An Onion in My Pocket

by Deborah Madison

  But here we were in 1970, far from the time of Buddha and almost any tradition of begging. We had to answer the question of whether or not we were vegetarian in terms of our own realities, and certainly we couldn’t ignore the first of the precepts, which warned against taking life. (The commandment about not committing murder is number five in the Christian lexicon.)We finally decided that the main kitchen, the one in which all our community’s food was cooked, was to be vegetarian. There was a little side kitchen and that was where people could cook and eat what they wanted. Still, it was offensive to some students to get a whiff of someone’s breakfast bacon, so eventually the small kitchen became off-limits to meat as well. In time we became a vegetarian community. (Of course, once you were out in the City, you could eat whatever you wished and no one would mind or know.)

  Intentional communities are somewhat like families. What we eat and drink shapes us into one kind of being and we want the parts that make up this being to be roughly similar. It helps to be on the same physical page with regard to food if you’re engaged in certain activities. Farming, playing sports, or living a life around sitting meditation all have their own physical requirements. It would be, I imagine, odd if some members of a monastic community tucked into steaks at dinner while others found thin vegetable soups to be sufficient. Not that both can’t practice sitting meditation, but the meat-eating contingent might want more digestive time before evening zazen. Practically speaking, eating the same foods is a smart thing to do.

  So once we figured out we were vegetarian in the City Center, one of the first orders of business was to figure out how to eat so that fifty people weren’t trying to cook their own meals several times a day. A student named Loring Palmer offered to take charge of the food in the first weeks of our moving in together. Loring was an exceptional cook and he was calm and focused in the kitchen. He also happened to be a macrobiotic cook, but not in some half-baked, brown-rice-only way. His repertoire went far beyond brown rice. His dishes were truly balanced, deeply nourishing, and delicious. In particular he was a master at making succulent stews based on vegetables that most of us didn’t grow up eating, like burdock (gobo) and lotus root and daikon. His cooking inspired me to take classes from his macrobiotic teachers in San Francisco, but even though I liked Loring’s food tremendously, I didn’t really want to sign up for the whole macrobiotic lifestyle. Still, I learned something in those classes about how to hold a knife, and how to look at and generally consider a vegetable.

  Loring hadn’t planned on being the head cook for long, so one evening at a house meeting, the question was asked if there was anyone who was interested in taking over the kitchen. My hand shot up. I hadn’t realized that I wanted to do this, but at that moment it felt that the kitchen was just where I wanted to be. For one thing, it looked like the most interesting place to be. Two, I wanted to cook. But, three, I wanted to be around food because I had my own anxieties about being hungry.

  No one else seemed to want the job so it was mine and I overlapped with Loring just long enough to learn a few basics before he went on his way. I knew hardly anything about the foods he cooked, but I learned how to make brown rice for sixty, miso soup, a few arcane vegetable stews, gomasio (sesame salt), and pancakes without the benefit of baking powder, sugar, eggs, or milk. I had never seen myself as a vegetarian, but since meat hadn’t occupied a particularly large place in my prior life, it didn’t really matter to me what I cooked. Dry lamb burgers, experimental steaks, and those rarely met with pot roast and chicken-and-dumpling Dad dinners hadn’t made me a serious carnivore. I suspected that there were plenty of things to cook aside from meat, and the way I saw it was that I just happened to have gotten myself involved with cooking vegetarian food for a while.

  In the 1970s we were taking a stand against TV dinners, processed food, and the white bread of our parents’ postwar generation. Our mothers may have felt liberated and we may have longed for those TV dinners where you could eat dessert first and Mom wouldn’t care. (TV dinners were hearsay for me—we didn’t have them, or a TV.) But here we were sincerely trying to replace these new convenience foods with all those wholesome grains, beans, and other foods that promised good health. Our collective intention was to return to eating whole foods, nutritious foods, honest foods, unprocessed foods. The problem was that we didn’t really know that much about cooking anything at all, let alone these foods. Whose mother had cooked soybeans with sesame paste? Whose dad had strolled out to the barbecue to grill a slab of nut loaf or tempeh? (We didn’t even have tempeh then.) Who knew how to cook wheat berries or, for that matter, who knew what they tasted like or, even more fundamentally, what they were? Not terribly astute when it came to food and the kitchen arts, we were exploring new territory with varying degrees of success and without the advantages of cooking classes or cooking shows to tune in to where experienced chefs might show us the way. Cooking classes had not yet started being offered in the San Francisco community, except for Jack Lirio’s French cooking class, which I did take. I remember his cream puff swans. Aside from this, there weren’t really others.

