Blessing the Hands that Feed Us (4 page)

“Yuk.”

“A lot you know. It was really good.”

Later I went farther, tasted more. Every winter the family migrated to Hollywood Beach, Florida. Our three-day drives from Hempstead, Long Island, were punctuated by stops at Stuckey's, the old pecan and tchotchkes shops along the great American highways of the fifties. You always knew how far the next Stuckey's was. As soon as you drove out of one there was the billboard: O
NLY
247
MILES TO THE NEXT
S
TUCKEY'S
. My brother and I kept track of Stuckey's distances like gamblers keep track of the odds.

Coming of Age in the Sixties

My food circles widened as the years went on. Opportunities to indulge my insatiable curiosity kept coming as I went farther afield.

In Austria I sampled fresh yogurt. In Spain I ate
calamares en su tinta
(squid in its own ink) and
morcillo
(blood sausage) and
tortillas,
which there meant frittatas of potatoes and onions cooked in olive oil. In Norway I ate goat cheese and lutefisk, drank aquavit, and sang “Tak für Matten” before the meal. In Russia I gorged on black caviar. Intourist, the Soviet tourism bureaucracy, required visitors to purchase meal tickets in advance—enough for caviar and chicken Kiev for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. In Mexico I learned to hunt turtle eggs in the early morning on the beach and to grind potent chiles, salt, and garlic in a stone molcajete for killer hot sauce. My neighbors—literally barefoot and pregnant—taught me to slap masa between my hands into thick Mexican tortillas and cook them over a wood fire. In Cuba I ate greasy arroz con pollo, fried plantains, and moros y cristianos (black beans and rice). In Thailand I ate sticky rice. In Hungary I actually had goulash. I fasted in the desert and gorged at the King's Table in Las Vegas. I ate around. And unto roundness.

In a way, coming to Whidbey Island in 2005 after fifteen years of globetrotting was coming down to earth again. It could well be that the chicken in the bubbling Crock-Pot on the potluck table had roamed free in one of my neighbors' yards and been beheaded, bled, gutted, and plucked by the very hands now giving a final stir to the fragrant stew.

Within an hour, I'd agree to start my road back to eating where I am planted, but for another few minutes the world of anywhere eating was my oyster—and whatever else on that table I could get onto my plate. It didn't seem unreasonable that in addition to some homegrown salads there were three kinds of corn chips and five kinds of salsa. Nor did it seem strange to me that flavors from India and Africa were combined in one rice dish or fruits from three continents were in a fruit salad. The exotic has almost become humdrum to us.

By now I had snagged a piece of pie just to be sure and was beginning to scoop small mounds of each appealing dish onto my plate, tightly arranged from the center out like packed sunflower seeds in mature, laden heads. I was maximizing the plate. I would give a new meaning to “super-size me.”

Overeating

Overeating is as American as apple pie. We are free to consume as much as we want whenever we want—and no one can stop us. Corporate food companies advertise on TV and on the Internet and in the pages of magazines and on roadside billboards knowing that as we gain, they gain. They pack us as full as possible—like geese bred for foie gras—and tell us this is freedom and choice and happiness. It all tastes so good that we comply, not realizing how scientific the manipulation of taste is. Our palates evolved in nature, where sugar and fat are rare and rich sources of energy, and salts contain precious minerals. In the presence of any of these, our brains flash G
O
, assuming such rich fare is limited. A stop signal wasn't needed.

But now we aren't hunters in the wild, we are consumers in the endless food courts of the early third millennium—global eaters with reptilian brains. Products laden with fat, sugar, and salt—or all three (salted caramel ice cream, anyone?) are readily available in fast-food drive-throughs and full refrigerators everywhere. In a stroke of evolutionary brilliance, Frito-Lay nailed it when they advertised “Bet you can't eat just one.”

I filled my plate as if I, like my ancestors, didn't know when a feast like this would come my way again. We do know, though. Probably in three hours. But hardwired habits are hard to shake. Finally liberated from the constraint of the strict diet I'd been on, I was doing what comes naturally—getting ready to gorge. Could it be that I wouldn't just expand back into my old two-size-larger clothes after the extreme diet? The diet's originator promised otherwise. I chose to believe him. To imagine I was not only two sizes smaller but had the metabolism of a teenage jock.

I wandered out to engage in the happy ritual of drifting from one group to another, renewing acquaintances, meeting new people, hearing about births, deaths, marriages, divorces, and the migrations of children off the island and back on. We talked politics but without too much passion, and about personal trials without too much detail. Content didn't matter much. We were just happy little bees rubbing antennae.

The 10-Mile Diet Begins

As I was enjoying the infinite pleasures of eating in good company, Tricia Beckner wandered by with her husband, Kent Ratekin. Tricia has short, highlighted hair that she ruffles as if to punctuate her sentences. We officially met as sopranos in the Open Circle Singers, a no-audition choir that let me actually sing instead of—as I had been instructed in school—just move my lips in sync with the tuneful. I'd joined the choir the first month I was here, discovered I hit more notes dead-on as a soprano, and found myself next to Tricia weekly, mumbling jokes between songs.

