“The Vegetarian Myth”

“I want my life— my body—to be a place where the earth is cherished. And I want eating— the first nurturance— to be an act that sustains instead of kills… How many rivers were dammed and drained, how many prairies plowed and forests pulled down, how much topsoil turned to dust and blown into ghosts? I want to know about all the species— not just the individuals, but the entire species— the chinook, the bison, the grasshopper sparrow, the grey wolves. And I want more than just the number of dead and gone. I want them back. In his book, Long Life, Honey in the Heart, Martin Pretchel writes of the Mayan people and their concept of kas-limaal, which translates roughly as, ‘mutual indebtedness, mutual insparkedness… the knowledge that every animal, plant, person, wind and season is indebted to the fruit of everything else is an adult knowledge. To get out of debt means you don’t want to be part of life, and you don’t want to grow into an adult…' The lesson here is obvious, though it is profound enough to inspire a religion: we need to be eaten as much as we need to eat. The grazers need their daily cellulose, but the grass also needs the animals. It needs the manure, with its nitrogen, minerals, and bacteria; it needs the mechanical check of grazing activity; and it needs the resources stored in animal bodies and freed up by degraders when animals die. The grass and the grazers need each other as much as predation and prey. There are not one-way relationships, not arrangements of dominance and subordination. We aren’t exploiting each other by eating. We are only taking turns. The tree isn’t offering sweetness out of the goodness of its heart… it’s striking a bargain, and even though we’ve shaken hands and collected, we aren’t carrying through on our side of the deal. The point of the fruit is not humans. The point is the seeds.  The reason that the tree expends such tremendous resources accumulating fibers and sugars is to secure the best possible future for its offspring. And we take that offspring, in its swaddling of sweetness, and kill it.” — Lierre Keith, The Vegetarian Myth

I was born with a rumen, a digestive system solely effective in breaking down plants and absorbing solar energy and other beneficial minerals. I have lived by plants alone this far in my life. In the primary forest is a menagerie of animals — from those whose tails loop around high boughs to those with enormous ears and flat feet on fours that pound the earth hard so trees could someday see their offspring seeds come to life — and I am one of them.  My family is cute. We have cubby faces and bouncy paws, love leaves and berries, love hanging out together, but not moving a lot, just eating leaves and then sleep sitting. One day when I had grown up, I discovered writing. And I started observing the forest.

The biodiversity of life is fantastic! With every chance I get to explore is a peculiar discovery and I made notes on everything I could describe. And the more my mind learned so much and organizing them seemed important, I started analyzing my data, began drawing movement corridors and maps, and connecting the dots— knowing full well about the nutrient cycle from the ground up and affecting all. I was particularly amazed about the endless search for food across species, and one point of interest to me was size versus diet nutrition. The entry into my curiosity was this question: Why are some large animals, like the Elephants and Giraffes, to name a few of similar constitution/condition, eat only grass or shrubs or shoots, yet still attain power and heft unbelievable in growth? Answer: rumen. Ruminating animals are gentle animals and tender to their young and herd, loyal and dutiful until death. In fact I followed a poignant story of a calf and its mum for a while and wrote about it. The youngster wasn’t the healthiest yet he liked to play water hose at the communal pond with mum, and always she was careful, but together they were always joyful. But this happiness didn’t last long. The herd, led by the mum, buried the boy in the same river bed now dried over due to the hot season in full force, and in a circle surrounding the boy a succession of lamentable songs amplified through the entire forest. His mum's song, her cry, I knew her voice, made my head fall to tears. I wanted him back, so bad. If only I could.

They say, and this I mean what earth has taught me, earth as a biological phenomenon with an ecological imperative, is that I became a writer because writing’s origin comes from the meaning of rumination, which is to think deeply. The foliage I consume excessively, they say, impregnates my mind with the marvelousness of the “seed of life” itself, that from this single point could flourish into an emerging ornamental of thoughts, and then blossom big red and white heart flowers. I may not be overthinking this, but I sure believe that one of these seeds the mum elephant “planted” on her way to play once with her boy, dormant for years in the forest, came to full life again.


