Blessing the Hands that Feed Us

by Vicki Robin

  Then a few years ago several women noticed an unseen group whose need for food wasn’t being met—homeless teens. More than fifty, sometimes closer to a hundred, teens have run away from or gotten kicked out of their parents’ homes and don’t get enough to eat. So those caring women started W.I.N., Whidbey Island Nourishes. At first they simply put in refrigerators around the south end of the island so that teens, without having to beg or explain themselves, could pick up some healthy, fresh food every day. Eventually—thanks to a grant—they switched to vending machines reprogrammed to dispense without charge, yet with features that protect against food tampering. In addition, W.I.N. also sends lunches and snacks home every Friday with kids who normally rely on the school program. The people who pack these lunches love—I mean really love—W.I.N.

  In a community of eaters, feeding one another is contagious. One person does it, others want to. Also, in a community of belonging, there is no sense of some being givers and others being getters. We are all part of here, giving and receiving.

  While we here on South Whidbey tend to overcongratulate ourselves for how very cool we are, I am sure many readers live in communities like ours, communities where they have a sense of belonging, and so does anyone else who chooses to participate.

  In the years ahead I’m certain that such communities will multiply. People will turn to one another as the cracks in the industrial system widen and more fall through. We will discover we are not falling into oblivion but rather into one another’s arms. These stories are simply bread crumbs as you follow your own path to belonging somewhere, blessing the hands that feed you.

  Is food love?

  Am I simply saying that food is love, that I ingested love along with the turnips and greens? Yes, but even my understanding of “food is love” shifted. If I, as an anywhere eater, heard someone talk about food as love, I might have thought about a stereotypical Italian mama spooning seconds into her cringing bambino’s bowl, sort of stuffing her family with food-love, like it or not. More likely, though, I would think of an eating disorder, food being used as a psychological substitute for a real-deal relationship. This substitution of food for love makes sense only in a society where food is abundant and distraction is epidemic, where love is difficult but ice cream is easy.

  Geneen Roth is a cultural guru for those recovering from that food/love confusion. She nails it when she says on Huffington Post,

  During the first few bites, and before we get dazed by overeating, everything we want is possible. Everything we’ve lost is here now. And so we settle for the concrete version of our lost selves in the form of food. And once food has become synonymous with goodness or love or fulfillment, you cannot help but choose it, no matter how high the stakes are.

  In her book Women Food and God she says,

  No matter what we weigh, those of us who are compulsive eaters have anorexia of the soul. We refuse to take in what sustains us. We live lives of deprivation. And when we can’t stand it any longer, we binge. The way we are able to accomplish all of this is by the simple act of bolting—of leaving ourselves—hundreds of times a day.

  “Anorexia of the soul.” Trying to fill the need for love through putting something in our body, or stripping some fat out! We starve ourselves when we are starved for love. Or we stuff ourselves when we are starved for love.

  I was clearly in some confusion about food and love when I started the 10-mile diet. I’d just achieved Herculean weight loss so that I might like my body again—and yet there I was ogling that table of potluck dishes as though it were food porn. My 10-mile month didn’t change this. It simply gave me somewhere else to stand in relationship with food.

  Now I am an eater in context, which is more satisfying by a long shot than being two pants sizes smaller (though I do like that too!).

  I love knowing that I am part of a food system that is all around me, and actually doesn’t stop at my skin. My belly is full of bacteria chowing down on what I eat, helping me digest.

  Nature doesn’t really stop at some arbitrary property line—be it my yard or my body. As I discovered, food isn’t just what’s in the store or my garden. Edibles are everywhere. If I were quiet enough, sensitive enough, I’d probably hear them. I am food to them as well. Critters large and small would clean me up once I laid my body down. Everything is food for something else. As my Amazon forest experience long ago showed me: everything in the community of life gives back to life—except the human. We are the species that hoards.

  Clearly 99 percent of us don’t live this way in North America. We treat most of the world as things to possess—cars, mates, jobs, degrees, houses replete with whirring machines to keep nature from intruding, rotting our food and our floors, melting our drywall. If humans suddenly departed, everything we do to hold nature at bay would be gone, allowing disintegration of the man-made world to process naturally. Everything is compost. We too, when we pass on.

  Relational eating can bring us back to our senses—and back to a sense of gratitude. Our bodies are gifts; the “stuff” of us is just on loan from the Universe, due with interest (as in making something of ourselves) after four score and twenty years or so.

  This is a bit much to contemplate with every bite, but relational eating reminds us that by eating we are participating in this web of relatedness by which we all live. It steps us back on a path to humility and to this alternately frightening and comforting thought that we are just a thread in the web of life, not the weaver.

  Relational eating, then, serves as a touchstone for integrity. We vote with our eating. By purchasing the output of the industrial food system we are “buying it”—its processes and its assumptions. By eating local food, we tend our communities and nature. Being able to drive through a fast-food joint in our little personal tanks, protecting us from intrusion, gives us the sense of being a lone eater, but eating is never only a personal act.

