Authors: Nina Planck
Most of our food was local and seasonal, which is no doubt why I fondly remember the exceptions, such as the boxes of oranges
and grapefruit we bought each winter. We drank fresh raw milk from our Jersey, ate bright-orange eggs from our free-ranging
chickens, and a couple of times we slaughtered spent laying hens for soup. Our honey came from a local beekeeper. Occasionally,
there was venison or blue fish when we let local people hunt or fish on the property. In those days, few farmers nearby were
raising meat and poultry for local markets, so we had to buy those foods at the store, but today our beef, bison, lamb, and
chicken come from farmers we know.
Above all, we grew truckloads of vegetables. The simple act of picking vegetables for dinner— a pleasure known to all kitchen
gardeners, one that feels maternal and generous to me— is positively extravagant on a real farm, where there are acres of
fresh things to choose from. In June I might set out from the kitchen with a basket and a rough plan of attack— to find lettuce,
zucchini, and young fennel— and come back with a wheelbarrow-f, seduced along the way by the old spinach patch (abandoned
in the hot weather) or by a head of green garlic, still too young to sell but irresistible. If I'm feeling lazy, there's no
need to go to the fields at all. In the cool, dark basement, beans, eggplant, and peppers sit in baskets, ready for market.
Our berries, lettuce, herbs, and vegetables made a feast of every meal from April to November. In the old, strict days when
every penny counted, the first picking, however tiny— a dozen spears of asparagus or two pints of raspberries— went to market,
not to the kitchen. But once each crop was in full swing, we ate as much as we wanted. We grew only the best-tasting varieties,
such as Earliglow strawberries and Ambrosia melons. What we didn't grow, we bought or bartered for at farmers' markets. In
the winter, we ate our own canned tomatoes and frozen red bell peppers. We all ate huge amounts of vegetables— four ears each
of buttered corn, giant plates of sliced tomatoes, enormous green salads— and still do. I've never met anyone who eats more
vegetables than my family. To me, a half-cup serving of cooked broccoli is silly, a doll's portion.
Everything we ate was homemade. We made whole wheat bread and buckwheat pancakes from fresh flour ground in an electric mill,
and apple, beet, and carrot juice in the juicer. Making granola was a weekly chore for us kids. On winter car trips we packed
our own food, typically large pots of beans and rice, bread, apples, and peanut butter. The everyday dessert was apple salad
with yogurt or mayonnaise, walnuts, coconut, and honey. When we had proper desserts such as vanilla pudding, cherry pie, and
strawberry shortcake— which was not often— they were always made from scratch. Portions were big, leftovers prized, and nothing
was wasted. Eggshells and vegetable scraps went in a bucket for the chickens.
It all sounds perfect now, but jars filled with blackstrap molasses and homemade granola did not impress me. I wanted American
food, the kind normal kids ate. By far the biggest taboo in our house was junk food, and for that very reason it was deeply
compelling. When I had stand duty in the town of Purcellville, I made a beeline for the High's convenience store to buy ice
cream sandwiches— and told no one. On my eleventh birthday, my parents said I could have anything I wanted for dinner, and
I greedily ordered a store-bought cake. I can still taste the faintly metallic neon frosting. Yet I ate it gamely, unwilling
to admit that my hideous cake was inferior to the dessert my mother always made on our birthdays: chocolate eclairs with real
milk, butter, and eggs, and good chocolate. The first time I laid eyes on an all-you-can-eat salad bar, at the Leesburg Pizza
Hut where my mother waited tables that first winter, I ate a bowl of tasty-looking bacon bits with a spoon. They made me very
sick— and embarrassed, too. No one told me you don't eat bacon bits— the lowest form of pork, if they aren't imitation bacon
made of soy protein— straight.
These wince-inducing memories suggest that the Clara Davis experiments— sometimes referred to as proving "nutritional wisdom"—
work only when all of the choices are good ones. Sure, the baby cured his rickets with cod-liver oil, like a little instinctive
scientist, or a wild animal self-medicating by eating certain plants. But Davis gave the babies only good foods to eat. What
if the babies could have eaten ice cream sandwiches, neon pink cake frosting, and bacon bits? To my knowledge, no one has
tried such an experiment— unless you count our daily exposure to all manner of cheap junk food— but the evidence is not encouraging.
