That hat isn’t as stupid as it looks – there’s a mosquito net that folds into a pouch above the bill.

Before meals the monks pray. They say, “This food is for my body, not for enjoyment.” I think it’s ok to enjoy while you’re eating, but if you shove someone aside so you can have your favorite food then that’s just not right.

The other day someone said, in all seriousness, “I’m just trying to survive.” Business was slow, and though their ‘survival’ was at stake, they were using their money to pay me to wash the windows of their large home. We have a funny concept of survival. Their life isn’t at stake, their lifestyle is. A lot of us confuse the two, and since lifestyle is an extension of identity, the idea of changing it is equated with some kind of death. But it’s not death, it’s pride or vanity that causes the pain.

Food abounds. What if we ate what we had, not what we sought? And what if that was satisfactory?

I see why the monks warn us about enjoying food: Some of us buy our favorite food – even if we’re supporting companies that harm people – because we’re addicted to our lifestyles. I don’t think happiness depends on what we eat, so that’s not an excuse. When we’re addicted to something, we make compromises to secure it.

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

—

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?

Rugged independence persists in modern Corsica.

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.

U-District Farmers Market
Year-round. 9am-2pm
Corner of University Way & NE 50th

Magnolia Farmers Market
June 5 – Sept 25, 10am-2pm
Next to the Magnolia Community Center at 2550 34th Avenue West.

Bellevue Farmers Market
June 5 – Nov 20, 10 – 2pm
Washington Square
10610 NE 8th St

Kent Farmers Market
June 5th – Sept 25th
2nd Ave & Smith St in downtown Kent

Edmonds Farmers Market
July 3rd to Oct 2nd, 9:00 am – 3:00 pm
(Closed Aug. 14th due to the Taste of Edmonds)
Downtown Edmonds on 5th Street from Main at the fountain to Bell and east up Bell Street around Centennial Plaza.

Georgetown Farmers Market
June 5 to Sept 25, 10:00am – 3:00 pm
Located on the grounds of the original Rainier Brewery, 6000 Airport Way S in the Georgetown District, between the General Offices building and the old Malt House.

Redmond Saturday Market
May 1 – Oct 30, 9am-3pm
7730 Leary Way NE

West Seattle Farmers Market
Year-round, 10am – 2pm
The ‘Junction’ at California Ave SW and SW Alaska.

Ballard Market
Year-round, 11am – 3pm
5330 Ballard Ave NW.

Broadway Farmers Market
May 19 – Dec 19, 11am – 3pm;

Lake Forest Park Farmers Market
May 9 – Oct 10
Intersection of SR 522 and Hwy 104.

Meadowbrook Farmers Market
June 6 to October 31, 11am to 3pm
2728 NE 100th Street 98125

Mercer Island Farmers Market
June 20th – Oct 17th, 11am – 3pm
SE 32nd Street at Mercerdale Park

Renton Farmers Market
June 1 – Sept 28, 3 – 7pm
At the Piazza
3rd and Burnett
Downtown Renton

Columbia City Farmers Markets
Apr 28 – Oct 20, 3-7pm,
Rainier Ave South and South Edmonds.

Kirkland Market
May 5 – Oct 13, 2-7pm
Marina Park, Kirkland

Wallingford Farmers Market
May 19 – Sept 29, 3-7pm
Parking lot of Wallingford Center.

Sammamish Farmers Market
May 19 – Sept 29, 4-8pm
801 228th Ave. SE

Lake City Farmers Market
June 3 – October 7, 3 to 7 pm,
Next to the Library at NE 125th and 28th Ave NE.

Olympic Sculpture Park Farmers Market
July 15 to September 9, 3:30-7:30 p.m
Corner of Western Avenue and Broad Street, at the northern edge of the Belltown District.
(206) 654-3100

Queen Anne Market
May 20 – October 7, 3-7 pm
W. Crockett St. at Queen Anne Ave. N

Bellevue Farmers Market
May 13 – Oct 14, 3 – 7pm
First Presbyterian Church of Bellevue
1717 Bellevue Way NE
(425) 454-3082

Madison Madrona Farmers Market
May 14 to September 24, 3-7 p.m.
The corner of Martin Luther King, Jr. Way and E. Union Street.

Phinney Farmers Market
May 28 through October 1, 3-7pm,
Phinney Neighborhood Center, at 67th and Phinney Ave N.

Bothell Farmers Market
June 4 – Sept 24, Noon-6pm
Country Village
23718 Bothell Everett Hwy

We know very little about what’s in food and how it works in our bodies. Though we know about big things like carbs and protein and fat and fiber, there’re dozens, if not hundreds, of other ‘things’ that make up a pepper. These things – together I’m calling them ‘spirit’ – include anti-oxidants and other chemical compounds that we haven’t yet studied. We might not know their significance, but we do know we evolved eating veggies & animals complete with that spirit, and now we’re not.

Most food – even organic food – in most grocery stores comes from land where there’s only one crop in the ground. This practice is called monoculture. For example, peppers come from a farm where there are only peppers. This is cheaper because it means that the land can be worked by machine or at least in an assembly-line style. All the sun and water and fertilizer goes to the same crop, so they end up with huge, handsome peppers that are delicious to the eyes.

On the modern, industrial farm this means that the peppers keep pulling the same nutrients out of the soil. If the farm is going to keep producing peppers, the soil needs a boost from fertilizers. Large-scale farms will likely use man-made, industrial fertilizer, which supplies the nutrients that help peppers grow.

