A recipe. A stream of consciousness. A confession.

The problem with exposés, like the documentary on foodborne illness that I just watched, is that by identifying a specific problem deemed dire enough to make the argument that it needs an immediate solution we remove it from its necessary interconnectedness. All of us and everything around us are interconnected. Identifying a singular problem creates isolation, which creates an isolated solution. It breaks the chain of interconnectedness. This creates a problem elsewhere. Then we isolate the second problem and fix it and in doing so create a third problem down the line. And so it goes. The chicken is a good example of this regarding foodborne illness. Chickens are not meant to remain indoors crammed together by the tens of thousands. We do this to produce the most amount of chicken in the least amount of time for the least amount of money to appease every possible consumer directive to appease the desire for manufactured wealth. But the chickens get sick because they are in an unnatural environment. They develop e coli, for example. To manage this, the chickens are given antibiotics. But the e coli evolves and becomes resistant to the antibody. When the infected chicken goes to market and then infects the consumer, the consumer becomes ill. The doctor prescribes antibiotics. But, because the e coli strain became resistant to antibodies, the bacterium persists within us. This can be fatal. By attempting to fix the first problem we created a larger problem down the line. The correct and only solution is to discontinue the problem. Don’t raise chickens unnaturally and you won’t have sick chickens. Most often there is no just cause for creating a solution when the option to discontinue the problem is still available. Nature is too powerful to control and yields unimaginable consequences when we force her into our manufactured violence. We see this every time, without fail, though sometimes years after we’ve prematurely congratulated ourselves. Norman Borlaug, the Nobel Peace prize-winning man hailed for “feeding the world”. Then why is the world still so hungry? And why has our soil turned to dirt that requires increasing artificial inputs that continue to yield a smaller crop than the previous year and so it goes with the farmers poorer than they ever were and left with a land destroyed thus destroying the possibility of growing food to feed themselves leaving them even hungrier than before without any money to pay for the food they used to grow for themselves. And so it goes, Mr. Borlaug now dead and gone the reductionist white man at the seat of global injustice savior to the third world that didn’t ask for one, but Mr. Borlaug came along anyway to become no savior at all but, nevertheless, glorified by the first world that his legacy is killing, killing us and them a holocaust that never ends. This is the kind of result when man pretends he’s discovered some sovereignty over nature that will always reassert herself in due time.

This year I’ve had the pleasure to experience the frailty of man in the garden. We’ve become so fulfilled by our utter failure that it cannot be considered a failure at all. The churned-up land is a disorganized mess infested with bugs I’ve never seen before and more weeds than dirt. So many weeds. I can’t find our plants. Three-quarters of our corn is barely a foot tall. We’re lucky if we get a single pepper each week from the pathetic pepper plants. The few tomatoes are hanging from skeleton vines. Our zucchini harvest was our saving grace. We ate it in every known form for weeks then invented some of our own. We canned eight quarts of lovely zucchini agrodolce. Take a can of tomato paste and one part maple syrup to two parts apple cider vinegar and let come together in a pot. Halve or quarter 3-4 zucchini lengthwise depending on their size then make quarter-inch slices from there. Place them into the sauce, salt them to taste, and let simmer gently until desired doneness, covered. I prefer mine with a bite, especially as they’ll cook more while cooling in the jar. Remove the zucchini from the sauce using a slotted spoon and fill your canning jar with as much zucchini as possible—it’s ok to pack them down a bit. Then cover with sauce leaving an inch or so at the top. The heat of the just-made zucchini agrodolce will be enough to seal the lid of the can without going through the tediousness of boiling in a pot of water. But you choose your own canning destiny. You can eat this zucchini agrodolce in the winter as a side, mixed into soup, over pasta or grits (or polenta), with a fried egg, or poach an egg in the liquid with a generous dousing of hot sauce. Or you can do whatever else you wish it’s your goddamn zucchini. But then the bugs got to them and burrowed into every last plant, then moved on to our cucumbers, and now the lone cantaloupe. We tested the soil. It’s not soil. It’s dirt. There’s no nitrogen. There’s no phosphorus. There’s no potassium. But she’s our little baby. We’re composting all the chicken shit and eggshells and coffee grounds and mixing them with other store-bought organic compost and we’re putting cardboard all over the goddamn place to kill the weeds and it really looks terrible but the cardboard is working. We’re beginning to cover it with more compost in random plots, allowing it to suppress the weeds as it decomposes over time. We planted kale and carrots and beets and Swiss chard and cumin and squash and parsnips and beans and anise and chives and basil with more to come and hoping our fall crops fair better than summer’s. We’re going to overhaul the entire garden after the fall harvest. Compost. Clean. Organize. Build raised beds. Plan for next season as fully as we can leaving flexibility to change direction if we need or room for a bit of zesty spontaneity. The greatest success, not including the zucchini, is in the sod we removed to make our garden which sits in a giant heap at the end of the yard with mysterious tomatoes and pumpkins growing from it without any care whatsoever. And the four tomato plants growing randomly in the garden that we did not plant that haven’t died like the others and yield a more prosperous fruit, though odd ones, varieties we do not know, perhaps new ones created in an unintentional landrace unique to our little square of dirt working independently of us. We’ll save those seeds.

