Blessing the Hands that Feed Us

by Vicki Robin

  I wasn’t a foodie. I was lapsed from every diet—political, weight loss, or spiritual—I’d ever tried. My story may have a few more twists, turns, and wrinkles than yours, but we all have a food history and food psychology and food values. We each have a relationship with food that isn’t necessarily right or wrong, good or bad, but simply part of the narrative of our lives. This history steers our behavior no matter what high-minded course we set ourselves on.

  The challenge made so casually at a potluck was going to put me on the road to learning more about myself than just how to cook a turnip.

  Now It’s Your Turn

  Do you want to delve into your own relationship with food? Here are some questions and exercises to guide you. This is not a quick women’s magazine self-test. The questions and suggestions will worm their way into you. Your answers may change over time. You don’t need to stop reading until you finish all these exercises! Read through the questions and exercises, digest them, and read on. Chapter 2 is where you will see why, once I’d said yes, I was dead serious about going local.

  Who are you as an eater? To look at yourself as an eater (not a dieter!), here are some questions:

  • What does food mean to you—fuel, love, comfort, chore, pleasure?

  • What are your “must have” foods, and why must you have them?

  • Why might you have said “Hell no” or “Hell yes” if Tricia had proposed to you a radical experiment in local eating?

  • Where do your food preferences come from—your family, your culture, your travels, your values, your feelings about your body, your emotional states?

  • What are your guilty pleasures? Your must-have food necessities?

  • Are these preferences anywhere near your values? Your sense of fairness and justice? Your faith and politics? Your need to slow down and smell the snow peas?

  Your Life as an Eater

  To help you dig into your life as an eater, here are some prompts to uncork memories:

  • What did I eat as a child?

  • Who cooked for me? Did they teach me to cook?

  • What were my family meals like? Did we actually eat together? Did we watch TV or converse or, today, text?

  • What are my favorite foods and why do I like them?

  • What did I eat at family holidays? My wedding? In the school cafeteria?

  • Did my parents or grandparents or even great-grandparents tell me anything about food when they were young? My mother grew up in New York City; the iceman was a daily feature of life, and earlier still the fishmongers came through.

  • What new foods did I encounter as I grew up—and where?

  • When did I first get to choose what I ate?

  • Was food used for rewards and punishments? Was it associated with pleasure? Pain? Guilt? Rebellion?

  • Did I change what I ate when I changed my social group, took a new job, lived somewhere new?

  • What were my family’s food rules—their dos and don’ts? How has that affected me?

  • And how did I feel about it all—the food, the meals, the cooking?

  Your Life as a Dieter

  If you have altered your eating to lose weight, gain health, get closer to heaven, or live your ethics, you can go down that memory lane.

  TELL YOUR FOOD STORIES

  Weave these memories into the story of your life.

  MAKE A FOOD TIME LINE

  Draw a line, with one end your birth and the other today. Divide it into years or decades or life’s seasons (child, teen, young adult, etc.). Write memories along the time line, like “Mom’s grilled cheese sandwiches” or “Using the wrong fork at a formal dinner” or “White Tower burgers” or “Buying fish right from a boat in San Francisco.” Include the food trends and fads that came and went in your life, and extend your time line back before you were born. What were the foods of your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents? These are the people who formed you as an eater.

  WRITE ABOUT A MEMORY

  Use as a writing prompt one of the memories that evoke strong feelings—nostalgia, fear, happiness, friendship, domination, guilt. See what story pops out of “grilled cheese” or “the right fork” or “when my mother . . .” Make the story vivid and detailed. Where were you? Who was there and how did you feel about each person. Was it an ordinary day or a special occasion? Include what people were wearing, the sound of their voices, how the air in the room felt, the smells and tastes. What happened as the incident unfolded? Is it a story of comfort, of conflict, of a change in your life, of your crazy family, or what? Read the story aloud to a friend—having a witness is inherently moving.

