Attention. Geeking out. Bread.

Travel

11 Dec

This is the pivot point of the year. Everything that makes up a year — quantity of light, biomass, the arc of the path of the sun, cultural traditions— dwindles down, drawing inward to a point in the center of the earth where it turns around and is ‘reborn’. At the Solstice the year begins its journey upward again to the peak in the sky of summer.

This cycle is reflected in our own breath. Meditation begins with placing your attention on your breath. At first it seems pointless. Your mind rebels. But you keep just noticing, following the cycle of the inhale and the exhale. And gradually a different perspective emerges. There’s such an opportunity if we don’t do the conventional thing but instead pause and notice: taste, look, listen, ask what is the truest nature of this thing?

For instance, don’t assume flour is flour or a carrot is a carrot. The permutations of carrot are multitudinous. There’s variety — Jaune de Doub, Red Core Chantenay, Nante, Purple Dragon to name just a few. There are new summer carrots — skinny translucent orangesicles which taste more like their foliage, rather green. While winter carrots who’ve undergone hard frost and been dug out from under mulch and snow taste incredibly sweet, and deeply carroty. Then there’s the soil the carrot is grown in, how much water it received, how it was stored, etc. They can be eaten braised or roasted, shaved or chunked, raw or pickled…

I’m cooking with carrots just now, paring their knobbled shapes into consistent pieces for a chicken soup.

I like to be able to cut through a cooked carrot with the edge of my spoon: a root vegetable soft and saturated with flavor but as firm as the soil I sunk my spade into to unearth them. With my soup is new bread I’ve made from a natural leaven.

For some years, I’ve been burrowing down into the roots of bread. What is the real essence of it? What would it taste like if it were closer to that essence? In my admittedly intermittent quest I have recently acquired a tabletop Austrian stone mill. And I am now seeking out pre-industrial wheat varieties.

Flour from wheat has been with us for about 8000 years and was milled with stones until about 200 years ago. Wheat was taken in hand by humans over that long, long stretch of history. It’s a co-evolution, in a sense. Neither of us would exist as we are without the other. When we suddenly started grinding flour with the steel roller mill (about 1890) — which cuts and separates out the components of the wheat (bran, chaff, endosperm, the fats, the starch) and narrowing our breeds of wheat to those that worked best with the steel mills — we cut ourselves off from the diversity of wheat varieties. Not to mention much of the nutritional value of wheat.

My little mill will put me back in touch not only with the old wheat varieties and their different characteristics and flavors, but also with flour that is ‘alive’. Store bought flour has been stabilized by ‘aging’ otherwise its fats would quickly go rancid.

Freshly milled flours have their delicate fats intact as well as the microbes that will help quickly ferment a natural leaven.

This story of wheat goes very deep, connecting with the stories of its cousins barley and corn. (Leading on to beer and whiskey among other tales). Once you’ve tasted some of these old foods in their truest form it’s hard to see (taste) them the same ever again. Anson Mills in North Carolina will ship you freshly milled flours, corn grits, polenta, and traditional Japanese buckwheat flour if your tastebuds need to be recalibrated.

It’s all about diversity, about tasting the intricacies, finding certain characteristics intriguing and pursuing them, promoting them, inviting them. Because they make the system stronger. We can do this with our sense of taste that we exercise everyday. Rather than shutting down, paring down the options to just one variety for its efficiency or familiarity. It’s important too, to ask why are there just a few varieties of wheat dominating world agriculture? How have our perceptions been herded into one small corner? If we still knew how bread made from living flour tasted, or true raw milk from cows fed on good grass, our perspective would broaden, our gut flora would be more resilient — our planet too.

Our attention is our power. Perhaps the one remaining force under our own sovereignty. How we chose to place it is of the utmost importance. Listening in very quietly yields surprisingly engaging results. Geeking out on something seemingly mundane as breath — or bread —perhaps just following a trend at first but then really delving into it — can lead you into the core, the essence of things.

There’s so much to geek out on in the realm of so-called gardening and farming. Those terms, on the surface, conjure up stereotypes, and conventions. They sound banal or tedious to some, admirable but impossible to others. But once you’ve tasted the first carrot you grew, or felled wheat with a scythe, or raised your own beef on pasture, worlds open up to you. From the epic saga of soil biology; to compost alchemy; to the endless heritage varieties of food crops, each leading you down a storied, delicious culinary track; to small economics and feeding the world.

Why am I saying all this? Because I believe more of us, putting our attention on what’s real and essential (food is one of the biggies) — even in small bites — will find ways in that are incredibly fascinating, beautiful and revolutionary.