Food and me, #12: So, I haven't (quite) given up.

Perhaps you've given up on me, but I have not quite given up.  The start of school has been crazy.  And the semester has been crazy.  And right now I'm taking every day one day at a time.  But tonight, I thought I would make good on a promise and take one tiny step forward on these last six blogs by posting a poem that attempts to capture the rest of my experience which I left unfinished in #11.

Thirst

I drove down the green road,

past the golf course, past
the carefully manicured lawns, past
the Starbucks and the neat fluorescent aisles
of the local grocery store.

"My soul thirsts for you, God,”
I said, my bones clenching
the soft steering wheel,
“my flesh faints for you,
as in a dry and weary land
where there is no water left
since we pour it into the ground
an offering to green grass;
since we reverse osmosis filter it
for dehydrating stimulants;
since we hoard it in sterile,
clear plastic bottles.”

So I asked the LORD, the God
of power and glory, “Show me your face.”
I thought he might want me to burn
incense or fast or protest golf.

But the LORD said, “Rise up early
and go to the farmers market.
I will be there.”
Well, I didn’t make it very early,
I hoped that God would still be around.
The “bull’s blood” beets were fat and red,
there were purple carrots, and speckled
shelling beans and flat
kale leaves and jalapeño
peppers. The farmers smiled
and chatted. I bought some green
beans, but I didn’t see God.

So I asked the LORD, the God
of steadfast love, “Show me your face.”
I thought he might want me to
give up all I have or steal
from the rich and give to the poor.

But the LORD said, “Go to the butcher
and buy a free-range chicken.
I will be there.”
I wasn’t sure where he was going with this.
I looked around the narrow store
before timidly making my order
to the tall boy behind the counter
with the knives. They had wild Elk burgers
and salt pork and gammon bacon and bones
for soup. I left grasping the smallest
chicken like a goldfish from the fair,
but as it squished around in the bag I kinda felt
ripped off. I didn’t see God.

So I said to the LORD, the God
of silence, “Show me your face.”
I didn’t know what he was going
to say this time. And I wasn’t really sure
if I would do it anyway.

And the LORD said, “Cook that recipe
from Julia Child that you love so much,
use the bottle of sherry you’ve been saving
for something special and eat dinner
with your husband. I will be there.”
By now I was pretty sure God was
on vacation and had his auto-reply on random.

But I dusted off the sherry, put
it on the table, and considered it for a while.
It couldn’t hurt to try. So I cooked.
I cut out the chicken’s spine,
set it aside for stock. I split
the breast from drumstick, thigh,
wing, tenderloin, patted them dry and
dropped them into butter and oil.
Once they were brown and waiting,
into the pan went peeled, seeded tomatoes
and broth and the sherry. And, at the last,
sautéed brown mushrooms.

I boiled the green beans,
then they too sautéed carefully in butter
before I scooped them into the serving bowl,
pouring the sauce over the chicken
and, finally, setting the table.
We lit the candles, poured
the sherry, pulled our napkins
into our laps, broke the bread.
And the LORD was there.

Food and Me, #11: Back to Business

Two months ago I promised you a description of my first attempt at cooking a meal from Julia Child's cookbook.  The evening went a little bit like this:  Sadness and frustration and feelings of insecurity about what to cook.  Depression about the thawed whole organic, pastured chicken that I had to eat before it went bad, but didn't know what to do with.*  Forlorn glances at the clock to watch the time tick by, passing the normal time for dinner.

Then, a lightbulb!  Mom just sent me this cookbook, why don't I put it to use?  Flip, flip through the pages to... Poultry...  hmm... I don't have a good casserole dish (or the time really) to roast, nor do I actually have a roasting chicken apparently... I have a fryer chicken...how about sautee, that sounds easy enough?  There's one recipe that calls for a white wine and mushroom sauce. Ok.  Then there are the eggplant and zucchini which are going to go bad if I don't cook them.  I had a different recipe for ratatouille, but I bet Julia's is twenty times better... flip, flip... or twenty times longer...  Well, here goes.

So the first thing I had to do was send Clint out to buy a pound of butter and a bottle of white wine.  The poor guy was hungry and probably relieved to do anything that would make my mood better (or get him out of the house where I stewed).  Then I got started.  There was a lot of chopping.  First I disjointed the chicken.  There is something peculiarly empowering about taking a chicken apart.   In a chapter on knives in his cookbook The Supper of the Lamb, Robert Farrar Capon addresses the woman who knows how to wield and sharpen her own knives saying, "you will be provided with an instant rejoinder to anyone who presumes to lecture you on housewifery as an abject capitulation to the feminine mystique.  Simply let him see you presiding over your kitchen with steel in one hand and butcher knife in the other.  Execute six well-drawn strokes, and his words will turn to ashes in his mouth.  He was ready only for a maladjusted prisoner of the pantry; you have showed him instead one of the priestly archetypes of the race."

