The Story of a Meal

Last night we enjoyed a fabulous mostly local meal. IT was a pleasure! For me, the meals that mean the most come equipped with a story. Too much of our food is without story, just food. But when food has a history, some story that you connect with, I think that it has the ability to not only nourish our bodies, but our souls as well. And our souls could use all the nourishment that they can get these days.
So, how do you connect with your food and it's story? How do you find a way to make food more than "just food"?
I imagine that we each do this in our own way. For me, it begins with growing as much of our food as possible. Putting up the harvest by drying, canning, pickling and root cellaring as much as possible. It does not always last us all through the winter, but it is a start. It also means cooking from scratch with wholesome nutritious ingredients that are without artificial color, artificial flavor, food additives, pesticide residue, genetic modification, hormones or drugs. It is about being aware of where food comes from and what is in season.
The food we supplement our own produce with is bought, whenever possible, at the local farmer's market. At the Farmer's Market you get to talk with the farmer and ask questions about how the food was grown and where and even find out what variety of tomato it is. The varieties of produce available at the Farmer's Market are so diverse, especially when compared to what you can find in a conventional grocery store.
When we buy produce at the grocery store, we make sure to get organic. It does cost more and the regulations leave much to be desired.. but I know that I am NOT buying genetically modified produce and this is important to me. If I can talk to the farmer and find out how the food is grown, I don't need the certified organic label... but without the farmer, I want the certified label.
This fall we got a share in a cow that was raised locally and humanely. No feedlot meat for my family. Several folks went in on it and we have a great supply of wonderful beef. It has the flavor of life.
Another great source of local meat for us is Hickory Nut Gap Farms. It is the family farm of Amy and Jamie Ager. They raise wonderful meat. Last year we got a pork tenderloin from them at the Farmer's Market. The first bite brought memories flooding back to me, " This is what meat is supposed to taste like," I exclaimed. I had forgotten, I had actually forgotten what meat is supposed to taste like. As a child, we raised most of our own meat: each year a pig or two, a calf, and chickens. But it has been so long, that I had forgotten that taste of "Life" that is inherent in fresh meat. That one bite brought it all back to me and nothing else would ever be good enough again.
Now we get our meat from Hickory Nut Gap and have a great time going out to the country (all of a 15 minute drive) to do our shopping, talk with the farmer and see the baby animals. 
I will be honest with you, it does cost more. But the flavor is such that you don't need as much because it actually is satisfying on so many levels. Most of this country's food supply travels many, many miles to get to us, and average of 150o miles.  This food is breed to have long shelf-life and to look good. Taste is not even a consideration. No wonder so many of us simply eat to live...
Buying local should not cost more that food brought 1500 miles and imbibed with petroleum in so many ways. But for now, it does. The more we can support the local growers, the better it will be for all of us: economically, environmentally, nutritionally. In time, our support will make a big difference in so many lives!

I recently read the book, "Kitchen Literacy" by Ann Vileisis. This book rocked my world. It tells the fascinating story of "How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes From and Why We Need to Get It Back". Check it out. It will change your relationship to food and the stories we attach to our food.

I am fond of recounting our food's story as we sit down to eat. We hold hands around the table and Rebecca says thank you for the yummy food. I love that she is always so sure that it will indeed be yummy before the first bite! Then I tell the story of our meal.
Here was last night's story:

Yum! Hamburgers made from our cow with homegrown onions and home grown garlic and fresh picked arugula. Yum. Sweet Potato fries made from the sweet potatoes that we grew in our front yard this summer.   And my favorite, Tomato Jam made this summer from our tomatoes, basil and cayenne pepper instead of catsup. Yum. Maybe next time I will make the buns from scratch and someday maybe we'll get a goat and make our own cheese, but for now we know that the bread is organic and the cheese has no bovine growth hormone or antibiotics. Thank you for good food! Yum!

Does your meal tell a story? Is it telling the story that you want to hear?

How did I get here?

