by Brian Brett
In this new and crazy universe I found our refrigerator overflowing for several years with alien produce and condiments from around the world. Now I’ve begun limiting myself to simpler meals and local food in season. There are those who glamorize the small-farm diet. But as I’ve noted, the real rural diet is not always so pretty—especially if you’re poor and have just spent a year living on potatoes. If I stop and consider the local food of millions of people trapped in isolated communities where it’s millet for breakfast, millet for lunch, and millet for dinner, I’m grateful for the feasts I’ve embraced, even though I’m too aware of the damage caused by the population explosion and the demands of my refrigerator.
Food fetishism also includes health bores and vegetarians, who can rattle off their diets and colon cleanses interminably, and, worse, the pill freaks who still don’t eat their vegetables but thrive on vitamins and nutritional additives. There are disturbed people out there, I’m sure, who spend more on their vitamin and health supplements than on their food. Meanwhile, organic-lettuce eaters can be as obnoxious and insanely righteous as nonsmokers and their counterparts—exotic food cultists wired into the Food Network with its unreal “reality” shows and what’s often referred to as food porn. Food has always been a jungle.
DINNER! ISN’T IT AMAZING the changes it has gone through over the centuries? Whether you’re contemplating a stuffed lobster, a feed of mushrooms sprung from decaying trees, a New Age vegetarian hamburger, lettuce grown in that age-old standard—composted manure—or flesh slaughtered by hook or gun, it’s the endless, mysterious cycle that matters. According to Stephen Sondheim in Sweeney Todd, his play about the mad barber of London, “The history of the world, my sweet . . . is the story of who gets eaten and who gets to eat.”
As the small farm faces its greatest crisis, it also celebrates its greatest glories—on the land and on the table. When I recall our feasts and those I’ve encountered everywhere from Beijing to Morocco, I wonder if our greed will ever end, even as I stand in my garden among the arugula, yard-long beans, chicories, radicchio, cantaloupes, artichokes, and the gaudy Swiss chards while enormous chickens lumber like dinosaurs after cutworms in the pasture and the lambs gambol under the willow trees. The foreign has become local. We have too much, and someone will eventually pay for our gluttony. Somebody already is paying. People and landscapes all around the world have fed this feast that is our small farm, and I know we can’t go on forever.
That’s why, like a recovering addict, I am trying to wean myself from the banquet laid out on the increasingly empty table of the planet, eating what I can grow, eating what is at hand, eating the garden. We have learned to love arugula and coriander, although both are introduced greens (but local now), out of the garden. They’ve become ours. They’ve joined the tasty bones of our lamb shanks and the broth I can braise them with, along with other herbs. The lost art of organ meat is returning. Liver and kidney and heart and intestines and tripe are re-entering the diet as the slow-food movement introduces new attitudes toward food and revives traditions. At last we can enjoy once again the real fat of real animals—the healthy smoothness of that fat and the gelatin of cooked bones warming the tongue. Like our dogs, I love the good bones in my dish, their marrow well herbed. Lots of vegetables, root and stem and leaf, and the fruits of shrubs and trees—sweet apples and luscious plums, hard pears and raspberries. The old foods. They thrive in our fields and they are our true diet. They don’t need all the condiments of Vietnam or Provence. You can cook them straight and ungarnished, and their ambrosial essence is obvious.
Every year I find more delight in less. And maybe, at last, I have learned one small thing about consuming the world— take everything in moderation, including moderation.
20
A TOUR IS GOOD
FOR THE DIGESTION
AFTER I’VE EATEN heaven in our dinner a sleepiness falls upon me, usually while I’m drinking my tea. Walking is the finest cure for lethargy. I’ve always been a walker, and in the fire of my youth I could walk the shoes off my feet. At the age of twenty-two I walked across Mexico City in a single day.