We’ll get a couple of months of eggs from our baby girls—they just grow up so fast—before they’ll slow down to conserve energy in the cold months. I’m told our Golden Comets are good layers through the winter. But I’m told a lot of things. There’s no electricity way out by the chicken coop, and I don’t plan on getting any. But I’m sure my daughter will want to keep our girls warm and cozy, and my wife will follow suit. And I’ll get something out there to keep the girls warm all winter, to keep the eggs coming. The eggs will be free but feeding the chickens and keeping them warm sure won’t be. But that’s not what any of this is about. Everything has a cost, and I’m the kind of man who pays it. Unlike the great big men touting their work ethic and shunning the idea of assistance for others while getting rich from their commodity dairy and beef and pork and poultry and corn flakes and cocoa pebbles and soda pop and cheddar crackers all made from grossly subsidized agriculture. The richest of these men take more from Uncle Sam than everyone on food stamps collectively.

     For now, I “donate” $2.50 per dozen eggs I get from my neighbor. The yolks are so rich, scrambled eggs taste like they’re made without the whites. I supplement the small little fucked up garden vegetables with ones from a real organic farm, a few miles down the road. Foraged greens are exceptionally bitter these days, but through the act of getting them, we’re acquiring knowledge. It amazes us how many plants are edible growing all around us. Yarrow sells for thirty dollars a pound… I have an endless supply growing freely at the edge of the woods, next to wild blackberry brambles and dewberries and chicory and Canada lettuce which is pretty good when you fry it in butter, crack an egg on top, and douse it in hot sauce. Hot sauce is a good thing. Butter comes from the Guernsey ladies a couple of miles over the hill. Beef is a Scottish highland variety fed off the land, neighbors with our vegetable farmer. They raise a few hogs too which we delight in from time to time. I tend toward smaller portions of animal protein these days, often satisfied with it being an accessory to a meal, or not having it at all. But my family enjoys it and I believe it’s good for them. I enjoy it and am happy to have it, from such good people taking such good care of the lives that are sacrificed. But I’m happy that I can do with little if I find the strength to do so, so long as I avoid refined carbohydrates. But I’m a weak man. To tell you the truth, I have a gut that’s far too big, despite the quality of the ingredients I consume. I eat too much. Too many refined carbohydrates. And I don’t exercise. I have to change it. I’m unhealthy in the worst area. Fat right around the organs. I’m at increased risk for heart disease and diabetes. It’s horrible. For years I’ve dieted only on food from sustainable and organic farmers. Yet I’ve still succumbed to this gluttony, this unhealthfulness. I’ll take care of it. I will. It’s a challenge for me. Like so many. But it’s our responsibility, yes? Yes? To the ones we love. My weight has fluctuated between 160 and 250 for over 15 years. Mostly it’s somewhere in the middle. I quit drinking, so I should be able to find the strength to keep the weight off too. I’ll get there I’ll get there I’ll be alright I’ll be alright. My overindulgence is weakness. Especially with this type of work here, the words. You’d expect me to look healthy considering the content I represent. I’m tired. Perhaps a three-year-old and an eleven-month-old will do that, and a restaurant only ever just getting by, and the couple that have absolutely pummeled us financially with their failure. I don’t care about money. I just don’t want to cause others hardship. I like air conditioning and books and we eat well. I have no appetite for most other things that money can buy. I’d like a boat, to fish, to explore the water with my daughters and wife. In due time. Or never. There are ample ways to discover the water without it. And to fish. But I’m tired and I know I’d feel much better if I lost twenty-five pounds by ditching the damn sourdough croissants and moved my body. When we left the commodified city for the independence of the country, we had all of this in mind.

