Food = Community = Love

You may notice that I have changed the name of this blog from Bent Fork Farm to Olympic Fork. That's because my idea for this blog has grown from telling you about my backyard garden project (which I will still do) to all types of food-related activity here on Washington State's Olympic Peninsula.

I may be an unemployed journalist, but I am still a journalist, and a freelance one at that. So it wasn't long after I started this blog that I had the strong urge to interview other local people about their adventures in growing, cooking, and eating food. By "local," I mean folks anywhere between Port Townsend (where I live) and Sekiu (where Tim lives), which is almost all the way to Neah Bay and Cape Flattery, the northwestern-most point of the contiguous United States. I'll also travel south down the Hood Canal to places like Lilliwaup, an inky-dinky unincorporated town where my mom grew up in the 1920s and '30s.

So, while my backyard project is still called Bent Fork Farm, this blog is wider in scope because, really, food is about community, and on a personal level, it signifies the offering of strength and nourishment to ourselves.

As I said before, this is not a moral or political cause, this blog. I think the reason I welcome society's intense focus on eating healthy food is because that is how I was raised. I have never had to struggle with an addiction to soda pop because my brother and I weren't raised on it. Only if we were going camping did my mom stock up on pop -- grape, cola, root beer, lemon-lime, cherry, orange Safeway pop that went on sale for 10 for $1 in the summertime. And even though we had a Wonder Bread outlet down the street from our house, Hostess Twinkies and Cupcakes were rare in our household. Potato chips? Not on my mom's grocery list. Instead, for snacks and treats, we had homemade cookies, pie, cake, and the kind of popcorn you have to shake in a frying pan on the stove, and I don't mean Jiffy-Pop either.

My mother was from a large family that didn't have much. And in Lilliwaup there wasn't much to have except for what nature had to offer: fresh fish, oysters, clams, and berries. She, who is now 92 years old, once said to me, "We were poor, but we always knew we weren't going to go hungry because all we had to do was go outside."

As for my dad, he liked to fish, so having fresh and canned salmon around was no big gourmet deal. Since we lived in the "city" of Bremerton, we weren't as generous with it as Tim's family is though. When he and I recently went to dinner at his mom's house, his sister Mary loaded me up with some Humpy (aka Pink) and Alaskan King salmon to take home.

"People think Humpy isn't a good fish," she said, "but it is. You just have to know how to cook it."

And Mary cooks it marvelously. If I ever find out how she does it, I'll let you know. I think I actually prefer it to the King.

Tim, over the years, has given me a lot of line-caught salmon, both fresh and smoked. I had a friend once tell me that, in the Northwest, if a guy likes you, he doesn't bring you chocolate, he gives you smoked salmon. And it's true.

Fresh. Local. Made from scratch. And, I would like to add, food that is eaten with people you are, at the very least, fond of. Now, all of that which both my family and Tim's have always had to offer has become "in vogue" in a way it never was in generations past. I find that kind of humorous, especially when people compete to see who can wave their organic, locavore freak flag the highest.

If I haven't made my point clear enough, I really like what this review of Adam Gopnik's book, The Table Comes First: Family, France and the Meaning of Food says:

"By viewing the acquisition and consumption of food as an ethical and moral act, we diminish the fundamental pleasure that eating food provides us. By attaching social worth and political meaning to what we eat, and hoping that consumption can make the world a better place, we will not only fail to improve the world, but in the process lose the essential fact that eating should be about enjoyment."


Amen. This is what it means to eat the Olympic Fork way.