SHORT #29: A Race to the Daikon

Near the top of the hill we gathered, in the orchard in a circle, although, it would probably look more like an amoeba if you saw it from above. A farmer at the center of this ameoba-shaped circle instructed us.

“Take a look around you.” he said. “There is a vegetable.”

Now, this farmer is speaking in Japanese, a language in which there is no clear distinction between singular and plural. So he could have meant “There are vegetables.” Or he could have meant “There is a vegetable.”

Seeing as how the field is overrun with weeds and random plants though, I gather he means the latter. There must be one single vegetable, and it is hidden somewhere in this wild place.

Feet planted in the amoeba-shaped circle, along with the other farm visitors, my head turns and tilts and crooks, looking for the vegetable. Of course, I know what a vegetable looks like in the supermarket. A Carrot is a bright orange, long tapered tube. A Daikon, the Asian Radish, looks just like a gigantic white Carrot. The Potato, Sweet Potato, Red Onion, White Onion, Green Onion, Turnip, sure, easy enough to find on the store shelf.

Hence my problem.

In this wild looking field underneath a Mandarin orchard, the root vegetables are all tucked away in their homes. Their homes being the soil. So I should need to know what the tops look like. I hardly do.

Others are looking too, making wide eyes at certain places in the weeds around us. I follow their gazes and just see weeds. Tall weeds, short weeds, dark green ones, light green ones. None of which I can name. Then, I find it. Yes. A little bulb of white sticking up out of the earth in between the anonymous weeds. For sure it is a Daikon. A big one, too.

My spying of the Daikon comes just in time.

The farmer instructs us. “Now, I think you’ve seen the vegetable.” Everyone nods and smiles their greedy-looking smiles. “When I count to three, head over to the vegetable, greet it, and lovingly remove it from the earth, with care.” Everyone continues their nodding and smiling in the same way. Suddenly I am worried. If everyone heads for my vegetable at once, we are certainly all going to crash into each other, at best. Or worse. A fight could break out.

“One…”

And ‘lovingly?’ Dude, farmer man. I did not sign up for a farm orgy. It’s going to be mayhem. A love pile in the middle of an orchard, everyone trying to grab at my Daikon.

“Two…”

Surveying the distance between the edge of the amoeba and my Daikon, I am probably one of the closest people to it. If I ran for it and then leapt, I could surely be the first one there. Lovingly digging it out and claiming the prize.

“Three.”

I sprint. Three giant steps, leaping and crashing down onto the Daikon.

Greeting the Daikon quickly, I dig around and tug, but it does not budge. I dig some more and tug some more, and still, it firmly holds, hunkered down in the warm moist earth. In my brain, a clock is ticking. Surely, the others are all on their way to my Daikon by now. They are likely laughing at how foolish my harvesting technique is, thinking they can do better than this American former tech bro. If I take much longer, the others are going to pile on top of me and assert their will on my Daikon. I sink my fingers into the soil, dig harder and faster. I tug again. Finally, it bursts free, and my body catapults backward.

Lying on my back, the Daikon held high in the air like a glowing trophy, I imagine how to greet the crowd. I am the only American here. I know how to win this kind of game and they do not. It is too bad for them that I was faster and more agile, but they all seem like nice people. Surely they will be good sports, cheering at my success in finding the one vegetable.

Tilting my head further back however, the view is unexpected. I see only asses and heels. Everyone is buisily dispersed around the orchard, walking, or waving hello to the earth, or digging in various places. It seems, maybe for the best, that no one had been paying attention to me the entire time.

Then a shout comes.

“Red carrot!” announces one child, as he holds up his find.

“Purple parsnip!” shouts his mom.

“Golden Mountain Potato! Megi Island Melon! Sour Gherkin! Wild Orange Tomato!” The shouts come one by one, from everywhere.

This field that I had thought was only filled with weeds, was in fact full of vegetables. Not one, but hundreds, or more, and everyone miraculously had eyed a different one.

