Conversations with Micah: On Food

"Hello squishy belly."  Micah wraps his arms around my hips, buries his face in my tummy.  "I love you, squishy belly."

"What if I started running all the time and got really skinny Micah?   What would you think about that?"

He looks up at me, very serious.  His cheek is still resting on my belly as he ponders this.

Then, with all the passion of Micah:  "Eat! Eat! Eat!"

* * *

It's Ash Wednesday, and we've just returned home from services.  The quiche and the bread were not done in time -- everything always takes longer than it should -- so we had a snack and the kids are eating their meal now, late.  Julia Child's quiche, so much better than Molly Katzen's.  Heavy cream and butter are quickly climbing to the top of my list of life's greatest pleasures.  Also, white flour.  I've made a loaf and two baguettes, all white flour.  All of this, I know, goes against every bit of sound nutritional wisdom, but oh my.... I just can't stop.  I'm thinking of giving up risk-aversion for Lent.

I'm tidying the kitchen, wiping counters, loading the dish washer.  The kids are at the table in the dining room.

"Trixie?" says Micah.  "What's your favorite thing about this family?"

She has a fork-full of of cheddar-sausage quiche in one hand, a hunk of baguette in the other.  "The food," she says, between bites.

"Yeah, me too."

* * *

Dinner the next night.  Gratin with potatoes, cheese and pork sausage.  For some reason we have two dozen eggs in the fridge, and Julie is coming home with at least another dozen in the winter farm share tonight.  So I'm using up eggs like crazy.

Micah doesn't like the gratin, because he doesn't like potatoes, so he's eating another piece of quiche.

"Nial and Zach and I are the only ones in my class who eat healthy food," he says.

"Is that so?"  This is an interesting development.  Until very recently, he's been mostly horrified by his homemade lunches.  "The kids will laugh at me," he would moan, "if I bring that to school."  But when I relent, and buy him some awful yogurt in a squeeze tube or something, he doesn't actually eat it.  It's just about street cred.

When Trixie was Micah's age, she began a boycott of MacDonalds after I told her about industrial beef production.  It was an ethical boycott, though she didn't really like the food much either.  A couple of times on our road trip last summer we stopped at MacDonalds in desperation, and because Micah begged, but eventually even Micah declared he wouldn't eat there anymore.  "I just like the toys in the Happy Meals.  But that's not real food."

Apparently he has embraced being the kid with the healthy lunch.  "I'm teaching my friend Nassir to eat more healthy though."

"That's great Micah.  Has your teacher been talking to your class about eating healthy?"

"No, I just decided to teach Nassir."

"What did you tell him about eating healthy?"

"Like, he should eat his sandwich before his chips and snacks.  And his fruit, he should eat fruit.  Like that."

"That's great advice, Micah," I say.  "Maybe you should take your own advice, though."

He looks at me.

"You didn't eat your sandwich today.  And only part of your fruit."

He looks away, shrugs, the sly smile.  He is his own boy.  He will be a good man.

The Welfare of the City: Scenes from a Neighorhood

The second in an occasional series; the first:  Sister Margaret (or: the first time I walked away from poverty)

***

The snow has been relentless.  I missed the first wave, having been forced – entirely against my will, I’ll have you know -- to stay another day on my writing retreat in Manhattan because there were no trains home.  The kids and Julie had off Monday, which was a gift, and they went to school Tuesday, which was also a gift.  But they are off the rest of the week, which is, well, a mixed blessing.  If I could have one more day to get on top of the mess in the house, to get my head back in the game, that would be a good thing.  Instead I’m trying to catch some quiet moments alone where I can.  Which is why I’m going to be late to the neighborhood snow day potluck at Kate and Pete’s house.  The Brussels sprouts are my excuse – my, but they take a long time to roast, with just some olive oil and kosher salt.

When I arrive, the house is teeming.  I’m laden with the Brussels sprouts (roasted to perfection, if I do say so myself) and half the sticky buns I baked this morning with Micah and his pals Ada, age five, and Zady, age four.  Micah likes to measure and mix and roll things, but hates sticky fingers.  Ada and Zady, on the other hand, are girls after my own heart.  When it came to smearing soft butter on the rolled-out dough with their bare hands, they couldn’t get enough of it. 