As soon as I’m at the door and pulling on my shoes, a thrill goes through the dogs, and they lunge to their feet with anticipation. I wish I still had their eagerness for such simple pleasures. Bella is bouncing high on the springs of her young legs, while Jen watches her with suspicion. Olive, black and glistening, her legs bowed, her back painful with arthritis, is still game. The puppy will turn back when it’s evident there’s no sheep herding or raccoons in the trees. The others will follow to see what surprises I stir up.
Walking our small orchard, I stop at the magnolias we planted on the perimeter for the pleasure of our neighbours, who drive by the pink cuplike blossoms every spring. The trees are of varying sizes, ranging from four-footers mauled by deer that pushed through the fencing to fifteen-foot-tall young trees. Already, though it’s barely summer, their leaves are losing vibrancy. They need watering. Fifteen years to reach fifteen feet, and that’s the best of the lot. When I planted the same variety in our front yard in White Rock nearly three decades ago it took only six years before it was half the size of our house. The difference? Water. Healthy plants seldom need more than the environment they belong in, but after failing to provide them with the simple essentials, people will bombard them with fertilizers and pesticides instead.
Our farm, like most small farms, is abundant with the hedgerows that nourish the birds and small mammals which have lost vast swaths of their natural habitat as human development dismantles meadowland and wilderness. On Trauma Farm the hedgerows are a mess and thus rich. In small farms around the world hedgerows remain like ours. In Europe they became more formal as the forests disappeared, turning into topiary hedges and rock or wood fencing of property lines. The disappearance of the margins has spread to North America and even to regions of Asia and Africa. This loss of habitat can be devastating. The North American grosbeak population has declined 78 percent in the last forty years, and much of that loss is blamed on habitat destruction.
We have been lucky here, because of our benevolently neglected hedgerows and determined planting of trees, shrubs, and flowers that provide shelter and food for birds in the gardens surrounding the house. The “birdvine” soon spread the word, and although our summers are particularly rich, the shrubs of Trauma Farm vibrate all year with juncos, quail, towhees, finches, wrens, bushtits, and sparrows, augmented during the summer by flocks of migrating warblers, crossbills, grosbeaks, thrushes, tanagers, goldfinches, waxwings, and whatever. The world is impressively resilient, given the chance.
IF FARMING TEACHES ANYTHING, it’s tolerance. My tendency in garden design is toward the Oriental rather than the classic “garden rooms” philosophy of European gardeners. And I haven’t the patience for the repressive linearity of a manicured garden like the geometric knot garden. But Sharon and I have the greed of the average North American, so we often plant too much too close together, which demands greater maintenance. Our display gardens combine English cottage gardens with Zen stylings, achieving the success of neither.
I’ve never favoured row planting, even with vegetables, which we generally plant in our raised wide beds to allow more dense, often nonlinear plantings. Nature has few straight lines. I always smile at flower gardens where the tulips resemble soldiers on parade days. This is a mechanistic sensibility enjoyed by municipal gardeners, who prefer linear arrangements, especially along roadsides—the flowers marching like little leafy drummers to the tune of the idling cars locked in rush-hour traffic. In their few concessions to the natural world, shopping malls feature evergreen shrubs in stiff cement islands or rows separating parking stalls.
To plant our bulbs we dig out the area and then throw the bulbs up in the air and cover them where they land. This technique inevitably provides a more natural formation. We hardly ever plant in twos and fours, preferring the Japanese bonsai-grower philosophy of odd numbers. For various reasons even-num
bered plantings, especially in flower gardens, irritate almost all observers except those with control issues. Even-numbered plantings work only in a formal design, and a missing tree or shrub can be jarring.
In a spirit of anarchist defiance I planted our orchard in crooked rows, thinking foolishly that as the trees aged it would take on the look of an ancient orchard. All I got was a crooked orchard, which is a pain to mow and water, and that doesn’t impress Sharon, who you’d think by now would have gotten used to my wacko ideas. Sometimes I think my history on this farm is one of tradition, education, and idiocy. Then again, that might be the history of the average small farm. All that said, Sharon grudgingly admits the orchard now looks old and picturesque.
