Feeding the Hungry Ghost (6 page)

GENTLE NUDGE
the
FIRST: BUSINESS PLAN

You’re a busy person. I can save you time: act and eat mindfully.

Don’t close the book yet. Look, it needs a better name. Call it “Oprah” for all I care,
mindfulness
is really just a word for adding it up, for implementing a workable business plan. What do you want for yourself? What do you want for the planet? Now act accordingly.

For starters, think about what you’re going to eat next. Make a conscious decision only to eat food you recognize.

No, for real.

This thing you’re going to eat — what goes into making it? An apple is made from an apple seed, the soil where it’s planted, sun, water, and the time it takes to grow. A brand-name fast-food apple fritter is made from refined white flour, high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oil, and a whole lot of other things, including propylene glycol, which is used in antifreeze. It is only 2 percent apple.

Honey, eat the apple. Propylene glycol is just one of some seven thousand food additives, and the average American eats a dozen pounds of them a year. Additives are substances not naturally in what you’re eating. They’re put there by manufacturers who want to bling up their food so it looks prettier, tastes better, lasts longer.

Reading the label on packaging tells you something, but unless you spend your days in a lab, you probably bleep over the long chemical names and hope for the best. Hope’s good. Knowledge doesn’t hurt, either. Chances are, there’s more in your Happy Meal than you realize.

Yes, it’s a free world, a free country, and you can eat additives if you want to. But you’re not here to do yourself harm. If you don’t recognize the ingredient, don’t put it in your body. Go for pure ingredients.

You can reduce your carbon footprint, reduce your waistline, boost your eco-awareness, boost your metabolism, feel a vital connection to all living things, get that natural-glow thing going, and save money all in one go. Wanna talk multitasking at its easiest?

Mindfulness is a process, a practice, a gradual awakening.
Be patient with yourself; you don’t have to get it all down today. Relax. It’s all part of the journey.

a
CHILD’S GARDEN

The seeds of food and faith took root in me early, creating a rogue hybrid. I wasn’t a voracious eater as a kid, but I was a voracious reader. I read books and stories and poems, but also street signs, cereal boxes, magazines, billboards, and ketchup labels. And cookbooks, which I read as though they were storybooks. Each recipe told a tale — the ingredients were the characters, the preparation was the plot, and every one was a total, page-turning thrill. Take cheese soufflé — could beating egg whites really transform the slimy, transparent stuff at the bottom of the bowl into something huge, white, and fluffy? And how could the egg whites lift and rescue the cheese sauce for the soufflé? Would they all live happily ever after? No way! It would all go wrong! The mysteries of the kitchen had to be plumbed. Also on my to-do list: the mysteries of life.

If I was hungry for anything, it was to discover everything about it
now.
There was so much to know, but at six, I could already tell I wasn’t getting the real story. At school, at home, on TV, grown-ups were giving me the abridged, sanitized, G-rated version of life. I could tell by their wide, toothy smiles. I didn’t buy their version of things for a red-hot minute.

Then my parents announced they were sending me to Sunday school. This presented definite downsides. It shot a hole in a perfectly good weekend. I had to wear dresses that mothers called “darling,” which meant they itched and had fussy collars and I couldn’t run around in them.

On the other hand, I sensed you could get to the bottom of
things at Sunday school. The temple sanctuary, with its high, vaulted ceiling and stained-glass windows, was cool, silent, and still. It was what wisdom felt like.

But we were kids, little ones, given to tantrums, noise, and mess. We were not allowed in the sanctuary. Instead, the teachers herded us into classrooms with buzzing fluorescent lights. They talked about holidays, made us sing songs, and gave out construction paper, glue, and crayons for crafts. At first, I bided my time. Maybe we had to pass some kind of test before they’d let us in on things. I was determined to prove myself worthy.

By the third year, though, it was clear — we’d been duped.

