Food

I’ve never been someone at a loss for things to write about, but sometimes I wonder at my ability to overthink things. That’s a lie. I don’t believe there is such a thing as overthinking – at least not in a climate where people are egged on to abandon their own thoughts in favor of memes and outrage.

This morning I was reading a collection of essays by Ursula K. Le Guin called No Time to Spare: Thinking about What Matters. It made me think about details. One of the essays was called “Chosen by a Cat”. It was a rather long essay about her cat. At first, I felt an edge of disinterest telling me to move on. But I stuck with it and the more I read, the more compelled I was to finish. Why would an essay about a cat be compelling?

I have cats. One would think I’d have an innate interest, but my cats require a lot of time and care and attention. I’d rather not give my time over to the cat that is not mine to truck to the vet and not one whose random effluvia I encounter on a regular basis. Much like I didn’t want to hear about other babies while mine was keeping me awake all night long. Still, phrasing and details and perspective can make the most dull, inane subject seem interesting.

This post is a bit of a writing practice. Take something ordinary and write about it. Free associate. Meditate. See what comes to you.

Food with a View

Since I am up at 4am, breakfast is a solo affair. Lately, I’ve come to enjoy the slow process of slicing up onions, mushrooms and tomatoes. I toss them in a pan with an egg and some spinach. I eat with leisure, pouring over The Economist or reading essays as the coffee maker burbles out its magic elixir.

canstockphoto16338245 When I was young and fantasized about what I’d do and be, I thought I’d be a journalist, traveling the world, taking on lovers here and there, and being an entity unto myself. The snapshot in my mind of this amazing life was me, drinking coffee, reading a newspaper on a balcony with an ocean view.

Here I am, a married suburbanite parent. I love my life and my family. But a little part of me still longs for that sense of possibility and luxury. Making myself a fresh breakfast, reading the news, sitting in my quiet kitchen, my latest lover (of 18 years) dozing a couple of rooms away, a child I never imagined. I’m pretty sure I hear the ocean.

They Grow Them in Cans, Don’t They?

My favorite thing about slicing mushrooms is that they look like what mushrooms have always looked like in pictures. The knife slices easily through them like butter. I throw what looks like a half pound of mushrooms in the pan, but the heat makes them sweat away their size and color until they little resemble how they started.

canstockphoto17307371 Until my late 30s, I’d never eaten a mushroom except out of a can. I remember watching an episode of Jamie Oliver’s “Food Revolution” in which elementary students could not identify common vegetables. But growing up poor can be like that. You get cans from emergency food shelters. Cans are often cheap and on sale in large quantities, and they last a long time.

Mushrooms that weren’t a greenish gray seemed foreign to me. I made no connection from them to the pictures, either in storybooks or cooking shows of white, perfectly sliced plant food. I’d never seen or eaten a kiwi, either. Economics and education and accessibility – these change one’s menu and palate.

Alice in Wonderland Shrooms

Once I was at a music festival in Canada. There was a small caravan of the Canadian versions of Cheech and Chong next to our campsite. Like a movie caricature, every time they opened their door, pot smoke would come pouring out. A Canadian being high is an odd thing – how do you get more mellow than mellow?

canstockphoto4458871 Several people were eating “magic” mushrooms. They were seeing things and were subsequently paranoid and lost. They stumbled about campsites, disoriented and babbling. I’d never even known that was a thing. With my midwest upbringing (before the advent of rural meth labs and the current opioid crisis), booze and pot were the drugs of choice.

By that time in my life, I’d become a teetotaler. With a family history of alcoholism and a bad reaction the last time I’d smoked pot, I was completely sober amidst a crowd of drum-beating, mushroom-eating stoned drunks. It’s an odd experience, like walking through a circus. Your normal no longer seems normal and you become the oddity.

*****

Sometimes I ride myself about all the navel gazing and self-reflection that I do when writing. The thing is, once you realize the details of your own life – the complexity, the stories within stories, the layers of history and habit, you see others differently. We’re in an age that chooses to gloss over individual details, to caustically lump each other into easy categories. To imagine one person’s life and all the details that make them who they are, we have to look past politics and geography and gender and economics. Details make the story and everyone has their own.

I’m crawling out of a dark place to raise a hand in greeting. Hey, how’s it going? It’s Thanksgiving here in the U.S. and we Americans are preparing to do what we do best: eating and shopping. Like locusts we descend on turkeys and retail stores, driven forward by the primitive urge to acquire. See what I mean about a dark place?

I have a tendency towards depression and cynicism during this time of year. All the family issues rise like dysfunctional zombies and remind us where we’re lacking. While people constantly talk and write and proselytize about our dubious consumerism, somebody will still be trampled on Black Friday and grown women will roll about on the ground fighting over the latest electronic device. Arrests will be made.

So I really have to reach deep to import some meaning to this day that redeems it. Thanksgiving, stripped of its religiosity and consumer feeding frenzy, can simply be a thank you for the bountiful harvest we have seen this autumn. And it turns out, you don’t need to spend it with family you don’t voluntarily see any other time of the year. Meals can generally be pleasant times and no one gets arrested.

Thanksgiving dinner is comprised of all my favorite foods. I’ve spent a good portion of my life thinking about food and in the last decade or so, about where it comes from, how it impacts my health and how it impacts the planet. We have so many choices in this country that one learns to tune out the “latest studies” or arguments about organic and GMO foods. Now, not only do I have to fend off emotional eating, but I’m supposed to quiet the political arguments in my head about the right thing to do.

I have raised a child who is a self-declared vegetarian with aspirations to be an ecologist. She has entered an irritating stage of self-righteous zeal. Be careful what you wish for as a parent. Nothing like having a 9-year-old staring balefully at you across the table while you hungrily chomp on a chicken breast. She’s a better human than her father or I, but unfortunately she now knows it.

Many of our meal discussions revolve around where food comes from, how it is harvested and whether or not it’s the best choice for a human body. We have a garden and have spent hours planning, planting and picking. During the dead of every winter, I fantasize over seed catalogs. It used to be a simple pleasure, but now, it too has become an internal argument.

Seed sourcing, preservation and control has become a rather intense issue, as seeds get modified, patented and sued over by behemoth corporations. There are people all over the U.S. doing their best to preserve unique varieties and heirloom seeds, while the majority of food is sourced from more and more homogeneous crops, owned by a handful of multinational corporations.

Humans and the planet benefit from biodiversity. Between the meteoric rise in allergies and obesity and the fact that 75% of our food supply is sourced from 12 plants, there’s a lesson in there somewhere. The dystopian future has arrived.

So here is my gratitude for this day: we can still choose not to go blithely into that dark night. We have the opportunity to pay attention, to educate ourselves, to teach our children about what is quickly going to be known as the “old-fashioned” way of growing food. There are few pleasures greater than the first bite into a garden grown tomato or watching your child happily pick raspberries off the canes, eating them as fast as they are being plucked. Connections – that is what holidays are about, even when you’re just talking about the bounty before you.

I generally don’t do promotions or book reviews or guest posting on this blog. It’s just a personal preference. I’m making a Thanksgiving exception for a blogging friend of mine, S. Smith. The third book in her Seed Savers series, “Heirloom” was just released. Seed Savers is written for middle school kids, although my elementary student really enjoyed her first two books and is just starting the third. It is my privilege to be part of her blog tour.

Seed Savers is about a future where gardening and saving seeds is against the law. The majority of people have forgotten what it was like to eat fresh produce. An underground movement seeks to preserve and pass on the seeds and gardening skills to future generations. It’s a fabulous adventure story for kids with a lesson (bonus for parents!).