Food, Spirit and a Sense of Place

by Barbara Fisher

I grew up eating locally.

As the granddaughter of a farming family who raised cattle, chickens, hogs, and vegetables, I learned early in life what truly fresh foods tasted like.  I also learned what labor went into the growing and production of food as I followed my grandmother down the garden rows, planting seeds, hoeing weeds and transplanting seedlings every spring. In the heat of summer through the crisp days of autumn, we harvested, canning, preserving and freezing in preparation for the fallow season of winter.  

In light of this rather unusual upbringing, it should come as no surprise that I have since endeavored to eat as close to the source of my food as possible. Not only do I dislike the concept of shipping vegetables hundreds or thousands of miles from the soil in which it was grown, I mistrust the rampant use of chemical fertilizer and pesticides that are necessary to run mono cropped factory farms. I also abhor the inhumane practices of confined animal feeding operations where most of the meat animals in our country are raised.  These unsustainable farming practices may produce a great deal of food cheaply, but they come at an astronomical environmental health and ethical cost.

There is also an often overlooked spiritual cost to the animals, plants, planet and ourselves when we consume food that is raised using unethical, unsustainable methods. As a woman who has been deeply connected to the spirit of nature since childhood, I cannot help but be aware of this seemingly unending well of pain and corruption that comes from working against nature in order to feed ourselves, instead of working with nature.

When we take from the Earth without giving back, we are destroying not only the soil, the environment, the plants and animals, we are destroying ourselves. When we act as if there are no consequences, we are fooling ourselves: taking up arable land for more shopping centers may not destroy us, but it may starve our children and grandchildren.

As humans, we have forgotten that we are not apart from nature; we are intimately entwined within the web of all life. And as such, we must understand that our every action and inaction affects everything we do. If we choose to eat apples shipped to us from New Zealand, instead of the ones grown in our home county, we are choosing not only to ignore our local economy and neighborhood farmers while supporting the use of  massive amounts of petroleum to ship fruit half a world away, we are also spurning the spiritual and physical gifts of the Earth where we live.

All plant foods are filled with vital vitamins, minerals, photochemical, carbohydrates, proteins, fats and bioflavenoids, all of which are necessary to sustain life. As soon as a vegetable or fruit is taken from the ground or parent plant, these energy-giving and life-sustaining elements begin to wane, fading rapidly the longer the interval between the farm to the table. When we eat far from the source of our food, we are robbing ourselves of the nutrients that plants give us.

In addition, eating far from the source of food may be helping humans feel disconnected from the Earth. I believe very strongly that not only does the soil in which a plant is grown affect the flavor and nutritious components of that plant, it also has a subtle effect on the energy field of that plant, stamping it spiritually with a sense of place. When we eat food of questionable nutritious value shipped from all over the world that we buy wrapped in plastic and far from the soil in which it was grown, we may be feeding our own sense of rootlessness and not belonging to our communities.

But, if we eat what is grown and produced close to us, or even better grow some of our own food ourselves, we foster that spiritual sense of connection, of belonging, of being part of the natural world. We become more aware of our place in the natural world, and it helps us take better care of ourselves, our families, our lands and our planet.

As a part of my spiritual practice, I buy most of my family’s food from local farmers, and cook most of our meals, all from healthy whole foods. Here in southeastern Ohio, we are uniquely able to purchase local meats, dairy products, eggs, fish, honey, wine, herbs, vegetables, fruits, mushrooms, tofu, pasta and breads. Ohioans, as are others across the United States and the world,  are becoming increasingly aware of and interested in the economic, environmental and health values of truly fresh local food, and because of the state’s strong tradition of agriculture, we could stand at the forefront of this new movement.

I only hope that the spiritual value of ethically produced local foods will also become known to the people of my home state, as well as those across the country and around the world. Local food has the potential to not only sustain our bodies, our communities, our families, our neighbors and our environments, it can also sustain our spirits, and help us reconnect with the natural world.

"They [the Native Hawaiian people] were pleased --if not jubilant --to once again be eating in place, eating with their ancestors, and eating what was fit for their genes and their cultural identity."(p.209, italics in original)

Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods, by Gary Paul Nabhan, WW. Norton & Co. New York, 2002, $24.95

Reviewed by Crow

I have chosen to praise the concepts of slow food by reviewing yet another of Nabhan's fabulous books because he has been living the values of slow food since well before the organization was conceived. (In 1982 Nabhan was one of the founders of Native Seeds/SEARCH, which has been saving and advocating for local food traditions and seeds in the Southwest ever since.)

If you have been reading the Newsletter you know something about Nabhan's work: even if his other books don't reach you emotionally, this one will.  I cried with laughter, love and joy several times! For instance:

"Because they can hardly crawl more than a half mile an hour, hornworm larvae as well as snails are the epitomes of  slow food... Of course, other spineless (invertebrate) creatures contribute to agricultural productivity in more obscure but no less direct ways: they pollinate our crops, rebuild our soils, and reward us with their beauty and intricate stories of adaptation and survival.  Invertebrates, along with microbes, are the little lives that run the farm, and the world as a whole." ( p136, emphases added.)