A lot of our failings at Trauma Farm stem from the scarcity of teachers. Fewer than a dozen farmers with a rich past, like the Byrons, remain working on the island, along with a greater number of talented and self-educated amateur gardeners and perhaps a dozen horticulturally trained master gardeners. Traditional knowledge is dying, the community is breaking, and because of that, knowledge is now coming more from books or government agriculturalists informing farmers about good practices such as “Don’t put the corral above the well.” If you had done that fifty years ago, you would have been laughed out of the local coffee shop. Today such information seems original and is sometimes frighteningly necessary.
Our pasture is still green, though drying in its open, sandy heart, where the sun strikes it hardest. In another few weeks there won’t be much nutrition left in the grass, and by the end of the summer, instructed by the sheep’s grazing pattern, I will know which soil is weakest and needs liming or tilling or reseeding. When the sheep see me they rush up, led by the big ram, Jesus, named by a waggish friend because he was “resurrected” after a rough birth on Easter, and because that’s what I usually swear when he sneaks up behind me and tries to bang the food bucket out of my hand. Jesus is a beauty among rams, docile and gentlemanly, except for his occasional desperation at feeding time. He can be intimidating when he charges the food trough with the single-minded dumb hunger of a sheep. He caught Sharon once when she wasn’t looking and hurt her back. Almost all injuries with farm animals are the result of a distracted moment’s inattention, which can be rewarded as harshly on a farm as when driving down the road.
Trust in dealing with animals is hard to explain; it can be learned only by contact. When our grandchildren were young every one of them would break out in wails as soon as they saw Olive galumphing happily out of the house. Ajra was particularly frightened. She’d been visiting and living with our animals for a few years, you’d glance out the window and see this tiny girl hilariously shooing the big ram away from her flower collection, while Olive dutifully followed.
Working with animals can be scary at first because relationships in the natural world usually involve a combination of trust, power, and the pecking order. Only once all that is established does the relationship fall into place. The livestock understand that we are demanding obedience, and natural rebels that they are, they want to push for their freedom. It’s a bizarre relationship, if you think about it. Once our livestock and dogs realize that the rules are not onerous, that we are gentle and firm and want to work with them, they come over. Then they start to listen and often take delight in having direction. The sheep nature is inside every animal, including us. Good relationships are also tactile. I constantly touch them, but casually. I have no illusions about my power relationship with them.
And I must also admit I’ve taken the occasional perverse pleasure in watching our livestock startle a friend. A good surprise every now and then teaches us to recognize when to run and when to stand—a skill generally neglected in city living. A friend, a Native artist from back east, once dropped by for a visit, and while we were touring the lower pasture Jackson caught wind of us and charged in our direction, no doubt hoping to mug someone for a sugar cube. My friend took one look at this big black horse barrelling at us and from a standing position leaped the six-rail fence into the neighbour’s llama yard. I was impressed. He quickly scrambled back over the fence, away from the hissing llamas, while the horse eyeballed us cravenly, wondering what had happened to his sugar cube. I’ve always enjoyed a man who can move quickly.
THE FARM PROVIDES A great opportunity for kids to develop country skills. Our city-raised grandchildren spend at least a week at the farm every summer. They arrive fresh-faced and eager and immediately fight over who gets the better bed; then we send them out to explore. By the end of the first week they’ve been eaten alive by mosquitoes, got sunburned, run screeching out of the bush after encountering a wasp nest, discovered a dead chicken crawling with maggots that’s been dragged away by a raccoon, picked flowers for the house, eaten peas from the vine, and casually nibbled fennel in the flower garden. They scrape their backs falling off swings over a creek, ride the horse, peel the garlic, and are sent back to their terrified parents a little bruised and beaten but almost islandized. Their parents recognize that this experience is essential to their upbringing, like violin or dance lessons.
