Blessing the Hands that Feed Us (29 page)

Now It's Your Turn

If you live with others but don't eat together, establish a once-a-day or twice-a-week or even just once-a-week ritual of dining together. Say grace. Have a conversation where everyone has a chance to speak. Enjoy the stories of each person's day or week.

Yes!
magazine collected some graces from around the world.
1

Buddhist

This food is the gift

of the whole universe.

Each morsel is a sacrifice of life,

May I be worthy to receive it.

May the energy in this food

Give me the strength

To transform my unwholesome qualities

Into wholesome ones.

I am grateful for this food.

May I realize the Path of Awakening,

For the sake of all beings.

Ashanti (Ghana)

Earth, when I am about to die

I lean upon you.

Earth, while I am alive

I depend upon you.

Christian Children's Prayer

Thank you God for the world so sweet,

Thank you God for the food we eat.

Thank you God for the birds that sing,

Thank you God for everything.

Hindu (India)

Before grasping this grain,

let us consider in our minds

the reasons why

we should care for and safeguard this body.

This is my prayer, oh God:

May I be forever devoted at your feet,

offering body, mind, and wealth

to the service of truth in the world.

Mother Teresa, Catholic (Calcutta, India)

Make us worthy, Lord,

To serve those people

Throughout the world who live and die

In poverty and hunger.

Give them, through our hands

This day their daily bread,

And by our understanding love,

Give peace and joy.

Sioux

I'm an Indian.

I think about the common things like this pot.

The bubbling water comes from the rain cloud.

It represents the sky.

The fire comes from the sun,

Which warms us all, men, animals, trees.

The meat stands for the four-legged creatures,

Our animal brothers,

Who gave themselves so that we should live.

The steam is living breath.

It was water, now it goes up to the sky,

Becomes a cloud again.

These things are sacred.

Looking at that pot full of good soup,

I am thinking how, in this simple manner,

The Great Spirit takes care of me.

Jewish

Praised are You, our God, Ruler of the universe, who in goodness, with grace, kindness, and mercy, feeds the entire world. He provides bread for all creatures, for His kindness is never-ending. And because of His magnificent greatness we have never wanted for food, nor will we ever want for food, to the end of time.

For His great name, because He is God who feeds and provides for all, and who does good to all by preparing food for all of His creatures whom He created: Praised are You, God, who feeds all.

Try These Recipes

Georgie Smith's signature crop is Rockwell beans, a traditional Whidbey dry bean, so here's the right place to get her grandma Smith's recipe. And since I found some parsnips for my 50-mile diet at Nash's, I'm including Jess Dowdell's recipe for Parsnip and Aged Sheep Cheese Gratin.

Georgie's Grandma Smith's Rockwell Baked Beans

2–3 cups Rockwell beans (each cup is 2–3 servings)

1 medium-to-large onion, chopped

4–5 large garlic cloves, chopped into large chunks

1 small package cured salt pork, cut into 1-inch chunks

¹
/
₂
–1 cup brown sugar

¹
/
₄
–
¹
/
₂
cup dry mustard

Salt and pepper to taste

Soak the beans overnight.

Preheat the oven to 325°F.

Place the beans in a 2-quart oven-safe casserole dish with a lid. Add the onion, garlic, salt pork, and half of the brown sugar and dry mustard. Add enough water to cover the beans by about double their depth. Put the lid on and place in the preheated oven. Bake for 3 to 4 hours. Check every 30 minutes, stirring and adding water if the beans start to dry out. When the beans are soft and creamy, add more brown sugar, dry mustard, salt, and pepper as desired. Take the lid off and cook an additional 15 minutes to caramelize the top and cook off any excess water.

Jess's Parsnip and Aged Sheep Cheese Gratin

8–10 parsnips, sliced about
1
/
8
inch thick

3 cups goat's milk

1 cup cow's heavy cream

1 cup vegetable stock

4 teaspoons whole-grain mustard

1 cup grated aged sheep cheese (I love Glendale Shepherd's Brebis cheese)

Parboil the parsnips for 3 minutes, then rinse in cold water to cool them down quickly.

In a bowl combine the goat's milk, cow's cream, vegetable stock, mustard, and
1
/
2
cup of the grated cheese.

Oil the bottom of a 13-inch roasting pan. Lay down one layer of the parsnips, drizzle with the milk mixture, and repeat this process until you have finished all the parsnips. Cover with the remaining milk mixture, then cover the pan with foil and bake at 350°F for an hour. Top the gratin with the rest of the cheese and bake uncovered for 10 more minutes, just to melt the cheese.

You can add so much to this one little dish—grated carrots, mustard greens, garlic, leeks, onions, and more or less cream. This is fun, so just go crazy with whatever is in season and local.

Relational Eating

R
elational eating was not why I began the 10-mile diet. My reasons were partly sassy (sustainability as extreme sport) and partly serious (in the face of the triple crisis, relocalization was the only thing that made sense).

Relational eating, though, is where I landed. Literally. I came home to eat.

