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.

Eat to Live/Live to Eat

Do you eat to live, or do you live to eat? It’s a philosophical question that often requires some thought due simply to the fact that the respondent probably hasn’t previously contemplated it. On the surface, it’s a question of whether a person loves and savors food or whether they see it as a means of survival. The person who lives to eat is much more likely to see food as a philosophic and political focus; the person who eats to live likely eats only to sustain themselves, doesn’t particularly care what they eat, and does not see (or perhaps simply does not care about) the philosophic and political aspects of food. Notoriously, most of America eats to live and doesn’t even understand the difference.

My own relationship with food, now thirty-three years long, is varied and, as I’ve come to realize in recent years, somewhat unique. First off, I grew up with a stay-at-home mother who managed the household, raised the kids, did all the cooking, cleaning and laundry and was, for the most part, pretty damn good at it. When I was little, we lived in New England and I remember having hot dogs and Burger King for dinner, but there was also homemade macaroni and cheese and fried spam sandwiches. Not to say that fruits and vegetables and homemade dinners were uncommon or rare; they absolutely were not. But all of our food came from the grocery store, and much of it came from bags, boxes and cans. But things changed drastically after we moved to Oregon.

In Oregon, my grandmother and uncles were running a small commercial organic vegetable farm and fruit orchard on five acres of land. They had chickens for eggs, specialized in gourmet lettuces (before such things were popular), had somewhere near 30 different types of fruit (and a couple of almond trees), and sold their goods to local gourmet restaurants, of which there are many in southern Oregon. Their outlook on food was quite a bit different than my mother’s; they ate food they grew themselves, they bought plain yogurt and added their own fruit to it, they didn’t eat hot dogs because they were too busy barbecuing turkeys and salmon in herbal rubs they grew themselves. While we were piling Mom’s uber-gooey mac and cheese onto our plates at the kitchen table, my uncles were dining on pheasant and salads separated from the ground not thirty minutes before, garnished with edible flowers (another specialty of the farm’s) and served in the open air under the trees of the orchard with a locally brewed beer.

When we moved to Oregon and joined in on the turkey barbecues, my mother’s cooking style changed drastically. Fewer things came from boxes and cans and most of our vegetables came from our own backyard. For a few years, she and a friend even raised their own chickens (and turkeys, a few times); by the end of the summer, they would each have fifty chickens apiece in the deep freeze to help get our families through the winter. She started using herbs instead of breading, which I did not at first appreciate. We grew so much zucchini that I grew to thoroughly loathe it (something that took me 10 years of adulthood to finally get past). Everything we grew was organic because pesticides, at the very least, get into the ground water. You can rinse your veggies off, but you can’t rinse your water off was the thinking that seemed to support the practice.

My family weren’t food politicians in any sense; when they needed a vegetable they didn’t have or couldn’t grow, they bought it and it was rarely organic, locally grown or necessarily in season. My parents grew vegetables and raised chickens because it was cheaper than buying them and we were dirt poor. While my parents had found a way to save money, my uncles had found a way to make money. They hired me to work on the farm during the summers, helping to pick and wash the orders, mow the orchard, pick fruit (blackberry duty was much dreaded) and be the go-for person when items needed to be retrieved. I probably wasn’t needed, but my uncles did me a huge favor that I admittedly didn’t recognize at the time by paying me to help.

I came to deeply appreciate good food during this period and in my first years of adulthood, when I neither cooked nor knew how to cook, I always thought nostalgically of my family’s cooking. Though my mother had threatened me with cooking lessons, I had always made sure to avoid them as I had no desire to be stuck in the kitchen with my mother telling me what to do. So of course, when I moved out had absolutely no idea how to cook for myself and began to live off things like pasta and cheese (not even macaroni and cheese – this was just pasta with grated cheese sprinkled over the top), Subway sandwiches, ramen, rice-a-roni and Kraft macaroni and cheese. Eventually (and inevitably), I got sick of this diet and was too poor to continue buying Subway almost daily. I started making bread because of strong memories of my mother and grandmother making bread on a regular basis when I was a kid. I also knew I could get a lot more loaves out of a bag of flour than I could out of a bag of bread. I started using Pasta-roni mixes and adding things like chicken and fresh mushrooms to them. After a while, I started figuring that I could make the same things without mixes, so I started experimenting with cooking from scratch.

My early experiments, though almost always delicious and accompanied by fresh salads or steamed vegetables, weren’t exactly healthy; I’m amazed that there are survivors of my twice-baked potato and buttered steak dinners. But over time, I slowly came back to the food principals with which I had grown up on the farm: Eat fresh, eat healthy, eat well. This captivated me. In order to do this right, I realized that following recipes wasn’t going to cut it; I needed to learn about food, I needed to know how food worked, where it came from and what it was for. As an anthropology student in college, I initially intended to study ethnomusicology. But I quickly found myself getting more interested in the food served at the festivals and rituals I studied than in the music being played at them. At the same time, I found myself avoiding homework by playing endlessly in the kitchen. Within a couple of terms, I changed my focus and instead studied American food culture. I learned about fast food and slow food, I read Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, and MFK Fisher. I read my cookbooks like they were NY Times bestsellers and absorbed the Food Channel’s eye candy (including Giada De Laurentiis) like a sponge.

I became a person who lives to eat; I view food holistically as a philosophy and way of life. Some things about our food are so fundamentally human (bread making!) and others are so completely wrong (GMO Round-Up Ready Corn by Monsanto), but I think many are just forgotten by the average American practitioner of nutritionism (a paradigm that assumes that it is the scientifically identified nutrients in foods that determine the value of individual food stuffs in the diet). I don’t believe that vegetables come in bags, that everything we eat needs to be laced with corn and sodium or that feed lot beef is healthy and good for you. I firmly believe that until recently, humans coexisted with the Earth symbiotically and that Americans are now eating ourselves – and the planet – to death.

After close to a decade of studying food, food culture and food politics, I hope that I might be able to impart some small amount of wisdom regarding our relationship with food. In the coming weeks, I intend to post a series of blogs on food, our relationship with it, and its current place in the world through topics such as corn, fast food, nutritionism, GMO’s, and the cultural contexts of eating. I hope for these to be a catalyst for discussion and food for thought; maybe you’ll even stop eating to live, and start living to eat.