This is not a food blog and yet, it’s hard not to have food on the brain while reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Food, and the plants and animals they used to be, and farmers, and the big machine (or multiple interconnected machines?) that is the world wide web of manufacturing food, selling it, and consuming it.

I came across this book review the other day of How the World Eats by Julian Baggini, and no offense to the author but I don’t need to read it. From the review alone, I understand as much as my lazy brain is going to take in: it’s even more complicated than Animal, Vegetable lets on.

For example:

One of [Baggini’s…] frequent themes is that organic practices do not work well for all crops in all places, and have little chance of cranking out enough food for the whole planet, while high-tech intensive farming isn’t always as harmful as critics make it out to be. Nitrogen fertilizers derived from fossil fuels are anathema to environmentalists, but Baggini argues that synthetic fertilizers “could be produced indefinitely using renewable energy.” No-till agriculture, which relies on highly mechanized equipment for sowing seeds and applying pesticide, can make for healthier soil.

Not that I was ever going to get that deep in the first place, but the article reinforced my love of vague resolutions. “Be a little better” is what I’m sticking with. Tonight, for example, I’m going to go ahead and feel good about not wasting stuff in my fridge. After being reminded that Dimond Slice Pizza is not open on Mondays —

Hold on — Dimond Slice! This unassuming joint is one of my absolute favorite food places in the East Bay. The pizza is delicious. The ingredients are fresh, organic, and I believe locally sourced, and it’s reasonably priced, too.

But it’s so much more than that. Just dropping in to pick up my online order feels so right. They’re like the Cheeseboard (a beloved Berkeley collective that has seen a few almost-as-awesome spin-offs) but just pizza, and in this blue collar Oakland neighborhood, in a space that used to be a McDonald’s, for chrissake. The people behind the counter are always so chill, and the vibe while I’m waiting for my pie conveys that I’m a part of this no-pretense Oakland community, just by being there. Oaklandish is around the corner and there’s a Peet’s a few doors further down, and across the street is Farmer Joe’s, where we do 90% of our grocery shopping (and where we spent nearly 100% of our out-of-house time during the pandemic).

I’m an introvert, so not a chatty customer making friends with the workers or my fellow pizza lovers. But the vibe buoys me up just the same. It’s part of my corner of Oakland, and I love it.

But tonight when I went to place an order on my phone Google reminded me Dimond Slice is closed on Mondays. I pulled back into the driveway, went back inside, and opened the fridge. Little bit of salad greens, last bit of Romaine, half an orange bell pepper, a few scallions, last dribble of homemade salad dressing from a few nights ago, a few bites of fresh mozzarella, and voila: giant salad! Pretty tasty, but what made it really great? Using up odds and ends in the fridge instead of letting them go bad and then throwing them out — woohoo!

And feeling good about that small victory emboldened me. What if the buttermilk in the back of the fridge is still okay, and I finally use it to make that soda bread Kai got me? It’s an Irish soda bread mix, supposedly, just add buttermilk. I’m skeptical because there’s no sugar in the mix, and no currants or anything. So basically a giant biscuit, right?

But! This girl loves biscuits! And not wasting the buttermilk would be a wonderful coup, as it’s already a week past its best-by date.

I’m doing it. I’m baking the soda bread/giant biscuit. (Can you tell I’m home alone again? And drinking red wine again?)

But you guys! Here’s what compelled me to write this post. I mean, the wine might have something to do with it, but mostly it’s just this weird heart condition I apparently have: there’s a certain syntax that makes me over-the-top wistful and contemplative, and the good people of Garvey’s (the soda bread mix folks) hit the nail on the head.

The instructions on the Irish soda bread package say:

NOTE: Breads will have a pleasing color when done, and the bottoms, when tapped, will sound hollow.

I know. Why does this move me so? I don’t get it either. But hear it again, with a roomy pause at each comma: Breads will have a pleasing color when done, and the bottoms, when tapped, will sound hollow.

I don’t understand why that’s poetry to me, but it is. I wonder if Barbara Kingsolver could explain it to me, or maybe Kate DiCamillo. Or, oh! Elizabeth Wenk, who wrote the go-to guidebook for the John Muir Trail, “the essential guide for hiking America’s most famous trail.” Because that soda bread sentence reminds me of a line from Wenk’s guidebook that has stuck with me for more than a decade. It was in the section of the guide that I read before I started the second day of my first JMT thru-hike, early into the 100+ miles of solo hiking I did between the morning my then-husband dropped me off at the trailhead in Yosemite and the day a few weeks later when my best friend met joined me at Muir Trail Ranch. I’d been sick as a dog the night before, my body expelling everything from all orifices while I suffered a raging migraine, with nowhere to escape the hot sun because it was even hotter inside my tiny one-person tent. On a rise above the trail many miles from a bathroom or running water, I lay splayed in the dirt and moaning. When I was able to summon any imagination at all, it was to imagine tapping out in the morning after just one day on the trail.

But after hours of misery I fell asleep, and by dawn I felt renewed, physically better and also encouraged by my one and only companion, my muse and my cheerleader: Elizabeth Wenk. Before starting out for the day, I read her description of the miles to go before my next campsite. And when I found myself climbing interminable switchbacks when all I wanted to do was toss my pack off and retire, this simple half-sentence of hers became my mantra and carried me up the hill: for now you are climbing Sunrise Mountain.

I don’t even want to put it in quotation marks, because I’m not sure it’s exactly what she wrote. But something like that: it’s a slog of a climb, but don’t despair: for now you are climbing Sunrise Mountain.

I kind of want to cry just thinking of it. And something about that simple note on my soda bread instructions has hit me the same way, even though I’m just in my kitchen and on my couch tonight, nowhere near the grandeur of the mountains.

So what is it about these pretty little words of understated encouragement? Is it just my stupid, simple brain feeling stupid, random things? Or is it something about how beautiful and fleeting it is just to be alive and in the moment, doing the most banal things and noticing that you’re doing them: walking, breathing, baking, eating?

Is it being alone, and having the luxury of seeing what words grab you and sink in? Being alone and walking and walking or even just sitting with nothing much to do? Being alone and acutely aware of how weird it is that we’re even alive?

Acutely aware of how beautiful the world is, and how cruel, and how the only things that matter are the things that we decide matter?

Like for me: love, beauty, and awareness. Awareness of (big and small) love and (big and small) beauty; awareness of how everything is connected; awareness of how big and small we are; awareness of how everything living dies.

A pleasing color.

Tap, tap.

Hollow sound. Tap, it’s done!

Breathe, Bethany, breathe.

Readers, real and imagined: breathe.

Breathe. For now you are climbing Sunrise Mountain.