Blessing the Hands that Feed Us (3 page)

Want More Money?

Even though local food is often more expensive—sometimes far more expensive—than manufactured food, you get some of that money back through the nutritional value. According to the
Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture,
the high heat of canning causes some loss of vitamins C and B.
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And, as you will learn, industrial agriculture is like the Red Queen and locally produced food is like Alice. The rules change often and immediately to favor the imperious monarch. The playing field isn't level or even a gentle slant. Local producers have to huff and puff up some very steep hills of regulations and just can't compete on industrial agriculture's terms. It's not up to you and me to make up for all that, to spend more in service to our local growers, but it is up to all of us to participate in some way in changing the rules enough to make farming viable for young and new farmers. Currently less than 2 percent of our population farms. The average age of farmers is close to sixty. We needed a generation of scientists for technological prowess in the era of Sputnik and beyond. We now need a generation of farmers in order to eat well into the future.

Want to Live Forever?

No one can give you that. Religion may promise you an afterlife, which could be quite appealing if you are suffering in this one, but there is no tangible proof of it. Here's what local food can promise in that domain. Love. You are supporting your neighbors—and they are feeding you. You are weaving your community together in the most basic way. You are rewarding the hard work of those who farm in some measure by hand. The industrial food system of my youth, just when it was flexing its muscles, promised that your food was “untouched by human hands.” For our families in the fifties, disconnection was white bread was love. Local food
is
touched by human hands and that is the point. You are loving and serving the hands that feed you. Love, according to all religion, is the highest value. And who knows, that may get you into heaven.

Thriving Together

Local eating could seem like a personal choice that only hippies or Yuppies might make, but it is actually a collective project for a shared future. How to do that is the question. How do we have our (local) cake and eat it too (not sacrifice the benefits of anywhere food)? This is the challenge. By what agreements, compromises, laws, customs, rituals, or celebrations will we bring forth on this earth a future of common resilience, flourishing together?

In the seventies when we were waking up to spirituality, we'd say “the longest journey is the twelve inches between head and heart.” Now the necessary journey is “from me to we,” from self-interest to common interest, from YOYO (you're on your own) to WAITT (slow down, we're all in this together). The task now is to gather up our hard-earned freedoms and apply them to shaping a future that works for all. As it says in the Bible in Matthew 5:45, “He makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” Same with the earth's living systems—what affects them affects us all. The sun and rain of climate change fall on everyone. No one has the option of cutting loose from the collective, presuming she can make it on her own or survive at the expense of others.

We need to find a way to be free—and cooperate. To be creative and work for the common good. In short, to be part of a community and to be fully ourselves. What I call relational eating—being in relationship with the food, farms, farmers, forests, waters, soils, air, and other critters in a local living food system—is such a path.

The Age of Resilience

I believe we are in a new age, the age of resilience—the capacity to roll with the punches. Smart people in the age of resilience are resourceful—able to make the most of what's at hand. Relocalization is bringing more of what we need closer to our hands. Fear, though, will weaken both resilience and resourcefulness. I want to inspire you to live this adventure, to whatever degree you choose, with me and all of us in these times. I want to be inspired and motivated by
your
creativity and heart. Research shows that people rise to the occasion when they must—they muster courage and help one another and offer solace in the face of loss. What's ahead is an occasion we will all rise to—and we'll all do it right where we are: on islands, like me; in forgotten rural communities; in suburbs and cities. There is hope everywhere. Even in regions around the world impoverished for a host of reasons, communities are taking control of their destiny, relocalizing.

This, then, is where the 10-mile diet landed me. I could easily go back to old habits, but I haven't. I am aware of where my food comes from. I buy from my neighbors if at all possible, buy from my region as much as I can, and buy fair trade for food pleasures from afar if I can. I also buy those foods I love that come from everywhere/nowhere—and there are plenty of them. I'm transformed but not reborn. I simply like being acquainted with my food. I like cooking from scratch. I like eating less with more gratitude. I like growing what I can. I like being part of a global conversation about local eating—and adding my spice to the stew. I like the political puzzle—which policy shifts and personal choices and skillful practices will rebalance our food system. I like being part of this unfolding story, the shared adventure in security, sovereignty, and safety; in health, prosperity, and yum. And I like being relaxed about it all.

