Spanish views from a small town

Almost every household in these villages put in potatoes, plant tomatoes, sow corn, and collect grapes to make their own wine. Long ago they discovered that to have good crops they needed to apply pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides. Every year, when the first potato weevil appears, or the first curl on the leaves of the vine, the owner goes to a feed and seed store to buy powders of whatever, mix them with water, and apply with a pulverizer, generally a manual one of fifteen liters that the applier carries on his back like a backpack. Exceptionally, the applier will wear a face mask. Not so many years ago it was always the men of the household who would do this task (though women have since taken it on), and they would possibly smoke a cigarette while they filled the pulverizer with water, or even while they applied the final product. The clothes they would wear for the rest of the day, and they might or might not wash their hands before eating an afternoon sandwich. The box and se...