by Vicki Robin
I had also rekindled my love of writing. At first the blog posts felt like a guilty pleasure. I had more important things to do. Every day, though, had been a revelation. Each insight made me hungry for the next, and for telling my readers what I’d learned. Readers? The blog had one follower at the beginning: Tricia. By the end of the month, though, Yes! magazine reposted the pick of the week’s litter to their weekly distribution list. I was reading my food dictionary daily and watching TED talks and documentaries, all the while presuming that this was a trifling sideline. I was like a committed bachelorette who’d stumbled into a relationship with the milquetoast in the apartment next door. Hmmm. Milk toast. Another food from childhood.
Retox
Even so, I presumed it would be a romance, not a marriage. I had no pretentions of changing my diet for good, but I wondered what would stick. Might I need some new guidelines once I took off the 10-mile corset, promises to myself about behaviors that would anchor the transformations when the tides turned and the old foods flooded my life? Here’s what I went on to write:
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 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 buy meat from my neighbors 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 four beds to produce more substantial and plentiful food. More carrots and beans. More herbs (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 three 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 must 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.
The Missing Ingredient
Yet something was still missing from my local formula. What was it? I smacked my lips together as if my tongue were tasting for the elusive flavor.
Aah! People. Where were the people around the table in this new ethic of relational eating. Like so many of us solo people in our culture, I’d gotten used to solitary dining.
Eating alone was the downside of living alone, a state I love after thirty-five years of living cheek by jowl with a bunch of other people. The quiet. The dominion over my choices. Being the mistress of my time. Taking in only the chatter I choose through e-mail, phone calls, and my trips down into Langley for food, mail, and conversation.
It turns out that I am not alone—so to speak. Solo living is an up-and-coming lifestyle. There are more than 32 million of us free to dine with a spoon in front of the fridge.
Families don’t fare that much better. Less than 60 percent of families with teens manage even five sit-down dinners together a week. Research shows that family dinners do a world of good, positively affecting grades, reducing stress, improving nutrition, and cutting the risk of getting into drugs, smoking, or drinking. But even so, we can’t seem to get ourselves on the same schedule.
Eric Klinenberg in his book Going Solo points out that in 1950, less than 10 percent of households were singles. Now 28 percent—and rising—of households are singles. In most cities, that goes up to nearly 40 percent. In New York City it’s 50 percent. Apparently this is what happens in countries with rising incomes, a good social-safety net, and greater economic independence for women. Population experts have learned that the best way to drive down births is to give women economic independence. Now we’re seeing that going to another level, with millions of women, like me, discovering they like to be quirky—and alone. My friends still reassure me, “Don’t worry, you’ll meet someone,” as if my solitude were a burden. Even when I’ve “met someone,” I never thought it would be fun to have them underfoot.
But come dinnertime I always feel odd. Where are the other people around the table? After thirty-five years in community with a family dinner at 6:30 every night, eating without savoring conversation is not as nourishing.
I wondered how this 10-mile diet might affect my solo eating—if I would now broaden out again to feeding others, to breaking bread. Why, besides living alone, did I not share meals with other?
Busy Day, Busy Day, No Time to Make a Friend
I—like the majority of my friends and many families, apparently—am busy, busy, busy. I don’t even have time for inviting friends, it seems, much less preparing a meal for them. Unknown minions in kitchens and factories cook for us. Prepackaged meals and take-out meals allow us all to eat without cooking. Putting dinner on the table is as quick as calling for pizza or buying a preroasted chicken at the market. It’s less of a social occasion. Is it also more of an overeating occasion? Certainly I tend to eat more when no one is watching. Do others? Is there any correlation between living alone and obesity?
Back in the hunter-gatherer days, being ostracized was tantamount to being executed. We needed one another to survive. We still do, but the fact is hidden behind that Wizard of Oz screen of self-sufficiency. We wouldn’t last much more than a week without our farmers, whatever the scale of their operations, yet we eat almost as if going to the industrial outlet called “the market” magically produces food!
Is this a victory or a loss? Just because humans once needed their tribes to survive in the hunter-gatherer days doesn’t mean that eating together makes us human. Or does it? Are we by nature convivial—social creatures who flourish by sharing the vicissitudes of living? I wanted to come back to the tribe before the 10-mile diet was done. I wanted to welcome people into my 10-mile culture, to affirm the sufficiency and deliciousness of my food by feeding another. And who better than Tricia!
The Last Supper?
I was a rusty hostess—my meals and home arranged around solitude—but it was time to reciprocate my feeder’s generosity by feeding her. For more than a month Tricia had filled both my heart and my belly. I wanted my last official 10-mile supper to be with her and her husband, Kent, and I knew just what to serve. One of Tobey’s 10-mile twenty-five-dollar chickens.
On September 30 I scrubbed, swept, and vacuumed to a higher standard than I hold for just myself, and filled the house with the perfume of home cooking.