Food is our primary form of consumption. Transforming our relationship with food and the hands that feed us transforms so much else. I invite you to sit down at this banquet of stories and new ideas and nibble and graze and chew and digest and see how it all goes down. I invite you to simply enjoy yourself. If you find things you want to try, do so in a spirit of curiosity and good cheer. At the end of each chapter, a section called “Now It's Your Turn” offers some action steps that, once you've read the whole book, you can come back to and try out. Between chapters are some wonderful recipes using regional ingredients from the creative kitchens of fine local chefs, assembled by the star chef in the book, Jess Dowdell. There's something for everyone to savor—the gourmet, the activist, the lover of good tales. Bon appétit!

Localize Me?

July 4, 2010

The sun was warm, the sky clear, and, frankly, hyperlocal eating was nowhere on my radar. My only interest in eating locally was grabbing a bite of some German potato salad gracing the banquet table—dead ahead—laden with potluck dishes. Yet amazingly, I was about to sign on to an experiment in 10-mile eating that would redirect my life. Join me in my final hour of “anywhere eating.”

Let me set the scene. My clan of friends had come out of their home offices and back from their travels to celebrate the Fourth of July at our annual potluck picnic near Maxwelton Beach, one of the original settlements on the western shore of South Whidbey Island. Soon we would, with heaping plates of food, watch the funky-to-the-max Maxwelton Parade: the classic cars and political protest floats and whale puppets and waving political candidates and belly dancers and children wearing gossamer wings—all of whom promenade at two miles per hour along the dead-end beach road, throwing candy at us gawkers. We'd ooh and aah and eat and socialize and relax and watch the sun set behind the Olympic Mountains across Useless Bay.

Two hundred years ago, had you looked out over that very stretch of beach, you might have seen Lower Skagit First Nations people feasting on salmon, deer, perhaps duck supplemented with nettles and camas roots. A hundred years ago the Salish would have been gone and you occasionally might have seen thousands of people from all around the region gathered for a Chautauqua, a two-week festival of entertainment, edification, and inspiration. They would have carried picnic baskets filled with eggs and garden vegetables and meats and pies, almost all of it local food. People from miles around came to the five-thousand-seat amphitheater, built with the abundant lumber on the island by the first settlers, the Mackies, who'd arrived in 1905 on a steamboat, barging all their possessions ashore except for their milk cow Bossy . . . who swam.

Now here we all were, transplants to this island, many of us earning money off the island as consultants, writers, knowledge workers, and retirees, enabling us to live the good life here. Ahead of us were tables filled with dishes from every part of the planet: teriyaki chicken wings and hand-rolled sushi from Japan, fried rice from China, tabbouleh salad from the Middle East, potato salad from South America, chutneys from India, pasta from Italy, potato latkes from Poland. All of them considered American foods now.

The green salads alone were the world in a bowl. Lettuce from the Central Valley in California, cucumbers from China, tomatoes from Mexico, avocados from the tropics, salad oil from Venezuela, vinegar from China, pepper from Vietnam, and salt from the Himalayas. The sugar in the desserts was probably from Brazil.

I was a pretty sick puppy when I transplanted myself to this island in Puget Sound five years earlier. After decades of “saving the world” it seemed the thing I actually needed to save was my own life. I was diagnosed in 2004 with stage-three colon cancer. Strangely, the news seemed less like a verdict and more like a hall pass from carrying the world on my back as if I were the sole refueling ship on the way to the space station and the stars. It might have been the surgery that saved my life. It might have been the bit of chemotherapy I received that proved so vile I quit. It might have been, though, that I faced myself and changed my life—and I was officially well, though exhausted. That's when I came to this motherly island, and was brought back to full vitality by the very waters and mountains across the way and by the very people on that potluck line. I was healthy, I was happy, and I was ready to jump into life again.