  The results of our kitchen efforts were not very appetizing and this was indeed the era of stodgy, heavy, hard-to-digest, dull but meatless food. The bad rap that came with vegetarian food was well deserved. It would take time and a great deal of accumulated experience to learn to handle grains with a light touch and cook beans so that they were digestible and to explore deeply the world of vegetables. But in the process, many students did become adept bakers and cooks, working at places like the Good Karma Café in San Francisco, or writing books like Edward Espe Brown’s the Tassajara Bread Book.

  Back at 300 Page Street quite a few students didn’t care for macrobiotic foods, either Loring’s well-developed dishes or my less well-developed ones. Breakfast was an especially tough sell. Miso soup, soybeans cooked with molasses and onions, and brown rice cream just didn’t cut it for a lot of students, who ended up bypassing the kitchen altogether and drifting down to the Lum’s Café two blocks away on Market Street. There they could be found sitting at the counter reading the paper and enjoying fluffy pancakes, fried eggs, bacon, and white bread toast or home fries—standard American food—accompanied with coffee and sometimes a cigarette. Something had to give if we were going to eat together.

  A lot of distinguished guests came to eat with us at Zen Center and the abbot told me that as the head cook it was my job to cook food that most, if not all, of us, guests and students alike, enjoyed eating. That meant the food had to be familiar. Recognizable. The question What is that? should never arise when dinner was served. About the same time I figured that if we persisted with a strict macrobiotic menu, only those Zen students who were indifferent, hungry, or passionate about macrobiotic food would show up for meals, and that didn’t seem like the most inclusive way of feeding a community of people interested in practicing Buddhism. I sensed that Zen practice wasn’t as much about eating a macrobiotic diet (despite the word “Zen” in the macrobiotic cookbook that was popular then) as it was about the attention and care brought to cooking and eating. If we were going to sit down and break bread or eat rice together, meals had to be appealing enough to bring people to the table in the first place. In our case, the food itself had to change. It was already something that we were vegetarian. Not everyone in the community even wanted to be that.

  Gradually I began to include butter and cheese in our menu. I put baking powder in the pancake batter and used white flour so that the pancakes would be lighter and maybe even fluffy. Cinnamon and vanilla entered the kitchen along with pasta and tomato sauce. We had desserts on Saturday nights and cinnamon rolls for breakfast on Sundays. Bit by bit, I fashioned dishes that were familiar and appealing enough that we could all eat together without giving up all of our former foods or those counterculture foods we were striving to eat for better health. As a result we enjoyed a rather hodgepodge menu, which might have us eating brown rice
cream, soybeans, and pickles for breakfast one morning, muffins and scrambled eggs the next.

  Some of these changes were not in the interest of overall health, especially as we’ve come to see it today. Our original diet would probably score well for many, and I have heard that the Zen Center kitchen has gone through a vegan phase. We knew then as we know now, that whole wheat was better for us than white flour. Oil was (maybe) better than butter but butter was better than margarine, plus it tasted better. Popular thinking at that time suggested that it might be a good thing not to eat eggs, and here I was putting them back in our diet. Coffee gets mixed reviews today, but we sure wanted it then. Sugar? Sugar was rife with problems, but there it was. We wanted that, too. And we really wanted cheese.

  I never saw a Zen student turn down chocolate cake, buttery mashed potatoes, or a plate of cheese enchiladas. Foods like these were powerful attractors to the dinner table. Later we’d get it right again, but for the moment it was necessary to make a kind of backstitch to secure the fabric of community. How to balance change with intention and nascent kitchen skills was a question that was answered only by constant cooking and fine-tuning. In the meantime, people liked eating pancakes washed down with coffee, putting butter on their bread, and having cheese on their pizza. Eventually there was way too much cheese. There was cheese on everything. When I started Greens I added cheese to classic recipes that didn’t even call for it because I was so nervous about our nonvegetarian customers not feeling fed and satisfied with meatless food. I wanted them to feel good, and cheese helped.