   

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“THE LITTLE ROAD TO SEMI-EVER AFTER”

Woke up this morning with all the intention of collecting the flowers blooming in so many pots on the porch and arranging a pretty vase with orange-head gentlelady nasturtiums, with suffuse bouquets of red geraniums, with purple boa heathers, with papery pink bougainvilleas, and with sweet yellow bells. The backyard farmer in the neighborhood had grapefruits on his honor-system fruit stand, the rinds are yellow-green. To juice them will be bitter but the better antioxidants and ascorbic vitamin c will it have, just dilute with water and a few droplets of maple syrup, it will be wellness. Now what to eat for lunch. A coworker proudly gave cherry tomatoes from her garden, that’s one thing in the fridge; and, yes, a-few-days old trimmed broccolinis as another. Tamari is a gluten-free soy sauce with enhanced flavor that tastes great. Abodo’s structural flavor is a salt-acid balance and slow braising the vegetables with the balsamic quality of the tamari will achieve just that. As simple as over rice will be a healthy treat once cooked, two rounds if you must. Will call the dish: Tomato Tamari Steamed Broccoli Adobo Bap (bap in Korean means rice)... There’s this very New York book about happiness that is not referentially ironic, it is a memoir after all about a writer falling in love with a shrink, and when the fine parks and  fine restaurants in the city have suffused its old-world quality in that moment, romance will blossom to joy, and the next day with your hangover, you are still beautiful in your sweats walking up Madison Ave from E. 23rd and 1st, headphones on, and just like the song mentioned in the book, you hear it vibe in your heart the beat of a Josh Ritter song, that you know this feeling before, but this time it's yours. There’s a snow globe memory of New York lodged in my head as I’m sailing a solo boat on blue Hawaii. The flowers I pick, the food I cook here, the people I connect with, inspire my lifestyle as urban as it can be, but with nature’s approval (to borrow a line from Patience Gray). I have a relationship with the valleys and waterfalls on this island. I bring home her stream to water my plants. My table has a vase of beautiful flowers. I eat well, it is traditional what I cook sometimes, like home when I was young. Dean Moriarty is my idol. He is a poetic species from the book On The Road. His life’s tough and painful, but his thoughts, wherever he might be, journey on odes to beauty.                    

“The health-giving virtues of a meal depend on the zest with which it has been imagined, cooked and eaten. It seemed to me appropriate to show something of the life that generates this indispensable element. Abstinence, enjoyment, celebration, all have nature’s approval; if you practice the first, you maintain what is priceless — enjoyment, and its crown, celebration. For so many years I have had the good fortune to experience the human-plant relation as a precious and everyday fact— quite apart from its relevance to the cooking pot. Herman De Vries, the Dutch artist, in his remarkable catalogue entitled Natural Relations I - Die Marokkanische Sammlung, 1984, dedicates this work ‘To the Memory of What is Forgotten.’ It is about the relation between people and plants. The sculptor refers to the introduction as a ‘cenotaph to lost knowledge.’”  — Patience Gray

“This world of mine, which neither a Cuvier nor a botanist can find, will be a Paradise which I shall have only sketched out. And from this sketch to the realization of the dream is very far. What matter? To envisage happiness, is that not a foretaste of Nirvana?” — Paul Gauguin 

“Everyone in the world should have the chance to fall in love in a New York City spring, at least once. Spring, in New York, is like a new epoch in history. The sludge recedes; the trees return as green civilizers of the streets. Your beloved finally takes off all those obfuscating layers, and you can see skin. The Josh Ritter song goes something like, This trip has been done a hundred times before, but this one is mine.” — Heather Harpham, Happiness (The Little Road to Semi-Ever After), A Memoir. Painting, by the author, ca 2017, NYC

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A MEMORIAL IN YDRA

The family taverna, reaching it by passing a narrow alley inside the market near the port, Irene (pronounced Ee-re-ne-ya, which I understand in Greek means peace), the owner sat me down at the table with hot water to start and announced the special for the day.  Ydra, Greece is surrounded by the Aegean Sea and its landscape is Mediterranean-dry up to the hills, but rocks and limestones interspersed there is a wild habitat for mountain sage, beautiful oregano and the piquant flowers of dill. It was fall of 2016. The fisherman's soup was a traditional that season, a recipe of pureed rice, lemon, potatoes and herbs, served with homemade loaf bread. I was early and the only one at that time when the restaurant opened (I came in after my hike to the orthodox blue-and-white monastery up the hill), and Irene joined me at my table. I learned that the soup was particular to the commemoration of a passing of a loved one, a yearly memorial, as all the relatives gather around at home to pray and remember, before eating and drinking to heart. I returned to the taverna a few more times during my stay in Ydra, and my last night there I brought Irene a little white lilies and herb leaves bouquet set in an earthenware bowl. She had been hospitably nice to me every time I was at the taverna and over wine and salad we would frankly converse politics and poetry and friends, touching upon those topics from a point of view as amusements in life, and how travel and food draw the world closer to us. Ydra is rustic and ancient; no cars are allowed on the island save mules, like the one approaching Irene's taverna, saddling yokes of local groceries delivered here and there (see picture inset). I was there for a special reason (a tradition I do, alone, around that time of the year, in November, for the past 20 years, and each year at a different "world" to travel through. Meeting Irene was like meeting my mother again. She didn't know that the first time I came to her taverna was my mother's death anniversary, and the soup on offer was nothing short of a perfect memorial for her. We became friends, Irene and I, and she had wished my return to Ydra someday again. She had treated me, with food and love, like nothing short of her son... Looking back, I could replicate the lemon rice soup in my kitchen anytime, but what I couldn't is the notion that nothing good could last forever, except maybe only in memory. So, so many years have gone by of her missing in my life, but so, so many years, at last, of good memories. In peace, this is for Irene. 

