Essay: December 20
12/20/97
Bread, Honey, and Wendell Berry
by Elizabeth Hunter
“Eaters . . . must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.” —Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry’s voice blows through my mind the way the wind blew away the rain in our mountains yesterday: chill, clear and bracing. The arctic chill swept before it a spate of moist, unseasonably warm weather that had clouded and confused the last days of November. Thanks to Berry and a northwest wind, I can see more clearly now than I could a few days ago.
I borrowed a couple of books of Berry’s essays from the library on the last of those over-warm days, because of what I know of him through previous though limited contact with his writings. I know, for instance, that he inveighs tirelessly against a world where the large, the fast, and the mechanical are articles almost of faith. This world that upsets Berry upsets me too. I’ve been worrying over it the same way my dog Lucy has been worrying over the deer parts a hunter dumped somewhere up the road, and she dragged down into the yard.
For weeks I have been watching Lucy disassemble the deer’s legbone from a tangle of hide. For weeks I have been watching the deer’s head rot. Lucy has not spent much time on the head, though I noticed last time I was raking leaves that the lower half of the jaw has disappeared. I rescued the skull, since the skin had dropped away, and put it in a stump under the large hemlock tree outside my office window. I’m going to leave it there until more of what’s not bone has fallen away or been consumed by whatever is deconstructing it now. Then I’m going to bring it into the house so I can draw it. I like bones.
Because I looked at the deer’s head out my office window for days, my mind retains an image of it when it was more deerlike — when the tan and white skin was still attached, before the eyes had completely rotted away, when it still had a tongue. The eyes and tongue, particularly, made it difficult for me to look at it closely. The eyes are mirror to the soul — yes — and those rotting deer eyes somehow attached the deer remnants in the yard to the whole, living, breathing deer the hunter had separated from its life in the woods. I found I couldn’t bring myself to examine it while the eyes were reducing themselves to nothing. But now they’re gone.
In fact, except for the mental image, I’m fairly astonished to realize that skull out there was once a deer. It seems to have changed shape, more than the simple change in shape the loss of the lower jaw would explain. The skull has somehow abstracted itself. What I notice about it now are its surprising, un-deerlike aspects — how large and strong the teeth are, the way they’re stained reddish purple where they lock into the jaw, as through the deer’s last supper had been pokeberry.
As I was saying before truth broke in with all its matter-of-fact about the deer skull, I borrowed two Berry essay compilations from the library, and in the first one I opened — What Are People For? — I found much to chew over in the first essay I turned to, “The Pleasures of Eating,” which is the source of the quotation that begins this essay of my own.
I turned to the essay not because I was hungry, but because I was feeling a bit overfed. There were too many leftovers from Thanksgiving dinner in the refrigerator, and I knew that too many of my fellow Americans were expending their leftover hunger on goods of all description in the retail establishments of our great nation. Although I was not out there with them, the food in the refrigerator was making me feel more a part of the problem than the solution. I needed a little nudge from Wendell Berry, whose plainspoken prose works on me like a good dishwashing detergent on a gravy pan, to clean away the fat and get me back on track.
Before Thanksgiving I’d been inveighing against something myself, in an abortive essay I’d spent much too much time on before discarding. The only salvageable part involved a description of baking bread. Breadmaking connects me to home and hearth during the winter months the way gardening does in summer (and the extra heat from the oven comes in handy in the cold northwest corner of my house). When I started writing about baking bread, I had yet to immerse myself in its seasonal joys. My description was so lavish, brought so vividly to mind the pleasure of kneading a pliant dough, that I was forced to quit writing and correct the oversight.
Two of the three loaves I’d made that day were occupying space next to the leftover stuffing and turkey and giblet gravy, though I was making modest headway through them. Mostly, I was enjoying a slice or two, slathered with honey, for breakfast. It was about the best breakfast I’d ever tasted.
