On Beauty

and ugly tomatoes and our desire for uniformity

Farmers market display from a couple summers ago that I particularly enjoyed setting up.

Fair warning: if you call my tomatoes ugly I am likely to deliver a lecture on beauty. If I'm feeling rather generous I might ask what your definition of beauty is before I delve into my own soliloquy. In any case, I will most definitely inform you that they are absolutely beautiful, colorful monsters that demand to be worshipped and then devoured in the tradition of bacchanalian feasts.

Every market season this happens: some well-meaning (or thoughtless) soul will come up exclaiming how I have ugly tomatoes or that all the bites in my leafy greens must be good for something: because the bugs like them does that make them more nutritious? Someone might ask why do I have white beets? White beets are so weird, — alien — the implication being that different or unusual is somehow less desirable. My Aries rising immediately wants to passionately defend my vegetables because, you see, I find them quite beautiful, absolutely stunning if I'm being honest and want to brag. The point is, I see no other point in growing them unless they are beautiful, unless the product is the best that I (and good Mother Earth, of course) can produce.

My husband, Stewart will often look on silently in amusement while this interaction takes place, as he observes me transform from silently judging to an advocate for the inherent beauty of vegetables. For me, this is a moral issue and my Virgo sun won't accept anything less. Perhaps my husband is wiser than me and knows when to keep silent. But you have to understand, bits and pieces of my heart are laced through these vegetables. These vegetables, my vegetables, are grown with intention and if that's not beautiful then I don't know what is. Laughingly, I always tell these folks that my services and lectures are free of charge, except for the tomatoes. Those you will have to pay dearly for, blood, sweat and tears included.

All the farming “experts” out there, the ones who offer masterclasses and travel all over with the perfect formula and tips for how to make your farm succeed all say something similar: only grow certain vegetables, aim for uniformity, grow the red round tomatoes because they will sell the best, grow colorful bell peppers and maybe shishito peppers because they're having a moment, but don't bother with poblanos or heirlooms. Don't waste your time. Now, me being me, do I listen to this advice? Of course not! I grow as many orange varieties of vegetables as I can get my hands on because orange is my favorite color and I am always greedy for a feast for my senses, something to delight in, a rainbow of possibilities for the eyes and taste buds. Don't let me simply stop at orange vegetables, no, I am urged on and inspired by anything unique, something unusual that makes me stop in my tracks. The vegetables that I choose to grow must look beautiful and taste just as good as they look and the fact remains: I did not get into farming to fit the mold, become a commodity farmer or grow conventional, uniform vegetables. Quite the opposite is the case.

I love to grow vegetables. My husband and friends will confirm this. I love to use them to create and share meals with my friends and family. The vegetables I grow are a labor of love for my community. They serve the quite utilitarian purpose of nourishing me, but my reason for growing them lies deeper. Is it too frivolous to say that I grow them for beauty's sake? Each year I look on my garden as a fresh blank canvas and I am determined to create a masterpiece each season. I am determined to create something of beauty.

Here I am reminded of Elaine Scarry who writes in On Beauty and Being Just that “Beauty quickens. It adrenalizes. It makes the heart beat faster. It makes life more vivid, animated, living, worth living.” The pursuit of beauty on my farm and through growing vegetables is vital to who I am as a person and a farmer, helping me transcend the hard physical labor involved in farming, in the pursuit of something more: a beautiful tomato, an exquisite head of radicchio, a vibrant purple carrot that stops me in my tracks.

Beauty is at the heart of so much of who I am and the life I am trying to craft. I love beauty. I crave beautiful spaces. I attempt to create beauty through my garden and the vegetables I grow. I take almost as much pleasure in photographing these vegetables as I do in growing and eating them. Sometimes I take more. At farmers markets I take just as much delight in the installation and setting up the display to my exact liking as I do in the actual vegetables I bring to sell: piling vegetables as high as I can, arranging colors just so, creating my own palette of sorts with the vegetables I grew. Crafting a feast for the eyes, attempting to draw each person in, and finding as much allure in the process of presentation, as I do in the act of growing the vegetables. It's important to me. Beauty, presentation, style: these are all qualities I care deeply about in myself and my vegetables.

A variety of Asian and Italian eggplant that I simply had to take pictures of a couple summers ago.

Did I mention I really like taking pictures of my vegetables?

Springtime farmers market display.

In On Beauty and Being Just, Scarry writes that “at the moment one comes into the presence of something beautiful, it greets you. It lifts away from the neutral background as though coming forward to welcome you—as though the object were designed to ‘fit’ your perception.” I want people to be drawn in and greeted by my vegetables, mesmerized by their vivid colors, sensuous shapes and intoxicating aromas, just as I am. A lovely curvaceous head of radicchio is one of the most stimulating sights, the bright colors of a handful of freshly washed beets never ceases to make me exclaim and I am just as taken with the folds, curves, and colors of the heirloom tomatoes I grow, as I am with some of my favorite pieces of art.

