by BK Loren
Okay. Maybe there was some projection on my part, but the food looked empty to me. After all, most of it had traveled an average of fifteen hundred miles away from its home before reaching that shelf. I was raised a military brat; I commiserated with the “fresh” corn and its lonesome cross-country journey.
My grocery shopping woes were compounded by signs I saw plastered on telephone poles and streetlights in the parking lots: LOSE 40 POUNDS IN 40 DAYS. GUARANTEED! My father was active in three wars: WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. It bothered me that he had fought, as he said, “for the freedom of this country,” and that this was part of what we were doing with this hard-won “freedom”: creating and marketing food for its lack of content, while people in other nations starved. What else, I wondered, were we touting for its lack of content?
As I entered the door of the grocery store, I had only a vague idea of where my “fresh, organic” produce had been. An incomprehensible machine in, I don’t know, Iowa, or maybe California, had methodically stabbed the seeds into the ground, and a computer-programmed pivot had watered the seeds until they began to grow. They grew very big, very fast because they were designed by engineers to grow big and fast. Then whatever it was—let’s say a red pepper—was plucked from the vine and put to its first major test: Was it big enough? Did it have the right red pepper shape? Did it successfully hide all signs of ever being subjected to weather or greedy insects? Indeed, my shiny pepper passed the test! Proudly, my pepper was then herded into a truck with many other peppers that looked just like it. After that, a tarp was thrown over the whole crowd, and together they made the big trip across America (passing many local farms on the way), where they were unloaded into a distributing warehouse, then loaded into another truck and carried to another warehouse, and so on and so forth, until my “fresh, organic” red pepper arrived in the store in Colorado, where it sat in the stock room for days. After a while, it was slapped with a price tag, then displayed under bright interrogation lights. No wonder it looked naked and scared as I fingered through and plucked my prized capsicum from the bunch. By the time I purchased my succulent red pepper, I was at least the fourth person to pay for it. How many times it had been fondled before it became mine is anyone’s guess.
Since joining the CSA, however, my relationship with food has become more trusting, more intimate. On Thursday mornings, the Monroe farm truck backs into my suburban driveway. Jacquie Monroe, blond hair, jeans and T-shirt, hops out, followed by her two kids, Alaina and Kyle. We chat, What’s been going on in your life, not much, how about yours, things like that, then we commence with the work at hand. Jacquie stands in the bed of the truck and peels the canvas back from the produce, and my nose, nay, my pores, are filled with the scent of fresh garlic and onions and broccoli and cauliflower and beans and lettuce and, oh, I swoon. I’m ten feet from the truck when this culinary bouquet saturates me, and it occurs to me that I’ve never smelled anything like this in any grocery store. I don’t have to press my nose to the cantaloupes in Jacquie’s truck to see if they’re fresh. I can smell them from ten feet away, the sweet scent permeating the air like—like what? Like fresh, just-picked-this-morning, bright orange-meaty, extra juicy, can’t-help-but-eat-it-now cantaloupes.
By the time my produce makes it to my driveway, I know exactly where it has been. Jerry planted the seeds that were either handed down through three generations of farming on the same land in LaSalle, Colorado, or purchased new from catalogs, not Monsanto. Jerry, Jacquie, Alaina, and Kyle watered the seeds. One of the CSA working-members picked the produce, divvied up the harvest into potato sacks, and loaded the sacks onto the truck.
By the time I haul the gunnysack into my kitchen, huge chunks of loamy earth fall on the floor, reminding me that what I eat depends on just that—large chunks of undeveloped earth. The onions and garlic I get from the farm are not round balls; they have long green tops, great for soup stock, and the garlic is waxy, the skin nothing like the dry parchment I once thought encased all garlic. When I pull the bulb apart to extract a clove, garlic juice drips out. I had to look at my members’ newsletter to identify an oddly shaped golden mound as cauliflower. I learned later that commercial farmers hide the florets of their cauliflower from sunlight to assure a uniform color (white), and that the golden color of my cauliflower assures me more nutrients absorbed from the sun.
