10 Mile Diet

If this blog were music, I guess you could say I’m singing for my supper. At least I seem to be blogging for it.

For this month, at least, it seems that Tricia and I are engaged in an equal exchange. She wakes up in the middle of the night fearing I might starve. I do too. No, seriously,this challenge is growing her as a market gardener, and the cost is a box of veggies and a dozen eggs a week. I am examining my relationship with food – and really the food system – and all it costs is 500 words a day. Slick. Blogging for food. Would that work in a pinch if I stood by the road with a cardboard sign?

Don’t even go there, Vicki. In a week your veggie habit will be on your own dime. What will remain is this profound learning, a great relationship with Tricia (actually great-er) – and 25,000 words towards your next book, Your Food or Your Life, Transforming Your Relationship with Food and achieving… ummm…uhhh… what?…health?… love?

The point being, what started out to be an experiment in eating turned out to be an experiment in loving – and writing.

How can you not love the one who feeds you? If you have the good fortune to know who that is. Food is love, from the breast onward. That we can eat without attention not to speak of gratitude, is an unseen but sorry aspect of “farming out” our lives to service people – the farmer, the clerk, the mechanic, the plumber, the accountant, the financial adviser… the list goes on. Could you list the people who make your life possible, who toil daily so you can eat, sleep, drink, drive, dress, wash, work, play? When you think about it, the sheer intimacy of it is staggering. Hundreds of strangers have their hands all over your life.

The 10 mile diet has allowed me to get close enough to my feed-ers to kiss their hands. Tricia of course. Farmer John who sold me the onions. Pam Mitchell, so matter of fact in her strategy for farming other people’s land and selling at the Farmer’s Market but so important to this experiment. She was the one who alerted me to how incapable we would be here on Whidbey to feed ourselves for more than a month. She was the one who trained Tricia and who shares Kent and Tricia’s land.

Today I went to Rhonda’s to pick up some goat cheese her daughter Marina makes and gives me as a gift.

“I want to support your cause,” Rhonda has said, as has Marena.

I’m not sure it’s a cause. It’s an experiment in putting my mouth where my mouth is, in living what I espouse. But I am grateful that Rhonda wants to weave herself into my pattern.

Rhonda bustled around the house gathering up more “donations to my cause.” She put hand fulls of dried fruit into waxed paper bags – pears, figs!!!, apples (the figs get all the applause as they are so sweet and so special). Then we went out to their huge garage and she pulled a goat leg out of the freezer.

I looked at it stunned. That she would give it to me.  I knew that the most beautiful thing I could do was to take it, so I did with a sense of wonder. She talked about the goat. How it was happy from day one to day last. How they raised it and loved it. How it came from the goats they milk now.

Generosity itself is kept at arm’s length in our everyday lives. We click paypal buttons. We write checks between Christmas and New Years based on well presented literature about people far away. But here I am being invited to eat Rhoda’s kid (goat). How can we not be friends in the future?

I then stopped by to the farm where I get my milk and chatted with the woman who provides it. She said it had only been three years since they started raising animals. She told some stories of those years. About losing 5 fat turkeys to coyotes last year because they got out of their pen. About a friend calling to say their sow with half a dozen piglets was trotting down the road and the search party she, her husband and her son mounted. All the while she was sifting through packages from her freezer and selected  parts of last year’s pig: bacon, pork steaks and a slice of ham, 3+ pounds of meat in all.  I paid her happily. Happy to support her farming family. Happy to have a wealth of meat for my last week. Without grains and beans, a bit of dense meat is what tells my stomach it’s actually eaten.

On my way home I swung by the football field where Kent was announcing the game and Tricia running the scoreboard. She said to come and pick up some veggies that were a bit too big or curly or twisty or whatever for her regular customers. I stand under the viewing box and catch a bag from her and bicycle home (on my new electric assist bike, but that’s another story).

I came home and stir fried the last of Carol and Ed’s chicken (that lasted almost a week) with Farmer John red onion and Tricia broccoli, carrots, fennel and kale plus a bit of my exotics: salt and oil.

Food is love. Every exchange is love. More love than any of us can bear if we are honest. And so I blog to digest it all – and to celebrate another part of my food system  – the humans who spread the love around.

