Blessing the Hands that Feed Us

by Vicki Robin

  I avoid, if possible, GMO commodities. I’m not convinced that fish genes in tomatoes will kill me, but I am convinced that the industrial commodity system is decimating soils, cultures, tastes, natural genetic lines, and small farmers.

  I favor whole foods wherever they are grown.

  I look for fair trade coffee and chocolate and exotics.

  I use the sustainable harvest list for fish.6

  I buy pasture-raised meat within my region if possible.

  I refer to the Environmental Working Group list for the dirty dozen most toxic vegetables. This year it’s apples, celery, strawberries, peaches, spinach, nectarines (imported), grapes (imported), sweet bell peppers, potatoes, blueberries, lettuce, kale, and collard greens.7

  When there is no ethical difference between product A and product B, I let my frugality be my guide.

  I forage when I can—and this sometimes includes a dignified conversation with a produce manager about where he’s sending all those vegetable trimmings and rejects, after which I’ve been known to take home a bag.

  And when all else fails—or when my willingness flags—I simply do what I want, knowing my wants have been educated by my good habits.

  If I bump into you at a fast-food joint sometime, it doesn’t mean I’ve fallen off the wagon. Since you are there too, sit down and join me.

  Try These Recipes

  Here are recipes from Jess and local fine chef Sieb Jurriaans of Primo Bistro. The Bistro’s deck is the place to dine in the summer. You are on First Street, overlooking Saratoga Passage, Camano Island, and the North Cascades. The sun is still up (the sun sets close to ten at the height of summer). There are pleasure boats in the distance and people ambling along First Street, maybe hanging on the railing of the Boy and Dog Park, named for lifelike bronze statues by our local artist Georgia Gerber. Now that you are in the mood, maybe salivating a bit for the scene as well as the coming meal . . .

  Chef Sibrand Jurriaans Brussels Sprouts

  Here’s his narrative about the recipe:

  I thought I’d share a simple recipe but one that means a lot to me. I used to hate Brussels sprouts, always overcooked and nasty until one night I ate them at a restaurant in Seattle: The Harvest Vine. They were crispy, sweet, spicy, and nothing like the mushy ones I remembered from my childhood. I fell in love with an ingredient I used to despise. When we opened Prima Bistro it was something I wanted to replicate so I set out to create my version of Brussels sprouts. What we do is trim the outer leaves, cut them in half, and blanch them first in very salty boiling water; a chef I once worked for told me that the water you blanch your vegetables in should be salty like the sea. They should blanch only for about 2 to 3 minutes, depending on the size; you want them to still be crunchy inside. We then cool them down in ice water to stop the cooking. For service we cook and serve them in little cast-iron skillets. Depending on the size of the pan you use, you want to melt down enough butter over high heat so that there is at least 1/8 inch of melted butter in the pan—you can always drain some out before you serve. Believe me, butter is the key. We then place our cut sprouts flat side down in the foaming butter until they get a nice golden brown color; like other cabbages they have a good amount of sugar, so the browning gives them a nice nutty flavor. We then add chopped garlic and fine herbs (tarragon, chives, fennel fronds, parsley), salt, and pepper, and they are ready to go. They are slightly crunchy, sweet, nutty, garlicky, and the richness of butter tops it off—delicious. Since we began the dish we have started doing business with Georgie from Willowood Farm, and her Brussels sprouts business has grown with our need. In the wine world they talk about “terroir,” or “a sense of place”; this describes the essence of flavor in wine that occurs from where it is grown. I believe this is also true in the food world. The local produce we use speaks of the place it is grown and our Brussels sprouts are a sterling example.

