"How can we have a democracy if a huge percentage of the people whose daily task it is to put our food on the table don't even have the right to be here, to say nothing of voting?"

Andrew Griffin, who wrote that paragraph, is an organic farmer in Watsonville. He is the sort of fellow who can make us feel we would be better off not having him around to remind us of exactly how awesomely deceitful our society is, right down to the sentences blasting unbidden into your poor head while you read this.

Mr. Griffin is riffin' off of John Steinbeck, whose birth 100 years ago we marked last year. In "The Harvest Gypsies," Steinbeck said that "If our agriculture requires the creation and maintenance at any cost of a peon class, then it is submitted that California agriculture is economically unsound under a democracy."

Which means that our red-white-and-blue evolution has yet to catch up to what you got on the end of your fork. Yeah, and me too; I'm not drawing a pass, just because of past affiliations, grape boycotts, lingual dexterity, and more than a few shared meals. I hire a few hands off the parade down on the corner these days, once in awhile, but back in the days of Don Miguel it was me more alien in my own homeland than them here. They make peace somehow in this strange fiction of a republic while I feel on the lam from my own life. It's me that wants to go to Mexico, instead, and forever. Country? How about community? It was all them Flores and Hernandez people that laid the foundation bricks of the organic farming movement in California. I may have worn out the knees on my pants with them, but I did not hoe weeds under the waning light of the moon that often, except to savor the romance of it, nor without fail have five cases of lettuce picked before dawn. Our most profound spiritual experience was irrigating corn at midday. Now that those days are gone and irrecoverable their beauty can at least be measured by what replaces them.

Latino births are a majority now in California. Sort of provides additional permission for government to exempt methyl bromide once again. I mean, it's not like we got an endangered species on our hands. Why else would government suggest that we ignore science, and allow the continued use of such a dangerous threat to human health as well as a proven environmental contaminant that helps to carve a bigger hole in the ozone every year.

Maybe if we raised the issue of skin cancer for all the fair-haired Aussies instead we'd get a choke hold on methyl bromide [see story on page 9].

This past January, you noted Mexican farmers in Mexico City, trying to hack at NAFTA but their machetes wouldn't reach that far up. For them, it's all about corn and cooking oil. The big subsidized corn industry of the United States, newly unfettered by trade restrictions, will now crush the last life out of rural small farmers who grow the Mexican manna, corn for the tortilla, which is eaten like a sacrament there three times a day. Now the bitty towns will crumble and more men will trudge north to pick it and pack it and truck it and shrink wrap it and process it and truck it again. An endless supply of labor which keeps many of us working too cheap. I am not against immigration at all. What causes the invasion from the south flares my sense of indignation. Capital is shoving cultures around like past-due cartons of cottage cheese. Evil lies are masquerading as holy truths. The folks who claim that free-trade will create jobs are the same crooks who fire half the work force as soon as they make out with that nifty merger.

They tell me now that I have to go pick more collards. When something as simple as collards can rule my life, perhaps there is hope yet, and it's Miguel and Angel whose wisdom reigns, and not a miserable obligation to the growing gratification of the consumer.

Down at the big Natural Products EXPO in Anaheim in early March you are flat out not going to see or hear mention of Hernandez, et al. You'll get your genuflection, about as meaningful as giving the truck driver a can of coke, but talk is cheap, and paying the real price for food is too scary for mere merchandisers to contemplate. Imagine that all the sharpies hustling packages of farm-essence paid more than lip-service to the real work of getting raw product out of the ground. Don't derail me with your Fair Trade Coffee yada. How about Fair Trade Broccoli?

The EXPO is all about the package. Down here we are all about fresh. At weed level, the wild flavor of raw collards makes one believe that the sun is one big honeybee, the whole field tastes so sweet. The khaki-klad cognoscenti measure it as brix, dressing up that sugar-co-efficient with a fancy foreign word draped in science. But I don't need a machine to tell me those greens are going to be good.

You can see where we are splitting apart, once again, over food we expected to create as new, and yet I am nothing but naive for ever believing that money would not hunt us down and make us obey. And, more reasonably, however, measuring brix indeed does have benefits, not just in harvesting wine grapes but in figuring out if bugs will leave you and yours alone if your brix is just right.

Returning finally to collards, they are such a curious crop, don't you think? Usually appearing in the same breath with words like "corn-pone, chitlins and hominy," collards have become a bit of a fave for the culturally creative health seeker because their delivery on calcium, vitamin C and other key nutrients is paired with taste superior to kale. I used to grow collards and ship them, solely to Texas, because collards are a staple in the South. But now they are prized and confirmed in sentences featuring words like "immune-system, raw-food-enzymes, garlic and rice-wine-vinegar." We are glad that collards have grown popular within our tribe.