On top of all that priestliness, I'm also taken over by a sense of curiosity when I buy a whole food and take it apart piece by piece.  A kind of "Aha!" moment washes over me when I see how the chicken breast is connected to the breast bone, when I learn the good order of how to cut the chicken apart.  First, sit the chicken on its neck and saw down either side of the backbone, then set it aside.  Then, carefully, so as not to lose too much meat, cut down the breast bone and separate the two halves.  Find the joint where the thigh meets the body of the chicken and cut it.  Then find the "knee" and separate the drumstick from the thigh.  Same with the wing (though there is often little meat on it, since meat chickens aren't generally allowed space to stretch their wings).  Then finally, as Julia puts it "So that the breasts will cook evenly, slip a knife under the ribs and remove them."  Goodness, if only it were that easy!  I kept sawing into the ribs or cutting  too far into the chicken breast.  This might be because I don't know how to sharpen my knives. ;)

Perhaps all that sounds tedious to you.  It's just a chicken.  But it fascinates me.  This chicken was once a live thing, unique and hopefully happy.  Now it's life is gone, but I go to all the trouble of carefully disjointing it, to give it a kind of new life as a fabulous dinner, then it will give me life via my belly.  Such an interesting thought.  This is why I delight in buying whole chickens.

One last note.  I mentioned that you should set aside the backbone and then there are those ribs that are littered with the breast meat I accidentally severed from the rest of the breast.  The other thing I love about buying the whole chicken is how nothing has to go to waste.  I put these things in my crockpot and let them stew with water and vegetables (the celery tops and rubbery carrots from the bottom of the produce drawer in the fridge) and herbs overnight.  Ta da!  Chicken stock.  I pick out the meat pieces for a chicken and rice soup or a chicken salad sandwich and only then throw away the bones when they're exhausted.

And it makes me wonder, when I buy chicken breasts at the grocery store, where do all the chicken ribs and necks go?  They don't seem to be for sale.  I think they remind us of death so we don't like them around.  Are they just thrown away?  Isn't that wasteful?  Think of all the stock that could be made instead...  You could feed a whole city with that stock!

Oh my.  I haven't even gotten to the part where Clint comes home from the grocery store yet.  I haven't told you about Julia's advice to pat the chicken dry, or how I've inaugurated a "raw meat" towel in her honor.  Too many things to say...

*It was a humorous conversation with the farmer at the market where I bought the chicken.  I sorted through to find the least expensive one in the freezer, then plopped it down without a word on the counter and pulled out my wallet.  "Have you ever bought one of our chickens before?"  The tall, gruff farmer asked.  "No, but I've bought organic before,"  I answered.  "Well, they're not like Safeway chickens," he warned me.  I tried to convince him I was aware of that fact, but he insisted on taking $5 off the price, "in case you aren't satisfied."

Food and Me, #10: Diptych, Christ in two panels

Panel II.

After we visit the gravesite
and cry and hold one another,
we go out for lunch. And after
lunch we are tired and full, but we agree
to stop by Auntie Asha’s house, just for
fifteen minutes. Not a minute more.
I have a paper to finish.
And no heart for family.

When we arrive in Auntie’s red kitchen,
greeted by three generations of kisses
and the steel drum lilt of Trini voices,
the roti flour is already mixed
and kneaded, waiting for hands,
waiting to be divided into paratha
and dhalpuri. I poke my fingers
into the cotton-white dough
and learn with my fingers
the perfect proportions
of flour, baking powder,
salt and water to rise.

I give Grandma a kiss,
but I don’t think she knows who I am
until I say, “I’m learning to make roti,
Grandma!” Comprehending shines
on her wrinkled, cinnamon face.

Auntie Annie rolls the paratha
into a flat, white disk. A sprinkle
of flour, a smear of soft butter.
She cuts the dough into three strips
stacks them and rolls them together
into a great lump to rest.
Grandma sits and watches
from her chair like a throne.
“You ain’ doin’ it right,”
the queen of roti complains.
But even in her regal disdain,
she leans forward with excitement,
a little girl spying the action.

Uncle Al brings out the grinder
and the boiled golden dhal
becomes a soft flour. Asha
calls out for the geera,
“It’s behind your head!”
I root in the cabinet,
“Is this it?” “I don’t know,
let me smell it.” As the jar
opens the smell of cumin fills the room
and the dhal becomes roti.
The hands of three women
cup dough and scoop in the dhal,
carefully closing each into a ball.

The paratha is done resting.
Annie rolls it on the red counter
back into a white circle,
brushing oil on the heavy iron
tawa and slapping a full white moon
into its black sky.

“The last thing you have to do,”
Annie says grabbing the toasty hot roti
in an old dish towel with faded blue flowers,
"is bust it up.” She bunches the
perfect disk into a ball,
shreds it and presents it to me with a smile:
“Paratha…bus’-up-shut.” It looks just
like the broken shirt that is named for.

