It Runs in the Family (14 page)

I grew up eating compost. That sounds virtuous—if not reminiscent of back-to-the-land advocates Helen and Scott Nearing—it is actually a lot more truthful to say that I grew up eating garbage. Yes, I found half-rotten potatoes and grapefruit under the train tracks and brought them home to make into casseroles and salads.

About half an hour’s drive from Jonah House was Jessup Market, a wholesale fruit and vegetable market, where food came in on trains from fields across America and ships across the sea before leaving on trucks bound for supermarkets. A lot of it spoiled and got thrown out along the way. Boxes broke and spilled down onto the train tracks or rolled under tractor trailers. There were dumpsters full of food everywhere.

Sometimes as many as a dozen people lived in our house and everyone painted houses for a living. There was not a lot of money. But there was a lot of ingenuity, energy, and willingness to get dirty hands. For years, we went to Jessup every Tuesday morning before the sun came up. We got there early to beat the pig farmers, who also had permission to take the garbage and the leftovers.

My brother and I would join the crew in the summer and on school vacations. Wearing old clothes and too-large gloves that smelled like sawdust and old oranges, we dug around in dumpsters, scrambled under silent trains, and walked miles along the terminal collecting the smushed, the half-rotten, the excess, the unripe, and the overripe.

Sometimes, Dad let one of us drive the truck along the rows or share his honey-sweetened coffee. Other times, we got to ride home in the back of the pickup, perched atop piles of boxes. The produce and fruit was not just for us. A line of neighbors—their numbers curling around our block—waited for the truck each week. Folks would go along the line of boxes we placed on the ground, taking fruits and vegetables from each one. How much people took home depended on what we had and how long the line was. Dad would eyeball the five crates of apples and the seventy people and figure “four apples each.” If we had a lot of something, people could take a lot. If we had a little, everyone would just get a little taste. We’d set some boxes of food aside for our community at the beginning and then take the leftovers too.

That was just the beginning of our work. After saying goodbye to all the people, breaking down all the cardboard boxes and crates, and sweeping up the detritus and mush, we’d go inside to process our food haul. Some folks worked on a massive fruit salad and an equally massive green salad, while others picked through greens, pulling off old and yellow leaves before parboiling the remainders for freezing.

The work happened around our dining room table. There were bowls of vinegar-laced cold water for washing off the dirt and grime, layers of dish towels for drying vegetables, an array of repurposed plastic bags for repacking the good stuff, and huge piles of rotten bits that had been carefully carved off the good food. Sometimes dinner preparation started right there, with someone trying to figure out how to combine green beans, artichokes, and red peppers into a meal for ten.

It required a lot of creativity and some subterfuge to get through all the produce and fruit before it rotted away. Dad was always trying to hide grapefruit in the Sunday morning pancakes. It was also tough to find places to store all that food. Once, someone put a case of half-frozen potatoes under a table in the living room and promptly forgot about it. It defrosted through the floor boards and dripped rotten potato juice onto my sister’s head, as she and I slept in the room we shared in the basement. It was weeks before the stench dissipated.

But even with these somewhat gross setbacks, our sometimes bursting, always bustling household lived on garbage. This was long before dumpster diving was a T-shirt motif and freegans were on Twitter.

My family doesn’t dumpster dive today, but we haunt the “get rid of it” shelves in the produce aisle, where you can buy perfectly ripe avocados, somewhat bruised (but delicious) bananas, piles of loose grapes, somewhat split tomatoes, slightly spotty apples and plenty of other fruits and vegetables for dimes on the dollar. We don’t mind peeling away a brown spot here and there because it all enters the cycle of life in our robust and fecund compost pile in the backyard.

Throughout the growing season, we also have a community garden plot a few blocks from our house, where we grow lettuce, greens, tomatoes, peppers and herbs. This spring Seamus and I planted peas, lettuce, and cilantro in our three-by-six raised bed. At the end of that project, his hands were filthy and new freckles covered his cheeks. I can’t wait until the pea vines break through the soil. Then it will only be a month or so before he can pull snap peas off the vines and pop them right into his mouth. Last summer, his first strawberries were ones we grew ourselves and we’d come home from the garden every day covered in bright red berry juice.

In thinking about how and where we get food for our family, I was shocked to hear recently that about 40 percent of the food in the United States today goes uneaten. We throw out $165 billion worth of food each year. There is an insidious violence embedded in that percentage and that dollar amount—a blunt disregard for the labor of others and a callous devaluing of the gifts of the Earth. Why? Perhaps because it is hard to remember the people who grow our food and the land that nourishes our bodies beneath the fluorescent lights and piped-in Muzak of the grocery store. It gets lost amid the big displays and the elaborate packaging. Take breakfast cereal for instance—you pay more for the box and the cartoon character on the front of it than you do for the grain you pour in your bowl.

But when you work hard to grow, harvest, and prepare food—just like when you work hard to scavenge, distribute, and prepare it—you are a lot less likely to scrape it into the compost pail (or the trash can) at the end of dinner.

OUR JOB AS PARENTS

^“
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www. Don’t do it, Patrick. Don’t do it. Dogs pee here.” A woman was giving my husband a hard time because our eight-month-old son had just dropped his banana on the ground. Patrick picked it up, licked it, and was handing it back to our boy. Seamus scarfed it down. A minute or two later, he was grunting for more.

“If we threw away everything this child dropped,” I said with just a hint of heat, “he would be skin and bones. We do this kind of thing all the time. As you can see, he is the picture of health.”

