Blessing the Hands That Feed Us: Lessons from a 10-Mile Diet

Introduction

In September 2010, I undertook an experiment that turned out to be one of the greatest adventures of my life. It was so small at the start, but it eventually grew—and blew me wide open.

A farmer friend wanted a guinea pig to test whether she could actually feed another human being for a full month from what she could grow on her half acre. I wanted to test, from a sustainability perspective, if we here on Whidbey Island could survive without access to that cornucopia called the grocery store. We called the experiment a 10-mile diet.

I’ve done other sustainability as an extreme sport experiments many times. I’ve fasted—from food for ten days, from talking for a month, from air travel for a year—anything that would bring me closer to a life of integrity. I think sustainability is meant to be put into practice, not just debated.

The 10-mile diet was simply the next in the series. I did this experiment in hyperlocal eating wholeheartedly in September 2010, on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest. Whidbey is a gentle place. The island connects to the mainland via a twice-hourly ferry to the south and a bridge to the north, so our culture here is rural with an urban flair. Our climate is moderate. Driving up the long midisland highway, you might think—and tourists do—that it’s a bucolic and bountiful land with a few cities strung like precious pearls on a long chain. True, but there is much more to the story.

Almost all of our daily fare comes in on semitrucks on those ferries. Our grocery stores, apparently stocked to the gills, have only a three-day supply of food. If energy prices double again—as they have in the past decade—our transport-dependent pantry might get pretty bare. But what about all that rolling farmland? Some of those crops are for export off island. Some are to feed our animals. Not everyone who owns a farm, farms. What the owners do with their land is up to them, and many who can afford big spreads don’t need farming income. Then there is the wild card called climate change. Will the crops that grow well on Whidbey now grow well in the future? This year we had a late blooming summer and then months without rain. At the moment that’s a pity for the farmers but not for consumers. Our local suppliers are not from here. Grocers buy from whoever has a reliable supply—which could be Thailand or Chile or New Zealand.

Only some Charles Addams ghoulish character would contemplate these uncertainties with delight. Most of us simply don’t want to contemplate these conditions at all. After all, what can we do about it? This for me is where the extreme sport comes in, the real life game of skillfully reshaping assumptions and choices in light of the most likely scenarios. I know that change can be rapid, unpredictable, thrilling, but not always pleasant. I like to get ahead of the curve and surf. And, knowing my destiny is inextricably linked to my community, I like to build arks, not just surfboards. Call the 10-mile diet prototyping arks.

There is no special virtue in a 10-mile diet. Or a 50-mile or 100-mile diet. The miles are simply markers for something else: bringing our eating closer to home. Why? We have lost touch with the hands that feed us to our detriment, and this story is meant to show you what’s at the other end of the industrial food scale, to help you see that there are reasonable and heartening alternatives.

This book, then, is not about pious restraint. It is not about sucking it up and making do. It’s a banquet of good stories and possible skillful interventions that can tilt us toward food sufficiency. I describe the hows and whys of my 10-mile diet experiment, what I discovered, what I loved, what I hated, what I missed, what I learned, and a level of body and soul satisfaction I barely knew existed. It was only a month of that extreme, but they say new habits take twenty-one days to anchor, and so it was for me.

The 10-mile diet changed me. I blogged every day, diving into food issues, awakening sleeping-beauty skills of cooking and gardening and reengaging with an old passion for social change, sidelined while I recovered from cancer. Best of all, I finally landed somewhere on earth, in a real place with real soil and forests, a real community where I belong the way my skin belongs to me. I am part of life; not at a remove in self-sufficiency but connected in reciprocity, mutuality, and care.

Whidbey was a perfect place to run this experiment. In fact, if I lived across Puget Sound in Seattle, a 10-mile diet would have been far harder. Even with all the backyard gardens there, it’s mostly paved and built up. When I lived there, I always had a patch of lettuce and kale in the yard, but little about Seattle says, Eat here, so a 10-mile diet might not even have occurred to me. The point, though, isn’t for you to replicate what I did. I scouted out a possibility and documented it here because it points at a way out of our dependency on the centralized, industrial scale food system. As you will see, when you look at a broader definition of local food, we can all provision ourselves regionally—if we commit to personal and political change.

