I am not “organizationally challenged”; I am messy. I am not “situationally unaware”; I am inappropriate. I am not “concept deprived”; I am clueless. And, I am so not “memory impaired”; I am. . . I am . . . I am . . . Well, it’ll come to me later. Regardless of all that, I do know that, as a nation, we are all “reality averse”.

And it’s getting worse.

I can prove it. Unless this is the first one of these that you’re reading, you know that I’ve been spending an awful lot of your time on my experiences of starting an agricultural adventure on the micro-farm. But I also know, based upon your comments, that the vast majority of you prefer my oh-so-cute anecdotes about the birds, bees, and voles as opposed to my grumpy old rants about how the whole world is heading to hell in a handbasket while everybody is sitting around watching reruns of Jeopardy. So I figured I would take advantage of your conceptual predispositions and mention a couple of garden implements in the title. Those words in the title made you want to think one thing but I used them for my own purposes, namely to get you into the story, so that I can get this rant out and move back to the bees.

Since you’re still reading, it must be working.

Just to let you know that I am not being completely disingenuous, the core of this rant does revolve around gardening, organic gardening, in fact, and not merely organic gardening, but heirloom organic gardening. Really. In gardening, as in the rest of the world, it comes down not to what a word means, but to what a word implies, and how people who are truly duplicitous – unlike me, blink, blink – use that etymological baggage to deceive us. 

I got on this tear a couple of weeks ago but yesterday something happened that tipped the scales and now you have to pay the price.

I was doing some bee research online and I came across a local outfit that does bees, farming, chickens, etc. They sound like some people who exchanged their rat-race lifestyle for the bucolic life in the country where they could plant, and grow and gather away from the stresses and strife of the city. At the top of the first page on their website this happy couple was shown posed together in an idyllic glen somewhere, smiling in their camouflage outfits, with the head of a recently deceased blacktail deer sitting in their laps. Now, I’ve got no beef with hunters, except the ones who consider hunting a sport, but let’s call a spade a spade and not misuse words to gloss over reality. The picture in question was not captioned with the word “hunt” or “slaughter” or “kill” or even “take”. The caption said that the deer had been “harvested”.

If I were to say to you that I was going into the woods to harvest something, you would picture me returning with a bag of mushrooms, perhaps, or some wild berries. That’s what “harvesting” implies. It does not imply me back dragging back a bloody corpse which had been shot through the lungs with a razor tipped projectile and allowed to bleed out through bodily passages that were meant to handle air. I mean, come on, even “kill” would be considered a euphemism compared to that reality. “Harvest” goes too far. It is too gentle a word for what actually happened to the deer, it is too deceptive, and it is ultimately unfair to the deer.

It is, in short, exactly what we want to hear.

That was the tipping point. But this rant got started during my search for early season vegetable seeds to plant in the garden. Sounds like a pretty harmless activity, huh? A friend of mine referred me to a company called Seed Savers Exchange. They sell seeds for heirloom and open-pollinated varieties of fruit, vegetables, and flowers. Just to be up front, I think this is a good thing.

For some background, open-pollinated means that if you take the seeds from a plant and use them to grow new plants, then you’ll get plants exactly like the parents. This contrasts with hybrid plants which have been bred through a series of Mendellian crosses to accentuate a trait or traits and make them tastier or longer lasting or whatever. If you plant the seeds from a hybrid, the plant you get will not be the same as the parent, and may, in fact be pretty bad. It will be a throwback in all senses of the word. “Heirloom” varieties are those that have been around for a while but, from a reproductive standpoint, are open-pollinated as well.

Most of the fruits and vegetables you buy in the grocery store are hybrids and all of what your ancestors grew in their gardens were not. There’s nothing wrong with either kind except that hybrids are tainted with the stench of industry because their breeding process is artificially controlled by plant biologists in lab coats. Enter the Birkenstock-wearing granola-heads at Seed Savers Exchange (SSE henceforward). They avoid the industrial association that plague seed companies like Burpee by strictly avoiding hybrids. But, because of the crunchy-ness baggage attached to terms like “heirloom” and “open-pollinated” SSE cannot be merely a seed company, it has to be a not-for-profit seed organization. A dot-org, not a dot-com. All of these things imply something and while SSE does charge less for their seed packs than either Burpee or my local farm store does, it is still, in the end, a business.

Boy, it doesn’t take much to get you going? Does it?

Nope, but I haven’t gotten there yet. I went to their website to look for some Chinese cabbage seeds; Chinese cabbage being adept at growing in early spring, and came up blank. I guessed that there were no heirloom varieties – despite some four-thousand years of civilization in China – so SSE didn’t sell them.

Then the print catalog showed up in the mail and it all became clear.

SSE is an organization with a mission, and not all of their mission involves seeds. To quote them: “Our mission is to save North America’s diverse but endangered garden heritage for future generations by building a network of people committed to collecting, conserving, and sharing heirloom seeds and plants, while educating people about the value of genetic and cultural diversity.” (Emphasis is mine.)

There is enough baggage in that mission statement to stop a train. When you tear that sentence up word by word you can just feel the implications pouring out. It makes me want to stand up and sing the national anthem while I write out my check to the U.N. From the get-go it’s clear that these SSE guys are trying to foist their agenda on you and suck you into their tree-hugging, free-range, grass-fed, Kumbaya-my-Lord view of the world.

So they can sell you a membership.

In that same print catalog, on the page opposite the mission statement were ten professionally photographed pictures of vegetables. In the top row, second in from the left, was a very attractive picture of the soft green leaves of Bok Choy or, you guessed it, Chinese cabbage. Now, despite “Chinese cabbage” being a good enough generic term for the entire rest of the world, the people at SSE must have felt that it was politically incorrect to continue calling it so. This enclave of free-thinking, genetically diverse white people (there is a picture) living in Iowa, the center of cultural diversity of the known universe, must have figured that the American Gardener would agree that the job-stealing, bond-holding Chinese no longer deserved to have a cabbage named after them. So, singlehandedly, they decided to change it. In their quest to advance their political agenda, they chose a more bland, generic, and inaccurate name specifically selected for their own goals.

At SSE, it’s no longer “Chinese cabbage”; it’s now called “Asian greens”.

There’s nothing wrong, in my view anyway, of going out into the woods or onto the sea and killing something to eat it. There’s nothing wrong with raising chickens or growing carrots and then slaughtering them for food. There’s even nothing wrong with cloaking a social jihad in the guise of a seed company. But let’s not hide those activities behind softening words or deceptive terminology. Spades are spades and shovels aren’t. Softening “kill” with “harvest”, changing “Chinese cabbage” to “Asian greens”, or misusing any of the other words we make up to avoid offense or advance private goals, leaves a price to be paid.

That price is that the word and its meaning fall apart. We lose touch with what a thing really is, when we use a word that implies what it is really not.

In the land of food, that word is not “harvest” or “Asian greens”. The word is “organic” and the gap between what that word implies and what it now means, is immense.

Next week, better dress for summer, we’re going to meet the Devil.