  Squash Bisque by Jess Dowdell

  4 leeks

  1 carrot

  1 whole celery stalk

  1 onion

  1/4 cup roughly chopped garlic (3–4 cloves)

  2 tablespoons local butter or canola oil

  11/2 gallons vegetable stock

  2 cups apple juice

  1 gallon cooked squash from 1 large pumpkin, roasted

  4 green apples, cored and chopped

  1/4 cup fresh minced ginger

  1/8 cup chopped fresh sage

  Salt and pepper to taste

  Optional: cinnamon, allspice, and lemon

  Roughly chop the leeks, carrot, celery, onion, and garlic and sauté together in a large pot in the local butter, about 5 to 8 minutes, until the onions are translucent. Add the stock and apple juice and cook on medium heat until the carrots are soft. Add the cooked squash insides, chopped apples, ginger, and sage. Cook for 15 minutes more or until the apples are just soft, then puree with a food processor. Add salt and pepper to taste. You can also add some cinnamon, allspice, and lemon to punch it up a little.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Bringing Our Eating Closer to Home

  Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here

  —David Wagoner

  By the time February arrived local eating was a big ho-hum. After all that preparation, the 50-mile diet was such a cinch that it was barely worth writing about. After all, how long can anyone (but a food writer) pay attention to the hundred or so times a day that food cycles from the fridge to stove to plate to mouth to gut to, well, you get the drift. I kept my new network of local food sources. My garden wound down, but its hearty kale stuck with me through the winter. Molly’s CSA winter extender kept me in greens, tubers, and squash. I was well stocked with flour, cabbage, roots, and hearty greens from Nash’s Farm in Sequim, beans from Georgie, grains from Lauren and Georgina, onions and squash from Tricia, plus gleaned apples and jars of Belinda’s tough old birds. More and more exotics crept in, sure, but I now preferred relational eating to anywhere eating.

  As I mentioned in the introduction, a new behavior, they say, takes three weeks to go from conscious effort to established habit, at which point it recedes into the background of “just what I do.” Local was now a habit. Good for me, but so what? It was an important first step in change, but for me, that wasn’t enough. I needed to understand how something so natural—eating where you live—became so heroic, and how we can get back to the garden, so to speak, reintegrating food production into our communities.

  Now I was chewing on the question, What if everyone did it?

  As I’d learned even before beginning my diet, if everyone did it we’d quickly strip Whidbey of food. Even if just half of 1 percent of us ate exclusively from the island, we would use up all the local supplies. For example, a local mom-and-pop-type restaurant near me, Neil’s Clover Patch, got the local-food bee in their bonnet and now buys hamburger from the Long Family Farm. Half of what they produce now goes to the restaurant, and we don’t yet have a way to ramp up local beef production to meet the increased demand. Good news for Long’s. A steady single market. Bad news for the rest of us. Competition for limited supply.

  I hadn’t planned to prove anything by my hyperlocal diet—except perhaps that I can do anything for a month. It was just going to be an adventure. Even after all my discoveries, I wasn’t planning to march forward with a message for the world, once again donning my former lifestyle evangelist persona. I might have deflected these “How can everyone do it?” niggles and defaulted to a cheerful skepticism, but two things happened that kept me on the hunt for answers to bigger questions than “Where’s my crunch?”: a book and a dream.

  The Book

  Toward the end of September, as I found myself blogging that I was transforming my relationship with food the way I’d transformed my relationship with money, I had that wisp of a thought, I wonder if there is a book in here. I sent a
link to that post to my Your Money or Your Life agent. She wrote right back, “Get me a proposal as soon as possible.”

  And so it was that as easily as a dizzy-in-love couple can forget protection and find themselves parents, I wrote the proposal, Beth sold it to my Your Money or Your Life publisher, Viking Penguin, and the seed of this book started to grow, reorganizing my life the way a fetus captures a mother’s energy.

  The Dream

  The second event, a Technicolor dream, came two months after I was eating nuts and chocolate again. It was my first night in Brazil, where I was about to lead a tour. I was sleeping on the pullout sofa in my young Brazilian friend Thomas’s small apartment in the hip Vila Madalena neighborhood of São Paulo.