I begin the book by telling the story of who I was when I took up the 10-mile diet challenge, including the worldview that primed me to want to do it and the scramble to find the hands that grew the food that would feed me that month. You will meet Tricia, the market gardener who grew most of the food I ate, as well as other gardeners, farmers, and ranchers. Then you will follow, week by week, the ups and downs of my 10-mile month. After it’s over, I’ll evaluate the experiment, mine the gold. You will also join me on a hunt for answers to the question How dependent are we and do we need to be on the industrial food system to feed ourselves and the world? My tale ends with some key ideas about what weights we can put on the local side of the scale to give regional food systems a larger role in nourishing us all. I refer to these flourishing local food landscapes as complementary food systems, not supplanting the global supply chains but expanding consumer food choice. The goal, of course, is fair, affordable, accessible, healthy, delicious, and nourishing food for all. Who could disagree?

You will develop a new sense about feeding yourself, which I call relational eating. It is the shift from being a lone eater in the endless food courts of the industrial system, treating the hands that feed you like vending machines, to standing in the middle of your food system, with nourishment all around in the gardens, fields, farms, forests, and waters of your region. You are in relationship with these ever-widening circles of food, from daily habits to windowsill sprouts to backyard vegetable plots to neighborhood farm stands and gardens to the stores, CSA (community supported agriculture) membership farms, farmers’ markets, and more in your community, your regional food sheds, and beyond.

I make no effort to be definitive, exhaustive, or authoritative. If I waited for that, I’d never give you my mostly baked notions for your investigation. Also, local food is a passion and practice in rapid cultural ascendancy. A book cannot contain all there is to know as the field is changing daily. I’m sure that people in the know will challenge or correct me and that many of my readers have their own stories to tell and expertise to share. Being part of a rising tide of knowledge in the making is part of what makes local food so delicious. We’re in this together.

Hope

This is not just a story of food, though. It is a story of rekindling hope at a time when positive change seems harder than ever, when solving our global energy, economic, and environmental issues fairly and squarely seems almost impossible despite how much our politicians try to cheer us up with promises.

I’m a boomer. Those of us who chose to use our postwar birthright of opportunity to change the world made great strides in justice, fairness, environmental protection, and cultural transformation. I and my personal team (the New Road Map Foundation) set ourselves the wee goal of ending overconsumption in North America, of teaching, supporting, and even cajoling people to live within their means. By the end of the last millennium I had to admit that despite writing a best seller, despite the tens of thousands of people who say Your Money or Your Life changed their lives, we had failed to reach the larger goal we’d set: that Americans would collectively and voluntarily resize our consumption to what the earth can sustainably provide.

Coming out of my cancer years, the only hope I could see was adaptation to the consequences of inaction and ignorance: a diminished and changing earth. I found the relocalization movement and a pinhole of hope opened. But the 10-mile diet set off a gusher of natural hope, a confidence that the conditions for thriving and resilience are all around us and that food—revitalizing regional food systems—is a collective project worthy of our best efforts.

Is Local for You?

Local uniquely connects you, an eater, with the hands that feed you—your farmer, the food s/he cultivates and harvests, and the place you both live. Every one of us has this opportunity to reinhabit the land that nurtures us—that gives us life.

Before we began to eat fossil fuel—before this concentrated energy source changed everything about what and how we eat—most of us were involved in home production—whether growing or preserving or preparing from scratch our daily fare. Two hundred years ago in the United States, local was the way everyone ate, and farming was the primary profession—90 percent of Americans lived on farms. Takeout—eating food from nowhere, cooked by people you don’t know, put in Styrofoam to eat at home, possibly alone—is not the way any of us had been raised—until now! As much of a miracle as this disconnected way of eating is for busy people who want to do and make and influence more than dinner, we need to acknowledge that it has literally ungrounded us.

Making some small commitment to eating within a radius of where you live is an act of reconnection. It is an act of honoring the hands and lands that feed you. Food becomes where you live and who you live with, not just another consumer item. Thus eating local food becomes ethical and spiritual as well as all the other reasons to do it—sociability of farmers’ markets, freshness, unique and diverse cultivars, greater nutrition.

