Food is Primary Care

Sometimes I will buy a big peach, a bright red tomato, or even an apple only to be disappointed when I bite into a mealy peach, a watery tomato, and a tasteless apple.  I don’t like to throw out food, so I often eat it anyway. But sometimes, it’s just so bad that I guiltily toss the entire beautiful glob into the compost pile, burying it under some faded tulips or tough cabbage leaves.

Nutritionists say that we’re not getting the nutrients our bodies need from our food.  Considering the obesity epidemic and the debilitating diseases in America, it’s hard not to agree. Soil health, crop health, and human health are interrelated. Since the 1950s, however, crop yield has gone up, but nutritional value has gone down.  The great monocultures of agricultural production have focused on yield, pest resistance, appearance, and shelf life; not taste or nutrition.

Many of our food systems provide food that is low on both flavor and nutrition — for example, food served in hospitals to those who are ill, people who need healthy food. Turkey with corn might sound appealing when ticked off the menu, but when it arrives the next day, it’s a different story. Pre-frozen turkey rounds and corn niblets grown with chemical pesticides and herbicides, not to mention jiggles of artificially dyed red and orange Jello for dessert, is neither appealing nor nutritious.

The good news is that Marydale Debor, founder of the organization Fresh Advantage (their wonderful tagline is Food is Primary Care), works to put fresh and nutritious food back into hospitals, schools, and other institutions. It’s not easy – the old guard must be removed and new chefs who want to buy and cook with local ingredients need to be hired. Debor knows that buying food from a small local farm is the best way to get tasty and nutritious food.

A healthy diet contains a diversity of foods, but how to encourage diverse and nourishing meals when much of our food no longer has taste — especially when junk food has so much flavor? I heard a presentation by Mark Schatzker, author of The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth about Food and Flavor. He explained that not only have our foods lost their flavor, but food is now separate from taste. He gave the example of the Frito-Lay Company that makes Dorito chips. In that product, for the first time, taste was manufactured; and flavor was added separately such that taste had no relation to the product’s food ingredients.  Frito-Lay, Inc. (a subsidiary of PepsiCo) perfected the taste of their chip to be appealing to a wide group of people. This original manufactured taste opened the door to all kinds of manufactured food, in particular, the enormous category of junk food.

Humans can have associations with food taste from childhood like the sweetness of mother’s milk. If a manufactured food is high is corn fructose, it will satisfy this associative sugar craving, but, and here’s the catch, it will not satisfy the belly’s nutritive need because it’s only flavor. We don’t stop eating, because the craving doesn’t go away. We are caught like Tantalus reaching for the apples that are forever out of reach.

I love potato chips and eat more than I like to admit. But if that peach I had grabbed was warm, sweet, and juicy, or there was a basket of cherry tomatoes on the kitchen counter, I would eat a bellyful, be sated, and nutritionally fed. Healthy food needs to be the norm for people everywhere. Everyone should have access to nourishing and delicious food at a price that is affordable.

A Late Harvest of Cherry Tomatoes from Old Frog Pond Farm

Some people believe that our bodies can sense food grown with love and compassion; it feeds the spirit as well as the body, and sadly the opposite is also true.  Food made by an angry cook can make a food unappealing or even repellent. ‘Food is primary care’ — and real food inspires wonderful poetry!

Ode to The Tomato

by Pablo Neruda

The street
filled with tomatoes,
midday,
summer,
light is
halved
like
a
tomato,
its juice
runs
through the streets.
In December,
unabated,
the tomato
invades
the kitchen,
it enters at lunchtime,
takes
its ease
on countertops,
among glasses,
butter dishes,
blue saltcellars.
It sheds
its own light,
benign majesty.
Unfortunately,
we must murder it:
the knife
sinks
into living flesh,
red
viscera
a cool
sun,
profound,
inexhaustible,
populates the salads
of Chile,
happily, it is wed
to the clear onion,
and to celebrate the union
we
pour
oil,
essential
child of the olive,
onto its halved hemispheres,
pepper
adds
its fragrance,
salt, its magnetism;
it is the wedding
of the day,
parsley
hoists
its flag,
potatoes
bubble vigorously,
the aroma
of the roast
knocks
at the door,
it's time!
come on!
and, on
the table, at the midpoint
of summer,
the tomato,
star of earth, recurrent
and fertile
star,
displays
its convolutions,
its canals,
its remarkable amplitude
and abundance,
no pit,
no husk,
no leaves or thorns,
the tomato offers
its gift
of fiery color
and cool completeness.

