So true! We ought to refuse the bred-for-shipping varieties that our home grown MBAs have given us. Maybe if everyone rejected the crap served in restaurants we could reverse the trend. But there is hope, as in
Jay Knepper
Ah, the memories...
Back when I was about 10 years old (c.1971) I spotted an ad in the back of Boy's Life magazine and sent away for a Burpee seed sales kit. The idea was to ring bells door-to-door and offer quality, well-known Burpee flower and garden seeds to the neighbors. By selling certain amounts of seeds a boy would earn rewards at whatever level of sales he achieved.
A small box arrived a couple weeks later with quite a sampling of various plant seeds. Excitedly I hit the streets in our smallish, out-of-town neighborhood in northern Virginia. Surprisingly the neighbors were quite receptive and before long I had amassed quite a tidy sum of coin in the collection envelope with my seed stock practically depleted. As I recall I had sold something on the order of $15 or $20 worth of Burpee packets at 10¢ or 25¢ apiece.
My chosen reward was a wooden box chock full of an assortment of X-Acto blades and handle. Wow were those things sharp. I didn't have a history of carving or whittling (obww). Nor did I seriously take up the craft afterwards. I didn't want to dull the blades, after all. Everything seemed just as it should be. I sent away, they sent to me, I sold and submitted the proceeds, they sent me my payment. Budding entrepreneurialism wed to good ol' capitalism. Beautiful. (Not to mention the trust Burpee was extending to all those boys.) Then...
One day my older sister was using one of the blades for something or other. The long blade slipped off of the object and cleanly sliced into the web of skin and muscle between her thumb and forefinger. My mother confiscated the, *my*, X-Acto knife set. Too dangerous she said. Jeez.
Kinda like the Cox Red Baron, gas, fly-by-wire biplane I got for Christmas when I was about 11 or 12. My mother took it upon herself to be the first to try it out as my Dad fired it up. As the plane took off and gained altitude, she spun around and around and around trying to control it and keep up with it. A half dozen rotations and she lost her bearings, driving the plane directly into the ground, breaking the wing struts and doing serious damage to the future aerodynamics. Out of commission before I even got a turn. Jeez...
Totally Tomatoes P.O. Box 295 (or)
334 W. Stroud St. Randolph, WI 53956 USAGoogle for 'em ... and give the Early Goliath a try -- worked VERY well for me this year. (Also try the Old Brooks, not as early as Early Goliath, but still somewhat ahead of the pack and good flavor / size in an unusually cool summer here in MI.)
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