This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [33]
“I was not born a cook,” Helen often said, but during summer there were many visiting and helping mouths to feed, and feed them she must, so she came up with quick and nourishing, if sometimes unpalatable, solutions. Her secret was that she had a captive audience—there was nowhere else to eat out on the cape, and when you’re hard-worked and fresh-air hungry, pretty much anything tastes good. Helen’s other secret was that her ingredients from the garden were fresh, and of top quality—like those in the parsley-laden vegetable soup of Mama and Papa’s first visit.
Across the country in California, a French-trained chef named Alice Waters was opening, in 1971, what would become the well-known Chez Panisse restaurant, founded on these very principles of freshness that Alice had learned in France. Fresh local food was not political at that time; it simply tasted best.
Names grew up around Helen’s less inspired and more utilitarian creations—Horse Chow for oats and raisins with oil and lemon juice, Carrot Croakers for a cookie made out of leftover carrot pulp from the juicer, Scott’s Emulsion for boiled wheat berries, honey, and peanut butter “where the eater does the work, not the cook,” as Helen quipped, and Miracle Mush for grated carrot, beet, apple, and nuts. There were always large wooden bowls of popcorn drizzled with melted butter for a snack, and Helen was known to drop handfuls into people’s soup bowls for extra fiber, whether they wanted it or not. These names and combinations didn’t exactly make the mouth water, but they provided the body with the necessary nutrition and fortitude for hard work.
“A meal is best when eaten with your feet under your own table,” Scott liked to say over lunch, the philosophical feeding him as well as the physical. Papa often quoted another of Scott’s sayings, “Health insurance is served on the table with every meal.” As Papa saw it, good food was the secret to longevity and well-being that would save him from the early death of his father. The healthily aging Nearings were living proof that a simple diet was the key. But as it would turn out, the formula for health is not one-size-fits-all.
As with organic farming, health is more about individual trial and error, and my family would soon have its share of both. Yogurt alone could not make up for the B vitamins lacking in our vegetarian diet. Not being a nutritionist, I know only one thing for sure: that our high-carb diet often caused bouts of “the farts,” a condition that Papa denied, Mama relished, and I liked to laugh about, especially when one struck while I was seated on Mama’s lap for a bedtime story.
Still, even in the clutches of winter, when we should have been wasting away for lack of something fresh, Papa, like a garden elf, cut calcium-rich kale from the glass cold frames and dug parsnips and carrots buried and insulated by snow in the garden. Then, passing through the low door to the greenhouse on the front of the house, he added salad greens to the basket, ever amazed that the hardy greens and root vegetables germinated before daylight savings in October could survive the cold with such simple protection. He brought his offerings inside to Mama and laid them in her capable hands.
“This meal is fit for royalty,” Papa said enthusiastically to Mama and me over the dinner of baked sweet parsnips and onions with steamed kale, brown rice, and a fresh salad. His eyes sparkled in the lamplight. “Who knew we could eat from the garden like this in December in Maine?”
I see now that what also made the meal so delicious was that, despite the appearance of bounty, we were always on the edge of not having enough. And if our food supplies fell short, our “health insurance policy” was at risk. If either Mama or Papa were to become ill, there would be expensive doctor bills to pay, and the vital work to produce more food would fall behind.
That my parents had chosen