Pomme de Terre

To peel a boiled potato is a rare treat.                                  —François Ponge

Pomme de terre in French means apple of the earth. Like apples, les pommes de terre have been on the planet for thousands of years and have been cultivated on all every continent except Antarctica. They sprout easily from the tuber itself: a rarity among plants, unlike a seed that is often surrounded by fleshy material or a hard pit.

A forgotten bag of potatoes!

The potato had its start in the soil of South America between 8000 and 5000 BCE. Today in the Andes about four hundred varieties of potatoes are grown. A single farmer in Peru might plant thirty to fifty different potatoes. Some of these potatoes she knows are resistant to drought or disease, others keep longer once they are dug, some crop early, some late. Peruvian potatoes, like heirloom apples, have many-shapes: round, oblong, conical, to name only a few, with hues of red, brown, yellow, purple, and blue that are marbled, speckled, streaked, striped, and mottled. Twenty-five or so varieties are sold in supermarkets and it seems that Peruvian shoppers are familiar with each potato’s unique characteristic.

Near Cuzco, Peru, six thousand families live in the world's first "Potato Park." Here residents and scientists test the tolerance of different potatoes to changing temperatures in a 22,700 acre living laboratory. Climate change has affected potato growing in Peru as it has crops across the globe. Potatoes that grew at 3000 feet now must be grown closer to 4000 feet because of the rise in average temperatures at these altitudes. And in low altitudes, it is now too warm to plant them.  I am worried about our unseasonably warm local temperatures taking our fruit trees out of dormancy too early.

In his book, Potato: a history of the propitious esculent, John Reader writes that Juan, a Peruvian potato grower, told him that it had been a bad year for potatoes because an early frost had harmed the young plants. But his crop did all right. He had some plants that were frost tolerant, “and also tall enough to lean over and protect their weaker brothers.”

Farmers learn from their plants; being a farmer is being a nurturer. Humans need to eat, and if we are going to eat, we need to be kind to our crops. Today, so many people exchange money for food that we have moved far away from the mentality of being a nurturer towards plants. Money doesn’t grow on trees, and we don’t have to cultivate money with any sort of empathy. Is it any wonder that we have President Trump in the White House? His product, wealth, requires little compassion to grow, only aggressive boasting to propagate the Trump brand.

There is pressure on the Andean farmers to sell their land for profit. But it is organizations like the International Potato Center partnering with the “Potato Park” to support the Andean farmers so that their native knowledge will not be lost. Trialing the adaptive properties of hundreds of potatoes will hopefully insure that their children will eat food grown in the Andean soil, food will sustain them and their culture, as it has for millennia.  

The French poet, Francis Ponge, wrote prose poems about single objects like the potato.  Let’s not forget in these days of too much bad news to marvel at the simple potato.

La Pomme de Terre

To peel a boiled potato is a rare treat.

           Between the cushion and the thumb and the point of the knife held by the other fingers, one seizes — after piercing— one of those lips of rough, thin parchment and pulls it towards one to detach it from the appetizing flesh of the tuber. […]
          —François Ponge, in Selected Poems, edited and translated by Margaret Guiton

There are some potatoes with such papery thin skin that there is no need to peel away the parchment. And some are too beautiful to eat.

Freshly Dug Love!

The Myths of History

I’ve been reading the book, Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari. The author’s broad lens, an overview of our species from early man to the present time, is helpful as my focus has been so closely fixed on the daily headlines. Our brothers and sisters, members of our same genus, Homo, like Neanderthal man, Homo erectus, Homo soloensis, Homo floresiensis, among others, lived on this planet for millions of years. Then, Homo sapiens (Wise Man so we defined ourselves) evolved in West Africa, and spread throughout the Asian landmass, and all of the other members of our genus disappeared. Theories abound and no one really knows whether we were responsible. However, we do know a little about early sapien ways.

