A s teenagers, my brother and I brokered a deal with our parents: No summer jobs at home in Charleston as long as we worked on my maternal grandparents’ peach farm in Upstate South Carolina, where the expectation was that grandkids work harder than even the best full-time employees. Long hours standing inside the open-air roadside market, hauling bushels of peaches, shucking corn and shelling peas, and dipping several hundred ice cream cones meant our dogs didn’t just bark, they howled.
Nearly two decades later, the memory of those sticky hot days remains a bright spot. Those formative summers schooled us in work ethic and customer service, but they also instilled in us a genuine interest in the way food unifies people. Roadside farm stands are microcosms of the communities they serve and beacons to the passersby they draw, linking customer to farmer and food to land. Promise me a basket of just-ripe peaches, a half dozen fresh-picked tomatoes, a pound of tender okra, or even a bouquet of colorful cut blooms—as
