Blessing the Hands that Feed Us

by Vicki Robin

  My other stop was usually Van’s Produce in Seattle’s International District. It’s where the Chinese restaurateurs shop, and the other customers are mostly Asian. They have huge bags of dried shiitake mushrooms, strange long, hairy roots, and never-before-seen fruits, plus the standard vegetables you’d find in Chinese meals. Most items are 25 to 50 percent less than I’d pay on Whidbey—from farmers or grocers. The veggies often seem like seconds—imaginative shapes, hangdog limp, maybe bruised. They say it all comes from Mexico, which before the 10-mile diet didn’t strike me as a problem. I usually left with twenty-five dollars’ worth of produce, which would last me a week or more.

  Here’s another reason why Van’s worked for me: volume. Like many compensatory eaters—we who eat to satisfy hungers that have nothing to do with the stomach—I sometimes crave a Niagara Falls flow of food down my gullet. Like most dieters, though, I need low-calorie volume or my personal volume will increase exponentially. And my frugality dictates that I do all this within my money as well as calorie budget. You can see why I always stopped at Van’s when on The Dark Side.

  I occasionally shopped the farmers’ markets in the summer, but, to be honest, I went more for the socializing and music than the produce, jams, or soaps. I was what I call a three-beeter. That’s a person who buys three beets at a farmers’ market to get their local-food Girl Scout badge, but gets 99 percent of the rest of their calories from who-knows-where.

  The problem for me with the farmers’ market, as I said, was my hyperfrugality. Many of my eventual breakthroughs from the 10-mile diet came from crossing that long frugal-to-local divide. I now understand the forces that make the local cheese, meat, and veggies more expensive and am more committed to the well-being of my farmers than to scrimping. In fact, I learned many ways to think about the cost of beets that makes the farmers’ market beets a flat-out bargain.

  By the way, nothing on my shelves was going to be “in bounds” come September 1. All my frugal shopping, all my careful metering of chocolate and nuts and celery and popcorn, was about to stop. It was all . . . what do you call the opposite of local food? Food of unknown origin? Industrial food? Commercial food? Global food? Supermarket food? Approved by the FDA, so surely it’s fit for human consumption food? Plastic food? Grown with slave labor, laden with chemicals, subsidized by man-eating lobbyist sharks food? Really, this kind of food is so normal it no longer needs a name. What a difference one hundred years makes. Back then, local was the norm, and what we take for granted today was fancy food, foreign food, rich people’s food, and delicacies.

  Even before I started my 10-mile diet, I was being forced to become even more conscious of food than if I were on a diet. Everything that seemed normal and insignificant rose up for reexamination.

  I had not thought so comprehensively about diet since I’d been diagnosed with cancer.

  Exhibit C: Diet and Cancer

  When my tests came back positive for blood in my stool, the only dietary culprit I suspected was pumpkin seeds.

  I was holed up in a cabin at the time, pecking away at a big book on “rethinking freedom in a world with limits.” I wanted to challenge our current low-life sense of freedom as entitlement to do whatever we want, whenever we want without regard for the consequences. I wanted Americans to fall in love with limits, with everything that holds us together, that creates civility, that makes for fair play and justice and a healthy future. I sat day in and day out in the dripping Northwest woods writing, rewriting, and eating popcorn and pumpkin seeds to at least put my gnashing of teeth to good use. The words and metaphors lumbered across the pages like great dusty pachyderms. I just couldn’t seem to present the idea of limits so that people would say “Mercy me, how could I have thought I wanted to have everything my way! I’d much rather share and share alike with the other six billion on this wee, precious planet.”

  The only distressing symptom I had was leg cramps in the early morning. I took potassium, magnesium, and calcium, but they persisted, stumping me enough to get me to the doctor, who gave me the stool test card, and told me to fill it out and come back. Result: blood in every sample. Suspecting that the volume of seeds and popcorn had somehow rubbed my colon raw, I ate white rice for a week and did the test again. Same results. Next came the colonoscopy. Then came the news no one ever wants to hear: you have cancer.

  As it was colon cancer, you’d think I’d have made some link to diet, but I didn’t. I told whomever came at me with their latest theory of food and cancer, “I eat kale on my hands and knees in the garden. I eat broccoli. If I had to limit myself to one food group, it would be ‘green.’”

  Still, I became a magnet for cancer-curing diet recommendations. Brown rice. Seaweed. Wheat grass juice. Juicing in general (one friend had a juicer delivered to my home as soon as she heard the diagnosis). Carrots, celery, greens, beets, cucumbers, ginger—send it all down the neck of the juicer and drink your way to health. Blueberries, bananas, cranberries. Orange food. Yellow food. Red food. Stop drinking coffee—but take it as an enema.

  As I quietly assessed these diets for myself, I recognized in them the same mentality as in weight-loss diets: a pummeling of the flesh to fix a perceived problem.

  Of course I preferred life to death and being fit over being fat. But the “fixing” mind leaves no room for the quieter, more difficult work of going within to find what’s true. When you lose trust in yourself to know what is good for you and in your body as a self-healing, self-regulating miracle, you become the patsy for every quack cure and ersatz diet. So I thanked everyone for their concern and told them to keep their good ideas to themselves.

