Trauma Farm

by Brian Brett

  Less than a month later, under a threatening sky, I was phoned to pick up the hay I was buying from him, but I couldn’t make it until later that day. I drove onto the field, noting my load was safely under a tarp. The storm had come and gone by then, drenching the field. The farmer was on his tractor, contemplating hundreds of uncovered bales still in the field, ruined by the rain. There hadn’t been enough time to get them all covered.

  He just sat there with a wry smile and said, “I guess if the weather had been better last month and the tractor hadn’t broke, I could have got all the hay into the barn before it burned down.”

  19

  DINNER LIKE A BELL

  IT WAS A feast. Spontaneous dinners occur often in this big log house when friends arrive. There were a dozen of us, mostly in the galley kitchen—washing and preparing the salad, carving meat, plating dishes, setting the table— drinking wine, whisky, tea, water, or beer—talking too much and too loudly.

  We sat ourselves at a table so overflowing with food it was embarrassing: boiled black potatoes and a plate of Yukon Gold potatoes roasted with garlic and basil and oregano; free-range chicken; parboiled young chard, cooled and drenched with oil and balsamic vinegar and sea salt; a stuffed leg of venison; a stir-fry of Chinese greens, snap peas, noodles, seeds, and nuts; a salad garnished with edible flowers. Almost everything—except the noodles, some of the condiments, the nuts, and the seeds—came from the farm.

  We were laughing and shovelling food onto our plates until a shriek jarred us into silence. Our eyes turned to Mary, and the long pink worm escaping from her salad. Then the laughter erupted again as I picked the worm out of her oak-leaf lettuce and returned it to the garden where it belonged.

  Another good friend had washed the greens and, being from the city, hadn’t been as thorough as Sharon and I are. Even though our friend seeks real produce, the world has changed. There are no bugs and dirt in stores anymore, unless you can find a real farmers’ market—salad greens are generally already cut and washed and sealed in carbon-dioxide-injected plastic containers.

  The loss of insect life in our greens has long been a source of concern for those who still respect the natural world and reject a culture that believes it can extinguish bugs and bacteria. Though many methods for destroying insect life and fungi and bacteria are clever and harmless, the logic of the chemical assault chasing the illusion of bug-free iceberg lettuce is too dangerous. And along with the other dangers I’ve discussed—specialized plant breeding, monoculture, and the demands of globalized transportation industries—it’s why supermarket food has managed to become both tasteless and easily contaminated on a large scale. Dinners like ours have become rare events.

  I am the child of a diminishing generation that accepted a little grit in its lettuce and never thought much about bugs in the water unless it was foul. I grew up in various backcountry communities where the old-timers threw live newts into the well to clean up the bug population. Today the horror of salmonella and every other natural terror would get that well padlocked, but in those years of wood-cribbed, spider-and-woodbug-rich, leaky-lidded wells it was a good idea.

  YOUR BLOOD IS LIKE soil, living and learning and thriving on the wealth of invisible creation. The body learns as much as the brain does. According to Frank T. Verto-sick Jr., author of The Genius Within, “The immune system must learn and recall billions, perhaps trillions, of different molecular patterns. Our lives depend on its ability to make instant discriminations between friend and foe, not an easy task.”

  There’s much talk lately about how our antibacterial fixations and the fetishism of pill culture is endangering us. Since a controversial article appeared in the British Medical Journal in 1989 there has been increasing interest in the “hygiene hypothesis,” which claims that our futile attempt to separate ourselves from bacteria has led to childhood immune system disruptions and a surge of allergies and other immune disorders. Incidentally, these disorders are much less common in farm children. Natural living is proving less dangerous than unnecessary sterilization. This is why traditional “raw milk” dairy farmers insist that those who run modern dairies, knowing their milk will be pasteurized, are not always as scrupulous about contamination.

