For the 1000 farmers gathered at the Chattanooga convention center for the Southern SAWG conference, Saturday’s Taste of Tennessee dinner probably tasted like what you or I would ordinarily get at a banquet. For my unspoiled palate, however, the meal it was a delicious lesson in what the world tasted like before I was born.

The mixed greens and carrots on the salad were so tender that had I been alone, I would have tossed the fork aside and nibbled on them, stem first with the pleasure of a bunny rabbit. The meal went from Hmm to Huh however, when I took a bite of the sauteed cabbage and it was sweet! I don’t put sugar in my tea or coffee, prefer dark chocolate to milk and would take an extra helping of mashed potatoes over dessert any day, so sweetness is not really my thing. But biting into that ordinary-looking piece of cabbage didn’t pucker my mouth, or leave the aftertaste you get when sugar or honey has been added. No, this was more like a handshake than a slap, saying, “Hi, My name is Cabbage, and this is what I taste like.” The cabbage I met tonight gently seduced my mouth into its happy place and helped me leave the salt shaker on the table. Where it stayed for the entire meal, even during the meat.

Now, beef is normally something I could live without (and did for 13 years of my life), but after the roast I had tonight, I feel like I might owe it an apology. Unlike the striated, grisly and slightly bitter flavor I associate with beef, this meat was at once more tender and more dense and again, subtly sweet. It also lent itself to being cut with a dull knife into square bite-sized pieces onto which the mushroom sauce clung deliciously. The cooked carrots were also sweet and juicy -- two things I don’t associate with carrots -- and while the potatoes were closer to what I’m used to, it also must be said that I grew up in a potato household, where only education and travel were taken more seriously than our daily potato.

No less satisfying than the delicious fare was the conversation at our table, starring a pair of farmers from Orlinda, Tenn. who I want to become when I grow up. Carney and Alfred Farris are in their late 70’s and looked more like a couple who would sit around in the leather chairs in their den reading the New Yorker than a couple of pioneers in organic farming in Tennessee. For starters, they both seemed preternaturally healthy and vivacious, and reminded me of the elderly man who blew past me during a hike in the French Alps, back in the days when I was still a runner and in the best shape of my life. Alfred wore the tortoise-shell glasses, plaid shirt and green cardigan of the retired lawyer he resembled, and gave me a quick lesson on how they control the weeds on Windy Acres Farm, their certified-organic farm about 35 miles north of Nashville. Having first started farming in late 50’s, Alfred said they changed their ways in the mid 1970’s, when a group of young people convinced them to think about the environmental impacts of their work. Alfred said they now rid their rows of pesky weeds using a propane-fired machine that blasts young shoots with heat without hurting the cash crop.

It turns out that despite growing wheat, corn, soybeans, spelt and barley, insects are not really an issue because their plants are strong enough to resist attack. And as Windy Acres’ mechanic Samuel Justice explained, insects only attack diseased plants. He went on to point out that while we normally think of insects as “plagues” they actually are intended as nature’s composter to rid the food chain of diseased plants (I guess this means that thanks to pesticides, insects probably no longer vet the food we eat, giving all crops an equal chance: the good, the bad and the ugly). Or, as Alfred so succinctly put it, “Healthy soil, healthy plants, healthy people.”