Blessing the Hands that Feed Us (20 page)

Root Chips

Beets, potatoes, carrots, turnips, and parsnips are all good for this technique.

Thinly slice them, about
1
/
8
inch thick, then toss the slices with oil, garlic, salt, pepper, and any other herb that sounds good to you. Lay them in a single layer on a baking sheet and bake at 350°F for about an hour, until they are crispy like potato chips. Let them cool and chomp away!

Kimberly Bailey of Pickles Deli says:

I have a little deli that opened six years ago on the south end of Whidbey Island. Eating local, organic, and sustainable is very important to me. I have my own garden and utilize several farms on the island for my restaurant and home.

During the months when the crops and harvests are bountiful on the island (which is quite long, April through November) I create a menu called “From Whidbey's Palette to Your Palate.” This additional menu accompanies our standard one. This gives the customers a choice to eat local meats, cheeses, and vegetables. The menu focuses on all the fresh, local, organic, sustainable ingredients this wonderful island has to offer. I have a lot of customers look at this menu and ask, “What is a dragon langerie bean?” Or, “What is spicy lamb chorizo?” And, “Oh, I didn't know you could grow or raise that here.” I love explaining who the farmers are, where the food was grown or raised, and the method of farming they use. Every second you have to educate someone on what their own community has to offer, the better knowledge they have now to use and teach someone else.

I think it is important to support the hardworking farmers because they are growing/raising items that nourish our bodies—feed our souls. With rising fuel costs and a limited fuel supply it just makes sense to grow food locally so we don't deplete all of our country's natural resources.

Grass-Fed Bone Marrow Broth

Below is the Grass-Fed Bone Marrow Broth. I use Chia Farms Dexter cattle bones, Willowood Farm produce, Midnight Kitchen bay leaves, Good Faith Farm olive oil, and Whidbey Island Winery Malbec. I adapted it for my restaurant using Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions broth recipe.

2–4 pounds beef marrow knucklebones—with meat on them

3 pounds meaty rib or neck bones

3 onions, coarsely chopped

3 carrots, coarsely chopped

3 celery sticks, coarsely chopped

Drizzle of olive oil

4 or more quarts cold water

1
/
4
cup apple cider vinegar

6 peppercorns

2 bay leaves

Splash of red wine

Pinch of sea salt

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Place all the meaty bones and veggies in a roasting pan and drizzle with a little olive oil. Brown in the oven for 30 to 60 minutes, until well browned.

Meanwhile, throw all of your nonmeaty marrow bones into a stockpot, and add the water and vinegar. Let them sit while the other bones are browning.

Add the browned bones, peppercorns, and bay leaves to the pot, deglaze your roasting pan with red wine to get up all of the browned bits, then pour this liquid into the pot. Add additional water if needed to cover the bones and veggies.

Bring to a boil and remove the scum/foam that rises to the top. Reduce the heat, season with a little sea salt, cover, and simmer for at least 12 and up to 72 hours. The longer you cook the stock, the richer and more flavorful it will be. If you find there is floating fat from the marrow or oil, skim it off with a spoon or wait until after refrigeration.

When it's done simmering, strain everything—use your hands to squeeze all the goodness out.

Stick it in the refrigerator and let the fat harden on top of the pot. When hard, scrape it off and you will have a delicious bone marrow broth.

Week Three: The Week of My Discontent

O
kay, enough of the mysticism. While everything I just said about wiggling my toes in the grass and merging with life is true, it's also true that by week three the self-constructed fence between me and unfettered eating was making me feel as dreary and burdened as the babushka'd peasants in one of those old black-and-white Russian epics of hardship and starvation. I know it's not rational to compare my voluntary situation to famine, but that's how it felt to me.

I was finally getting into a groove. Days went by. I blogged. I cooked. By week three I had the hang of a new, preferred 10-mile daily fare. For breakfast I ate a frittata. I'd sauté some thinly sliced onions and potatoes in olive oil, and then add julienned zucchini or chopped fresh kale from my garden, some basil, and a crushed sun-dried tomato from Tricia's prior season. I'd scramble one or two of Tricia's eggs, stir in the sautéed vegetables plus salt, and return the mixture to my well-seasoned cast-iron pan. It cooked on low heat, covered, until the edges were done and starting to brown. Then the trick is to cover the pan with a plate, flip it quickly, and return the frittata—uncooked side down—to the pan to finish. Add tea from China, milk from Koren and Belinda, and honey from Island Apiaries, and I truly had enough.

Lunch was usually a salad because Tricia supplied me amply with cucumbers, tomatoes, mixed greens, carrots, apples, basil, and sometimes even a pepper. Dressing of lemon juice, oil, and salt. Goat cheese on top.

Snacks were often big flat Italian beans from my garden, steamed and coated with oil and salt.

