Blessing the Hands that Feed Us

by Vicki Robin

  The day I woke up famished and had to make a creamed soup from scratch showed me how little I’d valued the time I’d invested in food preparation. I’d considered it a chore, and discovered it could be self-expression. I’d thought it was a time-suck, but could see it now as self-care. What is more important, really, than conscious cooking and eating? Except for sex, eating is the only time we consciously open ourselves to receive the “not us”—that we allow something from out there into our bodies.

  Sure, I could have planned better so that I would have had soup already prepared for my postnap snack, but planning is not my strong suit. I’m inventive to make up for being forgetful and distractible. The restrictions of this diet allowed my inner culinary artist to flourish.

  There was a more honest, humble attitude toward the value of my time, with food taking a rightful amount of my attention. The 10-mile diet reduced the importance I give to my persona in the world—writing, speaking, leading. I am not so busy that I can’t attend, like everyone else, to the daily acts of harvesting and preparing food. The products of my mind are not more valuable than the products of the earth. I didn’t become an obsessive foodie, shucking my other activities. I included relational eating as part of my life.

  I matured as an eater from being on the teat of the industrial system to being aware of what it takes to feed me—and all of us. The sticker shock over the five-dollars-a-pound chicken was a blessing—it startled me into respect. My habit of hyperfrugality, ingrained over years, may never change, but now I can see through the plastic on the store-chicken carcass into the life of that bird or one like it. I can see the large industrial chicken houses and compare them to the spacious chicken coop up the hill. Once aware, you can’t be fully asleep again. The hidden costs of industrial food are now clear to me, influencing my shopping, cooking, and eating as well as my writing, speaking, and projects.

  It now seemed strange how much I had outsourced nourishment to “the experts”—the industrial growers, the packagers, the supermarkets, the cookbooks, the FDA, the USDA, the restaurants. Our industrial system has rendered us as ignorant about where food comes from as we are about how our computers work. Consequently, when we think about nourishment we think about “nutritional content” as listed by “the experts” on the plastic wrappers of foodlike substances. My 10-mile diet had given me an experiential touchstone. I was far less confused and dependent on others to tell me what was right or wrong about the foods I ate.

  Looking at how all these challenges—time, lack of the right ingredients, money, planning, inconvenience, hunger—had actually awakened my conscience, my competencies, and my heart to community, I saw how I was finally living that truth of “liberating limits.”

  Shifting from Lone Ranger freedom, I saw that community is also freeing. I used to quip, “Everyone wants community. Unfortunately, that involves other people.” Our habits of hyperindividualism have isolated us, making us more insecure rather than more secure, more fragile rather than stronger—but what a hard habit to break! The 10-mile diet, a hard nut to crack, actually cracked me open.

  Food Rules

  What rules—chosen constraints—might keep me on this path? How might I be faithful to what I now know, not like a convert to a cause but like a quiet daily attentiveness? By now, nearly at the end of the month, it was natural to think out loud about this by blogging. I wrote:

  Here are my 10-mile derived truths—which have rules associated with them. Rules that I will surely break but that will be there for me from this day forward.

  1. All food comes from somewhere. I want to find out where so I can in a way thank those that feed me, reward good practices and protect the livelihood of small to mid-sized farmers (sounds funny, I mean the land not the people). This could be a daunting but fascinating task. Eating local solves that issue so . . .

  Rule: I will purchase as much as possible direct from the producer.

  2. Food is love. Producing it. Cooking it. Eating it so that your body may be nourished. Death as an animal or vegetable and rebirth as us, living one more day. Our own death, if we don’t rest and rot forever in stainless steel boxes, feeds life. This doesn’t imply we must slather eating with unctuous sanctity, but that we can make a good faith effort to honor the life sacrificed that we may eat. In the community where I lived for 35 years we said grace before every meal. “Rub dub thanks for the grub. Bless this food to our use and our lives to your service. Thank you.” The pausing and holding hands bound us together at the end of busy dispersed days, slowed us down to the speed of savoring. Food is social. I will simply eat more with others, cook more for others, eat out with others. I will glory in my ability to feed people, to take from my stores and make a feast (if only fried rice) for friends.