  DIRT IS GOOD. EVERYTHING comes out of dirt. Farmers know this, which is why so many old gardeners still eat their soil. The tongue tells the truth when it’s not twisted by a culture that has cut off its own roots. You can taste soil’s texture, its acid balance, its life. Eating soil is like eating life, and that’s why it’s tough to stomach for some. I’ve never been good at it. I’m thinking this as I begin preparing tonight’s dinner. I’m peeling a basket of Pontiac potatoes—a favourite. Crisp fleshed, they make for magnificent baby potatoes, and fully grown they’re excellent fried, mashed, or baked. They don’t go sawdusty like the modern early-season varieties when cooked a minute past their prime. But they have a fatal flaw: deep, dirt-collecting eyes, and I begin to wonder if I’m also developing a dirt fetish as I meticulously scrape the eyeholes clean.

  Modern addiction studies tell us the brain takes thirty days to form an addiction and a lifetime to overcome such dangerous chains of synapses. I probably wash my greens more meticulously than the average person because we have plentiful water and I’ve met what can come crawling out of our garden, and I’m not fond of eating cutworms or grit. Common sense is the answer for food handlers, not the paranoia promoted by industrial farming and the advertising campaigns of cleanliness-addiction industries.

  Dangers in food are a fact of life. Parasites, protozoa, bacteria, viruses. A myriad of creatures. Everything from Salmonella to Listeria monocytogenes to Campylobacter jejuni, from Escherichia coli O157:H7 to parasitic worms. These days we’ve all learned to be more careful, but traditional behaviour and general cleanliness are less invasive than dangerous factory methodology. A few years ago a single infected steer in a multinational slaughterhouse contaminated thousands of tons of meat that appeared in places as diverse as Guam and Nevada within days. This, as I’ve explained, is why the local-food movement was born— out of the common sense of people who want to purchase their food from producers known and respected in their community. Those willing to take their chances with natural food, whether it’s real milk, organic produce, or traditionally slaughtered livestock, should retain that right. Eventually, Western society needs to make sane decisions about what is safe and what is not, because the increasingly sterile hygiene levels our government is driving us toward are becoming more dangerous and unhealthy than living with our feet and fingers touching dirt—and more environmentally expensive.

  Lately, all local farmers have been required to take a foodsafe course before we are allowed to sell our produce in supermarkets. Sharon got the short straw and attended. The woman giving the course displayed a classic case of too much science and too little common sense. Sharon and a clutch of local organic farmers had to sit there suffering a lecture about how manure is bad for the garden “because it’s full of bacteria,” along with other such useful information. The instructor’s paranoid list of dangers even ended up implying all water should be boiled before drinking. When one farmer finally asked her what was healthy to drink, the woman replied, “Soda pop is safe.” On this island, she was lucky she wasn’t tarred and feathered and set adrift in a rowboat.

  EVERY DISH HAS ITS season. Spring is rich with greens and strawberries and asparagus. My favourite crop is the early seed tops (scapes) of the hard-necked garlic, which appear at the same time as our Chinese snow peas. I steam-soften the scapes, then pan-fry them in butter with the snow peas, rock salt, and freshly ground pepper. As simple and clean as you can get. We have an abundance of garlic tops because people don’t know how delicious they are or how to use them. So they don’t buy them. Western society’s indifference (or even fear of) nontraditional food constantly surprises me, though that attitude has been changing during the last thirty years as ethnic cuisines sweep the world, riding the globalization wave, introducing cap
puccinos to Beijing and rice noodles to Idaho.

  Another late spring dish is fresh fava beans, which most people consider winter food. I find them too dry and lumpy then, though they might have been cooked for hours in a broth, but when they’re green and stir-fried they’ll melt in your mouth, and they remind me of those tender white butter beans of Greece. Equally delicious are the fava and snap-pea flowers that we add to our spring salads. Mixed with mizuna, romaine, spinach, tiny beet tops, green onions, and spidery pea-leaf tips, they keep us going until the more substantial and complex salads of summer.

  Then we gorge on tomatoes and cucumbers and the tromboncino, or Tromba d’Albenga, which resembles a twisted baseball bat—a summer squash-marrow that’s delicious raw, steamed, or fried. The artichokes also arrive in full, big bud, and we steam them and dip their leaves in garlic butter and swoon over the hearts. Summer is also the season for flower and seed salads. Entertaining gives us the opportunity to play in the garden, picking an assortment of blossoms for a garish and tasty plate. I’m especially fond of nasturtium and day-lily flowers.