Grotesquely few children encounter the natural world these days. A few guilty, dutiful parents send their children to “park experiences,” where rangers complain that the kids carry antibacterial sprays so they can sterilize themselves after touching a leaf or a slug. A writer has named a syndrome, “nature deficit disorder,” after these unfortunate and deprived urban children. While it’s natural for a parent to fear every poisonous bug, falling branch, and imaginary cougar behind the trees, it’s also natural for a child to experience these events and fears, and the loss of this experience is a danger to our civilization. People often phone and ask us if they can bring a friend’s children over to the farm, because they have never encountered a live chicken or sheep, or picked vegetables from a garden.
I WANDER DOWN BY the willows, at the edge of the first pond, in this eighteen-year-long day of the time-shifting, endangered, yet eternal farm. Chloe the goose is conversing with LaBarisha, the Arabian grey. Horse and goose have a curious relationship. They meet almost every day at the water’s edge, and I wonder what mysterious conversation travels between them. Chloe will swim up to the shoreline as the horse sips meditatively from the water. Then she will lift her head and they remain motionless, beak to nose, sometimes for several minutes, soundless, at least as far as I can tell from far away. Over the years I’ve watched similar conversations. Jackson loved the pigs and Jesus the ram. Animals talk, they die, they’re born, they die again, until all the stories fold into a long summer’s day of memories.
A giant, shimmering goldfish leaps into the air and lands on its belly with a slap, disturbing the tableau of horse and goose, and they separate, the horse eyeing me as I approach. Then a cluster of mallards crash into the air and wheel several times overhead before deciding I am going to stay, and they leave, no doubt disgusted. In the far rushes of the lower pond I see the red-headed merganser slip through the reeds and evaporate into the foliage. Mergansers are clever, and this one has the knack for raising broods from eggs laid in the muddy bank in this semi-public pond, miraculously shielding them from eagles, raccoons, and my dogs in the night.
The ponds are still high, but as summer drives its hot fingers into the earth the water level will drop, and the big pond we use for irrigation will soon resemble a bomb hole in a field near Baghdad. As the water tables fall with global warming, I have twice had to bring in an excavator to deepen and enlarge the pond, and only now are my water plants starting to fill in. These are artificial ponds. It’s tougher than it looks to create a natural ecosystem. And my plantings are often shredded by the geese, wild ducks, the horse, and sheep when the water level drops.
Yet somehow the life is moving in, aquatic plants arriving as seeds in the excrement of overflying birds or on the feet of ducks—insects from the unknown. There are water boatmen and fascinating stick bugs that resemble dead branches underwater, big fat toe-biters like aquatic cockroaches and leeches
—both of which can make the grandchildren studiously avoid the water. Contemplating our ponds, as immature as they are, I understand that I could spend my life researching them and still know very little. My gaze sweeps the farm, and I am struck by the inadequacy of my years of studying and practising the art of living on this tiny parcel of land.
Like the pond, like myself, like the changing and surprising world, the farm is countless events occurring simultaneously—an organism, a mycelium sending out threads in every direction. When we “rationalize” and narrow the diversity in the name of greater production efficiencies, we diminish it, although we may produce more yields initially. The fatal flaw of the infamous “green revolution” is our failure to comprehend that the more we expand our production abilities, the more we diminish the quality of both farm produce and rural life. Natural laws are a lot more complex than they first appear. And the natural world is always slipping through our fingers.
We have a tendency to reduce this complex world to simplistic, systematic, and superficial formulas. The scientific method is our greatest asset and our greatest failure. It applies reductionist, linear logic to a nonlinear world. This can work spectacularly in specific cases, but it slides into muddier ground as we witness with growing horror the results of this reductive logic in factory farming. That’s why so much of our land and ecological management has been disastrous. The more bureaucrats manage fisheries, the fewer fish we have; the more we “scientifically” regulate our livestock practices, the farther we drift from good health and good nutrition. If our science fails to take in the lessons of traditional knowledge and its intuitive skills, we doom our science. Nature doesn’t create factory environments, with good reason. We create them at our peril. Jane Jacobs points out that natural organisms thrive in conjunction with thousands of stimuli, not just one. If you consider the immensely complex world of the small farm, reductive and linear practices generally work, but all kinds of nonlinear approaches also work.