  In the dream Thomas was flying an old prop plane and I was somehow sitting on the nose in front of the propeller, relishing the wind, the sun, and the green landscape below. Then I slipped off, landing in a grassy field, surprisingly without hurting myself. I began to walk toward the horizon, waving to Thomas saying, “It’s okay. I know my way home. I’ll walk.”

  “No, you won’t,” he said, and, tipping the wing of the plane, he reached out his hand, grabbed me by the wrist, and up we went again, me swinging free, unafraid, relishing once more the air and light and landscape. But I was slipping.

  “I can’t hold on,” I said and fell again, onto the field as lush as a golf course. “It’s okay, I know my way home. I’ll walk.”

  “No, you won’t,” he said again, tipping the wing, grabbing me, rising, and then tipping the plane in the other direction so my body draped over the nose and I could hoist myself up to straddle it again as I had before, in the air and light and freedom.

  It wasn’t hard for me to decode the dream. When I was in the grip of cancer, I “rehearsed” dying in long meditations. I know it can be, if we stay calm, a “going home,” a liberation into spirit. In the dream I was quite happy to literally go “over the hill,” off into the sunset, home. But clearly this young man—and his band of young creative-change agents—was having none of it. He/they wanted me to fly with them. Not as the crew, but as the figurehead on their ship. I had more work to do in partnership with the next generations. My time of retreat initiated by the cancer was over, almost seven years after it had begun.

  Hope

  Come, come, whoever you are.

  Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving—it doesn’t matter,

  Ours is not a caravan of despair.

  Come, even if you have broken your vow a hundred times,

  Come, come again, come.1

  As often happens with assignments that come in dreams, this one asked more of me than I had. Yet. If I was going to inspire, energize, fuel the dreams of the next generations, I needed more hope than I had. I’d gotten from despair to acceptance to cheerful adaptation through the idea of relocalization, but that was hardly a clarion call for young warriors. Welcome to a diminished world. Here’s the mess we’ve made. Get busy, see what you can cobble together from it.

  I hadn’t actually lost hope. I’d buried it. I’d said a requiem for the planet at the turn of the millennium and poured a solid concrete slab over that crazy idea that we can stop the runaway train.

  Against my better judgment, though, reason for hope was sprouting right between the cracks. My 10-mile diet had done far more than convince me that my island could be a sturdy locker of survival rations in the face of the triple crisis. Each day of the diet I learned more about our tainted food and denatured food systems—reason enough to lose hope again . . . but I didn’t—because I was also becoming part of a growing community. In one sense, this means I was one of the people growing food and eating food grown locally. I was belonging. In another, I had stumbled into a widespread community of people working toward healthy food systems. In their company, it became natural to hope again.

  Natural Hope

  Hope is like fertility in the sense Chris Korrow, my biodynamic farmer, explained to me. It’s not something we put into life; it comes out of life naturally, like warmth or a sweet smell. Our task is not to forcibly change bad situations but rather to notice the seeds of hope we might cultivate. We don’t make hope. We cooperate with it.

  This kind of hope isn’t made by the will nor does it descend like grace from heaven. It isn’t invented or imagined. It doesn’t require proof or respond to moods. It’s there all the time. It simply requires watering.

  Nothing lives without hope, because hope is actually what every living thing expresses by getting up in the morning. Life hopes! Every second we’re alive, hope is there in our steadily beating hearts and our breathing. Hope is as much a fact of life as babies—which are themselves evidence of life’s hopeful tendencies.

  I spent a few months volunteering at a hospice facility to prepare myself as best as I could for the imminent death of my partner, Joe Dominguez. I’d been shielded, as most of us have, from seeing people sicken and die, and I needed to participate in that process somehow. There at that hospice wing of a hospital I saw how the heart keeps hanging on to life even when the mind has surrendered or given up. I’ve seen people ready to die, wishing to die, who live on because life wants to take the next breath. Life goes on naturally.