Ancient Turtle, Sculpture, LH

Homo sapiens, not content to stay in any one place, forged ahead. The first place we colonized was Australia, quite an undertaking considering the distance over land and water, but Homo sapiens did what we had been evolving to do. We stepped onto the landmass of what we call Australia where there were no other human beings, and changed it forever. Sapiens encountered great animals like 450 pound kangaroos, giant koala bears, and dragon size lizards. However, within a few short millennia, twenty-three of the twenty-four mammals weighing over one hundred pounds went extinct. Large animals have only one or two offspring and the gestation period is long. If the animal’s young are killed, even as few as one every month or so, in a few thousand years, they die out. As hunter and gatherers, we were not necessarily aware of the changes we were causing, but science points to the irreversible transformations we triggered.

Homo sapiens evolved extremely quickly. Unlike Homo erectus, for example, who used stone tools and remained essentially the same for two million years —  Homo sapiens wielded the hoe, the pen, and the brush, becoming farmers, and then, artists, politicians, scholars, scientists, and philosophers in a relatively short time. We developed a sophisticated language. Language, the big differential between us and other species, is how we shape our world. With language we decide collectively what to believe in, and how we envision the future. Harari makes the case that so much of our culture is myth anyway — it’s what we collectively believe. Sapiens became powerful because we learned how to collectively believe in myths—the myth of our economic system, the myth that there are countries with borders, the myths of religion. There is no scientific basis for any of these. From an historical perspective, you could say that religions developed and became dominant in a particular area for no more reason than a particular butterfly has blue wings. Perhaps we need to start dismantling some of our myths — especially the ones that separate instead of seek our commonality.

The assumption is that we have evolved from our wild and wooly ways, and developed and believe in sophisticated ideologies that we hold to be true and enable us to live peacefully and cooperatively with each other. But we don’t live peacefully or cooperatively with other sapiens or other creatures on the planet and we haven’t for many years. It’s almost as if our shadow side is finally coming forth and demanding to be seen and heard. It’s not this one election — nothing arises without a cause. On our planet millions of acres of forests are gone, our topsoil is disappearing at alarming rates, our biodiversity is shriveling, and climate change is going to make large areas inhabitable because of high water and high temperatures.  Greed, intolerance, and ignorance have all played their role.

This week I’ve been pruning the apple orchard with Denis Wagner who first taught me to prune the trees over a decade ago. We prune in silence until one of us asks about a certain branch. Sometimes we both stand back and gaze up into the crown of the tree wondering if there are some branches that need to be pruned out to encourage growth. We confer amiably and respectfully. We both know that there are multiple choices, and no one knows exactly what is best, but each cut changes the course of the growth of the tree. In the orchard it’s easy; we both want the best for the tree.

Does this analogy translate to the world? Not easily. Denis and I usually agree, and it takes very little for either of us to back down and harmonize with the other. But it does make me think that we need to talk, we need to stop building walls, stop filibustering, and stop being right. History has proved that unless we live compassionately and empathetically, we all suffer.

Apple Pressing, LH, 2016, Collection: Madeleine Lord

Hunters and gatherers related to their world with an early form of religion, what today we call animism. Animists believe that humans and animals can communicate — that we can and do have relationships not only with animals, but with trees, and even rocks. We share the world with these other creatures, both animate and inanimate. As we developed, we seemed to have forgotten that relationships are important. We have been focused on the power and the rights of the individual. Perhaps it’s time to throw out this notion of the sacrosanct individual, the one who signs executive orders at 4:42 pm on a Friday afternoon and changes the lives of thousands of people. But that means each of us, too, must loosen our own hold on our individual identity and join the fray – the messiness of living with all of our brothers and sisters, animate and inanimate, no matter what they do or do not believe in. 

Above all, we must enter the dialogue, speak up, loudly, and compassionately. We need to tell new stories that inspire and shed light on our earth, our home, our commonness. We are all Homo sapiens. We all have a beating heart.