  Is even obesity, at least in part, an expression of the impersonality of our industrial food system? It disconnects food from real relationships with the hands and lands that feed us, allowing us to mindlessly consume it. If you are a relational eater, if you give love to your farmers by buying their food and receive love from your farmers by eating their food, gratitude itself could slow your hand-to-mouth repetitive-stress disorder.

  As a relational eater, “food is love” signifies the love invested by every hand that feeds us—even the soil organisms that don’t have hands per se. Such love arises from the natural relationship among the members of a living system. We all give that others may live. Our economic system drives us toward a zero-sum game, all competing to get more. A bit of reflection, though, reveals that if one actor in a system always wins, eventually there are no more losers for the winner to surpass. Game over, system collapse.

  My friend Gary Vallat wrote me an e-mail about how his love for Duke and Kate LeBaron is knitted together with his weekly journey to buy their eggs.

  I met Gary, an island newbie, when he moved here to be closer to his daughter and her family. He’s a slender man, short silver hair, dark rimmed glasses, a Parkinson’s tremor keeping his hands aflutter. We worked together on a project for Transition Whidbey and became friends, slowly discovering that we were both old idealists from the “back to the land” days.

  Duke and Kate arrived in the mid-1980s at the tail end of the first wave of “back to the land” folks on the island. They built their own place, raised vegetables, animals, kids, and a bunch of hell in local politics. Duke was a big sober man, full of wisdom and knowledge won in that school of hard knocks called community organizing. Cancer had him by the ankle for nearly a decade and finally took him down in 2011, but not until he and Gary became friends, sharing conversations when Gary came to buy his weekly allotment of Duke and Kate’s eggs, and fooling around with calculating the carrying capacity for the island (some people fool around this way).

  After Duke’s death, Gary
wrote about those trips:

  The path to Duke’s and Kate’s property climbs a steep hill, follows a winding dirt road, crosses the fields of a remote residence (I had to connect with the neighbor to explain why I was “trespassing”). At Duke’s back gate I am met by the donkey and the Navaho sheep who are always wary, sure that this interloper might endanger the regular meals they are accustomed to. They briefly announce their concern then flee with now visible uncertainty. I cross the pasture and move through another gate passing the rooster’s harem, berries and the raised bed farm. Beyond the next gate is the true guardian of the path, the goose . . . usually blowing the horn of attack, spreading wide the wings of retribution and going for my ankles. Closing the final gate I arrive at the massive door to the castle where the prince waits in his chambers.

  Now the prince is gone but the path is still there, leading to memories and his partner who is willing from time to time to join me in bringing Duke back to life. . . . Kate brings out her cookies, puts the kettle on the gas stove and puts another log on the fire in the wood cook stove so that we can share our stories and complete a connection built on the memory of food—and Duke.

  “The memory of food—and Duke.” This is the wholeness of relational eating. The visit to Duke’s widow, the “grocery shopping,” the wander across a hill (violating conventions of private property), and successfully negotiating the gauntlet of animals, all of this is “eggs.” It is kindness, hunger, nutrition, being outdoors, being threaded into the web of life (some of it braying), the warm fire, the tea, the triumphant walk home with one’s booty in a backpack. And from this relationship with Duke arose a comfort in sitting with the ill and dying that led to a new engagement with the local hospice. It is stepping into the river of community, surrendering, allowing oneself to be part of a wholeness while still being Gary or Vicki or Duke or Kate or the goose spreading her wings. How wonderful to live somewhere that receives one’s love. How wonderful to know that eating is belonging.

  Eating Together

  What would relational eating be without relationships? Even though I live alone I find ways to dine with others—sometimes simply bringing my own plate of food over to a friend’s house so we can enjoy a family meal. But the natural response to relational eating is gratitude. This can be as simple as saying grace over every meal, no matter how many specific links in the supply chain you can name.

  I learned the following grace when I was part of a team that met monthly to develop a training that would help people change. Each weekend we’d take a break from the intensity of our brainstorming to eat. We’d hold hands and say the Buddhist blessing:

  This food is the gift of the whole universe—the earth, the sky, and much hard work.

  May we live in a way that makes us worthy to receive it.

  May we transform our unskillful states of mind, especially our greed.

  May we take only foods that nourish us and prevent illness.

  We accept this food so that we may realize the path of practice.1

  Grace before a meal and bedtime prayers were common when I was little. I don’t know what’s happened to “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep . . .” but I can venture a guess about mealtime prayers. How many singles with no hands to hold still say grace when they sit down to eat? How has this changed our sense of eating, from being a relational act to being a distracted act, reading a book or clicking through e-mails as we chew and swallow?

  Only the most devout among us follow the prayer cycles of traditional religions. Orthodox Jews are traditionally required to say a hundred blessings a day. Explanations vary as to why, but so what? Blessing opportunities abound. Put in a modern context, traditional cycles of daily prayer can translate into spontaneous berakhot (blessings) for every and any amazing moment when you recognize God hiding out in daily life. You can say a blessing when your eyes fly open in the morning, and when you wash your hands and face. You can appreciate as you dress that every limb articulates (more or less). In the same way you can say supermarket blessings for jars of peanut butter and for bins of chocolate-covered almonds and for whoever butchered that chicken, skinned it, boned it, placed it in a Styrofoam tray with something akin to a menstrual pad for any ooze, pulled taut the plastic, and slapped on a label with a bar code. If that weren’t enough amazement, what about the good intentions of the chemists who figured out those preservatives we now revile. Dollars to doughnuts—as they say—these men and women really thought they were bringing us better living through chemistry.