Eat. Blog. Love.

Rounding the bend into week three, and thus seeing the end of September gleaming on the horizon, I wonder what will stick from this experiment in 10 mile eating. Or re-stick.

I suspect I will never forget that just by eliminating grains and beans and nuts I lost 5 pounds and my ankles were as thin as a teenager’s (i.e. no bloating).

I suspect I will never lose sight of my food system, and will weigh the source of a product – and the possibility of local substitution – as I shop. I’m not sure I’ll revert to the Sears catalog in the outhouse for toilet paper, but perhaps there are many products I’ve used unconsciously that I can replace with something simpler and closer.

I suspect I will now invest more dollars in my local food system – as a shopper and as an investor and as a donor. I know I can get factory farmed chicken for 1/3 what I pay a local grower (i.e. friend), but I’d rather say yes to my neighbors for meat if possible. There is a principle called subsidiarity. Meet needs as close to home/source as possible and only go further afield if the solution isn’t at hand. Yes, I do want to eat local meat, and if I eat less because it costs more, that’s approved behavior in a range of diets. If I can’t get local, well, I’ll get regional.

I suspect I will also buy fair trade products that aren’t grown anywhere near me. Tea and coffee. Chocolate. I want to support local whether it is mine or a coffee bean grower in Colombia or Kenya. Relational eating and fair eating mean supporting farmers everywhere in staying on their land. Which isn’t easy for them, because subsistence and sustainable farming is very very hard work.

I suspect I will grow a very different garden next year. I have been a hobby gardener. Put some seeds in the ground and shout hallelujah if anything but kale and zucchini flourishes. I think I can plan a rotation for my 4 beds to produce more substantial and plentiful food. More carrots and beans. More spices (rosemary, basil and oregano in enough quantity to dry for winter). Fennel for flavor. Beets, turnips and rutabagas to store for the winter. Potatoes. Potatoes. Potatoes. I’ll get the winter squash in earlier so I will hopefully get more than 3 of them. I’d like to try parsnips too. And roma tomatoes that are good for sauce. As for fruit, I now know I want an apple tree and an Italian plum tree. We just gotta have sweet.

Of course for very good reason I’ll have lots of kale and zucchini and patty pan squash. That reason being – if all else fails, I have something from the soil.

Thinking about the foods I’ll ‘get back’ October 1 I find I am no longer desperate for crackers and cookies (though the first crunch might make a liar of me). I’m thinking I’ll re-tox in increments as to not get the food bends. I’m thinking I’ll give myself 10 more foods at a time. My list of returnees at the moment looks like:

1. chocolate covered almonds
2. a handful of nuts a day
3. non wheat bread – a slice a day at most (spelt, rye)
4. cheese – but really good cheese as a flavor not a food
5. oatmeal (for the cholesterol, which i will test in two weeks to see what’s happened)
6. dried fruit – prunes, apricots, raisins
7. Mr. Mobeley’s sauce (you Whidbey-ites know what I mean) and/or goddess salad dressing
8. almond butter
9. stevia!
10. popcorn at the movies

I can’t believe I didn’t say crackers after all my moaning earlier this month. Or avocados. Well, maybe I’ll do a list of 12 returnees to bring them in. What about balsamic vinegar? Soy sauce? Are you nuts, Vicki, go for 15. That’s a nice round number. (And if I go whole hog – so to speak -  on wheat, I too will be a round number.

Anyone making book on how many pounds will return once I expand my diet from hyper local?

Anyone want to give me their suggestions of the top ten foods to re-include? What would be on your food bucket list if the sky were the limit and the planet were there for the picking?

Another approach to re-tox would be to ask my body – not my mind – what it has really been craving this month. To take it as slow as I can when given permission to actually open the jar of nuts that have been staring at me this month. Can I apply awareness rather than rules? Let the invisible hand of my true appetites guide me? That may be very hard to do. Which, I guess, is why we create rules. So let’s see, what shall the rules really be? I have 9 more days to settle on that one. 9 days but who’s counting?

