Eat Mendocino is kind of like that game where you try to make a meal out of the random stuff left in your pantry when you’ve been procrastinating going to the grocery store.

It’s also like when you’re backpacking and every bagged dehydrated cup of noodles meal is the best thing ever because you’re hungry and it’s what you have, but you also spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about cheeseburgers.

It’s also like when you have a favorite blackberry patch that fruits on your birthday and you look forward to it all year only to feel bittersweet about the last fruits shriveling on the vine two weeks later.

The truth is that we live in this ephemeral world where plants grow and die and are subject to the seasons and climate. The truth is that it’s all about the plants. We are dependent on them and the farmers who know how to coax seeds into sprouting, a magic unbeknownst to me.

My skills are in looking under leaves to find the biggest fruits, saying thank you and yes to the abundance growing in wild places and in between the cultivated rows. My boots are wet from mushrooming and my hands are stained purple from huckleberries. I keep calendars and google maps full of labels to my uncultivated pantry.

But this is new territory for me. Both geographically, and on scale. I’m not used to putting things away with such fervor. It’s usually enough to enjoy the thing in its season, as a supplement, as spiritual practice, as communion; but not as staples.

Harvesting is trivial, it’s the processing and storing of food that contains much of the work and the reward. The white noise of the dehydrator has become our bedtime stories, and the cycle of the canner is no longer something I need to google each time.

It feels extravagant to spend time this way, as if it’s cheap, as if feeding our bodies is the only thing that matters. I suppose, in a way, it is.

I’ve never had to meal plan so much in advance. I’ve never cooked so much consistently. It’s common at a meal we spend half the conversation complimenting the chef and the plants and animals who went into the bowls… and the other half taking about what we are going to eat tomorrow.

I’ve always been the kind of person who squirrels away. A saver. I’ve never had such permission to actually use the good stuff.

And y’all, the stuff is really good.

I’ve learned that if you want to have pizza in January, it’s going to cost you oil or freezer space or propane burner time to seal your jars of late summer tomatoes. It’s a luxury.

I’ve learned that quail roosters sounds like tiny velociraptors. I’ve learned how to cook dried beans and how to appreciate goats milk and I’m slowly figuring out how to keep my pet sourdough culture happy.

I’ve learned that it’s always worth it to pull over one more time to harvest just a few more bay nuts. You don’t know when it will be your last chance.

I’ve learned that the reason I think jars of food are beautiful is not just aesthetic; it’s a promise of safety and a time capsule of a season’s abundance.

It’s also a representation of a value, harkening back to a time when single use plastics were not as ubiquitous. I am passionate about not producing a ton of waste in the same way Gowan is passionate about local food. It turns out, the two go together really well.

I used to sometimes buy things in plastic and put them into glass jars, the convenience of better storage and the aesthetic without the reality of living closer to your food. There always ended up a pantry of shame where I hid the open cellophane bags with the rest of the pecans that would never quite fit in the jar.

Now, food goes straight from waxed cardboard produce baskets or our gathering buckets and bags, or 25lb brown paper bags with the pull tabs on top. It feels good. It feels right.

I believe in the power of beauty. Sometimes aesthetics are a sign post to values.

What’s delighted me most —other than the fresh, complicated, delicious, unexpected food that goes in my mouth— is having a partner just as enthusiastic as I am. I feel endlessly lucky and enchanted to be on this unexpected journey with them.

It feels too good to be true, to be met by someone just as enthusiastic about roadside acorns as I am.

Hunter Rook

One of the things I learned from this project last time is not to let preciousness trap us into scarcity. Open some special jars, right at the beginning. Make some favorite meals even though they’re more work. Do as much in advance as possible. Have food ready before you get too hungry.

So far, since New Year’s Eve, I’ve opened a quart of canned tomatoes for choulent, a half pint jar of the hot and sweet sauce we canned with roasted Fresno chilies, roasted garlic and honey, a pint jar of pickled onions, and a pint jar of ketchup. The only one we used up was the canned tomatoes, but the pot they went into fed us for two solid days, 4 meals for 3 people in different forms. We fished the infused hardboiled eggs out for brunch, ate the thinner stew in bowls, several times, and ate the thicker stew the next day in quinoa wraps with the hot sauce and pickled onions.

This afternoon I’m going to start chicken soup with wild rice for tomorrow. Wild rice, really Indigenous cultivated, always reminds me of the gift of it we were given by a young woman who had gathered it in a canoe and danced the hulls off. We were housing at Fortunate Farm as a refugee from a fire inland, and the rice was one of the few things she grabbed in her dash to safety. She shared a bit with us as we cooked together, and it was nutty and smoky and perfect. This wild rice was grown by MendoLake Food Hub Cooperative members, and delivered to our barn.