  HAVE A FOOD CONVERSATION

  Through writing my blog and now this book I’ve discovered that everyone has a food story—and they love to tell it. Introduce the topic at a family meal or reunion, or over coffee with a friend. Host a potluck with everyone bringing a food from their youth and talking about it. Start a blog or a Facebook page and invite people to tell their stories.

  MAKE A COLLAGE

  Even people who think they can’t draw or compose music can use the art of others for collage—a powerful way to explore the soul of your relationship with food. Just get a stack of magazines and leaf through them, tearing out pictures that appeal to you without questioning why you are attracted to each one. Get out a piece of paper or cardboard and a glue stick. Pick from your collection—letting your unconscious speak—the pictures or fragments of pictures you want, trim them as you like (you may just pick a detail, a hand with a ring, a cherry), place them on the paper, and when you have an arrangement that speaks to you, glue them down. It’s pretty amazing to do this quietly with a group of people and then tell the story of your collage.

  WHAT ARE YOUR FOOD MESSAGES?

  Food messages are the instructions we absorb from family, culture, religion, society, and friends about how, what, why, when, and with whom to eat. They are the commandments, the dos and don’ts, the rights and wrongs, the goods and bads, of food. You may not even be aware of them, which is why identifying them can be so liberating. Some food messages are quite useful, and some are more toxic than the mystery ingredients in processed food.

  • There are rules about when to eat—three squares a day; not after nine P.M.; only when you are truly hungry.

  • There are rules about what to eat—no red meat; nothing with eyes; no animal products; no wheat; nothing cooked.

  • There are rules about where to eat—not in your car; not standing up at the kitchen counter.

  • There are rules about whom to eat with—daily family meals; never eat alone; eat in silence, attending to every bite.

  • There are cultural rules about how to eat—don’t smack your lips; yes, smack your lips; don’t belch; yes, belch; not with your hands; only with your hands.

  • There are the diet gurus, from Oz to Ornish to Atkins, who dish up their rules with absolute certainty.

  What food messages have you internalized? What foods do you label “good” and “bad” and why? Make a short list.

  This is just the beginning of your engagement as a relational eater—which is what I became thanks to the adventure you’ll read about in the coming chapters.

  Try These Recipes

  Jess Dowdell, whom you will meet in chapter 7, is now proprietress of the Roaming Radish, a deli, catering, and cooking class establishment. Passionate about local food and cooking, she can rattle off where she gets every ingredient, and who grew the greens or raised the lamb or roasted the coffee. When I wanted to include recipes in this book, I turned to her to know which chefs and farmers to approach and where to place each recipe in the narrative. Since I began this 10-mile diet journey at a potluck, here are two recipes from Jess for picnic-type foods.

  Local Bean Hummus

  2 cups dried Rockwell beans

&nbs
p; 1/2 cup chopped parsley

  1 jalapeño pepper, minced

  1 tablespoon honey

  1/4 cup minced garlic

  1/4 cup lemon juice

  Salt and pepper to taste

  Soak the beans for 12 hours, then cook them in a large pot over medium heat until they are soft. Drain and rinse them in cold water. When the beans are cool, transfer to a blender or food processor and blend them with the parsley, jalapeño, honey, garlic, and lemon juice. Add salt and pepper to taste. Add a little oil if needed to get a nice pureed-hummus consistency.

  Bread and Butter Pickles

  10 local pickling cucumbers (Patty and Loren from Quail’s Run grow the best!)

  1 cup salt

  Slice the cucumbers to the desired size, then mix with the salt and 3 pounds of ice, cover with water, press the cucumber slices down with a weighted lid, and let sit for 3 hours. Rinse the cucumbers and set them aside.

  In a large stock pot bring the following ingredients to a boil:

  3 cups apple cider vinegar

  3 cups sugar

  1/2 cup mustard seeds

  1/4 cup coriander

  1/4 cup dill seed

  2 tablespoons turmeric

  When the sugar is dissolved, add the cucumber slices and bring the water back to a boil. As soon as it boils you are done. Pack the pickles in jars to can or let them cool and store in your fridge.

  Sweet Pickle Relish

  Take 2 cups of your bread and butter pickles and 1 onion and chop them together. Great on burgers!