“Ooohhh! It feels so good!” They giggled, pinching off more butter and finger-painting it on the rectangle of soft, sweet dough.  Micah sprinkled the cinnamon, I rolled it up, and everyone helped pinch the seam.  I cut thick slabs and arranged the pin-wheels in the slurry of sugar and butter the kids had just spread with a spatula all over the bottom of the baking pans.  The warm, sticky cinnamon swirl buns are… well, words fail.  Possibly too much.  I’m taking half of them to the potluck.

I take my food to Kate and Pete’s kitchen and put it on the counter.  My Ada Ruby, their oldest, greets me with a hug.  Jen and Tim arrive with a bottle of wine.  Julie has put good beer in the fridge, Long Trail I think.  Folks keep arriving, with salads, corn bread, chocolate cake.  There are brownies in the oven, and the whole house smells sweet and chocolaty.  The main course is sheer perfection:  tortilla soup with lime and cilantro, avocado and red onions to sprinkle on top.  There’s also black bean soup, but I can’t eat any, I’m already so full.  I can’t find a plate to put Brussels sprouts on, so I just pinch a few with my fingers, then lick the salt off.  Zady’s dad Zach sees me and smiles.  He leans in and whispers, “I did the same thing.”

“Marta, those are so good,” says Pete as I squeeze out of the kitchen.  “Brussel sprouts are much maligned and I just don’t understand why.  I love them.”

“Me too!”  There’s not much food I don’t love though.  Licorice is the only flavor I really can’t abide.  Everything else is about texture: oatmeal, tapioca, rice pudding – I can’t do it.  It’s a shame too, because I love the idea of all those foods.  I mean really, is there anything more cozy and comforting than a bowl of oatmeal with cream and brown sugar and raisins?  Too bad it makes me gag.

“Hey Aaliyah, can I have that baby?” Aaliyah is one of Trixie’s best friends and our next-door neighbor.  Trixie has known Aaliyah and her sister Qudsiyyah since they were all two and three year olds.  For several years I took care of them before and after school, and had baby Ada during the day.  “Marta’s daycare and taxi service,” the kids used to call it. 

Aaliyah smiles and hands me baby Levi, Kate and Pete’s third child.  Josiah, their two-year old middle son is showing us a few dance moves, much to everyone’s delight.

I settle on the couch and bounce the baby on my knee.  Jen is beside me, hugely pregnant and looking uncomfortable.  “How you doin’ babe?” I ask, and lay my hand on her belly.  Jen is not only one of my dearest friends, but also my yoga and pilates instructor, with a studio in her home that is directly across the street from us.  I take private sessions with her, and we’re bartering for childcare.  It’s only recently starting to feel real that this isn’t just a plan, but a relationship.  A new baby in my life!  Suddenly I am so eager to have this baby on the outside.  Not as eager as Jen is, though.

“I’m okay.  I’m kind of sad, actually, but it feels pretty hormonal, not existential, you know?”  I stroke her knee absently, assure her I do indeed know exactly what she means. 

“I don’t think I’m going to stay for the movie,” she says. 

I shake my head and whisper, “Me either.”  I look round at this house full of people I love, every one of them a neighbor on my little block of rowhouses, most of whom I’ve known for years and years.  Jen (the other Jen, Zady’s mom) and Q & A’s mom Kelley are hanging a sheet on the wall; Emilia has just arrived with an LCD projector.  Movie night on the Terrace.  This is a good life.  My gratitude is deep.  Still, I know my limits.  “I’m going to leave when the movie starts, enjoy a little solitude before I put the kids to bed.”

I turn to listen to Michelle, on the other side of me on the couch.  She’s talking about food.  “We had a lunch meeting at work, and I’ve been trying to recreate this green been dish ever since.  With cranberries and pearl onions.  Oh my, it was so good.  I can’t quite get it right though – I think I’m putting in too much olive oil.”