Well, if the Sunday school teachers weren’t going to share the secrets of life, I was going to find out on my own. So one Sunday, as we went single file to art class, I stood at the back of the line. Instead of turning right, toward more paper, more crayons, more adult deception, I turned left. Over the pounding of my heart, I walked out of the classroom building, out of the temple, and into the whole world.

The whole wide world did not give up its mysteries easily. I passed a car dealership, an office building, and the field of patchy grass and crumbling masonry that is Miami’s oldest cemetery. I was all alone, and my bravery had its limits. I ran past the cemetery, turned the corner, kept running — and found the S&S Diner.

The whole wide world is very big. The S&S is cozy. It has red awnings, big plate-glass windows, and no tables. It’s all horseshoe counter, with red stools, the kind I loved to spin on, but there was no spinning going on inside; there were no kids. A couple sat together, laughing, their hands cradling mugs. Otherwise, people sat by themselves, plates and glasses and newspapers scattered around them, making a mess, resting their elbows on the counter,
doing all the things I wasn’t supposed to do. This was the most grown-up place in the world. And I was in it.

I squeezed the coins in my pocket, calculating if I had enough money for chocolate milk, when the waitress spotted me. “Well, hey there.”

The diners looked over, then back at their plates. Except for one man. He kept staring at me. The rabbi.

Not the Nice Rabbi, the happy, young one the whole congregation loved, but the Real Rabbi, tall, gray haired, old, with thick-lensed glasses and no smile whatsoever.

He said, “Come here.”

I have never been so busted in my life as I was at that moment. But it had never occurred to me before — rabbis ate. His breakfast didn’t seem religious; it seemed normal grown-up — scrambled eggs, black coffee, toast.

“Why aren’t you in class?” His breath smelled eggy.

I studied the plastic rack of little individual jellies and longed to arrange them by color and flavor preference.

“Dunno,” I whispered.

“You… don’t… know?”

He didn’t have to threaten or torment me. I was not used to misbehaving, not good at it. I caved.

“I get bored.”

The rabbi blinked. His glasses made his eyes look extra big. “Tell me,” he said.

So I explained the songs and the crafts were not quite what I was after. I wanted to know why people have to die, where they go when they’re dead, why bad things happen, and whether dogs could be Jewish.

He took a breath. So did I. The rabbi was a wise man; that was the whole deal. Would he level with me?

“Do you have a dog?” he asked. I nodded.

He broke a triangle of toast in half, spread a blob of purple jelly on it, and handed it to me. He hadn’t cut off the crust. I took a bite anyway, away from the crust. Having been sitting there a while, the toast had gone cold, and the crunch was gone.

He said I was asking questions rabbis had been asking for ages. Even they didn’t have all the answers. Well, what was the point of being a grown-up, of being a rabbi, if you didn’t get to know everything? I think he said something about life being a process or a journey. He might as well have handed me a box of crayons.

“Tell me about your dog,” he said. He asked about my family. He asked about me. He paid and we walked back to the temple, him looming above me.

Instead of dumping me back in class, he led me to the temple’s library. It was empty inside and dark, but he flicked a switch and it glowed with light. There were just the two of us and the room of books, great big grown-up books, all lining the shelves and yearning to be read.

“You like to read. You’re looking for answers. What if on days you don’t want to go to class, instead of running away, you come here?” Then he said. “It can be our secret. Do we have a deal?”

I nodded. A secret was good. But knowing things was better. I would have to read a lot to learn everything. But I already knew more than the rabbi. He put grape jelly on his toast. Anyone knows raspberry’s better.

With grown-ups and religion suddenly on my iffy list, I turned to poetry.

Poetry — okay, children’s rhymes — shaped my thinking
about food far more than any diet phenom, veggie fest, or food show. I somewhere came across
Walter de la Mare’s poem “Miss T.,”
which begins, “It’s a very odd thing — /As odd as can be — / That whatever Miss T. eats / Turns into Miss T.”

This was mind altering for me, like kiddie LSD. Of course food literally goes into you when you eat it, but I realized it
becomes
you, too. Whatever you eat gets integrated into your very essence. You literally
are
a warming bowl of oatmeal or a handful of neon-orange cheese curls, a fresh strawberry, or a slab of meat loaf.

