"How do I make it a food?" will be a non-fiction book about finding and creating bounty around you- specifically by growing or harvesting things you can use to improve your life.
I realize I've been doing a lot of, admittedly, half-assed research on the various things I have growing here this summer, and I could pretty quickly turn my 2 p.m. "What the hell am I going to do with these elderberries?" existential crisis into something helpful to others and myself.
The answer, by the way, is dry them-- but that's a chapter to be written later.
I guess I’m growing things now. How do I make it a food?
Great question. And it is probably something you could have considered before planting. But I get it, you know? Who knew that those elderberries would do so well? How could you be expected to know what to do with all that Lemon Balm that won’t quit cluttering your front garden? There’s so much wintergreen growing in that sandy area behind the cabin. What should you do with all this prosperity?
As tempting as it is to ask oneself to check one’s privilege, I understand if one wanted to be shamed, one would call one’s grandmother more often. The guiding principle of this book is about finding and creating bounty around you. How these things came into your life is less important than what you do with them next. If that means, in the case of cucumbers and tomatoes, for example, eating them directly off the vine without even washing them, that’s fine. (Unless you’ve used pesticides, which, let’s face it, if you’re reading this, you haven’t.)
See, there are few better things in life than a cool, wet cucumber to sate your cottonmouth after coming home late from a long night of carousing. In fact, in many ways, the fresh-of-the-vine cucumber is considerably better for you than a hastily ordered sadness pizza. (Sadness pizza is an impulsively ordered fast food pizza delivered to you in your bedroom at night. It’s not good for you, and the service will invariably screw up the order, but you’ll really just want a dopamine hit from the smell and feel of comfortable food being at your beck and call.)
Ok, frankly, a sadness cucumber is just as depressing as a sadness pizza, but at least it’s not pooped out of a dough machine when you hit the right API calls on your delivery app. You know what-- it doesn’t matter. Nobody wins a sadness contest.
The Bottom Of the Apple Barrel
I photographed these apples at some point in my life, but Meta has helpfully stripped all the meta data from the image in the process of exporting it to my collection. Thanks, Meta!
I recently shocked one of my students with the announcement and demonstration that you can simply pick an apple from a tree, bite it, and it will be delicious.
I saw a perfectly ripe Gala apple growing in the school’s orchard while the student and I were on a walk and talk, and without thinking, I plucked the apple, wiped it on my fleece, and took a bite.
As I walked on, happily munching, the student’s eyes widened, and I had to stop and ask him what was wrong.
“You’re eating an apple,” he stammered.
I nodded.
“From a tree. You just picked it from the tree and ate it.”
I nodded again. I realized he was experiencing part of the tree-to-table process he’d never considered before.
“Well,” I said, “I should probably have washed it first.”
“You can just do that?” he asked.
I looked around at the small orchard the school’s agriculture department ran. “I mean, probably not. I should probably have asked-- But the truth is, nobody is going to miss this one apple.”
To my surprise, the boy was not yet following.
“The tree just makes these?” he asked, gesturing at the apples around him. “For free?”
I nodded and took another bite. “Yeah,” I said, chewing. “You want one?”
“Sure,” he said. And he reached out and grabbed the biggest, greenest, most blighted apple in the entire orchard.
And when it was sour and unpleasant, he spit it out and demanded how to eat such garbage.
“Wrong tree,” I said. “That one’s not ripe, and because of whatever’s living in it, will need to be cut up a little.” I plucked him a gala apple from the tree I had picked mine from. “Try this one.”
The student was a little trepidatious, but he took a small bite and smiled as he chewed. “It’s tougher but sweeter,” he said.
“Then what?”
“Apples.”
“It is an apple,” I reminded him.
“I mean from a store.”
I nodded in understanding, but in actuality, I was anything but.
#
We spoke for a few more minutes, and eventually, I learned that, for this student, one only gets apples when they force them on you at McDonald’s with a Happy Meal. He’s never taken one at the lunch line and assumes the ones at grocery stores are ingredients, not food.
#
This is the state of understanding of where food comes from for many people in our country. Food comes from a store, which comes from a farm, which is a place where they have red barns and white picket fences and cows that make milk.
The idea that food could grow in your backyard, whether you’ve tended it or not, is not only an anathema for them but contrary to their sense of safety and trust. Students often say that they won’t eat home-raised eggs. They assume some level of security born of mechanical laying farming systems is not present. I try not to correct them on this because, hey, at least they eat eggs from time to time. God forbid I take these students through a mass-industrial chicken factory farm-- they’d probably stop eating forever. There’s a reason that today’s kids can’t tell the difference between Tubby Custard and raw chicken nugget slurry.