So… people keep asking me how I got this way, which I’m sure they mean as a compliment. After reading my post last night about “half-prepping,” Chris said, “well, it’s easy for you, but it would be impossible for me.” The obvious retort is that it comes back to the lottery of fascinations thing again and that many things that are easy for him about software engineering would be impossible, or at least feel impossible, for me.
Part of that is, yes, experience, but you only gain the kind of experience with software engineering that Chris has when you are really inherently interested in it. I have already said that I am interested in food, without meaning to be, so I notice it all the time. I don’t think that I could be the way I am if I truly didn’t care about food.
However. Bearing in mind that it is never perfectly clear how you formed the habits that make you you, I can probably point to some things along the way that contributed.
When I was in junior high and high school, we lived in a small (population c. 300) mountain town with no grocery store. The nearest grocery store was about an hour away, through mostly winding mountain roads, and both of my parents worked. We typically got groceries once every two weeks. We didn’t garden at the time, or at least not that I recall, but I did raise pigs (meat pigs) for 4-H and sold them at the county fair, and most of my friends’ families were ranchers or farmers or hunting outfitters or the like. Most of us hunted, so we often had a freezer full of venison. Most of my friends did rodeo, too, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is we went to the grocery store once every two weeks, so I started learning the necessity of meal planning and having a chest freezer at this time. All of my friends’ families shopped like this, too, so we weren’t weird; this was normal there.
My dad and his brothers and sisters always had big gardens in Arkansas, where I spent most of the summers of my youth. Each summer was totally different there, as my dad had trouble settling down, I guess, but there were usually gardens and there was always what I would now call foraging. There are just too many mulberries in Arkansas not to eat them, and other foods presented themselves in the times when I ran, semi-feral, through the overgrown forests of the Ozarks. But it was in Arkansas where I remember learning the habit of taking a salt shaker out to the garden with me, to be able to stand in the garden in my bare feet and eat the tomatoes straight off the vine. Many of the other things I learned in those summers in Arkansas were certainly less wholesome, but thankfully it’s the mulberries and the tomatoes that really stuck. That and the feeling of driving down a rural road with my bare feet hanging out the window of the truck, eating Frito pie and singing Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan songs with my dad. But, again, this is not the point here.
Somewhat later in life, we moved to Alaska with a 1-year-old firecracker. My husband was working as a “roe technician” in a salmon processing plant. We had very little money. We did have food stamps, but the foods in the grocery stores in Alaska, as I believe I’ve mentioned, were prohibitively expensive. I wanted my little boy to eat really well, to be strong and healthy, but it is hard to afford to eat well on food stamps. Not impossible, but hard. Fortunately the town we lived in (c 5000 people) was overgrown with wild foods. Every empty lot seemed to be home to blueberry and raspberry patches; sorrel and chickweed were abundant. About a block away was an estuary where we could sit and watch the salmon run, the eagles pulling what they could out of the churning rivers, an occasional beluga chasing the fish in from the sea. Nearly every day we walked to a vacant lot and picked berries for a snack and some greens for dinner, then went to the beach. We also had a plot at the community garden, where we grew mainly cabbage and peas and radishes, and my little helper ate all of them that he could.
Not long after that, we moved to a small town (population c 600) in eastern Idaho. There was no grocery store there, either; the nearest one was about an hour away, though down an interstate this time. My husband still didn’t speak especially great English, so it took quite a long time before he could get a job that paid much over the minimum wage. The first little firecracker turned 2 our first year there, and when he was 4, we had a second baby. Not long after that, my husband got a job driving a truck, long-haul for a year, and then in an oilfield in Wyoming. He was home rarely; sometimes we had a second car that I could use and sometimes we didn’t. I often went long times without getting groceries out of sheer necessity. I had a large garden in the backyard, and we hunted and fished; like many of our neighbors, we kept some chickens for eggs. When I could get into town to buy things that I didn’t grow, I bought them in very large quantities. My parents gave us an old refrigerator that we kept in the garage, and it often had cases of yogurt in it, or an entire shelf full of heads of cabbage. Again, this was all done out of basic necessity, as it was just physically difficult to get groceries even when we had money (or, for several years, food stamps) to do it with. But whether you have money or not, or a way to get to a grocery store or not, the kids are always hungry, hungry and growing, so the need to figure out systems to keep them fed, and fed in the way that you want them to be fed, becomes urgent.
And then through the great wash of days and years spent doing things you must do, they become habits. Sometimes it’s hard to undo the habits because you spoil yourself; I am like this with salad dressings, for example, and with many foods, but salad dressings were one of the first that I noticed. I have become picky, because I have got used to the way things taste when they are freshly made and they do not taste as good when they are not. Where I might have once had to think about prepping ahead for tomorrow’s meals or to have some cooked but not finished ingredients around, writing myself notes, now my body just knows the right motions. Like brushing one’s teeth, one simply moves. I can do it when I have not had a full night of sleep in a month; I can do it through migraines; I can do it when, as now, I have some sort of respiratory virus trying to keep my spirits down.
This has its down sides; to one degree or another, I am never not thinking about food. Or, not quite thinking, really; the food is fizzling around somewhere low in my brain, somewhere vital but not executive, only rising to consciousness when I need it to. I have a good mental inventory of most of the food in the house and when it needs to be used up by; I used to have to write this down, to make lists and inventories, but mostly not anymore.
I have lived other ways, as one does, depending on where I was living. I got groceries almost every day in Japan, as one does there. In Missoula, in college, I did try having a plot in the community garden, but to be honest, I was barely awake and I’m not sure we really produced much from it, but it is where I started teaching myself to can. In Atlanta we ate out a lot because the food there is wonderful, and I wanted to experience it all; the nearest grocery store was an unpleasant drive from my apartment, so I sometimes used Instacart or whatever. I can adapt. But my mom recently said to me that I finally seem like myself to her again, and she is probably right. I am most myself when I am living like this.
What we ate today: Being ill, I was craving soups. I had baked some pumpkins (half-prepping!) the other day, so for lunch I made a pumpkin soup and toast.
For dinner, I made green chile stew, the food of my people (New Mexicans), and some muffins to go alongside. J made some Turkish cookies called şekerpare today, from one of his boxes. They had an interesting technique — pouring a lemon syrup over the cookies — and are delicious.
No foods purchased, none received, although the lamb guy texted me so we could find a time to meet at the gas station and exchange meat for money.