vegetable salad

The lady tending her crops under the pouring cold rain 

                        

             I do love Caesar’s salad or any vegetable salad, for that matter. Yes, it is everyone’s favorite especially if he/she is a fitness buff, though Im not (I think so).  Most salads are not complete without  a piece of lettuce. It is used as platter lining, lone vegetable with a dressing or sauce, or one of the ingredients of a vegetable salad. It is good to munch if it is served fresh. The crunching inside the mouth is too much to savor for the sweetness of this leafy salad favorite.

Have you ever wondered how a single leaf of lettuce reached your platter? Well, you must have bought it.  But how it was raised, maintained, till harvested and been served in your meal.

I believed that any crop is been cultivated with labor of love.

her sons probably, stopped a while when rain poured heavily 

back to work after the rain stopped a while

Recently when I was in the strawberry field of Benguet, though it was raining hard, I still went there excited to see an actual strawberry fruit still attached to the plant. To my dismay, there was no strawberry for harvest that day.  Yet, I still went to the field, searching for red berries near the base of this green plant. Nearby, I observed this one old woman despite the heavy rain still clearing some weeds from her garden of lettuce.   Along with her, I guessed, are her sons. I say so, because they were able to rest a while when the rain fell hard some time while the old woman kept on weeding.

Hard labor is only the least description of the effort provided by farmers in cultivating their crop. It is not enough that you have the land and agricultural inputs to be able to produce food out of the land.  Come to think of this, in every grain, stalk, leaf, pod, fruit, herb you eat a labor of old women, out of school youths, frail old men, and other most disadvantaged bothers and sisters, and even children. I am not soliciting pity here, but let us acknowledge that without farmers; we may have enough money yet there will no food on our table. 

The next time we have a sumptuous salad with lettuce, may we remember that it may be raised by farmers that despite the uncooperative weather were out there tending this crop so we may continue enjoy our vegetable salad.