Relational eating crept up on me through my September days of boxes on the counter from Tricia and happening upon the Longs' meat sale on the way to Britt and Eric's wedding. It came through my conversations over contraband milk with Belinda and over a gifted goat leg with Sandra. It shone through Chris Wolfe's eyes as she recounted the local origins of every morsel on our plates in Bellingham, and it came up through my feet in my backyard.

After my first postchallenge bite of toast, still slathered with my hand-churned butter, I walked back into the land of anywhere eating—the land of hard cheeses and nuts and chocolate—but I brought my 10-mile foods along with me. They were all keepers. Anywhere eating was no longer the reward for being a good girl for a month. It had become how I sourced foods I couldn't find closer to home.

I looked at my experience of local food and recognized that it had indeed shifted from commerce to relationship, from weighing and measuring to immeasurables like belonging and love. It wasn't about better “food.” It was about a better relationship with food and all the hands that feed me: the farmers and fields that had nourished me, the daily interactions that now were part of my “sustenance.” My food, like my grocery store and my movie theater, now had a name tag rather than a bar code.

Throughout October I kept on eating Skymeadow eggs and drinking Elsie's milk. I was still picking greens from my garden and had signed up for Molly Peterson's season-extender CSA, so root crops and greens and squash were still pouring into my fridge and pantry every week. My freezer was still full of Long Family beef and some Tobey chicken. I'd stocked up on Georgie Smith's beans and Georgina Silby's biodynamically grown barley. I had my own and Georgie's and Tricia's squash on top of my cupboards, displayed like family heirlooms. I had jars of applesauce gleaned from a number of island trees, and jars of Belinda's tough old birds. Fifty percent within fifty miles in February now seemed like a piece of cake . . . which I might also have since I had Lauren's emmer and honey from Island Apiaries.

See what I mean? My food had gone from industrial to intimate—but there were even more transformations beyond the provenance of my food:

•
My relationship with my body shifted. Instead of it being a possession I judged, adorned, displayed, fed, and used as I liked, I saw it now as a living, breathing part of a living landscape. When I take three deep breaths to start meditation, I am not just relaxing my body, I am filling my lungs and belly with “here.” Here receives my feet as I walk.

•
My relationship with food has shifted. Instead of yo-yoing between gluttony and “dieting,” I actually enjoy food. It's the relational part that made the difference. I get intimacy and nourishment now, not just flavor and . . . OMG, calories. The word
diet
has come to mean what one eats “here”—just as people have done for centuries.

•
My relationship with my community has shifted. I had no idea how much of a visitor I was, even owning a home. I had no real stake in the place—in the people or nature. Through local eating, I actually came home.

•
My relationship with cooking has shifted. From someone with an adequate repertoire of dishes I liked, I have become a cook with the growing ability to “feel” what I might do with this root or leaf or fruit or muscle right in front of me, and how I might honor its qualities by cooking it well.

•
My relationship with entitlement even changed. The unconscious privilege afforded me by my class, education, and experiences has switched to a humble awareness that whoever my ego imagines I am, the reality is that I live by the grace of what lives around me.

•
Finally, my relationship with activism changed. I'm no longer fueled by an underlying terror at what my species is making of this world and am motivated now by a real sense that our lives can truly be a blessing for the earth.

All of this is bundled in the term “relational eating.”

The Web of Eating

Relational eating encompasses the whole shift from eating as a private affair from a vast continuous smorgasbord heaped high by the largely invisible industrial food system to eating in a living food system where food is precious because I know the farmers, the farms, the farm animals, the fruits and foraging spots, and the vicissitudes of the seasons. Relational eating involves my heart and soul, not just my mouth, because I now live somewhere, not just anywhere.

When I was a kid I was presented with a puzzling question: “Do you eat to live or live to eat?” I didn't know the answer, but wanted to get it right. If I eat to live, that denies all the pleasures of eating—the tastes of oatmeal for breakfast and chopped meat sandwiches for lunch and roast beef for supper, the warmth of dinner with my family, Almond Joys. But if I live to eat, that means I'm all about food, and that could lead to finger pointing to my size. I was stumped.

I couldn't see—until my 10-mile diet—that the question presumed I had no relationship with the food I eat—that I was an eater without any context. Relational eating says we never eat out of context. We always eat food from somewhere, always make food choices in the context of history and culture, climate and geography. Even if we are blissfully or woefully unaware of the fact, food doesn't just appear in a replicator on the
Starship
Enterprise
.

I now want to go back to the kids who stumped me and say with a bit of my own gotcha, “You've got it wrong. I love what I eat. And who grows it. I love to feed people. I love being alive. Here.”

No one lives outside the web of life. Plants and animals gave their lives so that we might live. Farmers or hunters or ranchers or foragers harvested this food for us, digging or picking or slaughtering or felling. The food may have traveled only a few feet or halfway around the world, with one hand or many hands touching or lifting or sifting or sorting or wrapping or washing it. We chew and savor and soon enough this life is in us, nourishing our bodies, feeding the billions of bacteria in our digestive tract.

Relational eating heals this illusion of isolation from “the hands that feed us” and shows us how deeply we belong to one another.

