Sam Smith - News that cucumbers are being widely recalled due to a Salmonella outbreak, gives me an excuse to tell about my one summer as a teenager heavily involved with cucumbers. As I wrote about it:
In
the course of their constant search for productive uses of the land, my
parents one summer stumbled upon the idea of growing cucumbers for
pickling. Growing cucumbers is easy; growing an acre and a eighth of
them for pickling is not. The pickling factory bought them at prices
that varied in inverse ratio to their size. The best price by far were
for those barely larger than one's finger. The ordinary cucumber of the
magnitude one would find in a grocery store was well past its pickling
prime and brought the least per pound. The time between the former and
latter state often appeared to require less than a day. Despite one's
certainty that all of the smaller cucumbers -- or A grade -- had been
discovered underneath the long lines of vines, the mere existence of the
larger -- or C grade -- cuke provided evidence that the search had been
inadequate. There were always an embarrassing number of C grade cukes.
Fortunately,
the task was so great, and required so many pickers, that my parents
could not discover individual responsibility for careless plucking.
After all, it could easily have been one of the numerous house guests
dragooned into the operation in order to stay ahead of the life cycle of
the common cuke On one occasion, even my grandfather appeared in the
field in his black tie and black suit to pick for awhile.
At the end of the morning, my brother and I would load hundreds of pounds of cucumbers into the 1941 Plymouth station wagon and haul them to Portland 20 miles distant where they would be weighed and then dumped into huge, malodorous vats. I learned that summer that loading things and driving them some place was fun. Picking them was not. On the way back we would pass five widely spaced small red signs with white lettering. They read:
Big new tube
Just like Louise
You get a lot
In every squeeze
Burma Shave