Blessing the Hands that Feed Us (16 page)

A study by the Nutrition Research Institute
1
project director and University of North Carolina professor Martin Kohlmeier, M.D., reveals why I, a lowly consumer, was not informed about the medicinal properties of food. In the study, 109 medical schools were surveyed and only 28 of them met the National Academy of Science requirement of even twenty-five hours of nutrition education.
2

I was certainly a poster child for the failure of our medical system to educate us on that food/medicine link. My diet was waking me up, though. Herbs and spices are used not just in cooking but in healing. All medicines once originated in nature. Where else would they come from?

We think of medicines as pills in jars, not leaves and seeds and bark and flowers. It's obvious, but until that moment I'd never put it together. When I quit chemo the naturopath prescribed turmeric—the same spice that's in curry. Reading up on this spice/medicine, I found it's even used to
prevent
cancer!

Only now is the food industry touting “functional foods”—ones with some smidgen of health-promoting, disease-preventing, or healing properties. What could be more functional, though, than fruits and vegetables—the mainstay of my 10-mile diet?

When Hippocrates said “Let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food,” he must have meant just what I was discovering as I read the
Dictionary of Food
.

Tools of the Trade

The final “ingredient” in my 10-mile kitchen was my stash of simple cooking tools.

I already mentioned the convection oven. In addition to producing zackers, it also did a fine job of roasting zucchinis sliced the long way, like chicken fillets, slathered in oil, and salted. The bigger zucchinis could be baked almost like winter squash—seeds scooped out and the cavity filled with sautéed chopped carrots, eggplant, and even Long Family beef. The oven was even big enough to roast a chicken, which I did as a treat at the end of the month.

The convection oven was one of my top eleven tools for turning the bounty in my yard and fridge into breakfast, lunch, and dinner and those minimeals in between. The others were

•
a chef's knife

•
a 4-quart pot with a steamer basket

•
a heavy 8-quart pot

•
a pressure cooker/canner

•
a cast-iron skillet

•
a mandoline

•
a Zyliss slicer

•
a food mill

•
a peeler

•
a blender

Perhaps I should have gotten a food processor and become Martha Stewart–proficient with it. That didn't occur to me. For one thing, the thrift store never had one, and I treat the thrift store as an angel of God—answering only truly righteous prayers. The Unfathomable Divine just did not want me to have a food processor. Not only that, if I'd gotten one it might have taken me the whole month just to learn how to use the dang thing. And the clincher is this: by a fluke of fate I happen to be a whiz with a kitchen knife.

How so? In 1968–69 I was a frequent extra on soap operas. The producer recognized that I had some “je ne sais quoi” (it didn't hurt that I was married to him and we needed the money), which led to a short career as the lady at the bar or in the elevator. On days when I didn't have other work, I would watch the soaps—at first just out of vanity to see my butt butterfly across the screen. Eventually, I got hooked on the stories and developed an embarrassing soap opera habit—which is how I learned to chop, because Graham Kerr's
Galloping Gourmet
came on right after
Love of Life
. I can still see his fingers on the back of that chef's knife as he rocked it up and down along a carrot or an onion, leaving a wake of perfectly even pieces. I actually went through a bunch of onions and several knuckles practicing in my own kitchen. The
Galloping Gourmet
also showed me how to sauté, braise, poach, roast, toast, bake, broil, and fry meat, fowl, and vegetables. I learned how to make a roux, a sauce, a gravy, and a meringue. In terms of life skills, Kerr proved to be a better professor than any I had in college.

And so it was that my chef's knife—with a little help from a mandoline and Zyliss slicer—was my noneclectic Cuisinart. No, I'm not talking about a mandolin, about using the strings of a musical instrument to slice boiled eggs. The mandoline—as well as the slicer—are hand tools that allow you, with rapid strokes, to turn fruits and veggies into thin or thick slices, thin or thick sticks, or fine or coarse grated pieces.

