Gathering

The raspberry canes grew so lush from the abundant rains this spring, I had to reach deep into them and pick the berries by touch.  When you grow and harvest a crop year after year, you get to know it pretty well, but it struck me as I picked, the ripe fruit was the texture of soft lips, and the berries as sweet as a kiss.  Well, maybe that image seems a bit strange, but for me, picking berries under the spring sun in my own back yard became a poetic experience.  I love the surprises that happen when I am in the garden, be it poetry or watching the Black Swallowtail butterfly caterpillars munching on fennel plants, then seeing the first butterfly freshly emerged from it’s chrysalis a week later.  Or seeing the soil pushed up in little hills knowing it is potato tubers doing the pushing and being glad I don’t have moles or gophers!



Serviceberry



I find a garden a magical place, but a garden with food growing in it makes my soul sing.  The plants are giving me (I prefer asking instead of taking) another season of food.  Each year the experience is different.  This year I will refer to as the lettuce year.  I have never had so much beautiful lettuce any other year.  Last year my serviceberry tree gave me so many berries I was able to make jam.  If you’ve never had serviceberries, they are like tiny blueberries but the small seeds taste like almond.  Pretty amazing.  Two years ago it was the cilantro year, I didn’t have to buy a bit because the self-seeded plants were everywhere in my garden.  This year, not one plant.  What happened?  I can probably come up with some good reasons, but instead, I am just accepting that the gifts that my garden offers are just that.  Gifts.  I’m not looking for why, or how to make it better.  I’m going to take advantage of what comes my way and give thanks.

If you don’t grow your food you have to gather it at a market of some type.  Have you noticed that some things taste better at certain times of the year and are less expensive?  This is another way of learning how to take advantage of gifts.  Locally grown produce can sometimes cost more because it is more labor intensive, but a farmer wants to sell what he has grown.  At certain times of the year some fruit and veggies will be more abundant and therefore cost less.  Take advantage of these gifts.  Stock up, freeze or can the windfalls.  Even better, pick your own.  What better way to get closer to nature, to smell the soil, feel the sun that miraculously runs plant engines producing the energy that enables a strawberry plant or an apple tree to produce food we eat.  I love to tick off the season by harvest times, strawberries: late May to early June, blueberries: July, all the way through the last apples in October.

Then there is the washing, sorting, canning, and freezing.  Touching and smelling the ripe fruit and vegetables awakens all my senses.  Once, after harvesting rhubarb, I heard the tension of the water filled stems snapping as they waited on the cutting board for my knife.  Another time I was struck by the sunset colors of the peaches I was peeling.  Plus, I find such a sense of accomplishment in rows of jars filled with sparkling colors of jam, peaches, tomatoes, sauerkraut.  By making my own jam I can lower the amount of sugar making it healthier and with less calories. The last few years I’ve been dehydrating berries.  My favorites are blueberries.  A tablespoon of dried blueberries is a wonderful snack, and midwinter, it is like summer fireworks going off in my mouth.  Blueberry Wow!  Dehydrated raspberries make my gluten-free scones amazing.

Yes, I can hear you, it does take a lot of time.  It is a choice to be this involved in feeding ourselves.  When my sons were little, they helped in the process.  They turned the crank on the strainer to make tomato sauce, stuck labels on the cooled jars, washed and sorted fruit and vegetables.  They wanted to help, it was what we did.  The kitchen was the focus, not the TV.  Now I’m not preaching throw out technology, my youngest son just graduated college with a degree in computer science.  And here’s the thing, he earned a four year scholarship without being involved in sports, or band, or any other of the myriad extra curricular activities during high school.  We did some community activities, but we all preferred the non-structured activities that home provided.  We like hiking, and gardening, and the freedom to choose not to keep busy 24/7. 

I guess it all comes back to the magic of it.  The wonderful experience of meeting farmers and growers, the sensuous experience of growing and preserving food, and the joy of eating the freshest, most delicious food available.  I don’t can as much as I used to, but fresh food continues to be an important part of my table.  It feeds the senses in ways I can’t put into words, but can be felt body and soul.  When you consider the beauty that this process brings into our lives, it is indeed a Sacred Meal. 

On Being Humane

How do expressions like “No pain, no gain”, and “Practice makes perfect” make you feel?  I mean, without thinking, what is your gut reaction to them?  For me, they make me feel that I fall short of being human, because I never make any gain when feeling pain, and no matter how much I practice something, I never reach perfection.

