cucumber season
weekly lingo "on", adj. when a planting is ready to start harvesting, we say that it's "on." the opposite of "on" is not "off," it's simply, "not on" (if before) or "past" (if after).
I’m sitting on top of a sandy, grassy hill at the farm that looks out over the river. The water is flowing with the slowness of late summer: the rush of spring melt is over, the optimal window for taking a float has passed, and what’s left is languid. The moment can feel lush if you let it. Blackberries, fattened by the sun, are popping out all over. They’re invasive, but we still make them into pies, stain our lips and hands and faces with them in excess.
Excess: the subject of this week's newsletter.
Each plant on the farm has a cycle. There’s a moment when you can pick it, and where a handful of starts from the same generation will be ready, or almost ready. Then there’s a moment when it’s passed, and everything’s gone soft (or hard) and slimy (or crispy, or wilted) and bitter, or any number of infinite other textures and flavors that are mere echoes of what it once was.
In between, there is a moment when it peaks: It’s had a chance to become exactly its best self.
That’s when it most makes sense to pick and eat or process. When enough of the plants are "headed up," "sized up," "on," or any one of the other words we use to describe a plant that's ready for picking, it's important to move them forward.
While some plants only get picked once, others, if you continue to tend to them, will give and give and give.
I'm talking about cucurbits: the family of flowering, vining plants that encompasses cucumbers, zucchini, melons, winter squash, even pumpkins, that will continue to offer their massive berries for weeks if the conditions are right.
Take zucchini. Once they're on, the beds are a jungle of wide leaves and stems that prick the skin and leave little sores. To harvest, we wear gloves and bring our knives, culling through the thick bushes to find fruits that are full-figured and full-colored. If you don’t pick them in time, they’ll grow thick-skinned on the outside, watery and flavorless on the inside. Some of them will grow as big as Louisville Sluggers.
Cucumbers are similar, if slightly less hazardous – their flowers remain small and delicate, and you can wipe the tiny spikes from their skin with a bare hand. It's unpleasant, but not a lasting pain.
If you let them go too long without picking, the mature fruits will burden the plant and make it harder for new ones to grow.
But if you stay on top of the harvest – staying in active appreciation for the gifts it offers – the plant will keep on producing.
It’s a commitment.
I have been thinking a lot about my own relationship to abundance and scarcity, especially when it comes to food.
I sometimes get overwhelmed by how much we have available at the farm, and yet, even when there is plenty, I feel anxious that it will get taken by others with none left for me. I still take home more than I need to, overcrowding my refrigerator with projects. I aspire to be more like the coworkers who wander into the fields after clocking out and fresh-harvest only what they need for dinner. Me and my food anxiety are a work in progress, and dwelling in the calm of abundance is slowly healing my spirit.
A lot of this fear is inherited.
My grandfather was hungry for the first 17 years of his life. The way he told his story, he was an unwanted child in the Depression era, raised by his eldest sister because his mom was too angry at his existence to take care. He ate the scraps from his siblings’ plates and foraged and was always skinny. He joined the Navy at 17 and ate well for the first time, his new brothers giving him their leftovers until he himself sized up. He was always obsessed with body weight – his and others' – prizing thinness. When he wrote down his life story on two pages, every paragraph began with his age and weight.
On my father's side of the family, we have a different kind of obsession with food and weight, one that prioritizes eating. Thanksgiving meals at our home were always stressful. You had a short amount of time to fill your plate and eat it before it all disappeared or some cousin put his fork in the sweet potatoes on your own plate, right in front of you. We ate quickly and then went back for seconds. It was a constant competition. I witnessed many relatives in a binge stupor not unlike a drug high: eating with intense focus on the experience of putting food in the body with little time to even taste it, followed by slouching on the furniture and taking long turns in the bathroom.
I did this, too, but because I was also fixated on controlling my weight, I integrated it into a form of bulimia that I struggled with for 17 years, from age 12 to age 29.
The thing about my bulimia is that it was a disorder of extremes. I would binge on foods that were easy to throw back up, lost in the process and the temporary, luxurious, trance-like feeling of being out of control. Then, when I was full, I would become intensely uncomfortable, both physically and mentally. I often binged more than I wanted to just to get to a point of no return.
Vomiting isn't pleasant, so I had to make sure I didn't give myself a choice. If I wavered, I'd stand in front of the mirror and tell myself that I had to puke or else no one would ever love me. I would bully myself into sticking my finger down my throat. On the other side, when my stomach was empty, I experienced a vacancy that felt even more satisfying than fullness. Often, I couldn't fall asleep unless my stomach was completely empty.
