Michigan flashback: free range, local, and fresh, but not organic

Scott's doing just great - we have no Scott news since our last updates, which is extremely good news.

I do not currently have sweet Michigan cherry wine on hand.  However, I am not without vice. 

Last night was the night my dear friend Robin came over, and we ate a box of truffles and some Brie and Blue cheese (on high fiber crackers).  We drank cheap red California wine.

And today, Saturday, I did not get up early, go to the 8:45 am Weight Watchers meeting at the Y, and then do a full Sweat-Inducing Workout At The Gym With Post-Workout Stretching while the children went first to ChildWatch and then to their 10 am Swim Classes. 

Instead, last night I set out Pop Tarts and Sun Chips and the TV remote, and told the girls they could eat as much of that as they wanted and watch whatever they wanted, so long as they let Mommy sleep in the morning.  The minute Mama got up, the TV and the Pop Tarts were going away.

It worked. 

I got to sleep until 9, bagged Weight Watchers, dragged the troops into swim classes at 9:58 am, and slurped down my lukewarm coffee on the pool deck while watching the virtuous exit the Weight Watchers meeting and drift towards the treadmills.

This puts me perfectly in the mood to write.  I shall tell you a tale of lands long ago and far away.

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We went to rural Michigan for the summer.


It really was quite the trip - me and my overliberal hippie California household going to see Grandma in her small rural town. It was what they call a high-impact visit, and while her town is probably much the same now that those wacky Left Coast tourists have all left, we surely aren't.

All five of us (Scott, me, Elli, Maggie, and Lucky the dog) flew out to see my mom for the 4th of July weekend. Lady Luck smiled on us; the 4th of July was Week 3 of Chemo, so Scott was feeling pretty gosh darn good. At the end of the week, Scott flew back to California early on a Friday morning, to arrive at SFO mid-day, so he could get to Kaiser to get his blood drawn before close of business, so his labs could be "run" in time for him - if the bloodwork turned out okay - to get another infusion of chemo on Monday.

I stayed in Michigan with the girls and the dog for another month. It was a real vacation for me - a vacation from cancer, from the responsibilities of running a household, from having to drive anybody to gymnastics or to an oncology appointment. To stay that length of time, I did bring my laptop computer and continued to telecommute while I was there, so I was officially "working." But the sort of paid work I do on the computer doesn't exhaust me the way the cancer (or housewifery) does, and so just being in a different zip code, in a different mindset, was such a vacation.

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I could give you a day-by-day description of the vacation - we had steak for dinner this night; we watched the most amazing sunset over Lake Huron on that night; we got supersized ice cream cones and they dribbled everywhere nearly every night. But those sorts of descriptions of somebody else's vacation are Boring. You don't want to hear about the lamb dinner we ate one night. You may not even know it yet, but instead, you want to hear about the saga of Blinky the Lamb. He's had quite the run on this planet. All in good time, my friends, all in good time.

We'll start at the beginning. My mom moved up to this little town on Lake Huron a few years ago, after my father passed away. She lives in a lovely house right on the shores of Lake Huron, off of a dirt road. There are about twenty other little (and big!) houses on her dirt road, and if you follow the dirt road out to the main paved road, you run smack into the cemetery. (The cemetery folks have been awesome neighbors mostly because they'll take any level of noise and don't really ever make much.)

Take a left and go a few miles, and you get to Grindstone City, where they used to make large circular grindstones, used to grind the grain of the Great Plains into flour and cereal; bring your Master Card and you can buy a two-story stone building built in the 1800's sitting a few fields away - the outhouse is included at no extra charge. Today's Grindstone City is a bit lighter on the grain but heavier on the sugar: now they sell massive quantities of Midwestern ice cream atop wobbly little cones, and Danny Zeb's Party Store down the street sells the distilled sort of sugar geared to the grownup palate.

Back to my mom's house. Take the dirt road out to the cemetery and take a right, and in about ten minutes you'll come to the traffic light in town. In the summer it displays all three colors: green, yellow, and red. In the fall and spring it sort of blinks weakly. And, I am given to understand, in the brutal winters, in the teeth of blizzards blowing heavily in from the Great Lakes, that little traffic light shuts off its blinking and just holds onto the wires overhead for dear life. It's just as well; even if it were to be typing out Michael Jackson's "Thriller" in Morse Code, people wouldn't pay much attention to it. There's not much need for traffic control here in December. There are only about 600 people in town full-time, many of them either too old or too young to realize they're not, say, in Los Angeles or New York City or Bangkok.

