As I write this blog, the taste of a recently completed snack of Gala apples and homemade cinnamon tahini dip still lingers on my tongue. It's autumn now, and this time of year always stirs up layers of apple-influenced memories: the joy of family day trips to the Georgia mountains, where we bought bags of Gala and Fuji apples (my favorite varieties!) at roadside stands. Baking apple crumbles in my previous DC apartment, as I found excuses to sample the crispy granola and brown sugar topping. Indulging in apple pancakes slathered in apple butter at a family orchard in South Haven, Michigan, as Brian and I celebrated a friend's wedding and the completion of our first corn maze.
I also give thanks to God for an apple-based memory from our first autumn in China:
Thank you for Downton Abbey and baked apples with [our new friend and classmate] Kathy last night. It was a nice evening together, and the apples in the rice cooker were delicious! Thank you for helping us find cinnamon,... and some odd though tasty brown sugar. Thank you for little comforts such as those, Holy Lord (November 3, 2011).
Apples steamed in the rice cooker tasted especially sweet because the process of finding healthy food during the autumn of 2011 was rather bitter. Writing last week's post from November 2011, where I focused on our love for Carrefour, brought up some difficult and traumatic memories. When I taught high school Spanish one year in Tidewater Virginia, I learned a helpful paradigm that distinguishes the lower, middle, and upper classes: upper class people want their food to be attractive. Middle class people want their food to taste good. Lower class people simply want enough food to feel full.* For most of my life, I had lived by middle class expectations, judging food by how it tasted. I now found myself with the plight of the lower class: I was searching, often unsuccessfully, for food that would fill me up and not make me sick. I was experiencing poverty.
This food poverty meant we drank beer not to distract ourselves (though that was part of it), but to help kill any bacteria lingering from whatever meal of murky provenance we had just eaten. When we visited the Tsingtao Beer Museum two years later, and learned how people used to drink beer as a healthier alternative to dirty drinking water or hard liquor, we empathized on a new level. Beer became medicine for us.**
This food poverty meant we could not eat any fruit or vegetable without a protective skin, unless it was fried in unclean oil, or steamed in our rice cooker. My stomach became quite the prognosticator. Within a few hours of food ingestion, my tummy could tell if any fresh produce I'd eaten came from the expensive imported foods store, or the cheaper yet dirty local wet market. We would occasionally walk 45 minutes to a luxury shopping mall for the rare treat of a salad mix made from imported spinach and lettuce. On most days, our produce repertoire consisted of bananas, oranges, and steamed broccoli.
This food poverty meant we paid an inordinate cost in time and energy to the pursuit of sustainable food. We didn't have a car or bike in Hangzhou, and taxis were difficult to secure. We had to schlep all of our groceries by hand, transporting them by foot or by bus. To add to our frustrations, we learned the hard way that the inventory in most grocery stores was wildly inconsistent: the imported prunes that I bought the week before would then disappear off the shelves for months, with no warning.
This food poverty partly arose because I was unfamiliar with local ingredients. After a few years in China, Chinese friends not only taught me how to order local dishes at restaurants, but also how to prepare them myself. Those first few months in Hangzhou, however, most of my energy went simply to finding food from one day to the next. I learned that those in poverty often face a choice: the long term investment of learning how to eat more sustainably, or the short term investment of finding a good meal that day. It took several years in China for me to have both of those things at the same time.
I had little control over much of my life in China, so I focused on the paltry places where I still had some semblance of dominion. I became obsessed with planning grocery store visits, scheduling my day or even my week around them. I stockpiled, and experienced a strange sense of ecstasy whenever I was able to buy all of the items on my grocery list. I kept an ongoing list with me at all times, as the thought of running out of coffee, cereal, milk, or bananas terrified me. I had already lost so much; I didn't want to lose the sacrosanct familiarity of our morning breakfast ritual.
Five years later, that food desert season still affects me. Now that I'm back in the US, I'm learning to let go of my grocery store obsession. I've clung to controlling tendencies over food for several years now. The One who provided manna in the desert is teaching me to open my hands so I can receive new blessings.
I've also gained deep compassion for those here in the US who live in food deserts. Living somewhere that lacks access to a healthy grocery store is a huge burden of time and money. My heart aches when I drive past the Latino or African immigrant crossing a dangerous highway as they wheel their own carts to Aldi, because I empathize with the effort it'll take them by foot or by bus to haul their goods home.
I'm not glad that I lived in a food desert. Honestly, it was one of the most difficult aspects of living in China. But I'm grateful that God can use even this challenge for good, as I now appreciate healthy food in a way I previously neglected. I now understand on a gut level why children need healthy meals in order to succeed in school. I now understand why those in poverty have an extremely difficult time escaping it, since they spend so much time just trying to feed themselves. And I now know, from personal experience, that the One "who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply [our] seed for sowing and increase the harvest of [our] righteousness"(2 Corinthians 9:10).