In a money fixated world, local food is not a bargain unless it comes from your garden, and even then I’m sure I haven’t grown $400 worth of food (the cost of building and filling my beds this year).Well, as Tricia’s husband Kent has pointed out, I’m getting a big bargain by Tricia supplying me – but I’m paying for it by being a guinea pig and I guess by telling the story of our experiment in relational eating.

The season of lushness is starting to wind down. Tricia’s basil is done, mine is getting black spots. My Kentucky Green Beans are done, a few pods making seed for next year. The scarlet runners are easier to keep up with now as there are fewer maturing each day. And so it came to pass that…

Tricia, who sells at a stand by Useless Bay Coffee on Saturdays to loyal customers has a little tangle with a regular.

“These eggs are small. You shouldn’t charge as much as you do for the big ones.”

“Heck, they are from the new pullets. They’ll get bigger in a little bit.”

“Well, you shouldn’t charge as much for them since they are small.”

“Heck no!”

She didn’t budge and neither did he and the eggs didn’t sell. And something in the relationship ruptured. Tricia was acting like this regular customer’s egg supplier. The money was important, but her sense of providing for a real and loyal human was also important. When he complained about price and chose not to buy, chose to not share the moment of scantness in a normally abundant flow of bounty, Tricia was just another peddler and he another shopper, out for the best deal.

Next story:

As you know if you know me, I am a very frugal shopper. I buy Ranger chickens because they seem a bit better than those Southern Grown family packs where you can almost see the chickens packed in their endless rows of cells, fattening up. Even though I do drool over the cheaper price for “so-grown” Rangers say they are “free range” and I choose to believe their lives are kinder and gentler  and the meat less tainted by injustice. Plus, once a month Rangers go on sale at my  market and I can usually get them for under $1.50 a pound.

My friend Robert Gilman says, “Money is a way to lose a lot of information.”

By the time I take advantage of that sale (and I do, my freezer always has a few Rangers in it. Chickens that is), the chicken is a product, not part of the great chain of being.

A 10 mile chicken, though, is a whole different bird. Kettle of fish. Whatever. The chicken I was lucky enough to find was raised by a friend. She and her husband bought, fed, housed, killed, bled, gutted, plucked and bagged it. It was $5 a pound. I’m sure at that price they were earning about what I am earning writing this blog. Nothing but satisfaction.

How could I haggle, knowing her and knowing from personal experience what it takes to dress (shouldn’t that be undress) a bird. I gladly paid her, aware in this case of the great chain of being.

We are not getting correct market signals for the price of food so we stumble into haggling with our neighbor farmers, expecting them to compete with factory farms.

But if we are on a budget (and more and more are), what do we do? In another post I suggested that one way to balance these scales (and our bathroom scales) was to eat a bit less of the better food. But once that accommodation is made, what? Is local just for yuppies and greenies. And are those who like local entitled to perfect local. Uniform eggs. Apples with no little worm holes.

As I pondered these stories I got an article from a friend – sort of a farmer’s rant. I’m pasting the whole thing in for the ones willing to chew on this conundrum along with me. Make a meal of it.

Do You Have The Balls To Really Change The Food System?

From your farmer- This article might challenge you, open your eyes a little more, or possibly offend a few, but the only way to make the food system better is to understand it more.  Some of my most beloved clients sometimes comment about items being too expensive but I am going to answer that with a question, how many farmers do you know that live in sprawling homes and drive expensive cars?  We’ve gotten so far away from understanding what it takes (physically and financially) to produce food that when you see it first hand it is quite surprising.

by Rebecca Thistlewaite

You watched Food, Inc. with your mouth aghast. You own a few cookbooks.

You go out to that hot new restaurant with the tattooed chef who’s putting on a whole-animal, nose-to-tail pricy special dinner. You bliss out on highfalutin’ pork rinds, braised pigs feet, rustic paté, and porchetta.

Later that weekend, you nibble on small bites as you stroll down the city street, blocked off for a weekend “foodie” festival.

Then you go back to your Monday-Friday workaday routine, ordering pizza and buying some frozen chicken breasts at Costco (“Hey, at least they’re ‘organic’!”) to get you through your hectic week. (You make time for at least two hours a day of reality TV.) You manage to get to a farmers market about once a month, but the rest of the time your eggs and meat come from Costco, Trader Joe’s, and maybe Whole Paycheck now and again.

