Faint taste of progress

ALONG a rural two-lane road linking my childhood home in northwestern New Jersey with my high school stood a tumbledown farm stand called Patsy’s. The eponymous enterprise was administered by a short, spherical woman with a gimpy leg and a startling dearth of dentition. Every August, big wicker baskets overflowed with majestic Jersey tomatoes in all their sweet and pulpy grandeur, followed by tree-ripened peaches as akin to today’s fuzzy bocce balls as a church picnic is to Mardi Gras.

These were the warmup acts. Around the second week of August, Patsy’s curtain rose on what we called Luther Hill corn. Only 6 inches in length and studded with bulbous white kernels nearly bursting with sweet nectar, they were as addictive as they were ephemeral. I once dispatched a dozen without breaking a sweat. Patsy hauled in the final harvest nearly three decades ago, but amazingly her wooden-plank shack has defied gravity and punishing Sussex County winters. On a trip home last year, I discovered that it had reopened as a produce market operated by a couple of truck farmers.

Patsy’s story serves as a metaphor for the evolution (or devolution) of U.S. agriculture, as recounted by Russ Parsons in “How to Pick a Peach,” a collection of chatty and occasionally dispiriting essays about the long decline of produce in the last century. The Los Angeles Times food writer explains how today’s Frankenstein vegetables, creatures of the laboratory, have seen remarkable improvements thanks to horticultural scientists -- in disease resistance, color, yield, durability and shelf life -- though at the expense of flavor.

This is hardly stop-the-presses news. Yet Parsons’ lively essays contribute some updated information and all manner of historical tidbits. (Did you know that the first self-serve grocer was a Piggly Wiggly store in Memphis that opened in 1916, or that the first modern supermarket, King Kullen, debuted 15 years later in Queens, New York?) In mini-chemistry lessons scattered throughout the book, we are introduced to scientists who labor to develop nectarines that can withstand long, bumpy train rides and strawberries that don’t squish at the bottom of the container.

But Parsons offers reasons for hope: the return of urban farmers markets and the explosion in demand for all things organic (even if many consumers are unsure what that entails). Although these movements represent a mere corn kernel in a silo of change, they reawaken palate-numbed shoppers to the pleasures of real food with palpable flavors. And these buyers are willing to pony up nearly twice the price for it, whether it’s from urban farmers’ stands or such retailers as Whole Foods Market and Bristol Farms.

“How to Pick a Peach” falls close to the tree of Parsons’ previous book, “How to Read a French Fry,” a more comprehensive and instructive treatise on the science of food and cooking. His new effort focuses on fruits and vegetables. Organized seasonally and by products, the essays meld science, history and chemistry with personal observations. Each is paired with helpful shopping and storing tips (never refrigerate potatoes, melons, tomatoes or unripe peaches; don’t wash lettuce before refrigerating or it will quickly wilt), and accompanied by several engaging recipes.

The descriptions of individual items are edifying and consumer-friendly, but at times I wished for more depth. For example, mushrooms, a rich and complex topic, are glossed over in a little more than three pages, followed by two recipes.

An especially appealing section is Parsons’ chronicle of the evolution of food production and distribution over the last 100 years. Throughout, he highlights the irony of America’s paradox of plenty: We are a country that enjoys the widest selection of food in the world, and at the lowest prices -- Americans spend less than 10% of their disposable income on food, the least in the industrialized world, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture -- yet we can’t find a flavorful peach at a supermarket.

At the turn of the 20th century, Parsons recounts, small-scale farmers formed a greenbelt around compact urban centers. As cities spread like pancake batter, growers sold to developers and moved farther out. The grower-consumer connection nearly disappeared with the arrival of cross-country railroads and their refrigerated cars. And widespread irrigation led to the rise of mega-farms in such sun-parched regions as California’s Central Valley, which today accounts for a quarter of all U.S. agricultural production, he writes.

With such developments, the process of delivering food became more than just loading the pickup with cantaloupes and driving to town. That led to the rise of the middleman, or distributor, who set in motion an agrarian triple play in which the farmers sell to middlemen, who sell to supermarkets, who in turn sell to consumers -- and, naturally, at higher prices. “It means one more group making a profit,” Parsons writes, “putting even more downward pressure on the prices paid to farmers, and it also adds another day or more to the time it takes for fruits and vegetables to get from farm to table.”

For all the farmers markets from Portland, Ore., to Portland, Maine, reversing a half-century of bad habits on the part of both consumers and agribusiness will take time, Parson writes. For now, “we must make do with the fruits and vegetables that we have, not the ones we may wish we had. And up to now, quite frankly, taste has been the least of anyone’s concerns.”