Blessing the Hands that Feed Us

by Vicki Robin

  From Rebecca I learned about FASS, which stands for fat, acid, salty, and sweet. Once you’ve put a dish together, she says, you should check the FASS balance through taste, fixing it by adding one or more of the elements. Her FASS tools looked surprisingly like my exotics—extra virgin olive oil for fat, lemons or limes for acid, and sea salt, of course, for salt. For the sweet she uses maple syrup where I use local honey.

  Looking at that list I wondered if the challenge of my 10-mile diet restrictions had activated some basic body knowledge. Maybe my “exotics” are a human need, not just a Vicki obsession. It’s always comforting to think that wildness has not been completely bred out of me, that if I were dropped in a remote area without a cell phone I might still last the night.

  The New Natural Food

  This daily reviving of my cooking chops gave the term “natural food” another new twist. Natural didn’t just have to do with how the food is grown. It had to do with how I was growing spiritually through eating this 10-mile food. In week one I began to sense food as community. Through eating within my micro food shed, I was becoming part of that food shed, particularly part of a community of real gardeners and farmers.

  As I chopped Tricia’s snow peas, onions, garlic, and kale for my evening meal, I realized that I was not only running any old vegetables, nor even just Tricia’s vegetables, through the rat-a-tat of my knife blade; I was holding all the care and attention—perhaps even love—Tricia poured into this fresh food.

  In the old days—just last month—of anywhere eating, I ate what was appetizing in the moment, balancing a largely unconscious set of criteria of crunch, custom, calories, culture, and several overlapping food pyramids and pies. I got my food from the bowels of my fridge or the packed shelves in my cupboards or the cheery aisles of my supermarket or the tempting menu in a restaurant. It was all mutt food, remix food, polyglot food. None of the ingredients had “grown up” together. They met only at the moment I threw them together into a dish.

  The 10-mile diet started out as simply the latest and greatest mental criteria: food miles. It was becoming something different, though. A growing sense of not just being in but belonging to my community brought me warm, fuzzy comfort. I felt tucked in somewhere safe and cozy, like sinking into a featherbed. Not sappy. More like a daily allotment of hugs. Family therapist Virginia Satir is quoted as saying, “We need 4 hugs a day for survival. We need 8 hugs a day for maintenance. We need 12 hugs a day for growth.”3 Local food was starting to satisfy my hug quotient.

  I wondered if I was simply insensitive to the love invested in growing anywhere food. Whose were the hands that normally fed me—or the throngs if you consider even something so simple as a spaghetti sauce? Tractor drivers. Pickers. Packers. Truckers. Stockers. No, I decided, that’s different. Those were hands of underpaid employees or field hands—if any hands at all. Few hands touched the cows raised in a feedlot and shuttled through the killing machine, sent as carcasses to facilities that ran the meat from many animals through the grinders to become the pearls of meat in the sauce. Hands of migrants paid less than minimum wage probably picked those onions by the ton on long days. Hands of the Immokalee workers in Florida, the biggest tomato-growing state, picked the tomatoes. They were paid a wage that barely kept them breathing—which might be considered a net good if the tomatoes were heavily sprayed with pesticides. Who grew the garlic? The cilantro?

  As I stood there chopping I wondered how far back in time or far away in culture I’d have to go to be intimate with food and the hands that fed me. I chopped faster, muttering the standard fuddy-duddy froth about “What is the world coming to?” and “What’s wrong with young people?” Then “What’s wrong not with them but with what they’ve been born into?” Then “What’s wrong with me, not valuing chopping, cooking, cleaning?”

  My Week Two Mystical Experience

  There were three different kinds of intimacy growing.

  One was the deeper friendship with Tricia and the new friendships with Molly and John, Loren and Patty, Belinda and Koren, and other farmers. Beginning to count on one another.

  A second was this coziness growing—this sense of belonging somewhere real and literally earthy.