In the short term, at least, availability seems to determine what we eat, rather than instinct for health. Squirrels, given
the choice between acorns and chocolate cookies, take the cookies. The natural diet of sheep is grass, but when offered dense
carbohydrates— the ovine equivalent of store-bought cake— they will binge until they are listless. Even a modern hunter-gatherer
will drink honey until his teeth rot, if he can get enough.
"As stupid as these choices seem, one can't really blame them on a lack of nutritional wisdom," writes Susan Allport in
The
Primal Feast.
"During the course of evolution, squirrels, sheep, and humans have rarely encountered large quantities of concentrated, high-energy
foods. Why should the food selection mechanisms of animals include protections against overeating these things? Our human
tastes for foods evolved and enabled us to survive in the forests and the African savannas where animals were lean and fibrous,
food shortages were a fact of life, and sugar came only in the form of ripe fruits and honey, foods that were available only
on an intermittent, seasonal basis." It seems that animals and humans both lack brakes for runaway junk-food craving.
Once you grow up, of course, you have to take responsibility for what you eat, and my parents believed in Emersonian selfreliance.
When I was ten or so, they decided that Charles and I should learn to cook, and we drew up a dinner and dishes schedule. We
all cooked the same way, building simple meals around our abundant, gorgeous vegetables. The ingredients weren't fancy, and
the recipes weren't sophisticated. I loved my night to cook, especially the grown-up feeling of providing for my family, and
here and there I made a stab at something original. Once I prepared Chinese noodle soup by boiling vegetables and pasta in
water with lots of soy sauce. My mother wasn't impressed— it probably tasted terrible— but I was proud of my creation and
the memory of her reaction hits a tender spot. Another time I baked chicken with rosemary. "It's good," said Charles, "except
for the pine needles." My cheeks flushed with shame for introducing a fancy— and risible— ingredient to plain old chicken.
Simplicity was a virtue, and culinary experiments weren't much encouraged.
What
was
prized was the idea of the farm as physical paradise.
We were encouraged to sigh with delight over the sound of the spring peepers, the flash of the fireflies, the scent of honeysuckle,
and— most of all— the flavor of our own melons and tomatoes. I was already a nature lover and took huge pleasure in our beautiful
farm and unsurpassed vegetables. But I never understood how appreciation of nature conflicted with making dinner a bit different—
tastier, fancier, sexier. Wasn't nice food also a gift of nature?
Now it's obvious that I lived in a kind of paradise about food. My mother's philosophy— provide good homemade food on a budget
and then leave your kids alone to eat what they like— was working. Charles and I were healthy, physically active, never picky
eaters like other kids we knew— yet looked down on. As for me, it all seemed simple. We grew the best vegetables in the world.
At home there was only good stuff, which I ate happily. From time to time, there were treats— like Danish butter cookies—
or compelling, but quite possibly regrettable, stuff in restaurants. Mostly, I was ignorant about the big world of food and
therefore unashamed. When the school principal sent me home with a free turkey for Christmas, it seemed like nothing more
than a stroke of good luck. If my parents didn't care that we didn't have a lot of money and ate simple food, why should I?
Above all, I wasn't neurotic about food or my body or my appetites. An untroubled child with lots of energy, I ate what I
wanted, when I was hungry for it. Naturally, it didn't last.
My Virtuous Diet Makes Me Plump and Grumpy
A TYPICAL TEENAGE GIRL, I was anxious about all sorts of things, and placed my anxiety squarely on— what else?— food. The
experts said that many of the foods I grew up on— like Yorkshire pudding topped with a pool of hot butter— were unhealthy.
The smart advice was to be a little bit more vegetarian: eat less meat, less dairy, less saturated fat.
The medical wisdom began to dovetail with our somewhat alternative subculture. Our farming friends and the college students
who worked on our farm each summer were health-conscious and green. In those circles, being a vegetarian— better yet, a vegan—
was environmentally, nutritionally, and ethically correct. In the worker kitchen down by the little pond, the famous vegetarian
Moosewood Cookbook
was the bible, and communion was rice and beans. Times have changed. Now the workers buy raw milk, eat local venison, and
dream of keeping chickens, goats, and cows on their own farms.
