Four Seasons in Five Senses: Things Worth Savoring

In this collection of essays, the author, a writer, lecturer and organic peach and raisin farmer, explores farm life through the five senses, rhapsodizing on--among other things--the color of weeds, the smell of mud, the sound of a shovel sinking into soil, the feel of old work boots and, above all, the""explosion of flavor"" from his Sun Crest peaches. Masumoto (Harvest Son) celebrates the homey routines of small-scale, low-tech farming passed down from his Japanese-American clan, and inveighs against industrialized""fast farming"" and its flavorless products. In but not of the commercial nexus, his own peaches are""a dialogue between producer and consumer,"" and they create new memories,""emotions"" and""true stories and personal connections."" It all adds up to a Thoreauvian manifesto in which the organic farm is the last refuge from a modernity that deadens the senses and deprives us of authentic experience. When Masumoto has something to write about, like his family's wartime internment or the economics of produce distribution, he writes well. Too often, however, his sensual epiphanies degenerate into food porn (""my teeth sink into the peach's succulent flesh, and juice breaks into my mouth as I seal my lips on the skin and suck the meat"") or impressionistic sentence fragments (""Chickens. Barns with barn owls. Porches. Straw hats.""). A readership of connoisseurs, slow-food enthusiasts, and unhappily deracinated urbanites will warm to Masumoto's ode to the exalted spirituality of organic farming, but some may find it nostalgic and overly sweet.