Food, Fish, and Good Neighbors
On starting a garden, Wendell Berry, fish, and reliable neighbors.
A couple weeks ago, I built a raised garden bed.
It will be my first foray into growing my own food. The bed is a modest four feet by eight, requiring just over 21 cubic feet of soil.
Someone I know, who has grown his food in climates from New England to Africa, encouraged me to build three beds: each of them four feet wide and sixteen feet long. He exuded excitement and cheer as he shared his experience.
I am not sure I’m prepared to maintain that kind of garden space. Perhaps I will get there. For now, I’ll stick with one bed: four feet by eight. We’ll see how it turns out.
Over time, if all goes as planned—which it surely won’t—the garden will provide zucchini, tomatoes, cilantro, carrots, asparagus, radishes, lettuce, and spinach.
My expectations are realistic, which is to say they are low. I’m new to this. But there is reason to be hopeful.
For one: I started some seeds inside the house. They sit neatly arranged in trays by the window. I water them and check on them. A few weeks ago, while I was out of town, I was pleased to receive a text from the person who said they’d tend the seeds in my absence. It was a picture of a tiny leaf: lettuce. “They are growing!” Now there is some life in other trays as well.
With all of this, the garden has come to feel more real. I’ve managed, so far, not to mess it up. What was just an assortment of little trays of dirt now yields life—which it is my responsibility to maintain.
In addition to the aforementioned foods, I will grow sunflowers, some marigolds to keep the pests away, some butterfly flower too. I have sought guidance from books, YouTube, some podcasts, and advice from people who know more about these things than I do.
There is much to consider. I do not know much about soil. This is quite important, and I am learning. I do not yet know what I do not know. I will need some tall fencing to keep the deer out of the garden, since they are always going at my bird feeders as it is. Most of all, this garden is a step in the direction I’d like to take my life, my relationship to the food I eat and where it comes from.
Wendell Berry, in his 1970 essay “Think Little,” writes:
Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.
More and more of my decisions, the garden included, are sprung from a hope to improve my corner of the world—to be a better steward of “the place by which one is owned,” to steal another line from Berry I’ve written about before. Part of this is accomplished simply by coming to know a place better, by actively doing so. It is also accomplished by way of direct action on the individual level.
This hope, more and more, has come to feel like an obligation. A daunting one. It is easy to feel powerless when faced with the fact that much of what needs to be changed in the world seems to be out of our hands. The proper reaction to this powerlessness is not to bemoan what power we don’t have, but to enact what power we do.
It is not easy, and often not glamorous, but it is simple. Much of it requires doing little things, making little changes in your own life. Hence, “Think Little.” Pick up trash. At the grocery store, purchase less beef. Buy foods with less packaging, or find ways to obtain food without packaging at all. Buy local. Do not impose so much on the planet. Start a garden.
This past year, I made a point of being more intentional in enacting some of these ideas. I picked up lots of trash. I stopped eating red meat. Forgoing red meat was not entirely voluntary: because of a tick bite, I’ve developed an allergic reaction to the meat of any animal with hooves—but I rarely miss it. In a way, being bitten by that tick feels like a tiny rebuke from nature: get your act together; you are part of the problem.
Because of all this, I kept and ate more fish this last year than I had in all my fishing life before—connecting more directly with my dinner. This past year was one of the best of my life, largely because of how often and intentionally I exercised power over what I could: my choices, my actions, my corner of the world.
The fish I kept were predominantly scup—known as “porgy” in other locales—which are abundant, not difficult to catch and fillet, and taste wonderful. In the state of Massachusetts, I am permitted to keep 30 scup for myself, so long as they are nine inches or larger. I do not keep them when they’re that small, and rarely bring home more than three. There are practical considerations to such temperance. I could, by law, keep 30 scup; but keeping 30 scup would also mean cleaning 30 scup, and finding space for 27 or so in the freezer.