  CHAPTER TWO

  Putting My Mouth Where My Mouth Is

  Holy (local) cow! I thought when I got home. Can I actually survive for a month just on what Tricia grows? Go meatless and fatless and sugarless for thirty days? What have I signed up for?

  I’d agreed in part because the challenge was my kind of quirky, but also because I’d already signed up for the bigger game: lowering consumption here in the United States because of the damage we’re doing to the earth—and our souls. Besides, I was no stranger to do-it-yourself and grow-your-own. Even though I’d gone soft since settling down, exercising my mind while my butt spread in my swivel/recline/snooze office chair, earlier in my life I’d lived one of the standard story lines of my generation: go on the road (thank you, Ken Kesey); explore spirituality (thank you, Ram Dass and Stephen Gaskin); go back to the land (thank you, Mother Earth News); and design a new future (thank you, Whole Earth Catalog).

  The back-to-the-land season was in the early 1970s, right on schedule for alternative boomers. A group of friends and I lived for three years on fourteen acres in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, which is up there with Barrow, Alaska, in subzero temperatures. I went because I wanted to learn what an Ivy League education failed to teach me—how to walk on this earth like I belonged here, foraging, hunting, raising, and butchering animals and other fundamental arts of living. One of the group had bought the land sight unseen. We arrived with high ideals and a thorough lack of knowledge, only to discover that our homestead was a logged-out cranberry bog with just one acre above the water table.

  We built a Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps–style corduroy (log and sand) road from the blacktop to our island of high ground, and stuck a sign at the entrance: EGRESS. P. T. Barnum, father of the modern traveling circus, is famous for saying “There’s a sucker born every minute.” He suckered paying customers into moving through the sideshows as fast as possible by pointing them to one exotic feature after another. “This way to the tigress!” Oooooh. “This way to the Negress!” Aaaaah. Thus hooked, people would eagerly stream through the tent flap labeled THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS—which means “exit”—and find themselves out in the dust again. Our land was our egress from the conventional world and into our laboratory for a new society.

  Everything was novel and exciting. I had a learning field day—quite literally because we needed to carve a field out of the forest to grow a garden. We cleared a half acre of scrawny alders and lodgepole pines with a bow saw and a machete. It was barely above the water table, so we dug drainage channels with a posthole digger. Even so, what we had looked nothing like “soil.” It looked like a devastated clear-cut. We needed something akin to a plow.

  Rhinelander is known for the Hodag, a mythical doglike snorting creature seen only by drunk hunters in the woods. To find our “something like a plow,” we went first to the dump (an open, shopable pit down the road), then to the Hodag Shopper, the local trading rag. There we found a “perfectly good, just needs a little TLC” rototiller that Joe Dominguez, one of the community members, tinkered back to life. He rolled it out to the garden like a proud mama displaying her first baby in a pram. Instead of walking behind it, he stood on the back like a Roman charioteer, sinking the tiller’s tines deep into the lumps and clumps as he rode triumphantly round and round the garden—spewing soil out the rear.

  That our garden flourished was a miracle. Perhaps it was beginners’ luck. Maybe it was the fact that we walked the garden daily—agricultural extension agent monographs in our dirty hands—like doctors on rounds, analyzing with our big brains what was happening to our peas and carrots.

  I also traipsed through the woods with a copy of Stalking the Wild Asparagus by Euell Gibbons. I brought home fern fiddleheads and cattails to sample for dinner. Nothing tasted like chicken. It tasted like compost itself, and I was darn glad this was a three-year voluntary experiment in simple living.

  We found a renegade piglet in the woods, named her Piggy Sue, fed her table scraps, and scratched her ears all summer. In early winter our neighbor Farmer Gray—a furniture salesperson turned farmer—helped us shoot and butcher Piggy Sue.