  Rule: I will say grace, eat slowly and savor my food, and with others as often as possible in my solo, willful and busy life. I will cook for others as much as possible. From scratch.

  3. I am my food system, not apart from it picking and choosing but part of it, giving and receiving. This is a shift from food being out there in a supermarket where we select this over that. Once you see yourself as woven into a food system, not just a shopper in a market where the system is hidden from view, more than what goes into your mouth transforms you.

  Rule: I will allow my life as an eater to make me aware of the web of life that supports me, and all of us. I can use a phrase as simple as “food system” to remember.

  4. Food is political, there’s no way around it. From raw milk being illegal to other distorting government policies that make packaged food cheaper than real food. From school lunches of pizza and purple milk to the ever growing number of hungry in our midst.

  Rule: I will inform myself about the food system, the regulations and laws and customs that give us both obesity and starvation. I will vote about it. I will write about it. I will donate.

  5. Food is complex. The way we live is shaped around the food we eat even when eating is done in cars, in cities, far from the source. Agriculture, as we all know from our history and geography lessons, permitted humans to settle in one place which permitted social stratification in cities, money, specialization, slavery—you name it, taming grains and animals gave it to you. Humans now occupy almost all niches where energy (food) is available for the picking or planting. Civilization itself has marched across the face of the earth—as Bonaparte said of armies—on its stomach.

  Breakthroughs in food technologies—the Green Revolution, selective breeding, genetic modification, industrial agriculture, even the Farm Bill—solve the problems of starvation while feeding the problems of diminishing productivity and a population that now is so large it seems we can’t all be fed.

  Food is complex because of this history and its unintended consequences. The food problem is the overshoot problem which is the annual increase of births over deaths problem, and if you want a hot potato try talking about that! I am dedicated to the work of “learning to live well together within the means of the earth.” No amount of “Eat your peas, think of the starving children in China/Korea/Bangladesh/Pakistan/Africa” can solve our malnourishment and maldistribution problems. They are systemic. Hunger, I fear, is going to creep into lives that thought they were secure. And when we are hungry we are cranky. So add war to the list.

  Rule: I can nudge the system in the right direction with my choices and I intend to. I will support local sustainable agriculture everywhere.

  6. Food is highly emotionally charged. People have pride and shame, fear and longing around weight, size, diet du jour, longevity, inability to feed the family, diet-related illness. And I am people. I am a lifelong “diet-er”—and even if I were thin as a rail I’d still somehow have an eating disorder since I look at food as a threat or reward, as comfort or sport, as right and wrong—and myself as good or bad depending on which system I’m beating myself up with now.

  Rule: When I find myself judging mysel
f, others or others’ judgments of me I will step back, get grounded and let go.

  7. Food is great. Tasty, tangy, creamy, yummy, oily, colorful, salty, biting, sweet, juicy, spicy, crunchy, crisp, meaty, fishy, slithery, chewy, nutty, hot, refreshing, subtle. Lord strike me dumb at least (or dumber) if I don’t fully savor every bite of that miracle called food.

  Rule: I will enjoy the sensual, delicious act of eating.

  8. Food is fun. It’s always there to select and cook and eat, to think about, to learn about, to write about and especially enjoy. It shouldn’t be stuck between “more important things,” like a gas station or pit stop for the body. 10-mile eating isn’t a new food system. A new set of imperatives. I have stumbled into a new relationship with food. I can offer others this way of engaging with food—which may result in more justice, health, appropriate weight, sustainability and fun. What do you think?

  Rule: Continue to write about, think about, research, advocate for—and eat—food. Bon Appetit.

  La-De-Da

  Then a most sobering thought overtook my wandering mind.