Now consider the words, inhuman and humane.  Do we treat ourselves humanely, or act as if we are inhuman?  Often times the prescribed adages tell you to fight against being human as if being human is a failing.  These notions work against us when we are considering lifestyle changes.  I recently heard an interview about physical therapy where the patient said that his therapy felt good.  I remember thinking that about the therapy for my frozen shoulder.  It felt good, so I wanted to do it.  So much for “no pain, no gain”.  I can’t recall a single thing that caused me pain that I wanted to pursue.  The problem with adages like those above is that they set us up to fight against being human and therefore become stumbling blocks in our desire to do better.

I recently completely accepted the fact that I am gluten intolerant.  I have known it for years, but so loved bread, both making it and eating it, that I would go in cycles of not eating bread then binging on it.  Or I would eat it only occasionally.  I always had the same results: pain.  This past February I was in so much constant pain that I determined to not eat those foods that I suspected were causing me pain for a short while.  These include gluten, dairy, coconut, and peanuts.  I decided at the same time that I would cut back my consumption of all grains.  No more than two servings a day and most days I found I only needed one.  After one month, I felt so good that it was easy to continue this diet, and after all, I just eliminated some food.  I missed cheese somewhat, and found on occasion I couldn’t resist the temptation.  I would buy a very small quantity, just enough for one serving, and despite the odd looks from the other side of the counter, this took care of my cravings and I could then resume my diet regimen. 

By the end of the second month I realized I was losing weight.  This was not my intent, but it made me happy.  I wasn’t starving myself, I was pleasing my palate, and here I was losing weight!  Now five months into the diet, I have noticed another change.  I am not craving things anymore.  I don’t eat a lot of sugar, but always craved it.  I especially wanted cookies and was stretching my grocery budget buying gluten free varieties.  Since I had decided to eliminate grains instead of substituting for wheat, I stopped buying them.  Now I don’t miss them nor do I crave sugar.  Five months is not a long time, but when you feel you are missing something, it is.  I believe this is the reason so many diets fail and exercise regimens fall away.  It is because we are making ourselves unhappy by taking things away instead of looking for ways to make the changes enjoyable.

Our plans for change start by criticizing ourselves. We then use these thoughts to punish our failures by insisting on a strict diet or an overzealous exercise plan, and end up comforting ourselves with favorite foods while distracting our minds and bodies with TV or some other mindless entertainment.  If that is not enough, we call ourselves failures!  No one would say to an accident victim, get out of that bed and walk to surgery.  Yet we don’t think twice about being mean to ourselves if we can’t stick to a diet, especially one that is so different from the one we are used to.  If we started by being compassionate with ourselves, to forgive, or not blame ourselves for our condition, our approach to change would be radically different.

Here’s what I would suggest for making changes.  First, take some time to observe what you are doing now.  Notice if you get headaches, stomach aches, muscle soreness, a stuffy nose, or any other symptom that could be related to food intolerance.  Try to notice if you can make an association between what you ate and what you are feeling.  This can lead to finding particular foods to reduce or eliminate from your diet.  Or maybe you have already decided on what to change in your diet.  Use the thought, “I like to eat less _____”, not “I eat too much _______”. 

When you have an idea of what changes you’d like to make, choose one change and think about what you will need to do to accomplish it.  This may mean changes in shopping habits and meal preparation.  Sometimes changing the store where you shop can help.  The key is to think about what you are doing and start slowly.  Radical changes never last long.  If you don’t like cooking, don’t buy foods that need a lot of preparation.  Don’t tell yourself you can never have something or that you will save it for a treat.  There are certain foods I try to avoid buying.  If I find myself reaching for them out of habit, I stop myself and find an alternative that fits better into my new plan.  If you crave something, get a little bit of it.  You can buy one cookie at a grocery store bakery; you don’t need to buy a whole box.  If you need fewer calories in your diet, eat a small portion of a high calorie food you love and larger portions of low calorie food that you love.

The next step is to accept that you will not always meet your expectations.  If this happens, think about it in a compassionate way.  What happened?  What could you have done differently?  Maybe the temptation was too hard to resist.  Maybe it was habit.  You have just learned something about yourself.  Use this knowledge to help avoid these pitfalls and accept that every change requires renewing your commitment to it every day.  When you feel you have made your first change ‘stick’, add another change.