  Traditional peoples, I also reasoned, didn’t have to wonder about food choices. Some based their diets on corn, some on wheat, some on rice, some on whale blubber, and you know what? If any of those diets was wrong, none of us would be here today. Chew on that. One great wonder of the world is that our bodies can transform just about anything that isn’t poison into food for us—day in and day out.

  No, cancer didn’t change anything about my diet.

  Setting the Table for My 10-Mile Month

  As the cancer crisis receded, the triple crisis heaved up on the horizon, groaning like a distressed frigate about to come apart at the seams. I couldn’t ignore it.

  Transition Whidbey had mobilized a lot of energy. Hundreds attended our monthly events called Potlucks with a Purpose—a magic combination of eating, socializing, networking, and an open mike where people offered their surplus, asked for what they needed, celebrated their wins, and announced their events. A lecture would fill the minds once the body and heart were satisfied—most often with information that would jolt us into awareness and action. At the end, new or ongoing action groups had time to meet.

  Even so, these potlucks did not fix anything. My inner “Uh-oh, we’re in deep doodoo” meter was still in the red; we weren’t moving far enough or fast enough to make difference enough in time. To add insult to injury, I wasn’t doing it either. No longer my old paragon of sustainability virtue, I had allowed a complex and costly life to grow up around me. In my old community house, shared with half a dozen people, I had only a few hundred square feet to call my own. Now I owned a two-thousand-square-foot split-level people box—and lived here alone! Back then, my ecological footprint was four acres, on par with a Mexican.

  Now it was seventeen acres, which means if everyone lived as I do, it would take four planets to provide for us. I was far from integrity, given what I knew of overshoot. The pressure to either jettison my values or do something about them increased. Thanks to Tricia’s challenge I was now accountable to someone else—and a very generous person at that. I would finally make a very-good-faith effort to eat very locally. The 10-mile diet did what cancer could not: get me to engage enthusiastically with limiting my last bastion of willful disregard for the consequences of my actions: food.

  I was a bit nervous, very curiou
s, and strangely relieved, like when you finally square your shoulders, march into your garage, and start cleaning out everything that’s been long forgotten but not gone. The task has been waiting for you. The effort to ignore it has worn you down. It got so that when people admired your home, you thought, Ah, but you haven’t seen the mess in my garage.

  Now, to stock my fridge and freezer for September.

  Satisfying My Meat Tooth

  In late July, driving over to set up for Britt and Eric’s wedding, I passed some green fields I’d always admired in an “Isn’t my island just the prettiest place?” kind of way. A small hand-painted sandwich board by the driveway read, MEAT SALE TODAY 10–2. I was no longer a casual Sunday driver. I was driven—and I swerved in. It turned out to be the Long Family Farm.

  The 200-acre farm has been in the family for five generations. It all started in 1912 with a Dutchman, Claus Brower, who came to those very fields in Maxwelton Valley where I was about to “score” some protein for September. Claus eventually married the widowed Nancy Long, who arrived from Montana with three sons in tow. The boys purchased 300 cull chickens from Percy Wilkenson’s hatchery in Clinton and started their own farm next door. Over the years, the flock grew to 5,000 laying chickens and some cattle. After Claus’s death, Joe Long grew the operation further to 130,000 chickens and more than 100 Angus cows. His son Leland and his grandsons, Robert and Loren, dropped the chickens, kept the cows. They now raise healthy 1,200-pound, two-year-old, grass-fed, and corn-grass-finished animals. A mobile slaughter truck humanely slaughters them, and then the carcasses go to be aged, cut, and wrapped by the nearest USDA-approved butcher (forty miles and a ferry ride away). Some is sold there and some is sold locally to restaurants, grocers, and individuals—like me that Saturday.

  This five-generation history is part of the hope of our island. It reaches back to a time when we could actually feed ourselves with local foods—and did. Even New York City, if it went back five generations, would find similar hope—maybe not within ten miles, but certainly fifty. My own life began on that other island—Long Island—before Levittown transformed Nassau County’s potato farms and pine forests into one of the first large-scale, low-cost subdivisions. I remember how they heralded Levittown as a miracle for the middle class, part of the optimism and rising affluence after World War II. No one at the time thought they’d miss those potato farms—and we haven’t. Yet. But if feeding ourselves without access to cheap, easily produced oil means we all need to eat foods grown closer to home, it’s good to know the lawns and parks and estates and hobby farms of Nassau County are still, in essence, soil that a new crop of young farmers—with support and education—could farm to help feed the city folk. The fact that farming close to where we live was once normal means it can be once again.

  Go back further in time on Long Island and you’d meet tribes like the Canarsee, Rockaway, Merrick, and Manhasset. You’d see them gathering clams along the shore, fishing from their canoes and hunting in the forests for wild game. Much of their food was harvested without being cultivated, a rarity now, a reality for most of human history.