Family Photo: My son, Alex, and his Dada, 1988

Southern Apples, an Elephant, Monkey, Rabbit, and Bird, Two Mango Trees and a Birthday

I celebrated my 60th birthday this week. My partner, Blase, gave me a first edition of the book Old Southern Apples, written by Lee Calhoun. Southern apples might sound like an oxymoron, since not many people think of the South as an Eden of apples. But over 1300 varieties originated south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and these apples are an important part of the area’s agrarian history. Old Southerners not only talk about Bloody Butcher corn and Red Ripper peas, but the now extinct apples like Fall Ambrosia (sounds so delicious), and the still available Limbertwigs.

Old Southern Apples describes the unique features of over 1600 apple varieties (though 300 of them originated elsewhere but were grown in the South). The book divides these apples between 300 still growing or available at nurseries and 1300 now extinct Southern apples, the names and descriptions mostly taken from old nursery catalogues (a coincidence that both numbers are 300). The book also contains forty-eight plates of hand-painted apple pictures selected from the seven thousand in the collection of the National Agricultural Library. That was from the days when the United States Department of Agriculture hired artists!

Old Southern Apples, Plates 15 - 18; Photos: Jerry Markatos 

As you may know, apples grown from seed are the unique progeny of two parents, because the blossoms are cross pollinated. Most of these seeded trees crop with hard, sour, or small fruit, better for the hogs than for eating off the tree. Some apples are good for making hard cider and apple cider vinegar, but a few trees out of a thousand planted might produce unexpected, remarkable apples that would be given names and propagated. Of the 1600 apple varieties mentioned in this book, all of them grew from seed to be extraordinary apples. In the South, whether the settlers were large landowners or tenant farmers, they all planted out their orchards with seeds, they didn’t set out grafted rootstocks. It was the way it was done.

Today, it would be the rare individual who would scatter seeds to plant an orchard. After all, who would want a collection of wild apples? Large orchardists order sapling trees from wholesale nurseries in the thousands or even ten thousand. Blocks of the same variety, interspersed with another variety for pollinating, are planted. It is the researchers who cross apples and come up with new varieties for orchards to trial. A few apples become the darlings of the marketplace. This approach to apple growing is very different from the grand creativity that nature realizes with such ease. As Lao Tzu said, Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

Inside my card, Blase tucked a print-out of a Buddhist tale. When King Mahajanaka, an earlier incarnation of the Buddha, was traveling through a park, he saw a monkey sitting on a branch of a mango tree. The King longed to stop and pick a few mangoes, but traveling with his large retinue, he had to continue without stopping. He decided he would sneak back alone that night to pick a few mangoes. That night, when he got to the grove, he lifted his torchlight and saw that someone had gotten there before him. The mango tree was stripped bare of fruit; its limbs were broken and its leaves lay scattered everywhere. He was saddened to think that this beautiful tree would likely not survive this ravagement. Then he saw another mango tree, one that had not been harmed. He realized that this tree avoided the carousing thieves because it had no fruit. The King returned and pondered his experience with the two mango trees. He decided he would renounce his title and give away everything he owned. He would become a tree without fruit. I love the story of the King Mahajanaka and the mango tree, but it could be taken as a teaching in renunciation. As many of you know, the orchard at Old Frog Pond Farm had no apples this year, and it was not because I renounced my title of orchardist.

The Birthday card Blase gave me was hand painted in Bhutan; he had saved it from our trip seven years ago. It is of a bird on a rabbit on a monkey’s shoulder, on an elephant (the bird and rabbit are hard to see). They are walking under a mango tree laden with fruit. It is an illustration of the “Four Harmonious Friends,” a much loved Bhutanese tale. These animals worked together; the bird planted the seed, the rabbit watered the sapling, the monkey fertilized it, and the elephant protected it until it grew into a beautiful tree with fruit for all of them.

"Four Harmonious Friends" handpainted in Bhutan

I loved my gift of so many fruit related stories. Our orchard is so much more than its acres of grafted trees. It’s a language we speak and share; a wild grove of poetry, paintings, sunsets, clouds, blossoms, and, hopefully next year, delicious fruit.