“Shelley, how many years have I known you? Seventeen? And I didn’t know you like to cook.”

“Has it been that long? Really?  You know, you mentioned recently about knowing my father, and I didn’t realize you’d been on the block that long until you said that.”

“Oh, yeah, I remember your father.  We moved here in 1992.  I was just trying to remember how old your Erich was then?  Maybe eight or nine?”

“Yeah, that’s about right.  He’s grown now.”  She sighs.  “But food, yeah, I love food.  I love everything about food.  You know, some people say they like to eat, but don’t really like all the preparation – all that chopping and cooking, you know?  But I just love it all.”

I smile, nodding.  I remember last summer, when there was a huge block party to celebrate because Shelley had completed her degree.  I do remember now eating some amazing barbeque pork on her stoop that day.  That was when we talked about her father.  How he went to Tuskegee.  How proud he was – never bought anything on credit.  Walked to the car dealership on the Avenue, paid cash, drove home with a new car, no note.  Her parents were good people.  Shelley is too.  And I don’t doubt she can cook, because that barbeque was amazing.  It’s all coming back to me.

“I was talking about this once with a girlfriend at work,” says Shelley, nodding her head in a sort of circular motion. “I said, ‘I love everything about food.  I love the way it looks, I love the way it tastes, I love the way it feels and smells….’  And my girlfriend, she looked at me and she said, ‘Shelley? Are you talkin about food or are you talkin about sex?!’”

I touch her arm, laughing.  “Shelley, good food and good sex?  Just two sides of the same coin, if you ask me.”

“You got that right!” She’s still chuckling and nodding her head.  “You sure do got that right.”

What's for Dinner? Curried Apple-Butternut Squash Soup and Cabbage-Carrot-Beet Salad

Folks ask me for recipes a lot, so I'm going to start posting some of them. If you don't love food .... well, poor you. Because good food? Good food is on a short short list of life's greatest pleasures (and I'll send a yummy care package to anyone who can guess the other six. The Seven Greatest Pleasures in Life According to Marta. Sorta like the Seven Deadly Sins.... hmmm. Aren't there also Seven Virtues? Hmmmmm.)

Where was I? Oh yeah, food. I just read Michael Pollen's Food Rules: An Eater's Manual, and I can't recommend it highly enough. If you've been meaning to read Michael Pollen ... well, you really should read Omnivore's Dilemma, because it's awfully good. But if you're not going to (though you should, really you should), read Food Rules instead. It will take you half an hour. Forty-five minutes if you're a really slow reader. Food Rules is Pollan's explication of his own seven-word (seven again!) answer to the question "What should we eat?" Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants.

Here are some of Pollan's 63 Rules that I particularly like:

#3: Avoid food products containing ingredients that no ordinary human would keep in the pantry.

#7: Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce.

#13: Eat only foods that will eventually rot.

#20: It's not food if it arrived through the window of your car.

#27: Eat animals that have themselves eaten well.

#39: Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.

#43: Have a glass of wine with dinner.

#51: Spend as much time enjoying the meal as it took to prepare it.

#53: Serve a proper portion and don't go back for seconds.

#55: Eat meals.

#63: Cook. (That's my favorite, I think.)

Speaking of cooking, here's what we had for dinner:

Curried Apple Butternut Squash Soup

(this is from my brother and sister-in-law; we had this for Thanksgiving, minus the butter)

Cut two butternut squashes length-wise and put then cut-side down on a cookie sheet with a little water. Bake in a 350 degree oven until soft.

Saute two small or one large finely chopped yellow onions in 4 tablespoons of butter (yes, butter!), along with 4 or 5 (or 6) teaspoons of curry powder or paste and two or three cored, peeled, chopped apples until soft, about 25 minutes.

Add three or four cups of vegetable stock (I made my own today, with roughly chopped parsnips, onions, carrots, cabbage, a bunch of old parsley, some bay leaves, and a tea ball full of thyme, rosemary and peppercorns) and a cup or two of apple cider.

Scoop out the squash and add to the pot. Salt and pepper to taste.