Seamus is fat and happy, alert and engaged, and he has seven teeth. Going anywhere with this kid requires constant chitchat with admiring strangers. I don’t want my kid to eat dog pee, for sure. But I also don’t want him to live in a hermetic bubble of germophobia. I do not wipe down the carts with sanitizer at the supermarket. I do not bathe him every day—it is a twenty-minute wrestling match that I usually lose so I save it for special occasions. I do not scrub his toys every time they fall on the floor. For the most part, I just brush them off and hand them back to him. I do try to keep him from eating too much sand, dirt, grass, and leaves. But he is a curious child and encounters the world with his hands and mouth first.

He likes sitting on our lawn, which is great because he and I are in charge of the mowing with one of those push power mowers that requires constant stick removal. He also likes exploring the ground at the community garden since there are lots of wood chips and dirt to taste. Through all of this, I watch him carefully and rescue him when he runs into trouble.

But I do not freak out every time he puts something “dirty” in his mouth. I have learned from more seasoned parents that this just causes stress and makes moms and kids grumpy. I am also finding out that the more Seamus is exposed to now, the healthier he is likely to be as he gets older.

Dr. Thom McDade, who directs the Laboratory for Human Biology Research at Northwestern University, found that children who were exposed to more animal feces and had more cases of diarrhea before the age of two had less incidence of inflammation in the body as they grew into adulthood. These inflammations have been linked to chronic adulthood problems like heart disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s. As Dr. McDade says, “Microbial exposures early in life may be important…to keep inflammation in check in adulthood.” It is called the hygiene hypothesis and it is gathering credence amongst health professionals.

In a recent Swedish study, researchers found that early exposure to parents’ saliva may help stimulate a baby’s immune system, and that could mean a lower risk of developing eczema, asthma, and sensitivities to certain allergens. They looked at parents who lick the baby’s pacifier to clean it rather than washing it with soap or sanitizing it.

Of course I want to protect Seamus from what is dirty. But I am not all that concerned about the spectral dog pee lurking on the ground where bananas and toys may fall. I want to protect him from prejudice, from racism, from hatred—from the real dirty underside of life. I once listened to a segment of
Snap Judgment
on NPR where the host, Glynn Washington, described moving with his family from Detroit to rural Michigan when he was a little boy. On the first day of school, he got on the bus. A hush fell over the other kids: “See, we were the only black folk for miles around.”

He tried to sit in the first open seat, but a “tow-headed boy spit on the seat, right where I was going to sit. I kept walking down the aisle and every open seat had spit on it, daring me to sit in it.” He finally found a seat at the very back, next to a little girl who silently moved her backpack to the floor to make room for him. They sat together every day after that.

He kept sitting in the back with the girl, Mary Jo. One day she got on the bus smelling awful. It was winter and her family’s pipes had frozen, so she could not shower after doing her farm chores. She masked her unwashed body smell with perfume and when she got on the bus, the whole bus erupted, screaming about how bad she stank. Washington called it the odor of “rotting flowers pressed on top of barn filth.”

At first, he wished that she would sit somewhere else. Then he was ashamed, recalling how she had been the only one who accepted him at all. He moved his backpack to the floor and Mary Jo sat down reeking of perfume and chores. They talked for the first time that day—chatting all the way to school. I cried into the sink thinking about how mean kids can be. I also cried into the sink thinking about how kids can rise above it all and be so kind and generous.

Where would Seamus have fit into this story? Would he be a spitter? Would he rail against his classmates’ prejudice and racism, calling them out, calling them to something better? Or would he be the one to silently move his backpack to the floor? Would he be compassionate and accepting? Would he be brave and principled?

Glynn Washington is probably in his mid-forties now. Racism, sexism, homophobia, violence, and good old-fashioned ignorance have not disappeared from the playgrounds and yellow buses of the United States. Isn’t protecting our kids from the disease of hate and violence more important than sanitizing their toys?

In middle school, I volunteered in the school library. One day, I stayed after school to shelve some books. The whole building was quiet, but it was not empty. On my way to the bathroom, I was stopped by an older girl. Like most of the kids I grew up with, she was black. I didn’t know her. But she grabbed my stocking cap off my head and spit in it. I had not done anything to make her mad. My whiteness might have provoked her. Maybe it was easier for her to be mad at me than at something big and scary and wrong in her own life. I have no idea. But she was mad. So she hocked a loogie in my hat and then shoved it in my face. I resisted the urge to cry. I went back to the library, collected my things, and went home. She was so angry. She was itching for a fight. What did she do when I took that away from her? Did she find someone else? I went home and told my parents. They gave me sympathy, compassion, and a lesson in the corrosive effects of rage and powerlessness. They had never met this girl and did not know her particular circumstances, but they probably did a really good job of explaining where her hatred and rage came from and reassured me that not reacting—not lashing back at her in anger and hurt—was a strong and nonviolent reaction.

“To those to whom much has been given,” my dad intoned, “much will be expected. You are so blessed. You are loved and cared for and you live in a good, safe home. And you need to be generous with others who don’t have all those benefits. In this instance, what is expected of you is compassion. You can take what she has to dish out. It does not have to hurt you.”

Our dad was a pacifist, but a big burly one with five older brothers and a handful of medals from the killing fields of France during WWII. No one was stealing his bike or spitting in his hat. Our mom is a pacifist too. Of course she would turn the other cheek, but you would have to be nuts to make her do it. I spent the next few weeks skittering through the halls and peering around corners, hoping that the girl had gotten herself expelled. I did not suffer any long-term psychological scarring from the loogie in my hat. I did stop wearing hats so much. I had pretty much forgotten about this entire episode until I watched
Bully
, the 2011 documentary film that follows five kids who are routinely bullied. Two of the kids committed suicide after suffering years of abuse at the hands of their peers. When the film was first released, it was rated R because of the terrible language that the kids used while talking to one another, meaning that those same kids could not have seen their foul mouthed selves on the big screen in the theater.