  This experiment was not going to be over on October 1. I’d committed to the 50/50 February experiment. Me and my big mouth.

  As this reality sank in I realized that I needed to start thinking ahead. Where was my food for the winter months going to come from? The only thing that survives in my garden over the winter is kale. I’ve seen it with an inch of snow on top. I’ve seen it glazed with ice like some plastic Christmas tree. It still survives. But no woman can live on kale alone.

  Welcome to the reality of fall for most of human history. Not fall as the time to start a seasonal marathon of pigging out on trick-or-treat loot or turkey and stuffing. (And by the way, pigs do not pig out. Few animals do, except when they hang out with us.)

  No, traditionally fall meant the seasonal race to preserve all that great food before it rotted. It was its own marathon of canning, drying, freezing, digging, picking, burying (potatoes and turnips can be buried in dry sand), and even planting for early spring. Fall meant hours of blanching and pickling and chopping and scalding. Fall meant falling into bed exhausted having put up green beans, green tomato chutney, tomatoes, zucchini puree for soups, squash puree for pies, applesauce, and chicken.

  Yes, I said chicken. My ultra-energy-efficient freezer accomplishes this energy savings partly because it is so small—too small for a whole month’s worth of meat, fruit, and vegetables. It was made in Europe, where many people still eat in moderation, still shop daily, wheeling their rickety wire carts to the butcher, fishmonger, and green grocer to see what is fresh and appealing. We in America, on the other hand, treat our fridges like storage lockers—stuffing them with items we may never use. As George Carlin once said, “Leftovers make you feel good twice. First, when you put it away, you feel thrifty and intelligent: ‘I’m saving food!’ Then a month later when blue hair is growing out of the ham and you throw it away, you feel really intelligent: ‘I’m saving my life!’” So, if I wanted meat and veggies in February, I needed to do at least a bit of canning.

  How could I do that on the cheap? Belinda had some tough old hens that no longer laid enough eggs to pay for their feed. (Life is harsh on the farm.) She cheerfully sold me three—plucked, gutted, and frozen—for half the price I’d pay for a tender young fryer, and threw in the canning directions for free. “Just stick the pieces whole in the jar. Don’t bother to bone them. They’ll can just fine.”

  In the past I’d butchered everything from a pig to a coon, not to mention chickens, rabbits, and our ornery rooster named Holy Fu*k. I was sure once I’d sharpened my knife I’d whip through those birds, putting the meat in jars and making the bones into broth.

  Not.

  Those old birds really knew how to hang together—thighs to legs, wings to backs, breasts to thighs. Picture me hunched over my cutting board, arms flapping like chicken wings, hacking and pounding while I chewed on my pride so I could swallow it. I ended up boiling the whole carcasses enough to soften the ligaments. I then boned them, boiled six canning jars, packed them with meat, filled them to a half inch of the top with broth, wiped the sealing edges carefully, popped the sterilized lids on carefully, screwed on the retaining rings, put them in my forty-year-old canner, added several inches of water, tightened the lug nuts, put it on a burner set to high, vented the steam, put the fifteen pounds of pressure weight on, waited for the jiggle, turned down the heat, and pressure-canned those suckers for ninety minutes. All for six pints of chicken.

  Yet there can be a great deal of satisfaction and even pleasure in doing the work associated with feeding our families. Looking at a well-stocked pantry or freezer, knowing where that food came from and where it will go, you can feel a real sense of accomplishment and—dare I say it—love. Food from your hands and heart will feed people you care about. The last time I knew I would not starve because I had stored food was that winter nearly forty years earlier in Rhinelander when we stored packages labeled Sue (Piggy Sue), Jane (Jane Doe the deer), Dr. Buck (the deer), and Stew (the steer) in our neighbor’s freezer. We just don’t have to think that way anymore, such a recent development in human history. I don’t presume we’ll need to go to my extremes anytime soon, but there is no better way to develop a truly visceral relationship with food than to store in September what you will eat in the winter.