Local also matters in a larger context. Our apparently lush food system is like a giant flower on a spindly stalk. Look at the flower and everything is beautiful and right. Peer underneath at the stalk and you realize how precarious it is. You enjoy the bounty—yet every day you wonder when it will snap. The system itself assures us that nothing is wrong. But we now know that every aspect of that beautiful flower depends on fossil fuel not just to transport crisp apples from New Zealand or grapes from Chile but to fertilize those distant soils and protect those faraway plants from pests and even support the rapid prototyping of new hybrid seeds. New technologies may let us extract more oil now than before, but the basic supply is finite. That voluptuous dahlia of the fresh food section at your Whole Foods market is like a painted curtain or a projected image—real enough, but not really real for really long.

I will introduce you to what is real to me—the interesting and informative farmers and gardeners and chefs and institutions of Whidbey Island in the far Northwest of the United States. Meeting them you will see how local works in reality, and the extraordinary joys as well as challenges of rehabilitating local food systems.

Will Local Make You Thin, Rich, Healthy, and Eternal?

Let’s get this self-help promise over with. Half a century of relentless advertising and half a millennium (at least) of fire-and-brimstone religion have stoked our darkest fears of being cast out, lonely, sick, rejected, unloved, and vulnerable. We’d buy anything that could save us from that fate, which is truly worse than death.

The self-help industry thrives on these fears and offers personal salvation. Let’s see how local measures up.

Want to Get Thin?

Once you participate in growing food or at least in the lives of the farmers who grow your food, you are less likely to waste it.

Industrial food is easy and cheap and loaded with sugar and fat. The business of food is profit, so we, the eaters, are cajoled, exhorted, and enticed to eat too much, broadening our bottoms as we feed the corporate bottom line. And food in the United States is surprisingly cheap; no people on earth spend as little as we do on food as a percentage of our budget. This means that we have few speed bumps on our highway to overeating.

On my 10-mile diet I lost six pounds in a month, partly because I ate no grain, but also because I ate with reverence and respect for my feeders.

Want to Get Healthy?

Unless you live next to a megafarm, feed lot, or some food-processing plant where one or more of the hundreds of nonfood ingredients found in many food products get added, local food means simpler, more basic, and less toxic food. While this is not a screed against manufactured food, it is an invitation to rethink what, beyond real food, goes into your body and whether those additives are truly necessary for food to be delicious and easy to prepare. I loved the rich, flavorful food I ate in my 10-mile month—and beyond. I had energy all day long—and my bad cholesterol went down and good cholesterol went up.

Want More Money?

Even though local food is often more expensive—sometimes far more expensive—than manufactured food, you get some of that money back through the nutritional value. According to the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, the high heat of canning causes some loss of vitamins C and B.¹ And, as you will learn, industrial agriculture is like the Red Queen and locally produced food is like Alice. The rules change often and immediately to favor the imperious monarch. The playing field isn’t level or even a gentle slant. Local producers have to huff and puff up some very steep hills of regulations and just can’t compete on industrial agriculture’s terms. It’s not up to you and me to make up for all that, to spend more in service to our local growers, but it is up to all of us to participate in some way in changing the rules enough to make farming viable for young and new farmers. Currently less than 2 percent of our population farms. The average age of farmers is close to sixty. We needed a generation of scientists for technological prowess in the era of Sputnik and beyond. We now need a generation of farmers in order to eat well into the future.

Want to Live Forever?

No one can give you that. Religion may promise you an afterlife, which could be quite appealing if you are suffering in this one, but there is no tangible proof of it. Here’s what local food can promise in that domain. Love. You are supporting your neighbors—and they are feeding you. You are weaving your community together in the most basic way. You are rewarding the hard work of those who farm in some measure by hand. The industrial food system of my youth, just when it was flexing its muscles, promised that your food was untouched by human hands. For our families in the fifties, disconnection was white bread was love. Local food is touched by human hands and that is the point. You are loving and serving the hands that feed you. Love, according to all religion, is the highest value. And who knows, that may get you into heaven.

Thriving Together

Local eating could seem like a personal choice that only hippies or Yuppies might make, but it is actually a collective project for a shared future. How to do that is the question. How do we have our (local) cake and eat it too (not sacrifice the benefits of anywhere food)? This is the challenge. By what agreements, compromises, laws, customs, rituals, or celebrations will we bring forth on this earth a future of common resilience, flourishing together?