  We cook according to the season, and I eat less, more simply, and later in the day. Often, we find ourselves out in the garden at eight in the evening. My stomach will start growling as I realize I haven’t thought about dinner, so we tend toward quick stir-fries and raw fruits and vegetables.

  During the fall the dehydrator comes out and the harvest fills our storeroom and freezers. Cooking meals becomes more extended, especially on the days cool enough to justify lighting the kitchen stove. We begin soups we can leave simmering all day on the cast-iron surface. This is also the season when Sharon and our friend Gerda have a big antipasto day, making enough for the year, and sometimes pesto, which they freeze in ice cube trays, then dump into freezer bags for use in the winter.

  Winter is our season for long, slow, hearty dishes. The wood cookstove is roaring and we raid the freezer and storeroom to make stocks to freeze for quick lunches and dinners in summer, when we are too busy to cook. Sharon or I will cook up large batches of tomato sauces. The iron of the stove clangs daily once again as we rustle about in the kitchen and the storeroom overflowing with onions, squash, shallots, cabbages, potatoes, and several varieties of garlic. Here, in our temperate climate, the garden goes on through the winter, filled with winter greens and Chinese (jade choi, mei king choi) and Japanese (mizuna) vegetables, leeks, kale, overwintered beets, and parsnips. We have a large kitchen with three ovens (including the wood stove). Sometimes we need them when a dinner party erupts.

  “Some of us eat to live, and others live to eat.” That’s the theory of the American poet and novelist Jim Harrison, who also invented a new school of journalism—gonzo cooking columns. We eat both ways at Trauma Farm. Food does sustain us, and yet we delight in its rich opportunities.

  I GREW UP IN a kingdom of local food. Fraser Valley suburban cuisine—mashed potatoes, overcooked beef roasts, canned mushy peas—I exaggerate, but it was determinedly plain, except for the cooking of my Italian relatives. In my early twenties, for no reason I can understand—maybe because of the psychological fluctuations caused by my dicey medical state, my love of Vancouver’s Chinatown and a beautiful young woman whose family owned one of the tastiest restaurants in Chinatown, and an omnivorous mind that insisted on reading everything—I underwent what’s known as a “click.” One morning I woke up curious about what I ate and why. That’s when I began my adventures with food, discovering the diversity of local cuisines around the world.

  Jane Jacobs, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, argues that the variety in our cities sprang from a thriving, untrammelled, almost microbial civic core—a human ecosystem that naturally extended to the rural world feeding it. Published in 1961, her book was treated with contempt because it opposed the dominant planning theory of the era—the logic trap of the Radiant City, promoted in the book of the same name by the modernist artist and architect Le Corbusier. He insisted that we design mechanical, reductive environments such as traffic grids, malls, suburbs, office-tower grids, environmental green spaces—all the claptrap of modernist planners, who also see nothing wrong with factory farms feeding the factory cities. This philosophy not only contaminated urban planning but contributed to the growing pressure on the small farm. It eventually devolved into a view of food as flavoured nutrient molecules.

  The Radiant City concept ignores the organic magic of people living together and treats the home, culture, and food as merely gears in a “machine for living.” Thus the boring dinners of my youth, which I soon rejected.

  A half-dozen years after my first investigations into food, and the week after meeting Sharon, I invited her to one of the two surviving sushi restaurants in Vancouver during that era. The relationship nearly ended when I ordered a plate of sashimi (sliced raw tuna) and an ikura (salmon roe on rice in a seaweed wrap). But she fell in love with the tempura, and fortunately the restaurant served substantial whisky sours (called cherry blossoms), so she soon forgot the raw fish, and we remain together nearly thirty years later.

  Although we were both raised at plain tables, over the years we have become companion adventurers in the world of food.

  One of the first things we discovered was that we could resolve our expanding social debts by throwing an epic feast every couple of years and inviting our neighbours, relatives, and friends—all those whose dinners we had not reciprocated. We called these “pig parties” because we’d impale a pig on a spit and roast it whole, or sometimes we substituted a couple of lambs. The main dish made the vegans and vegetarians a little queasy, but since we provided more than enough vegetable and fruit dishes, they survived, and a few even discreetly sidled up to the carving table for a taste of crackling or tenderloin once they learned it was “happy” meat, the local term for livestock raised naturally.

