Food!

(First of my potatoes headed for my table!)

I love food and love to eat. I was a horrible picky eater as a child and my picky eaterness has continued in some version into adulthood and perhaps gotten worse because while now I will try just about anything, I have become a very informed eater, perhaps an overly informed eater some would say, and I am quite picky about what I buy. I like to buy my food with love! I do have to meet the needs of my family, most of whom are not happy with bulgar salad and beet greens as snacks, so we do have to have frozen pizza and boxed mac and cheese around at all times for the independent snacking needs of growing boys. But it is one of my great pleasures in life to find and buy and cook good, fresh, healthy, whole food for our meals. Having worked in agriculture I can really appreciate the work that goes into well produced food, and it deserves some love. I do keep to a budget, and even though we try to keep it on the generous side I don’t frequent gourmet shops and I almost never buy processed anything except jam and condiments. Even in my most impoverished periods in my youth though I always bought as high quality fresh food as I could. As my husband’s father liked to say, “You cheat your stomach, you’re cheating the wrong man.” Or, another way to look at it is, you are what you eat. Who wants to be a factory farmed beeflot cow or a genetically modified chemical laden dorito just because it saves a few bucks?

I don’t want to talk about how bad mass produced, processed, factory famed supermarket food can be though. It’s becoming common knowledge and Michael Pollen, Barbara Kingsolver, Vandana Shiva, Alice Waters and many others have already written just about everything there is to say on that matter. I just want to crow about how GOOD my food is these days, and what a joy it is to buy it and support the hard efforts of farmers, fishermen and other producers in my economically strapped area.

I’’ll start with one of the joys of my life here in Warren, ME. Beth’s Farm Market, hidden up a quiet road on the way to the transfer station, this place is a hub of activity because it is seriously the best farm stand that I have ever been to or can even imagine. They’re not strictly organic and they’re not perfect but their vegetables are so perfectly fresh and delicious and they run such a tight ship over there and everything is so good….it’s pretty impressive. They must be serious overachievers. Plus, in this busy age they cater to the one stop shopper. You can get your all your produce needs, frozen local grass fed beef and all natural pork, fresh bread, biscuits and donuts, oysters, lobsters, jams, jellies, fresh eggs, cream, canned juice, and absolutely the very best ever, perfect strawberry shortcake! All day every day all summer. I love to go there, can you tell?

If I want fresh local bread I can buy really excellent sliced or shaped loaf bread in at least 5 different locations in close vicinity.

If I want wine I can ride my bike right up the road to my favorite wine makers in Maine and also my neighbors and buy their Villager white blend or a nice dry tobaccoey merlot with grapes from long island. If I drank harder stuff I could also get an excellent locally made gin or passable rum right up the road the other way to Union.

If I want fish I am seriously in luck here because 5 minutes from my house is a fish wholesaler with very fresh stock, or there is another great fish shop in Rockland and there is just no shortage of fresh fish buying opportunities in my life now.

There are two stores nearby that focus almost completely on locally produced goods, and there I can be sure to find local meats of all kinds, as well as fresh local cheeses, yogurt, milk, butter and the ever present eggs and bread and vegetables.

I can even get local, organic milk, butter, shrimp, smoked fish and some produce at Hannafords.

I do also have my own garden full of green and cukes and potatoes right now, and my neighbors across the street have some really happy organically fed chickens and I can run over there and chat with her and get some super fresh eggs most any time.

Even though I live on 8 acres in the middle of a blip on the map called Warren, ME all of this wonderful food can be bought freshly every day within a 15 minute drive from my house.

This food is really fresh, and often surprising and varied in its taste. Granted the yogurt that I buy doesn’t taste even remotely like yoplait. Yoplait is its botoxed up Valley girl cousin. This food is not homogenized. It tastes like the soil and the rain from right here that went into it. It reflects the practices and preferences of the hands that made it. It is varied and influenced by the seasons. I find it to be so fully nourishing and grounding, tying me to this small patch of earth and the other people that live on it.

Empty Nest

(This is an image created from the nest for an auction to benefit animals affected by the BP Gulf oil spill)

A few weeks ago I was cleaning up my very overgrown vegetable garden. I was pulling milkweed and goldenrod from between the beds, and preparing to saw down a Christmas tree sized thistle. As I get closer to the thistle I saw, about 2 feet above the ground hidden in the branches, a fresh bird’s nest with four small, pale blue speckled eggs in it. I gasped and backed up, suddenly terrified of what I had almost done. I hadn’t touched the nest and hoped that I hadn’t disturbed it too much, but I had almost exposed it. I propped brush back up around it and wrapped string around the outside of the pile and didn’t go near it for a week. Tim checked on it though and told me that he had seen the bird back on the nest again. I was very relieved.

Then a week or two later I was back at work in the garden and thought I would check it myself. I peeked through the thick brush and was heartbroken to see that the nest was upset and empty. We hadn’t ultimately been the cause of this nest failure, but something else much lower to the ground had reached up, tipped the nest, and devoured the eggs without leaving a trace. I pulled the nest out and cut the thistle and brush down. The nest is about 6 inches in diameter, with a center hollow of about an inch and a half. It’s soft and thick and perfectly round, all created one blade of dried grass at a time carried by beak and wing. A wonder of engineering and a work of art. I’m so very sad for the mother bird. It is such a tragedy. A small, common tragedy perhaps, but no less truly sad.

I’ve seen a lot of small tragedies lately that would probably never have haunted my thoughts before. I am attuned to them, and each one hurts these days. A perfectly plumed seagull truck down by traffic, a tiny mouse running in the gutter inches from truck wheels, a friend’s disappointment. There have been a few moments when I feel overwhelmed by despair. How can we stand it? This world full of unfairness and small and large tragedies and no way to ever fully protect ourselves. My skin got thin and exposed in the recent loss of our baby, and it hasn’t fully thickened up yet. I do heal, I am fine. I spend most every day very happily right now, and feel quite healthy. I just know something else about the world to be afraid of now. I have experienced a little more of the world’s darkness, a little more of our fragility. That knowledge will seamlessly become part of who I am, but while it is fresh and new now it feels heavy and raw sometimes. This is part of the work of healing. Feeling the sore spot and acknowledging it and watching it fade to a pale scar on your consciousness.