  The third intimacy was with the food itself. I was savoring my meals more, not just because they tasted better but because I was cooking from scratch and each food required attention to flavor, texture, cooking time. I began to sense the perfect fit between my body and my food. Because I must eat, my body is as attuned to food sources as any teenager is to a datable other. That I don’t know myself this way is a testament to the efficacy of the industrial food system. You can lose your ability to taste, smell, hunt, and cook—and still consume three thousand calories a day.

  Food. How basic. To think my whole life I thought I knew what it was. The Penguin Companion to Food showed me how limited my vocabulary for “the edible” was. It has more than 2,650 entries. Edible plants numbered in the hundreds of thousands before extinctions started picking them off. Heirloom and indigenous varieties of fruits and vegetables numbered in the many thousands. A typical produce department might have thirty to fifty different fruits and vegetables for sale.

  Beyond what Tricia delivered, I began wondering what else grows here that I could eat. Looking no farther than my 10-mile woods I discovered wild foods like burdock, dandelion leaves, nettles, rose hips, and several kinds of mushrooms—and there are probably many more. We can still gather clams and seaweed from the shore and pull salmon, crabs, and other fish from the waters. Every one of these foods passed the sunlight and soil and rain of our region through its cells, cells that would provide my body with vibrant nutrition.

  I felt like I was becoming a tad indigenous through this 10-mile experiment. I had never before thought of the plant world as a system with me as an element of it—the planter, the gleaner, the eater, and eventually—let’s be honest—the eaten. The whole system had been abstract at best, like when you read a paragraph in your science book about the hydrological cycle but then leave it to experts to make sure it works in your favor—that potable water flows from the tap. I don’t even need the wisdom of my ancestors to drink.

  I’d lived once before in a rural farming community where I learned to garden, hunt, forage, and preserve food. I knew a bit of the camaraderie of people who depend on the land and their hands for the food they ate.

  New to me, though, was how perfectly designed I am as an animal to eat what is all around me. Talk about intimacy!

  Tastes came alive. I began to appreciate my very taste buds, which are exquisitely designed to receive what the natural world has to offer—the bitter, sweet, salty, sour, and umami (savory) of it—enhanced by my nose responding to those aromas from seeds and leaves, crushed and chopped and rubbed and ground into powders. Combine taste and smell with the pleasures of crunchy and creamy and fragrant and you have a symphony of tongue delights. Food and our tongues are made for each other! There is little in life as intimate as food entering our bodies and becoming us, yet how often do we marvel at this marriage of tongue and nose and sight, at the ritual of preparing the food to enter us, at that moment when sensation leaves conscious awareness until the stomach grumbles again. How often do we see the ordinary anew?

  If you have nary a mystical bone in your body, skip the next few paragraphs, but I invite the rest of you to join me standing in my yard one day in September, looking at my garden, wiggling my toes into the unmowed grass, breathing the soft air and contemplating what The Penguin Companion to Food and my 10-mile experience were teaching me. I felt something ripple through my body. I felt food. I was in it. I felt the animals and fungi and beneficial plants and ripening fruits, and felt not just my nose and eyes responding but my skin, which nigh on quivered in response. Eyes seemed to open in the backs of my legs and my spine and hands, in my ankles and heels and shoulder blades. I was “seeing” food in total surround. Our eyes face front. Does t
hat lead us to pursue our desires, to lurch forward into markets and bars and new cities and books, seeking nourishment for body, mind, heart, and soul? These eyes all around me gave me a relaxed sense that I need not pursue food. Nature was not designed perversely, as if it were a game of winners and losers. It was designed so that everything—including me—fit together. We are not against one another. We are for one another. This doesn’t just mean rooting (so to speak) for one another winning. It means that “just rightness” of pollen and stamen, of ruminant and grasslands. Yes, due to droughts and diseases, some people—like in the dust bowl in the United States—do not survive, but “tooth and claw” is now considered a lesser evolutionary strategy than cooperate and win.

