the story of the Poop Tomatoes

Looking for jobs and found an organic farm in Naperville. I had no idea we had organic farms so close. It looks sweet, if unproductive toward future career, because you get paid partly in vegetables.

So then I read up on organic farming. Turns out the USDA has standards for organic farms to be certified organic, one of which -- about how long animal manure has to be "cured" before you can harvest vegetables off the land where you use it -- brought back a story my parents told me once. It has poop in it!

My parents moved to Mokena, a town which (then) was in the boonies surrounded by farms, a year or two before I was born. They built the house we lived in there. So obviously they didn't have a lawn at first, just dirt. They saw an ad in the paper for (treated) sewage fertilizer: the state would come and spread it on your lawn for free. So they did.

The crop that came up that first year after they spread the sewage wasn't grass: it was a verdant field of ... tomato plants. Hundreds of tomato plants.

Turns out tomato seeds pass unharmed through human digestive tracts and survive to germinate.

So come July my parents had a bumper crop of tomatoes, dozens of pounds, on their hands. They brought them to work and everyone thought they were the tastiest tomatoes ever.

Best story ever yeah?