  “Life goes on” is not a weary statement of monotony, like Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day.”

  “Life goes on” has the exuberant, inevitable power of a great waterfall.

  Once I discovered this natural hope, it was easy to embrace it not as an antidote to the data but as a deeper truth in which the data is generated. The data doesn’t contradict hope. Hope itself generates the data; why would researchers develop the data if not hoping to contribute to maintaining or improving life? If the data is disturbing, that’s life at work, providing us with the kick in the pants we need to change. It worked with the ozone hole. Data showed up and we acted and the hole diminished. The weight of data is now pushing against policy makers, moving them (some would say glacially) toward climate remediation.

  But honestly, there wasn’t much reason for hope in the human world. Forests may regenerate, life may go on, but many think it has a better shot without our human presence.

  In my new role as elder-on-a-nose-cone, do I just need to avoid the touchy subject of overshoot and collapse?

  My breakthrough came when I realized I actually don’t know what’s going to happen a week from now, so how can I be sure that my predictions for a decade from now will be true. It’s like seeing a car going south at sixty miles per hour on 525, Whidbey Island’s backbone highway, and saying, as it passes you standing in Bayview, “That fella will drive right into Puget Sound in ten minutes.” We might predict that, except we don’t know if he’ll slow down, turn onto a side road, get a flat tire, remember he left his wallet on the dresser and turn around, or get a speeding ticket. And we are certainly discounting that he’ll probably drive onto a ferry and not simply sail off the pier.

  The present suggests but doesn’t predict because we can’t see all the factors in play. A lot can change between a measurement and an outcome.

  Saying you don’t know how things will turn out doesn’t deny the data, but it does allow you to release your convictions, widen your frame, see more options, head in a better direction, or slow down. As you do this, you might just find more hope-filled possibilities and turn your attention there.

  I’d based my life for several decades on this overshoot data. I don’t have to stop believing in it, ignoring everything the climate and resource scientists have said and the world’s best minds have confirmed. I simply need to allow for some mystery and humility between today and fifty years from now.

  As I was writing these words, news came that a mentor and friend for nearly thirty years passed away: Ernest “Chick” Callenbach, author of Ecotopia and wise elder of sane living. He composed a final essay as cancer was doing its dirty
work, and tucked it into his hard drive to be opened after he was gone. Among the many wise ideas was this section on hope:

  Hope. Children exude hope, even under the most terrible conditions, and that must inspire us as our conditions get worse. Hopeful patients recover better. Hopeful test candidates score better. Hopeful builders construct better buildings. Hopeful parents produce secure and resilient children. In groups, an atmosphere of hope is essential to shared successful effort: “Yes, we can!” is not an empty slogan, but a mantra for people who intend to do something together—whether it is rescuing victims of hurricanes, rebuilding flood-damaged buildings on higher ground, helping wounded people through first aid, or inventing new social structures (perhaps one in which only people are “persons,” not corporations). We cannot know what threats we will face. But ingenuity against adversity is one of our species’ built-in resources. We cope, and faith in our coping capacity is perhaps our biggest resource of all.

  Understanding that even if my facts are correct my interpretations are not certainties liberated me to hope in a very new and invigorating way. I don’t know how things will turn out. I don’t know if what I’m doing will make much of a difference. But I know that life hopes, and if I choose to hope, to stand in hope, to BE hope, then I am headed where life naturally wants to go. Not only did this open me again to life—it seemed to my strategic mind like a winning strategy. Better to be a swivel-hipped quarterback looking for openings than a soldier with marching orders.

  This felt like shaking off a dream. Or blinking into the daylight after being in a long tunnel. It felt like someone had snipped the string pinning my wings to my body so I could soar again. It felt, in short, like me. I was on the nose of that plane in the wind, with younger hands now on the controls. I was done resisting our slide into overshoot and collapse. My new assignment was to nourish life. Somehow.