51 ~ Food Not Bombs

I recently visited my daughter, Alonda, in Brooklyn, New York, where she moved about a year ago. She has a weekly gig there, to which I tagged along:  she and a few of her friends spend every Saturday in the kitchen of local café, cooking a free, fantastic, vegetarian meal to distribute to New Yorkers in need, under the umbrella of the movement Food Not Bombs (http://foodnotbombs.net/new_site/).

 Something particularly admirable about Food Not Bombs (at least Alonda’s chapter of it) is not only do they provide meals to those in need, the meals are of exceptional quality. Nowhere have I seen it written that only the prosperous in our society should eat well.

Alonda (right) and mates feeding the world (or at least the center of the universe, NYC).

Watching her prepare nosh instead of nukes, and strolling New York’s streets with her, I was struck by the ubiquity and the range of food in our lives. Perhaps nowhere is this quite on display like the Big Apple (yeah, even its name is food; and in fact in the 1600s the settlement that would become New York was first called New Orange).  Of the many storefronts along Brooklyn’s streets, most are devoted to food and drink - delis, bakeries, restaurants, bars, liquor stores, coffee shops, grocery stores, pizza joints, etc.

New York’s food diversity extends both horizontally and vertically. Horizontally, there is of course the extraordinary diversity of food. In the first day or two, Alonda and I ate Korean, Italian and Moroccan (Jewish Moroccan, to be precise), and when we couldn’t get into a particular French restaurant that specializes in both seafood and vegetables, we pivoted to a vegan Buddhist Japanese restaurant. Food is one of the city’s dominant expressions of human culture. It is everywhere, all the time, high and low.

Likewise, the vertical range of experience for meeting food is on full display in New York,  as a mirror of America’s wealth disparity. In the same neighborhood, on nearly the same block, you can get a free meal at a shelter, or have a $300 per person dining experience at a table booked months in advance.  

Back home in rural Wisconsin, throughout the year I find myself similarly consumed (as it were) with food – gardening, foraging, hunting, fishing, preservation, cooking (and then always the dishes to do…).  Food takes a lot of time and attention, and New York helped to remind me that in this I’m not an outlier. 

But evidence suggests that it wasn’t always this way for we humans. In a fascinating conversation published recently in the New York Times (here), anthropologist James Suzman explains that members of at least some traditional hunter-gatherer communities spend only about 15 hours per week securing their susteance.  I mean, some days I can spend that much time just weeding the beets and carrots.

I believe the operative word and difference here is community.  Working alone, it’s a lot of work to put enough food in your belly. This is something I observed during my years working among remote villages in Laos - that for example, marriage is in large an economic necessity in the village, because it would be so difficult for one person to cover all the work necessary to grow and forage enough food. Two people in cooperation can produce more than twice the food as two lone rangers.  In the village, the poorest of the poor are invariably widows.

That principle scales up further, so that a community of, say, 50 people can collectively produce much more food, with less labor – in some cases only 15 hours each per week - than could 50 independent individuals.  Then, too, there are the significant emotional bennies – it’s a lot more fun doing such tasks together.

Many hands make light work - yours truly helping plant rice in Laos (2007).

Fortunately, my grocery shopping moratorium has motivated me to carve out elements of a food production community around my house – such as trading leeks and potatoes I grow to my neighbors Mary & Dave, and getting a share of leek & potato soup in return. We both end up with leek & potato soup (and a deeper connection of friendship) with less labor than each of us on our own.

So, I’m all for spending more time feeding one another and less time bombing ourselves (literally and figuratively). Have some fun with Food Not Bombs’ amusing animation short on this topic, at the bottom of their homepage.

Speaking of shared food production, since my last post I visited the Amish farmer Gideon Zook, near La Farge, Wisconsin.  Great name, and great strawberries.  Gideon is da man for berries, and he ably filled my order for 24 quarts of his finest.  His sweet rubies now slumber in various forms in my freezer and canning jars, and I’ll wake them come winter.