When you eat a meal you eat a place.¹ Not only are you physically becoming part of the food and its soil, but you’re spiritually saturating your body with the terroir.²

This will blow your mind. Have you ever heard of camas or salal? Well, let me tell you about them, friend. Camas is a plant with an edible root that seems to be somewhere between an onion and a potato. (It has a bad-ass brother named, death camas, which isn’t nearly as fun to eat.) And salal is a low shrub that you’ve definitely seen around the NW if you’ve spent any time here. It lives under tall trees, near water and it makes little black-purple berries. You’ve definitely seen it.

Both these plants are native to the Pacific Northwest. Along with salmon they were the staple foods of the Northwest native peoples.

I have lived here my whole life. I wouldn’t say I know everything about Western Washington botany, but I pay as much attention as anyone else. Until a few months ago, I had never even heard of the two plants that were the pillars of people’s diets, right here, for the last 10,000 years. And it’s not like I’m six years old; I’m thirty! Over thirty!

So, what does this have to do with anything? I’m not really sure myself, I’m a little drunk.

I guess what I’m getting at is that Presence/Attention/Awareness is about more than just focusing on the moment, it’s also about engaging with this place where we are.³ Because we eat many times a day, we have many opportunities to engage with the terroir, to be sensually present in this physical Place and let the rain become our blood. We should eat food with which we share terroir, with which we have a common rhythm.

Salal and camas evolved here, so where are they in our diets? Maybe they taste bad, I don’t know, I’ll tell you this summer, but maybe they were pushed off our plates by cheap food from other places. If we are where we eat, then most of us are geographic Frankensteins.

Where it rains so much that there’s rain in my dreams and my knees can feel it and it narrates Sunday mornings, do I eat the onion that drank the rain that wet my hair weeks before?⁴

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¹ “Terroir” technically refers only to food and drink (and the official distinction doesn’t even require that the food be organic), but I like to think of it as applying to other things as well – clothing and building materials immediately come to mind.

Art made with local materials is, I think, something different. Of course food and clothes and structures can be created with inspiration to become more than just necessities of survival – they can become expressions of place through person – but the timing of the creative process may or may not coincide with the need for food or shelter, and those two things are going to be taken care of regardless.

² Not to mention the spirit with which the farmer grows, treats and harvests the food.

³ Travel is, essentially, the experience of and engagement with Place. Which is why these food posts have a place on a travel blog.

⁴ This is what I thought about when praying before each meal in France, how our bodies mix with the earth and why I can taste Marguerite’s biceps in her wine.

When the animal is dead, the Mazzeri rolls it over and looks into its face. They recognize a person they know in the face of the animal, and the next morning, they announce to the town that the person they saw will die within a year. Even if it’s a family member, they are compelled – by Quellu Quassu, the Corsican “Some Thing” more vague than the Christian God – to hunt it and kill it, against their own will. The Mazzeri do not choose the person, they’re simply death’s messengers.

The hunt takes place in dreams, but Corsicans consider dreams to be a parallel and relevant world: the prophesied deaths occur within the year.^{1}

Of course, this tradition died out half a century ago.

I arrived on Corsica among the skeptical majority, the rational liberal who doesn’t necessarily believe in something he can’t see, like God or dream-hunters. To each his own, of course, but if I can’t see it, I don’t believe in it.

Then, in mountains that had been presented as ogre- and Mazzeri-filled, where dreams had been dangerous, we saw kids in Yankee baseball caps and Nike tennis shoes listening to 50 Cent.

We have lost something, I could see.

The world is poorer for the loss. Much poorer. What richness is steam-rolled by skeptical media, employment-focused education, the medical establishment and our science-centered faith? What creative force was extinguished by the Church or ignored by tv-addicted posterity? And how did MY money encourage it?

I wondered, “Really, what does it hurt to open myself to believing in dreams and magic? Am I skeptical only because I have so much pride that I think it matters that I be right or wrong?”

I chose to open myself to the possibility probability that there’s much more going on than what I can see. At the very least, it will make my world richer.

But science and money, the twin pillars of Modern religion, crush cultural niches, the pockets in which creative wealth can accumulate. The Corsican mountains are flat. The Snoqualmie run casinos. Modernism has its cellular talons in Africa.

Then we rolled into the valley of the Christian Back-to-the-Landers, and everything lit up. Nowhere else had I seen a cultural cauldron like this: the kids were singing songs to entertain themselves, they talked about natural phenomena, they believed in the supernatural, the Christian God, they believed that Mary was there and helping them. They had stories. They had a world that was immediate and rich, and legends of their own creation were growing in its garden.

