The lady behind the counter at Butcher’s Farm Market in Newport was multi-tasking.

Phone tucked behind her ear, she was ringing up the customer in front of me, an elderly shopper with perfectly coiffed white hair, all the while carrying on an animated conversation about horse feed. Or cow feed. Some kind of animal fodder, anyway.

There were limits to my eavesdropping.

“The difference is in the nutritional value,” she said, as she bagged a handful of unruly tomatoes. “Hay is not the same as straw.”

Then she leaned over and whispered, “Can I put these in the same bag with the fruit?”

“Oh, my, yes,” the elderly lady replied. She’d been following the phone conversation, too. She seemed surprised at the question, as if a character in the movie she was watching had suddenly turned to her and asked if she wanted more popcorn.

The phone conversation continued. “Straw is a byproduct. Uh huh. I said, it’s a byproduct. You take whatever’s leftover after you process wheat, or maybe oats. You know, the stems and leaves. Then you bundle that up, and it’s straw. As opposed to hay, which is basically cut grass. So it’s more nutritious.”

The wonder in the elderly shopper’s eyes seemed to have less to do with the lecture on fodder than with the fact that the checker was simultaneously talking on the phone, making change, and tidying up the counter for the next customer.

“So I’d recommend the hay. Yup. No. No problem. Thanks for calling.” She hung up the phone, but the subject was still very much alive in her mind.

“I didn’t come from farming people,” she said. “But my husband did. That’s how I know about straw and hay.” Then she bore down on her customer, with the practiced air of a schoolteacher, and proceeded to quiz her. “Did you know about the difference?”

“Oh, no,” she answered, tucking her change neatly into her wallet. She may have been wearing white gloves. I can’t quite remember. If she wasn’t, then she was the kind of lady who would have been wearing them long after they went out of fashion. Just because. “You see, now I’ve learned something.”

The checker smiled with obvious satisfaction. “You have a nice day!”

Then it was my turn. I offered up my Honey Crisps, tomatoes, and a guilty whoopie pie or two, and watched as she rang them up with lightning fingers.

“You don’t mind if I put all these in one bag, do you?”

“Not at all,” I said. “Although that is a leading question.”

“Hm,” she said. The part about a “leading question” didn’t sit quite right with her.

But she let it go, and then started quizzing me, too. “Did you know the difference between straw and hay?”

I admitted that it was news to me.

She went over the technical details one last time, and then she added, “You know, I didn’t come from farming people. Once, I asked my husband whether he thought our neighbor ought to grow some more straw, and he laughed! Grow straw? Never let me forget it.”

Ah, humiliation, I thought, the heart of the teaching impulse.

We humans love to teach. We teach all the time, whether or not we’re aware of it. It’s not just a profession. Every parent is a teacher – of language, of general knowledge, of culture, of habits, good and bad, by commission and omission. This is how human civilization is transmitted from generation to generation.

We teach for all kinds of reasons, but especially to help someone avoid a painful mistake. For instance, saying something that might open us up to ridicule by a spouse.

Why was the checker at Butcher’s so keen to impart the difference between straw and hay? So keen, in fact, that she made sure that at least two of her customers, plus the one on the phone, knew – and I mean knew – the answer?

Perhaps she was trying to protect us from our own ignorance.

Or maybe the answer is deeper than that. The difference between straw and hay used to be universally known in Perry County. Back when virtually everyone farmed, haying was a fact of life. You knew what it was because you’d wielded a scythe, or fed a husband or son who had. You knew the difference between straw and hay because the health of your animals – and thus your livelihood – depended on it.

How to properly feed a farm animal is still a preoccupation for a lot of people in this county. But for many of us, the straw/hay distinction can be filed away with other bits of formerly crucial knowledge, like the internal mechanics of a hand pump, or the recipe for horseshoe iron.

Farm stands like Butchers are a kind of throwback. We love them for the same reason we love the sight of carefully tended fields. They speak to a collective past of farms, homesteads, and harvest festivals.

Of course, human history is full of tragedies and reversals. Who knows? Maybe someday the straw/hay distinction will once again be a matter of life and death. Better to know about it, just in case. The future of human civilization might depend on how well we do on a checker’s quiz!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go see a man about a whoopie pie.

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 27 September 2012

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com