My friend Joe in Colorado perhaps said it best: “I felt like when my wife drags me to a church – you know, that I just don’t quite fit in – like I can’t smell something that everybody else does, or my fly’s unzipped and everyone knows it but me.” I now know what he meant. Because last night I, like Joe before me, attended my first meeting of the local beekeeper’s association.

The meeting started with the first session of the beginner beekeeper training class. I arrived a bit early and walked into a room that was completely jam-packed with people. There is apparently a lot of interest in keeping bees. The class was like many such courses where the purpose of the first session is to get you to pay and give you the course materials. Sign-in was followed by an astoundingly brief lecture on the nature of the honeybee, then a break that was longer than the lecture – to give stragglers a chance to pay up, and finally, the general meeting of the association.

My first impression of the group was: “My, there is an awful lot of people here for the number of people here.” I felt like I had stumbled into the feedlot for the Kitsap County chapter of the Twinkies Fan Club. I collected my paperwork – I had paid in advance by sending a check through the mail, if you can believe that – and, having learned my lesson last year about speaking up in a meeting, found a single chair in the middle of the back row where I could hide. Two or three more tons of students squeezed into the room – a visual that is nearly as disturbing to write about as it was to witness – and the lecturer began.

The first few minutes of the first lecture optimally defines two things. Step One is what the presenter wants to get across as the tone and content of the class and Step Two is what the class developer thinks the target demographic is. For Step One the lecturer began with a full description of the Linnaean taxonomic classification of the honeybee, its reproductive strategy, and distribution and traits of the genetically distinct honeybee subspecies. He tossed out more Latin terms than a 1950s High Mass, all backed up with detailed anatomic drawings and morally obscure descriptions of the naughty-bits of apis mellifera – the common honeybee. From this kick-off we were meant to learn that the class will be based on science rather than speculation and was designed to advance our knowledge of bees and beekeeping in a structured, methodical, and efficient manner. After all, the class I was taking, if I managed to make it through the tests, would be my first step on the way to becoming a Certified Master Beekeeper. A noble goal indeed.

The instructor next moved on to Step Two and threw out a question to assess the level of the class. “What are the products of the honeybee?” I kid you not, “honey” was not the first guess ventured. This came as some surprise because, as I eavesdropped onto some of the conversations going on in the room, it seemed like an alarming number of people – for a beginner’s class – had already attempted to keep bees. The question being asked by all of these people was: “Why did my bees die?” I will leave it to you to put two and two together.

There’s another class coming up this Saturday and, weather permitting, we will be able to go mess around with some bees. Maybe the class will have thinned out a bit by then.

But I will still feel out of place. I don’t know what it is, but whenever I find myself in a group setting the rest of the crowd reacts to my presence like I just announced I was feeling much better after my recent bout of Ebola, thank you for asking. When I sat down in my nearly invisible chair in the back row the first thing that happened – I mean almost instantly – was that the people next to me got up and moved away; this despite there being no other place to sit. Then, after the break, I returned to my chair to find that the two seats on either side of mine had been removed. Not just slid further away, but folded up and put back in the garage. I checked my shoes – clean, I exhaled into my hand and sniffed – okay, but I popped some gum just in case. I couldn’t figure it out. It was almost as if the people around me could sense, at a subconscious level, that, in addition to taking the class, I was also taking notes and that the best way to avoid appearing in these pages was to make themselves scarce.

The presentation that followed – with the full membership of the association now present – was interesting, informative, and packed with good questions. The general membership seemed keenly interested in what was being said although a fight almost broke out when one of the members admitted killing weeds with Round-Up. This left me hopeful that, as the class progressed, the level of content would track along with it. I’ll keep you posted.

After the presentation finished I left the venue and, for some unknown reason, I had a hankering for some fast food and for using words like “hankering”. As I headed toward the highway I passed a Burger King, stopped, and went inside. It had been a long while since I had been to Burger King but my usual combo was still number one on the menu. Because BK lets me have it my way I customized my order with cheese, no onion, and extra pickles. Burger King, I’m guessing in the interest of healthful nutrition, now offers their combos in three sizes with small being the default. When the order taker asked me my size preference I asked to see the containers. Well, the small French fry container, had it been equipped with straps, could have easily served as a backpack for a trek across the Hindu Kush. The drink cup was just a diving board short of the summer Olympics. I didn’t even look at a medium. I collected my order – which cost over two dollars more than the last time I had it my way – and headed out to the car.

Whereupon, I ate a French fry.

I’m not sure why it is but I seem to be spending more and more money on food whose quality and flavor is decreasing in geometrically-inverse proportion to the price. Given the taste of the BK frite, I’m guessing that The King is paying about a thousand bucks a pound. I mean, come on, it’s a potato. How can you make it taste even more bland. BK has managed to do just that. The fries that BK sold me seemed like they had been boiled to the point of mush and then tossed into the fat. Outside of the crisp oily coating there was no visceral indication at all that what I was eating could even remotely be considered food. I’m sure somebody discovered that if they process the potato before they sold it as fries they could extract a product that could be sold to Trader Joe and stuffed into his processed food boxes. The result is that I get flavorless fat-sticks from Burger King and Singapore Curry from Trader Joe that tastes vaguely like potato soup.

Despite the rapidly rising prices for potatoes of lesser and lesser quality, more and more varieties are appearing on the shelves to try and entice us into packing more starch into our diets. The most disturbing trend is the sale of “fingerling” and “new” potatoes. These are basically immature potatoes that were dug up and sorted out before they were ready. In the olden days, say pre-1990, these tiny taters would be used as seed for next year’s crop or fed to the hogs. Nowadays the smaller they are the more they cost to the point where, around here anyway, a two-pound bag of marble-sized micro-spuds costs eight bucks.

Given this effort:price ratio, I figured I could very profitably grow potatoes on the micro-farm. I don’t eat that many potatoes in a year so, at three or four dollars a pound, there might be some money to be made at the farm stand. To this end I started looking into varieties to plant and boy was I surprised; ten dollars a pound for seed potatoes which, to my admittedly untrained eye, look exactly like the buck-a-pound variety available down at Safeway. I did some research as to why seed potatoes are worth ten times as much as store bought and found the following explanation:

“Store potatoes should not be planted because most have been treated with chemicals to suppress sprouting and many are carriers of disease.”

I’ll let that soak in for just a second.

The logic is that you shouldn’t plant those toxic taters because of all the chemicals, fungus, and microbes; but it’s okay to eat them.

Yum!

My fast food craving is now over and I see I have yet another argument for pursuing this little micro-farm endeavor with renewed vigor. With food quality on a downward spiral such that even a humble French-fry needs to be processed before we can consume it, then can Twinkies be far behind? I think I better get one while they last.