Dinner would be some creation utilizing frozen local meat and fresh Tricia produce. Liver and onions. Burger and oven fries. Stir-fried vegetables. Sliced tongue. Braised greens with onions and garlic. Don't I sound like quite the cook?

As long as I stayed home, in my ten miles, in my now familiar cycles of eating and cycling to gather food, I was fine.

But I was also trapped. I'm used to mobility. I'm used to going where whim, will, or necessity sends me, confident that my destination will also be filled with mountains of food. My blissy little ten-mile loop was beginning to feel more like a chain getting yanked.

In week three, for example, I wanted to attend a regional gathering of Transition Town groups. It was in Bellingham, a mere one hundred miles north. To survive for fifteen hours out of my teensy-weensy microbioregion I was going to have to schlep a day's worth of food along with me.

I packed a Conestoga wagon–load of salad, bags of steamed green beans and steamed kale, a pint of milk, the entire bottle of honey (decanting was too much trouble at five
A.M.
), several baked potatoes and boiled eggs, carrots, and an apple.

All the while I packed the food I felt something between self-pity and irony. By choice I was sending myself back a century in time or off to a less-developed country. I couldn't moan, “Why me, oh Lord,” because it was evident that I had brought this on myself.

I was brought up to think about those less fortunate, so my thoughts then turned to people I've known who have food sensitivities and must pack this way all the time. Allergies to wheat, dairy, gluten, chicken, oats, nitrites, peanuts, tree nuts in general, beef, eggs, shellfish, seafood, and soy are increasingly common. I once stumbled on a few people living in a tent colony in the desert who had just about every sensitivity in the book. They were like people quarantined—struck with the plague—except they had to keep us out to survive. Any whiff of perfume could send their bodies into a complete tizzy, and soap, detergent, deodorant, baby powder, shampoo, conditioner, face cream, salves, and toothpaste all stink to them. There are now thirteen thousand name-brand perfumes alone. I was quarantined—voluntarily—only to a ten-mile radius for a month. You are not suffering! I scolded myself. You are being slightly inconvenienced. Stop whining.

Wine. I'd love a sip of wine, yet at that time none was purely local.

See. I could say “Get my goat” or “Don't cry over spilled milk” or “That sounds fishy,” and my nose would start sniffing the air, my tail would rise, and I'd be ready to hunt again.

Yet this sense of deprivation was chosen and time-limited—and still something of a lark. The problems of the ill and underprivileged endure for weeks, months, and even lifetimes. On October 1 I could release my chosen constraints. But those with fewer resources often live in what are now called food deserts, city neighborhoods where the poverty rate is 20 percent or higher and the nearest healthy, affordable food is a mile or more away.
1
Even more reason for me to refrain from whining.

Still I kept on. My lovely cup of morning tea was now not ginger and not orange juice and not a banana smoothie. I sipped it as I waited for my ride to Bellingham, surrounded by what now seemed a steamer trunk full of food, and sniveled more.

I looked for an apt analogy for how I was feeling and could find none better than the very Russian peasants I mentioned earlier. My mother and I journeyed to Russia back in the days when it was still the USSR—back when travel was all but banned and the few tourists allowed to enter had to travel via Aeroflot planes (think of flying Model T Fords) and stay in former czarist palaces converted to Supreme Soviet–approved fleabag hotels with only cold running water and room keys made for dungeons. She was attending—of all things—a psychological meeting in Moscow. Back then we thought that Russians used mind control to quell the toiling masses. They made people psychologically ill, not well, or so the stereotype went. I was curious to travel behind the Iron Curtain and was along for the ride.

We'd flown from Latvia to St. Petersburg on an international airline, but the St. Petersburg to Moscow flight was entirely Russian and entirely different. Clutching our passports as if they were parachutes, we boarded our Aeroflot plane for our flight. Along with us—I kid you not—came a family carrying their chickens in a cage. Bringing fresh food for the journey meant bringing it live for slaughter at their destination.

I flashed back to all those third-class train rides I'd taken the year before when I studied in Spain. There too lumpy older women, black scarves tied around their doughy faces, toted large baskets of food on their trips. Later I'd see the same sight in India, China, and Southeast Asia. The local passengers knew not to assume there would be food when the train stopped in the dead of night because a cow was on the tracks or something broke and they had to wait for another train to pick them up. In two days.

Or perhaps they were taking a family member to the hospital, where they would need to cook for the patient—probably a big improvement over the institutional hospital food we get here.

Surviving the Day

My friends arrived to pick me up for our carpool to Bellingham. Without Sherpas I had to lug my bags down my front stairs to their car, feeling dowdier by the minute. Their cheerfulness snapped me out of my mood. I refocused on how far less common food scarcity is in this country; we are actually so awash in food that we throw out one third to one half of it somewhere between the field and the Dumpster. How lucky we are to be confident that wherever we go, food will be there to greet us.