The fertilizer is good for making it grow, but is it good for making it whole? Probably not. Monoculture doesn’t exist in nature, in fact it’s unique in earth’s history to our modern age. Monoculture removes its peppers from the natural cycle of life, which is the source of spirit.

In the wild, a pepper lives among other plants, fights for resources, fights off bugs, eats decomposed vegetation that’s been pooped out by worms – the natural cycle of life. Plants evolved to live in close quarters with other plants of other species, so that’s how they’ll grow most healthily, that’s how they’ll develop spirit.

Our bodies evolved to eat foods that come from healthy soil (and water). Our bodies evolved to eat plants that live among other plants. We evolved to eat foods complete with spirit, so that’s how we’ll grow most healthily ourselves.

If farmers, to save money, make compromises on the health of their soil, we compromise our own health by buying their peppers.

This is why just eating vegetables isn’t good enough. This is why just eating organic isn’t good enough, this is why just eating local isn’t good enough. To eat healthily we need to eat from healthy land. What does this look like?

Healthy land lives. It has many different plants that take different nutrients from the soil and give other nutrients back. This is the basis of polyculture farming (or ideally, permaculture) – different plants help each other. Worms are another pillar of healthy land, turning dead vegetation into soil that’s rich in the nutrients that living plants love.

Womb-apples are prehistosexy.

So, what’s at stake? A lot of these ideas come directly from Michael Pollan. In his inspiring book, In Defense of Food, he makes a compelling argument that the diseases of civilization are the result of the modern industrial diet. These diseases include cancer, heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, varicose veins and hemorrhoids, and more. To me, the point is this: we know that we evolved eating foods that grew in a wild, natural context. Are we so arrogant that we think we can circumvent nature without compromising our health?

The best way to ensure that you’re eating from healthy soil is to eat what’s growing wild. The next best is to grow the food yourself. Failing that, go to a farmers’ market and buy from farmers who are small enough that they care about the quality of their soil and plants. If shopping at a grocery store, shop at a cooperative that has information on the farms from which it buys its produce.

Avoid buying vegetables in industrial packaging. Avoid buying veggies from grocery stores like QFC or Safeway or Costco. If you’re in a pinch for time, go home and throw together a meal from what you already have at home, I’ll bet you didn’t even need to shop that day.

Again, the closer you are to your source – the fewer hands through which your money passes to get to the soil – the more sure you can be that the health of the pepper is not being compromised. And, in turn, you’ll be healthier and spiritier.

Three times a day you medicate yourself. Be efficient and discriminating.

Be overjoyed about wild crab.

He illegally goes to Arizona to find work. He finds it at a diner, busing tables. The pay is much better there than at the tomato farm, which means that if Joe sacrifices his comfort, he can send money home to his family. Obviously he’d rather be in Mexico, but, you know, that’s life.

After the hullabaloo in Arizona about illegal immigrants, Joe moves to Seattle where he finds work busing tables at a cafe.

Then, in December, you walk into the cafe and you order water and a tomato. Joe brings it to you. Neither he nor you know where the tomato is from. The tomato is originally from Joe’s old land, from the farm that didn’t pay him well.

The cafe owner might know that it’s from Mexico, but they might not, and besides, they’re watching the bottom line. Of course, that’s why we eat Mexican tomatoes in Seattle – because it was so cheap to grow and harvest that the cafe can buy it and serve it to you at a great price in the middle of winter, or maybe you buy it at a grocery store for the same reason.

The local stuff the farmers grow here is too expensive, you think, and besides, there isn’t any local tomato in December, and you want tomato in December, seasons be damned.

You smile at Joe, and he smiles back, and both of you are oblivious to the fact that by ordering tomato you’ve indirectly separated Joe from his family. He may or may not resent you for it. You may or may not resent him for being here.

You might buy Coke from Iowan farmers displaced by corn, order chicken from an Arkansan displaced by chicken farms, drink wine with French people displaced by vineyards, order salmon from Alaskans whose fish runs are trickling. These are gastronomic refugees, maybe some generations removed, but they can’t go home.

You’re no socialist, but you also don’t want to hurt people, you tend to like them. But money alienates us from the spirit and people at the source of our food. So you spend the money and you hurt others. You’re not bad, you just didn’t know how else to do it.

So, now that we can see how it works, we have to ask ourselves: given that we have money and there’s tomato on the menu or in the Costco, do we have a right to buy it just because we want it? Am I greedier than I am compassionate?

Your money can be used for good, to support things you believe in. It can be used here, for the farmers and farms that are here. For the families and nutrients here, even if they don’t have tomatoes. You don’t need a tomato, like, ever.

The default use of money, these days, supports practices that hurt others, so it’s not good enough to go with the flow. The closer you are to your source – the fewer hands through which your money passes to get to the soil – the more sure you can be that your food isn’t hurting people. It kinda doesn’t matter how bad you want the tomato.

The next few posts about food are for the people who want to do good but don’t have time to do the research. They want to improve themselves but find the information confusing. They don’t want to hurt others, but they aren’t sure what that means in practice, or maybe they aren’t aware of the importance of their food source.

These food posts will show some of the political, social, economic and spiritual impacts of our eating decisions. I’m sharing this stuff because it’s tremendously important that this awareness spread, that we all work on this together and support each other in our eating practices. I’m convinced that eating consciously is the foundation for a clean life, personally and nationally.

Eating is a political, social, economic and spiritual act. Three times a day we vote, speak, support and pray. Our food sources deserve careful attention.

That’s the disclaimer. See you tomorrow.