The message of “Miss T.,” delivered for the under-eight set, is very much like the famed aphorism of eighteenth-century French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin —
“Tell me what you eat
, and I shall tell you what you are.” I can’t draw a straight line between my very vegan self now and the little girl revved by words and rhymes, but that poem, with its clever cadence and fanciful images, made me think about what I ate. So did Florence Page Jaques’s poem “There Once Was a Puffin.”

The poem’s bird hero, with its sad clown face, lived all alone on an island, without
“anybody to play with at all.”
I would have been happy to play with the puffin. Instead, I worried. Where was the rest of his flock? Had they moved on? Why would they do that? And
how
did they do that? Didn’t they realize puffins can’t fly?

There were more worries ahead, in the following stanzas. The puffin hung out and ate fish, but he was lonely. Until the fish came and made him an offer — “You can have us for playmates, / Instead of for tea!” Then everything got better, and they all became friends. Now “the Puffin eats pancakes, / Like you and like me.”

Happy ending, on to the next poem. But like “Miss T.,”
“There Once Was a Puffin” stayed with me. Woven into the lilting rhyme scheme was a seed, a lesson about compassionate eating. It’s best not to eat your friends. Especially when you can have pancakes instead.

Whole Grain Pancakes

Timing is everything. While many recipes in this book will encourage you to take your time, pancakes will wait for no one. Make the batter just before cooking and heat the griddle or skillet as hot as you can. You will be rewarded with fluffy cakes that aren’t half bad — or half bad for you.

Serve with maple syrup, fresh fruit, powdered sugar, or whatever you like. You can even serve these topped with sautéed vegetables, in which case it’ll be a more substantial and brunchy affair. A puffin would approve.

Makes about one dozen 3-inch pancakes

1 tablespoon vegan margarine, such as Earth Balance, plus more for cooking the pancakes

1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour

¼ cup whole wheat flour

¼ cup old-fashioned oats (also known as rolled oats)

1½ teaspoons aluminum-free baking powder

1 teaspoon ground flaxseeds (also known as flax meal)

1¾ cups plain or vanilla soy milk

Melt the 1 tablespoon vegan margarine in a large skillet; set aside. Meanwhile, combine the all-purpose flour, whole wheat flour, oats,
baking powder, and flaxseeds in a large bowl. Add the soy milk and the melted vegan margarine to the dry ingredients and stir until just combined — do not maul or manhandle the batter.

Melt additional vegan margarine in the skillet over high heat. Pour or ladle about ¼ cup of the pancake batter onto the griddle to form a 3-inch pancake. Add as many more pancakes to the pan as you can fit, allowing plenty of room between them.

Cook until the edges brown and a few bubbles form, about 4 minutes. Using a flexible spatula, flip the pancakes and cook until golden brown and fluffy, about 4 to 5 minutes.

Serve at once.

Enjoy. Me, I am not a true eater of pancakes. I am not a true eater of breakfast (perhaps we can blame the rabbi incident). Or rather, I don’t eat breakfast in the morning. I like it much later in the day. A bowl of oats with cinnamon, flaxseed, and walnuts, or a sexy, slickery mango, or a just-baked muffin and a cup of coffee or tea. What could be bad? This is a quirk or predilection — a much nicer word — I picked up from my grandmother Marcella.

My mother dutifully, lovingly cooked most of my meals when I was growing up, but it was Marcella who taught me more about eating. And adventure. She was my paternal grandmother, a Kanner not by blood but by marriage, who, thank God, injected the Kanner line with a much-needed dose of liveliness and mischief. I have a good many Kanner traits. I give bad phone. I have a telegram-like terseness, a tendency toward thinness, good teeth, good feet, and an amazing capacity to feel cold even in Miami. But from my grandmother, I get a love of the exotic and, alas, an inability to filter. Like her, I tend to blurt inappropriate things.