I tie an apron around my belly, measure and mix the ingredients. Between my fingers, I squish and squash the dough, kneading and flipping the biblical food onto a floured board.
Yeast
Sugar
Salt
Flour
Warm tap water
I am about to spend some weeks alone. I see the days already. They are stacked like the frayed, braided rungs of a rope ladder. Hold me up! I shout as I climb to Massachusetts where the arm of Cape Cod clings to the pinnacle, the faded roof shingles of east coast glory. I am moving home in August, abandoning Chicago and the idea of living anyplace but where I belong. I have a job in a little schoolhouse and it starts at the end of summer. Scott is going first, hence this foreboding loneliness. In a week, he and his sister will drive the 900 miles from here to there. He will have a job interview. Eventually he will return to say good-bye to the city and to pack a truck of our boxed up belongings.
In a bowl, blanketed by cellophane and cloth, the dough rises, an expressive artifact.
Nana was Italian. She hand rolled pasta and made chicken soup with lard. Papa was Irish. He gave me these blue eyes and my tendency toward wall flowery. Grandma is an English gardener who bakes dinner rolls, North Atlantic fish and thin cookie crisps. And when I write her letters, she writes me back. Grandpa is French Canadian. He digs for quahogs with his tan feet and drives his boat full throttle into every political debate set down on the dining room table, where he never refuses a cup of coffee or glass of scotch.
An American hodgepodge, I bake my bread.
Happily, I hop onto the nailed slats of this toboggan as it backslides toward housewifery and the history of my ancestors. For too long now, I have poised myself at the top of a metaphorical mountain, pointing fingers and sticking up my nose.
Despite this self-inflicted separation, I am never really alone. For I come with a full stack of history books dating back to Ireland, Nova Scotia, England and Italy. In my pockets I have copper colored photographs and coal sketches, scratched polaroids and memories captured by digital film. In my pack, I have hammy down corduroys, fabric scrunchies, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and clip-on earrings. We, my husband and I, share this life, clinging to one another like magnets of opposite poles, but we are never detached. We are descendants. And behind us, tugging at our senses like a motley arrangement of webs are the memories of our childhoods. Threaded, they shred if not reinforced. I have snipped several of these strings, pronouncing wheat to be toxic and smoked salmon to be savage, but today I turn, grasp these ties and weave the twine into patterns before reinforcing them with bungee cords. Digging one of the hooks into my heart, I play the wires like harp strings, tugging to remember recipes, scents, tastes, textures and sounds. Who was I to think I could create a new culture? Never could it amount to the one given to me. The one cultivated by stories, blood, eggs and potlucks. Culture is as complex as Grandma's Garbage Soup and as filling as Nana's nine course Christmas feast. It is warm as Mom's sticky cinnamon buns made from scratch and Pop's plugged-in skillet of tightly packed blueberry pancakes. Because even the most delicious, beautiful vegan restaurant with the friendliest of staff could never reach into my childhood and rewrite the first chapters of my memoir.
In the corner of our little kitchen stands a big brass statue of myself. I call her Hypocrisy. Shiny and small, she stretches one of her feet into her opened mouth and with the other hand, she grasps a cornucopia of farm fresh fare. On her shoulder hangs that leather, olive-green purse she never sold, despite her previously penned plans to do so.
For two and a half years, I have been a verbose vegan, petitioning through prose my desire for the world to quit killing beasts for boots, belts and feasts. I obsessed over documentaries, books and online communities. Scott became a vegetarian at the same time, which felt like victory. His decision somehow made mine look less crazy. I was proud of his choice to eat atypically, despite the frequency with which I pretended to pump cow utters whenever he ordered his burrito with cheese and sour cream. Now, a couple years later, we have decided to abandon vegetarianism and live again as omnivores.
A month ago, I diagnosed myself Deficient. I set up bottles of supplements like some kind of ragtag army unit of broad-shouldered soldiers. "Now go in there and fight this approaching anemic enemy!" I ordered, throwing them back like an opened grenade.
"Are your teeth blue?" My sister asks a few weeks later while we are having lunch in Boston.
"Probably. I took an iron supplement on our way here." I explain, polishing my pearly powder blues with a paper napkin. "They're made of beets!" I say before turning to my brother and whispering, "I THINK I HAVE DEFICIENCIES!" To which he shakes his head and smiles.
Vitamins. Nobody even really knows if these isolated nutrients DO ANY GOOD! And yet here I was popping them like salty popcorn. I want food to nourish me, not some chemical compounds manufactured by industrial scientists.
After a year and a half of veganism, my digestive health started to decline. Nearly all foods caused internal yeast infections to bloom, belly bloating balloons to inflate and the skin on my face to burst into tender pink pimples. At the time, it did not occur to me that these reactions might be due to my animal-free diet. Instead I concluded that my body was sensitive and simply doesn't digest unhealthy foods. So I went more extreme and embarked on a raw, low fat, vegan diet. I ate pounds and pounds of fruit daily and an enormous salad every night. During the first three months, I was thrilled. Look at me everybody! I found the correct way for us humans to live! I wanted to shout from the tops of lawn chairs at crowded cookouts. My skin was clear and smooth, I had lost weight, I was obnoxiously happy all the time and I had infinite energy. I never even farted! And my armpits never really sweat or smelled. I had also stopped producing earwax and boogers and I had not had a cold or flu all year. However, my hair was falling out in a silent, scary sort of way and the absence of my period alarmed me.
