Explore Farmers' Market society in Mike Madison’s, Blithe Tomato - By N.L. Belardes

A farm girl and her country singer sidekick read Mike Madison's
new book, Blithe Tomato...

I admit I have read more travel narratives than most. Such writings take you on long journeys over land, in planes, trains, beat cars, on footpaths through history, across rain-strewn oceans and happy isles, exploring cities and countryside on every corner of the planet. Writers include historians, literary folk, military writers, seafarers, bloggers, journalists, Nobel Prize winners, and more. Don’t even get me started naming writers.

The travel narrative is a reader’s eyepiece to the world, far more detailed than an advertising-laden show on the Travel Channel. You know the episodes with a bubbling host reading astonishingly from a watered down script. And then there are the steamy tourist brochures down at your local AAA, and books by Lonely Planet telling you about the best restaurants in Suva, Fiji.

Yawn. Give me the adventure, not the marketing.

In good travel narratives readers submerse themselves into more detail than they could ever imagine. And sometimes the imagination far outweighs an often blurry, or myopic focus on a colorful TV show, or even from their own travels—yes, some people are not as adventurous as the books they read.

A book like Blithe Tomato is not a travel narrative in the sense that the author is an outsider recording his take on a foreign country. There are no Yugoslavian travels, or dips into war-torn Iraq’s out-of-balanced cityscapes. Yet Blithe Tomato is a journey that travels to foreign lands. Mike Madison’s storytelling interconnects California’s small farms with farmers’ markets and the diverse people who make up a peculiar American culture of food.

Madison takes you out of the city to the war-torn farmlands of California, where farmers often fight equally between natural landscapes of blights, weeds and gophers as well as against the machinery needed to toil large plots of land—all for a miniscule profit.


Gophers? What Gophers?

You’d be surprised. The small farms of America are not all lands of elitists with enough money to buy politics and Mercedes SUVs. Small farmers and the markets they cater to make up an American character of determination, humor, strife and poverty amid agricultural markets that seem to teeter on the verge of ‘farms going under’: out-of-control hybrids, reduced product diversity, pesticides, profit losses, questions of organics, and the constant swallowing of the little farmer by a vastly changing and progressing urban mindset that creeps into agricultural landscapes.

And Madison brings a human side as well by describing people: people who hang in the balance of despair and success, who all traverse farmlands and farmers' markets in a shared existence that Madison politely observes.

Readers will get a sense of the adventure and satisfaction of farming; in how even in repetition comes the savory flavors of fresh agriculture, free of toxins, and prepared in simple dishes that reflect simple ideals in complex agricultural environments. Madison’s Blithe Tomato is a humorous journey, a wise journey, and is just as filled with uncertainty as it is with the assuredness that there are more people like him, who just plain care about the land.

*NOTE: I tried to contact Mike Madison, but I think he was having a war with gophers that must have taken part of his crop, and gnawed through his Ethernet cables…

Buy Blithe Tomato from Heyday Books
More reviews by Paperback Writer:
Bicoastal Babe (Cynthia Langston)
Resurrection (Steve Alten)
Buy my book: Lords Part One
Buy my book: Thick White Crust

This entry was posted by N.L. Belardes, on Monday, July 17, 2006. You can leave your response.