Part of Being Real, Being Human...

garden starts • Wendell Berry • we are what we eat • strawberry + rhubarb

Apr 21, 2025

Spring ritual: garden starts at Amaltheia Organic Dairy

Part of being human is being whole—being connected to ourselves, one another, and our places. This is why I’m so “into” food…not to eat but to wonder: Where did it come from? How was it grown, harvested, made, and brought to me? What does it leave behind?

Food connects me to what’s real—to nature and nature’s seasons, to a sense of gratitude and the givenness of life, to my body and the right way to treat it, for nutrition and health but also for joy.

In case you need a reminder, food is meant to be a joy in life!

Each spring, at Amaltheia Organic Dairy’s first-of-the-season sale, I begin gathering plant starts for my garden. It’s love at first sight—4-packs of baby kale that will produce loads of greens all summer and into the fall, parsley, thyme, mint, tarragon, and tiny violas that start off in the raised bed but spring up in surprising places:

volunteer violas, a welcome delight as we come out from under months of snow

I get my baby tomatoes from Woods Rose Market; each year they seed tomatoes and peppers, tending them in greenhouses until they can trust us to take care of them which means, be careful when you plant outside! In Bozeman that means the last weekend of May at the earliest. So, I prepare myself for a few weeks of living with flats of starts on my radiator in the dining room so the plant babies can soak up the sun from a southern-facing window. When the weather begins to warm, I set them outside during the day and bring them back in at night. It’s a love thing.

Wendell Berry and the Given Life

Wendell Berry is such a prolific writer that it’s challenging to know where to start with his works. I thank Ragan Sutterfield for his book, Wendell Berry and the Given Life, which helped point me in a good direction. From the Forward by Bill McKibben:

“It is correct to read Berry’s work as a guide to the virtues, especially those usually neglected in our world: humility, for instance; or stability in time and place; or peaceableness. … Berry also bears witness—relentlessly—to a value that most of our high-consumer culture has actively disparaged: community, the idea that we are more than our individual selves, the idea that indeed we really only exist in relation to those around us, both human and otherwise.”

“Berry’s essays and poems and, perhaps especially, his fiction provide us with a working and workable account of what life might look and feel like properly lived. It’s hard to read the Gospels and not want to come away emulating in some way the life of Jesus; it’s hard to read Berry and not want to be a side-hill farmer in the southeast United States. In both cases, it’s the hard and necessary work of the reader to transpose the scene into their own lives; this insightful volume helps with that task, for which I am deeply grateful.”

And from Chapter 8: Membership; Joining the Community of Creation:

“…the local culture cannot be simply a thing on display in concert venues and art galleries, but something that will ‘preserve and improve the local soil.’”1

We Are What We Eat

Alice Waters’ slow food manifesto, We Are What We Eat, speaks to some of these same themes of belonging and adds a call for us to prioritize and nurture a culture that champions values of biodiversity, seasonality, stewardship, and pleasure in work.

Herein, a contrast of two cultures, fast food and slow food:

fast food culture with chapters: convenience, uniformity, availability, trust in advertising, cheapness, more is better, and speed
slow food culture with chapters: beauty, biodiversity, seasonality, stewardship, pleasure in work, simplicity, and interconnectedness

Each time we choose to eat, we are making a choice—towards more love and connection or something else. My life changed for the better when I began to pay attention to this.

Strawberry + Rhubarb (and how to eat all those Easter eggs)

The combination of rhubarb and strawberry speaks Spring to me and I want it on everything from morning yogurt to grilled salmon for dinner. I made my first batch of compote last week and it’s almost gone, so time to buy more rhubarb stalks.

Please enjoy these recipes for strawberry rhubarb things and, now that I think about it, how to eat those Easter eggs:

strawberry rhubarb salsa

fish on the barbie

strawberry rhubarb compote

spinach salad with honey mustard vinaigrette

egg salad

Smooth Sailing, Fix Your Food Relationship in 2025!

So this is week 16 of Smooth Sailing. We’ve covered the 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating, and I post every Monday to share my perspective on how to set yourself free from dieting thinking and live a more connected life. Please subscribe and share. Thank you so much for being here.

Here’s a recap so far, since the beginning of January:

About Love & Cookies, homepage

Fix Your Food Relationship

Week 1: Food Addict? Or Something Else?

Week 2: Health and Happiness

Week 3: Sugar “Addiction” and Primal Eating

Week 4: One is Never Enough…because None are Allowed

Week 5: Nutrition is a Thing

Week 6: Allow Yourself to Receive

Week 7: Think About Food Less + Enjoy it More

Week 8: Say Yes to No

Week 9: Your Natural Healthy Weight