Bring the whole thing to a boil and let it simmer for a little bit.

Blend it all up with your immersion blender (and if you don't have an immersion blender? Get one! Everything is better with an immersion blender).

Serve with grated apples and/or a dollop of sour cream or just a scoop of soft butter if that's all you have.

Cabbage-Carrot-Beet Salad with Caraway and Cider Vinegar

(I made this up)

Boil two large or three or four small beets until soft, and then peel and cut into cubes or sticks.

Slice up a quarter-or-so wedge of green cabbage and saute in a couple tablespoons of butter, along with some kosher salt and a few grinds of pepper. Grate a carrot or two into the cabbage as it cooks. Grind up some caraway seeds (maybe a tablespoon or so) with a mortar and pestle and add to the cabbage. When the cabbage is a little soft but not totally wilted, add the beets, a little more whole caraway, and a couple of tablespoons of cider vinegar. Toss and cook for a few minutes until everything is warm and pink. Serve warm or room temperature.

Confessions of a Hopeless Geek

This morning my mother-in-law expressed concern that I would go hungry if I did not accompany the family to the Amish restaurant for lunch, but I assured her I would find food if I grew faint while spending the day writing in the Wooster Public Library. My mother-in-law gets anxious if she thinks someone isn’t being well-fed, and we are all the happier (if a bit plumper) for her exquisitely successful means of coping with her anxiety. Today she put her anxiety to rest by directing me to an American-style diner and a Greek pizza place, both directly across the street from the library.

I have just returned from the American-style diner, where I had two eggs over easy, hash browns, bacon, wheat toast and coffee at two o’clock in the afternoon, for five dollars ($7.50, including the fifty percent tip I left for the very lovely waitress who brought my food before I’d even stirred the cream and sugar into my coffee). While I ate, I read Julie and Julia, which I can’t decide if I like, but I most definitely love in that I’m-on-vacation-and-I-just-dripped-egg-yolks-on-my-book-because-I-don’t-want-to-put-it-down-even-for-food sort of way. (Book review to follow shortly, in which I promise to offer a more nuanced opinion.)

And now I’m back at my spot by the sky-filled cathedral windows in the library. In addition to lunch, I have taken a few breaks from writing the latest installment in my Welfare of the City series, in order to flirt on-line with a couple of men I’m particularly fond of (both pastors no less! One gay, one happily married – “non starters” as Julie likes to say about the hopeless innocence of my flirting). And here is my geeky confession: Is it possible that a day could be any better than this? With only the very fewest of exceptions, I’m pretty sure the answer is “No.” Shameless geek, that’s me.

But I do want to leave you with a passage from Julie and Julia just to spice things up a little. If you are a regular reader of mine, you may recall that to my mind, food and sex are really just two sides of the same coin. If you are a regular reader of mine, you may also recall that I love to write about sex, but in the interests of my very private wife, not to mention her father-who-reads-my-blog, I will only ever write about sex in mostly abstract ways which offer very, very little in the way of detail about my own actual sex life. Here I offer just the tiniest deviation from that rule, in an effort to allay any concerns the following excerpt might create; that deviation being an assurance that I am not, in fact, a practitioner of polyamory (not that there’s anything wrong with that!), but, in point of fact, I am quite the boring, geeky, middle-aged, blissfully married lady. Such assurances, however, are prelude to a further confession, which is that blissful monogamy notwithstanding, I find erotic energy in all sorts of experiences and relationships. My friend Gordon, founder of my book review group, recently reviewed a book by George Steiner called The Lessons of the Masters. In his review Gordon wrote, “The essence of the master-disciple relationship, according to GS, is loving trust, in which the entire soul of the student is opened to new knowledge. The mode of exchange is always speech (never writing), and it is somewhat erotic, though usually not actively so.” I replied to Gordon’s review with such enthusiastic virtual head-nodding that it occurred to me after impulsively hitting “send” that perhaps I had not been entirely demure and lady-like, as befits a middle-aged married lady such as myself. So be it. This middle-aged married lady loves her teachers, and totally gets what George Steiner was talking about. This middle-aged married lady also loves to feed people, and totally gets what Julie Powell is talking about in this passage from Julie and Julia (pp. 216-17 in the hardcover edition):