  You’d see the same on our West Coast “long island”—Whidbey. The Duwamish, Snohomish, and Snoqualmie tribes flourished along this whole coastal region1—mostly summering here on Whidbey, following the seasonal foods—until the white settlers came 150 years ago, logging the island like a barber would give a buzz cut. With skirmishes and raids, the settlers gained ground until they drove the natives out. A road connecting south to north was built, then the bridge connecting Oak Harbor to the mainland, while ferries connected the south to Everett. A naval air station was built on some of the best farmland—because it was flat. Zoning and land-use policy, combined with the relatively cheap land on the island compared to the mainland, eventually dotted the countryside with five-acre hobby farms amid the remaining forests, small cities, and developments and a few large farms like Greenbank Farm and those on Ebey’s Prairie, now preserved as a historical—and farming—reserve.

  For most of human history, cities have been intimately involved in food production. Architect Carolyn Steele became fascinated with the relationship between food and human settlements. In her well-researched, highly original book Hungry City, she explains, through recounting the history of food eaten in London, that food production was once integral in cities and could be again. Before fossil fuels and internal combustion engines, the best way to get meat to the city was on the hoof. Abattoirs within the city—terrible places according to all reports—did the butchering, and the butcher himself was but a few blocks away. Vegetables grew in and close to the city. With fossil fuels, all the messiness, stench, and toil of farming, ranching, and processing food could be banished to the hinterlands. Out of sight, out of mind—and isn’t that how it is for us today? If we give credence to peak oil, economy itself says we need to call all those cows and hogs and vegetables back home. Later we’ll talk about urban agriculture—the many ways people are growing their own at home in the cities. For now, it’s enough to see from the Long Family Farm how close we still are to that way of life. We are food rich compared to many, but the fact is that every road, every parking lot, every skyscraper sits atop soil. It isn’t gone. It’s just out of sight. And starting to come back to mind.

  But when I saw the little meat sign and swerved into the Longs’ driveway, I wasn’t thinking about all that. I was thinking about red meat, which always brings out a bit of the hunter in me. As I selected my meat from a cooler by a card table under a shade tree, I got to know a few of the Longs. After I paid, Stephani, Leland’s wife, took me around to the side of the house to give me one of the slugger-bat-sized zucchinis stacked on the back porch like firewood—but considerably less useful. As we chatted about the farm I mentioned how much I liked beef liver and tongue, but, with the amount of chemicals fed to factory-farmed animals, I just wouldn’t eat them anymore. She disappeared, returning with frozen packages of liver and tongue, which, at that moment, didn’t interest their customers. I went home rich in tongue, liver, roasts, hamburger, and enough zucchini for a week. Infused with a disproportionate sense of huntress-prowess, I filled a freezer drawer in my eco-fridge with meat, knowing that in September I would not die from a lack of protein. Plus I’d made back-porch friends with the people who tilled the fields I’d admired as a tourist. I was already eating my way into the heart of the place.

  Milk: Telling the Udder Truth

  Several years earlier, wanting to expand my repertoire of rural skills, I volunteered as an alternative milker for a friend’s goat co-op. At the time I assumed only that it was a lovely way to learn a skill and share some milk.

  When I began the hunt for local milk, I asked that friend about her supply.

  “Sorry, no can do. You’d have to come and milk the goats yourself because selling milk is illegal. And I’m full up with milkers.”

  I was confounded. How could anything about milk be illegal? Milk. What about that “Got milk?” campaign where stars wear milk mustaches? Isn’t milk like Mother and apple pie?

  “It’s the raw part,” she said. “Unpasteurized milk is illegal to sell.”

  My first response was to laugh. How ridiculous! But it’s true. It is illegal to sell raw milk to the public due to concerns about E. coli, Listeria, and salmonella. Pasteurization handles that for the masses. By heating the milk to below boiling for a few minutes (or up to half an hour, depending on the temperature) and then cooling it rapidly, spoilage slows and thus we can buy “fresh” milk in the grocery store, which lasts for a week in the fridge. Proponents of raw milk say that grass-fed, hygienically handled animals all but eliminate the dangers, but improperly handled raw milk can be a deadly product.

  The issues, as you might guess, had something to do with truth (pasteurization does make the nation’s milk supply far more safe) and a big something to do with corporate lobbies. More on this later.

  Raw milk proponents,
though, aren’t just Luddites, preferring life in the preindustrial lane. They also claim that raw milk reduces incidence of allergies, asthma, digestive problems, and learning disabilities. It helps with arthritis pain as well as boosting immunity. Some even say it lowers cholesterol and clears cataracts. No wonder my friend sought and found a loophole in the pasteurization laws and started the co-op. She is one of those “The difficult we do today, the impossible takes a little longer” people. No surprise, then, that she found a creative way to obey the law and still have goat milk for the community. If you milk your own goat and drink the milk, it’s legal. If you prepare goat cheese from that milk and bring it to a potluck, it’s legal. So she gathered a group of sister milkmaids to form a goat co-op. They co-own the herd, take turns milking, buy the feed together, keep records, sterilize their equipment, and provide their co-op members with fresh, delicious milk. When the co-op needed a few backup milkers for vacationing members I got trained, and when called I could take home the absolutely luscious creamy milk. (An aside for those who think “ick” about goat milk: If there are no billy goats around to arouse those sex hormones, goat milk does not taste “goat-y.”)