I could see how this might be the kernel for a culture. It wouldn’t take many more generations, or like-minded families, for this to develop into a web of myths and practices that the world has never before seen.

So, what does this have to do with food?

There are groups of people among us that are making an effort to live in this fashion. They don’t have TVs and don’t read the newspaper. They’re trying to live in a way that allows them and their kids to sharpen the impression of their characters^{2}, that the force of their creativity be unrestrained and untarnished by mass-commercialism, that they can channel their unblemished centers and create with its texture. And for their efforts our world will be richer.

These are the people we need to support with our money. Whether they’re making clothes or constructing homes with local materials or growing food, our money needs to go to those who are creating culture, not steamrolling it.

If we’re going to buy food, let’s buy it from these people, the farmers, the independents who are making this place richer. Let’s buy from the small stands at the farmers’ markets, to help the fragile ones nurse quiet lives.

And we need to stop supporting the steamrollers, the brand names – Coke, Safeway, Costco, Monsanto, Dole, and all the others. There is no spirit in money-centrism, and I’m tired of hearing their voices in humans’ mouths.

Money is the agent of the modern world’s evolution. Spend wisely.

—
^{1} Dorothy Carrington in Granite Island, describing the Corsican fishing community:

“A week he was missing with his boat and crew…. I heard only a single comment on the situation: ‘His wife came down to ask for news. You should have seen that woman! Her face was black; she has drunk the blood of his heart.’ Blessed are the illiterate, who can spontaneously express themselves in such apt and opulent imagery! But perhaps this was general in the days before universal education began mass-producing minds. I have often wondered how far the Elizabethan writers were indebted to the virile, vivid speech of an illiterate majority.”

She wrote about the Mazzeri and other Corsican folklore in The Dream Hunters of Corsica, in which she reinforces her point:
All this, one might say, belongs to the past. Rational French state education and materialistic values have discredited the evil spirits and reduced the legends to curiosities of folklore. The ogres have vanished; the Devil no longer roams among the rocks. Nor, indeed, does Saint Martin…

^{2} “The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character… Under all these screens {brands to which a person subscribes} I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are: and of course so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.”

– Ralph Waldo Emmerson

Reading Emerson makes me want to overturn cars.

The most unexpected part of holding the fowl was that it was warm. I guess I don’t know what I expected, but the feet felt like human fingers. It’s kinda like when you imagine kissing a person, but you forget to imagine saliva, and it totally changes everything.

City boys have written about killing their first chickens before, so I won’t go into it. It wasn’t an emotional experience for me. But as we were plucking the feathers I told Didier how amazing it was that I’d only killed my first fowl after 30 years.

“I got a good education in high school and college, I’m happy about what I learned and it was relevant for what it was… but it wasn’t…”

“…essential.” He offered.

“Yes.”

“The root of the word ‘essential’ is ‘essence’ or ‘truth.’ You weren’t educated about the truth…”

“… of how our bodies mix with the earth.” I said.

“Exactly.”

Didier and I were on the same page a lot, some of his rants could have come from my mouth. The ones about how companies have a stake in keeping their employees powerless, how it’s good for capitalism that people be vaguely afraid about the future, and so on.

When he taught us about the medicinal herbs in the garden I took tons of notes, but I had a hard time accessing what I’d been taught. I’d look at a plant and look closer at its leaves and compare it to my notes and would be too unsure to declare it Citronelle! or Lemon Pepper! or whatever. I said this time and again, and I’ll repeat it here:

“Learning to identify plants is like learning to read for the first time.”

People ask us often, “So, the kids could leave school at 15? How did he educate them?”

I was curious about this too. One day we went for a ride with Didier and his oldest son. They sat in the front seat, we sat in the back. As they drove, Didier pointed to the sky and talked about the movement of the clouds. He pointed to the hills and talked about the rock formations and the fossils. He talked about the fields that the neighbors were sowing. His son pointed to a sea gull that was out of place here. His son talked about the history of some old structures on their land. His son talked about planting by the moon and how it was a good guide but not the last word. His son talked about finding fennel by looking for a larger reed, because fennel grows at its feet.

Azure with her wild salad.

In other words, Didier taught his children about the land and the plants and the weather and the animals and natural systems and Catholicism. He taught them the things that he considered essential.

They might not know a lot of the academic stuff we consider foundations of knowledge, but they’ve learned how to have a relationship with the earth, and I think that’s fundamentally healthy.