We dropped by Rev’s the other day. “It is war!” he told us. “There will be famine. We’ll have to eat our own food!” No problem there. When the tourist business went south half the island went back to farming.

The neighbor with the cow pastures across the road gave us some land to farm. There is no rent, he is just happy to have someone keep it cleared. Bobo went up and cleaned the whole thing, burnt all the brush, got someone to help put in mounds for yams and planted yams, dasheen, coco, plantains, pumpkins and so forth. All the starchy vegetables that are called “food” around here.

He gave two days of labor to a neighbor in exchange for precious “yam heads.” These look like huge hairy brown testicles with one green stalk like a blackberry stem. I could see that they are precious by the tender way Bobo treated them. They mustn’t be disturbed or upset, and it took three trips with the big market basket to take them up to the farm site. There, they were carefully laid down on top of the special mounds. They needed to get used to their new home before getting buried in the spectacularly fertile Jamaican soil.

Afterwards, John Crow, who is applied to when acts of great strength are required, jammed in bamboo poles for the yam vines to climb up on.

Bobo and Dimple are up there every day working away at this farming project. They bicker like an old married couple and then come to me with their sides of the story. “I told her to buy carrot seeds at the farm store!” She bought broccoli instead. He doesn’t believe in broccoli. Because she has access to the Adventist community who care about the medicinal properties of broccoli, she argues she can sell her broccoli for 100 dollars a pound rather than 5, the current going rate. It goes like that.

Google informs me that there are 18 different varieties of yams in Jamaica and that the word ‘yam” comes from the African word “to eat” or “nyam,” which by the way means “to eat” in Patois, too. At first, I wasn’t a big fan of huge pots of boiled “food” with small portions of curry or veggies, but since it is what's for dinner these days, it is growing on me. So far, I am familiar with the cultivated yellow yams and the “renta” yams that people dig up in the bush.

Yams are ferocious tubers and secrete something or other that gets on you and itches if you try and wash them. You just peel them as best you can and dump them into boiling water mud and all. In the meantime, they get stored on the floor with a protective coating of dirt and mold.

There are different qualities. “Wow, this is a really good yam!” I would hear and I had no idea what they were talking about. They all looked the same to me. The first time I brought one home from the supermarket, my purchase was met with horror. But now I can distinguish a good yam. When they are good, they are flavorful with a pleasing texture. Bobo claims that the yam head he got from his two days of work are very superior quality. He will fuss over and coddle them a bit while they grow, in order for them to "fluff up" and be really good.

I think what I am observing here in this village is a “traditional diet,” in the Weston A Price sense of things. People get up in the morning and do physical work nonstop all day. Whatever they are eating must be good. “I’ll have some of what they are having!” I don’t think I can go wrong with that!.