Tricia and Kent showed up all smiles and with a few extra vegetables since we’d developed such a momma-and-baby-bird relationship. Kent has a round face that lights up when he smiles, and had always seemed to me a man with enthusiasm to spare. Whenever we’d been at a meeting together he’d nearly bounced up out of his chair to offer at least two or three inventive solutions to any problem we encountered. When I first met Tricia in the choir, there had been no Kent on the horizon. Now they were work as well as life partners, Tricia the gardener, Kent—by day a teacher—the builder of fences and sheds and greenhouses.
Soon we were at the table for the meal. I’d roasted the chicken with Tricia’s garlic and rosemary inserted under the skin and inside the cavity for flavor. I’d also roasted some of Tricia’s vegetables: onions, potatoes, turnips (aah, how I love them now), and carrots. For the salad (Tricia’s greens, tomatoes, and cucumbers) I made a dressing of crushed garlic, fresh chopped basil and oregano, and those precious exotics, oil and lime juice. For dessert I’d cored some of Tricia’s apples, drizzled Island Apiaries’ honey in the wells, and baked them. I put out a pitcher of Belinda’s cream for the apples and the coffee and tea.
We carved the chicken as though it were a Thanksgiving turkey, slicing the breast meat rather than just serving a whole breast to one person, a leg and thigh to another. Maybe it was the slow, rich, ambling conversation, maybe as food producers we were all viscerally aware of what it took to put that meal on the table, maybe the meat itself was more filling and tasty because the bird had had a happy life out in the grass, pecking at grubs and organic feed. Whatever, there were actually leftovers that I portioned out over days, making the price per meal equal to wolfing down a miserable, grown-in-the-dark, beak-clipped, factory-farmed bird in two sittings. Alone.
Our conversation delved below the level of food and farming to how Tricia and Kent met, fell in love, and married, and then deeper to our spiritual beliefs and experiences. It was then that I learned of Kent’s mystical bent and his study of Rudolf Steiner—biodynamic farming and a whole body of work on the integration of nature, spirit, and daily life. I’d never had a chance to learn firsthand about Steiner’s thoughts and we talked long into the night.
All the while a warmth spread in my belly that was the opposite of hunger. It was the fullness of giving.
In India they say, “The guest is God.” By feeding Tricia and Kent I was paying forward all the cups of warm beverages and little empañadas and cheeses and fruit and even Coca-Colas I’d received in homes across this world. I returned to the tribe—if only for an evening. I realized how I need people just as much as I need crunch or chocolate or calories. Local is a place in the heart as well as one way to fill my stomach. Like that moment in my backyard when food became where I belonged, not just what I bought, this dinner reminded me that feeding and being fed makes us belong to one another, makes us a people.
I went to bed so very satisfied, body and soul.
I slept. I woke. And it was . . .
October 1
Toast! It was such an event, I wrote it large in my journal. Followed by:
Crunch!
I topped the toast with almond butter and sat down to eat it with my standard tea, honey, and milk, cat on my lap, journal on the arm of the chair, feet up, eyes gazing at the beautiful line of fir trees to the east of my house and Mt. Baker to the north.
I made it. Yet it made me too. Or remade me. Besides having lost six pounds, something different was simmering in my soul. My friend, author, and global activist Lynne Twist, said once, “We don’t do our projects. We enter them and they transform us.”
What had changed within me? I asked and waited for answers to come, jotting them in my journal.
Homecoming
The first thought that came was this: Now I know I live somewhere.
I’ve lived in houses in towns and cities, yes, but I’d never cast my lot so fully with a place and a people, with the local farmers, farms, fields, forest, and friends who live here too. In Rhinelander I’d learned to grow a garden, butcher animals, and process food, but we were isolated from town, and we relied less on our garden than on our burlap bags of rice, beans, and potatoes. While I wasn’t sure “we”—as in all of us here on the island—could live “here” as religiously as I had this month, I knew that my effort to do so had knitted me into the community at a most profound level. A real community of place where people with differences live together and find common ground.
Where had I been living before September, anyway?
With perfect postmodern irony I thought, I live in my mind. A skin-encapsulated, life-process animated bundle of thoughts. A child of Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.” The “I-that-thinks” has actually been the only consistent address for what I call me. Born in Oklahoma, I lived sixteen years on Long Island before I was off and running. Rhode Island, Madrid, and Brooklyn formed a six-year runway to taking off for parts unknown. I then spent fifteen years “on the road”—on and off living in a motor home punctuated by stints in driveways and rental homes for projects in Mexico, Arizona, Wisconsin, California, Colorado, Washington, Texas, and Canada. The circle of friends was fairly constant but the place called “home” kept changing. Then eighteen years in a shared house in Seattle, but lots of the time in hotels and on airplanes as I traveled the world to speak about frugality. Then cancer uprooted me from everything, planting me like a seed in that rental on Whidbey. Everywhere I lived until this diet—even Seattle for so many years—felt more like a stage set than settled. That old Willie Nelson song “On the Road Again” used to be my theme song.