  In fact I do take such prayers with me when shopping, gardening, cooking, and eating. I shop in the Star Store with such gratitude. The cans and bins and wrapped meats and deli and paper products are a gift of the whole universe, the earth, the sky, and much hard work. In between conversations with friends by the cheese and between the fruits and nuts, I remind myself what a miracle it is that all this food is mine for a brief swipe of a debit card.

  Back in the day when interviewers asked me for my top money-saving tip, I’d often say: “Gratitude.” It’s very hard to impulse-buy when you are awash in gratitude for everything you have, which includes not just this shirt but the earth, the sky, and the much hard work of the generations who brought you the comforts of this life, just as it is.

  It seems to be that way for relational eating. Even all this time later, hard to zone out with a spoon without thinking about the hands that are feeding me, without recognizing the preciousness of food.

  Relational Farming

  It stands to reason, once you think about it, that you can’t be a relational eater without relational farmers—farmers in relationship with seeds, land, seasons, and more.

  The closer your farmers are to the soil, the more they are your link to blessing the earth that feeds you.

  The “farmer” has many faces: hunter/gatherer, subsistence farmers who own land, tenant farmers who rent land, truck farmers who bring crops to market as they mature, subscription farmers who grow for specific customers (CSAs or restaurants), family farmers who still grow a diversity of crops and livestock, industrial farmers who are more like industrialists than farmers—who hire farmworkers to actually do the work.

  Whom you choose as the farmer for each product you buy—in the supermarket or farmers’ market—gives you a different relationship with the soil. Knowing your farmer means you are only one step removed from this humus (healthy soil), a word that shares a root with human and humane and humble.

  By contrast, buying industrial food puts you in relationship with a faraway soil-like substance, diminished of life but bulked up with soil “steroids.” The foodlike substances are half laboratory creations, with added flavors and stabilizers and genes for cold or poison tolerance.

  Stepping into Your Farmer’s Boots

  The closer you are to your farmer, the more you see through her eyes and share his challenges.

  You become sensitized to what he or she deals with daily in producing local food in an industrial system.

  You see how the USDA and FDA, while protecting consumers from bad apples (so to speak) among industrial producers, regulate the life right out of small-scale producers who want to sell their surplus to their neighbors. Some trade is simply against the law. I bought Elsie’s milk from Belinda and got goat cheese from Nina like I used to score marijuana. Both acts were illegal and therefore could not be spoken about. When we’d see each other around town, we couldn’t speak out loud about . . . ahem . . . that.

  Some of my farmers have worked around these restrictions by forming co-ops—owning a piece of a cow or a goat and therefore milking “their” animal legally.

  Some products are constrained by legislation requiring permits, inspections, licenses—all adding cost to the product—too much cost for small-scale operations.

  Vicky Brown of Little Brown Farm is a case in point. Another islander, Lynn Swanson, finally got her sheep dairy
licensed, but at this writing Vicky runs the only remaining legal dairy on the island, milking her herd of twenty-two goats every day. The playing field between her cheese and anywhere cheese—goat, sheep, or cow—is so unlevel she’d have few customers if she hadn’t cultivated local loyalists at the farmers’ market and upscale wine shops. She turns the milk from her “ladies” into yummy handcrafted cheeses that she has to sell for top dollar—six times what bottom-dollar cheese fetches—because of the many dollars she has to spend to comply with all the regulations and inspections and pay all the licensing and insurance to sell her wares legally. I’ve stood in her barn, each of us nuzzling a baby doe with ears softer than my cat’s back. I’ve looked around as she pointed out the special stalls and paints and bathrooms and sinks she has had to install to comply with regulations. She’s run the numbers for me, punctuating the recitation with a snort at the people who ask why her cheese is so expensive.

  Could she simply skip the rules and sell raw milk cheese in the underground food trading system that flourishes here via friendship networks? Of course, but then she would not be Vicky Brown who takes pride in her one and only profession—dairywoman. She left a high-paid corporate job—bringing with her all her professional skills—to build a real business and succeed. She is, therefore, on the front lines of confronting the unfairness of a system that does not make any allowance for scale of operations. A license is a license, no matter what size your herd. Inspection fees are inspection fees, no matter what size your operation.

  The same playing-field tilt discourages people from buying five-dollars-a-pound chicken and Georgina’s grain and Georgie’s beans (at least five times the price of their industrial counterparts). This is not just a question of scale. Migrant labor and undocumented laborers earn a pittance and have little voice in shifting their conditions. Factory food isn’t necessarily cheaper to produce than artisan food because some of the costs are hidden in our taxes. In addition to the low price we pay for it directly at the market, we also pay indirectly through Big Farm subsidies, environmental cleanup from shoddy practices, or the health costs of food-borne illnesses. With local food, we pay premium price because our farmer does not have those subsidies and does not take cheaper shortcuts that could endanger the environment and our health.