  What Else Is on the 50/50 February Shopping List?

  Six pints of chicken, though, would not go very far.

  Fortunately, my 10-mile month made this 50/50 constraint feel like taking off a tight girdle and sprawling on the sofa. I could go farther to find food. I could also go beyond even those fifty miles to eat what I damn well pleased, in moderation.

  It was simple to check my supplies at home and my known suppliers to verify I’d be covered.

  Milk: I had my regular suppliers.

  Meat: still had plenty of the Long Family beef, plus a few Tobey chickens.

  Exotics: check. Double check, in fact, because I had to do only 50 percent.

  But for the rest . . . I needed to do some serious thinking.

  It was time to start enlarging my pool of food suppliers and range of foods. So when I was at the market that Saturday I talked to Georgie Smith, a fourth-generation farmer from Ebey’s Prairie, a mere twenty-five miles north. She shares a booth at the market with Mike Nichols, who started as a farmer and is now developing a local food delivery service, picking up from island growers—and beyond—and delivering to customers’ doorsteps.

  Mike may be too young to be a true curmudgeon, but he’s a curmudgeon-in-training—wiry and compact with rugged good looks, a wry sense of humor, and strong opinions. As a grower he was well aware of a missing link between small producers and their customers. Every one of them needed a truck and time to bring their product to market. He decided to fill this gap with Whidbey Green Goods, buying surplus from gardeners and farmers and delivering custom orders to his clients each week. By cultivating this very local ground, Mike is actually generating more island production as people realize they can put in one more row of beans and fund a year of movies. He says of his endeavor, “One rung up the food ladder from ‘home garden’ is a food web of small growers and producers that are of a size where they give a damn about what they grow and produce to put on your table! Whidbey Green Goods is your link to that Very Local food web. . . . WGG’s primary mission is to move this Very Local bounty into Very Local kitchens.”

  One of his biggest suppliers is the very Georgie Smith who shares his stand.

  Georgie is a big, bosomy, ruddy-cheeked no-nonsense woman who decided to put five-plus acres of her family’s rich bottomland in production when the economy sank and took her ten-year job as a marketing director at a small import company with it. Her farmer’s capacity to improvise solutions and her dad’s ability to cobble together anything needed from old parts has made her business flourish. She grows man
y kinds of vegetables but specializes in heirloom dried beans and a variety of potatoes and onions. I strapped a ten-pound bag of potatoes to my bike carrier, added some onions and a bag of beans to the saddlebag, paid gladly, sauntered over to the Island Apiaries booth for my February honey, and then pedaled home. Even with all that weight on board, I got up the hill and into the garage. When I hung my net bag of potatoes on the unused garage door tracks, I felt a bit like a hunter who’d arrived with a dressed deer strapped onto my Land Rover’s roof.

  Later in the fall I called Mike for a home delivery of several squash, which I proudly displayed above my kitchen cupboards as if they were Grandma’s fine crockery. I had several of my own mystery squash up there as well. They had grown to basketball size on sprawling squash plants from seed someone had given me. If I wondered how I’d fare in the winter, I just needed to look up there, calculating two meals a squash, and look at the bag of potatoes, calculating about twenty meals per bag, and open my onion drawer or check my garlic bowl or, of course, look at my jars of Belinda’s chicken. I could open my freezer to check on the two local chickens resting silently beside a beef roast and some liver. My stores were limited, yes, but they were THERE.

  Then I discovered Georgie’s neighbors on Ebey’s Prairie, grain growers Georgina Silby and Lauren Hubbard. Grains meant—if I would grind them—everything bread-y and pasta-y and cracker-y. Grains, I now realized, having lived largely on vegetables, meant stick-to-your-ribs, solid-in-the-belly food. I understood for the first time the elegance of grains, a calorie-dense, nutrient-rich, easily stored and transported food, and, in fact, the foundation of civilization. I was ready to stock up.