Blessing the Hands that Feed Us (5 page)

This is just the beginning of your engagement as a relational eater—which is what I became thanks to the adventure you'll read about in the coming chapters.

Try These Recipes

Jess Dowdell, whom you will meet in chapter 7, is now proprietress of the Roaming Radish, a deli, catering, and cooking class establishment. Passionate about local food and cooking, she can rattle off where she gets every ingredient, and who grew the greens or raised the lamb or roasted the coffee. When I wanted to include recipes in this book, I turned to her to know which chefs and farmers to approach and where to place each recipe in the narrative. Since I began this 10-mile diet journey at a potluck, here are two recipes from Jess for picnic-type foods.

Local Bean Hummus

2 cups dried Rockwell beans

¹
/
₂
cup chopped parsley

1 jalapeño pepper, minced

1 tablespoon honey

¹
/
₄
cup minced garlic

¹
/
₄
cup lemon juice

Salt and pepper to taste

Soak the beans for 12 hours, then cook them in a large pot over medium heat until they are soft. Drain and rinse them in cold water. When the beans are cool, transfer to a blender or food processor and blend them with the parsley, jalapeño, honey, garlic, and lemon juice. Add salt and pepper to taste. Add a little oil if needed to get a nice pureed-hummus consistency.

Bread and Butter Pickles

10 local pickling cucumbers (Patty and Loren from Quail's Run grow the best!)

1 cup salt

Slice the cucumbers to the desired size, then mix with the salt and 3 pounds of ice, cover with water, press the cucumber slices down with a weighted lid, and let sit for 3 hours. Rinse the cucumbers and set them aside.

In a large stock pot bring the following ingredients to a boil:

3 cups apple cider vinegar

3 cups sugar

¹
/
₂
cup mustard seeds

¹
/
₄
cup coriander

¹
/
₄
cup dill seed

2 tablespoons turmeric

When the sugar is dissolved, add the cucumber slices and bring the water back to a boil. As soon as it boils you are done. Pack the pickles in jars to can or let them cool and store in your fridge.

Sweet Pickle Relish

Take 2 cups of your bread and butter pickles and 1 onion and chop them together. Great on burgers!

Putting My Mouth Where My Mouth Is

H
oly (local) cow! I thought when I got home. Can I actually survive for a month just on what Tricia grows? Go meatless and fatless and sugarless for thirty days? What have I signed up for?

I'd agreed in part because the challenge was my kind of quirky, but also because I'd already signed up for the bigger game: lowering consumption here in the United States because of the damage we're doing to the earth—and our souls. Besides, I was no stranger to do-it-yourself and grow-your-own. Even though I'd gone soft since settling down, exercising my mind while my butt spread in my swivel/recline/snooze office chair, earlier in my life I'd lived one of the standard story lines of my generation: go on the road (thank you, Ken Kesey); explore spirituality (thank you, Ram Dass and Stephen Gaskin); go back to the land (thank you,
Mother Earth News
); and design a new future (thank you,
Whole Earth Catalog
).

The back-to-the-land season was in the early 1970s, right on schedule for alternative boomers. A group of friends and I lived for three years on fourteen acres in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, which is up there with Barrow, Alaska, in subzero temperatures. I went because I wanted to learn what an Ivy League education failed to teach me—how to walk on this earth like I belonged here, foraging, hunting, raising, and butchering animals and other fundamental arts of living. One of the group had bought the land sight unseen. We arrived with high ideals and a thorough lack of knowledge, only to discover that our homestead was a logged-out cranberry bog with just one acre above the water table.

We built a Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps–style corduroy (log and sand) road from the blacktop to our island of high ground, and stuck a sign at the entrance: E
GRESS
. P. T. Barnum, father of the modern traveling circus, is famous for saying “There's a sucker born every minute.” He suckered paying customers into moving through the sideshows as fast as possible by pointing them to one exotic feature after another. “This way to the tigress!” Oooooh. “This way to the Negress!” Aaaaah. Thus hooked, people would eagerly stream through the tent flap labeled T
HIS
W
AY TO THE
E
GRESS
—which means “exit”—and find themselves out in the dust again. Our land was our egress from the conventional world and into our laboratory for a new society.

Everything was novel and exciting. I had a learning field day—quite literally because we needed to carve a field out of the forest to grow a garden. We cleared a half acre of scrawny alders and lodgepole pines with a bow saw and a machete. It was barely above the water table, so we dug drainage channels with a posthole digger. Even so, what we had looked nothing like “soil.” It looked like a devastated clear-cut. We needed something akin to a plow.