I make such quick work of any vegetable that I could easily be hired for an infomercial. I'm so fast, in fact, that if I am not conscious of what I am doing, I can make quick work of my knuckles as well. Really, in the time it would take for you to pull out your food processor, change blades, plug it in, do the grating or slicing, wash everything, dry it, and put it away, I could be finished and cleaned up with time to spare just using my mandoline and Zyliss slicer.

Not that I am against things with power cords. My stove, fridge, and microwave were so essential I didn't even put them on the list of “tools.” I chose to list the blender because I hauled it out almost every day to turn steamed stubs of this and that into creamed soups. My Foley food mill, an ingenious hand-crank device for turning stewed fruits and veggies into thick sauces, might have been sufficient, but this wasn't a back-to-basics experiment. I don't live in the woods anymore. I live in a subdivision in a house with wall-to-wall carpets.

A word about the pressure cooker. It reduces cooking time, yes, but mine, an industrial-duty one, has served me for nearly forty years for so much more: canning fruits, vegetables, and meats; cooking dried beans in twenty minutes rather than three hours; and turning wild game into delicious, tender stews. In high school we would joke about “mystery meat” on our sandwiches. A pressure cooker can turn many mystery meats—raccoon or woodchuck, anyone?—into passable dinners.

These tools plus my basic cooking skills from Mother, home economics class, and Graham Kerr were what got me through the month of cooking my 10-mile diet.

Rediscovering Cooking

What I was discovering again, in short, was cooking. Cooking as a learned skill. Cooking as how one eats every day instead of our quick grazing in restaurants and shopping in minimarts and takeout and drive-throughs. Cooking from scratch, from what's at hand. If you can't cook, your eating is totally in the hands of the food industry. Even if you cook from recipes, you still need to know the basics of cooking.

When I started the 10-mile diet, these learned skills and the can-do attitude I acquired from years of do-it-yourself-ing helped me make 150+ yummy meals.

Had I stayed in New York, though, and remained on a career and family path, I might never have learned these household arts.

Do any of us these days—with food, food, everywhere and not a drop home-cooked—really need to know how to separate eggs, caramelize onions, whip egg whites and fold them into angel food cake? Do we need to know the difference between roasting, baking, braising, sautéing, frying, and stewing—and when to use each? Perhaps not. Perhaps it's fine to rely on the deli counter or the supermarket or the purveyors of dinner in a box or microwave bag or restaurants of every class and style to make our meals while we make money to pay for it. Perhaps it's just my passion for getting down in the guts of every aspect of life, learning how things work. Perhaps I lived in the woods too long. Perhaps I drank the Kool-Aid of a post-peak world, where such competencies will distinguish those who are happy from those who are bereft. Remember the old Boy Scout motto “Be prepared”?

Making Dishes Sing

All this improvisational creativity aside, I did have one cookbook on my shelves that actually taught me the essence of transforming ingredients not just into edible food but into rich, deep, flavorful meals. Rebecca Katz, former cook for the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, where I went on my road to recovery, wrote
One Bite at a Time
, which is about putting “yum” into healthy fresh ingredients so that people who can't keep down much food might actually want to eat. As someone who couldn't even get down a smoothie during my brief foray into chemo, I know how vital that is.

From Rebecca I learned about FASS, which stands for fat, acid, salty, and sweet. Once you've put a dish together, she says, you should check the FASS balance through taste, fixing it by adding one or more of the elements. Her FASS tools looked surprisingly like my exotics—extra virgin olive oil for fat, lemons or limes for acid, and sea salt, of course, for salt. For the sweet she uses maple syrup where I use local honey.

Looking at that list I wondered if the challenge of my 10-mile diet restrictions had activated some basic body knowledge. Maybe my “exotics” are a human need, not just a Vicki obsession. It's always comforting to think that wildness has not been completely bred out of me, that if I were dropped in a remote area without a cell phone I might still last the night.

The New Natural Food

This daily reviving of my cooking chops gave the term “natural food” another new twist. Natural didn't just have to do with how the food is grown. It had to do with how I was growing spiritually through eating this 10-mile food. In week one I began to sense food as community. Through eating within my micro food shed, I was becoming part of that food shed, particularly part of a community of real gardeners and farmers.

