an abandoned community garden with peppers and tomatoes and lots of basil.

special topics in optical physics

Lasers shoot like pinballs across a train set of glass and mirrors and tunnels of different sizes and positions. Plastic of the kind that used to separate freezer cases keeps the table top display protected. Contrary to the exciting DANGER signs pasted on the doors and positioned around the interior, the laser's are off. My friend pulls back the plastic flaps to allow a closer view. The end result, he points to one area the way one might to indicate which end is up, is the rainbow display created by the intense beams.

A high schooler accompanies us on the lab tour. He might intern for the summer. I know I learned that light is separated in waves back in physics class and that our eye can only see certain kinds of light but I can only imagine creating a rainbow with Crayola's. Maybe the kid is thinking the same thing. I'm stuck. I can't see how all the little pieces of glass, painstakingly polished at the workbench next door and then lovingly arranged like a Hummel collection will produce a rainbow with a story. These researchers see more than just Roy G. Biv when reviewing the printouts. Every beam shot through each substrate (usually a gas...why gas?) tells a story. What doesn't have a backstory these days?

Somehow fluids are involved. Microscopic ones. Even though I yawned more than was socially acceptable due to the dim, laser friendly lighting pre coffee, I was paying attention. Trying to leap from microfluids to their medical applications: a new test for diabetes. There were other applications at work in this space the size of a two car garage. Something to do with defense, though that was confidential, and even if I was privy to the details, they'd be lost on me.

Our friends generously shared the place where they spend many of their waking hours, the kind of place requiring many more hours accumulating knowledge in order to function there. Where does the urge come from to move beyond the tentative steps of a high school lab intern to the rocky expanse that is the study of science to the demanding terrain entailed in the pursuit of original research.

My understanding of this place was dimmer than the lighting but I left with the charge you get when you're around people who are engaged with their work, who have a passion for something complex and relatively obscure, who are looking so intensely beyond themselves that you want to take in the view.