'Making Do,' Eating Locally, Accepting Where I Am

The final section of the discussion of 'Catching Fire' is coming soon: the really crucial stuff about what Wrangham's scenario implies for raw-foodists.

But I have to make a digression, to honor a feeling. I've been wanting to write a series of posts about 'making do,' being creative with what you have even if it isn't much or isn't ideal. From some perspectives, 'eating locally' is a part of 'making do,' and living in Alaska, where the ground is frozen seven months of the year in the balmier places even, makes that a challenge!

I've been hearing people elsewhere talking about starting their gardens, and have seen photos of fiddlehead ferns poking up. I ate loads of fiddleheads last year - in June! So we're still a good ten weeks away…)And this morning, as Phil and I hiked on the frozen beach, talking about fishing expeditions, I found myself tearing up with compassion for myself (not self-pity, I hope!) - remembering how very hard I had tried to 'eat locally' for many months last year, to convert my body to get most of its calories from fish and game - and how very much better I feel now that I'm no longer forcing that, but how sad that it cuts down on 'local' subsistence so very much.

Of course, in the three-to-four month growing season we can grow quite a lot of vegetables, and last year we wild-crafted large amounts of berries and greens (nettles, ferns, various shoreline grasses and herbs, as well as kelp and dulse). That's something to look forward to.

And for now, I am doing my best. I sprout lentils, fenugreek, sunflower seeds. I mix dried nettles in with my salads (delicious!). Cilantro pesto from my wonderful cilantro patch last year is in the freezer and getting used. I want to find out if it's possible to grow maca here, spirulina - would be so cool to grow superfoods besides the superfoods that grow wild here.

Since I've been sent this opportunity to make this place home for now, I have to make the best of it and learn all that I can from it. This is one of the last wild places, a place of great beauty. And it has been my husband's chosen homebase for the past 30 years (almost as long as I've been alive!) And even if it is true that eating fish and meat made me sicker, I can derive all sorts of powerful medicine from the plants that grow here. They have to be pretty potent to survive here at all. Considering how horribly spiky it is, in the first of spring, the new growth shoots of devil's club are surprisingly delicious. (Devil's club, by the way, is 'oplopanax horridus,' where the 'panax' part indicates its status as a panacea. More to explore there.)

Like many who live in Alaska, we have no running water at home (imagine the challenges there)! We haul six-gallon jugs from the public spigot at Safeway in town. Well, that spigot has been out of order the past few days (thank goodness I didn't make kombucha - we'd have had no water at all). We are finding another way today, and it has also inspired me to harvest snow from outside and explore that.

So, I temper the twinges of sadness I'm feeling at living in the land of the long winter with determination to do my best, and to learn as many of the lessons offered to me here as I can possibly compass. I continually make my peace with the 'eat all local' ideal, and give thanks for all the ways that I can connect with people elsewhere, and hopefully share some of the powerful plant and animal lessons that I'm learning here. It's certainly a global and iconic instantiation of the whole practice of 'making do,' and I look forward to writing more about that.