Granted, the food I get from the farm often looks sallow, splotchy, and ill formed. That’s what I love about it. My produce is renegade! It is so lusciously, succulently, and nutritiously ugly. The beets are like a kid’s rock collection, different sizes and shapes, some round and plump as a heart, others as long as carrots. Some potatoes are like skipping stones, others like large river rocks. Inconvenient for cooking? Maybe. But compare that to this inconvenience: Much of this food would have been tossed into the trash bin if Jerry and Jacquie had continued selling to the natural food stores in the area. According to Jerry, only certain sizes, shapes, and colors meet the “high standards” demanded by grocers. They do not test for nutrients, up to half of which are lost seventy-two hours after a piece of produce is picked, organic or not. They do not test for toxicity. They test for uniformity of size and color. Diversity does not make a beautiful display, and a beautiful display is what opens the floodgates to the insatiable urge to buy. Food in America is often not about hunger.
Jerry also tells me that about 25 percent of all commercial produce in America is thrown away in the field because it is blemished, scarred, crooked, or off-color. Another 25 percent is then tossed during the grading process, which bends to the whims of food fashion. For eons, Grade C and smaller potatoes were tossed into Dumpsters due to their inadequate size. Recently, however, someone noticed that Grade C taters are downright delicious—more delicious even than expensive Grade As. Thus, the birth of a trend; when you order “new potatoes” on the menu at your favorite gourmet restaurant, you are eating yesterday’s trash and paying more for it.
Americans, by and large, select their food based on the unwieldy, abstract notion of physical beauty. It’s as if we were scoping the produce for a one-night stand, when what our bodies really need from food is a healthy, long-term relationship.
It may be true that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone; however, I think there’s a more slippery version of the same truth: You don’t know what you’ve lost till you find it.
When my father walked into my house and picked up an organic tomato from my fruit basket, I watched a whole world return to him. Through this food, we celebrated our connection.
PLATE TECTONICS AND OTHER UNDERGROUND THEORIES OF LOSS
EARTHQUAKES
I lived in a small cabin nestled in a redwood forest above the Pacific Ocean. Every morning, I woke up before dawn and counted my reasons for living: the trees, the scent of the ocean through the redwoods, the refracting light that looked liked diamonds on the distant waves, the sound of seals barking at night, my body, the complexity of my body among the billions of bodies together in this world, the way my body could move and my mind could make choices, the way these images and sensations wove themselves into my dreaming, the night air, the morning air, the air.
I recited these reasons like prayers. I hung on to them with all my might precisely because my grasp on them had been weakened. I clung to my reasons for living so I would not, that day, decide to take my own life. But the part of me that believed these reasons for living shrunk to something imperceptible as the day narrowed into working and interacting with colleagues. By the end of every day I was convinced I had outlived every reason I had for living. This was not the romantic depression I had occasionally posed for in earlier days, the depression of an overly philosophical artiste living in an imperfect world. This was different. I didn’t choose it; it chose me.
In his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Albert Camus says the only serious philosophical question is suicide. But at this point in my life, suicide was not really a question; it did not exist in the realm of ideas. I
t inhabited my body, my bones, my spirit. It was the only thing that made sense.
Then, one evening, I was lying on the couch, tired from my workday, and a rumbling entered my body like loud music with too much bass. I went to my front door, but couldn’t grasp the handle. The door swung open on its own, and I stood in the threshold, watching my truck catapult toward my house. I heard a blast, and then another. The giant redwoods quivered like aspens.
It seemed as if it took me several minutes to comprehend that the earth beneath my feet was shaking, but the Loma Prieta earthquake spanned only fifteen seconds. To this day, I can account for what took place during every one of those seconds. The earth was alive, its body shuddering through the soles of my feet.
