life in a red state 205but keep their religion to themselves as they bring a day’s work to this
packing house inside a former tobacco barn. If sanctimony is an additive
in their product, it gets added elsewhere.
The tomato room offered a 56-degree respite from the July swelter, but
it was all business in there too: full boxes piled on pallets, in columns
nearly reaching the ceiling. The stacks on one end of the room were wait-
ing to be processed, while at the other they waited to be trucked out to
nearby groceries. Just enough space remained in the center for workers to
maneuver, carting out pallets for grading, sorting, and then slapping one
of those tedious stickers on every one of the thousands of individual toma-
toes that pass through here each day—along with every pepper, cabbage,
cucumber, and melon. That’s how the cashier ultimately knows which
produce is organic.
Supermarkets only accept properly packaged, coded, and labeled pro-
duce that conforms to certain standards of color, size, and shape. Melons
can have no stem attached, cucumbers must be no less than six inches
long, no more than eight. Crooked eggplants need not apply. Every crop
yields a significant proportion of perfectly edible but small or oddly shaped
vegetables that are “trash” by market standards.
It takes as much work to grow a crooked vegetable as a straight one,
and the nutritional properties are identical. Workers at the packing house
were as distressed as the farmers to see boxes of these rejects piling up into
mountains of wasted food. Poverty and hunger are not abstractions in our
part of the world; throwing away good food makes no sense. With the help
of several church and social justice groups, Appalachian Harvest arranged
to deliver “factory second” vegetables all summer to low- income families.
Fresh organic produce entered some of their diets for the fi rst time.
/I grew up among farmers. In my school system we were all born to our
rank, as inescapably as Hindus, the castes being only two: “farm” and
“town.” Though my father worked in town, we did not live there, and so
by the numinous but unyielding rules of high school, I was “farmer.” It
might seem astonishing that a rural- urban distinction like this could be
made in a county that boasted, in its entirety, exactly two stoplights, one