And now the dhalpuri
is ready for rolling and frying.
I do the flipping, while Margaret,
whose son brought me into this kitchen,
rolls. Her sisters laugh. Auntie Lisa
gets out her camera. “Look
at the American girl making roti!”
The oil pricks my skin
as the roti slaps down,
rises up with steam.

The glass table on the back porch
is spread with love--curry chicken and
coconut shrimp, sour pomsite fruits,
ripe figs, sweet basmati rice, lettuce salad.
And roti.

And Grandma tries to eat her napkin.
She scowls at me, “Dis roti bittah.”
“Ma, that’s not roti!” Lisa says,
and takes the napkin. We eat curry
with our fingers, wrap it in layers of roti.
We wag our tongues to cool their burning.

After fifteen minutes times eight,
we leave with a bag of roti, resurrected.

Food and Me #9: Diptych, Christ in two panels

Panel I.

I carried slavery on my shoulder,

weighing down my bones

on the bus ride home from class.

Silence stilled me like a drug

as I stared out the window at the blank

flash of faces passing by.

I plodded home from the bus

under the weight of judgment.

I let myself into the quiet and shade

of our apartment, alone for hours

before Clint would come home.

I sat at the tiny table

and stared at the white wall

for a while, letting sadness billow

and cloud into the room.

But then I remembered there were cherries

slowly dying in the refrigerator.

I drug my heavy limbs to the door

and lifted the cherries out of the cold.

As I pitted them, cutting deep to their bones,

the red dripped down my arms to my elbows

staining my skin. The pits collected in the

metal bowl with the dull rhythm

of a hammer hitting a broken bell.

I washed the red down the sink

to make the dough with a few pulses

of the food processor, the blades

pulverizing butter and flour and water

into a kind of submission.

I pressed them smooth across the counter,

with the heel of my hand

one palm-full at a time.

But I had no patience to wait

for dough to chill. Instead

I formed a ball, and quickly crossed it

with the side of my hand

before the rolling began.

Then I mixed the sour cherries

with sugar and, for the sadness,

I offered up clove, nutmeg and allspice.

The top crust covered them all with

a pricked Latin cross.

Then the heat and the waiting.

I grew restless as the timer ticked

off mounting piles of washed dishes

and folded clean clothes in the waiting

until I ran out of work

and just sat to breathe the burning,

of the flour frying in butter

and solemn incense bubbling

over the cracked crust.

When the door finally clicked open

that night, we ate sadness incarnate.

Food and Me #8: Five Sense Friday

seeing

My parents faces, for a second day.   The golden ripeness of my plum CSA share ready to be made into jam the old fashioned way from "Happy Farmer Al's" family recipe.  The new, bright eyes of a two-week old baby.

hearing

Friends voices punctuated by cooing and crying.  The plop of preserves in the making.  The successful pop of the canning lids at the end of the day.


feeling

the mush of 25 pounds of ripe plums as I pitted them and dumped them into the biggest pots I had.  My elbows hitting my mothers elbows as she reached across the bowl for a new plum.  The gentle stab of a persistent and familiar headache behind my right eye.

smelling

sweetness.  light.  humidity.  heat.  richness.  spice.  savignon blanc.

tasting

Oatmeal waffle breakfast (complete with strawberries and whipped cream).  Leftover lunch of every-vegetable, "Live longer" casserole.  Spicy pakistani curries of lamb and chicken and chickpeas over the sweetest brown basmati rice.  Brownies with the new parents.  The tartness of a finished plum jam.

*      *      *

A friend posted on her facebook today the quote "Work is love made visible" (Gibran).  Today our work was love made edible.  It was very, very good.

Reflections on Moving and an Apology

Phew.  Two more amazing summer classes, one TA job, and one move later, I'm back.  I warned you I wouldn't really be able to post after June 25, but I'm sorry I didn't meet my goal of 17 posts before then.  However, I will say that when I set that goal I didn't know that we would suddenly decide to move.  The good news is that I will continue the "Food and Me" series soon.  And you'll get the benefit of all the thinking and growing I've been doing in the mean time.

In the mean time I have a few loose reflections on moving that I thought I would share.

*Moving has definitely made me face the reality of my embodied-ness.  During two years of theological study at Regent, I've come to realize how much our culture, especially evangelical Christian culture and academic culture, de-values our bodies.  In the past century or so, we've experienced a kind of revival of the heresy of gnosticism, which denied that Jesus was fully man because it ascribed to a belief that matter was inherently evil.  This works its way out in the way that we tend to value the spiritual, the intellectual, and the virtual over the physical reality that we live in.  Well, I found it very convicting to clean our old apartment and realize how much I had been ignoring the dwelling place of our physical bodies.  Even though I've been trying to "take care of myself" by eating better, I had been neglecting the simple aspects of deep cleaning our apartment.  After hours and hours of scrubbing scuff marks of the wall, then scrubbing the kitchen cabinets and fridge and oven, I swear I felt like my arm was going to fall off.  Worse, I wished it would fall off because the muscles ached so much I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat, I couldn't do anything with my right arm.  I couldn't even rest it because it still hurt.  And of course pain killers are loaded with corn--so there was no getting around my pain.  But I felt a little bit like the karate kid.  The work had taught me a valuable lesson:  taking care of the matter around you is important.

