This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [31]
“You’ve been into the berries,” Mama would scold, but she couldn’t get too mad because she, too, snuck them like that.
Despite the importance that food held in our lives, or perhaps because of it, Mama and Papa sometimes fasted during holidays, as the Nearings did, when the rest of America was “glutting,” as Helen called it. Practiced over the centuries for religious and political reasons, fasting in moderation is thought to benefit health and slow the aging process. For my parents, it was cleansing and helped ease the burden on our winter stores of food. They drank only water and tea or juices made from carrots, beet, wheatgrass, and apples. One of Mama’s favorite inventions was a grater and cheesecloth that she used in place of an electric juicer.
Mama loved fasting and the light-headed euphoria that set in after the first day or so of hunger, her mind free to wander more endorphin-laced paths. There was a sense of control in it for her that went deeper than the political and health stance of the Nearings. Somewhere along the way, the endorphins produced by hunger became an addiction for Mama equal to any drug. For Papa, hard labor had a similar effect. As with alcohol or drugs, the high of fasting and the grit of a good day’s work momentarily eased a troubled mind. While the material addictions of the outside world had given way to purer ones, the effect was the same. As with alcohol, Mama often became spacey from fasting, a side effect of initial low blood sugar that made the simplest tasks exceedingly difficult. Little details such as fixing my dinner didn’t matter so much anymore. I would try to communicate important things to her in my rudimentary language, how hungry I was, for example, but she wouldn’t really hear me.
“Uh-huh,” she said as she busied herself making her fruit and vegetable juices with her grater and cheesecloth. “Uh-huh, uh-huh, yup, sure.”
Fasting became another way, really, of checking out.
Food for Mama was equal to love, and, though she might withhold it when fasting, she usually meted it out to Papa and me straight from her heart. The preparing, cooking, and storing of food made up the pulse of her days. I’d wake in the mornings to the sound of Mama grinding grain. Clamped to the kitchen counter, that steel mill from Hatch’s was her magic tool, transforming inedible whole grains into vital ingredients as she stood beside it, hair pulled back, working the crank. The groats went in a funnel in the top, to be ground by opposing metal wheels attached to the crank, and depending on the setting, meal or flour streamed or puffed from the spout into a bowl.
To supplement the food from the greenhouse, root cellar, and stores of mason jars, the fourth component of our food supply, also not mentioned in the Nearings’ books, was the ordering of bulk nonlocal foods. We went in with the Nearings on orders from the organic supplier Walnut Acres: twenty-pound bags of oats, wheat groats, and sunflower and sesame seeds, plus five-gallon metal containers of oil, nut butters, maple syrup, and honey. Most important to our diet were the whole grains, which had not been processed to remove the fiber and nutrients, so had to be ground by hand instead.
For breakfast, Mama often made hot cereals—twelve-grain, Irish oatmeal, or cornmeal, all ground with the mill and served with butter and maple syrup. Lunch might make use of the leftover cornmeal for corn dodgers with baked beans. For dinner, the organic Durham winter wheat groats were ground for bread to go with her famous vegetable soups, served with salads from the garden or greenhouse.
Once I was old enough, I’d come and wait expectantly by the stove as the smells of baking bread filled the house. The cookstove was our most important possession, without which we would either