Blessing the Hands that Feed Us

by Vicki Robin

  Practice 5: Your Food Ethic

  Once you have an honest list of what you buy and why, start to think about what conscious criteria you want to put in place. Unfortunately some people who are ethically rigid give “ethics” a bad name. I think of them as steering me toward what I love rather than away from what I fear. I think of them as a beautiful collage I can contemplate to orient me rather than a plaque in the office to say what I have achieved.

  Here’s a checklist of considerations different people have about the foods they buy and eat. If you believe them all, you might find it hard to shop! If you just buy what you want without any consideration of the effect of the food on your body or other people, you might wonder what the fuss is about. If the list gets you thinking, do some research and make considered choices.

  • Price

  • How much packaging?

  — None!

  — Nothing you can’t recycle

  — BYOB: do you bring your own bag?

  — Don’t consider packaging

  • Brand

  — Known ethical companies

  — Store brands for price

  • How is it produced?

  — Organic

  — All-natural

  — Wild-caught

  — No antibiotics

  — Shade-grown

  — Free range

  — No GMOs (genetically modified organisms)

  • Where is it produced?

  — Local

  — Shipped from where?

  — Factory farms?

  — Factory-processed—versus homemade

  — Fair trade?

  • What stores—and why

  — Farmers’ market

  — Food co-op

  — Locally owned grocery store

  — Chain grocery store

  — Costco/Sam’s/Walmart—volume discount stores

  — Online

  — Trader Joe’s

  — Specialty stores

  — No stores: gleaning, foraging, freegan (food that is or would be thrown away)

  • Where in the store?

  — Produce

  — Bulk bins

  — Only perimeter

  — Which aisles: Frozen? Canned? Boxed? Cereals? Paper/cleaning products?

  • Health

  — Raw

  — Cold-pressed

  — No salt

  — No sugar

  — No gluten

  — No nuts

  — No chemicals

  — No meat

  — No dairy

  • Religious

  — No pork

  — Kosher

  — No animals

  • Ingredients

  — Five or fewer (the Michael Pollan suggestion)

  — No high fructose corn syrup

  — Salt

  — Sugar

  — Colors, flavors, preservatives

  Practice Six: Treasure Hunt

  Your local farmers and markets are your treasure troves. Use all the tools of the research trade—library, newspapers, Internet, networks, bulletin boards, local food organizations—to find as many of these as you can:

  Local farmers’ markets

  CSAs that serve your area

  Good farm stands

  Your neighbors’ eggs

  Food co-ops

  Food hubs (resale and distribution points for regional growers)

  U-pick berries and vegetables

  Pasture-raised beef, chickens, goats, and sheep

  Wild-caught fish

  Practice Seven: Host a Potluck with a Purpose

  Potlucks with a Purpose started right on the front lawn of Island Coffee House in my hometown of Langley, Washington. Our year-old Transition Whidbey group wanted to host enlivening and community-building events that would educate, inspire, inform, and motivate our community. The formula we developed has stood the test of time and traveled to many other Transition groups. Here’s the recipe:

  A heaping potluck table: best if people incorporate some local foods into their dishes and write the ingredients on a card.

  Eating together and socializing.

  Celebrations: a moment at the mike for as many as want to for sharing some accomplishment since the last potluck.

  Offers and asks: a moment at the mike for as many as possible to offer something they have that they’re willing to share or to ask for something they need. Firewood, livestock, furniture, surplus of all sorts, have traded hands through these “offers and asks.” One requisite of community is vulnerability, living the truth that we really do need one another. Being able to offer without strings and ask without shame allows resources to flow.

  Announcements: a moment at the mike for as many as feasible to announce resilience events. This “town crier” time lets us see how much is afoot.

  A connections table: a place where people with offers, asks, and announcements can put their information for others to find it. If a community organization wants to put out information, a member should be sent to make an announcement.

  A free box: where people can bring surplus for others to take if they need it—clothes, books, food, toys, whatever.

  A meaty, provocative talk or program: a speaker or panel that keeps challenging and informing the community, hopefully to the point of action being taken.

  Action groups: existing and newly forming groups meet at the end to plan actions.

  Generally, the eating and socializing is a quarter of the evening, the networking is a quarter of the evening, and the program with all the Q&A and action groups is half.

  Potlucks with a Purpose promote community without complacency and action without coercion. They are fun events, family-friendly, inclusive. They knit us together by sharing from our surplus and displaying our generous sides. They keep the heartbeat going, feed oxygen to projects, give us courage. They are also like the “welcome wagon” for your community’s relocalization efforts. Newcomers can find where to engage or find people to engage with them.

  Try These Recipes

  Since you’ve just read about my hunt for 10-mile food, I thought you might like to try a local wild food recipe. Because of the search for local dairy products, Vicky Brown’s cheese seems a good piece of knowledge. You’ll meet Vicky soon enough; her story of shifting from being a corporate executive to being a milkmaid has many lessons.