The honey came from hives my friends tend behind the glass studio they operate together. They label their honey The Glass Bee. It’s $10 a quart. I’m sure I could find cheaper honey in the supermarket, but I have several reasons for buying theirs. For one thing, it helps them make a little money and get rid of part of the very considerable harvest they have continued to enjoy, even in the face of the mite infestations decimating hives across America. Their hives thrive because he is religious about medicating them twice a year. This and other beekeeping duties require him to put on a bee-suit and veil and gloves during some very hot parts of the day and year, but he is the type of person who doesn’t let personal discomfort get in the way of doing what he needs to do. If he did, I don’t think he’d blow glass or have built the reputation he enjoys as a glass artist.
Most of my motive for buying Glass Bee honey is self-interest. Like a big, fat, honey-loving bear, I help myself to the sweetness that caring for bees and harvesting honey brings to my friends’ lives. Glass Bee honey tastes better to me. On a chilly morning when a year is winding down, nothing lifts me up like a breakfast of bread I’ve made swabbed with honey from my friends’ hives.
In an abstract and distant way, I was aware that they kept bees long before I knew the actuality of it. I stumbled on the sweet actuality one day when I dropped by their house to leave something and found them in full scale honey production. The scent, the minute I stepped in the door, was overwhelming, heady, as though I had, by stepping over the lintel, transmogrified into a bee, forty feet above ground, drunk on sourwood, cherry, and locust bloom.
Something about the light coming in their windows, and the rich brown of their wood floors is stirred into my memory of that scent and the sight of the supers with their full, unbroken combs stacked on the coffee table. Then going around the corner, into their little kitchen, seeing the separator with its petcock, and the five-gallon bucket of strained honey underneath it: she, pricking the cells her husband’s knife had missed with a comb that reminded me of the ones my grandmother used to keep her bun in place, 40 years ago. He, removing one bucket and readying another to receive more of the rich amber liquid. The whole of that scene, the sight and smell of it, just picked me up, transported me. What lucky people these friends of mine are to be doing this, I thought, from my unsticky vantage point.
“A significant part of the pleasure of eating is one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes,” Berry writes. Yes. That accurate consciousness of the source of Glass Bee honey has made me a customer for life.
Berry urges us to “learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to home.” He is right. He’s not just being doctrinaire. We are big old bears. We want to eat the world, to stuff all of it — honeycomb and honey and even bees and leaves and the blue sky and the clouds, if possible — into our mouths. Joyously, as if we could never get our fill. That’s natural, even right. We want to bury our fat old paws, our hairy muzzles into it, to slobber, to lick, and frankly, to wallow in our food, the way we did when we were messy babies, to sling that baby food around and slap our palms into it. Wasn’t that fun? Don’t you kind of remember that when you see a baby do that? (especially a baby who is not at the time in your charge). Isn’t there something satisfying about seeing a baby bend over and bury its face in the food it has smeared all over the tray of its highchair, and then jerk its head up, fling out its arms and squeal with delight?
Sure there is. The mistake we make is not recognizing that we can revisit that joy, not by cramming handfuls of food down our throats, but by spreading a slice of toast with honey and knowing the experience that surrounds us with that honey and bread. The robbing of the hives. The whirring of the separator. The pouring of the honey into the jars and tightening down the lids. Every slice of homemade bread I cover with honey, I cover too with that day I came upon my friends in full honey production. And with the day that I returned to don a bee suit and watch him take the hives apart to check for queen cells. And the day I felt the bread dough, warm and supple, stretching under my palm. It all goes on my bread, every morning, those days — those smells and sounds and the way the bees flowed out of the hives. I eat the days with the bread and honey. It tastes wonderful. As I eat it, I eat the world.
The difference between making your own bread and spreading your friends’ honey across a just-toasted slice of it and buying your bread and honey at the supermarket is the difference between sex and artificial insemination. You can make a baby both ways, but given a choice, I know which process most would choose. What I don’t understand is why, when it comes to bread and honey, so much is so readily sacrificed.