Rhinelander is known for the Hodag, a mythical doglike snorting creature seen only by drunk hunters in the woods. To find our “something like a plow,” we went first to the dump (an open, shopable pit down the road), then to the
Hodag Shopper
, the local trading rag. There we found a “perfectly good, just needs a little TLC” rototiller that Joe Dominguez, one of the community members, tinkered back to life. He rolled it out to the garden like a proud mama displaying her first baby in a pram. Instead of walking behind it, he stood on the back like a Roman charioteer, sinking the tiller's tines deep into the lumps and clumps as he rode triumphantly round and round the garden—spewing soil out the rear.

That our garden flourished was a miracle. Perhaps it was beginners' luck. Maybe it was the fact that we walked the garden daily—agricultural extension agent monographs in our dirty hands—like doctors on rounds, analyzing with our big brains what was happening to our peas and carrots.

I also traipsed through the woods with a copy of
Stalking the Wild Asparagus
by Euell Gibbons. I brought home fern fiddleheads and cattails to sample for dinner. Nothing tasted like chicken. It tasted like compost itself, and I was darn glad this was a three-year
voluntary
experiment in simple living.

We found a renegade piglet in the woods, named her Piggy Sue, fed her table scraps, and scratched her ears all summer. In early winter our neighbor Farmer Gray—a furniture salesperson turned farmer—helped us shoot and butcher Piggy Sue.

Farmer Gray became our mentor and benefactor in many ways. He'd hoped his children would stay on the eighty acres he'd bought with his savings to live his own “back to the land” dream of a self-sufficient farm. Instead they'd all skedaddled to Wausau and Madison as soon as they could, and our group of passionate young oddballs became “heirs” to his knowledge about hunting, butchering, canning, freezing, growing, harvesting, and more. After Sue he helped us butcher Dr. Buck, the deer that had been eating our garden; Jane Doe, the doe a hunter shot illegally and left for the coyotes; as well as a raccoon and rabbits. We cut Sue, Jane, and Dr. Buck into chops and roasts and stored the wrapped pieces in Farmer Gray's freezer over the winter—getting a package every Sunday for dinner. The rest of the week the meat would become soups and stews and toppings for beans and rice or part of meat sauces for pasta.

Farmer Gray's wife, Pat, helped us learn to cook what we'd killed. The secrets to making all types of game edible were (1) to cut out the scent glands that snaked between the hide and flesh, and (2) mountains of chopped tomatoes and garlic.

Farther down the road were Marty and Beulah, an old Lithuanian couple who took pity on us but also liked us. On our first visit they brought a dusty bottle up from the cellar, uncorked it, poured it, and told us to try it. It tasted like fine sherry. Dandelions, they proclaimed, pleased as punch to stump us. Back down they went for another bottle, this time a deep red, uncorked it, poured it, and watched us—now quite drunk—make appreciative smacking sounds with our lips. Beets, they said, waggling their heads with pride. And so it was that I learned to make wine, which I did by the garbage-pail-ful in the woods. Beulah also taught me how to can food, which seemed like sex—wondrous and dangerous. Something could explode. Go awry. Start new life growing in your body, namely, botulism.

We would have harvested wild rice, which grew in the lakes all around, if it hadn't been the exclusive privilege of the Menominee Indians. We did buy it, though, along with fifty-pound sacks of potatoes, which, if I remember right, cost about five dollars each. We also always had a fifty-pound bag of field beans on hand, which may well have been grown in Wisconsin.

We ate plenty of that era's anywhere food too. Sacks of brown rice. Cans of tuna at three for a dollar (and still six ounces). Ketchup, though, we eventually learned to make from our own abundant tomatoes. Spaghetti. Blocks of yellow cheese. Flour for baking bread and making pancakes.

That Rhinelander experiment wasn't about 10-mile eating. It wasn't about “local” or “organic” as philosophies of life. It just happened to include lots of local food because we were bent on growing our own. We composted by feeding Piggy Sue. We enriched our soil via a load of pig manure delivered via belching tractor and jerry-rigged trailer from a half-blind pig farmer down the way, a recluse in Coke bottle glasses who spoke, if at all, in three-word sentences. The result may have been local, but the intent was survival.

Would my current experiment be much different?

Yes! In three ways:

First,
this was a partnership between an eater and a feeder. I wasn't a spring chicken anymore, and had no desire to prove my prowess as a producer. Growing all my own food was not the great adventure I wanted in my sixties. As it turned out, this eater-feeder partnership led to one of my most profound transformations. Had I grown my own I would have missed it.