We were desperate to live differently, to shed ourselves of the weight of our weaknesses. We wanted pure independence. To say no to the reliance on others that kills the spirit. To put money in its deserved place beneath our fulfillment. I’ve felt the land in my bones since I was born. I’ve only just learned that. I’ve spent my entire life trying to discover that, trying to decipher my anger. I feel like for my entire life I’ve been crowded inside a barn with tens of thousands of other people. I’ve been trampled and pissed on and fed parts of the dead around me mixed into my kibble and I ate it and pissed on others too because that’s what I knew, it was all I knew, it was all that all of us knew. But somehow I saw the door and the light and I wondered for a very long time what it was and after decades I found the courage to walk through it and what I found was everything. I found everything in the light. But parts of me the many broken parts of me remind me of where I came from, and I have to unlearn and be okay with not having before I truly learn not to have that thing that place that goal that doesn’t make sense when I’m surrounded in lightness but the darkness I still remember. And I can choose the lightness always without the dark and I’m learning that and I’m getting closer to leaving it behind but there are casualties too that cause discomfort leaving people in the past the darkness there the people who knew me differently that may or may not see me now the man who felt the land in my bones as a boy that only just discovered that emancipation. We left the commodified city with little idea how to garden or how to raise chickens or how to this and how to that but knew we’d learn as we went along, and so we have and so we continue to do and in doing so we learn something we never intended to collecting knowledge and capabilities we never imagined and so quickly. To learn one thing is to discover that you can learn another.  To become fulfilled by one action creates the desire to attempt another, and fulfillment accompanies that as well. And so it goes. 

     And I can tell you, the ones who prefer not to cook your meals prefer not to spend the time to do it prefer not to spend the time cleaning them up, that what we are replacing these activities with is chronic unfulfillment. We replace the time we would spend washing dishes with more time for scrolling our mobile phones as the television that we aren’t watching dances like a strobe light in the background of the darkened room. We stay up too late doing nothing at all, get a poor night’s sleep, and wake up cranky and unfulfilled by our time off from the work we go to that we don’t like very much. For many of us, once we get into the action of doing dishes, we find the peace of such activity while listening to music and feeling fulfilled by the tidying up and become inspired to tidy up a bit more. We wipe the counters and sweep the floor. And once the tidying is complete and hands are dried the thought turns to a cup of tea. Something about having completed a task attracts us to another and so we make the deliberate action of tea, the ceremony, the warming of the water and the removal of the cup from the drawer and the retrieval of the tea and the pouring of the hot water and the steeping the simple alchemy of it all manifesting a soothing elixir all so simply deliberate causing more fulfillment the gesture of our hands the completion of our ideas that leads to the thought of a book in bed where we find ourselves soon after the house put to rest and the television off and the mobile phone charging at the bedside awaiting another day while we lose ourselves for a moment in words before drifting off to sleep having read only a few pages and drank only a few sips of tea but it wasn’t so much about the book or the tea but the fulfillment we received from the deliberateness of our actions. We awake the next morning having gone to bed early and slept well not being overstimulated by the chaos of television and phone scrolling stress inducing email correspondence and comments on social media posts and trending politics and we take the bait so easily. We’ve slept well because we cared for ourselves having initiated the deliberate act of making a meal which created the opportunity to do the dishes, not the annoyance of them. The interconnectedness. By accepting the subtle motions of life that create the whole we embrace this interconnectivity. The small tasks are our pilgrimage to a more fulfilling life, and we do ourselves a great disservice by removing them. And so it goes.

Zucchini Agrodolce:

Ingredients:

3-4 zucchini

1 can of tomato paste

¾ cup maple syrup

1 ½ cup active apple cider vinegar

Salt to taste

-In a Dutch oven, or pot large enough to hold all the ingredients, combine tomato paste, maple syrup, and ACV, then cover on medium low heat util all ingredients combine

-Lengthwise, halve zucchini if small or quarter if large, then slice into ¼ inch pieces.

-Place zucchini into pot and salt to taste, stir to combine, then cover and simmer until reaching desired doneness. Keep in mind the zucchini will cook more sitting in the canning jar.

-Using a slotted spoon, transfer zucchini to a canning jar, gently packing down until an inch from the lid, then cover with sauce and immediately close with canning lids. Take care not to close too tightly, or the air will not escape and cause the ingredients to spoil.

-The heat of the zucchini agrodolce will be sufficient to create a vacuum seal. This will be indicated by the button on the canning lid. You may hear a popping sound as your jars rest on the counter.

-If canned properly and stored somewhere dark and cool, like your pantry, this product will last indefinitely.