In the seventies when we were waking up to spirituality, we’d say the longest journey is the twelve inches between head and heart. Now the necessary journey is from me to we, from self-interest to common interest, from YOYO (you’re on your own) to WAITT (slow down, we’re all in this together). The task now is to gather up our hard-earned freedoms and apply them to shaping a future that works for all. As it says in the Bible in Matthew 5:45, He makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. Same with the earth’s living systems—what affects them affects us all. The sun and rain of climate change fall on everyone. No one has the option of cutting loose from the collective, presuming she can make it on her own or survive at the expense of others.

We need to find a way to be free—and cooperate. To be creative and work for the common good. In short, to be part of a community and to be fully ourselves. What I call relational eating—being in relationship with the food, farms, farmers, forests, waters, soils, air, and other critters in a local living food system—is such a path.

The Age of Resilience

I believe we are in a new age, the age of resilience—the capacity to roll with the punches. Smart people in the age of resilience are resourceful—able to make the most of what’s at hand. Relocalization is bringing more of what we need closer to our hands. Fear, though, will weaken both resilience and resourcefulness. I want to inspire you to live this adventure, to whatever degree you choose, with me and all of us in these times. I want to be inspired and motivated by your creativity and heart. Research shows that people rise to the occasion when they must—they muster courage and help one another and offer solace in the face of loss. What’s ahead is an occasion we will all rise to—and we’ll all do it right where we are: on islands, like me; in forgotten rural communities; in suburbs and cities. There is hope everywhere. Even in regions around the world impoverished for a host of reasons, communities are taking control of their destiny, relocalizing.

This, then, is where the 10-mile diet landed me. I could easily go back to old habits, but I haven’t. I am aware of where my food comes from. I buy from my neighbors if at all possible, buy from my region as much as I can, and buy fair trade for food pleasures from afar if I can. I also buy those foods I love that come from everywhere/nowhere—and there are plenty of them. I’m transformed but not reborn. I simply like being acquainted with my food. I like cooking from scratch. I like eating less with more gratitude. I like growing what I can. I like being part of a global conversation about local eating—and adding my spice to the stew. I like the political puzzle—which policy shifts and personal choices and skillful practices will rebalance our food system. I like being part of this unfolding story, the shared adventure in security, sovereignty, and safety; in health, prosperity, and yum. And I like being relaxed about it all.

Food is our primary form of consumption. Transforming our relationship with food and the hands that feed us transforms so much else. I invite you to sit down at this banquet of stories and new ideas and nibble and graze and chew and digest and see how it all goes down. I invite you to simply enjoy yourself. If you find things you want to try, do so in a spirit of curiosity and good cheer. At the end of each chapter, a section called Now It’s Your Turn offers some action steps that, once you’ve read the whole book, you can come back to and try out. Between chapters are some wonderful recipes using regional ingredients from the creative kitchens of fine local chefs, assembled by the star chef in the book, Jess Dowdell. There’s something for everyone to savor—the gourmet, the activist, the lover of good tales. Bon appétit!

CHAPTER ONE

Localize Me?

July 4, 2010

The sun was warm, the sky clear, and, frankly, hyperlocal eating was nowhere on my radar. My only interest in eating locally was grabbing a bite of some German potato salad gracing the banquet table—dead ahead—laden with potluck dishes. Yet amazingly, I was about to sign on to an experiment in 10-mile eating that would redirect my life. Join me in my final hour of anywhere eating.

Let me set the scene. My clan of friends had come out of their home offices and back from their travels to celebrate the Fourth of July at our annual potluck picnic near Maxwelton Beach, one of the original settlements on the western shore of South Whidbey Island. Soon we would, with heaping plates of food, watch the funky-to-the-max Maxwelton Parade: the classic cars and political protest floats and whale puppets and waving political candidates and belly dancers and children wearing gossamer wings—all of whom promenade at two miles per hour along the dead-end beach road, throwing candy at us gawkers. We’d ooh and aah and eat and socialize and relax and watch the sun set behind the Olympic Mountains across Useless Bay.