  The feeling was somewhere between creepy and ecstatic. If I live in food, I can relax. Not only do I belong to my farming community and gardeners and farmers’ market, not to speak of the markets that contained food I could eat again in a few short weeks; I belong here. Here. I belong to the fertility of the soil and the exquisitely adapted plants and wildlife. Perhaps the animals in this rich coastal environment felt this way and didn’t even have to label it. The bear lumbered to the water’s edge in the spring as walls of fish migrated upriver to spawn. They simply feasted there the way we do at an all-you-can-eat buffet. The Haida and Tlingit knew where the berries and the camas and the mushrooms and the clam beaches were and walked around in this food, eating.

  The creepy part is that when you realize how deeply you depend on another—be it a berry bush or a mate—you know your vulnerability to loss. You realize that control is ultimately an illusion. We can delay death but we have not conquered it. We can build levees but we cannot control the vehemence of storms. We can, as farmers know, plant and tend and water and watch, but we only work with nature, not command it. Especially now, as we watch the skies and wonder if the storms sweeping in again and again are harbingers of climate change or just—as we hope—El Niño or La Niña.

  I’ve discovered over many years of trying to find love without making myself vulnerable that it doesn’t work. To be touched deeply, we have to open. To open is to not know or control how things turn out. Food vulnerability is the last thing any of us wants. In fact, agriculture is our sustained human attempt to control our food supplies. Without predictability of “food income,” the energy of a family or culture is necessarily focused on survival. Once those needs are met, we liberate our hands and minds for invention, for the arts, for dreams, for so much of what we identify as human. So my sense of belonging to this living web of eaters and food was awe-ful in both senses of the word. It inspired awe and it pulled back the Wizard of Oz curtain on my safe little life where food was guaranteed. Even when I lived in the woods on a hundred dollars a month, I never wanted for food. That hundred dollars bought a lot of rice and beans, powdered milk, and peanut butter.

  That fusion with the life around me and in me could not have lasted more than half an hour. I can’t consciously attend to anything much longer than that. I have been able to re-create it ever since, though, by imagining that I have eyes in my shoulder blades and the small of my back and feeling myself bathed in air and light and that buzz of vitality as every scrap of life exchanges energy with what surrounds it. We breathe out and leaves breathe in. Sunflowers turn toward the sun. Our digestive tract undulates, moving food from tongue through every stage of transforming the nourishment into us and the rest into poop—which in nature would soon be soil for more to grow. I took time now to relish that experience of life moving through life and becoming life once again.

  Pigging out on Tricia’s food became impossible. Not only would it dishonor the life energy she invested in growing it, it would dishonor the life energy of the food itself.

  Mind you, I never want to lose control over my food supply. I never want to go a day without food unless I’ve chosen to fast, knowing there is food waiting for me at the end of that long hungry tunnel.

  Yet I never want to lose this newly awakened intimacy with food, this transforming relationship with food. Flavors and fragrances are now triggers for awe and gratitude as well as for grabbing and gobbling.

  I can’t tell you what I did after this moment of awe faded. I probably went upstairs to eat.

  Which brings us back to the practicalities of the 10-mile diet. From talents (how to cook) and taste (how to enhance flavors) to tools (how to slice and dice, shred and shake, blend and beat, what turned out to be a mountain of food).

  By the end of the second week I was surely getting the hang of my 10-mile eating. I’d do my weekly pickups on my bike—milk at Belinda’s, then cheese at Nina’s, then home.

  This week I decided to ride over to Tricia and Kent’s just to see my food ripening in the ground and on the trees. Unlike in the past when I took as an article of faith that one doesn’t just “drop in unannounced,” I now felt free to visit them. We were in cahoots in a daily adventure of feeder and fed. I commented in the blog about this:

  For this month, at least, it seems that Tricia and I are engaged in an equal exchange. She wakes up in the middle of the night fearing I might starve. I do too. No, seriously, this challenge is growing her as a market gardener, and the cost is a box of veggies and a dozen eggs a week. I am examining my relationship with food—and really the food system—and all it costs is 500 words a day. Blogging for food. Would that work in a pinch if I stood by the road with a cardboard sign?

  Tricia was in her processing shed, a 10-by-30-foot well-built (by Kent) structure between her yard and garden where she processes and packages her bounty for market. It’s well ordered and clean, with a sink, a hose with a spray head, an industrial salad spinner the size of a washing machine tub, glassine bags, net bags, twist ties, bags, and bins.