Abundance and waste.
Hunger and fullness.
Scarcity and greed.
I do not experience these things as opposites, but as two sides of the same plank.
A decade ago, while researching my family history, I came across one passage in my paternal grandmother’s diary where she admitted exasperation with her husband. My grandfather had bought apples at a steep discount — so many of them that she would be processing for days, sorting out the unusable ones, cutting healthy parts from the others to make applesauce and apple butter to keep their eight kids fed through the winter.
At the time, the passage made little sense to me. I didn’t understand yet the role that processing excess — salvaging from what has been discarded by the higher classes — has played in the survival of my own family, like so many others.
The desire to consume every last bit of every available useful thing is embedded in the memory of my body, and has been difficult to override, even when letting things go was the best use of my time and energy.
I think about a phrase that was passed to me in eating disorder recovery: “It’s already wasted.” Meaning, if you made or took more food than you could eat — bit off more than you could chew, you might say — there was no need to further burden your body by forcing it down. It is okay to take only what you need. If you've already had too much, it's also okay to sit with, and learn from, that discomfort instead of doing your body even more harm.
In fact, it's this process that teaches you what you need, and how much of it. It teaches me how to listen to my body, how to trust myself, how to plan for the future with wisdom.
The present moment contains all the seeds that the future will ever have. It is, it has always been, enough.
Cucumbers originated in India. The story goes that they were brought to Europe by Alexander the Great and to the “New World” via Haiti by a certain Portuguese human trafficker to whom history has already given too much credit.
Maybe that's true. I don't know enough to present that as expertise, nor do I ever believe such simple stories, written by white men and carried by their descendants across time like toxic little seeds. Other stories suggest that they made their way from India to Africa, and from Africa to South America, via birds. At any rate, it's not a linear story. That's not really how life spreads. It's possible that all of these things happened at once, the way nothing really arises in isolation.
The story I find most interesting is the one in which we know that cucumbers are from India because, as the title of a Bright Eyes album once put it, the story is in the soil.
When looking backwards through time without story, you can still find answers by looking for clues. Plant scientists look for what’s called the “center of origin," also known as the “center of diversity.”
You look for the place where that crop exists in the greatest number of varieties in the present day. Where it springs from the soil like a spring of water. Where not only one or two special types have survived, but there’s an endless regeneration, generation, genetic experimentation conducted by the plants themselves.
People say these centers of diversity are critical for survival. They provide resiliency for the species.
I don't know if I like looking at it that way. It feels a little colonial, perhaps. It looks at genetic diversity of plants solely through the lens of what it can offer us humans, how it can sustain the species we have already decided to prefer.
What if, instead, we look at is as a beautiful thing in its own right, the self-expression of the land itself, the creative work the ancestors of those lands do to feed the people. Pushing up daisies, and cucurbits.
There's something more here, about how colonialism always takes without giving back – extracting, appropriating, exploiting, only ever seeing the most superficial gifts and taking them for itself without nurturing the soil from which they came and the people who tended them over generations. About how important living diversity is – not only big seed banks and libraries, but the living, breathing plant life that is evolving along with the changing climate and appropriate for the times we're actually in. About how part of decolonization, in the individual minds of the descendants of colonizers such as myself, is learning how not to take something just because you can. But I will leave it there for now.
Farm worker update
Last week, I shared about the California farm workers who were marching from Delano to Sacramento in support of a union voting rights bill. As of today, they have made it to Sacramento.
Also today, the group Familias Unidas por la Justicia is marching in Olympia, Washington to put pressure on Governor/former U.S. Presidential candidate Jay Inslee to declare a climate emergency. They are demanding that workers have greater access to heat protections, PPE, and hazard pay for working in extreme weather conditions and wildfire smoke, and other work toward climate justice that both protects workers' lives in the present moment and helps us build a more sustainable future.
We each have a different set point for how free we can feel to consume, give away, let go to waste. It seems to me a very useful exercise indeed to play with this line, not to achieve one thing or the other — I reject the supremacy of minimalism and thinness and recognize the dangers of hoarding — but to find our own balance. To have confidence that you have anticipated well what is coming, to feel prepared as both an individual and a community, to have room to be generous, and also to be unburdened by the pressure to find a home for the things you’ve gathered — these are deep pleasures.