*This move was also pretty tough on me, because it came right at the end of a month of classes.  I love Regent summer school because of its intensity:  each class meets daily for two weeks.  But by the end of the month, I was exhausted.  I hadn't had any time at all to think about packing or moving.  In fact, the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday we were supposed to start to move, I was still writing my food course paper.  Clint was mad at me, and rightly so, because he had finished his paper on time and was working (you know, so we could pay our rent) in the mornings and taking trips of stuff to the new place in the afternoons and evenings.  I felt overwhelmed and burnt out.  But I made it.  I only cried like, you know, 5 times.

*The good news is that I love our new apartment.  We have at least twice as much space as before, a real separate kitchen for me to cook in, cabinet space for all my pots and pans and bulk foods, a garden outside (which came pre-planted with yummy vegetables thanks to our friend Ben who just moved out of the apt) and it even has a washer and drier (a true luxury for the apt dweller!).  But while having so much space is a blessing, Clint and I have noticed how easy it is to get caught up using our computers in different rooms and forget to spend time together.  It was also a little overwhelming to unpack, because everything had been in one room before, and now I had to decide what was going to go in each of the 6 rooms in the new apt.  More space = privilege + more responsibility.

*Finally, after two years of walking to school, Clint and I are public transit commuters again.  There are blessings and curses to both ways of getting around, but I'm looking forward to the quiet at the apartment during the days.  I finally have my own desk, so hopefully it will do wonders for my writing and hopefully my writing career.  I didn't realize before how distracting it was to be able to just run over to Regent and visit Clint at work or stop by the library or other errands.  We're both hoping that we'll be able to be more intentional now about our time.  I know I've been more productive already!

Anyway, this was a little rambly, but I thought I'd give you a little update into my world and thoughts recently.  More on food to come!

Food and Me, #7: Five Sense Sabbath (Three weeks removed)

**warning:  this post describes in detail the slaughter of a lamb I witnessed on Friday, June 5.  I did not find it a disturbing experience, but if you have never experienced a butchering, you might.**

Hearing: the pop of the stun gun, the sawing of knife on woollen neck and spine, the gush of blood from the throat, the sigh of air leaving lungs, involuntary kicking of hooves against the barn wall as the last burst of life ebbs slowly from tendons and sinews.

Tasting: gunpowder smoke, the metal taste of a stomach clenched with nerves

Touching: sharp of knife, tuft of wool, heat, punch, and tug of skinning, my own skin's softness from handling the fat

Seeing: so little red, actually, after the initial rushing stream; warm brown eye stilled; hung meat; steam rising from offal; organs so similar to my own insides, ovaries and all,

Smelling:  warm and putrid smell of organs resting in a blue Rubbermaid container, hay and manure of a low, covered barn, salt blood, the raw tallow smell of lamb remaining on my arms for hours, long after washing up.  Then, sun and wind in muslin cloth as we wrapped the carcass tightly for hanging, keeping the flies from the fresh, clean meat.

And all for a Seder supper on Saturday night, complete with roast lamb just like it says in Exodus. Meat so moist and tender it practically melted on my tongue.  The rich broth filling the house with the smell of life lost and life sustained.  The lamb's life laid out in a butcher's cradle for mine.

Food and Me #6: The Kitchen

Now, I'd like to talk a little bit about cooking.  I've always felt a little... insecure... about cooking.  I never really did it that often until I got married.  Then, suddenly, I had this very hungry person to feed every night (since that was our agreement).  I tried cooking a little more, you know, starting out with Trader Joe's style reheating, and slowly building up to recipes in my favorite Whole Foods for the Whole Family.  And I had some disasters.  You know, where things are inedible because of their high carbon content.  Or when the eggs in the casserole refuse to set.  And for a long time I was absolutely crushed by those failures.  The housewife demon whispered in my ear many, many nasty things.  I was convinced for a while that I was a terrible wife destined to a miserable chore.  And I hated all those show-off women who made like 4 course gourmet meals and stuff.  They had to be doing it just to make me jealous.

But then I would have a good day, where the food was on the table before I began to feel faint and dizzy with spinning around in my tiny kitchen, where there was enough to feed a hungry man and a few hungry friends.  I started to actually look forward to the meals, and even more to the yummy leftovers that I planned for lunches.