Second,
I wasn't “leaving civilization.” I would be eating Tricia's food in the context of what I call my plain vanilla people box—a split-level classic—in a subdivision in a village that's a twenty-minute ferry ride from Everett, Washington, home to three nuclear-powered aircraft carriers at the Naval Station Everett. As it turned out, this was crucial to the value of the experiment, as I was showing how you can “drop in” to eating local food rather than “dropping out” to the land.

Third,
and this was a doozy, the world had changed in ways that make local food a crucial new normal rather than a quaint back-to-the-land season of a young person's life.

Back to the Land Versus Earth Day

As I was dropping out, going back to the land and within to find myself, others of my generation were dropping in to politics. While I was breaking apart assumptions and surmounting the significant challenges of living in a community and on the land, others were busting up different concrete—taking on the complacency of our upbringing and the dawning awareness that our new consumerist way of life had dark shadows: oil spills, poor air quality, pollution, and “the silent spring” of declining biodiversity thanks to pesticides, among other toxicities and injustices.

My generation's signature was a belief that we could change the world. Some of us, like me, went to the woods to live—as Thoreau exhorted—intentionally, so that when we died we would not discover we had not lived. Others went to the teach-ins on Earth Day, exhorted by Gaylord Nelson and Denis Hayes to protest the enemies of nature and protect mother earth. Back then there was still a choice between fight or flight. There was an “away.” The population was only three and a half billion. Now it has doubled. Back then humanity was living well within the ecological means of the earth. Now our ecological footprint has increased by 250 percent. We are deep in ecological debt, yet, like so many debtors, we can't seem to slow down. Now we are consuming 1.4 planets' worth of resources every year. Our carbon footprint has also doubled.

The amount of land paved over to build houses, cities, and roads has increased by 75 percent; 75 percent more forests are felled now for paper and wood; 85 percent of our fisheries have collapsed. Carbon in the atmosphere has gone from 320 parts per million to nearly 400 ppm (350 ppm, according to climate scientist James Hanson, is the upper limit to keep a stable climate).

That first Earth Day and subsequent ones passed me by as I was living story number one—retreat and create—in the woods and later in the desert in southern Arizona, without phone, running water, a well, or an appetite for politics.

In 1980 I began to reengage. In a small way, my friends and I had been on a hero's journey—a quest to find the true gold of life beyond the safe and comfortable. Through our experiences we believed we had found something true, real, and of proven value to others: our approach to money and stuff that offered freedom through practical skills, frugality, and guts and through a larger purpose, service, and creativity. We taught the first “transforming your relationship with money” seminar in our living room, then in church basements and community centers, and eventually in auditoriums holding four hundred people. In short order, the demand outpaced our abilities. Overwhelmed, we re-created the seminar as an audio and workbook course, and let it travel around the world while we stayed home.

After all those years out of the mainstream, emerging again to teach was quite heady. But my heart wasn't on fire until the end of the decade. It didn't seem enough to simply help people one at a time. I had a thirst to understand how our personal strategy for change dovetailed with the big changes afoot in the world. Then I attended the Globescope Pacific Assembly in 1989. This first U.S. conference on a new idea—sustainable development—seemed just the place for a crash course in global issues. As I listened to the lectures and workshops, a tsunami of terrifying data swept over me about the state of the world.

It was like I was handed a big, blazing “While You Were Out” slip on which were written three bullet points:

•
exponential growth

•
overshoot and collapse

•
limits to growth

These three horsemen of the environmental—civilizational, even—apocalypse are now referred to as the “triple crisis.” For me it was a triple whammy.

It's in my nature to take ideas seriously, and these three big ones went right into my gut as shock, then into my heart as overwhelm, and then into my do-it-yourself head as a passion to act. If these terms are not familiar to you, read the next three sections. If they are, you can skip them.

Exponential Growth

A benign and beneficial name for exponential growth is “the magic of compound interest.” You've seen the curves—maybe in a high school class, maybe in college, maybe in a sit-down with your financial planner. Let's say your wealthy aunt gives you $10,000 as a high school graduation present and you put it in the bank at 5 percent interest. In ten years with straight 5 percent interest you'd have $10,500. But if the interest was compounded (each month you get 5 percent on a new amount—capital plus accumulated interest), you'd have $16,500. By year 14 you would have doubled your money; the rule of thumb is that 7 percent interest doubles your base amount in ten years. In year 50 you'd have $122,000. Wait one more year and you'd earn another $5,400 in interest. This accelerating annual return is called “exponential growth.”