![]() ![]() I appreciated the friendly, 40-strong motorcycle gang who strapped six sacks of corn and 10 watermelons to their bikes and rode off to a Stokes State Forest picnic. “I hope ‘fresh-picked’ means you picked them yourself.” I looked around me: Did they think I’d gone picking in the state forest, or in one of the new commuter developments? Didn’t they notice the absence of any roses-and-resin tomatoey perfume? ![]() You can’t get that country flavor in the city!” They couldn’t get it here, either: These were New Mexican beefsteaks, greased with mineral oil to an enticing sheen and petroleum fragrance. “I wait every year for the real Jersey tomatoes. “Give me Jersey peaches over Georgia peaches any day.” Those were Georgia peaches they were palming to their kids, whispering, “Eat up,” before the fruit had been weighed and paid for. They tossed the husks on the ground for me to rake up. “Taste-wise, nothing compares to Jersey Silver Queen,” the New Yorkers declared, clawing at ears of a fat-kerneled, North Carolina–grown supersweet hybrid, all sugar and no corn flavor, nothing like Silver Queen. This story is republished from Narrative.lyįor the first time in my life, I heard about the naturalness, tradition, and superior flavor of New Jersey produce. But “local” was the magic word hand-painted on our signs it was what made our customers, most of them New Yorkers driving to country vacation cottages, slam on their brakes and pull over. My instructions were to claim that all the produce was local, although nothing was or could be local: It was early June in northwestern New Jersey’s Kittatinny Mountains, and the produce had been shipped from warmer parts of the world to the distributor who’d sold it to my boss. Customers began arriving before I’d opened the shutters I weighed, bagged, and rang up purchases on an old cash register. Arriving early in the morning at the little wooden hut, 10 miles from the nearest town, I stocked the displays from the refrigerated trailer behind the stand, building tomato and peach pyramids, lugging out watermelons one by one, and wrestling 60-pound burlap corn sacks. ![]() It was my first job, and I worked all day on my own. I met my first New York foodie more than 20 years ago, when I was 17, hawking “local bananas” at a roadside produce stand in rural New Jersey. ![]()
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