Guess what? You are NOT changing the food system. Not even close.

You’re no better or different than the average American. You pat yourself on the back, you brag about your lunch on Twitter, you pity your Midwestern relatives eating their chicken-fried steak and ambrosia salad, but you secretly loathe your grocery store bill — which consumes only 8 percent of your income while your car devours 30 percent. Your bananas and coffee may be Fair Trade, but everything else is Far From It. The dozen eggs you splurge on once a month may be from local, outdoor-roaming birds, but all the other eggs you eat come from a giant egg conglomerate in either Petaluma, Calif., or Pennsylvania.

And even that pig in that nose-to-tail fancy dinner came from a poor farmer in Kansas or Iowa because the restaurant is too cheap or lazy to find local, pastured pork. And the ingredients for that foodie festival touting itself as local and sustainable? They mostly came from other states except a few ingredients they highlight as being “local.” But those restaurants, caterers, and food trucks just go back to using the low-cost distributor once the event is over.

So. Want to make a difference?

Here’s what a sustainable food system actually needs you to do, in no particular order: (more…)

Lesson Number One (repeat after me as many times as it takes to get through your thick skull): It’s not about me.

This has been among my highest insights in my most expanded states of mind. It’s also clear that eating – however much it is keyed into the “it’s all about me” survival systems of the body – is a collective endeavor or it just doesn’t work. For humans at least. I live because we live – in reciprocity. Me, you, the farmers, the politicians, the merchants, the animals, the vegetables, the minerals, the trees and oceans, the earth. These are my pals. These are my suppliers.

One of the largely unsung efforts spawned by Transition Whidbey is a mapping project of our food system. Click here for the report and I’ll have more to say about it as we go along. John Lee, one of the authors, spoke about it briefly at our launch potluck for our September Eat Local challenge. He said that a food system is made up of:

Home gardeners
Home gardeners with surplus to share
Market gardeners who provide CSA and Farmer’s Market shoppers with weekly supplemental vegetables — whatever is in season.
Suppliers who reliably provide restaurants, grocery stores and institutions with the food they need everyday in reliable quanties and qualities to run their business.

Here’s a picture of most of my food system working hard for me:

Meet carrots and Italian Beans and a Patty Pan squash and a Zucchini from my garden, fresh picked in early morning barefoot, drawn into the singing of the birds.

Meet tomatoes from my friend Terra’s garden, Terra who has a husband Tom who built a hoop house fit for a nursery where the tomatoes are so plentiful she sent me home with a bag full. If Terra’s thumb were any greener it would be day-glo.

Meet Potatoes and Beets and a Green Pepper from Tricia’s market garden. Tricia is my main food system maven. I took the picture while Tricia’s potatoes and leeks and garlic were simmering in stock I got from boiling the bones of Carol and Ed’s fresh slaughtered and plucked chicken (more on local chicken later) which she delivered to my door and stopped for a cup of tea.

After the photo I then chunked my carrots, added them to the potatoes and beets along with some oil and salt and roasted them. Yum! I was conserving heat after roasting a baseball bat zuke sliced almost lengthwise, best yet.

Roast Zucchini with Gourmet Magazine presentation

And meet Farmer John’s onion. John Peterson has been growing on the island for years and now his daughter is taking over. He sells at the Farmer’s market. I went to see if he had onions and squash because I want to stock up for the winter. After some banter about…

“Do you have your squash drivers license” to which I replied

“Do I need a license if it is under 10 pounds?”

He said he’d be harvesting the storing onions later in the season and to call him. I didn’t even know there was a difference between the storing and eating onions, but now I do.

All the while that huge red onion was staring me in the face. I LOVE to cook with onions. All cooking for me starts with chopping an onion. I nigh on to drooled over that onion as Tricia’s have been enough but not that luxuriant plenty that allows you to over-do.

As you know, I’ve been hungry at times – hungry for food that isn’t in my 10 miles. I’ve now lost 5 pounds (and don’t miss it one bit!). So that big fat onion grown just miles from my home proved irresistible. I bought it. And bit it this morning in my fritatta.

