The Bounty of the Earth
by Rev. Colin Bossen, March 22, 2009
Perhaps my first memory is standing in a cornfield with my Grandfather George. He was a Minnesota family farmer on the verge of retirement. It was the summer of my second birthday and my parents and I were visiting the family farm for the last time. I remember wandering through the rows of the straight corn, holding my grandfather's hand, and thinking how impossibly tall everything was. When I looked up all I could see was my grandfather and his infinite stalks of green towering above me.
It ends there, like most early memories, an impression more than a narrative. I do not remember going back to the farmhouse, my grandparents' massive garden and the home cooked meal that Grandmother Dee made, most likely from scratch. In my mind there is just corn and my grandfather, corn and my grandfather, corn and my grandfather, stretching off into a child's infinity.
Corn, of course, is a type of food and when I consider food and memory I find that they lie together like twins. In one of the most famous passages in literature Marcel Proust explores this relationship. In his "Remembrance of Things Past" he describes how eating a petite madeleine, a type of small French cake "moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell," soaked in a little tea transported him back to his childhood. Through the cup of tea he was able to bring back into being the town "of Combray and its surroundings" as he knew them as a child. His sense memory of the cake disintegrating in the warm tea was enough to blot out all present reality and consume him with the past.
Our relationship with food helps define who we are and how we relate to the Earth. The fact that food is primal is one reason why sense memories like Proust's are so vivid. Another, I suspect, is that the eating, preparing, buying, gathering and growing of food are religious acts. The word religion comes from the Latin relgio which means to bind. Religion is what binds us and connects us together. Nothing binds us and connects us to the Earth and each other more than food.
Michael Pollan's book "The Omnivores Dilemma" makes precisely this point. The book explores Pollan's relationship with nature through the course of four meals. He eats fast food. He prepares a meal from natural and organic items he purchases at Whole Foods. He helps slaughter and then eats a chicken from a small sustainable farm in Virginia. And he gathers and hunts a meal of wild pig and mushrooms.
Each of these meals places him in a different relationship with the food chain. The fast food meal puts him at one end of giant chain of food processing that starts with genetically modified corn in Iowa. Pollan makes the point that fast food is often eaten alone and in the car, making it an anti-social as well as industrial activity. Eating fast food he is scarcely aware that his meal was its component parts--corn, cow, wheat and petroleum.
The natural and organic supermarket food puts him a little closer to the start of the food. The food that he eats does not contain nearly as many synthesized products. It is largely made up of whole foods--unprocessed vegetables--and animal meat raised without antibiotics and growth hormones. He prepares it himself and eats with his family, thus making its preparation and consumption a social event. The food arrives at his table not as some product but as something he had an active role in creating.
Pollan's third meal places him closer still to the start of the food chain. He visits an innovative sustainable farm and learns about the complex ecosystem the farmer there has created to not just maintain but improve his land and ensure the health of his animals. He also slaughters chickens in a rudimentary assembly line.
Finally, Pollan's fourth meal teaches him about how food ultimately comes from nature. He learns that finding food in the wild is uncertain. At one point he spends two hours looking for abalone. He only finds a single one. He also comes to understand that eating meat requires the taking of life. Working on a slaughter line it was easy to render the chicken an abstraction. Shooting a wild pig, however, seems to Pollan a more cold blooded act. The animal has not made the Faustian bargain of domestication. Despite his struggles, Pollan describes this meal as "perfect." It places him in direct contact with the food chain. But it also causes him to realize that humans can no longer eat like this. Hunting and gathering food is unrealistic and unsustainable because the human population is too large.
Reading Pollan I am reminded that what we eat is a reflection of what we value. It is no coincidence that many religions have dietary laws. These laws are expression of the relationship of how a given culture relates to its food and ultimately nature. Jewish and Muslim dietary laws, for example, recognize that some types of animals, either domesticated or in their natural environment, carry with them a great number of food born illnesses. In the pre-modern society where these laws developed it was best to avoid meat that could kill you if it was not cooked properly. Many Buddhists avoid meat all together because they think it is wrong to inflict suffering upon other feeling beings.