For this book Nabhan's approach was to spend a year growing, gathering and hunting slow foods.  This was not just for a series of spectacular meals (though he did prepare and report on a few of those). His goal was to obtain 95% of his diet, mostly through his own labour, from his backyard and as far away as within a 250 radius of his home.  And he succeeded, while inspiring, informing and entertaining us with his interactions with family, friends, neighbours, plant, animal and human. 

One of his experiences: Jogging a road in his neighbourhood, Nabhan comes across "extensive windrows of trash and wrappers left behind [along the roadside] by fast food aficionados_" The experience emphasized his choices: "Every day like this, I too could be seduced into shooting up such junk, to toss its wrappers out the window, and surge ahead on a chemical high. Or I could go cold turkey, and be humbled by the realities of gardening, hunting or gathering in this wildly unpredictable land."

Nabhan is not much good at the "slow life" part of the equation, however.  His very fast life as a member of a Lebanese American family, food scientist and activist for all he believes in, has him flying from Arizona to Lebanon, Chicago, Minnesota, Washington DC, rafting down the Colorado River and driving to the Gulf of California and maybe some other trips I have forgotten. (OK, the last two are within his 250 mile radius but were not strictly part of his food gathering efforts.) Most of his travels have to do with the "Politics" part of the book and its title. His personal reportage on the growth of Community Supported Agriculture and the Annual Campout of the Seed Savers Exchange versus the endless frustrations faced in dealing with the EPA over Genetically Modified BT corn (the kind that kills butterflies) is stunning.  It enlivens an already very lively book and gives true insights into the Good and the Bad in the world of food today. The inherent contrast between many people's positive efforts to maintain our access to genuine and safe slow foods and the industrial size stumbling blocks thrown in our way by commerce and government are overwhelming.

The book comes to a hilariously triumphant and moving (tear time again) climax of bread dancing (p.298).  With some 250 friends of many tribes and persuasions, following the guidance of Spirit, Nabhan has just walked for 12 days across the desert from the Gulf of California to the Mexican-American border near his home.  It has been a pilgrimage of faith to declare the beliefs of all of them (and many of them not well) that slow foods, their original foods, are still real, alive and available and that, with the help of those foods, each has to strength to begin to heal themselves. "Suddenly our friends from the other side appeared with an armful of the breads we had chosen to break on the border, not for nourishment but for catharsis.  We had chosen Pan Bimbo and Wonder, the loaves of foul air and feeble constitution."

 The catharsis and the climax occur in just how they "break" these breads.  But I won't spoil the story for you.  Get this book.  Read it all. It won't hurt if you want to read page 298 first...

 A shamanic moment to close:

"Like the peregrine, we need to cast a far-seeing eye across the landscape, while knowing how to tirelessly pursue the food most fitting for us close to home.  It's a tricky balance: when to soar high for the wide view, and when to dive for our own nourishment." p.207 

Other books that may be of interest:

Slow Food Revolution by Carlo Petrini, the person credited with starting and fueling the Slow Food revolution.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver, a deeply involved family whose lives, "make a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life and diversified farms at the center of the American diet."

Journey to the Sun
Anna-Sara  Fire

I always ground, center and shield inside a tree but this time it felt different right away. In Swedish the word "root" is rötter and the word for "feet" is fötter and the word almost sounds the same. That was important in this journey because I felt very clearly that the roots were my feet and that I was connected to the fire through them.

The roots of the tree were feeling hot, like they were on fire. Like they were stretching all the way down (or in) to the center of the earth and like there was a sun in there too.

I had become the tree that I usually just am inside of. In my branches were  a lot of bats and one of them came to take me up to the sun.

We were going above the tree tops, above the clouds and even above the sky.

When we were on the way up we passed through different layers in the atmosphere, and for each atmosphere we went through the breathing changed. It was very clear to me that the sun takes the oxygen, but it also gives something. It gives a whole new way of existing.

When there was no more oxygen I first panicked, but the connection with the sun transformed the feeling into a very interesting celerity. Everything was very clear to me. How it all works.

When there is no air, there is nothing that can go through our bodies, nothing that can work with us in the way we are used to. When our bodies can’t interact with the air, when there is no air our bodies stop having a frame and boundaries. We become one with what is surrounding us. In this case it was the rays from the sun. They were compact and my body stopped existing. I was the rays.

And we got closer to the sun.

The sun was bright, but all concepts had changed. Colours were suddenly like material, a colour was something you could feel. It not an illusion. So I think the sun was red or yellow, but it was more how it was feeling around me: how it was to be that colour since I was everything around me,  then how it looked.

The middle of the sun was the hardest of materials, that was my first feeling when I got close enough to it to experience it. It was harder than anything we could ever imagine, that could ever exist, but that made it also be nothing. It was in between. And the fact that it was so hard also made it eternal, ever existing but that also made it be nothing at all. Just a part of time.

I was thinking about its size, but I realized pretty soon that since my body doesn’t exist anymore and I’m a part of everything around me I can’t experience the size of the sun. It could be the biggest thing we can imagine, taking up the whole universe. But it could also be a little pea.

The whole journey was a lot about experiencing and questioning and rethinking our reality.

Crow Dancing Fire, Norfolk 2007