I also stopped by Georgie’s stand. She’s as close to a supplier as we have on the Island – she grows up in Coupeville (out of my range) on Ebey’s Prairie, but if I want to try a not so hyper local experiment in the winter I’ll need some winter squash and (storing) potatoes. Word had it from Chris Williams who, through the Grange, puts out a bulletin about available regional food that Georgie would have 10 pound net bags of potatoes today. But Chris jumped the gun and Georgie hadn’t started digging up the potatoes – and the squash, she said, are just sitting there not growing due to all the rain (it has been a wet summer).

Here is another sobering fact of a local food system. If you are eating local and there is a gap or a failure in what is produced, you are back into food insecurity. I met Georgie a few years ago when tagging along with Vito Zingarelli who was trying to create a Whidbey Fresh Farm to Chef network. His efforts introduced farmers to chefs, yes (and I had the privilege of designing a bit of that meet-up) but the gaps were clear. To wit:

Unless a farmer can provide a chef with what he needs for his menu, he can’t rely on the farmer. So he must buy from Charley’s food delivery truck, a big distributor on the mainland.

Unless there is a reliable delivery system – a truck that picks up and delivers produce from the growers – it can’t work. And that business was yet to be started. A truck and a person willing to take the risk of developing the business. To make his living in the system.

The cultures of farmers and chefs – even though they both deal in food – is different. This was a party of engineers and artists. Some cultural bridging needs to happen to hook our system up so we have a reliable supply.

In Chris’s bulletin there was also word of a big food warehouse in Marysville – which if I were doing a 50-mile diet would be in my foodshed – that’s selling bulk produce at amazing prices. If it is produced nearby, it is a good source for winter storage.

One thing that is plentiful these days is stuff to write about. I have blog posts stacked up. Coming out my fingers before breakfast. Who knew this would be such a hit with my inner writer. That it would feed my soul.

So off to do some “real work” – and then eat my veggie roast for lunch. And my soup for dinner. And a bit of that chicken. And the last of the apple sauce. Who says there isn’t “enough.” At least for now.

Last night I stumbled into the food salon at the TED talks online. If you don’t know www.ted.com I recommend it highly – rich brain candy (which is not fattening).

Mark Bittman, the cookbook author and on-air chef (how many are there now?) told us that Americans eat 8 ounces of meat a day and should be eating that amount a week.

I listened as I ate 4 ounces of some bovine neighbor’s liver, and wanted to hide my plate from the computer screen so Mark wouldn’t see.

Louise Fresco, a sustainability activist from the Netherlands, encouraged us to get off our high locavore horse and recognize that the global food system – with all its transport and specialization – is necessary to feed the world. To advocate for local uber alles is to consign many millions to starvation. Our numbers are a result of agricultural choices and we can’t advocate for local-ism without recognizing the many beings who depend on a – hopefully well run and healthy – large scale agriculture system.

I was wrong again as I ate a salad of Tricia’s lettuce, tomatos, basil and cucumbers. I determined to shade 10-mile eating a bit towards Hobbes who said the life of the peasant: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Whatever you advocate there is always the question of: What if everyone did it?

I’m clear that my experiment is revealing how hard it is to feed ourselves and maintain our current way of life. If everyone shifted to 10 Mile Diets where I live there would not be enough cows, goats, chickens, ducks, geese, hogs, not to speak of vegetables to feed us for a month. At most. Without grain it would be even more of a shock. When you get this, the whole ethos unto religion of localism does become more brutish. If we changed what we eat, we would have to change how we live. Drastically.

So I started this experiment to “eat my words” – live my espoused values. And now, 2 1/2 weeks in, I’m in hot water. My goose is getting cooked. I’ve arrived at dueling opinions and certainties.

One reason for this is that we have taken eating off automatic. And we did it a long long time ago. The flourishing of the human animal on this planet is a story of food – and I’m sure there’s a TED talk where someone with a PhD who can lay that out for me. We are what – and how – we eat. Hunters and gatherers gave way to Farmers – which then gave way to the Mechanized Food System.

