I put up the positives and a few negatives on the NY Produce Show on the Epi Log but had a few outtakes I hate to waste. Like how a woman snipping samples of corn shoots explained how they’re produced: “First we terminate the baby corn.” Don’t tell the Teabaggers, or the Chimp: There’s abortion in the microgreen aisle.

Also, too, women buy most produce, but guess which gender markets it. To give just an idea of how fly-dominated the show was, when I stopped in the ladies room the attendant was asleep. Plus I was tempted to drop my card into two drawings for prizes, a Harley and tickets to whatever sport’s games are going on now, because I’d surely have won something I couldn’t use.

On two floors of the Hilton (could there be a more surreal setting?) I met two people I knew either personally or from phone interviews. I stopped by the booth whose backers got me invited, where I knew no one but where the founder and I go way back. Two booths represented growers my consort and I covered in our ill-fated harvest book in 1992. The national garden turns out to be surprisingly small. I couldn’t get to the show on time, so the press office was empty and someone steered me to the main registration desk, where they wondered why I wasn’t at the press lunch. I didn’t even realize there was one, and wasn’t interested, so I grabbed my name tag and headed up the escalators. Later I saw a little group of other food writers being led around by the nose and felt as if I’d escaped the sheep roundup. I will never understand the logic of the mass scoop, hand-fed.