This is why it upsets me when I hear people comment on how ugly heirloom tomatoes are. Sure they might be gnarly and their skin might not be absolutely perfect and shiny and blemish free and they certainly aren't the uniform and perfect red tomatoes that we've grown used to seeing in the grocery store. Why don't we label the uniform, tasteless red tomatoes ugly? They are ugly and downright distasteful to me but I also know we live in a culture conditioned to uniformity, algorithms¹ and a standardized way of looking at the world.

From an early age I have prided myself on crafting an identity that goes against the flow, walking outside the normal expectations, taking the road less traveled, but I realize that I too, can't help but be shaped by these standards. We are bombarded with images of how a tomato should be red and a cucumber should be waxy and dark green, so our brains start to misfire when the possibility of something different is presented to us after a lifetime of being inundated by a red tomato, even though in all actuality, the red supermarket tomato tastes absolutely nothing akin to how the ideal tomato should taste.

Our standards for beauty align quite alarmingly similar to our uniform standards for tomatoes. If these are the standards for beauty, then I think, how absolutely boring! I mean, just look at those colors—purples, blues, greens, oranges, yellows, whites, reds—every color of the rainbow and then some. When you cut into an heirloom tomato, the color intensifies even more. And that's just the exterior surface, we aren't even getting to taste. Heirloom tomatoes have the most incredible flavors and what always astonishes me, particularly with heirlooms, is how they are all tomatoes, but the flavors and tasting notes are so varied. A tomato is not just a tomato when we are talking about heirlooms. The explosion of flavor in your mouth can range wildly from smoky and earthy to bright and citrusy to fruity and sweet. Heirloom tomatoes aren't uniform, you'll never find two that look exactly alike, but that's how I like beauty. If everything and everyone looked absolutely homogeneous, life would be pretty boring, wouldn't it? Beauty can be found in the differences, the variety, the vibrancy and the intensity of color, soul and character. That's how I like my tomatoes and my people. And that's why heirloom tomatoes are pretty darn beautiful to me.

Just look at this magnificent beast of a tomato which weighed in at well over two pounds!

I call myself a farmer, but to me, to be a farmer, to farm well and justly, with compassion, encompasses so much more than the dictionary definition of farmer: "a person who owns or manages a farm." Where is the feeling in such a definition? Where is the sunshine and rain and blood and sweat and tears, inherent in being a farmer? Where is the beauty?

I quite prefer the definition of an alchemist: "a person who transforms or creates something through a seemingly magical process." That settles it then, I am an alchemist: a student of mother earth, an observer of nature's intricate processes, a friend to animals and trees, a caretaker of vegetables, a shoveler of shit. All of which I do in pursuit of beauty: a beautiful life, a beautiful meal, a beautiful thought crystalized into action.

These vegetables that I grow are beautiful and I am quite often mesmerized by them: singing their praises out in the field, photographing them in the perfect light, turning them over and admiring them.

Radicchio touched by the first hard frost of December.

Rainbow carrots and summer leeks bathed in early morning light.

Beauty will always look different to each individual person but what I'm trying to say is that we're all conditioned to how we perceive beauty, whether or not we realize it, to some degree or another. What we consume currently and what we have consumed from a very early age, the culture we are immersed in, our family, conditioning and so much more shape our tastes, forming our individual concepts of beauty. Until I began to farm and grow heirloom tomatoes for myself, I had no idea that I could grow two-pound orange tomatoes that tasted more like melon than a traditional tomato. I didn't even know such a tomato existed! So my exhortation to you is taste the tomato, whether or not you think it is ugly, I can promise you that the flavor is a thing of beauty. The flavor will expand your concept of what a tomato actually is. You might not like it, you might find the flavor confusing, but your tastes will be questioned and broadened beyond the bland red tomatoes that exist in every supermarket. This is ultimately why I farm: to try and expand my own horizons, my preconceived notions of how the world is into something else, yes, but also how it could and should be: full of orange tomatoes, luscious greens nibbled by bugs, and a storehouse of colors and flavors to make each individual sigh and smile with delight.

xxx Natalie

1. I've been working on the ideas in this essay, mulling it over in my mind for the past few weeks and then last Monday, Alicia Kennedy released this brilliant essay, “The Algorithm of the Mind,” with this quote (among so many others) that I found particularly stimulating and pertinent to my own essay: “I love beauty; I care about how I smell and what my “look” conveys to other people about me, though of course the context of a “look” depends on who’s perceiving it. Beauty is why I love food, why I take pictures of it, why I stage my tomatoes. I love people who create beauty. I appreciate people most who can see beauty even when it hasn’t been packaged and sold to them. Yet it’s difficult to discern a difference, and I’m being arrogant in thinking I can do so.”