From Dirt to Digestion

My plan to start writing a food research blog has failed. When I came up with the idea, I was a week out from seeing Michael Pollan speak at Benaroya Hall and had some very lofty ideas about what I wanted to work on. Unfortunately, I’m just not in the place I need to be right now to write the kind of blog I was dreaming of. One day, the research bug will hit me so hard it will knock me into a forgotten set of Encyclopedia Britannica, but for now, let’s just say that my lofty ideals regarding food still hold true and that I want to share them with you.

I’ve been experiencing a measure of pride lately as we dig up fresh garden beds, shop for edible seed starts and start some of our own. It’s exciting to put a plant in the ground and watch it grow; it’s more exciting to put a plant in the ground knowing that it will grow into something I can eat. Food is an amazing thing to me and I honestly can’t find much in life that’s more exciting than putting a seed in the dirt and giving it some water, watching it get bigger daily and eventually turn into something I can eat, but that’s not where the fun stops at all! The real blast for me is carrying that thing I miraculously created out of dirt, water and sunlight into the kitchen and finding the best way to eat it – that is, of course, if it gets that far. Untold pounds of produce have passed through my hands over the decades, never to even see a kitchen before I’d consumed them. From dirt to digestion in a matter of moments; you simply can’t get more flavorful, nutritious food than that.

I was never a kid who had to be told to eat my veggies unless it was zucchini which, to be fair, my mother seemed to think was acceptable in boiled form. Between my parents’ house and the family farm, I was rarely out of arm’s reach of a fresh piece of fruit just fallen from the tree, a vegetable ready for plucking off its vine, an edible flower or a pleasantly munchable herb. In my family, a walk through the yard was the best way to get an afternoon snack, and dinner often had a carbon footprint of about 100 yards – and that only because we kept our meat chickens and turkeys up the hill.

Thinking back on this childhood in Eden (and how little I really appreciated it at the time), I recognize several things. For one, I was healthier. Working in the gardens and snacking off the plants around me as I went was just plain healthier than sitting on my ass in a windowless office eating microwaved leftovers of last night’s dinner. Also, I was far more in tune with the seasons. When you’re working the land, you KNOW when winter is coming, and spring is the most exciting time of the year. The plants and the sky tell you when it is. Living in an apartment in the city and working in the previously mentioned windowless office, it’s quite easy to miss the early signs of weather change and not fully realize what season it is until it’s in full swing. I also cannot deny that my food tasted better. When I buy conventionally raised eggs from the grocery store and think about the ones we used to raise, I’m repulsed by the colorless, runny slime I see before me and want to call the whole dish off. Yolks should be bright, sunshine yellow and whites should be almost like gel; able to hold up on their own, not running all over the pan.

It has recently been declared that we have entered an entirely new historic epoch – one not named after geology or any natural Earth processes that might be going on. The new epoch we are in has been dubbed Anthropocene, so named for the influence humans have had and continue to exert on the natural world. In this epoch, people live in cities and gather food that has been manufactured by machines and is presented in boxes and bags inside buildings illuminated with artificial light; gone is the stark reality of hunting and foraging or going without. A very small percentage of the offerings in a grocery store actually resemble the kind of food I ate growing up. For many, food is now their closest connection to nature, and even that is several steps removed from natural processes.

The Anthropocene human doesn’t even have to know what season it is because the same foods are available to them year-round. There are no seasonal limitations in the modern industrial food chain (there is also very little real food, but that’s an entry for another day). The modern human has a job to do and doesn’t have time to feed him/herself, and often not the skills to do it, either. A great many modern humans in America do not know how to find food in the wild, grow food in their backyards, or cook food in their kitchens.

We live in an epoch of urban sprawl where food is valued not for its flavor or its origins and creation, but for its speed, convenience and cost. Food is the only thing we buy where we almost always think cheaper is better, regardless of how it was made. Take, for instance, two hamburgers: One is made from locally raised cows that lived outside and ate grass, has cheese that came from a local dairy, tomatoes, lettuce and onions from the garden down the street, homemade condiments and fresh, homemade buns, but costs about $12 with a side of locally grown French fried potatoes. The other hamburger was raised in a CAFO on corn and always had a roof over its head, has a plasticky slice of pasteurized, processed, American cheese food product on it, doesn’t have a tomato because of a cold snap in California, lettuce and onions of unknown origin, commercially made condiments and an enriched bun with no flavor that’s going to turn to gluey paste as soon as you bite into it, but only costs $6 with a side of genetically engineered French fried Russet potatoes. In a survey of 100 members of the general public that I conducted back in college (Fall, 2004), 67 respondents would have gone for the latter just because it was cheaper and $6 was about the value they put on a hamburger. Of those 67, only 23 admitted that the first burger would have tasted better, but still didn’t want to spend the money on it.

In other countries, food is part of the culture. The French think they taught the rest of us how to cook. The Chinese never greet a guest without offering them something to eat and drink. Major holidays and festivals will send people to work in their kitchens for days and even weeks at a time in preparation of the festivities. In America, people hire chain grocery stores to create their side dishes for them because they only have time (or often the skills) to handle more than one dish themselves. In America, food is something you grab on your way to the next thing, and this baffles my mind because we still mostly judge food by its flavor – do I enjoy eating this? – but we’ve also fallen victim to Nutritionalism, wherein we judge our food purely by what we know about it scientifically (completely forgetting that this is constantly changing).

Maybe I’ve been spoiled. Maybe growing up the way I did put some high and mighty ideas in my head about what food should be. But I see the modern industrial food chain making people sick and creating ignorance; there are people who don’t know that milk comes from cows or that chicken meat actually comes from those funny-looking flightless birds, and they can’t identify fresh produce just by looking at it because it’s not available in the urban centers in which they live. Yes! In the United States of America, the land of plenty where everything is over-produced, there are places where people do not have access to unprocessed, perishable food. But what I don’t understand at all is why more people aren’t interested in their food before it hits their mouths.

I have felt such great pride lately as I recreate my kitchen and my life to cut down on waste and grow and preserve as much of my own food as possible. I feel grateful for the ability to wean myself even further off the industrial food chain as I learn quick and easy bread recipes, how to make yogurt and collect wild yeast. My goal is to stop buying anything I can make myself, and as a result, I’m learning so much awesome stuff and cutting down on waste and consumption (not to mention cutting my grocery bill in half!) as I go. I wish that I could imbue those around me with this same curiosity and passion and inspire them to excitement about something as simple and complex as a tomato. We spend so much of our lives eating – in fact, we die if we don’t – and good food is such a pleasurable experience that skipping to the meal without truly understanding and taking part in the process of getting it to the table seems like a disrespectful failure and a slap in the face of what it means to be human.