The ecological and political arguments for a vegetarian diet came to the fore in 1971, the year I was born. In her seminal
book,
Diet for a Small Planet,
Frances Moore Lappe argued that modern beef farming was ecologically unsound (it wrecks natural habitats), politically unjust
(you could feed more people on the grain cattle ate than on the steaks), and nutritionally unnecessary (we don't need all
that protein). The idea that a vegetarian diet was healthier clinched it for me, and I became a vegan in high school. It was
perhaps my only act of rebellion against my stubbornly tolerant parents. My state of mind is still vivid. With all the bad
press animal foods were getting, the quickest route to salvation seemed clear: eat only plants.
The summer of 1989 was the last season I lived and worked on the farm. In late August, still the height of the season, my
parents drove me to Oberlin College, with the stereo shelf my mother built and my other things in the back of a pickup. Later
I transferred to Georgetown University and set up house with my boyfriend in Washington, D.C. In my own kitchen, I was free
to invent my own philosophy about food. But I'd lost my instincts and didn't trust my appetite. Eating became an intellectual
question. How many people could you feed on the grain it took to raise one steak? If saturated fats are dangerous, why eat
any? The vegan experiment ended fairly quickly— I
liked
yogurt— but for many years I was a vegetarian.
Fear of fat and cholesterol dominated our little kitchen in the row house on Twenty-seventh Street in northwest Washington.
Even a hint of slippery, creamy food on the tongue sent me into panicky disapproval. Peering at labels, I stocked the pantry
with low-fat foods. In those days, I believed the conventional nutritional wisdom: that unsaturated fats were good for cholesterol
and saturated fats were not. Monounsaturated olive oil— the star of the vaunted Mediterranean diet— was the only fat I trusted
. . . but not much of it. The taboo on cholesterol and saturated fats meant no beef, eggs, cream, chocolate, or coconut. Our
only dairy was nonfat yogurt, and there was plenty of rice milk and soy ice cream.
MY VIRTUOUS DIETS
At the height of my various nutritionally correct diets (vegan, vegetarian, low fat, low saturated fat, and low cholesterol),
this was the picture:
Real Foods Off the Menu
Beef, lamb, game, poultry, fish, and shellfish
Milk, cream, butter, cheese, and eggs
Chocolate and coconut
Real (But Rich) Foods Strictly Limited
Olive oil
Avocados
Nuts
Real Foods I Ate Plenty Of
Fruits and vegetables
Brown rice and beans
Whole wheat bread
New Foods I Tried to Love
Various imitation foods made with soy and rice
Fat-Free, Sweet Things I Ate Quite a
Lot Of
Juice
Nonfat frozen yogurt
Today it's hard to picture
what
we ate. I loved to cook, but most foods were off the menu— no beef, pork, lamb, chicken, fish, milk, or eggs. We ate lots
of fresh local vegetables, large green salads, burritos, and bean soups. I ate mountains of rice, beans, and pasta. For dessert
there was fruit salad, but without the mayonnaise of my youth. A well-used recipe for nonfat oatmeal bars with pineapple springs
to mind, and on special occasions I made fruit pies with butter crust. Now and then I grated low-fat cheese over salad or
treated us to grilled shrimp from the waterfront fishmonger.
Now it's clear why my boyfriend gave me a cookbook on my nineteenth birthday: the poor fellow was desperate for variety. It
was
Martha Stewart's Quick Cook Menus,
and I read it from cover to cover in one sitting, fascinated with the fancy foods she touted, like balsamic vinegar, creme
fraiche, and homemade mayonnaise. Now Martha Stewart is famous for all the domestic arts, from antique paints to pine cone
crafts, but in those days she was a champion of simple, seasonal meals— and her recipes always worked.
Quick Cook
was my first cookbook, it bears the marks of many good meals, and I still use it.
As for my health, I felt terrible. My digestion was poor, and I was moody, tearful, and tender in all the wrong places before
I got my period. In cold and flu season, I got both. I was depressed, too. Partly to stave off the gloom, I ran three to six
miles a day, six days a week. On this virtuous regime I also gained weight steadily— and before I knew it, I was plump. How
plump? Well, women and weight is a treacherous topic; no one agrees on the definitions and people get touchy, so I'll try
to be objective. I'm almost five feet five inches tall and weigh 119 to 125 pounds, much of it muscle. In my vegetarian days,
I was 147 pounds and soft all over. That's a body mass index (BMI) of almost 25, squarely in the "overweight" category.
1