To make this soup I will take broth out of the freezer from a young chicken, and a frozen bag of mirepoix, which is the sautéed mix of onion, carrot and celery that we made before the fall celery harvest shriveled. I’ll also peel and dice a ton of our increasingly sprouting potatoes, and the winter squash cubes that go into literally every meal. I’ll also float some eggs to hard boil, as I usually do in crock pots of soup.

Our friend Lee is coming to stay, so I went to our cabin to make a fire to warm it before they arrive, and on the way back we loaded the rest of our dry storage from it’s old home to our new house. I have beans and onions and jars of dry chilies to find homes for, and somehow another box of potatoes I’d forgotten all about. Every potato on this farm is threatening to sprout and I have long hours of processing ahead of me to save them for the really hard months- February and March.

In some ways I feel like I know how to do this, in others I’m totally experiencing this new. Having two capable people ready to julienne potatoes for frying in March is a revelation. So much has changed about my daily life. To have partners in this that live in my house is magical. To not be a full time vegetable farmer, heavily laden with kale in a single swipe of my arm, is surreal. The sheer quantity of dishes is the only thing I feel like I don’t quite remember. This time, however, I’m not the only one doing them.

Yesterday, on New Year’s Day, Hunter was washing dishes while I was processing vegetables. My phone started buzzing and shrieking, the screen flashing an earthquake warning. Hunter went straight for the pantry shelves, leaning their whole body against it. I grabbed them by the scruff of their neck and hauled them to a doorway, grabbing Morgan who was coming to see what the alarm was, and the dogs, we stumbled together to the most solid beams of the house, the huge fir posts framing the bedroom where it meets the hallway. We clung together until we were sure that nothing was actually going to happen, and then laughed through our tension and hugged each other. I scolded Hunter for grabbing the pantry shelves- especially with the magnetic knife block on the wall right next to it. I remembered my friend’s smashed kitchen up north, that thankfully they weren’t standing in when the shake happened, and shuddered. Your face is more important than the canning jars, I said. “I could have broken their fall with my face!” They protested, laughing. I kissed their face over and over, trying to convey the clarity of my priorities.

I’m so grateful that in the last ten years I’ve grown more confident with canning, thanks to my patient teachers. I’m grateful for our shelves of jewels, transforming bland winter staples into exciting and nourishing food. Sometimes I just stand and admire them, a wall of sturdy stained glass more precious than the windows of a church to me. They are security, variety, wealth. I would rather see every single jar smashed on the floor than have Hunter be hurt by their falling, even a little.

I’ve just returned from checking the flock and water is pouring off of me, denim is plastered to my thighs and my coat is heavy as I hang it by the stove on the wood rack. Morgan went into the sea for salt water, and it’s reducing in big clouds on the back porch on our canning burner. He’s kneeling, blowing on the coals to rekindle the fire in the rainy, gloomy afternoon. Hunter’s sourdough is rising, and their pine soda is gently steeping in the window. The dogs are snuggled on the cow hide by the fire, the hide that used to adorn Pip, my elderly cow who passed last December, whose body I saved to nourish us this year. In the pouring rain of Januarys gone by, she would lick the water off my face with her rough tongue, and extend her massive russet head for scratches under her chin.

Titania, my old goat, died this morning. I have now been doing this long enough that my old guard is elderly or gone. Ten years ago she was a young goat, who leapt down from the truck she was delivered in like a deer, and immediately checked my pockets for treats. I adopted her during Eat Mendocino 2013. She would walk into the woods with me and my students, who kept browse journals with drawings and leaf samples of the species she liked to eat, and those she passed over. She was a strong and tall white goat, a breed called a Saanen, and had delicate upright ears and grew a magnificent beard as she aged. Long after her milking career ended she and I would go on walks in the woods, she walked beautifully on a leash all her life. We would pick berries together and I could always count on her to lead me to the sweetest patches. One day she lay down on the trail and wouldn’t get up. I waited for her to rest, feeling ashamed that I hadn’t noticed we were pushing her old bones too far- she hadn’t shown any sign of fatigue until then. Shortly after that walk, I noticed she was unable to keep up with the flock and was being hazed off of feed by the young rams. Our neighbors adopted her for a life of leisure in their small barnyard, where she spent her golden years being loved by their toddler until the toddler became a kid, and Titania became feeble. Last night she lay down and wouldn’t get up, this time for good. She was loved to the end.

We pour care into these relationships with plants and animals and people, and they pour it back into us, and we tend each other as well as we can. In the end we let go, and that is an expression of love too.