My house was damaged, but did not fall down then. It fell two days later, during an aftershock. I was away at the time, and when I returned home, yellow security tape outlined the circumference of the shattered foundation. That night, I slept in a parking lot with other folks whose homes had been destroyed. We gathered around a bonfire and ate food given to us by the local grocer.
I’d been depressed for well over a year when the earthquake hit and had not been able to summon the time or motivation to look for professional help. The hopelessness and lethargy inhabiting my body made that bleak world seem as if it was the only place available to me, and at the time, it was. But something unnamable happened during the quake. For the first time in years, I felt a small amount of hope, and so I began looking for a therapist.
Each therapist I visited cited the grand display of the earth’s power as the cause of my depression (they, too, had experienced the incredible quake). They diagnosed me with PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder) and other acronyms that tied my depression to the losses the earthquake brought about in my life. But the acronyms did little to help my state of mind, and though I generally respect the process of therapy, talking for an hour a week in an air-conditioned office at that time in my life only magnified the disconnection that was haunting me.
I know now that the earthquake was not the cause of my depression; I was already depressed by the time the earth rattled beneath my feet and tore all my earthly possessions to smithereens. But my therapists were right about the quake playing an active role in what I was feeling. It was the main reason I was eventually healed.
TREMORS BEFORE THE QUAKE
To say when my depression began is a little like trying to determine the sneeze that turned the cold to pneumonia, the tremor that triggered the quake. I began to feel, in myself, a crevasse. It shifted viscerally, noticeably; it gaped wide enough to trap small emotions; it began to fill with a deep sense of loss.
At intervals I couldn’t determine or control, bits of memory lit up in my mind like scenes from a poorly lit movie. Their dimness didn’t frustrate me, but rather, drew me in. I looked harder to see them, certain that their plots were essential to understanding my life. There were the nights I had gone swimming with friends in the local reservoir. They were beautiful for their simplicity, for the clothes we didn’t wear, for the way the cool water felt on our naked bodies; there was a silence behind every whispered laughter, and the stars shivered in a darkened sky we normally ignored.
There was the day I went hunting with a friend who had always condemned grocery store vegetarians (like me) who felt virtuous in the “safe distance they kept from the guts of living.” She challenged me and my open mind to try hunting again (I’d tried it a few times with my brother when I was younger), to go with her.
A week later we sat silently, alert, almost perfectly still in the woods buried behind our little city. I couldn’t recall when I had sat so still for so long in one spot, the world folding in on me in that particular way: light cascading through trees, my senses heightened to every sound, every brush of movement magnified. It was as if my survival depended on my utter attention to the world in which I lived.
That night we dined together on rabbit. Though it was not the first time I’d eaten meat, it was the first time I had witnessed the relentless beauty and the necessary violence that eventually became my little dinner; I had seen and felt the exact moment when the rabbit turned from subject to object, the warmth of its body in my hands, the earth and its remaining wildness becoming a part of my body.
Though no single event felt like a cause or a genesis of my depression, my mind constellated images that carried a visual significance beyond language. These images relayed to me exactly how distant my daily existence had grown from everything most essential to me; they teased me with the possibility of a real connection to something substantial, not ephemeral—a sense of history, of my own place within history, of my own delicate but beautiful threads in a tapestry I could never fully comprehend.
It was not a trauma that caused my deepening sorrow. It was the recognition of beauty, and of my increasing distance from it.