The town appears geared to leisure (in particular, the summer sort of leisure.) Relative to the San Francisco Bay Area where we live, the population is somewhat skewed to either end of the age spectrum. The very young appear fairly content.

The teenagers can't wait to get out of there and even in the days of the Iraq wars the military looked pretty gosh darn good to many of them, boys and girls alike.

The young families are all looking for that needle in the haystack: in the middle of farm country, in the middle of an economically depressed region, they are looking for that elusive well-paying secure job which will let them raise a family.

The retirees fall into two categories. The first category are those who grew up here, raised a family here (as a farm wife? as a teacher? as a beauty salon owner?), and now find themselves being old here. The second category of retirees have been to Los Angeles, New York City, and occasionally Bangkok, and have decided those places are too gosh darn {expensive/loud/fast/liberal/crowded/full of bulls**t} for their tastes, and so they have retired to this, their own little piece of paradise. These retirees are my mom's crowd. In the summers they read poetry by the shores of the Great Lake as the sun sets at 9:30 pm. In the winters they get properly snowed in and listen to their Elvis Presley CDs. In the spring they have the leisure to watch the snow melt (in a region which measures snowfall in feet, this is actually a nontrivial activity.) In the fall they sit in their living rooms and vote Republican.

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This whole business of voting Republican brings me to the next subject of the Rural Michigan Experience. There is Acceptable and Not Acceptable Behavior. It differs somewhat based upon zip code, and (while not going anywhere near politics) here I will give you a brief outline of Ways We Know We're Not in Kansas Anymore.

In urban California, it is Acceptable to eat with an eye to the global pesticide load, to calculate the total (weighted average) distance your dinner has travelled to your table (in kilometers so you can appear more European), and to Do Your Part in Keeping Organic Farmers in Business. (This has a whole host of possible extensions, including going vegan, joining those Zero Population Growth people, and Freecycling early and often.)

In the rural Midwest, it is Acceptable to get the very best yield for your farming investment that you can, and while you're at it, everybody earns their keep - even the children and the dog.

Do you see the orthogonality building?

Just before we left, Scott and I got on (yet another) health kick. What if this cancer was caused by, say high-fructose corn syrup? What if these massive quantities of this sweetener are actually feeding the cancer? We try to remain semi-un-hysterical, but when there's something like metastatic cancer, it's hard not to channel those folks in the 1950's who were wondering, what if this lung cancer really is caused by cigarettes?

Well, if the cancer liked high-fructose corn syrup, we were going to starve it out. The "HF" was banned from our house, from our children, from our cars, and (mostly) from our grocery order.

Like self-respecting Bay Area yuppies with an added burst of mortal fear thrown into the equation, we skimmed Michael Pollan's book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma." We watched Morgan Spurlock get Super Sized. We shuddered our way through Fast Food Nation. And I am too afraid to watch the one where the cow has a UPC code on it (is it Food Inc?) We already have organic vegetables delivered to the house as part of a CSA, and have kids who eat whole-wheat pasta with No Genetically Modified Ingredients, Ever! Even our dog eats green beans (and adding to this shameful behavior, she also doesn't really "earn" her keep. At least not in the Midwestern farm dog sense of earning one's keep by hunting, herding, or guarding.)

And so, after a red-eye from SFO to Chicago, a few hours running around O'Hare, a stop at McDonald's for breakfast (and a fervent hope that all the organic steel-cut oatmeal I'd eaten in the previous six days would somehow absorb or subvert the McFood we were eating at the airport), we caught the puddle-jumper to rural Michigan. Within ten minutes of landing, we had all our luggage (including the dog), and were standing in the morning sunlight, blinking stupidly, in the middle of what was essentially a giant cornfield.

There were rows and rows of corn. Each row had a little sign at the end of it.

Scott pointed the signs out to me. "Look at that! What do you make of that?"

I knew exactly what "that" was. "Darling, it's a sign telling you what brand of corn seed they planted there."

He was fascinated. "I guess not everybody eats organic corn seed raised by local farmers."

The entire two hour ride back, we passed row after row of corn. Big ones, small ones, droopy ones, floppy ones. Ones for people to eat. Ones for dairy cows to eat. Ones to feed to beef cattle that we then feed to people. I'm sure an amazing number of them were slated for High Fructose Corn Syrup glory.