May the grass on Titania’s bones grow tall and wild and sweet, and may I never put into a jar anything I wouldn’t sacrifice gladly during an earthquake, to keep Hunter’s face safe.

It’s time to start the soup.

It’s Thanksgiving morning, and the table is full of thick slices of winter squash sitting on trays like fat golden half moons. They smell like cantaloupe. We are taking the squashes with dings and bruises that will not cure down for winter and roasting them into puree for the freezer, and juicing them for pumpkin vinegar.

Today is a fasting day for us. I have fasted on Thanksgiving, (Thankstaking, Truthgiving, etc) for a bunch of years now. I donate the money I would have spent hosting a big dinner to a Native cause. This year it was helping cover transportation and hotels for people traveling to Alcatraz for the Sunrise Ceremony. It has already happened, and was beautiful.

Hunter just dropped a squash on its soft spot and it imploded wetly. The ones we can’t eat will be fed to the chickens, who love fermenting and soft fruits like these. The work of processing includes handling the messy and unpalatable and transforming it into nourishment in some form as well, through the beaks of chickens or mouths of worms in the compost.

For most years I’ve followed the model of fasting I use on Yom Kippur- I don’t eat or drink from sundown to sundown. Some years I have had to work outdoors in the cold very hard on this day, because animals don’t understand holidays or days of mourning, and on those days I have tended to drink hot water, because dehydration is dangerous and drinking cold water in the cold while fasting feels unhealthy. Today is the first year we have been seriously sick in my household.

I feel miserable. Fever and headache and chills, and my throat is so dry and painful I can barely swallow. So today, by the consensus of the three people living in this house, we will drink tea with honey and salt for electrolytes, and will drink broth later if we feel we need to.

I want our abstinence to be meaningful, but not unsafe. I want to acknowledge and atone for our group complicity in injustice and also maintain love and care for ourselves as vulnerable individuals. This is a balancing act present in every day of life on stolen land.

The human impulse to celebrate a Harvest Festival is ancient and present in many cultures, such as the Irish Mabon and the Jewish Sukkot. I think its an inherently wholesome thing to celebrate, except when it comes with a self congratulatory erasure of the actual history of occupation of a stolen land, which sadly this holiday does. So, after years of compromise when I called it something else (“farmsgiving”) and included donations and education about local contemporary Native issues, I ultimately decided just not to participate in this day. I live a beautiful life full of beautiful food and 100% of that is dependent on the work Indigenous land stewards did for millennia and are doing now to try to protect what is left after the destruction of colonization. I can give up food and celebration for one day in solidarity.

Not all of us can afford to do that. Some of my peers whose work schedules give them no time to see family might feel they need to seize this time. We’re all trying to survive Late Capitalism, and if giving this day up isn’t workable, I’m not going to judge you for that. I would just encourage you to listen to Native voices on this issue, from a diversity of perspectives, and contribute to their causes if you can, and reflect on your place on this land.

Considering today as a day of mourning, I am thinking about the people in my home county who were forcefully marched across the mountains at gunpoint, the elders killed along the way, and how many of them were sick, as I am sick today, but without the soft bed and rest that I can return to if I get too fatigued being up. The cruelty of the settlers and colonists is truly beyond my comprehension to understand, but I see it still happening now, in how Water Protectors are gassed and shot, at how the Pomo Land Back movement here is attacked and Indigenous grandmothers threatened, with bullet casings thrown at one of them by young white men in trucks speaking about target practice. Others with revving trucks a foot from their face. I see it in my queer siblings lost this week in Colorado, and in the sign to our Shul across the road ripped off the building, the “Jew” in Mendocino Coast Jewish Community gouged.

I see the hatred and cruelty, but I can’t understand it. I can’t understand what drives people to do these things. I worry that if I can’t understand it, I don’t know how to stop it. I am mourning for the people who were hurt and killed by it in the past, and those that are today. I’m mourning in advance for my beautiful community who I am afraid will be hurt or lost. There is something deeply broken in the spirit of Americanism. A brokenness that defends itself from reflection with violence.

Today I am mourning that the United States of America exists at all. Imagine for a moment what this continent without colonization would have been. I don’t mean without travel- Polynesian and Asian people had been traveling to this continent for ages before colonization. What happened here wasn’t inevitable. It didn’t have to be this way. Imagine California, one of the most linguisticly diverse places on earth, the home of elk and grizzly bears and wolves and the mightiest migratory bird flyway in the world, untamed and undrained by agriculture. Imagine this continent entering the Information Age as a collection of sovereign Indigenous Nations. When Europeans were still shitting in the streets cities in Central America had indoor plumbing. What would have happened if Europe hadn’t interfered with their scientific advancement?