*I've been told this paradigm comes from Dr. Ruby Paine's A Framework for Understanding Poverty, but I have never read it myself. I'm happy to be corrected! :).
**The Guinness family in Ireland started their own brewery for similar philanthropic reasons. Read more here. I've also recently learned that it's doubtful that beer actually kills bacteria ingested at the same time as drinking. But beer does have other health benefits.
I also give thanks to God for an apple-based memory from our first autumn in China:
Thank you for Downton Abbey and baked apples with [our new friend and classmate] Kathy last night. It was a nice evening together, and the apples in the rice cooker were delicious! Thank you for helping us find cinnamon,... and some odd though tasty brown sugar. Thank you for little comforts such as those, Holy Lord (November 3, 2011).
Apples steamed in the rice cooker tasted especially sweet because the process of finding healthy food during the autumn of 2011 was rather bitter. Writing last week's post from November 2011, where I focused on our love for Carrefour, brought up some difficult and traumatic memories. When I taught high school Spanish one year in Tidewater Virginia, I learned a helpful paradigm that distinguishes the lower, middle, and upper classes: upper class people want their food to be attractive. Middle class people want their food to taste good. Lower class people simply want enough food to feel full.* For most of my life, I had lived by middle class expectations, judging food by how it tasted. I now found myself with the plight of the lower class: I was searching, often unsuccessfully, for food that would fill me up and not make me sick. I was experiencing poverty.
This food poverty meant we drank beer not to distract ourselves (though that was part of it), but to help kill any bacteria lingering from whatever meal of murky provenance we had just eaten. When we visited the Tsingtao Beer Museum two years later, and learned how people used to drink beer as a healthier alternative to dirty drinking water or hard liquor, we empathized on a new level. Beer became medicine for us.**
This food poverty meant we could not eat any fruit or vegetable without a protective skin, unless it was fried in unclean oil, or steamed in our rice cooker. My stomach became quite the prognosticator. Within a few hours of food ingestion, my tummy could tell if any fresh produce I'd eaten came from the expensive imported foods store, or the cheaper yet dirty local wet market. We would occasionally walk 45 minutes to a luxury shopping mall for the rare treat of a salad mix made from imported spinach and lettuce. On most days, our produce repertoire consisted of bananas, oranges, and steamed broccoli.
This food poverty meant we paid an inordinate cost in time and energy to the pursuit of sustainable food. We didn't have a car or bike in Hangzhou, and taxis were difficult to secure. We had to schlep all of our groceries by hand, transporting them by foot or by bus. To add to our frustrations, we learned the hard way that the inventory in most grocery stores was wildly inconsistent: the imported prunes that I bought the week before would then disappear off the shelves for months, with no warning.
This food poverty partly arose because I was unfamiliar with local ingredients. After a few years in China, Chinese friends not only taught me how to order local dishes at restaurants, but also how to prepare them myself. Those first few months in Hangzhou, however, most of my energy went simply to finding food from one day to the next. I learned that those in poverty often face a choice: the long term investment of learning how to eat more sustainably, or the short term investment of finding a good meal that day. It took several years in China for me to have both of those things at the same time.
I had little control over much of my life in China, so I focused on the paltry places where I still had some semblance of dominion. I became obsessed with planning grocery store visits, scheduling my day or even my week around them. I stockpiled, and experienced a strange sense of ecstasy whenever I was able to buy all of the items on my grocery list. I kept an ongoing list with me at all times, as the thought of running out of coffee, cereal, milk, or bananas terrified me. I had already lost so much; I didn't want to lose the sacrosanct familiarity of our morning breakfast ritual.
Five years later, that food desert season still affects me. Now that I'm back in the US, I'm learning to let go of my grocery store obsession. I've clung to controlling tendencies over food for several years now. The One who provided manna in the desert is teaching me to open my hands so I can receive new blessings.
I've also gained deep compassion for those here in the US who live in food deserts. Living somewhere that lacks access to a healthy grocery store is a huge burden of time and money. My heart aches when I drive past the Latino or African immigrant crossing a dangerous highway as they wheel their own carts to Aldi, because I empathize with the effort it'll take them by foot or by bus to haul their goods home.
I'm not glad that I lived in a food desert. Honestly, it was one of the most difficult aspects of living in China. But I'm grateful that God can use even this challenge for good, as I now appreciate healthy food in a way I previously neglected. I now understand on a gut level why children need healthy meals in order to succeed in school. I now understand why those in poverty have an extremely difficult time escaping it, since they spend so much time just trying to feed themselves. And I now know, from personal experience, that the One "who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply [our] seed for sowing and increase the harvest of [our] righteousness"(2 Corinthians 9:10).
*I've been told this paradigm comes from Dr. Ruby Paine's A Framework for Understanding Poverty, but I have never read it myself. I'm happy to be corrected! :).
**The Guinness family in Ireland started their own brewery for similar philanthropic reasons. Read more here. I've also recently learned that it's doubtful that beer actually kills bacteria ingested at the same time as drinking. But beer does have other health benefits.