The Joy of Getting Serious about Healthy Eating

With the abundance of summer growth
this is an opportune time of year
to practice what we’ve been learning:
that Earth and humans benefit
by eating less meat
(using it, as Thomas Jefferson advised,
as a condiment rather than the main course)
and eating lots more vegetables.
And so our guests
at Turtle Rock Farm
are eating Gazpacho
grilled vegetables with pasta
tapanade made with eggplant and chick peas
corn and black bean salad
wheat salad
lentil salad
potato and green bean salad
pizza with grilled vegetables
fruit sorbets.
We eat many vegetables and herbs from our garden
or the gardens of other Oklahomans
through the Oklahoma Food Coop
or directly from the farmers themselves,
like the honey we get from Everett.
As guests eat fresh vegetables
seasoned with fresh herbs
they exclaim what a joy it is to eat this way
and when they are leaving
after a day or two,
they tell us, “And I feel so healthy!”
There’s not the slightest feeling that they were deprived
or had to sacrifice.
Rather, they have a joyful experience at the table.

One of the books we’ve read recently
is Sharing Food by Shannon Jung.
Our health and Earth’s health
and all of creation’s health
are interdependent, writes Jung.

Our dependence on air, on water, on food, on each other and on God is integral to health and bodily well-being. Acknowledging and living in support of all life is essential to honoring our individual bodies, which are only relatively individual. Our health depends on the health of others. Only for a time could we suppose the validity of ‘apartheid thinking’ whereby one sector of life benefits at another’s expense. Indeed, all life is related. The quality of the air we breathe, the meat or fruit we eat, the chemical content of the water, the life-giving or life-destroying quality of our relationships with others – how could we not suppose that these were part of our health? Rebecca Todd Peters indicates the way a person’s health and communal health are integral to reach other. ‘Post colonials recognize…a moral universe in which individual actions are understood to have communal effect – for good or ill – and in which the well-being of the community is taken into consideration before individual decisions are made.’

The reality of a shalom creation, in which all beings have a role to play in the well-being of each other, and the future goal of restoring such a shalom express a mutuality of interdependence. We are to strive for justice for all because all are God’s beloved creatures. Honoring the body is a way to get in touch with God’s goodness and the sustaining of life.

It is no wonder
that while eating less meat
creates a healthier planet,
our bodies get healthier as well.

 

Sleeping in the Breeze

I live in an 112-year-old house,
built, obviously,
thankfully,
before electrical air conditioning,
with cross-ventilation:
windows and/or doors
on the north, south, east and west.
There’s almost always a breeze
blowing through my house.
There is central, electrical air conditioning now
but I don’t have to use it very often.
If the breeze turns hot,
it’s usually late afternoon
and I shut the windows to keep the cool in
and by evening can open them again
to let the cooler night air through.
And if it gets into the three-digits,
I shut all the windows
and turn on the electrical air conditioning.
But almost always
in the warm months
I get to sleep
with the windows open
and a breeze blowing through.

Guests to Turtle Rock Farm
who stay at the old farmhouse
usually tell us
what great sleeping it is
to sleep with a breeze.
It’s one of those simple experiences
we’ve forgotten
and that is important:
napping,
sleeping
in the soft breeze.

 

Sharing the Prairie

Biak Bay

A witty friend,
upon seeing photos of the Alpaca
who’ve come to live with us,
exclaimed her astonishment
at their wondrous features:
“Are you sure
they aren’t from outer space?
That they weren’t left here
by whoever made those crop circles?”

We think of the Alpaca
as being from Peru.
And indeed,
they live there
and the garments made by Peruvians
from their silky wool
are beautiful
and warm.

But the fact is
Alpacas, members of the camel family,
developed on the Great Plains of North America
in pre-historic times
and later moved
into the Southern Hemisphere.
The Alpaca
are from here.
They grazed the prairie,
with its shoulder-high grasses and occasional broad-leaf trees,
over thousands of years,
pre- and post- Ice Age,
alongside their cousins, Lllama and One-Hump Camels,
as well as miniature rhinos, ancestral horses,
saber-toothed cats,
long-jawed dogs,
ancient beavers
and rabbits.
In her book Prairie: A Natural History,
Candace Savage describes
the freezing and melting of water
in the Bering Sea’s land bridge
and further south through the Canadian Plains
that allowed the migration from the north
of mammoths and mastodons,
grizzlies, elk, moose
and the steppe bison.
Across those frozen land masses,
ancestral camels and some horses moved north,
but the Llama and Alpaca moved south.

So it is no wonder
that they fit so well
on the prairie they left some 10,000 years ago.
They were here
long before we were.
Sometimes, we think they look at us
like we’re from outer space.

Biak, Cha Cha and Mr. Darcy