  Jess Dowdell’s Nettle Soup

  2 cauliflower heads

  3 carrots

  3 celery ribs

  2 onions

  6 Ozette potatoes

  1/2 to 1 gallon stock

  1/2 brown grocery bag full of sweet spring nettle tops (the top 6 inches of the plant)

  1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger

  Salt and pepper

  Crushed red pepper flakes or Mike’s hot sauce (optional)

  Roughly chop the cauliflower, carrots, celery, onions, and potatoes.

  In a large stock pot, sauté the vegetables in local butter or canola oil for about 5 to 8 minutes. Add the nettles and continue sautéing until they are wilted. Add any kind of stock you wish (I like vegetable or turkey the best) just to cover all the ingredients. Cook on medium heat until the potatoes are soft. Transfer to a food processor or blender, add the ginger, puree, and add salt and pepper to taste. To “heat” it up, add some crushed red pepper or Mike’s local hot sauce.

  Vicky Brown’s Recipe for the Most Simple Dessert of Cheese Makers

  The easiest cheese to make goes by many names. It seems that nearly every culture has a version with a different name. It is basic and easy to make with ingredients you have in your home; no ordering cultures from France or enzymes from New England.

  This cheese
can be made with milk or even whey left from other cheese-making projects. If you’re using whey, your yield will be quite small; you might want to add some more milk for a better yield.

  For cheese making, never use aluminum. Only use nonreactive pots and utensils (stainless steel, enamel-coated, silicon, and wood are all good options). Heat your milk to about 195°F, stirring constantly to keep it from scalding. Once the heat goes above 192°F add vinegar. I use white vinegar but you could use any type of vinegar. The flavor does not stay with the cheese; you’re just using the acidity to coagulate the milk. I’ve tried it with raspberry vinegar and was very disappointed that the very expensive vinegar did nothing but leave a little pink wash in the curd.

  You need to use about 1/4 cup of 5 percent acidity vinegar for every gallon of milk or whey. Depending on the starting acidity of your milk or whey you may need more or less. Often people fail at this simple cheese because they stop adding vinegar at the measured amount; just another capful or two might be enough to coagulate your milk.

  As you add the vinegar your milk will immediately begin to separate into curds and whey. Once you see the separation make sure your pot is off the heat and let it set for 5 to 10 minutes. The calcium in the curd will cause it to knit together.

  You may be able to scoop your curd out of the pot, or you could strain your cheese to separate the curds from the whey and mold it using a colander or basket. Be careful, it is still very hot!

  Let the cheese sit about 20 minutes to let more whey drain out, then put it on a plate, sprinkle some cinnamon and nutmeg over it, and drizzle some of your favorite local honey over it. Eat it while it’s still warm!

  If you prefer savory to sweet you can use it to stuff pasta or mix with herbs or just on a cracker. Once cool enough this cheese could be pressed by hand and refrigerated to make a firm grating cheese. This cheese is also made with any type of milk. Even though I’m partial to my goats and make it often with cow milk, I find that it’s heavenly when made with sheep milk!

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Week One: Grounded!

  Friends and Neighbors

  D-Day (10-Mile Diet Day) Minus 1

  On August 31, I arrived home dog-tired after a long day in Seattle hauling trash to the dump from my old community house—now on the market. I wanted to eat, which is my basic response to hunger, yes, but also to stress, exhaustion, frustration, and distraction. As well as celebration and excitement. I’d picked up a TJ wrap on the way north, probably the chicken, avocado, blue cheese, lettuce, and mayo one. I had my last bites of industrial food dribbling down my chin as I surveyed the first box of veggies on my counter that Tricia had left, along with a dozen eggs. As of the next morning my life depended on her, and she wanted me to be ready. Beside the box she left this note:

  We did it! After all this talk since July 4 the 10-Mile Diet will start. Yahoo! Here’s the first box of veggies and stuff. We can tweak the amount (more or less) as the weeks progress. This should give you a good start. Some things like three turnips and overgrown green beans I threw in hoping you could put them to use. Comments and suggestions will be helpful. My new mantra is freedom and abundance and may we all have it.

  The bounty stunned me, like waking up to a mountain of gifts on Christmas morning. Yes, I was a “human subject” for her experiment. But she was volunteering for my experiment as well.

  Sure, as Tricia’s husband, Kent, later pointed out, from a purely pragmatic perspective, this experiment worked great for frugal me—I was getting free food. But something beyond just “cheap” had started: the bond of love and vulnerability between feeder and eater began with that box of food. Later I came to realize how this experiment was as much about the love as about the food, the knitting together of producer and consumer into the fabric of community. Indeed, one of the oddities, once you think of it, of our modern industrial system is this lack of relationship. I was headed, unknowingly, into relational eating.

  Morgan Spurlock’s month of McDonald’s “super-size me” resulted in a pasty complexion and a bulge over the belt. What would happen during this month of eating Tricia’s food, I wondered, as I unpacked that box of turnips, potatoes, onions, green beans, half a head of cabbage, bunches of kale and chard, apples, a big bag of lettuce, pints of cherry tomatoes and strawberries, three Asian pears, three small cukes, and a dozen eggs. Would I become the picture of health? Would I end up hollow-cheeked and as thin as a rail? Would I be able to feel my ribs again? Would I love or hate Tricia for that? I was about to find out.