"Somewhere along the way, I discovered that in the physical act of cooking, especially something complex or plain old hard to handle, dwelled unsuspected reservoirs of arousal both gastronomic and sexual. If you are not one of us, the culinarily depraved, there is no way to explain what’s so darkly enticing about eviscerating beef marrowbones, chopping up lobster, baking a three-layer pecan cake, and doing it for someone else, offering someone hard-won gustatory delights in order to win pleasures of anther sort. Everyone knows there are foods that are sexy to eat. What they don’t talk about so much is foods that are sexy to make. But I’ll take a wrestling bout with recalcitrant brioche dough over being fed a perfect strawberry any day, foreplay-wise."

Indeed.

Christmas Menu: A Sonnet

Of brie and gouda, comte, let us sing!

Of marinated mozzarella balls!

Oh kalamata! Ascolano calls!

For French baguette our peals of joy shall ring!

Oh turkey stuffed with Cajun pepper bread!

Bring potch* and corn and roasted Brussel sprouts!

Pour wine and cider, winter ales and stouts!

Come one, come all, that none shall go unfed!

Rejoice! Key lime -- oh cranberry delight!

Corn muffins, macaroni and (good) cheese!

This tart with pear and frangipane will please!

Let cream puffs, coffee, tea round out the night!

Oh glorious day! Oh silent night of joys!

Upon the island of the misfit toys!

edited to add: *potch (not sure if this is how it's spelled) is mashed potatoes and rutabaga, which Aunt Beth brings every year

"If you're afraid of butter, use cream." ~Julia Child

Last summer we made our second -- and hopefully annual -- trip to New Hampshire to visit Suzanne and her family at their vacation home where they spend the summer. We swam across beautiful clear lakes, we kayaked, we hiked, and of course we ate lots of really good food. We also went to see Julie and Julia, which Suzanne and I just loved. We loved it so much, in fact, that we made a date to cook Boeuf Bourguignon a la Julia Child on my birthday in September.

It was perhaps the best birthday ever. We watched an old episode of Julia Child cooking Boeuf Bourguignon, and then started cooking. While the stew simmered in the oven, we watched Sense and Sensibility, because another of our projects together is to work our way through all the Jane Austen movies (I know, it's a hard life, but someone's got to life it! As Suzanne noted when she posted these photos on Facebook, it's a shame you can't upload the aroma! You'll just have to take my word for it -- this was one divine meal.

We promptly decided we needed to cook together regularly, and chose Italian for our next adventure: pan-fried thin beef steaks cacciatora style with zucchini risotto (also divine, if I do say so myself):

This meal was a little more labor intensive than the beef stew was, so we didn't have time to watch a whole Jane Austen movie. Instead we watched several episodes of Jacque and Julia, including an episode on desserts that featured ice cream filled profiteroles. Our next meal was conceived: a simple tomato soup that would leave plenty of room for the main course:

cream puffs and ice cream filled profiteroles

cream puffs served on a bed of creme anglaise and raspberry jam (below)

fried apple pies

and raspberry souffle.

YUM.

edited multiple times to deal with stupid formatting issues (sorry!)

notes: on bodies

I have an essay about bodies and incarnational faith in my head that has been percolating for months now, but it’s just going nowhere. I think this needs to be a conversation first before it can be an essay. So I’m going to throw out a list of things I’m thinking about, and if any of them resonates for you, leave me a comment won’t you? (I can’t tell you how much it makes my day when you all leave me comments!) Consider this a bunch of jumbled thoughts in search of a thesis and some organizing principle.

I.