What would have happened in Europe itself? If transportation, as it was called, wasn’t an option to get rid of political dissidents and the starving poor? If the Scottish Clearances couldn’t have happened? If the Diggers Movement couldn’t be broken up, if England couldn’t have outsourced production to colonies and therefore couldn’t have devoted all its own land to industrial mills? Europe would have had to deal with itself. It wouldn’t have been just the French who had a revolution. The Irish may not have been starved to death because the British would have been weaker as a military power. My ancestors might not have had to flee.

I wish Europeans never learned to build boats. I don’t imagine there’s any version of history that would be without cruelty and bloodshed, but I think it would have been a better world.

I’m brought back to the present moment by the oven door opening, trays of golden squash coming out in a fountain of steam. It’s strange to process food without tasting anything, but at this time of year we can’t spend a whole day out of the kitchen. The winter squash is a Native invention, a result of millennia of selection. It is an amazing technology, an electricity free storage method for carbohydrates and protein rich seeds through the long winter. Everything I have is due to Native innovation and labor. My very body, with its mix of genetics from all over the world coming together in Agricultural California, would be impossible without colonization. I would give all of it up to see a world where none of this happened.

Because I never will see that world, instead I want to see a future where Native land management and culture take its rightful place at the center of our society. One way we can begin to make that possible is to tell the truth about the past and present treatment of Native people on this land, and let go of our comfortable fables. Another way is to directly return land stewardship to Native people. Xa Kako Dile, a nonprofit lead by Native women, is housed now on Fortunate Farm, which we began years ago to feed the community. I understand a bit more now about what that means, and what is required of us to make the future we want to see. I know I am only just beginning my education and deconstruction, which will go on forever.

Wherever you are today and whatever you’re doing, I hope you take a moment to mourn the lives, stories, cultural knowledge, food ways, and relationships lost to colonization, and reevaluate how you can act in this next year to bring healing and reconnection to the land you’re on.

This is a question I’ve been asked multiple times in the last couple of weeks of posting prepping process photos and that question alone shows me how much time has passed. A significant number of people I know and love now in the County weren’t around back then!

Eat Mendocino is the name for a local food experiment, coined by Sarah Bodnar who did the project with me in 2013. It was and will be an investigation into the food ecosystem made by putting my body on the line. For a calendar year, January 1st to December 31st, everything I eat and drink including oils and salt and spices, must come from Mendocino County.

I always intended to do this project again a decade later, and that time has now come.

It’s not intended to be prescriptive- it’s not a comment on how anyone should eat. It’s a farmer and rancher exploring the limits and celebrating the abundance of this place by choosing to be entirely dependent on it. It’s a show of trust in my community and a willingness to find our gaps by stepping into them. Obviously a lot changes in a decade. We are stronger in so many ways, and have also suffered losses. I’m also not the plucky young farmer I was then, I’ve gained competence but lost the simplistic certainty that comes with the limited perspective of youth.

Eat Mendocino 2023 is a survey of what has changed in local food here in the last ten years, and an exploration of what is different internally, what has been slowly simmering in my personal kitchen this last decade.

The rules:

No anonymous food. This means no fillers and additives. We harvest saltwater to make salt, we know the people who press our oil. When we say everything we mean everything. I won’t be drinking coffee or eating chocolate or buying (I still feel conflicted about this one) locally made products whose ingredients are not locally produced.

People can bring food to trade with us from their region when they visit, and we can bring local food with us if we travel, and enjoy local food where we are too.

A new rule for 2023 is that in the last decade The MendoLake Food Hub was born. Fortunate Farm has been a partner from the beginning, and we are deeply invested in their success. We host a Node for distribution on our farm. Relationships are more important than arbitrary borders, and the partner farms in the Hub are my community directly. Therefore, all produce on the Hub is kosher for EM, even if the farm is across the County line.

I will be writing through the whole project. Posts will be a combination of process and recipes, food system discussions, and reflections on the changes over time in this very small food shed over the last decade. Nobody will get judged for their food choices on my page, but I will do my best to share ways to make local food more accessible for everyone as I find them.

I’m amazed at the audacity of my young self to assume I would be farming in this county ten years into the future and be able and willing to repeat this project, but that prediction came true, though not in a way I would have imagined. I am still here and I am still willing to do some ridiculous stuff for love and curiosity. You’re welcome to join me!

(The first photo here is me in Fall 2012, in my bean patch prepping for 2013. The second is Fall 2022, processing dry beans, preparing for 2023.)