The Family Peach Farm That Became A Symbol Of The Food Revolution - NPR

"Epitaph for a Peach" was Peach Farmer Mas Masumoto's elegy for the kind of peach that "tasted great, like a peach is supposed to."   He later expanded this essay into a memoir of one year of life on his family farm.

"It hurts," he wrote, to see "flavor lost along with meaning."

`Mas Masumoto's daughter, Nikiko, never thought this farm was anything special. For her, it was just part of growing up in the Central Valley, a place that she expected to see, pretty quickly, in her rear-view mirror. "It's very common in rural schools that 'success' is defined as going away and not coming back," she says.

So off she went to the University of California, Berkeley. She loved it. "I was off in my land of gender and women's studies, feminist theory, really wild and political ideas, and I decided to take an environmental studies class," she recalls.

One day, in that class, a visiting speaker laid out the environmental impact of food production, how farming defeated nature with plows and pesticides. And it dawned on her that her parents, planting cover crops and wildflowers in their organic orchard, were actually doing something important.

 

That thought was followed by another one: The most radical thing that she could possibly do would be to go home.'

 Read the rest of the NPR story here.