Just Food

            Back from the supermarket, I try to remove the tag from fruits and vegetables. The white little oval tag that carries the PLU and a bar code and can be found on most fresh supermarket items, from tomatoes to watermelon.

            It bothers me. I hate the tag, it’s small and sticky. The only way to get rid of it is to affix it to something else. Plus, there’s glue and paper (or, even worse, plastic) on my food. Yes, of course, the glue is harmless. If I wash an apple or a tomato before removing the tag, it won’t come off easily. The pesky thing leaves a residue that blemishes the fruit.

            Why does it bother me so much?

            I don’t know.

            I hate it.

            “But they need to do that,” someone tells me. “They need to identify the food. Otherwise how can they keep track of where the food comes from?”

            Maybe that’s it. Maybe I don’t want my food to be identified. What’s going on, now the pears are carrying IDs? There’s something wrong with that.

           

            It’s Romania and it’s the 1980s and we have a garden. Every weekend, that summer and then many others summers, we go to Cuvin, a small village half a mile away from Ghioroc, a larger village where the train stops, fifteen miles away from Arad, where we live.

            Now all the kids my age living in Arad have grandparents living in the countryside. Ours are far away, so in order to get some village experience my father rents for a mere nothing a plot of land at the foot of a hill. The land is uncultivated; it was recently parceled out and rented to city types like us (Arad has 130,000 people) to enjoy amateur gardening on weekends. We turn it into a garden.

           

            These days, the supermarket tomato can be from anywhere, from California to Argentina. Maybe that’s the problem: the tomato that I’m about to eat has already traveled more than my grandmother has in a lifetime. A scan of the pesky tag can tell the history of the fruit’s travels: where it came from, how it flew here…—flew? This creeps me out. Why on earth would I want to eat a flying tomato? I almost expect it to smell like exhaust gas, the vibrations of the plane engine engrained somewhere in the pulp of the fruit.

            To get to Ghioroc, we take the old train, one of the first electrified lines in Europe (before using it in Vienna, the wise Austro-Hungarian imperial administration tested electrified train lines in Eastern Europe, at the margins of the empire, and so in the eighties we were taking this one hundred years old train). Its wooden benches are made for shorter people, its windows open and close (or rather don’t open and don’t close) if you use a crank. The old train is called “the Green Arrow”, partly because it’s painted dark green and partly because it’s very, very slow: it takes more than one hour to travel the fifteen miles that separate Arad from Ghioroc. It stops every three miles or so, to gather all the farmers from the villages and offer them access to the town, where they go on Sunday to the market to sell their produce.

            On Sunday evenings, when we come home, strong middle-aged peasant women get on the train: they have wide hips and long dark skirts, pleated, with long aprons and white shirts. They cover their hair with dark colored scarves. And they carry big baskets with wide open mouths, two feet deep, three feet wide at the top.

            “How can they even carry these baskets?” I ask my mother.

            At a train stop, I see two men lifting a basket and helping a woman put it on her head. Then she walks away, back erect, carrying fifty or sixty pounds on her head.

           

            I remember them carrying strawberries, cherries, tomatoes, and apples to the market. The smell of the fruit filled the dingy wagon, where most travelers stood rather than sat (each basket could easily occupy two seats; some travelers grumbled). At the market, the same baskets, filled with eggplants, potatoes, peas, cauliflowers, strawberries, apples.

            “How much?” she’d ask.

            A kilo of this, half a kilo of that. Fruit flowed from the basket, a continuum of abundance, which she stopped with an expert gesture. Usually she’d be right, measuring with her eyes, a tiny bit less than the amount requested. Then, with a final gesture, she’d throw in the last apple, potato, or pepper, tipping the scale.

           

            Back then, fruit came from the hills of Siria, which gave good strawberries; cabbage from Comlos, which was known for its growers; apples from Santana; sheep’s milk cheese from a woman my mother knew, and so on. A continuous flow, from rain to earth to the peasant woman to the market to us. No PLUs, no bar codes. No individually-tagged-flying-in-the-sky-around-the-world tomato. Just food, and the woman with callused hands offering it to us.