In the alley of the Jolly Green Giant

All of a sudden, everything is about "the farm." I have never lived on a farm, but we were farm-adjacent when I was a kid. 150 acres of corn and tomatoes and squash and rutabagas were literally in our backyard, and we were privileged to pick, cook, and eat what we wanted all week, and then settle up with the farmer when he set up his roadside stand on Sundays. I like the farm lifestyle from the distance it is from me, meaning what I don't have to get up and 5 AM to shovel manure (unless you want to count writing this blog....)

And I don't know what started all this.  Perhaps it was when restaurants started claiming their food was of the "farm to table" variety.  Yes, that okra was grown on a farm, but it took lots of detours on the way to your plate.  And what difference would it make?

Not long ago, out on Harford Rd, they built some houses on a big lot where a restaurant used to be. They advertised the houses as being "farmhouse townhouses." Townhouse is the Baltimore term for what other cities call rowhouses. That's fine, but in all the farms I have visited or driven past, there were always individual houses, not a row of them. Each farm family had their own house, so they wouldn't wake the other families while shoveling manure at 5 AM. The houses they built in this development look nice and substantial, but they are no more "farmhouses" than Rocky Mountain oysters are seafood. And no farmer I have ever spoken with referred to his house as a "pied-à-terre," so there goes that. 

Of course, you like shredded cheese on your taco and burrito, but why do the cheese companies now call the thicker shreds of cheddar "farm style" shreds? You could get a brick of cheese and grate it yourself in the kitchen of Trump Tower, and that's as far from a farm style home as you can get.  

It's a honor to know farmers, and I'm sorry that city folks are trying to co-opt their lifestyles for commercial purposes. I have to figure they don't really care. They know how people are!