Lakshmi Tata, Manager, Edible Stories Market Garden:
Me and my family own, operate Edible Stories Market Garden. It’s a small market garden in Hillsboro, Oregon.
We decided to try growing some vegetables that are used in South Asian cooking. It just made it more meaningful for us to grow these foods that have some cultural heritage behind.
Both my husband and me were thinking of what all we should be growing. And, of course, we have local farms that have — at that time, 10 years ago, were growing what you get in the regular grocery store. But then we said, why don’t we try growing something that other people are not growing?
And over time, people started appreciating it. It was something that connected them to their heritage.
Aanandhi Ganesh, Farmer in Training, Edible Stories Market Garden: When my mom goes out, she will, like, pick vegetables, different types of Indian vegetables, and she will come back home, and she will cook that. And she will be talking about how when she was in India how her mother or her grandmother would cook that, and she would be cooking in the same way.
On our farm, we grow many different types of vegetables, but a few ones are like doodhi, which is a gourd. Many times, you just cut it up, boil it, use it for sambars, which is the type of soup, again, with many spices.
My least favorite is karela. It’s a bitter gourd. It’s extremely bitter. We just chop it up and fry it. And many — you either really like it or really hate it.