I was also a lot lighter—not from the chemo but from a six-week marathon diet that had stripped twenty pounds off my body and promised to have changed my metabolism so that I could now eat gloriously, wantonly, voluptuously, without ever gaining back a pound. Having paid my dues, the payoff was this very meal, these glistening dishes full of fat and sugar and salt, crunch and slither and squish, noodles and rice and everything nice that I'd been denied trying to regain my menopause-obliterated waist.

I was trying not to look too eager as I clutched my plate and eyed the spread ahead with all the casualness of a hungry dog when he's about to get fed. I flicked my tongue to both corners of my mouth, in case I was drooling.

Until this day, the only “food issues” that got my attention were personal. They were all about feeding my mouth, not feeding the world. In two decades of writing and teaching about the perils of overconsumption, I had challenged only our obsession with money and things and their impact on the planet, not our obsession with food, eating and dieting. How could I challenge our food insanity when I had my own hand in the cookie jar?

How Have I Dieted? Let Me Count the Ways

I'd always been an eater, of course. I was born that way. The simple act of bending my elbow with food-laden forks and spoons would amount, over my lifetime, to more than six tons of food disappearing down my gullet. What I have to show for all that shoveling is that I'm alive . . . with a few extra pounds.

The first time the bliss of feeding turned to the shame of fat was when I was six. On a hot day at a summer camp far more progressive than my parents knew, we were invited to take off our shirts and run in the sun. I watched kids with rail-thin bodies and ribs like keyboards tear their shirts off. I was pudgy—and mortified. In those days I loved cinch belts, so I valiantly hiked mine up from waist to underarms like a tube top and wiggled my hips like a movie actress, smiled, and came to know that I was different. I was fat.

The cinch belt was, in fact, the first of many elastic strategies for shaving off the odd bump and lump. “We've got to get you into a girdle,” my mother hissed one day as she walked behind me and saw that puberty was rearranging my fat attractively into two round dancing butt cheeks. We went directly to B. Altman's foundations department to sausage me into a body shaper that could second as a chastity belt. Sometime later our family physician put me on my first diet. He had a big, sloppy, tobacco-stained gray mustache and his own balloon of a belly and delivered a sheet of paper with “the diet” with the same authority as God handing those two tablets to Moses. Dry toast. Skim milk. Naked vegetables. Sliced fruit. Skinless chicken.

So began a lifetime of diets and cheating on diets. I replaced pleasure and appetite with lists of dos and don'ts—and more diets than beads on a rosary. From Atkins to Fat Flush to Zone to South Beach to raw food to no food (fasting) so I could remember what my ribs and hip bones felt like—but, like the tide, the fat rolled in again and I rolled my self into a girdle as a last resort.

Then there were the health and virtue diets. Eat no fish (fisheries are collapsing). Eat no red meat (bad for your arteries and definitely bad for the feedlot cows). Eat no chicken (mass-produced in cages). Eat no dairy—you're probably allergic. Eat no eggs—cholesterol. No, wait, eat eggs, you need the lecithin. Eat nothing with eyes (our brothers and sisters)—only fruits, nuts, and vegetables. When I lived in the woods in northern Wisconsin, tending a half-acre garden with a group of friends, we took a photo of us brandishing guns and knives at a wheelbarrow full of fresh-killed vegetables—yanked from the ground and piled high like carcasses. I dabbled in food virtue, one “right way” after another—and went back to eating what I wanted, working only on the virtue of self-acceptance.

The derivation of
diet
from the Greek means simply “how you live.” Traditionally it simply meant what people eat; cultures identify with the foods of their land—the salmon people, the seal people, the reindeer people, the taro people. Are we, then, the fast-food people? The aspartame people? Have we lost our “diet”—our way of life—entirely in service to dieting? If you review the many diets,
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few agree what to limit. Ayurvedic practitioners even question the supremacy of chugging down eight glasses of water a day. We should sip, not gulp. It should be warm, not cold.

I even lost any honest hunger, that inbred signal to get up and seek food. Hunger was always an option, welcome because it meant my diet was working; my body was finally eating its stores of fat. In my whole life I might have missed meals, but I've never gone hungry involuntarily for more than a day. My hungers were for things food could not really solve—because I was sad or scared or frustrated or bored. I bit down on food so I wouldn't snap at the next person to cross my path.