Recently the scientist Richard Wrangham has suggested that the food we eat is what makes us human. According to an article in the Economist, Wrangham believes that what makes humans unique is that we cook our food. Cooking allows us alter food so that it is easier to digest. This in turn makes it possible to get more energy from the foodstuffs we consume. That energy powers our brains, the biggest energy consumer in our body. Without cooked food we would not consume enough calories to power our minds. And ultimately it is the creativity of the human mind that distinguishes us from other animals.
Cooking is not just about nutrition. It is also about socialization. It requires cooperation and coordination. Telling stories around the dinner table or passing along family recipes are two ways that we create and perpetuate culture. Wrangham suspects that the origin of society is around the cooking fire.
Another theory has it that the origin of civilization lies with the invention of agriculture. Humans were social before we learned to plant and harvest seeds. We worked together in groups to hunt game, forage for edible plants and fungus and prepare our meals. The advent of agriculture, however, forced us to form larger communities and stay in one place. In time this led to the specialization of labor and the development of complex technology. Without agriculture we might be socialized but we would never have become civilized. Agriculture freed the majority of the population to engage in other pursuits beyond the search for sustenance.
My mother's family were farmers. Many of my memories of them have to do with both the production and consumption of food. The joy and pride they took in the farming life is something that continues to astound me. My grandfather's cousins were a particularly tenacious bunch. My cousin Leslie farmed right up until he died. When we last visited him he was in his early 90s and still planting and plowing. In fact, he died on his tractor. In the summer heat, tending to his corn, he suffered a heart attack and crashed straight into the side of his barn.
I have a lot of memories of corn. Growing up in the Midwest I think of late summer as corn season. As a child it was a time when my parents would visit local roadside stands on a weekly basis looking for fresh sweet corn for dinner. After I was five or six it was my job to shuck the corn before my mother would boil or roast it.
This usually meant sitting on the back steps of our house and pulling back the green leaves to expose the golden kernels. I hated clearing away the silk. It seemed impossible. Slick, it stuck to my hands and to the ears. If it was not removed the corn was less appealing. No one wanted corn silk stuck in their teeth.
Corn is one of the staffs of life. The Mayans of Southern Mexico and Central America often refer to themselves as the corn people. There is a recognition that their lives are dependent upon corn. Even today corn makes up more than fifty percent of the diet of a typical Mexican. This leads some to state "I am corn walking."
The Pollan has described Americans as "processed corn walking." Over the last fifty years there has been a revolution in agriculture that has transformed the American diet to be ever more reliant on the corn plant. The meat we eat--be it chicken, beef, pork or even fish--is corn fed. Processed corn products appear in our sodas, wheat breads, candies and canned foods as preservatives and flavoring.
Most of these processed corn products are new to the human diet. High fructose corn syrup does not appear in the nature. Many scientists suspect that the recent rise in obesity and type II diabetes, as well possibly some kinds of cancer, can be traced directly to our increasing consumption of processed corn.
Processed corn has also altered the rural landscape. Gone are the diversified farms of my grandfather's generation. No longer will you find farmers growing a dozen crops and a variety of animals on their property. Instead most contemporary farms are devoted to corn as monoculture. If you drive through rural Iowa or Minnesota you will find an endless sea of corn shimmering against the sun.
Such monocultures do not appear in nature. They are vulnerable to disease and insects and require massive amounts of petroleum, rendered as petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides, to remain viable. I am not even certain that viable is the right word to use for such farming. Since its advent it has whittled the depth of the Iowa topsoil in half. A hundred years the topsoil was an average of four feet deep. Now it is only two.
