"Everyone Eats There." Yes, but What Do They Eat?
This Mark Bittman story in the annual NYT Magazine food and drink issue appeared last month under several headlines: Heavenly Food California's Central Valley: Land of a Million Vegetables Everyone Eats There It is this last headline that has stuck with me--and continued to agitate me. This is because I find the headline misleading or--perhaps more precisely--because it tells only part of the story. Bittman's piece is an homage, of sorts, to California's Central Valley, which produces more than a third of the produce grown in the United States. Bittman writes: The valley became widely known in the 1920s and 1930s, when farmers arrived from Virginia or Armenia or Italy or (like Tom Joad) Oklahoma and wrote home about the clean air, plentiful water and cheap land. ... Unlike the Midwest, which concentrates (devastatingly) on corn and soybeans, more than 230 crops are grown in the valley, including those indigenous to South Asia, Southeast Asia and...