The farmer turns to me. “A Daikon, eh?” Still on my back, I nod as the farmer surveys my harvest. “Must be 20 centimeters or so. A bit young, but not bad.”

I smile and nod. A bit embarrassed, but also thankful that, as far as I could tell, no one noticed my frantic behavior in jumping and leaping.

Later that night we sit on tatami floors in a simple old farm house, sharing our vegetables in preparation of dinner. Some go into a curry, or a salad. My Daikon is braised and added to a steaming pot of soup.

When served, I bite into the Daikon slowly, closing my eyes, feeling like I own it an apology of some kind, for the haste with which I had ripped it from the soil. I think it forgives me, otherwise it probably would not taste so good. Looking up from my warm bowl of soup, two fires burn in the room. One of them for tea, and the other for the soup. The waves of light and shadow flicker on people’s faces, and I feel something indescribable in these faces, eyes, and mouths. There is thankfulness, but also, something more than that.

“It’s so good!” A child next to me shouts, looking at the Daikon and then into my eyes.

“Ah. Yeah. It is beautiful.” I reply to him.

He smiles and laughs. “That was a good jump onto the Daikon. Like a tiger killing a rabbit!”

The room quiets for a slight moment. It is long enough for my cheeks to flush with heat however, after which the entire room erupts in laughter. They had seen my Daikon hunting technique after all.

“Americans are good raddish hunters!” another man shouts, holding up a glass of sake to me.

Still flush with embarassment, I can not help but smile too. Even playing the part of the foreign idiot, these people still accept me happily, and I think the thing that I feel must be something like peace. Or some deep bevenolence. Or perhaps love. Or maybe all of these ideas, somehow expressed, not just between the human beings here, but the building itself, the fire, the vegetables, and the landscape which provided all of this to us. All of that, wrapped up into a single, delicious, awkwardly emotional moment. I don’t know how else to express it. I do know, that few tears came down my cheek.

Continuing to slowly enjoy this moment, I wondered why the act of eating had never felt this way before. I also wondered, what life might be like if, somehow it continued to feel this way in the future. Not just for me, but for others who lived in places where our relationships with food, nature, and each other have become so limited, tense, and difficult. What if it were normal, that food was procured, not from shelves in a market, but from nature directly; semi-wild fields filled with an endless array of unique vegetables, and people who knew how to spot them?

I guess that such a change, if it were to happen in the general population, would ripple into other parts of life too. Certainly, a world with more tiger-like ‘American Daikon Hunters’ would manifest changes in many more areas of life than just how we procure and eat food. What those areas would be, and how it would feel for each of us, is something we will not really know however, until we each start down that path for ourselves. Each in our own way.

This writing was based on a true story of the Mandarin orchard cared for by the renowned Japanese natural farmer Masanobu Fukuoka. His style of farming, which he began experimenting with in the 1930s, is what researchers today might call a ‘nature-based solution’ or an ‘Agroecological’ solution. Fukuoka used no chemicals, no heavy machinery, and imported nothing from outside the farm’s own local ecosystem. Although he popularized many ecological farming methods, his farming was not about a ‘method’ but instead, about cultivating a relationship with nature in order to find the answers that related to his local ecology. Here, Fukuoka demonstrated a point that many of us could learn from today: a good individual relationship with nature is the basis for an ecological society.

Much like today’s food forests, permaculture gardens, and agroecological farms, Fukuoka’s farm also produced more food per acre than any industrial method. It did so again, because of the relationhip, a human being working together with nature rather than against her. Fukuoka’s natural farming was popularized with the English translation of his bestselling book, The One Straw Revolution, still in print today after over 40 years.

For our part, my partner and I spent several years visiting generations of natural farmers in Japan and Korea, while producing the documentary Final Straw: Food, Earth, Happiness. If you are just a bit curious about all of that, you will also find a free, 20-minute version of that film on YouTube.

You would probably also enjoy this short, inspired by natural farming:

SHORT #5: Growing Food on Broad Street

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