And then, one day, I was cutting beets and beet greens for a borscht.  They were fresh from the farmers market and they were the most amazing colors I had ever seen in my life.  Burgundy and green.  If you've ever seen me in person, you probably know that my favorite color is red.  Well, those little ruby chunks of crisp antioxident yumminess laid on a perfectly complimenting bed of green took my breath away.  I am not doing this experience any justice at all in prose form, I shall have to try writing a poem about it in the poetry class I start next week.  Those beets were pure poetry.  Beauty incarnate.  Sexy as a woman in a red dress.  They were so alive.

I'm starting to realize that most of the ingredients we start with are quite the opposite.  No wonder we hate cooking.

So all this culminated, the Friday night a little over a week before the food course started, in me remembering that experience with the beets after months of cooking exhaustion because of all the things I can't eat now.  I had an eggplant and a thawed fryer chicken in my fridge that needed to be eaten tonight.  So I started thinking.  The recipes I had previously planned just didn't have that je ne sais quoi.  I flipped open my crisp new copy of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and sent my hungry husband to buy a bottle of white wine and a pound of butter.  While he was away I started chopping.  Once the butter arrived we could start frying (I made Clint help here). Three hours later, at like 8pm (no wonder Europeans eat so late!), Clint and I sat down to the most amazing meal I had ever cooked in my whole life:  Sauteed Chicken in a white wine, mushroom and tomato sauce and ratatouille provencale.  But the best part was the process...

But you'll have to wait to hear about that.

What's the most amazing/enjoyable meal you've made?  What made it so much fun?

Food and Me, #5: The Supermarket Experience

So why have I been telling you so many of the details of my food nostalgia?  For a higher purpose.  In his book Desiring the Kingdom, author James K. A. Smith argues that we are more formed by our repeated practices than by ideas (for a great review of the book see my friend Josh's blog).  For the first 25 years of my life or so, the most formative practice for determining what I ate was going to chain grocery stores.  It's something that we repeated at least once a week (I imagine), week after week.

You probably know the kind of experience that I'm referring to:  You run out of milk or eggs or something else you need, so you run to the store.  You park your car outside the big, warehouse-like building.  You grab a cart or a basket from the front of the store and dash to the back of the store where the Milk is stored, perhaps running past the produce and bread (on the fast-track around the outside of the store) or perhaps cutting through an aisle (where the colorful boxes all vie for your attention:  Low in fat!  High in omega 3!  Sugar free!). Once you've found your item, bring it to the front where you can look at magazine covers while you wait to check out, pay, and get out of here.

But recently I read a book which reminded me of a different kind of store.  The small general store in the book Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston was owned by a couple, and its front porch was the town's hub of gossip and storytelling and checkers and fun.  When you needed something, you brought your list to the store, and it was served to you in the proportion you needed (not pre-packaged).  The store owners could give their personal advice about the products, could give you a little more than you paid for to bless you, or could allow you some credit if you had a rough week.  The downsides were that they could also cheat you, the store didn't always seem sanitary (perhaps there were rodents in the bottom of the cracker barrel) and often there weren't too many choices.  Because there were only so many people working behind the counter, there could be a longer wait as they fetched all the goods for you.

These downsides were what inspired Clarence Saunders to found the first Piggly Wiggly Supermarket and patent his design.  He had admirable goals:  to make shopping more efficient, to increase product competition (which could potentially help bring prices down), and to cut some of the overhead costs of individualized service.  At first shoppers were overwhelmed by all the choices and had to be "trained" how to help themselves as they followed the arrows through the aisles, but eventually it's caught on as the supermarkets we know and love.

I don't think I'm the only one to feel guilty about shopping at the supermarket.  Whether its for personal health reasons (seeking food with fewer chemicals like MSG and HFCS), or for reasons of justice (fair trade, concern for environmental impact of foods shipped long distances) a lot of us are asking questions.  But I've found that the habits of supermarket shopping are hard to break (obsessively looking for the lowest prices so I can spend my wealth on other things, trying new foods based on their packaging, ignoring veggies because they're not "new and improved" nor packaged nor "easy"). As I study a little bit about healthy farming practices and healthy eating, I'm starting to wonder, has our obsession with cheap food made food too cheap, that is, so cheap that farmers with sustainable practices like avoiding genetically modified seeds and pesticides, and growing organically can't make ends meet anymore?  And so cheap that the food is stripped of a lot of what nourishes us?  Has the supermarket separated us too much from our food?

I'm still processing a lot of this so push back on me!  I want you to tell me what you think!

Resources on the supermarket:
Stuffed and Starved by Raj Patel, chap 8
Revolution at the Table by Harvey A. Levenstein, chap 3
An Ontology of Trash by Greg Kennedy

Food and Me, #4: On Corn and how it is in everything.

...And I needed to be ready to do anything in order to have the willpower to give up corn!

I was still feeling miserable when my mom came to visit me in August of last year.  In fact, I had lost a whole week out of a six week class and had to apply for extensions for my papers.  I didn't think of myself as sick, I just had headaches sometime, so it really got my attention when my health was holding me back from my school work.