There were probably some clever ad men back then whose job it was to convince that rowdy free crowd of nomads to stay put and garden. Can’t you hear them around the fire?

“Har har har, Stanley over there wants us to tie ourselves to a water buffalo and run around behind him. So we can eat grass. Har har har.”

Seriously, though, the technologies that have enabled us as a species have also disabled us. We do not actually know what and how to eat through natural intelligence. Our choices are run externally by the system and internally by our disconnection from our guts. We have ceded our lives to experts. We are hooked up on a vast machine of research and culture and old wives tales wearing lab coats. The Matrix. The eating matrix.

As with slavery, our good fortune here in the US rides on the back of people whose lives have been reshaped to feed us – people around the world, growing our vegetables and flowers and meat and grain.

What does it mean to eat ethically – without sacrificing eating deliciously and joyfully and healthily? I don’t know. Yet. (Though I’m sure some of you do – and will tell me.) In this experiment I’ve never posed as being right or righteous. At best I am a physical as well as moral guinea pig.

Second only to food I am most voracious for learning. I love learning, raw, cooked, salty, sour, sweet. It is all soul food for me. So this month is feeding that very deep hunger I have to really understand this life in all its facets before I leave my carcass to a few more hungry animals.

I can’t tell you who provides me with milk because they are criminals. Yes, selling milk out your back door to neighbors who need it is illegal. Because some people have gotten sick due to unsanitary conditions at some farms (small and factory), all people must drink pasteurized milk. Here’s an article on raw milk from Wikipedia for those who want to understand the issue more deeply.  Here’s another from Scientific American and it’s worth reading the comments. I want to merely address the issue of freedom embedded in the issue of raw milk.

While I’m glad there are agencies designed to protect citizens from harm – from police to the FDA – I also want the freedom to make educated choices, accepting responsibility for the risks in order to get the rewards. In other areas of life – taking back roads labeled impassable, smoking cigarettes, drinking booze – I have the freedom to make an informed choice. Why not milk? Why not just sign a waiver with the milker, a hold harmless document that says I am responsible? Jeesh, even downloading computer programs that could crash your whole system, ruining your whole intellectual output simply requires an “I accept” click and off we go.

Like other liberty issues, this one links hippies with NRA members. Both want the freedom of individual choice. Both protest old biddies and bureaucrats controlling what they do in the privacy of their own home. If you want to control my udderly innocent desire to drink my neighbor’s milk, let me take out a license.

Yes, my neighbor could get a license. Have their dairy approved. That is an expensive process, though, and will drive up the cost of the product. Just let me decide. If I get the runs, whose business is that anyway. I could die sooner riding a motorcycle than drinking raw milk. (Scientific American says the issue is sending your kids to school with E Coli and infecting others. Raw milk aside, isn’t sending your kids to kindergarten full of sugar just as dangerous?)

Foodies will make their case on dueling research. This is the “good for you – bad for you” debate. Raw milk kills. Raw milk heals. Okay now crank up the decibels. add some placards. you have a real food fight.

I’m not going there. I’m just saying it is my right as an American to choose what I eat if the consequences affect me alone, rarely others. Perhaps the raw milk argument is like the one for medical marijuana – in small quantities for personal use when an aid to healing. Hey, maybe I can get my doctor to write a prescription for it…

So many technological advances have been radical in their era. Outside the mainstream. Ridiculed. Many certainties of the medical and scientific communities of their day are now hogwash. We do not know what received wisdom will be in a decade on raw milk. Until then, perhaps we can practice the golden mean. Moderation in all things. Perhaps we can designate substances not proven socially harmful as contained, not controlled. Contained to personal use. By consenting adults.

So I am arguing for legalizing buying milk direct from your friend’s cow on three counts:

1. Freedom
2. Local supply chains
3. Common sense

All of the above are quite American.

Yesterday I attended the Transition Pacific Northwest Convergence with my day’s 10 mile food in tow to survive for 15 hours out of my eensy beensy micro bioregion. Chris Wolfe of Transition Whatcom County took on to cook breakfast, lunch and dinner for all 60 of us, even though she’d never cooked for more than 9 people. She cooked for days, slept little and served it all with such radiance and humility that the food itself gleamed.