I have exactly no background in theology or philosophy, so I can’t and won’t try to talk with any authority about the so-called “mind-body dichotomy,” except to say that it seems to me to be alive and well, and I think that’s sort of a shame. Again, I have no idea what others have meant by “mind-body dichotomy,” but what I mean by it is this distinction we all seem to have between our “Selves” and our “bodies.” And how I hear this distinction play itself out in real life is that almost everyone is pretty critical of their bodies – no matter what kind of bodies they have (and see, there’s the distinction right there in the very language we use, this notion that we “have” a body, sort of like we “have” a light blue mini-van, or ratty brown dansko clogs, or a red clock in our kitchen; not that we “are” our bodies, but WE “have” them). Most of us think we’re a little too fat, or a lot too fat, or a little too skinny, or a lot too skinny; we don’t like the wrinkles here or the sags there, and our thighs are too lumpy or our hair is too frizzy or our boobs are too little or our butt is too big or or or … it’s pretty endless, isn’t it, the stream of judgment our Selves dish out to our bodies? And our bodies are just mute, everyone’s favorite whipping boy, the repository of so much shame and disappointment and judgment.

So sometimes I wonder what it would be like if the tables were turned, if the Selves just shut up for a minute, and let the bodies have a turn. I bet the bodies would have a thing or two to say to their Selves, don’t you think? I think most of the bodies that their Selves love to hate would be pretty damn pissed off at how ungrateful their Selves are. If you think about it, our bodies do a LOT of nice things for us … I just imagine them saying, “And all you can think about is how big your butt is? Really?” It just seems kind of petty, doesn’t it, in the face of everything else your body does for you?

II.

Let’s make a list, shall we, of all the nice things our bodies do for our Selves. Be as specific as you can. I’ll start with a few thoughts. My body allows my Self to …

…hear Julie’s gorgeous descant floating above the congregation on Sunday mornings

…taste salt and vinegar potato chips and Three Philosophers beer

…walk on the beach, the waves roaring in my ears, the sun shining on the surf

…nurse a child, one I didn’t even give birth to

…run, sending endorphins to my brain and keeping my moody Self relatively happy

…lay hands on a dear friend and pray for healing in her life

How ‘bout you?

III.

And, it turns out, even folks who have, by any objective standard, bodies that are simply exquisite, even they can’t get over themselves and just be grateful. I know this because my friend Jen, who is a dancer and a yogini and a Pilates instructor, tells me that her dance students and colleagues are often the most harsh critics she knows of their own bodies.

Jen and I do yoga together once a week in her beautiful apple green home studio, and I’ve never experienced yoga like I do with her. She approaches my body in yoga like an artist approaches a canvas – a serious artist, one who intends to create nothing short of a masterpiece; an artist who approaches her craft with both loving passion and exquisite technique, and so is both gentle and demanding, holistic and technical. That my body gets to be the medium of her art once a week feels like nothing short of a divine gift, and sometimes when I catch a glimpse of us in the mirror I gasp and say, “Oh my god, look at us! We’re so beautiful!” And Jen laughs in delight and tells me she’s going to take me to all her dance classes to give her dancers a pep talk, because they don’t so much see it.

And I have to just wonder, what’s up with that? I mean really. A couple of weeks ago, Trixie and I went to see Jen perform in the Fringe Festival, and I loved watching all the dancers, more than I ever have before, I think because I just forgot about wondering what it all “means” (which makes me feel stupid) and I just reveled in their bodies, which were so awesome, and moved in such gorgeous ways. There was one man in particular, whose body was different from many male dancers I’ve watched – he wasn’t built, his muscles weren’t round and pumped, in clothing you might even think he was just skinny, and not so strong. But when he danced, all his muscles showed themselves, long, strong lines stretching from joint to joint and moving him in the most beautiful lines imaginable. I was enthralled.

After the performance, Jen met me and Trixie for a cheese steak at Pat’s, which happened to be just a half a block away from the dance studio, and I grilled her: “Are you serious? Those dancers don’t understand that their bodies are near-perfect gifts? They don’t just walk through the world reveling all the time in how beautiful they are and in what their bodies can do? Really? I just don’t get it.”

IV.