When my mom told me that migraines are frequently caused by food allergies, I was interested, but unconvinced.  From what I've read about migraines (especially on nytimes.com) there is very little that doctors can do to treat migraines.  It seemed too easy to say they could be cured by avoiding a certain food.  Besides, I've always kind of resented picky eaters, and I was convinced that allergy sufferers were another kind of picky eater.  But after a little preliminary testing, Mom and I decided that I was probably allergic to corn, and I decided to try to eliminate corn from my diet. 

It seems easy, right?  I don't eat that much of the yellow stuff, maybe a couple corn-on-the-cobs a year and sometimes some frozen corn or corn bread.  I did eat a lot of popcorn, but I was pretty sure I could survive without it.  I knew to avoid corn starch and corn syrup (including the high fructose kind) and found that these were the foods that would immediately give me a headache if I had them.  But after a month of somewhat half-heartedly avoiding all these things, I still had headaches.  So I thought that maybe I should do some research about corn allergies online.

What I discovered was stunning.  There are so many more foods with corn than I ever dreamed!  Here is a picture of all the corn-laden products I had in my house at the time I checked the website:

Needless to say, I started to become a little overwhelmed.  My wheat flour was contaminated with corn (same milling machines), all canned goods (citric acid), any condiment made with white vinegar, things with "natural" sweetener xylitol (including most chewing gums), breads, even shampoo and conditioner!  For a complete list of trouble ingredients, check this website.  The documentary King Corn also discusses how corn is in many of the foods we eat today.

I have made long, slow progress against the allergy.  I was used to cooking for myself, but not to the extent that I now had to.  Everything had to be made from scratch with the corn-free substitute ingredients that I found.  There were no short cuts and there were very few restaurants where I could eat at with confidence.  I was also constantly finding new things that I was sensitive to, as I eliminated corn and became more sensitive.  So I found it really hard to enjoy food.  I was pretty hungry for a couple months.

But the good news is that I've gradually found foods I can eat with confidence and many of them are organic or local brands that perhaps I should have been eating in the first place.  But my supermarket-trained obsession with the getting the lowest price and the best deal had been holding me back (I'll explain this a little in the next post).  Clint and I aren't rich, but when we find healthy food that is nourishing, it's worth it to spend the extra little bit. 

And I've also found that it was worth it to spend the extra time that it took to make our food.  At first I found it very exhausting and frustrating.  Many of our favorite recipes from the past few years were no longer useful.  I felt I was starting over again from the beginning.  But the work researching groceries, trying new recipes, and plain old cooking and washing dishes has continued to have the effect of planting my feet on the ground.  I'm not just a mind who happens to have a body, but a whole person.  Taking care of myself, my body, is important work, and it teaches me about God.  And in the last month I've been convicted that it's just as important to eat slowly and enjoy my food.  Food is not just fuel for my machine, it is a good gift from God.  I have a new-found gratefulness for my daily bread.

Food and Me #3: Catching up

I should pick up where I left off.  I apologize for the delay.  I left you just at the point where I returned from my study abroad.  Up until that point in my life I think I had ascribed to a pretty common belief:  food is just fuel.  I didn't spend too much time preparing, thinking about, or eating my food.  Basically, I only ate because I had to in order to go and do the other things that I valued more like reading, studying, hanging out with friends, etc.  But after I had lived abroad, suddenly I began to realize how wonderful simple foods could taste.  So I tried to recreate a few of the recipes that my señora had cooked regularly, like that wonderful fresh salad, a saffron chicken dish, eating fruit for dessert, and so on.  I even began making my own baguettes (rather ambitious for a girl who mostly baked blueberry muffins from a box).  In my senior year of college, I found cooking and baking to be important work.  It kept my feet on the ground and gave me something physical to do while I worked on pretty abstract studies in English Literary Theory.

As I moved to New York, between my first years of teaching, my budding romance with Clint, and long commutes, I didn't have a lot of time for my food.  I began shopping regularly at Whole Foods, but often that just meant that I was buying Amy's Organic frozen dinners or pizzas.  McDonald's has a brilliant, but sinister plan in New York: they put their restaurants right by the subway stops.  Way too often I would stop by for a quick bite on my way home, when I was too tired to think much about food.  I went through various food fads/fasts, weaning myself off of coffee (which I had become addicted to in Spain), giving up refined sugars for Lent a few years.  I knew that I felt better when I avoided these things, and I began to notice how things like High Fructose Corn Syrup are in a lot of things that you wouldn't guess, like sandwich bread.  But ultimately my self control wouldn't last and I'd be back to eating these foods again.

Perhaps the biggest major change I made in these years was trying to cut out a lot of the "whites" in my diet (white rice, white flour, white potatoes, granulated sugar) and change them for "browns" (brown rice, whole wheat flour, sweet potatoes, raw sugars).  A friend had bravely emailed me that she noticed my skin was breaking out a lot (which it was), and she had the same problem years ago.  Through exercise, change in diet and visits to a dermatologist, she had improved her skin a lot.  I was game to try it.  But it isn't a change that happens overnight.  At first whole grain foods seem bulky and dry in comparison, but after a little while, you begin to crave them and the "white" foods seem pasty and unfilling.

