Okay, it just happened again. After a month on the road (doing research on farmers’ markets), I’m finally home in Colorno for a night or two. Bought some nice cherry tomatoes from Coop (yes, I should have gone to Fruttaviva, but I needed--needed--a bottle of Prosecco as well. Dunque...) I washed the little babes, most of which I had to pop off their rigor-mortis’d-but-still-fragrant stems. And it’s that fragrance--green tomato leaf--that has just happened into my nostrils again.

About a week ago, I was visiting Jason Horner at his tiny perfect organic farm in Ireland. (It’s easy to find: out the Tulla Road from Ennis, then left at Cross of Stancilhill, then leftrightrightTjunctionleftagainveeroffatthelakerightleft, then ask twelve different very surprised Irish countryfolk where you are and where you need to go. After an hour of driving in circles, get found by Jason’s lovely wife, beckoning you to stop driving down the wrong lane. See, simple enough to get to.) We shared a delicious and supremely local veg-based lunch, and then took a walk around his fields while he told me about modern and traditional farming, rural culture and community issues, new economies, teaching schoolkids, teaching adults. He also, to get to my point, gave me a Sungold cherry tomato off one of his jungly polytunnelled vines. The skin was the most iconic orange imaginable, and as I popped the fruit into my mouth, I smelled that tomato leaf smell. Jason’s hand to the tomato to my hand to my brain.

A million years ago, there was a groovy, ultra-hip fragrance store in NYC’s West Village. The Times had done a little piece on them, because their new scent, based on tomato-leaf extracts, was flying off the shelves. I went, I sprayed, I wafted, and I really tried to like it. I thought, if I’m ever gonna wear a scent, it’ll be Tomato Leaf. But something about it just didn’t work for me. (Nor did the cucumber-lettuce-tomato eau de toilette on the next shelf. No lie.) Maybe there were other attars or essences blended with the tomato leaf. Whatever it was, I walked out with a vanilla-coco thing that nearly did me in the first time I tried to wear it....

But there on Jason Horner’s farm, as I stood breathing in real, pure, single-note Tomato Leaf, my brain opened up about the trueness of being in contact with the source of smell--or flavor, or texture, or color and shape. And I came to the conclusion (a bit of a leap here, I know), that every single person in the world needs to spend a year of their life doing National Farm Service work. We all need to understand and own that trueness of origin from first-hand experience. But educating people one by one is slow, and it’d result in Jason Horner’s turnips getting trampled. So I say: screw the military. Dump the Peace Corps and national civil service programs. Abolish the year abroad. Everyone does a year on the farm.

Society needs farmed food. Farms need workers. People need to understand their foods’ origins. Humanity (though they may not know it yet) needs to hoover in the perfect green olfactory godscent of fresh tomato leaf. QED.

I’m only half joking here. Yes, the Edible Schoolyard project is great, and may be raising a new generation of kids who are more connected to food and where it comes from. But what about a booster shot of that education later in life, when we have more buying- and decision-making power, and we need an old lesson to get reinforced just as we’re about to start taking real action in this world? And what about a forced effort to sustain small producers, who need people working and need people learning so that there will be someone to take their places when they retire? Besides (and I’m speaking to the voting moms and dads out there)--our sons and daughters DON’T DIE during routine patrols of the veg patch.

Just a thought. And please vote for me and my NFS Platform Policy when run for king.

--DS, having a two-night stand with his own bed