I'd seen her, actually, in another setting that I hoped she did not remember. My new apartment came with a garden plot and I needed some manure to enrich the soil before planting. A normal person would have bought a bag of precomposted steer manure, but not frugal me, not with sheep next door. Indeed, that paddock had dung galore—on the other side of a fence. I waited till dusk, climbed the fence, and started to fill my bucket. A car had passed by, and even though I crouched at the sound, Tricia (the driver) told me later that she'd noted a strange sight of someone apparently—could it be?—stealing poop.

But Tricia wasn't thinking about manure bandits when she saw me. She had something else on her mind. “Hey,” she said, “Kent and I were watching this thing on YouTube last night. You know Morgan Spurlock?
Super Size Me
?”

I only nodded because my tongue was now squishing creamy Yellow Finn potato salad onto the roof of my mouth.

“Yeah, well, I saw this Netflix movie where this guy did a ‘super-high me' thing. Smoked pot every day for a month. So I said to Kent, ‘You should do a “super-yeggie me.” Eat only what grows in my garden for thirty days. Sort of a reverse
Super Size Me
.'” Tricia has a half-acre garden where she grows both for home use and for sale from a stand by the Langley post office. “He said no.”

“Are
you
going to try it?”

“Heck no. No way I could do that. I can't live without my treats. But I decided to see if someone else would. I've asked a dozen people so far and no one is game. It's probably impossible.”

“I'll do it,” I said, shifting from the German potato salad to a cherry pie so sweet I am sure the main ingredients were white sugar followed by cornstarch, with some cherries mixed in to merit being called cherry pie.

Sustainability as Extreme Sport

Lifestyle experiments are like extreme sports for me. As soon as I had language I'd try new things and run to Mother saying, “You know something?” and give a report on my latest discovery. In the years since, I've lived in an operatic range of temperatures—from the coldest (Rhinelander, Wisconsin) to the hottest (Florence, Arizona) parts of the country. I lived for years in a motor home with just forty cubic feet to call my own: thirty-five cubic feet for sleeping, five cubic feet for possessions. For six years I lived on one hundred dollars a month. I hiked solo in the Anza Borrego Desert, fasting for three days in a cave by a huge rock clearly used by the aboriginals for grinding seeds and corn into a powder with a stone. None of this felt like suffering or deprivation or even risk. It felt like going to the edge of the known to see what I—and the world—was made of. Live for a month on what Tricia grows in her garden for farmers' market sales? Sure. Not just sure, but “Hell yes! Bring it on!”

And so it was that I undertook hyperlocal eating with no other expertise than being an eater who by now had packed away much of my lifetime tonnage of food to relieve stress, to taste the world, to celebrate and mourn, to tap out the rhythms of my days.

I wasn't a foodie. I was lapsed from every diet—political, weight loss, or spiritual—I'd ever tried. My story may have a few more twists, turns, and wrinkles than yours, but we all have a food history and food psychology and food values. We each have a relationship with food that isn't necessarily right or wrong, good or bad, but simply part of the narrative of our lives. This history steers our behavior no matter what high-minded course we set ourselves on.

The challenge made so casually at a potluck was going to put me on the road to learning more about myself than just how to cook a turnip.

Now It's Your Turn

Do you want to delve into your own relationship with food? Here are some questions and exercises to guide you. This is not a quick women's magazine self-test. The questions and suggestions will worm their way into you. Your answers may change over time. You don't need to stop reading until you finish all these exercises! Read through the questions and exercises, digest them, and read on. Chapter 2 is where you will see why, once I'd said yes, I was dead serious about going local.

Who are you as an eater? To look at yourself as an eater (not a dieter!), here are some questions:

•
What does food mean to you—fuel, love, comfort, chore, pleasure?

•
What are your “must have” foods, and why must you have them?

•
Why might you have said “Hell no” or “Hell yes” if Tricia had proposed to you a radical experiment in local eating?

•
Where do your food preferences come from—your family, your culture, your travels, your values, your feelings about your body, your emotional states?

•
What are your guilty pleasures? Your must-have food necessities?

•
Are these preferences anywhere near your values? Your sense of fairness and justice? Your faith and politics? Your need to slow down and smell the snow peas?

Your Life as an Eater

To help you dig into your life as an eater, here are some prompts to uncork memories:

•
What did I eat as a child?

•
Who cooked for me? Did they teach me to cook?

•
What were my family meals like? Did we actually eat together? Did we watch TV or converse or, today, text?

•
What are my favorite foods and why do I like them?

•
What did I eat at family holidays? My wedding? In the school cafeteria?

•
Did my parents or grandparents or even great-grandparents tell me anything about food when they were young? My mother grew up in New York City; the iceman was a daily feature of life, and earlier still the fishmongers came through.

•
What new foods did I encounter as I grew up—and where?

•
When did I first get to choose what I ate?

•
Was food used for rewards and punishments? Was it associated with pleasure? Pain? Guilt? Rebellion?

•
Did I change what I ate when I changed my social group, took a new job, lived somewhere new?

•
What were my family's food rules—their dos and don'ts? How has that affected me?

•
And how did I feel about it all—the food, the meals, the cooking?

Your Life as a Dieter

If you have altered your eating to lose weight, gain health, get closer to heaven, or live your ethics, you can go down that memory lane.