To Live on a Piece of Land Without Spoiling It.

A Day-Job

"The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it." —Aldo Leopold.

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What does our ultimate task in land ethic have to do with meatballs? The easy answer would be to say that every meal is a direct representation of how one is choosing to care for the land, which I do believe and try to live by, but easy answers tend to be big-picture, hyperbolic, partial truths and those tend to be one-dimensional and rarely helpful in our tiny, kaleidoscopically intricate lives. The less easy answer doesn’t serve as well as a bumper-sticker rally cry, but it served my daily thinking this week and that’s about as big-picture as I can muster anyways and I thought it worth sharing.

There are times (many more times than I’d like) in a writer’s life when she questions, deeply, the point of her work. This is when a day job, a side job, any other job comes in handy - not only for an actual paycheck but to reorient the spirit and replenish integrity. You heard all about my past jobs in this August’s letter, Work , but my current work is really interesting and fulfilling me and I’m just now learning again the most obvious thing —I need to continue to do work that I feel good about in order to continue feeling good about writing about it, or feeling good in general. Duh.

This week, a couple of new homeowners had me come over and help them with both a landowner consult and a kitchen consult. I don’t often get asked to do these in winter and the blank, white page of January was actually counterintuitively helpful for clarity of vision toward what the place might want to be. We walked their land, covered in snow and talked about their goals, both idyllic and realistic, for how they’d like to contribute to the place. They fed me chicken soup and chocolate chip cookies hot from the oven (not a bad gig) while we talked about how they eat on the best and the worst of days and how they would like to eat. They sent me home with a big bag of wild rice that they’d harvested (!!!) and a lot to think about other than myself (the biggest gift of all).

At home, over the next few days, I distilled their goals down to:

• To have a variety of hardy perennial plants and trees that offer food, medicine, utility, beauty, and ecosystem services (wildlife food/shelter, pollinator host, etc…), requiring minimal maintenance.  

• To find ways to incorporate wild foods into meals regularly in ways that are not only focused on function, utility and health but aim at pleasure, excitement, and ease. 

I found real kinship in these goals and it reignited some of the flame I’d lost in my relationship to my own land and meals. I spent the next few days cooking and eating with these people in mind - a busy, industrious young couple with a toddler in a new house in a new town, wanting to eat as well as they can within their circumstance and bring in wild foods whenever easy and/or exciting. I let desire and ease take the wheel. Enter meatballs. We’re not talking Marcella Hazan meatballs, we’re talking frozen meatballs plucked from the waste stream of industrialized food by way of the Mennonite market in Brownfield where my husband and I often score amazing deals on obscure, off-brand or discontinued food items. I typically look for snacks and non-perishable items there, not meat. I’ve been kind of a purist about either killing my own meat or knowing exactly where it came from and how it lived but organic, 100% grass fed and finished, animal welfare certified, hormone and antibiotic free meatballs, 12 for $1.75 on their last stop for consumption before the landfill, strikes me as one part of one way to live on a piece of land without spoiling it —lessening waste, and we are thinking about ease here, we are leading with ease and pleasure, so I let go of the guilt that I didn’t shoot a deer and make these meatballs myself and sear the discount meatballs that someone else raised and killed and made for me and I revel in the ease of it, then simmer them in Marcella’s tomato sauce with butter and onion (with tomatoes and onions I grew) and put a slice of provolone on the bottom of the bowl and pour everything over it, hot. Parmesan on top, now what’s the easiest, most pleasurable wild food to add? Imagine a toddler needing something from you. Sweetfern. Strip a few dried leaves from the stem, crush in the palm and sprinkle over the bowl. Honestly, it was revelatory. Watch the whole scene, here.

Beyond the suggestion of putting sweetfern on their meatballs (and most other things), I put together a few pages of notes on how these people might work toward their goals of bringing more wild food plants onto their home landscape and into their meals, which I have since been transposing onto my own life, which led me to think that some of you may be able to make use of these notes, too. I asked them if they’d be ok with me sharing the notes here with my paid subscribers, to which they gave an enthusiastic “yes”. It’s a living document of sorts, which I will be adding to over time. A lot of things were shared in person and not included in the document, too, but these are the foundational thoughts for two people with a young child and a small piece of land who want to live on it without spoiling it and maybe even make it better.

Maybe some of it applies to you and your place, too.