Two hundred years ago, had you looked out over that very stretch of beach, you might have seen Lower Skagit First Nations people feasting on salmon, deer, perhaps duck supplemented with nettles and camas roots. A hundred years ago the Salish would have been gone and you occasionally might have seen thousands of people from all around the region gathered for a Chautauqua, a two-week festival of entertainment, edification, and inspiration. They would have carried picnic baskets filled with eggs and garden vegetables and meats and pies, almost all of it local food. People from miles around came to the five-thousand-seat amphitheater, built with the abundant lumber on the island by the first settlers, the Mackies, who’d arrived in 1905 on a steamboat, barging all their possessions ashore except for their milk cow Bossy . . . who swam.

Now here we all were, transplants to this island, many of us earning money off the island as consultants, writers, knowledge workers, and retirees, enabling us to live the good life here. Ahead of us were tables filled with dishes from every part of the planet: teriyaki chicken wings and hand-rolled sushi from Japan, fried rice from China, tabbouleh salad from the Middle East, potato salad from South America, chutneys from India, pasta from Italy, potato latkes from Poland. All of them considered American foods now.

The green salads alone were the world in a bowl. Lettuce from the Central Valley in California, cucumbers from China, tomatoes from Mexico, avocados from the tropics, salad oil from Venezuela, vinegar from China, pepper from Vietnam, and salt from the Himalayas. The sugar in the desserts was probably from Brazil.

I was a pretty sick puppy when I transplanted myself to this island in Puget Sound five years earlier. After decades of saving the world it seemed the thing I actually needed to save was my own life. I was diagnosed in 2004 with stage-three colon cancer. Strangely, the news seemed less like a verdict and more like a hall pass from carrying the world on my back as if I were the sole refueling ship on the way to the space station and the stars. It might have been the surgery that saved my life. It might have been the bit of chemotherapy I received that proved so vile I quit. It might have been, though, that I faced myself and changed my life—and I was officially well, though exhausted. That’s when I came to this motherly island, and was brought back to full vitality by the very waters and mountains across the way and by the very people on that potluck line. I was healthy, I was happy, and I was ready to jump into life again.

I was also a lot lighter—not from the chemo but from a six-week marathon diet that had stripped twenty pounds off my body and promised to have changed my metabolism so that I could now eat gloriously, wantonly, voluptuously, without ever gaining back a pound. Having paid my dues, the payoff was this very meal, these glistening dishes full of fat and sugar and salt, crunch and slither and squish, noodles and rice and everything nice that I’d been denied trying to regain my menopause-obliterated waist.

I was trying not to look too eager as I clutched my plate and eyed the spread ahead with all the casualness of a hungry dog when he’s about to get fed. I flicked my tongue to both corners of my mouth, in case I was drooling.

Until this day, the only food issues that got my attention were personal. They were all about feeding my mouth, not feeding the world. In two decades of writing and teaching about the perils of overconsumption, I had challenged only our obsession with money and things and their impact on the planet, not our obsession with food, eating and dieting. How could I challenge our food insanity when I had my own hand in the cookie jar?

How Have I Dieted? Let Me Count the Ways

I’d always been an eater, of course. I was born that way. The simple act of bending my elbow with food-laden forks and spoons would amount, over my lifetime, to more than six tons of food disappearing down my gullet. What I have to show for all that shoveling is that I’m alive . . . with a few extra pounds.

The first time the bliss of feeding turned to the shame of fat was when I was six. On a hot day at a summer camp far more progressive than my parents knew, we were invited to take off our shirts and run in the sun. I watched kids with rail-thin bodies and ribs like keyboards tear their shirts off. I was pudgy—and mortified. In those days I loved cinch belts, so I valiantly hiked mine up from waist to underarms like a tube top and wiggled my hips like a movie actress, smiled, and came to know that I was different. I was fat.

The cinch belt was, in fact, the first of many elastic strategies for shaving off the odd bump and lump. We’ve got to get you into a girdle, my mother hissed one day as she walked behind me and saw that puberty was rearranging my fat attractively into two round dancing butt cheeks. We went directly to B. Altman’s foundations department to sausage me into a body shaper that could second as a chastity belt. Sometime later our family physician put me on my first diet. He had a big, sloppy, tobacco-stained gray mustache and his own balloon of a belly and delivered a sheet of paper with the diet with the same authority as God handing those two tablets to Moses. Dry toast. Skim milk. Naked vegetables. Sliced fruit. Skinless chicken.