This basic diet continued to grow as Clint and I got married and came here to Regent.  As a full time student, I was a different kind of busy, and I was able to spend more time on cooking and finding good recipes.  Both Clint and I were really happy with the progress we had made, but there was one catch.  After five years of progress toward a better diet, I was still having migraine headaches, and if anything they were getting worse.  They lasted longer and longer (up to four days, once or twice a month) and were more debilitating.  I was willing to do anything to get them to stop...

Food and Me, #2: The Middle Years

The next stage in my autobiography of eating is “leaving home.”  Growing up, I had learned how to use a recipe responsibly, but it was easier just to follow the instructions on the back of a box or sauce package.  I only needed this knowledge intermittently anyway.  I didn’t think too seriously about eating; it was just something I had to do. I was much more concerned with talking, thinking, having brilliant epiphanies, writing poems, etc.

The first few years away from home I spent mostly in the cafeteria at Cedarville, affectionately known as Chuck’s. Of course, like any college freshman who hadn’t been allowed ice cream, soda, or Lucky Charms, I had them all frequently.  Over time I developed my habits:  Pizza, pizza sandwiches, maybe salad, or an odd Belgian waffle.  Always a glass of water and a glass of Sprite mixed with Cranberry juice.  (I did go through a soy milk phase, I don’t remember why).  If we didn’t eat very nutritiously, the one think we did very well at Chuck’s was eat together.  I always ate with friends, and especially at lunch, we tended to linger talking and sipping coffee and going back for ice cream until they kicked us out.  I laughed a lot and gossiped a lot and I have fond memories in that place.

These first years of college I began to suffer from headaches.  I didn’t think of myself as sick at all.  Just every once in a while I got a headache, tried to sleep it off, and felt better.  After a while they started to get worse and cause me nausea.  But I still didn’t think about it too much.

It was study abroad that really started to make me think a new way about eating.  In England, I had to cook for myself.  I didn’t eat fancy, but I did buy fresh veggies regularly and this yummy probiotic drink called Yakult.  I loved the freedom of stopping in the Sainsbury’s Local and picking up a few things for the week.  I loved popping in cafes and restaurants for a pecan Danish or a bacon-brie-and-cranberry baguette.  I started to realize just how bad some American foods are.  The average supermarket bread in England was a million times better than American bread and dead cheap.  The cheeses available were AMAZING (Hello, Cheddar is actually a place!  And its not the only one where they make cheese.).  Some of my best memories of Oxford are of cooking, eating, drinking tea and telling stories with my housemates in our little kitchen.

Spain changed everything.  I lived with a family who ate fairly traditional Spanish food:  coffee and toast for breakfast (fresh buns bought daily); a big afternoon meal at 2 with a salad (always the same: iceburg lettuce, tomatoes, half a can of corn, onion, sea salt, vinegar and oil), a freshly warmed baguette, and usually some variety of soup or beans or maybe an artichoke in broth, finished with green olives (with the pit!) and Laughing Cow type cheese, then an orange, onto the peel of which la Señora would tap the ashes for her after dinner smoke, filling the room with this wonderful sweet burning smell; and a small, late, cold dinner.  I absolutely adore Spanish food.  The only headaches I got in Spain were on Sundays when la Señora didn’t make coffee… caffeine withdrawl.

Then I returned to the US.  Where my parents had moved from the city to a small town and did most of their shopping at Super Wal-Mart.

P.S.  Two notes:  1) my word count has swelled to 600 words.  This feels like a more natural cut off for me. 2) I want to apologize if in my first food post, I belittled anyone who writes a recipe blog.  I should have said that my expertise is theology (and autobiography, since I haven’t gotten to much theology yet—I promise, they’re related) so I will stick to that.  I’m still a novice about food, but I’m learning.

Food and Me #1: Cornography

My mom is a fairly good cook. Her mom was a fairly good cook who grew up on a farm and trained at the University of Wisconsin in Home Economics. Mom's cooking was simple and unadorned. Salt and pepper were basically the only spices she used regularly. She didn't like garlic, onions, tomatoes or mushrooms, so we didn't eat those very often. She had good skills and techniques in the kitchen and had a good repertoire of recipes. Some days we ate simply: a meat, vegetable, bread and salad. But other days the meals were more complex: beef stew or chili or beef and bean pie, shepherd's pie, chicken crepes (a favorite frequently requested on birthdays), roast chicken or turkey or pot roast, tacos or homemade pizza. No matter what, we always ate together at the table.