The Midwestern love affair with genetically modified corn continued in the newspapers. In addition to advertisements for trailers, livestock, babysitters, and farm equipment, you can buy genetically modified seeds. On page 3, there's the ad for AVA Soft White Winter Wheat, which is moderately resistant to Fusarium (scab). It has Excellent Yield Potential, Good Test Weight, and it was developed by Hyland seeds, from Ontario, Canada.

The ads for corn, wheat, and other seeds in the paper looked just like the technology, clothing, and recreation ads we see out here. Fry's Electronics advertises network cable; Macy's advertises its fall collection, and Hawaii advertises its airfares to the Bay Area crowd, just like the good folks at Hyland seeds, in Ontario, Canada, were advertising their products, complete with full technical specifications and locations where they could be purchased, to their target market audience.

With newspaper ads like that, it was time to realize that were essentially in Rome. So for the time we were there, we ate non-organic meat-heavy saturated-fat-laden delicious (and locally grown) produce and meat and dairy.

(One of the reasons you see me going to Weight Watchers these days is that I put on 8 lbs in 5 weeks.  I didn't think such a thing was possible outside of pregnancy, but evidently with enough ice cream, anything is possible.)  

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At least my mom said the eggs were bona fide local, fresh, and free range. I asked her how she knew that.

"Well," she said. "I know they're local because I pick them up off the highway on my way back from Bad Axe. There's a farm, and they have a little brown fridge out near the road. You stick your money in the little box, and you take your eggs out of the fridge."

(Isn't it just delicious that the closest "town" is called Bad Axe, Michigan?)
"But," I pressed. "That's local. How do you know they're fresh?" I was used to egg cartons from the manufacturer, with stamped expiration dates, and a little "USDA Organic" certification plus some other verbiage saying something about the chickens getting to run around. These eggs came in cartons from all sorts of manufacturers, with a little note inside saying the eggs were not from the name stamped on the carton. (I guess the farmer sourced gently used empty egg cartons from Somewhere Else?) There was no expiration date applicable to the actual eggs in the carton.

She said, "You know how you have a hard time peeling the hard boiled eggs?" That was true. Every blasted time I hard boiled up a dozen of these, getting the peel off of it required a chisel. It turns out that's because the eggs were *too fresh* - a new concept to me - and that if the eggs are really that perfectly fresh, the wise housewife knows to let them sit a few days before trying to hard boil them. The wise housewife serves fried eggs the first three days, watching as the large lovely orangish-sunny yolks occupy up a huge portion of the whites. The wise housewife watches the thick egg yolk drip slowly down the side of the fork, onto the white buttered toast, and keeps her hard boiling activities down to a low simmer for a few days. I may be a wise housewife someday, but for now I'm still squarely in the "forced to use a chisel because she's in a hurry" camp, in all too many areas of my life.

"All right, all right," I conceded. "That's fresh. How do you know they're free range?"

I came with her the next time she bought eggs. Sure enough, we pulled into the dirt and gravel driveway. We got a carton of eggs from the rainbow of carton sizes and shapes in the little brown dorm fridge. (Is there a Society of Little Brown Dorm Fridges? Do they Facebook together? Is this fridge surprised she's packing eggs when all her other sister fridges are probably full of beer? Or, more likely, did she do a noble stint in the dorms at Michigan State, and then at Delta College, and then again at Wayne State, and after a serious Tour of Duty, is she relieved to be back in the peaceful country, servicing sober Christians who want good eggs during reasonable daylight hours? But I digress.)

We put the money into the box. I don't remember exactly, but it was probably about $2 - far less than the $6/dozen it costs to get anything comparable in the Bay Area.

My mom pointed to the back yard. Sure enough, behind the farmhouse were all the usual accoutrements: a horse, a barn, a field (full of genetically modified corn), and The Free Range. The Free Range was, of course, chock full of chickens. They were a rangin' and a rollin' and a peckin' and a scratchin'. Every so often the Working Dog would run by and they would shift to tremendous a-cluckin'.

So, dear readers, here's how you know you're getting eggs which are local, fresh, free-range, and non-organic.

They're local because you don't go very far to get them.

They're fresh if they don't hard boil well but make lovely hollandaise sauce.

They're free-range if you can see the chickens running around.

And they're not organic if you're in a part of the country where under "organic," the local dictionary lists: "paying excessive money for corn which is moldy, produce which is worm-eaten, and cows that don't produce very much milk. See also: d**n fool."