We arrived two hours later. Sixty bright, creative people from Transition groups in the region eagerly swapped stories, insights, and challenges for a rich day of conversation. Everyone but me feasted at the snack and lunch tables. I, the self-excluded, nibbled through my stores, gauging hour by hour whether my food would last. By dinner I had three green beans, two carrots, and an apple left. The gnawing hunger in my gut hammered at my virtuous mind. You don't have to starve, I said to myself. You don't have to be such a purist. The exception proves the rule—let dinner be your exception. This is just an experiment, not an assignment from on high.

And on and on. I was afraid, though, to fall off the local food wagon. I might not have the will to get back on. My word seemed my only protection from lapsing.

As this little skirmish went on in my mind, Chris Wolfe of Transition Whatcom County took the microphone to announce that dinner was ready. As she described every ingredient and the local farmer who grew it, my resolve began to waver. She had personally looked in the eye of almost every producer for the fare she offered—greens, beets, soups, granola, apples, eggs, cornbread, berries, even lentils. What wasn't a direct buy was bought from local organic grocers.

The food was as local as she could get, and given that she was feeding sixty people three meals that day and had never before fed more than nine people at one meal, the love in that meal—love like a fierce commitment to nourish the tribe—was immense.

“I haven't slept much the last few days,” she said. “Oh, and I've prayed I wouldn't make any of you sick.” She was as radiant as if she'd just run a marathon and this was her finish line. By eating, the group would be partaking of her victory.

I began to feel more like a sourpuss than a lover of the hands that feed me.

Then she said, “There's plenty of food. Even if you didn't sign up for a meal, you're welcome to eat. Everyone should have enough to eat. Be my guest.”

That did it. In this space of love and generosity my rigid loyalty to my 10-mile food seemed petty rather than noble. To turn down food is one thing. To turn down love is another. I caved. My stomach did a little victory dance as I loaded up on spinach salad and lentil soup and sat with my new friends.

As we chatted over the meal I wondered whether in fact this food was more 10-mile food to me than what I'd hauled from my micro food shed a hundred miles south. Is 10-mile eating ultimately honoring the locale you are in, rather than a peevish insistence that only food from your patch of earth is local? Maybe our 10-mile circle moves with us as we move our bodies. Maybe the love shining in Chris's eyes was more to the point than loyalty to my micro-foodshed.

Going Local, Wherever You Are

I was back in the circle of community, returned from the land of feeling deprived and excluded, warmed by companionship, fed. The lessons, however, would never leave me.

The first lesson is that love trumps pride—or can when we're faced with big challenges and community is crucial to surviving. Then we discover what's important and who are “our people.”

The second lesson is what Mark Twain advised: “Moderation in all things, including moderation.” It's hard—but doable—to eat locally wherever you are. In Bellingham, that would be Whatcom County. On Whidbey it's Island County. Ultimately, though, local isn't just a ten-mile spotlight that travels with me, showing me what I can eat. Local means being in relationship with the hands that feed me, whether it's a two-hour walk from home or a two-hour drive or a two-hour flight. In addition to being about the environment, about sustainable local communities, and about healthful foods, it's about nourishing closeness.

Distance, then, isn't the new, improved measure of food correctness. Fear of the post-peak-oil future, with collapsed food-supply chains and cars bumping along potholed roads burning the last drops of fossil fuel, is too small and paranoid a motivation. Community, though, is a delicious reward for local eating, whether or not we get our civilizational comeuppance.

I prefer blessed-if-you-do, blessed-if-you-don't scenarios. I choose to try new behaviors that will certainly stand me in good stead should the global supply chain break down but will also make my life richer and happier even if the whole industrial enterprise self-corrects and survives for centuries to come.

The Transition movement partakes of this same blessed-if-you-do, blessed-if-you-don't attitude. Transitioners are passionately engaged in resilience (diversifying local economies), resourcefulness (creatively using and repurposing what is already at hand to solve problems), and relocalization (reducing dependencies on long supply chains for our food, water, energy, tools, and stuff of daily life). These three together—resilience, resourcefulness, and relocalization—are the key to thriving in these uncertain times.

Resilient systems are diverse, networked rather than hierarchical, sharing rather than hoarding, collaborative rather than competitive, communicative rather than secretive. They flourish by increasing options and strategies for the system as a whole. Resilient people are resourceful—able to meet their needs in a wide variety of ways.

Relocalization is the process of communities becoming resilient and people becoming resourceful—so that we have more and more local options for meeting more of our needs. This is the inspiration and aspiration of Transition Towns. There are critiques of these multiplying efforts (approaching a thousand communities worldwide). They are accused of being

•
Pie in the sky: at best another marginal movement, this generation's “back to the land.”

•
Xenophobic: abandoning the world's problems, building a local fortress, and pulling up the drawbridge.