As I chopped Tricia's snow peas, onions, garlic, and kale for my evening meal, I realized that I was not only running any old vegetables, nor even just Tricia's vegetables, through the rat-a-tat of my knife blade; I was holding all the care and attention—perhaps even love—Tricia poured into this fresh food.

In the old days—just last month—of anywhere eating, I ate what was appetizing in the moment, balancing a largely unconscious set of criteria of crunch, custom, calories, culture, and several overlapping food pyramids and pies. I got my food from the bowels of my fridge or the packed shelves in my cupboards or the cheery aisles of my supermarket or the tempting menu in a restaurant. It was all mutt food, remix food, polyglot food. None of the ingredients had “grown up” together. They met only at the moment I threw them together into a dish.

The 10-mile diet started out as simply the latest and greatest mental criteria: food miles. It was becoming something different, though. A growing sense of not just being in but
belonging
to
my community brought me warm, fuzzy comfort. I felt tucked in somewhere safe and cozy, like sinking into a featherbed. Not sappy. More like a daily allotment of hugs. Family therapist Virginia Satir is quoted as saying, “We need 4 hugs a day for survival. We need 8 hugs a day for maintenance. We need 12 hugs a day for growth.”
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Local food was starting to satisfy my hug quotient.

I wondered if I was simply insensitive to the love invested in growing anywhere food. Whose were the hands that normally fed me—or the throngs if you consider even something so simple as a spaghetti sauce? Tractor drivers. Pickers. Packers. Truckers. Stockers. No, I decided, that's different. Those were hands of underpaid employees or field hands—if any hands at all. Few hands touched the cows raised in a feedlot and shuttled through the killing machine, sent as carcasses to facilities that ran the meat from many animals through the grinders to become the pearls of meat in the sauce. Hands of migrants paid less than minimum wage probably picked those onions by the ton on long days. Hands of the Immokalee workers in Florida, the biggest tomato-growing state, picked the tomatoes. They were paid a wage that barely kept them breathing—which might be considered a net good if the tomatoes were heavily sprayed with pesticides. Who grew the garlic? The cilantro?

As I stood there chopping I wondered how far back in time or far away in culture I'd have to go to be intimate with food and the hands that fed me. I chopped faster, muttering the standard fuddy-duddy froth about “What is the world coming to?” and “What's wrong with young people?” Then “What's wrong not with them but with what they've been born into?” Then “What's wrong with me, not valuing chopping, cooking, cleaning?”

My Week Two Mystical Experience

There were three different kinds of intimacy growing.

One was the deeper friendship with Tricia and the new friendships with Molly and John, Loren and Patty, Belinda and Koren, and other farmers. Beginning to count on one another.

A second was this coziness growing—this sense of belonging somewhere real and literally earthy.

The third intimacy was with the food itself. I was savoring my meals more, not just because they tasted better but because I was cooking from scratch and each food required attention to flavor, texture, cooking time. I began to sense the perfect fit between my body and my food. Because I must eat, my body is as attuned to food sources as any teenager is to a datable other. That I don't know myself this way is a testament to the efficacy of the industrial food system. You can lose your ability to taste, smell, hunt, and cook—and still consume three thousand calories a day.

Food. How basic. To think my whole life I thought I knew what it was.
The Penguin Companion to Food
showed me how limited my vocabulary for “the edible” was. It has more than 2,650 entries. Edible plants numbered in the hundreds of thousands before extinctions started picking them off. Heirloom and indigenous varieties of fruits and vegetables numbered in the many thousands. A typical produce department might have thirty to fifty different fruits and vegetables for sale.

Beyond what Tricia delivered, I began wondering what else grows here that I could eat. Looking no farther than my 10-mile woods I discovered wild foods like burdock, dandelion leaves, nettles, rose hips, and several kinds of mushrooms—and there are probably many more. We can still gather clams and seaweed from the shore and pull salmon, crabs, and other fish from the waters. Every one of these foods passed the sunlight and soil and rain of our region through its cells, cells that would provide my body with vibrant nutrition.