Am I the only one this nuts? I don't think so. We treat our bodies like servants or mannequins or machines or sex objects or conveyances for our overactive brains—rarely as a simple blessing, an aliveness. Food thus becomes a temptation, the enemy, a pleasure money can buy, an ostentation, a trifle, a given. Many of us have a love-hate relationship with food. We binge. We purge. We won't eat. We won't stop eating. If news of hunger and starvation wafts in on the morning news as we drink our fruit smoothie or eat sausage and eggs, at best we write a check—and perhaps later in the day assuage our uneasy conscience by another visit to the fridge.

How perfect that I was about to begin the 10-mile diet just as I'd finished feeding my fat-hating demon one more time. No longer a little girl at summer camp who could hike up a cinch belt to fit in, I was inching, literally, toward a matronly body—and I didn't like it. That's why I joined a growing number of friends in using a new super diet—the standard starvation plus a hormone that aids weight loss the way steroids aid muscle bulk. They'd all lost upward twenty pounds. Now I had too and was about to celebrate my win . . . by eating.

I did not know what I was in for with the 10-mile diet. I never expected to develop a new relationship with food that had nothing—but nothing—to do with my size. I would fall in love with the hands and lands that fed me. I would learn to seek nourishment, connection, and empowerment through how I grew, bought, cooked, and ate my food. I, the lone eater, would become I, the blessed, with food, farmers, farms, fields, and forests that fed me. I would receive the love right from the food, rather than turning to food as a substitute for love. This kind of diet sticks because it transforms the eater.

Local food could be yet one more fad or one more issue or one more virtue. Something to try—and say you did. The experiment I would soon undertake required an honest look at my current relationship with food. How I used food as an emotional crutch, as a ritual, as an entitlement, as an identity, as a set of habits I had no desire to break. On that summer day in 2010, though, local food was simply the happy distance between plate and mouth.

Growing Up in the Fifties

Most of us at the potluck had grown up in the fertile soil of the post–World War II middle class. We grew up hearing:

“Eat your vegetables. Think of the poor starving children in . . . [China, Korea, Africa].”

“Don't ruin your appetite.” (Which meant no snacking after four
P.M.
Ruining our appetites was a sin against Mother, who spent an hour cooking our dinner.)

“If you don't eat your dinner you can't have any dessert.”

“Clean Plate Club!”

Our parents were reflecting their experience during the Depression, when so many did not have enough to eat. Meager fare continued into the war effort. Until the year I was born, sugar, coffee, processed foods, meats, canned fish, cheese, canned milk, and fats were all rationed, and victory gardens fed the nation.

After all that privation, the United States liked its women rounder. Marilyn Monroe was a size 14, compared to the size 6 stars of today. We weren't afraid of a little weight. Milkmen delivered creamy fresh milk in glass bottles—plus butter and eggs—to the rising middle class's doors daily. Fear of the link between high cholesterol and heart disease was still in the future. Elsie wasn't yet a cartoon character standing on hind legs, a frilly apron around her waist. No, Elsie was a real cow and she lived, like I did, on Long Island. And we put big dollops of real butter on our hot vegetables before serving them.

Food miles back then weren't an issue because most food was at least regional. Sure, we had Wonder bread from the breadbasket of the nation and the new frozen, canned, and boxed foods made elsewhere. But the hundreds of additives we now ingest were still gleams in chemists' eyes.

My first foray from the confines of home was to that progressive camp in Tenants Harbor, Maine, where we had Lobster Feast Day each year. We each got a whole one-dollar fresh-caught lobster to drown in butter and eat with bibs that never kept us clean. We'd cook the lobsters in giant black-bottomed stockpots over a fire on the beach, plunging them in boiling water and then piling seaweed on top to steam our now bright-red lobsters to perfect rubbery doneness. The cook also harvested a lacy white seaweed and made seaweed pudding that I bragged about to playmates stuck on Long Island.

“I ate seaweed.”