Farm stands

Based on the recommendation of a neighbor, we've now shopped a couple of times at Beth's in Warren. It's the kind of place where nearly everything for sale is grown on-site, where half-a-dozen chickens run around the aisles, where the fruits and vegetables are beyond luscious. Like farmers' markets and the slow food movement, farm stands are becoming quite popular. Beth's is located some 5 miles off Route 1, in the middle of nowhere, and yet the parking lot was full and there were several people in line at each of the two registers. The true test of any farm stand is the corn; Beth's is the best I've ever tasted. It is almost yellow, not white or pale like some of the new varieties, and it actually tastes like corn, not chewy sugar.

This morning we went to an honorary Maine farm stand that happens to be located in Needham, MA. It is such a pleasure to go to Volante's: no crowded aisles full of bumper-car shoppers, no fluorescent lights, no 57 varieties of depressingly packaged cereals, no refrigerator cases so cold that you really should put on long pants just to get milk; just heaps of peaches and apples and beans, mums in the greenhouse, a 25-foot table devoted solely to corn, open-air building. If we ignore the ranches and Colonials and their chemical lawns on the drive there, if we close your eyes against the Audis and the SUVs, and look only at the gorgeous produce, and the fields sloping away from the greenhouse, we could be in Maine. No live chickens, but pretty damn good for suburbia. And for the duration of the fall, I vow to buy no supermarket produce whatsoever, MA or ME.