The Strange World of Food

Here we are in the pandemic, confronted with the first view of a post-apocalyptic world. And it has partially hyped up and deeply affected our relationship to food. Way back in 2012 I wrote a blog post about how apocalyptic literature focuses in part on getting food. As we’ve been quarantined due to Covid-19, I’ve been thinking about that blog.

Surprisingly, some people’s response to the situation was to buy seeds for a new garden. Grow food. This is a great response, as is all the sewing of masks, and I think speaks well of our human impulses in a time of challenge. I hope more people take up growing food. When I went to place my ordinary late-season-odds-and-ends seed order, it was too late. The shipping times had extended to late May or June! Lucky for me, this is also a time when everyone wants to help out. A friend sent me some seeds so there can be melons in the greenhouse this season.

I’m very interested in food, from a growing and cooking and eating perspective. And all those areas are in great flux right now. Social media has been interesting in this regard.

I’m part of two online cooking groups. One is comprised of Grinnell alums from multiple time periods (roughly 30s through 60s) that share everything from what they’re cooking to the equipment they’re using to cook it. We’ve happily shared our kitchens, spice racks, pot and pan collections, and all manner of baking, preserving, smoking, sous vide-ing, instapotting and just plain cooking. If you have an ingredient and want to use it, they’re your go-to place for suggestions. It’s a friendly and a happy place to be.

A few weeks ago I was added to a group called Shelter in Place Cooking. I only have one real contact to this group, and he is an incredible gourmet cook. The early posts to this group were also very gourmand, and I felt quite intimidated. I also felt quite anxious– where are all these people getting all these fancy ingredients? How are they continuing to cook like this? The group continued on at this haute level until finally someone said something along the lines of “I’m sorry, I have to leave. This group reeks of class privilege. I thought it would be about stretching the pantry or cooking when you can’t go shopping regularly, but it’s not.” This person was not wrong, but his or her leaving kind of opened a floodgate to what people in the group (which is quite large) were actually cooking. Meatloaf posts and “favorite hot sauce” threads, back to celebrating eating and cooking.

What happened in that second group, however, is part of a line of thought that’s really hitting me this week. It’s about what has maybe changed for the long term as a result of the pandemic. Maybe we’ll release our hold on some of the “luxury” that has informed so many lives, particularly in the last several years. I’ve been uncomfortable, even as I’ve enjoyed and benefited from, the level of assumed luxury in our society, particularly among the white middle class. We eat like kings, we travel like kings, we consume like kings. We have supported a leisure economy the world has perhaps never known. That has been our Gilded Age. Gold leaf food, small plates placed on pillows that release their scent when you pop them open to eat. Getting up and traveling– more or less whoever you are– on a cruise ship or on a tour anywhere in the world. I enjoyed my cruise to Alaska last year very much, especially the food, and I’m glad I did it. We were surrounded by large family reunion groups, and though the class issues were clear and present at all times, they were more evident between the crew and customers than between the customers themselves. Before and after the cruise, I indulged in all manner of fantasy looking at the itineraries for more, longer cruises, (even though that would not be my preferred method of travel). If someone wants to write a book for our times now, it should chronicle a man or woman who has benefited from this golden age of travel– no, not travel, leisure— and end with that person on a cruise ship which a pandemic has made impossible to dock. Sort of A Gentleman in Moscow on a cruise ship. And a younger gentleman.

Meanwhile, there’s also a crisis in our actual food supply. Here in Minnesota, farmers are killing their chickens and starting to kill their hogs. They are dumping their milk. The supply chain has broken down in serious ways. First, there’s the serious and widespread issue of schools and restaurants closing and thus shedding a “bulk buying” situation many growers and producers depend upon. It’s not possible to just start packaging for the grocery store and shift food supplies there. Among the stories I’ve heard is of food pantries that have no storage space and a restaurant in Chicago filling their walk-in with supplies for a local food shelf, and of a carrot farmer packaging up carrots and selling them through a farmer’s market or at the farm in 25-pound packages. “But I can’t sell 10,000 pounds of carrots that way,” he said. So he’s shifting his planting plans. Another farmer is trying to sell hogs at cost– assuming people can find a processor for one or two instead of 100– rather than facing the possibility of having to euthanize 300 hogs.

So where will we be, as the question of the week goes, “when this is all over”? I of course have no idea. There’s no real threat, I don’t think, to the food supply. But lots of restaurants will go out of business and lots and lots of people will lose their jobs and things will be tight. We will have to take care of each other for a long time, and we might want to take care of ourselves a bit differently as well. Maybe the most profound piece I read this week was this one by Gabrielle Hamilton, the longtime owner of Prune restaurant in Manhattan’s East Village. I never ate there, but am sure that the restaurant where I ate what may have been my last truly wonderful restaurant meal in New York, is the “woman-owned and woman-run restaurant with an economic-justice mission that has eliminated tipping” she mentions in her piece, only a few blocks from Prune and Russ and Daughters and Katz’s deli.

Here on the farm, it’s a decidedly mixed bag. I put the alliums out too early and killed the onions, shallots, and leeks I cultivated carefully since February, the first plants. However, there are greens to eat more regularly from the garden, and we’ve even had a few radishes from there. I go out regularly and check to see if the asparagus is coming back– not yet, but soon! I managed to plant some potatoes in bags in the greenhouse, where I also just did the first pinching of blossoms off huckleberry bushes and a tomatillo plant. Still too early for them to be outside, but we’re getting there. I’m looking into the possibility of buying one of those pigs.

We’re eating well, thanks to a friend who dropped off more venison and a big bag of frozen garden tomatoes, our access to a local lamb farmer, and my well-stocked pantry. I’m finally figuring out, at least in part, how to order and get food through online ordering and sending my husband to fill the gaps.

Growing food, though, is a long game, which all those seed buyers, the ones who actually make it to the planting stage, will discover. And no matter how much you think you’re growing, it will only ever (unless you’re a homesteader) be supplementary to what you get in the grocery store. Still, it’s a good instinct, and I hope people enjoy it and have successes and some form of the Victory Garden returns. And I am looking to see what will happen, in a sort of halfway apocalypse, where there will still be scallops if you can get them, and maybe not a lot of $600/plate dinners for a while.