Will Write for Food

My first impression of the Sugar Bush was, wow, this road really sucks a lot.

My second impression was, how many creeks are we going to have to drive through to find these stupid trees?

Third impression? Oh god, we’re lost in hillbilly murder woods.

We did eventually realize we were on the wrong road, when we got to the third high-water crossing. So we turned around and came back and found our way back to the rest of the flock.

It felt for a moment like I was transported back to the woods outside my town, with mud and sheet-metal sheds and the smell of something burning without any visible source of fire. And the high density of men in coveralls and boots.

About halfway through the walk to the grove, my brain made a bootleg Microsoft noise and shut down all but life-support functions and vague interest, which colored my perception of the rest of the day.

The air is crisp and cold, the sky is dotted with fluffy white clouds, and there’s about fifteen college students standing around in the woods. I poked a bag full of sap and it just felt like a rigid Ziploc bag full of water. We all looked around, took pictures, tried not to roll our ankles on fallen branches and slippery mud. A power drill was applied to a tree in a way that would have gotten me yelled at by any reasonable authority figure that saw. Bit by bit we dispersed, returning from the place outside of time, until the last five of us admitted defeat and returned to the cars, ready to rejoin the world at large. We got to taste real, proper maple syrup and warm back up near the cooker, and that was a nice time.

Real maple syrup tastes so much sweeter than I had expected it to. And so much richer as well, it made me desperately want pancakes for the rest of the week, something I tragically did not attain before the craving left me.

There is so much work and manpower that goes into making real maple syrup, it’s no small wonder how expensive it can get. Cold days and hot fires and mud in the zippers of your boots. Chapped lips and sticky gloves and wood shavings all over your shirt. I’ve never been one of those people who has to know where their food comes from, but there is something reassuring about knowing exactly where something came from before it goes into your body.

I can’t imagine the grief that would come from losing a mother and a grandmother at such a young age, with such little warning. I am fortunate enough that all of the close family members I have lost have been at the ends of long, rich lives. The most recent was my maternal grandmother. It wasn’t a surprise, but I still cried myself back to sleep when I got the seven am phone call from my mother, my freshman year of college. I didn’t have anything as concrete as frozen casseroles to eat, not with campus dining, but I remember the night before it happened, I had walked with my roommate and two other friends all the way to Dobbs. I cried over my ham and cheese sandwich.

This is not me trying to make anyone feel bad. I just have a very limited way of communicating emotions with normal human beings. Food, obviously, won’t fill the hole a person leaves in your heart. But it can fill your stomach, and when everything hurts, it is a comfort. I’ve rarely had food so filling as what you can find in a casserole dish. Casseroles unite us in grief. I don’t know I’ve ever met someone that actively chooses to consume casseroles outside of the grieving period, despite their relatively inexpensive nature and ease of preparation. There is something so human about everyone bringing casseroles to fill a stomach when a heart is aching.

At time of writing, I’m about sixteen hours out from our journey into the sugarbush and I’m legitimately hype about it. That opinion might change once we’ve hiked a half mile in and the half mile out and I still have two classes left, but for now I’m enthusiastic so let’s go!

I have only the most general concept of how sap is turned into syrup so I started with the Penn State “Maple Syrup Production for the Beginner.” I hadn’t thought about there being different flavors for different species of maple, but I guess that answers my question of whether or not I could tap the maple tree in my front yard. (It’s no, apparently. Red maple, not sugar maple). This article has more things I’ve found in a hardware store than I really expected from anything assigned as reading in a food writing class, and way more geometry than I’ve ever used in making food. There is a lot more science in making maple syrup than I originally anticipated. This is a much drier article, one lacking, ironically, in flavor text.

And so I move on to the History of Maple Sugaring, thanking this author for not using the word “syrup” in their title, because it’s starting to lose all meaning. Right off the bat, this article holds my interest a lot better, with a story and a bunch of words I hesitate to attempt to pronounce. Little wild men told the Anishinaabe how to make sugar from sap! That’s a fascinating origin story! One Ancient Aliens would love to spin, I’m sure. There’s historical documents that are food writing! People have been passionate about food writing since forever, apparently, and some of it has even lasted long enough for it to come back around to us. (And of course, another ancient practice is berated, belittled and damaged by Proselytizing Europeans. As is the nature of history, unfortunately.)

I leave you now, because I have to find something to eat, and I’ve read and written the word syrup too many times. Syrup. Syrup. Syrup. It’s lost all meaning. Syrup.

I know that we have previously established in class that “Food Writing” is an enormous umbrella term, but in all honesty, I’ve slept at least twice since the start of the semester, and it’s always nice to get a refresher. It’s also a pretty big relief to see “to be a good food writer is to be a good writer.” Not to toot my own horn, but I am generally acknowledged as at least a decent writer, which really reassures me as to my ability to do food writing well. The comment in chapter one about just writing what you had for breakfast does remind me of what my mom used to complain about seeing on Facebook, before it was taken over by eerily targeted ads and Russian bots.

I love the way that everyone in this book seems so excited about food writing, which is a real 180 from the way most books I need for classes are. The whole genre of food writing is creative writing, just not in the fiction sense people tend to associate with creative writing. “Creative” in the sense that it’s not dry description, it’s got some color in it, a little zing.

I think I’ll hang on to the idea of “write what inspires obsession in you.”

I went to go listen to Brian Hammons speak about Black Walnuts, and I actually learned a lot. Before this, my only exposure to the concept of Black Walnuts was through the wood, because I had a phase where I was extremely into carpentry and wood crafts as a whole. Black Walnut wood is actually a very valuable hardwood, good for decorative flourishes, but its shock-resistance and strength also makes it perfect for gun stocks.

Despite being more or less native to this state, I had no idea that we even had a state tree nut, let alone one that so many people like to use in baked goods or ice cream. I also didn’t know that Missouri produces, on average, 65% of the Black Walnuts on the market every year, or that they’re so insanely high in protein. And they can use the whole nut for things, like even the shell can be used as an abrasive to clean metal, which is good, because only something like 6.5% of the Black Walnut, by in-shell weight, is actually edible. Some companies are even starting to use the shells as fill for Astroturf fields, replacing tiny rubber crumbs. Of course, they’re biodegradable, so they would need to be replaced every once in a while, and I don’t really know how that would work with a football player that’s allergic to tree nuts, but I’m a writer, not a scientist, so I will leave the speculation to smarter people.

Black Walnuts seem like one of those things that I really should have been aware of, and it’s really my own fault that I wasn’t. They’re all around, all over the state, in the ice cream, on the golf course in my hometown. I’ll have to look for them the next time I find myself at the grocery store.

The Chanterelle Seeker by Janisse Ray caught my attention in particular out of the reading assignments for today. I think mostly it was because of the description of a dude that just sounds like Hozier and also EXACTLY the kind of guy you expect to run into in the woods looking for mushrooms. I don’t actually know anything about mushrooms other than that sometimes they come up in my yard before my dad runs over them with the mower, so this was kind of a look into a whole different reality, one where this store-brand folk singer has emotional attachments and reactions to mushrooms. And this man, Ancil, has managed to make a whole job about the food he’s passionate about. He’s a mushroom farmer, which I honestly had never thought of as a real job, but also a forager of mushrooms.

The woods are full of free food. Of course, most of us don’t know enough to tell the toxic mushrooms from the terrible tasting to the actually good ones. If you want to get technical, everywhere nature flourishes is full of free food, it just depends on how dirty you want to get your hands. Foraging is a much more sustainable method of acquiring food than just going to Walmart to buy it, but it takes mental and physical energy, and lots of time, which means that it’s not a viable choice for most people in this day and age.