  If you have close to 150 people of all ages and politics wandering around stuffed with food and drink, things can go sideways very fast. And after a couple of kegs of beer the crowd gets a bit loose. At one pig party there was far too much Scotch and probably island herb smoked out in the bush, where the young rowdies wouldn’t get caught and lectured by their elders. I was fairly distorted myself, and one of the last things I remember, around three in the morning, was a large, hairy biker saying, “I’ve got thirty oysters in the shell.” We kicked up the fire in the field and roasted them in their shells. Once they popped open we forked them into a pot of melted butter, chopped garlic, and cilantro—then swallowed them whole. Only old Howard and a couple of the skateboarders hung in there with me and the biker, who announced he was known as Pigster because he used to raise pigs for a living.

  Around dawn I was lying in bed with a crashing headache and what felt like a pound of congealed butter in my belly. A racket erupted below our bedroom. “That rooster sounds awful close,” Sharon muttered. Her tone indicated this was my problem. I staggered out of bed onto the walkway overlooking the main floor and realized that not only were there sleeping bodies of expired partygoers everywhere but the doors were all open and we’d forgotten to shut the coop. Gertrude the hen, being a leader and not a follower, had invited the chickens into the house. Charlie was standing atop a pile of expensive art books on the front-room coffee table, crowing his heart out while Gertie observed fondly.

  I pulled on my pants and scrambled down the stairs, shooing the chickens out before they shat on the fancy books and rugs, waking a few unhappy and hungover guests. Outside I noticed Pigster crawling from under a willow tree. He strode around the house without a goodbye, tucking his shirt in, climbed on a big, black bike by the house gate, and cranked it over. It had no muffler and the roar echoed through the house. Then he revved it up and rolled down the driveway, past the field of guests who’d brought tents for the weekend, no doubt waking them all.

  The bike’s thunder faded, and then, as if in a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western, it grew louder again. He drove back past the sleeping tenters and parked by the house, strode off
to the willow tree, stuffed a pair of polka-dot boxer shorts into his leather jacket, and returned to the house. By then I was sitting on the front deck with a few friends. I was so wrecked I had a bottle of Maalox in one hand and a beer in the other. This time Pigster silently nodded goodbye.

  He started up the bike again, and the hapless tenters got another concert as he roared by and was gone. I never did find out who he was, or who invited him to the party, but the oysters were great. I chugged back a good shot of my hair of the dog while the chickens pecked about our feet, cleaning up the spilled food from the night’s festivities.

  ONE OF THE MORE curious phenomena since the seventies is the shift in our attitude toward food in North America— the ascendency of nutritional hysterias and fad diets, the cults of exotic dishes and ethnic cuisines. Cultures generally have complex, ancient traditions of diet, yet for various historical reasons, including the modernist, mechanistic attitude to community inspired by Le Corbusier, the majority of North Americans (apart from the Québécois) have lived in ignorance and relative unconcern about what goes into their bellies. Today, overcooked meat, boiled potatoes, Southern fried chicken, and mushy veggies don’t cut it anymore, except for those whose taste buds and neural synapses have been redesigned by the artificial flavours and advertising of the fast food industry. These people—and you can see them waddling down any American street—are programmed addicts of adult-sized flavoured Pablums fortified with sugar, fat, and salt.

  At the same time, food fetishism is sweeping through our society and we are discovering what only a few gourmets or world travellers once knew. Never before have people experienced such a bonanza of exotic produce. Even while thousands of tomato and cabbage varieties are disappearing, the supermarkets are displaying dragon fruit and plantains and truffles. Food shows and magazines and reviews are now ubiquitous. Dinner guests can knowledgeably discuss everything from ratatouille to the Japanese art of kaiseki—the ultimate combination of art and dining in which everything from the view through the window to the flower arrangement to the serving dishes is designed to express the totality of the food and the theme of the meal.