It is a snowy day here in Western North Carolina, as I find myself reflecting on where I come from, I am realizing that the choices that I make for my family are based not only on the state of the world today but on my own personal history.
When I was in kindergarten, my family went on a Sunday drive in the countryside on Long Island and stumbled on a goat farm. Now this was back in the 60's and there really was still some country left on Long Island in those days. I remember duck farms and potato farms and other small farms. But we managed to stumble on a goat place and stopped to check it out.. Well my Mom fell in love with the idea of raising goats. Funny how well I can remember that day even now. It was all she could talk about on the way home. But we lived in a township that did not allow farm animals and so began the search for a place where we could have goats. We had always had a big vegetable garden and I remember their first discovery of the hornworms on our tomato plants and the big stir that they caused. Mom and Dad gathered them in a jar and pulled out the reference books so that they could look them up and figure out what they were. So odd looking and morbidly fascinating to us kids. It's been 40 years and yet I still remember that jar and the writhing worms!
Anyway the talk at our house was all about goats after that Sunday drive and "back to the land" and homesteading and where could we do it. I love this part of the story! My parents decided that Pennsylvania sounded like a good place to "do this" and so they got a map of Pennsylvania and blindfolded Mom and she "stuck a pin in the map"! She landed on Middleburg, PA. And we went on our first of many farm hunting trips to Pennsylvania shortly after. We looked at farms in Middleburg and then other Pennsylvania towns and then into New England. Nothing was quite right and eventually another Sunday drive turned up a very old house in Sayville, NY also on Long Island (not far from our original place) that was in a township that did allow farm animals. It was an old center-hall colonial house build pre-revolution and had been in the same family ever since it was originally built. It had no electric and no plumbing, three outhouses out back, an old chicken shed and another big out building. I think it was an acre. They added all of the modern conveniences and my Dad, a cabinetmaker, faithfully restored each part of the house to the period that was built in. It was an amazing process of research and restoration. It was a combination genealogy and archeology project. Old houses always have a story to tell hidden in the construction techniques, add-ons and items lost in the floor boards or tucked away in other places. But add to all those clues, the house and shed were filled with old letters, magazines, newspapers, clothes and more. These people did not throw anything out and Mom was able to piece together the family history of these original inhabitants.
So our first family homestead was on a town lot in a small town setting. We had goats and chickens and a big organic garden. We kids always had our own garden plots that we were our responsibility. We ordered most of our seed from Gurneys back then. Each of us would choose one vegetable that we wanted to grow and we'd each also get several "penny packs". In those days Gurney would package for kids the "penny pack". It is not in their catalog anymore. But Dad always guessed that after a day of packaging seed they must have swept the floor to fill these "for kids only" packs as you never knew what you would get from these seeds. It was a magical things for a kid to have this wonderful mystery only to to be solved as the plants came up and revealed themselves.
Books like Grow It and Stocking Up and magazines like Mother Earth News and Organic Gardening were standard family reading.
Our in-town homestead continued on until I reached the 7th Grade when my parents became restless for that "back to the land" life. They had a real desire to "get out of the rat race" and move to the country.
We started this farm search, as we had begun the first hunt, in Middleburg, PA and there, nearly 10 years later, we found our place. It was an overgrown Christmas Tree farm where the land either went up or it went down.. not much level land there but it was 53 acres with a barn and other out buildings. The 100 year old covered over log house had electricity but no plumbing. Okay it had plumbing.... a hand pump in the kitchen, a galvanized wash tub in the "back room" for bathing, and an outhouse on the hill between the garden and the house.
Whenever I tell this story, I hear that old John Prine song running through my head..." Blow up your TV, throw away your paper, Go to the country, build you a home, Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches, ...." because that is just about what we did. No more TV, we grew most of our own vegetables in a terraced garden. Besides the goats, we raised chickens, ducks, and geese. We always had at least one beef calf and a pig or two for meat. We tried rabbit and strange but memorable things like beef tongue. For staples we shopped at the original Walnut Acres in PennsCreek, PA in our same county. (The original Walnut Acres, both the central Pennsylvania farm and the mail order food company founded in 1946 by organic pioneers Paul and Betty Keene, went out of business in the summer of 2000. The name and label is now owned by the Hain Celestial Group.)
This is how I spent my teenage years, milking and feeding the animals before school each day, helping in the garden and with the canning and preserving food for the winter. I am the oldest of five children and I know that I was often not a happy participant in this family experiment and way of life. But today, as I look at my life, I realize just how formative those years were in my view of the world and the choices that I now make for my family. When I look back into my deepest roots, I realize that my own urban plot and the path that I am on today first began in my family's homestead garden so many years ago.