Industrialized agriculture separates most of us from the cultivation or collection of our food. In doing so it changes our relationship with the Earth. The story of the rising complexity of our civilization and increasing size of the human population can be recast as the story of the majority of humanity's growing alienation from the production of food. Instead of growing it ourselves or buying it from a local farm stand our encounter with food usually takes place in the supermarket. Walking the aisles of Zagara's Marketplace I discover an endless bounty of fruits, vegetables, dairy, fish and meat all ready for the taking. I do not have to harvest the plants or kill animals for the meat. I find myself seemingly disconnected from the food chain. If I want something all I have to place it in my shopping cart, walk to the check-out counter and hand over some money.
This is very different than my mother's experience as a child on the farm. She had a pet cow, favorite pigs and was involved in the slaughter and preparation of the chickens. Autumn was always canning season, a time when my grandmother, my mother and my aunt would toil for days preparing to lay-up food for the coming winter.
I know something about canning. My mother still did it when I was young. And at my grandparents' lake house they kept a vast labyrinth of canned goods in the basement. There were canned tomatoes and beets and jams and jellies of various varieties. I was particularly drawn to the canned apricots and peaches, the holy of holies. Sometimes we would get these delightful fruits as mid-summer afternoon treat or on top of ice cream for dessert.
Almost everything in my grandparent's pantry was grown in their massive garden. There, with well tended black soil and organized into neat rows, one could find potatoes, tomatoes, greens, beets and a host of berries. There were the sweet currants--brilliant red or black--and the prickly fuzzy sour gooseberries.
Whenever we would visit my grandmother would work magic and transform the treasures from that bountiful stretch of vegetation into supper. Often my brother and I would be sent outside to dig potatoes or pick beans only an hour or so before we ate them. For the most part of grandmother's cooking was simple but there was nothing quite like her fresh ingredients.
My grandfather was an avid fisherman and I spent most of my summers as a child down on the dock or out a boat with him trying to catch walleye, pike or sunfish for dinner. Often we would return from an expedition with a plentiful catch. My grandfather would supervise my brother and I as we cleaned the fish. Then my grandmother would patiently show me how to dredge and fry the fish in flour.
There are few times I have felt as connected to the Earth as when I visited my grandparents. They had a very different relationship with the land than I do. As farmers they understood how we connected we are to it in a way that I, as city dweller, probably am incapable of ever quite getting.
But as spring arrives I anticipate a few afternoons of close connection with my source of sustenance. I am an avid forager and the coming of April means only one thing in my mind--morel mushrooms.
My first mushroom hunting expeditions were when I was probably no more than six or seven. My mother would take me with her as she and her friends searched for the honey combed bells. We would fan out through a wood with sandy soil and generous leaf litter. Looking near trees, peering through undergrowth, we would search for signs of the delicacies. Most times we would find at least a handful. When we did we would return home to a feast of fried mushrooms with garlic, usually accompanied by the spring's first asparagus.
Mushroom hunting places me in a very different state of consciousness than the one I normally inhabit. In order to be a successful hunter I need to be absolutely present and focused. I have to cast my eyes downward and pay attention to the variations of the soil. I need to look upwards so I can seek out certain types of trees. I try to discern patterns in the locations of the morels I find so that can have an easier time finding them on my next expedition.
When I hunt for mushrooms I feel my connection to and dependence upon the Earth. The experience is quite different from my trips to the supermarket to buy ingredients for dinner. Like Pollan, I get a small sense of what it must of have like to be an early human, completely dependent upon the whims of nature and luck for my survival.
Preparing the mushrooms I eat also suggests to me how our relationship to food makes us human. I know how to hunt and cook morels because of my mother. I eat them, build bonds of union and a common culture, with friends in social gathering. The fellowship we share is a reflection upon both our relationship and our willingness to have a direct relationship with the food chain.
Eating a meal of mushrooms I am reminded of the closing line of Clifton poem "and i taste in my natural appetite / the bond of live things everywhere." The food we eat shapes our connection the natural world. It is one way we share in and survive on the Earth's bounty.
May your next meal be a blessed one and remind you of your connection to the natural world. Everything you eat starts as sunshine. Each morsel was nourished by the soil. Each bite a product of the hands that worked to bring you food and the food chain--whether long or short--that connects you to other people and the planet.
Amen and Blessed.