She had personally looked in the eye of almost every farmer and producer for the fare she offered – greens, beets, soups, granola, apples, eggs, cornbread, berries. What wasn’t a direct buy was bought from local organic grocers. Chocolate, almond milk, lentils. It was as local as she could get and given she was feeding 60, it was two person months of 100-mile eating with a couple of exotics.

But it wasn’t “my” 10 miles. Not a Langley, WA 10-miles. I’ve already figured out that when I travel I can eat within 10 miles of wherever I am, but Chris’s loving food was outside even that radius of S Seattle Community College. So be it. I could love her and even her food without eating it – and keep my word.

Before dinner she announced that there was plenty for everyone and if people who hadn’t paid wanted to eat, they were welcome to do so. They could contribute to offset her costs, but that wasn’t required  (it wasn’t clear if she would break-even financially even though she had broken-even spiritually by a long shot.)

So there I was. One apple, two carrots, 3 green beans left. Hunger didn’t drive what I did next. It was the realization that I could say yes to her local loving and yes to her local purchases made with such integrity – and no to rigidity of mind which could slide me over into ideology and holier-than-thou. Even with a commitment to values, there are higher values that should always trump that. And giving and receiving love is one of them.

So I put a donation in the pot and ate a beautiful spinach salad, without going overboard and eating the chocolate and lentils, things clearly not from our region.

I used to be a borderline missionary. You can now say “Hi, Vicki” as if we were in an anonymous meeting. There was a right way of doing things (i.e. reducing consumption) and my task was to be sweet and funny and convincing enough to make you do it. Despite the fact that I was right (wink) the blowback of that stance was that I judged myself as harshly as I secretly judged others. I was protesting pollution while polluting the air with my holier than, if not thou, them attitude. I had no space to grow, change, learn more, experiment and fail. Not direct causation… but I did develop a cancer in my gut and one aspect of the healing was letting go of those prisons of my own rightness.

We are in overshoot – yes. We consume in North America more than is fair, just or necessary – yes. There are truly dire consequences of these choices – yes. But my indignation and rigidity were not making a different way of consuming any  more compelling.

Just a spoonful of humor and humility  makes the medicine go down a lot more smoothly.

I felt very satisfied as I dozed on the ride home to Whidbey while my friends chatted away in the front seat about the great day we had.

I have to think about food way more than I used to – or differently than I am used to. Tomorrow I am going to a Regional Transition Convergence in Seattle where mostly local (to Seattle? Bellingham? 100 miles?) food will be lovingly prepared but I now feel like someone with food sensitivities… so picky about source that I might as well bmo – bring my own.

I’ve already realized that for this 10 mile eating to work over the long haul (if I even want to work it), I’d need to assume 10 miles from wherever I am, not from Langley WA. How can I go to Brazil for a month otherwise. A suitcase full of Zackers and Zookies? No, there 10 miles would be avocados, papayas, mangoes, greens and fish.

But for this meeting I’m not sure where the food is from, and given that I am fiercely loyal to my word about 10 mile eating for this month, I need to think about how I will satisfy my hunger. A whole day into the evening of hunger.

So I am packing like the Russian peasants I saw on an Aeroflot plane back in 1966 when it was still the USSR. The plane was a reject from a toy factory for starters. It was touch and go whether we would touch down safely and go on our way. But then I watched the other passengers – all Russians as this was the era when few Americans could enter the country. They were dressed like the people who boarded third class trains in Spain – bundled in dark dowdy clothes and carrying – of all things – livestock along with their baskets of food.

This is life in the “less developed world” – if you are deathly ill you need to bring your family to the hospital to cook for you and feed you. You need to bring your livestock on holidays to Odessa (touch of irony here, but not totally). You can’t assume there will be food when the train stops in the dead of night because a cow is on the tracks or something breaks and you must wait for another train to pick you up. In two days.

We here are awash in food. We never doubt that there will be food where we are going – and plenty to eat on the way (except, now, for airplanes where perhaps eventually we WILL bring our chickens). There are grocery stores, convenience stores, snack machines, snack bars, restaurants, cafes, street vendors, mom and pop shops. We live here in a mountain of food. Actually we move mountains of food every day. Stocking shelves, cooking at restaurants and institutions and homes, serving, eating. An tidal wave of food flowing through us.