The happiest people I’ve ever known were not the wealthiest (who seem most encumbered by the future, perhaps sensing how their own greed is depleting it), but those most capable of being present in the moment without turning off their awareness of the greater context. The most creative people I’ve known can work with whatever they have, without justifying the systems that create such imbalances in the first place.
No matter how much or how little we have, we can keep investing in life. We can stay open and generous.
I think back to last week’s newsletter. In the Soviet Union, food shortages meant more people began to grow their own. Soon the Russians with their gardens full of tomatoes had more diversity than global markets could imagine.
From scarcity came an abundance of seed. From a difficult present, they grew a more vibrant future.
From salvage, we grow miracles.
On the farm, we grow more than we need, or can harvest. It doesn’t make financial sense for the farm to pay us to gather up more than has been ordered.
It is hard for me, sometimes, to kneel in a field of flowering plants for a final harvest and see how much fresh, beautiful produce grew and flourished and was devoured only by the bugs before going to seed, knowing their future is to be mowed and the soil beneath them tilled and replanted. The whole cycle over, just like a government fiscal year: scarce, then abundant, then spent in a way that forces us to begin again from scratch.
I remind myself: It's already wasted.
I remind myself: It already did what it needed to do. It fed the bees and the bugs. It filled itself up with water and reached toward the sun. It gave and received its pollen. It was beautiful while it lasted.
I remind myself: This is a world where some people have more than they can ever eat, and others go hungry, and here I am in the middle, where perhaps there is something I can do to bridge those worlds so there is greater abundance, and less waste, in both. Or perhaps, the best thing I can do is find this balance in myself. Writing this newsletter, knowing it could in theory be better but that this is the best I can do for now. Letting my stress about the future melt into a present embodiment through which I can make plans and take wise actions. Slowing it all down.
In the quiet of the dew-covered field, I hear another of my favorite songs looping through my mind. It's by the New Pornographers, and the chorus goes like this:
All of the things that go to make heaven and earth are here
All of the things that go to make heaven and this
Success was survival and kid, it still is
Success was survival and kid, it still is
The Best Thing I Ate This Week
I am learning to work with the abundance I have right now (fresh produce; farm store bucks; food that gets donated to the staff shelf in our cooler because it is already past) and stop worrying about what I don't (cash for other groceries; good kitchen appliances).
This week, I had:
some excess from the farm (zucchini, garlic, a hot pepper, cherry tomatoes, and parsley),
excess from our CSA boxes (a single new potato and an onion from another farm, and a handful of shishito peppers),
some corn tortillas sent back from the store past-date, as well as cheddar cheese and sour cream from the grocery, and
some chipotle/coffee salsa macha I bought at the farm store with the small allowance our bosses offer us workers there each month.
So I did these things in this order:
Made a simple fresh salsa by chopping the cherry tomatoes, mincing the jalapeño, and tossing them together. Then I realized I had forgotten to stir the liquids so I grabbed a jar and put in some vinegar, oil, and salt, shook it, and poured it over, at which point I realized I had forgotten sugar so I just stirred that in by hand and it was completely fine.
Chopped the garlic and onion (roughly), diced the potato into pieces so small they might as well be called minced, then diced the zucchini.
Blistered the shishitos in a pan with some cheap vegetable oil, then added some of my fanciest salt for serving.
In the now-subtly-shishito-infused oil, lighted fried the garlic and onion, then added the potatoes and covered the pan with a lid for quicker cooking-through, stirring occasionally. I added the zucchini last since I knew it would cook fast even in its larger size. Then I tossed in some spices: salt, pepper, cumin, cayenne.
Warmed the tortillas on one side, flipped them, added the cheddar to melt and put the lid on to trap the heat.
Removed the tortillas with the melted cheese and added my veggie mix, then topped it with sour cream, the fresh tomato salsa, parsley, and salsa macha.
I did not take photographs but you will have to trust me: this was one of the best meals I have had in a long time.
For dessert I had vanilla ice cream topped with walnuts and a strawberry basil compote made from fresh farm basil and some strawberries that had been sent back by the farm store because they were on the verge of going bad — perfect for processing and serving the same day, sharing with a beloved housemate while we sat outside and looked at the stars.
Out of abundant salvage, I made life for myself and others, and I savored every bite.
Thank you so much for reading this newsletter – however much or little was nourishing to you this week. I'm still getting my bearings and figuring out how I want to manage this each week and letting it develop. Your attention, feedback, and support at this early, somewhat fragile stage are so very, very welcome.