I don’t know how I got so lucky (I like to give all the credit to my parents, who were pretty wonderful, but it may just be the way I’m wired), but I really love my body. And if you don’t know me in person, you should know that my body is pretty much just fine as a whole, and it has a few quite nice features, but it also has more than enough features that fall far short of any objective standard of “beautiful,” so if I wanted, I could be quite harshly critical. But for some reason, I’m just not. In fact, I seem to have the reverse of the body-image issues that plague so many folks who see their bodies as much less attractive than they really are. I generally feel much fitter and prettier than I probably am, in fact. Sometimes when I’m trying on clothes in the harsh light of a dressing room, I am startled and wonder, “Oh! Is that how I look to other folks? ‘Cause that’s sure not how I feel!” But then I just shrug and think, “Oh well, too bad for them if it is!”

I do try to take good care of my body, and I love it even more when it is strong and fit. But when I am doing things to make it so, like running or yoga, it’s not because I hate my body and want it to be different, but because I love my body and want to enjoy it even more. Even when my body has not been working so well – like when I struggled with infertility, and gained a lot of weight – even then, I’m pretty sure I didn’t hate my body so much as feel really alienated from it. The split felt pretty extreme. I felt much of the time like pure intellect and raw emotion, but pretty disembodied, and it took running a marathon and nursing Micah to connect everything back up. But even then, in my worst moments, I think my body’s self-image (and that’s interesting language, isn’t it?) was unrealistically positive, relatively speaking.

I count that as a blessing, by the way.

V.

Now I know that there are many folks who have bodies that make life hard for them in very real ways. Their bodies keep them in chronic pain, or they don’t allow them the range of experiences they would like, or they are simply failing way too soon, or they are fundamentally wrong in some way, like they don’t match up with their Selves’ gender. I am trying to figure out how to be careful, and where folks like this fit into what I’m thinking. But it also seems to me, somewhat ironically, that those Selves who have the most legitimate complaints about their bodies are often the most loving and forgiving of their bodies, and the most grateful to them. That seems like something interesting to explore.

V.

I have a vague notion that some of the blame for this mind-body dichotomy lies with our friend Paul (and/or sketchy interpretations of Paul), right? Except it’s possible that I’m just in over my head here. My friend Pierce, who was a Pauline scholar as an undergraduate, and with whom I went to law school, tried to give me a lesson on corporality in 1 and 2 Corinthians on Facebook, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to take a whole evening, face-to-face (i.e. our bodies actually in the same room), probably with beer … and good food … and of course a Bible. And even then I’m not so sure I’m gonna get it (and let’s face it, Pierce is way smarter than I am, and the only reason I did better in law school than he did is because I, being the total nerd that I am, never missed a class and briefed all my cases, whereas Pierce, being totally NOT a nerd, did not; and in the end it turns out maybe he was right because look who’s earning a living practicing law, and look who is doing neither!). But if any of you theologians want to take a stab at explaining what Paul had to say about bodies in the comments, I would be ever-so-grateful (or if you just want to make a date with me and Pierce for an evening discussion over beer and good food, leave your availability! I mean, how fun would that be?)

VI.

Okay, and since we’re talking about theology (where, I reiterate, I am in way over my head) … aren’t bodies sort of at the heart of being Christian? Isn’t incarnation and resurrection pretty central to our faith, for those of us who are Christians? Isn’t it the central scandal of Christianity, as Kathleen Norris says, that God “came to us and share our common lot” (in the words of the UCC statement of faith) … in the form of a fully human body we know as Jesus? So what’s up with Christians hating their bodies?

I’m not so good at praying, but the closest I sometimes feel I get is when I close my eyes and try to imagine Jesus as a real live person. I always imagine he is long and thin like that dancer I saw recently, the one whose muscles didn’t bulge but instead stretched in lines across his body that were as perfect as the lines his body in turn made in space as he danced. I imagine that Jesus had unruly hair, maybe even dreads, because who has time to groom on the road, right? And that his skin wasn’t as dark as Micah’s, but certainly darker than mine. And I wonder what he smelled like, because I’m sure it wasn’t deodorant or after-shave, and I wonder what it would feel like to hold his hands, and whether he snorted when he laughed. I would love to fix him a meal and watch him eat, because I bet he loved to eat, and I love to watch people who love to eat. And I wonder if his face got soft when he was listening to someone he loved, and I think he must have liked to touch people, and kiss them, and walk arm-in-arm.