  Farmer Gray became our mentor and benefactor in many ways. He’d hoped his children would stay on the eighty acres he’d bought with his savings to live his own “back to the land” dream of a self-sufficient farm. Instead they’d all skedaddled to Wausau and Madison as soon as they could, and our group of passionate young oddballs became “heirs” to his knowledge about hunting, butchering, canning, freezing, growing, harvesting, and more. After Sue he helped us butcher Dr. Buck, the deer that had been eating our garden; Jane Doe, the doe a hunter shot illegally and left for the coyotes; as well as a raccoon and rabbits. We cut Sue, Jane, and Dr. Buck into chops and roasts and stored the wrapped pieces in Farmer Gray’s freezer over the winter—getting a package every Sunday for dinner. The rest of the week the meat would become soups and stews and toppings for beans and rice or part of meat sauces for pasta.

  Farmer Gray’s wife, Pat, helped us learn to cook what we’d killed. The secrets to making all types of game edible were (1) to cut out the scent glands that snaked between the hide and flesh, and (2) mountains of chopped tomatoes and garlic.

  Farther down the road were Marty and Beulah, an old Lithuanian couple who took pity on us but also liked us. On our first visit they brought a dusty bottle up from the cellar, uncorked it, poured it, and told us to try it. It tasted like fine sherry. Dandelions, they proclaimed, pleased as punch to stump us. Back down they went for another bottle, this time a deep red, uncorked it, poured it, and watched us—now quite drunk—make appreciative smacking sounds with our lips. Beets, they said, waggling their heads with pride. And so it was that I learned to make wine, which I did by the garbage-pail-ful in the woods. Beulah also taught me how to can food, which seemed like sex—wondrous and dangerous. Something could explode. Go awry. Start new life growing in your body, namely, botulism.

  We would have harvested wild rice, which grew in the lakes all around, if it hadn’t been the exclusive privilege of the Menominee Indians. We did buy it, though, along with fifty-pound sacks of potatoes, which, if I remember right, cost about five dollars each. We also always had a fifty-pound bag of field beans on hand, which may well have been grown in Wisconsin.

  We ate plenty of that era’s anywhere food too. Sacks of brown rice.
Cans of tuna at three for a dollar (and still six ounces). Ketchup, though, we eventually learned to make from our own abundant tomatoes. Spaghetti. Blocks of yellow cheese. Flour for baking bread and making pancakes.

  That Rhinelander experiment wasn’t about 10-mile eating. It wasn’t about “local” or “organic” as philosophies of life. It just happened to include lots of local food because we were bent on growing our own. We composted by feeding Piggy Sue. We enriched our soil via a load of pig manure delivered via belching tractor and jerry-rigged trailer from a half-blind pig farmer down the way, a recluse in Coke bottle glasses who spoke, if at all, in three-word sentences. The result may have been local, but the intent was survival.

  Would my current experiment be much different?

  Yes! In three ways:

  First, this was a partnership between an eater and a feeder. I wasn’t a spring chicken anymore, and had no desire to prove my prowess as a producer. Growing all my own food was not the great adventure I wanted in my sixties. As it turned out, this eater-feeder partnership led to one of my most profound transformations. Had I grown my own I would have missed it.

  Second, I wasn’t “leaving civilization.” I would be eating Tricia’s food in the context of what I call my plain vanilla people box—a split-level classic—in a subdivision in a village that’s a twenty-minute ferry ride from Everett, Washington, home to three nuclear-powered aircraft carriers at the Naval Station Everett. As it turned out, this was crucial to the value of the experiment, as I was showing how you can “drop in” to eating local food rather than “dropping out” to the land.

  Third, and this was a doozy, the world had changed in ways that make local food a crucial new normal rather than a quaint back-to-the-land season of a young person’s life.

  Back to the Land Versus Earth Day

  As I was dropping out, going back to the land and within to find myself, others of my generation were dropping in to politics. While I was breaking apart assumptions and surmounting the significant challenges of living in a community and on the land, others were busting up different concrete—taking on the complacency of our upbringing and the dawning awareness that our new consumerist way of life had dark shadows: oil spills, poor air quality, pollution, and “the silent spring” of declining biodiversity thanks to pesticides, among other toxicities and injustices.