AFTERSHOCKS
When the quake hit, I felt the earth beneath my feet, and I saw the accouterments of my life falling away. In the months that followed, I no longer had access to many of the things I had relied on as part of my self-definition. I wasn’t allowed to enter the area where the rubble, my rubble, lay at the bottom of a ravine. I wasn’t allowed to attempt to recover anything. A sign warned me that walking out to that dark ridge was not only dangerous, but illegal. The yellow tape, however, was less than a brick wall, and so one day, I ducked under it, sat on the hillside, and looked down. There it was: my life. A little pile of stuff that I recognized as I might an old friend; I was glad to see it, but I understood that we had to part ways. Most of the things I saw poking through the dirt held memories. I saw the arms of my jean-shirt reaching out of the mud, the pants that I usually wore with that shirt twisted, half-buried behind it. The outfit looked as if it had tried to swim to the surface, as if it had struggled to survive. I saw photo albums and tried to recall the images they held. I saw books I had lugged with me from state to state while I was a student, the books I just could not let go, their spines severed, their muddied pages rigid in the wind, like flocks of dying birds. If I could have climbed down there I would have held them for a moment, then tossed them like doves into the air. From the perspective of the hillside, my life looked so small and so inextricable from the earth. I didn’t feel particularly bereft. I felt amazed.
My therapists were surprised by my response. They worried I was on a dead-end path, that perhaps I was leaning toward a romantic desire to drop out of society completely. They urged me to maintain a realistic balance. The life toward which I was traveling, they feared, was a simplicity conjured by nostalgia.
I explained I didn’t want to “return to nature” or to some nonexistent utopian era. I believed then as I do now that nostalgia pieces together the past into an incomplete picture, a lie. I didn’t want to go back; I wanted to stop. When I was on the freeway, forced to travel at seventy miles per hour in order to stay in the flow of traffic, I wanted to stop. When I was rushing from one professional meeting to the next, completely unaware of any sight, sound, beauty, or ugliness, I wanted to stop. I did not want a promotion, did not want a cell phone, did not want to trade my house in for a tent, did not want to wear buckskin clothes; I did not want to go forward or back to anything. I wanted to stop where I was, where we are, right now. I thought, There is nothing else I need. But the world kept on. I could not stop it. So I wanted to stop what I could—my life, my contributions to a world in which I did not believe. It felt like an answer.
I began to see death as similar to the laundry: I knew it was a necessity of life, and procrastinating it only made things pile up. That’s the sense I had—things were piling up—not unresolved emotions or guilt, as therapists and friends assumed, but material things. Houses, cars, insurance, bicycles, kayaks, clothes, photos, computers, software, memberships to gyms, memberships to professional associations, memberships to clubs, knickknacks, books, more cars, more insurance, more clothes. These were the things I had worked for. These were the things I did not want.
> SUBDUCTION
sub-duc-tion: when two lithospheric plates collide and one is forced under the other.
The Loma Prieta earthquake was the shaking that upset the 1989 World Series, the quake that tumbled the Bay Bridge, killed sixty-three people, injured more than three thousand, shifted sidewalks by ten feet or more, and made many seaside farmers’ neat rows of garlic line up with rows of Brussels sprouts, the cabbage line up with artichokes. The magnitude of the quake was huge; it extended throughout the entire San Francisco Bay area. News reporters called it a “natural disaster”; others called it an “act of God.”
My therapists and I worked on “the appropriate response to grief,” the digging up of subterranean emotions. But I felt no real excavation. It was just language. What I understood as loss—my job, my nice car, my participation in a world with which I did not agree—my therapists saw as gain, and what they saw as loss—the fact that my clothes, my sofa, my TV, my desk, my computer had gone scuttling down a deep ravine—I saw as gain.
I thought of Saint Francis, the patron saint of San Francisco, who, in the thirteenth century, stripped off all his clothes, handed them to his wealthy father, then began walking a rugged path toward the walled city of Gubbio. Some time earlier, he had heard what he believed was the voice of God saying, “My house is falling into ruin. Go and repair it for me.” Maybe the earth shook beneath Saint Francis’s feet that day; maybe he did not lose everything, but simply let it go. Maybe his response was not grief, but ecstasy. In Gubbio, he lived with weather and wilderness, celebrating all the elements that decorated “God’s house.” The beauty and the destruction, the violence and grace.