I love communion, maybe because it’s as close as I feel like I get to the incarnate body of Christ as he lived in it; and I love all the messy, complicated relationships that make up church (and I like them in person better than email!), and I love worshipping and praying and working side-by-side, literally bodies touching, eating, singing, crying, laughing, sharing our stories, because that’s what makes me feel like part of the body of Christ, which is when resurrection feels most real to me.

VII.

See, I have no idea where this is going. So holla back!

The Omnivor's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Michael Pollan (2006)[*****]. I've read a number of books about food and agriculture, and have reviewed a few of them here (Gene Logsdon's essays, Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle), but this is the best in the genre that I've read by far. Pollan combines a ton of compelling information (some of it worthy of a Stephen King horror story) with really nice personal narrative and interesting, well-drawn characters. Four meals give the book its structure. The first, in the section entitled "Industrial: Corn," is a fast food meal from McDonalds, eaten in the car at 60 miles per hour. In this section, Pollan looks at the way that corn has quite literally taken over our food chain and our bodies. Because of the way that corn photosynthesizes carbon in the atmosphere differently than most other plants, it is possible to trace the carbon in our bodies back to corn, no matter how its been processed in between (through a cow, for example, or as xanthan gum, and most of the rest of the items in the second half of the list of ingredients in processed food). The average North American is now apparently one quarter corn -- more than people, such as Mexicans, who have a traditional corn-based diet. The ubiquity of corn is the direct result of two connected forces: first, the Nixon administration's desire to keep both farmers and housewives happy, and the desire of industrial capitalism for ever-expanding food markets, despite the fact that we can only consume so many calories each day. Earl Butz, Nixon's agriculture secretary, launched a cheap-food policy by pushing farmers into producing rivers of corn, so much corn that the bottom fell out of the market (corn fetches less at market than it costs to produce). That problem was solved with subsidies to farmers, and the rest of us are kept happy with cheap food, a good deal of which starts as corn. The problems with the subsequent industrialization of agriculture and food are legion: monoculture is ecologically devastating; much of the resulting industrial food-like substances -- convenience food! super sized food! lunchables and uncrustables and big gulps! -- lack nutritional value, are making us fat, and can barely be called food at all; animals become viewed merely as protein production units, and thus lead short, miserably tortured lives so that we can have bland, cheap, and morally indefensible meat, eggs and dairy; and the whole catastrophe is premised on cheap, plentiful, toxic petroleum -- to put some semblance of fertility back in the soil, to kill the pests and weeds, to move the industrial food around. Pretty grim stuff. The second two meals, set in the middle section entitled "Pastoral: Grass," are "organic," but that's about all they have in common. The first, purchased at Whole Foods, is mostly "industrial organic," a movement whose ecological and nutritional benefits Pollan weighs and finds at best a marginal improvement over conventional industrial food. The second is a meal produced almost entirely at Polyface Farm, an ingenious 550 acre farm -- 100 acres of grass, 450 of forest -- where the cantankerous, Christian libertarian farmer produces an unbelievable amount of "happy meat" with almost no inputs (fertilizer, pesticides, feed, etc) and absolutely no waste. (My dad is the socialist atheist version of this farmer, so I sort of feel like I know him. He reminds me also of the contrary, cranky Gene Logsdon.) The final meal, in the section entitled "Personal: The Forrest" features wild boar hunted by Pollan himself, foraged wild mushrooms, and even bread risen with wild yeast. When I first started reading this section I thought it was overkill (pun not originally intended, but there it is!), and wondered if the book wouldn't be better and tighter without another 100 pages. As it turns out, this was perhaps the most fascinating section of the book, with a masterful argument against the animal liberation movement and in favor of eating meat; as well as thoughtful, funny, and compelling reflections on ourselves as predators that called to mind how much I loved Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer and made me understand the appeal of hunting as sport for the first time. All in all, this is a compelling and entertaining read, and if nothing else, will make you think hard about the food you eat. I highly recommend it.