  Nuts!

  The first thing that came out of my mouth the first morning of our experiment was “Nuts!” As I shuffled into my kitchen on the first day of this challenge I came face-to-face with the fact that a very cornerstone of my daily well-being—milk for my tea—was missing.

  I might even have said something more R-rated, but saying “nuts” here reminds us right off the bat of something else off the menu. Nuts. Normally nuts are a major Vicki food group. They are oily, crunchy, tasty bite-sized packages of perfect pleasure. They go on salads, in stir-fries, in yogurt—and into my mouth morning, noon, and night. Or they did until this morning. Grrr.

  Believe me, I tried to find nuts within my 10-mile limits. Walnuts are possible to grow on Whidbey, but I couldn’t find any trees. Hazelnuts were a better bet. There was a grove less than a mile from my home that I’d passed through many times on my way to the beach. At least I thought they were hazelnuts, but I’d never really looked closely because before this summer, the natural world was merely backdrop and my food was found not on trees but on shelves.

  This grove, however, seemed to have lost the knack of bearing fruit. I remembered that a neighbor had a nut tree—but when I sidled up to him to inquire, I discovered it was for the birds. Literally. He gave up the fight with local wildlife that always picked the tree clean before a single nut could mature. He was quite relaxed about that choice. I wasn’t—but it wasn’t my tree so I went back to scheming. I asked around and heard about other hazelnut groves, but these were now all squirrel all-you-can-eat restaurants too. To say “nuts” was to remind myself of the great divide that now lay between a favorite food and me.

  So, okay, no nuts. But also no milk. Wednesday was my raw milk pickup day—and this was Wednesday—but my milk was still in Elsie’s udders. I couldn’t get it until seven P.M.

  Finding the Treasure in My Own Front Yard

  So there I stood, a ratty robe over my cotton nightgown, barely awake yet already bereft. I had hit the twin barriers of food preference and food habit within a half hour of my feet hitting the floor and tucking into fluffy slippers.

  The purpose of a chosen constraint like a 10-mile diet is to put awareness above habit and preference. Fasts—be they from overeating, gossip, or chocolate—are essentially reset buttons. They give us a chance to see our inner slob—that creature of lazy routine who prefers never to be upset, challenged, thwarted, or disturbed. The one who sees himself in a magic mirror that takes pounds and years off his body. Who has dozens of excuses about why anything happens (or doesn’t), usually starting with “They . . . ,” and who can say “I’m awake” quite convincingly in his sleep. Through fasting we poke our sleepy heads up out of the well-worn grooves of our daily lives. We free ourselves one tiny degree further from pride and delusion. But probably not until we’ve grumbled for a while about it, just as I was doing about the lack of milk for my tea.

  I felt like the king in the A. A. Milne poem who wanted “butter for his Royal slice of bread” and was not placated when offered marmalade by the queen instead.

  But then I remembered—because creativity blooms when habits and preferences are thwarted—that one day I saw my neighbor Tanya carrying a gallon glass jar of milk into her house. “Bet that was her own bovine contraband!” I called her and, yes, indeed, that had been nectar from Elsie’s neighbor Buttercup.

  I explained quickly my desperate si
tuation. “Can I borrow a pint of Buttercup’s milk? I’ll pay you back tonight with Elsie’s.”

  “Sure,” she said, and I threw on a coat long enough to hide my bathrobe and nightgown (but still in slippers) and trotted across the cul-de-sac with a clean jar in hand.

  I returned home with a satisfying sense of accomplishment. Aaaah! Finally. I had my morning elixir—10,000-mile tea brought to a rolling boil in water from the town well 500 feet away by 100-mile electricity from the Skagit River, sweetened with 10-mile milk and honey. I felt just like the king when he got his butter.

  I went out on my deck—journal in one hand, tea in the other—to sit as I did every day, rain, fog, or shine. Today the crystal-white wedge of Mt. Baker shimmered against the blue sky and the waters of Saratoga Passage between Whidbey and Camano Island rested unruffled. Closer in were the village of Langley and Tanya’s house across the way. I’d just borrowed the proverbial cup of sugar from her, and by that act I’d crossed the divide between living in a neighborhood and being a neighbor.

  A Neighbor in Need . . .

  What just happened? I wondered. Yes, I got my milk, clever me, but this warmth in my belly isn’t just from the tea. My pen hovered over the page, waiting for this feeling of well-being to translate into thoughts and sentences.

  I’m so damned independent. I’m a creature of my country, that’s for sure. Live free or die. Well, I guess I almost did. Die, that is.

  I crawled onto Whidbey six years ago cut loose by my own choice from all the moorings of my life—a long-standing group household, a home I co-owned, several organizations I was leading. A sane person with stage 3 colon cancer would have stayed where help was always at hand, the rent was free, the food was cooked by others, the meals were convivial, the work was worthwhile and well established, and the networks were strong. But no, I had to go it alone. I thought I did it to face myself, but maybe I was really withdrawing from the pulls and tugs of community. Why else the loneliness?