After several months searching for my missing menstrual and signs of hair re-growth, I returned to the cooked vegan diet. Packing in loads of lentils, tofu and supplements, I rapidly gained the weight back and the skin on my face had a fit. WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME? I am eating the healthiest diet I know of. For so long, I had expected to experience the sort of health I had read about. Just wait until my family sees how healthy I am, then they'll all go vegan! (And when this didn't happen) ...Juuuuuuust be patient. Any day now I'm going to look FANTASTIC and they'll start trading in their turkey for tofu, their steak for seitan, and their mozzarella for cashew cheese. I'll save their lives and the lives of countless animals! I'll be a hero.
This never happened. My scheme flopped like the rag doll I began to resemble: pale, thin and too emotionally weak to stand up for myself.
I must give my body the credit it deserves. For it has tried very hard to get my brain's approval, doing its absolute best with the plant-based diet. However, I realize now that I must return to the butcher, the fisherman and the dairy maid for a small daily portion of flesh and curd. I use these unsavory terms so that I do not become disconnected from my food. Bacon is hog bits, steak is cow slices, eggs fall from hen holes and cheese comes from the sagging udders of a cow or goat. And for whatever complex reason, of which I may never fully understand, my body needs a little of this in order to function properly. For I, an American mongrel, raised on 2% milk, steak stir frys and breaded cod, simply require it.
"Whoooooooo's gonna die first!"
My meat-enthusiast brother and I once sang to one another. Imbedded in this snarky tune was a strained relationship where animal arteries and tempeh stretched between us, causing us both to gag and spew disprovals at the other. Well, Patrick, I won't be ordering five-egg omelets with two sides of pork sausages, but I will ask that when I see you in August you save me a small piece of whatever animal is charring on the grill. Don't get me wrong, my dear brother, I still believe in the power of kale, cucumbers, whole grains and organic local fruit. I am not re-negging EVERYTHING. I am just saying that perhaps eating domesticated animals who are fed appropriately, not injected with hormones or antibiotics and given room to roam, is not the evil I once believed it to be. And now I would like to saw down this fence of food fights we have built up between us. Here is my cloth white napkin, I wave it high enough for you to see.
...And while I am at it: To all you curious social acquaintances and family members spouting your "WHAT ABOUT YOUR PROTEIN?" questions at backyard barbecues and holiday hootenannies, I want to award you all with invisible I-told-you-so-Rachel trophies. Congratulations.
I would also like to apologize to you, Mom and Dad. I'm sorry if my vegan lifestyle sounded like an implied scream---HOW COULD YOU FEED ME MURDEROUS POISON ALL MY CHILDHOOD? YOU ARE HORRIBLE <
Orthorexia Nervosa: (noun): an obsession with eating foods that one considers healthy. A medical condition in which the sufferer systematically avoids specific foods in the belief that they are harmful.No black coffee, no cake of any kind, no pints of beer, no sips of wine, no bread, no chocolate, no tea! I had placed myself on this narrow pedestal. I will only consume raw fruits and vegetables. No vinegar, no oil, no grains, no legumes, no nuts, no meat, no milk! Nothing cooked! Nothing baked! Nothing fried, grilled, boiled, or steamed! Why would I eat anything that isn't perfect? Caffeine is a drug! Alcohol ruins your liver! Grains make you fat! VINEGAR IS POISON! And cooking kills so much of the nutrients!
...To an extent, some of these claims hold a little truth. However, I realize now, when digested responsibly, the damage by any or all of these is nothing compared to the sadness of separating oneself from her place in the universe. I love coffee shop culture, cold pale ales, PIZZA PIE, peanuts and baked sweet potatoes. I like sharing appetizers, pots of soup and strawberry rhubarb pies. I love sitting around diner booths, kitchen counters and picnic tables, sharing in the old gustatory way of food and drink. Fuck festering and fretting in the isolation of extremism. Why imprison oneself for the sake of an overly intellectualized argument? Wild nature is violent. That is the raw truth. And whether one lives in Iraq, Mexico or Vermont, violence is everywhere. Birds are eating worms. Humans are hunting, fishing and farming. Children are plucking berries and trampling insect ecosystems. Cats are torturing mice. Bears are catching salmon. Bats are biting into bugs. Women are raising chickens, turkeys and hens. They are milking cows and plucking feathers and stealing eggs. They are weeding gardens, planting seeds and feeding their friends and families. Evading the culture carved by my ancestors isn't as simple as attending a dinner party with my supper in a tupperware container because irregardless of my personal philosophical preferences or even my recent reacquaintance with nutritional nostalgia, the entire makeup of my molecular being is starving for the food of my youth.
With a small set of binoculars, Scott watches me wander in and out of idealism like a bird in a storm. Once, I briefly caught the wind and soared. But eventually my body grew tired and I pummeled into the branches of the ancient familial tree where it had always stood, no matter how far I thought I had flown. Now it embraces my beaten body, entangling my harlequin ties into the cracks of its earthy bark. I quit fidgeting for freedom and see now the scars my scissors left the last time I was here. I don't want to wander away anymore. I want to be home. With one bungee hook dug into my senses, I take the other and hammer it into the heart of my history. Here I will build my nest. Hey Momma! I'm comin' home.
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