Belonging

I remember my first experience of belonging here on Whidbey. I was fairly reclusive in the months after I moved into my over-the-garage apartment in March 2005, where I continued my recovery from cancer as I relished that return to anonymity after years in the public eye. Summer came and went, bringing the usual tide of tourists that subsides after Labor Day. In October, the cashier at the Star Store said, as she rang me up, “You left your gloves here last time.” I was enough a part of here that when she found my gloves, she knew they were mine and held on to them until I came in again.

Growing up I learned that belonging meant beholden. It meant others owned me and had control over my choices. Here, though, I've slowly relaxed and learned that belonging doesn't have to mean kowtowing. It doesn't mean conformity, putting on a uniform, and getting stripped of your personality, like belonging to the army. It means that even though we may be as different as a hand and a heart, we belong to the same body—in fact, we help determine what that body is. There are limits to appropriate behavior, but they apply to all of us. If we are here and we don't willfully make life tough for one another, we belong.

This is the Goldilocks quality to belonging. To belong you can't be too big for your britches or too much of a shrinking violet. You need to be “just right.” In anonymous eating, you can gorge or starve, and who cares? You can buy anything you want, and who's watching, especially if you buy your food at a drive-through? You can be bombastic or a wimp, and you're just part of the daily din of life. Not on my island, or in almost any close-knit community. The more woven into this place I've become, the more I see that my choices matter, for better or worse. I see how others feed my life, and how I also feed them.

Although I now belong here, this community doesn't own me. I'm free to close my door, to live as I wish, to come and go and be a “no-account,” not accountable to anyone I don't choose to give that power. We move together organically, sometimes with close coordination, most often in a sort of friendly dance, our faces known to one another.

Several years ago a carpenter fell off a ladder, ending up paralyzed. A year after that an old community member who'd left years before moved home to die. More recently a tree fell on a car, killing a young child instantly. In all these cases, and many more, the community responded as a whole, yet with respect—giving time, money, benefit performances, auctions, and hot dishes. In a minor way, I've had ups and downs here, romances and breakups, that the community watched from an appropriate distance, neither judging nor meddling, reabsorbing me when the pain had passed. You could say this is what a good church does, but if you aren't part of the church you aren't always part of the circle of care. Here the island is a bit of a church itself. It has a spirit. It has a soul. If you “be” here “long,” it takes you as one of its own.

Good Cheer

We have several community organizations that express that spirit. One is Good Cheer Food Bank. South Whidbey's first community charity started as a little food pantry in 1962. Approximately 20 percent of the families on the island use their services now, since the recession, but Good Cheer's mission isn't just a hunger-free community. It is to involve the community as volunteers, donors, and recipients. In other words, we are all part of a system that gives and gets and gives and gets until it's neither giving nor getting but community. Good Cheer raises money the normal way—fund-raising, begging, cajoling, etc.—but also through running three thrift stores “staffed” by 16 paid and 470 volunteer employees. Want to give back to the community? Volunteer at Good Cheer. Want to feel useful? Do the same. Want to end hunger, meet people, get out of the house, preview the merchandise as it comes through the door as donations? Good Cheer will “gainfully” employ you in serving.

The Good Cheer Food Bank used to be in the back room of their downtown Langley thrift store. Those in need, though, had to run the gauntlet of shoppers to get their week's food—an unnecessary embarrassment. Good Cheer raised a ton of money, bought the old Masonic Temple on a hill at a major crossroads, and converted it into a food distribution and merchandise-processing center. No more standard bags or boxes of standard food presented without choice. It looks like a grocery store, except that people pay with points rather than dollars. They have worked out a unique points system so that fresh produce and dairy are cheap and junk food is dear—just the opposite of the industrial system. Every person who needs food gets seventy points a month, with ten more points per additional family member. A ten-pound bag of potatoes is three points. So is a small box of instant mashed potatoes. A can of baked beans is three points, same as a two-pound bag of beans. Angel food cake mix is five points and limited to one per visit. A big bunch of kale or head of broccoli is one point. The points themselves make a point—healthy eating. Of course, if you buy dry beans or whole potatoes, you have to know how to cook. Good Cheer has cooking classes to teach people how to use the healthy ingredients. The crowning glory, though, is the .4-acre organic garden. Cary Peterson, a masterful gardener and Buddhist practitioner, organized hundreds of volunteers to build the garden. Dozens tend it, harvesting five thousand pounds of food a year. To provide fresh food for the table all year, Good Cheer now contracts with a young farming couple for winter vegetables.

Good Cheer has other sources of fresh food as well. The Gleeful Gleaners, who formed several years ago at a Transition Whidbey potluck, now add to the mountains of summer fruit, as does the Langley Middle School garden, The Whidbey Institute (a retreat center) garden, and the Greenbank Farm Training Center (more on that in the next chapter on my 50/50 diet). Farmers, gardeners, farmers' market vendors, egg ranchers, cattlemen, and fishermen often donate their surplus to the food bank as well.

This isn't instead of government programs. The food bank takes advantage of Northwest Harvest and Food Lifeline to purchase industrial food. They buy from Costco, get donations during food drives, and have couponing down to a science. But wherever the food comes from, the basic care that attaches to it is the same. Good Cheer is the essence of eating as belonging. Because you belong here, you will always have food.