So began a lifetime of diets and cheating on diets. I replaced pleasure and appetite with lists of dos and don’ts—and more diets than beads on a rosary. From Atkins to Fat Flush to Zone to South Beach to raw food to no food (fasting) so I could remember what my ribs and hip bones felt like—but, like the tide, the fat rolled in again and I rolled my self into a girdle as a last resort.

Then there were the health and virtue diets. Eat no fish (fisheries are collapsing). Eat no red meat (bad for your arteries and definitely bad for the feedlot cows). Eat no chicken (mass-produced in cages). Eat no dairy—you’re probably allergic. Eat no eggs—cholesterol. No, wait, eat eggs, you need the lecithin. Eat nothing with eyes (our brothers and sisters)—only fruits, nuts, and vegetables. When I lived in the woods in northern Wisconsin, tending a half-acre garden with a group of friends, we took a photo of us brandishing guns and knives at a wheelbarrow full of fresh-killed vegetables—yanked from the ground and piled high like carcasses. I dabbled in food virtue, one right way after another—and went back to eating what I wanted, working only on the virtue of self-acceptance.

The derivation of diet from the Greek means simply how you live. Traditionally it simply meant what people eat; cultures identify with the foods of their land—the salmon people, the seal people, the reindeer people, the taro people. Are we, then, the fast-food people? The aspartame people? Have we lost our diet—our way of life—entirely in service to dieting? If you review the many diets,¹ few agree what to limit. Ayurvedic practitioners even question the supremacy of chugging down eight glasses of water a day. We should sip, not gulp. It should be warm, not cold.

I even lost any honest hunger, that inbred signal to get up and seek food. Hunger was always an option, welcome because it meant my diet was working; my body was finally eating its stores of fat. In my whole life I might have missed meals, but I’ve never gone hungry involuntarily for more than a day. My hungers were for things food could not really solve—because I was sad or scared or frustrated or bored. I bit down on food so I wouldn’t snap at the next person to cross my path.

Am I the only one this nuts? I don’t think so. We treat our bodies like servants or mannequins or machines or sex objects or conveyances for our overactive brains—rarely as a simple blessing, an aliveness. Food thus becomes a temptation, the enemy, a pleasure money can buy, an ostentation, a trifle, a given. Many of us have a love-hate relationship with food. We binge. We purge. We won’t eat. We won’t stop eating. If news of hunger and starvation wafts in on the morning news as we drink our fruit smoothie or eat sausage and eggs, at best we write a check—and perhaps later in the day assuage our uneasy conscience by another visit to the fridge.

How perfect that I was about to begin the 10-mile diet just as I’d finished feeding my fat-hating demon one more time. No longer a little girl at summer camp who could hike up a cinch belt to fit in, I was inching, literally, toward a matronly body—and I didn’t like it. That’s why I joined a growing number of friends in using a new super diet—the standard starvation plus a hormone that aids weight loss the way steroids aid muscle bulk. They’d all lost upward twenty pounds. Now I had too and was about to celebrate my win . . . by eating.

I did not know what I was in for with the 10-mile diet. I never expected to develop a new relationship with food that had nothing—but nothing—to do with my size. I would fall in love with the hands and lands that fed me. I would learn to seek nourishment, connection, and empowerment through how I grew, bought, cooked, and ate my food. I, the lone eater, would become I, the blessed, with food, farmers, farms, fields, and forests that fed me. I would receive the love right from the food, rather than turning to food as a substitute for love. This kind of diet sticks because it transforms the eater.

Local food could be yet one more fad or one more issue or one more virtue. Something to try—and say you did. The experiment I would soon undertake required an honest look at my current relationship with food. How I used food as an emotional crutch, as a ritual, as an entitlement, as an identity, as a set of habits I had no desire to break. On that summer day in 2010, though, local food was simply the happy distance between plate and mouth.

Growing Up in the Fifties

Most of us at the potluck had grown up in the fertile soil of the post–World War II middle class. We grew up hearing:

"Eat your vegetables. Think of the poor starving children in . . .