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  —

  Being the cook in any community is a challenging job. For starters, it’s hard work and there’s a lot about food that requires constant care and attention if it’s not to be wasted or mistreated. It can mold, it can dry out, attract bugs, sour, and lots of other things can go wrong. But what was especially difficult for me was learning that I couldn’t please everyone. People didn’t hesitate to tell me when they were unhappy with the food, so I was always failing at least a few people at a time. There was never a point in resting on some imagined laurel garnered by an especially successful meal, for someone was sure to let me know exactly why it was wrong—for them.

  People had their own ideas about what was good and what wasn’t concerning food, and there were plenty of food trips disguised as allergies and other health conditions that were used as arguments and defenses. As anyone who has cooked in a restaurant knows, while some allergies are quite legitimate, others become a person’s way of saying, “I don’t like that” or “I’m special.” Some special conditions were real at the Zen Center, and even if I thought they weren’t, I tried to treat them as if they were, but I wasn’t always as sympathetic as I might have been. Sometime I just wanted to say, “Oh, you’re just making that up!” (I do admit that I am forever grateful that I have missed the antigluten, -grain, -dairy phases we humans are going through.) At the same time, I was quite aware that unlike the person pleading for more cheese or less miso, being in control of the food meant that I didn’t have a reason to be anxious. I could, after all, dip into the cookie jar if I wanted to. Or cut off a hunk of cheese. I was at the source.

  Traditionally in Japanese Buddhist monastic life, the job of head cook, or tenzo, was given to a senior monk, not a beginner like myself. There is a famous Buddhist guide for the tenzo, called the Tenzo Ryokan, written by Dogen-zenji in the 1200s. We didn’t know about it then, so I wasn’t using any guide, just feeling my way. But somehow, the business of sitting zazen every day and going to service and chanting and all of that filtered into my kitchen consciousness. My mind may have been racing around like crazy while I was sitting on my cushion with a straight back and aching knees, but at least sitting was bringing attention to that discursive mind. Eventually that attention came to bear in the kitchen as a kind of tenderness for both food and people. It just happened. It was a very slow process. I mostly failed but even so a sense of care grew bit by bit.

  Just recently I was sitting at a dinner table with a man I was ordained with decades ago when, in the midst of our reminiscing about Zen Center, he suddenly blurted out, “I’ll never forgive you for serving hijiki and carrots in the third bowl during sesshin!” This had been in 1970. We were now in the teens of another century. He didn’t mention the brown rice and miso soup that were served with the hijiki and carrots. I was also pretty sure that he hadn’t really been harboring this nonforgiving resentment for the past forty years, but I was taken aback to learn how offensive a dish that seemed good to me (and many of us at Zen Center) was to a young man from Kansas in 1970. But another friend asked, when he heard this story, wasn’t it already strange that this Kansas boy was assuming a cross-legged posture for hours at a time?

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  Not everyone was comfortable with the Japanese food inspired by our Japanese teachers, or by macrobiotics, or by some of the “new” ingredients, like hijiki and tofu, though the response wasn’t all necessarily negative. “That was the most tender chicken I ever tasted!” exclaimed a student from New York City upon tasting tofu for the first time.

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  Food disappeared fairly reliably from the Zen Center kitchen so the cooks were always putting signs on containers pleading, “Please do not take!” The best ruse was to say it was for Suzuki-roshi—no one would take that. Sometimes there was a forest of signs protecting leftover desserts and whatnot for Suzuki-roshi. I had to wonder if he really was intending to consume all this food. Yet I hesitated to throw it out when it was time to clean the reach-in.

  There were always little trails of stolen chocolate chips and raisins in the storeroom, cheese whacked off the main block. Even tofu got it. Arriving in the kitchen around 4:30 one morning to start the breakfast cereal before zazen I encountered a block of tofu sitting on the cutting table in the semidarkness; a knife was plunged into it and liquid was seeping out and dripping over the edge of the table. It was just water, of course, but it felt like blood, as if the tofu had been murdered. Why anyone would want to eat raw tofu in the middle of the night or at four in the morning was hard enough to understand, but it was also hard not to take it personally.