But I’m being fed through a little straw this month and I need to bring my own food tomorrow. Steamed green beans and broccoli. Salad. 2 apples. Some sliced meat from my yummy pot roast dinner (best yet). Carrots from my garden. I’ll be like a mom with an infant – a big bag of necessities to get through the day.

This experiment in hyper-local eating is not preparing for the third world to come to the first world. I’m not assuming a sustained 10 mile diet for any of us. I don’t see immanent collapses of the global food supply chains. I’m not even secretly rooting for it as a comeuppance for our arrogance.

I am also not teaching you about a 10 mile diet. The 10 mile diet is my teacher. It is transforming my relationship with food, eating, justice, body… who knows where this will go by the end of the month. 15 days. But who’s counting?

Traditional peoples have traditional words  to describe a way of life we’ve forgotten. I’m fluent in Spanish and learned two words my year in Spain in 1966 that aren’t in US English. Cundir and Aprovechar.

Cundir means to make something last, go far. In English it might be something like the old Maxwell House Coffee ad ‘good to the very last drop.’ I remember visiting a couple devoted to peace and to the legacy of Peace Pilgrim. Every aspect of their lives was considered, respectful to resources. They made everything last. The had a celery bunch from the store and I watched her carefully slice it down to the root for our salad and then toss the root in the soup pot. She was making that celery last. It is also bit like the old “use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.” Or buying a soup bone rather than the meat and feeding a family on it. Or like “stone soup”.

The Stone Soup story goes like this. A hobo in the 30s was in a railroad yard around a fire with other guys who rode the rails, staying warm.

“Sure wish I had something to eat.” one said.

“Me too. I’m down to nothing.”

“Well, I’ve got this great little stone” our hobo said pulling a stone the size of a potato out of his pocket. “Yessiree, this stone has been the basis of a lot of great soups. Filling. Something about it just makes that flavor come out. Stick to the ribs. And it’s a bit magic. I can use it for a pot and when every scrap is gone I just pop it in my pocket for the next pot. i’ll put it in this pot of boiling water fellas and just see how good it’s gonna be.

The man who had been hard up dug in his pocket. “I’ve got this carrot I took for some ladies’ garden”He popped that hefty carrot in.

“Here’s a turnip”

“Here’s a potato. Okay, here’s both.

One by one the guys pulled the bit of food they’d been hoarding and put it in the pot and pretty soon they had a hearty … stone soup.”

With little control over volume and variety of food filling my fridge. I am making everything cundir. Every leaf of basil. Every slice of onion. Every blemished potato or apple that Tricia tosses in because she can’t sell it to her regular customers.

Aprovechar is similar but has to do with the pleasure derived from every little bit and scrap of life. You can “aprovechar” a meal, a sunny day, a conversation with a friend. To aprovechar you have to be present. You have to be grateful, at least a bit, for what you have rather than hankering after what you don’t have. So often, living alone, I prepare a nice meal for myself (i like cooking) but the eating is less conscious. When I eat with others, I am slow and savor both the food and the conversation. Alone I tend to open a magazine to stimulate my mind, actually detracting from the stimulation of my taste buds. Voluntarily surrendering control over the volume and variety of my food flow, I am retraining myself, poco a poco (little by little) to aprovechar once more my food. And make it cundir.

I just posted the below on my Your Money or Your Life blog about what I’m doing over here on my 10 mile diet blog. I want to share it with you as a piece of my learning. If you haven’t read Your Money or Your Life some of it might not make perfect sense to you – but it will make sense in terms of my discoveries reported on this blog.

It’s called: Transforming Your Relationship with Food.

I’m discovering with my September 10 mile diet that truly the same principles and practices for looking at money apply to food. By only eating what can produced within 10 miles of my home I am discovering a lot about my relationship with food.

I am seeing my emotional relationship – the feelings and desires that drive me this way and that. To nuts and after 9 PM eating. That would be like people’s money and stuff addictions. The visits to the mall to see what you might want rather than get what you want. To substitute shoes (or chocolate) for love. (more…)