  “The tomatoes are coming in, let’s look,” she says. I’m excited to see what’s growing—and maybe glean a few castoffs unfit for the market though perfectly nutritious and delicious.

  As I said earlier, she now splits the half-acre garden—ninety raised beds in all—with Pam, and each has a 16-by-55-foot hoop house (a greenhouse made of plastic pipe and clear plastic sheeting) funded by a benefactor who regularly rewards women with courage and projects with vision on our island. Indeed, the tomatoes were in. I have never tended a tomato plant that looked half as healthy as Tricia’s, which stand tall between wire supports.

  I felt like some jealous and dejected housewife in a 1950s ad for laundry detergent. With furrowed brow she peers over her backyard fence at her neighbor’s spanking-clean, dazzling-white T-shirts and linens flapping on the clothesline. “How does she do it?” the voice-over says. “My T-shirts have [dark music starts playing] ring-around-the-collar.”

  That’s what I thought about these plants with no brown curly leaves, no slug-gutted fruit hanging limply along the bottom, no blossom-end rot.

  Then I noticed, as we walked down the row, that Tricia was tidying up like a nursemaid tending tykes for impeccable wealthy parents. She clipped off brown-edged leaves, picked up the fruit that had dropped, picked out stray weeds. In part, it’s because she is simply like that with everything she cares for—including me. Careful, attentive, respectful of each leaf and fruit and person. In part too it’s because this is her livelihood. I am in her workshop, on the floor of her plant . . . so to speak. She also invited me to pick as many cherry tomatoes as I wanted, which I did. We exited and she tossed the “litter” she’d collected onto the huge compost mountain along the fence.

  There are many theories about how to make “the perfect compost.” There’s hot compost and cold compost, there’s worm bins and leaf bins, and all manner of expensive containers and secret formulas. Here Tricia and Pam are the soul of casual. They have so much plant matter to toss that it all goes into a heap. I spied a “perfectly good” bok choy plant. Take off the wilt and it would be fine. Tricia saw it and saved me the embarrassment of begging by handing it to me (it was good for two meals). I put it into m
y backpack along with the tomatoes.

  As we walked to my bike she picked up a few slightly wormy apples from the ground, looked at me quizzically, and of course I added them to my haul, hugged her, and off I went to Belinda’s for the milk.

  The Raw Milk Controversy

  It was my third trip up the rutted dirt driveway, onto the worn wooden porch, past the Mr.-Ugly-contest-winner pooch to get my half gallon of creamy milk from the little fridge.

  Belinda happened to come out and we chatted. She’s well informed, feisty, and nobody’s fool. She and Koren have made a life to their liking for themselves, raising animals for milk, eggs, and slaughter.

  Belinda told me about the controversies surrounding raw milk—naturally from the point of view of someone who thinks it’s perfectly safe and wholesome. I am still finding it hard to believe that she and I are engaged in an illegal act. The libertarian in me balked at the government sticking its nose in this neighborly trade. I was willing to sign a release form stating that I would not hold Belinda and Koren liable, even if my gut were in an uproar due to salmonella in the milk. I trusted them and believe that people-in-community take care with one another—making wholesome potluck dishes and pies for bake sales as well as trading fresh milk. This is one of the underpinnings of buying local—you know your producers and can decide whom to trust. You don’t need the government to protect you from them. True, children can’t make that kind of considered decision, so one would need more caution—but not a blanket rejection.

  From 1998 through 2009, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention received notice of ninety-three outbreaks due to consumption of raw milk, resulting in nearly two thousand illnesses, only 10 percent of which sent anyone to the hospital.4 Of course, we’d like to have zero illnesses but two thousand in eleven years isn’t an epidemic. Let’s put that in perspective. How many people have eaten tainted spinach in that time? Deadly cantaloupe? How many people have sickened from E. coli in hamburger meat? We don’t ban meat because it could be eaten undercooked, though we might put a warning label on it about careful handling.