Another place I’d claimed as home was “the planet.” I was a global citizen. I was part of a highly mobile global community of sustainability pioneers. We met in hotels and at conferences like lovers meet for trysts, sustaining a conversation about “narratives” and “paradigms” and “policy frameworks” and processes and philosophies and levers and systems and who was funding what. We ate at buffets and banquets and in restaurants, and I always came home a few pounds heavier—wherever home was.
It was like I’d hovered over life, one of the privileged few who did not need to land somewhere—or apparently anywhere—to make a go of it. When I was a highflyer, so to speak, I tended to look down on people who stayed put. The term “local yokels” probably went through my mind more than once. “A rolling stone gathers no moss” used to seem an instruction to keep moving. Now it seemed like a formula for never belonging to a place or a people.
With the 10-mile diet I’d landed, and I suspected it wasn’t just for a month. I began to understand what being a part of place and community could mean in a different way. Shopping, dancing, walking the trails, strolling in town, I saw Belinda and Koren, Britt and Eric, Sandra and Nina, Tricia, Kent, Pam, and other farmers I knew, like Georgie, Molly and Anna and John Peterson, and Loren and Patty Imes, and on and on. Not only were they becoming part of my life, I was becoming part of theirs.
John Young, a teacher of traditional ways, talks about becoming native to a place. When I’d met him fifteen years earlier he was giving every student an entry-level assignment: Find a “secret spot”—a place in nature near your home that calls you. Visit it daily, rain or shine, chilly or warm, for a year. Notice the life in this small patch—the cycles of the plants, the animal tracks, the changing arc of the sun, the shifting winds. Only then are you ready for the next assignment. He had an “alien test,” now called a “tourist test,” that asked questions about where you live—about native vegetation, waterways, which direction the storms come from, poisonous plants, and animal tracks. Almost everyone flunked. Almost none of us really lives where we live.
My 10-mile diet was like a secret spot—a place I was, by choice, tethered to. Surprisingly, after so many years of spreading my wings, I found spreading my roots liberating.
The Freedom of Limits
The second thought that came was this: The constraints of this diet had actually freed me from my fierce independence, a brittle shield that did nothing to really allay my fears. I’d bumped into this shield in those six months of contemplation when I had cancer. I’d felt it like a mime feels a wall—invisible but made vivid when contact happens. I was old and wise enough to not try to rip it down or dismiss it as fantasy. I let my life still, let that fluttering self settle down. Now, thanks to the diet, I had settled in. Rather than feeling trapped, I felt held. The ground under me seemed solid. I didn’t need to fabricate safety every day by my actions. I just needed to pa
rticipate.
For years I’d thought, written, and lectured about “liberating limits.” How a canvas can free an artist’s imagination. How well-made structures (bridges, marriages, cities) actually give people the freedom to move. How values are the chosen limits that allow our lives to deepen rather than dissipate.
My 10-mile diet, with all its constraints, was a perfect case in point. This rootedness was actually freeing me from that background fear. As I looked back over the month from the happy land of toast and almond butter, of chocolate and popcorn, I was able to see how many of what I called problems turned out to be portals into new freedoms. Like all limits, the obstacles interrupted my patterns. To find my way to happiness again, I couldn’t go back to blissful ignorance. I went forward, sometimes through thickets of assumptions, to find a truer place to stand and a softer, sweeter sense of freedom.
I reflected on these liberating limits I’d encountered over the past four weeks:
There were unpleasant constraints that turned out to be doorways into a greater love. My flair for drama made me think of myself as a Russian peasant as I packed for that trip to Bellingham. Honest fidelity to my word, though, set me up for an honest realization: love trumps rules. The love poured into purchasing and preparing the food at that conference was a higher value than my strict adherence to a limit I’d set. Only by keeping your word does breaking it in service to a higher truth have any meaning. A more nuanced “rule”—“local everywhere”—came from that surrender. Local isn’t consigning oneself to a narrow existence. Rather, “local” is honoring, respecting and supporting the life of the place you are, wherever that is. Without the disrupting limit to my everywhere-eating, I would not have learned these lessons.
There were creative solutions when I couldn’t just “go to the store.” Missing ingredients snapped me out of my routines and forced me to actually address what I did have with new respect and even gratitude. What I lacked in range I made up for in imagination. Lowly potatoes rose in status in the absence of rice or pasta. I really saw all the possibilities in all the vegetables that grew here. Honey, my only sweetener, became the nectar of the gods, not just an expensive way to widen my girth. Using the ingredients at hand, I figured out how to create a full-spectrum sense of satisfaction—even substitute crunch.