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Baked Garlic and Broiled Jalapeño Sauce

Sam Sifton wrote this wonderful sentence in his Sunday column on cooking: "I'm not a line cook nor a chef, just a loving provider, trying to make what's available into something delicious for my family's meal." In the column he had also explained the similarity between a line cook and a home cook in terms of purpose in the kitchen as a brigade de cuisine. Both will look at the pantry (or the fridge), and following their food instincts plan in their heads the foundations of deliciousness by prepping the ingredients and making the sauces for tonight. Tomatillos, check. Flat-leaf parsley, check. Canned organic garbanzos, check. The cook notices a large lime, cuts it in half and juices them, check. A technique is then employed through the seasoning: Let's bake a head of garlic steeped in olive oil butter, all the while broiling the tomatillos and seeded, salted jalapeños together until the green skins are charred and the combined acids from the vegetables are caramelized in their sweetness and heat. The pasta water is boiling, too, and in goes the stems of parsley for herb-flavor absorption. The fresh ravioli-edged fettuccini is quick to achieve al dente, and so at the peak temperature, throw in the chickpeas to halt the moisture and seal in the bite. Love is in every step of this process because you are following it to your  stomach (at a professional restaurant the line cook is in charge of family meals, off menu, and the cook more than often would make something traditional from home, as if a home cook, and that's when their minds, the line and the home cook's, would meet). To lusciously coat the pasta with the garlic and jalapeño-tomatillo sauce (well, there is a bit of work to release the creamed garlic out of its head, and this is how: by laying the charred bulb on its side on the plate and with a fork holding it down and the knife scrapping the papery skin like a tube slowly releasing its allium paste as would ossu) is sure heaven. It is the same effect, that place in your heart when you're all done in the kitchen and feeding your loved ones happily around your table happily being fed. Summer is here in the central Pacific and the watermelons have bloomed.  This cold fruit quenches and satisfies toothsome following down its sweet juice after your love food. And this, too, shall provide for all your wants. 

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I AM AYU

         “Looking back I seem always to have been escaping from my kitchen into my workshop: cooking in order to work, rather than working in order to eat. 

                                    But sometimes I escaped from both — into the sea, into the woods, onto the mountainside.”     — Patience Gray 

Emerging sleek from the rapids I smell my hair and skin of cucumber. I am the freshwater ayu, breathing strong against the current… I am returning to the high mountain as a fish. The winter I was in Niigata, grilled ayu-on-sticks were already selling at the local market, and my Tokyoite companion, famished from skiing and flushed from the hot tub, devoured the legendary ayu head to tail, clicking the Sapporo a few times. She and I had met in San Francisco a way back and she’s now living permanently in Japan. We are good friends and I love eating with her, especially what she would prepare at her place, a shabu-shabu lunch favorite: dipping tofu cakes, savoy cabbage and shiitakes in sesame ponzu dressing after chopstick-cooking the veggies in a simmering dashi broth on a portable cookware on the table, and singing shabu-shabu to the extent the food will be cooked— it is named for that time.  This morning the rock pools at Iao Valley where I swim were perfect catchments for ayu. They were crystal clear, the pebbles had given up the mirage, the gentle cascades bubbled in whirlpool traps, as if this corridor river had come down from the sky. But no ayu can be found. But an essence springs from the water… a reason for cherry blossoms and magnolias to pine, in the downstream current my body has been shaped, the forest is my ground, but I am deep, very deep in the aquifer of the earth and the legend has found my way. I am ayu, the one that escaped.

(Illustration by author, copying the painting of Hokusai.)

PS. At the Morgan Library Museum in midtown Manhattan was an exhibit of Hokusai works, the artist who drew the famed woodblock print The Great Wave and other nature paintings of fisherfolk and the mountainside life. Pencil and sketchbook in hand, I drew one scene he depicted of two friends on a straw mat, but the perspective was panoramic and the gorge in autumn was the theme. The friends are not fully visible but according to the inscription are eating chestnuts and ayu and have a pot of wine while relaxing on a bank under a tree. It was many years since this memory, and I remember this sketch crediting Hokusai that I gave to my friend from Berlin (my national parks camping-mate) a picture of the ecological beauty of friendship, in all its forms.  

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