  Another morning I found a note on the reach-in door. Someone was apologizing for having taken some plums. Actually we didn’t have stewed plums, we had stewed prunes—this being back in the day when there was a difference—so I thought it was an interesting liberty the author of the note had taken. Although his poem seemed like a good one, I was annoyed at the theft. When I asked him about it after breakfast he laughed at me—didn’t I know that poem of William Carlos Williams’s? I didn’t, then, but I do now. It goes like this:

  This Is Just to Say

  I have eaten

  the plums

  that were in

  the icebox

  and which

  you were probably

  saving

  for breakfast

  Forgive me

  they were delicious

  so sweet

  and so cold

  I was not unfamiliar with food theft, both long before my Zen Center years, when I stole Twinkies because my parents wouldn’t buy them, and much later, near the end of my Zen Center years. I was then living at Green Gulch and was sitting a sesshin. It was the third day, often the hardest of the seven days. One’s body ached, one was tired and often discouraged. The time that remained before the sesshin ended seemed endless. We might at this point wonder why we were even there and not somewhere else more pleasant. So when the tea came in midafternoon, it mattered. It was going to be warm and soothing; it was going to wake us up, and there was going to be a treat, and on the third day one still cared about treats.

  The treat for this particular tea break was a walnut crescent butter cookie dusted with powdered sugar. Tea was poured at a fast
clip, the clappers were hit, and we nibbled and sipped furiously before the cups were collected and tea was over. When I bit into the cookie I thought that it was the most perfect cookie in the world—the texture, the flavor of the ground walnuts, the scent of the vanilla peeking through—the whole thing. It was perfect. I wanted to clear my throat and announce to everyone in the zendo how utterly stellar this cookie was. But I didn’t. I behaved and enjoyed this little moment of perfection quietly.

  Once the cups were collected we left the zendo for a break. I walked through the kitchen on my way to my cabin and there, alone and unguarded, was a platter of the walnut crescent cookies dusted with powdered sugar. I didn’t even look to see if anyone was watching—I just took one, tucked it in my deep Japanese sleeve, and left. Once in my cabin, I retrieved the treasure and took a bite. I expected the same magic to flood over me, but there was nothing. Yes, it was a good cookie, even an excellent one, but it had lost its power to move me, let alone the world. Where did its power go? I took another bite, but it didn’t return. It was gone. It had somehow evaporated.

  Is the magic in being given something, not taking it? I’m sure there are times when that isn’t true, but I concluded that if you were not starving but merely aching and tired then the goodness and magic might just have to come from a gift. Later I thought it was the context—the fatigue I felt in the zendo, the discouragement, the quick serving of the tea and treat, the spaciousness surrounding the event, perhaps these were the conditions that allowed me to experience the miracle of that cookie. All that was missing in my little cabin.

  9. Shopping for Food

  For all the familiarity I was trying to introduce to the Zen Center kitchen, our shopping habits were quite different from those of our parents, as were the ingredients we used. Soy, our major oil at first, was supposed to be good for us, but it was not particularly tasty and it easily became rancid, that is if it wasn’t already. Olive oil became our new oil when I made contact with Mr. Sciabica, an olive oil producer from Modesto, and he put 300 Page Street on his delivery route, showing up every few weeks with a five-gallon tin of his golden Mission olive oil. A cheerful and vibrant man, he wore without fail a bright cap and matching vest knitted for him by his wife, Gemma. When Greens opened, in 1979, I was still buying oil from Mr. Sciabica. Twenty-five years later, when researching my book on farmers’ markets, Local Flavors, I ran into Mr. Sciabica at the Modesto farmers’ market, where he was selling his family’s now several kinds of olive oils and vinegars, many of them prizewinners. He was still wearing a matching knit hat and vest made by his wife. As we talked about those years when I began to buy from him, he told me that his family started selling their oil in 1936, and that they were the first in California to produce olive oil commercially. It’s taken more than eighty years to get to the point we’re at now, a place where many people are making olive oil, though often, but not always, on a much smaller scale than the Sciabica family does. Even my brother makes olive oil. His brand, Yolo Press, has won many competitions, too. But as his is an entirely one-man hands-on operation there isn’t as much of his brand as of the companies we see at Trader Joe’s or the Sciabicas.