My Relationship With Food

*trigger warning for discussion of an eating disorder*

My mom and I had rice, stir-fried broccoli (from a nearby farmstand) with ginger, and corn on the cob (from the same farmstand).  As we sat down to eat, my mom commented that she'd just been reading how corn and peas should be counted as servings of grains instead of vegetables because of their high starch content.  This caused a slightly heated discussion about counting food.

You see, I was anorexic when I was younger.  I never got to the point where I had to be hospitalized or anything, and since it was never diagnosed it took me a while to come to terms with the fact that I'd suffered from an eating disorder.  My doctor, my mom, and possibly my dad suspected it at the time, but it wasn't until last spring that I told anyone about what I'd gone through five years before.

Because I obsessively counted calories when I was in the grips of anorexia, any counting associated with I eat makes me feel closer falling over the cliff back into the freefall of anorexia.  Thus the mention of counting servings of food groups made me a bit on edge at lunchtime.

My philosophy today towards food comes from the cookbook Laurel's Kitchen.  In it, the authors, including Laurel Robertson, a dietician, say:

-Move to a diet (not a reducing diet!) of low-fat whole foods

-Take up a program of daily aerobic exercise

-Withdraw your attention from food and its consequences and absorb yourself in activities that really deserve your interest -- activities where you have to give yourself to something truly worthwhile 

When I read the above section of the book while anorexic, it was revolutionary to me.  It was so contrary both to how I was living my life and to how American culture expected people, especially girls and women, to treat food and weight.  The basic sentiment of the passage, to eat whole foods, exercise, and not worry, has stuck with me ever since, though I'm not completely sold on the low-fat part today.

Why is any of this relevant?  Well, if it weren't for my eating disorder, I wouldn't be on the path I am on today.  I started baking bread, cooking meals, and eating more vegetables while I was anorexic.  At that time, it was because it made my control over what was going into my body even more rigid.

As I began to recover, my interest in food didn't go away.  When I was anorexic, I'd found not only control in making food, but also enjoyment.  Relaxing my control over what went into my body was very hard, even scary at times, and it took months and months.  As I pruned away the obsession with every calorie, I found the joy in making food, particularly in baking bread, was still there.  I think I found it reassuring, I didn't have to get rid of everything I had become since my anorexia began.  The calorie-counting girl had to go, but food-creating girl could stay.  I was only losing part of myself, and that gave me a foothold as I clawed my way back up the cliff towards a more normal relationship with food and my body.

I cannot say that I'm glad that I suffered from anorexia.  I am glad that I was able to find value in my suffering, to turn things that I hurt myself into an interest in good food that I will hopefully be aspects of helping myself, my family, and my community for the rest of my life.

As a coda, it occurred to me that a person complaining about counting food like I did in this post is an awfully strange person to be embracing counting food miles.  Perhaps because they don't pertain as directly to health and weight, food miles don't scare me as much as other things that get counted with food.  All that I know for sure is that when locavorism makes me proud, but it doesn't bother me to make a chocolate cake (with obviously non-local chocolate) for my dad's birthday or order a salad with my meal at a restaurant in January.  While suffering from anorexia, every calorie I ate was a failure, but sometimes I just failed worse than others (bran muffin = bad, second helping of spaghetti with lots of Parmesan cheese = very, very, bad).  Locavorism is positive for me, a self-affirming path of personal growth.  That doesn't scare me in the slightest, so I can feel secure as I count my food miles  this September.

About Buffalo's Cornucopia, 2011 Edition

After I registered for the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York (NOFA-NY) Locavore Challenge last year, I set up this blog to share my experiences trying to eat almost eating locally in Western New York during the harvest month of September.  Unfortunately, my mom had to go out of town soon after the challenge started to deal with the death of a relative, so I (at age sixteen) ended up doing way more of the cooking than I bargained for.  So the first part of September I was too occupied with simply getting food on the table three times a day to worry about blogging, and I just never got in the habit.


Despite my struggles in the beginning of last year's Locavore Challenge, I ended up really enjoying it.  I decided to enroll in the NOFA-NY Locavore Challenge again this year and start up this blog again, too.  To reintroduce myself and to share what's changed about me over the course of the past year, I've put some quotes from what I shared in first post on this blog last year below in bold, followed by an update on each statement in italics.


2010: I already have a tiny business raising and selling meat and eggs from heritage chickens and turkeys raised on pasture without antibiotics and the like.
2011: Well, a big aspect of my tiny business has shrunk.  Everything that could go wrong did go wrong with hatching and brooding turkeys this year, so I only have four little ones instead of the twenty to forty I'd usually be raising to sell for Thanksgiving.  My family may end up eating all four of the turkeys ourselves.


The chickens are doing better than the turkeys.  I've doubled my laying flock from ten hens and a rooster to nineteen hens and two roosters, and have no problem selling the eggs.  I'm now raising over forty chicks that I hatched myself.  The males will be butchered later this fall for meat, both for personal consumption and for sale, and the females will expand our laying flock.


2010: In the next couple of years, I hope to start my own organic farm on the impoverished East Side of Buffalo.
2011: I still certainly want to become a farmer.  However, I'm much less sure if I want to farm on the East Side of Buffalo, or if I even want to go into urban farming at all.  I'm planning on starting to intern on farms next spring, once I finish up my schoolwork for high school.  I'm also very interested in applying for FoodCorp, where I'd spend a year on things like community gardens and nutrition education in an inner-city community somewhere in America.  Anyways, I'm hoping to work on food and agriculture in a few different settings over the next several years so can learn both basic organic farming skills and what setting I'd like to farm in.  Wherever I end up farming, whether in the country or the city, I do know that food justice is something that I definitely want to make an integral part of my farm.


2010: As a poultry producer, gardener, CSA member, and farmers' market shopper, I already get much of my food locally from May through November. However, I've been wanting to see if I could become a complete locavore ever since I read Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.
2011: As mentioned above, I still keep poultry.  My garden has expanded a lot since last year (although I'd still love it to be bigger!) and I still shop at a farmers' market.  I've expanded my food shopping to include farms stands down my street and Farmers and Artisans.  The latter is a direct result of the last years Locavore Challenge.  The former is largely due to the fact that we stopped getting a vegetable share from our CSA, Thorpes, though we a still buy a fruit share and a winter share.


2010: If I enjoy being a locavore, I might not stop after September 30th!
2011: Locavorism was certainly not enjoyable at the beginning last September.  My parents had signed onto the project with little hesitation earlier in the summer, but were not nearly as enthusiastic when it locavorism became a reality.  My dad was especially annoyed.


By the end of September, though, I'd won pretty much won him over.  I think it was my cooking.  We became a little more relaxed about non-local items once October came around, but we were still eating a mainly local diet through the end of January.  Then the winter squash that we'd saved from our garden ran out and the deer at all the wonderful carrots in the field that would have been going into our winter share from the CSA we belong to, and things just fell apart from there.


A lot of people seem to think that eating locally would be boring because of its limits (like no strawberries in January).  After our months of locavorism, we found it to be just the opposite.  There was no excitement about the new crop that had just come in, and we had forgotten about how to plan meals without the urgency of fresh foods from the garden or CSA share that needed to be used up quickly.  Since none of us were to excited about using as a lot of out-of-season produce from the grocery store, we ended up eating the eating the same few meals over and over again.


We couldn't have been more excited when the East Aurora Farmers' Market started again in May.  By the end of June, it felt like a good chunk of our food was once again local, and it's the percent of our diet that's local has steadily increased since then.  I think our mindset is already that of locavores, and I know it will be a much smoother transition into locavorism this September than last.