It is also important to stop believing you have complete control over what you eat.  It is hard work to fight biology that says more food means better survival combined with the amazing variety of high calorie foods so temptingly offered everywhere you go.  The changes you want to make can take years.  If you continue to see yourself failing, you will never make progress.  One day will be easy, the next not.  That is the way of it.  Above all, be as patient with yourself as you would want others to be to you.  It is inhuman to to expect perfection.  We ultimately need to be compassionate and humane with ourselves while recognizing the importance of respecting our bodies’ needs if we are to make any progress toward our goals.  The sacred meal shows us that eating foods we know we shouldn’t is no more compassionate then beating ourselves up about it afterward.  Feed your internal fire as if your life depends on it, because it does.

Waste Not, Want Not

I have been thinking lately about our relationship with food.  I’ve been reflecting on the ways we grow it, agribusiness vs. family farm vs. backyard; the ways we prepare it, industrialization vs. homemade vs. restaurants; and the way we consume it, eating from a paper bag vs. a family table vs. a table among strangers.  I’ve been considering the implications of our food practices, not in carbon footprint and calories, but in our personal relationship with the food.  Perhaps the question is, do we even have a relationship with food? I think the answer is yes, but as with all relationships, it is complicated and can always be better.  I’m writing The Sacred Meal not as a lecture on what you should be doing, but to reflect on our food practices.  Perhaps you are ready to look a little closer at the gift that sustains us all, food.

What do you know about the foods you eat?  If you are a label reader, you know the ingredients and nutritional value, if you buy from a farmer, you know the way it was grown, but is that all we should know?  The cycle that created the food we eat today started, in the very least, a year prior.  It began with growing a plant to harvest seeds, or an animal’s pregnancy.  If we start in the field where next year’s seed crop is grown and end with the finished food on your plate, how much energy, time, and waste was part of it’s journey?  For today, I want to focus on food waste.

The last few years some local farms have been growing pumpkins for Halloween.  I watched the fields leaf over in Kelly green, and soon large orange flowers poked out to invite pollination.  While the pumpkins were green they were well camouflaged, but soon the leaves yellowed, the round spheres turned orange, and the harvesters came to take them out of the field.  The thing is, they left more than they took, hundreds of pumpkins smashed and turned back into the ground, wasted.  Yes, the left behind pumpkins fertilized the next crop, but I knew that the buyers only wanted the ‘pretty’ ones of a certain size.  What’s more, I am sure that almost every one of those harvested pumpkins are in a landfill now.  I try really hard to think of pumpkins as something other than a food crop, but I’ve been growing pumpkins for years, and even that lowly field pumpkin is eatable.  I can assure you this practice happens with other crops too.  Even on small local farms that produce for CSAs and farm markets, the smaller produce is tossed on compost piles or turned right back into the soil they where they grew.  In fact I can personally testify that yellowed, wilted greens that came out of a CSA box and never made it to the pan, is part of the compost I now spread on my own gardens. I think about the waste. A lot.

Joseph Campbell talked about sacrifice in the series Mythos II.  Although he admitted he had a problem with sacrifice, as do I, he explains that those who practice sacrifice see it as a way of feeding the fires of life.  He says that it is a reflection of the practice of taking food into our bodies, feeding our internal fire of digestion to sustain life.  It has long bothered me that we waste so much of the food we produce, but now I have another way to look at it.  When I am preparing the ultra-fresh food I have purchased from a local farm, I think about the wasted seed that was not harvested, the wasted baby plants that germinated too abundantly, the misshapen vegetables that were left behind, the bits and scraps that stuck behind on bowls and spoons, the last bites that no one wants, but is too small a portion to put into the refrigerator for leftovers.  All sacrifice to the fire of life.  As I turn my awareness to all the food that is not consumed, I am grateful for this sacrifice that allows me to feed my internal fire.  The food was not wasted, it was given back to cycle.

Of course, I am not a proponent for waste.  We should do as much as we can to avoid it.  Buying from a local grower, making sure to buy and cook only as much as you need, freezing and canning extras, or re-purposing items such as turning extra fruit into smoothies, ice pops, or sauces all help reduce waste.  But when waste can’t be helped, be aware, be thankful for the abundance, and compost to feed the next generation of food crops.

I am hoping through my reflections you will want to become more deeply connected with your food, not just what is wasted, but what, when, and how you feed your internal fire. I am hoping you will join me on a journey that will enrich your relationship with food and your life. I am asking you to refocus your attention to allow yourself to see the sacred in the simple act of gathering, preparing, and eating food.  In future reflections, I will be discussing obtaining food, recipes, food allergies, and more.  I hope you will come sit at my table again for another Sacred Meal.