Yesterday my family made its (fairly) regular trek to Salman Ranch to pick raspberries. Three hours of harvesting yielded four-and-a-half pounds of small though juicy organic fruit. This wasn't our best crop, but it's still worth the time and energy required. And no, it's not for the relatively inexpensive cost of picking ourselves. I like the fact that we are re-connecting with our food supply, seeing how the fruit is grown, nurtured and harvested.

The bees buzzed through the field while the moths and butterflies flitted out of the leaves. The sun - relentless and way too hot for mid-September - beat down from the clear, cerulean sky. And the only sounds you heard were people calling to each other from the rows and the sound of leaves rustling as you reached in to delicately nab another delicate berry. This may not be a realistic view of what harvest time used to be - I doubt the men and women working the fields chose to spend their Saturday afternoons hunched over thorny bushes. And I seriously doubt the farmers allowed them to take home their bounty (even if we did pay for it).

But that wasn't really the point of our trip: As a suburban family, we are unconnected from our food supply. It's rare that we see the trees and plants upon which our produce is grown. While we do make a point to talk to some of the farmers at the local farmers' market, we don't see the day-to-day operations necessarily to bring the prettily-packaged eggs or honey. I want my kids to understand that growing food is hard work. In fact, growing food using sustainable, eco-friendly practices can be back-breaking. Yet people do it every day.




Thank you.