Mom didn't really make much from scratch, though it wasn't for lack of skill.  It was just easier to use the pre-prepared ingredients.  It saved time for her to spend with the three of us kids and made it easier for an Air-Force mom to get dinner on the table for a family meal every night. The ingredients were usually from the middle aisles of the grocery store. We used canned vegetables (or sometimes frozen), canned fruit cocktail, canned beans, frozen chicken cordon bleu or chicken kiev, canned sauces, bottled salad dressing, boxed cakes, frozen pie crusts, etc. Mom was a fairly avid couponer, so she would keep coupons in a little file box and save lots of money when we went big-time grocery shopping about once a month. We didn't spend much time in the produce section, since my little brother thought cherry tomatoes were bouncy balls. We did, however, eat a lot of carrot sticks and apple slices.

Of course, what we kids wanted when we went to the grocery store with Mom, were the brightly colored boxes. Fruit Loops, Lucky Charms and Count Chocula and Pop Tarts for breakfast, Lunchables deli meats, Kool-aid squeezits and fruit roll ups and gummy snacks for our lunches, and soda and ice cream desserts. But Mom held her line. We were not allowed sweet cereals, Mom would always check the sugar content, and we usually stuck with the cheerios or corn flakes (but by high school we never had time for breakfast anyway). Mom always made our lunches, I think she saw it as her responsibility and it was cheaper than buying school lunches. We got Lunchables once a year on a very special occasion, the rest of the year it was either Turkey or PB&J, always on wheat bread, carrot sticks, chips (usually tortilla chips, sometimes Doritos or Lays), and some kind of dessert. Mom had a soft spot for Little Debbies, but we often got the fruit roll ups or gummies too, or sometimes a few bite-sized candy bars. Mom had a healthy suspicion of red Kool-Aid, so we usually got Capri Sun juice or water instead. Soda (which we called Coke, no matter what it was, since we grew up in the South) and ice cream were for special occasions.

I don't think anything about this was abnormal for most families. We shopped at the grocery store and ate what was offered there and enjoyed it. It tasted good, it required less time working in the kitchen, and it allowed us more time to sit down together. If anything, we felt that we were on the healthy side of things. We ate regular portions of vegetables, limited our sugars and fats, and always stuck with wheat bread.

But the diet I grew up with is a far cry from the diet that I've transitioned to in the past few years. The main reason: everything on this menu (aside from the carrot sticks) has corn (and yes, I mean everything). I found out last August that I am allergic to corn.

Food and Me

My blog has been neglected and I've been trying to think of a good, interesting topic to get it going again.  Recently, the thing that has made me so excited I'm ready to jump up and down and smile at everyone and tell them life is wonderful has been food.  Specifically, reading about, studying, making, and enjoying food.  The cleaning up part is not quite as much fun, but I do feel that it is a means of grace in my life.  (Yes, I just subtly compared dish-washing to a sacrament, a way to meet God.  It's not such a stretch: as Kathleen Norris points out in The Quotidian Mystery dish-washing is an integral part of the Communion in Roman Catholic services.)

And so, in the next few weeks I would like to write about food.  Now, I'm fully aware that there are five million and one food blogs out there.  I'm going to try to go deeper than just sharing recipes.  Recipes are nice and helpful and a good way to connect with friends across the miles (since I always think of you with love when I use a recipe that I got from you and I do use your recipes!).  But I'd like to reflect spiritually on the food that I'm thinking about and planning and making and eating.  What do my food choices (about health, sustainability, etc.) mean about my relationship to God's creation?  What does the work that we put into (or don't put into) our food mean?  Does it matter if I eat with other people or stuff my face with toast while walking to class?  Basically, does God care about what I eat and how I eat it?

I think that I'll attempt to answer these questions by keeping a food diary which describes not only what I'm eating (though I'm sure you all care deeply about my diet ;) ) but my thoughts, feelings, and perceptions as I encounter food.  I hope that this does sound at least vaguely interesting to you. 

A lot of these thoughts (but not all of them) will be connected to a wonderful and unique Regent College course known fondly around these parts as "the Food Course."  On May 30th, Clint and I will be taking the ferry to Galiano Island to live on our professors' farm for two weeks with a community of 20-odd other people.  I have one week before the course in which to finish (and reflect on) a copious amount of food-related readings, then we will be on the course for two weeks, then I will have two weeks to wrap up my coursework before other summer classes claim my life. 

I bet in those 5 weeks I could write at least seventeen 500-word entries reflecting on food before Friday, June 25:  background to my relationship with food, reflections on my food experiences through the course, and a little bit of the kind of thinking I'm doing for my final paper (but I won't bore you with the whole thing, unless you demand to know).  Why seventeen entries?  I want to be accountable to actually finish (unlike my long-promised final post on Twilight and God), so I'll set myself a number and a due date.  I do like numbers with sevens in them, but more so it averages out to about 3 entries a week, just about the right number to keep you interested but not too overwhelmed, with two added in for good measure.  Why 500 words?  To keep it short, which is an art.

I'll get started on entry #1 in the next few days.  I think I'll call it "Cornography..."