You keep what you know you will use, and are compelled to use it while it is fresh. I’d hate to waste a fish. It’s not hard to imagine the feeling is similar with gardening: I would hate to watch my lettuce grow—all the way from seedling to harvest—only to see it go to waste.
Aside from scup, I kept bluefish. I am permitted to keep three of any size, though those of smaller to middling size taste best. The taste of bluefish is often maligned. Wrongly so. If you like fish, you’ll like bluefish—especially when it’s fresh and has been dealt with properly. Bleed them right away, keep them cold. One of the fishermen in Peter Matthiessen’s Men’s Lives said: “A bluefish tastes like a fish. . .” with the issue being that “people don’t want something that tastes like a fish, they want something that tastes like a recipe.”
Being a little higher on the food chain than scup, bluefish are a stronger reminder of the fact that we, too, have our place in that chain. It is a hard thing to forget when you rip a fish’s gills and watch its blood furl out into the water or pool up in your bucket. In John Hersey’s Blues, a fisherman explains how a five pound bluefish comes to be:
I am told it takes fifty pounds of silversides to produce a five-pound blue. It takes five hundred pounds of plankton animals to produce those silversides. It takes five thousand pounds of microscopic sea plants to produce those plankton animals. The vast sea meadows, which give this northern sea great beauty in the spring, also give me and my family, indirectly, sustenance. “All flesh is grass.”
Eating a fish you caught yourself definitely enhances the experience of eating that fish. Berry put it aptly when he spoke of “enlarging” the meaning of food. A fish caught is different than a fish bought.
You feel a greater sense of obligation to the resource, partly out of self-interest, when you get your food directly. It is to your own benefit that you act in a way that ensures there will be fish for you to catch when you’d like to eat them. It is to your benefit to be a steward of the places where you fish. Pick up your trash; pick up other people’s too. It might not be your trash, but when it’s littering a spot that you care about, of which you consider yourself a steward, it is your problem.
An overarching theme here is simply to do things. Keep a fish, start a garden. Rely more on yourself.
It’s tempting, from here, to fall into a certain pattern of thinking: self-reliance, “rugged individualism.” This is not as admirable as we might believe. The sense of pride I find in the things I’ve learned to do is not rooted in self-reliance—in the fact that I can do them—so much as the fact that they give me something to offer.
Let me draw again from Wendell Berry. In his introduction to The Art of Loading Brush, he describes one of the defining aspects of “agrarian character” as:
An acknowledged need for neighbors and a willingness to be a neighbor. This comes from proof by experience that no person or family or place can live alone.
The more we learn, the more we can rely on ourselves. This is true. But the more we can rely on ourselves, the more we can be relied upon by others. We can share what we know. The more others can learn from us, the more they can rely on themselves in the future, and thus be relied upon by others. Then, they can share what they know.
In addition, the more we have to offer and are thus relied upon, the less hesitant we may be to ask for help or rely upon others. We can learn from them, and are more willing to do so having something to offer in return.
This cultivates a healthy sense of collective reliance. The more we have and are willing to offer, and the more we kindly and thankfully accept the offerings of our neighbors, the better neighbors we make.
Food is an easy path to this neighborliness.
I have found much pleasure in sharing fish with people. A friend of mine expects fresh scup tacos whenever he visits me. Partially joking, I offered to bring him a cooler full of scup as a wedding gift. We go out and catch them; I clean and cook them. We eat together.
Another friend likes bluefish. He will always take some if I have any to offer. Never will I forget the happiness I felt when he remarked upon the quality of a pair of fillets I brought him.
Once, upon spying some new co-workers of mine fishing from a jetty, I brought them a scup I’d caught as a way of further introducing myself. It wouldn’t have been the same had I offered them a fish I’d just bought at the market.
Often, I’ve been on the receiving end of such gestures. The same person who shared his knowledge of gardening once invited me out on his boat for a day. We caught bluefish, scup, and black sea bass. I went home with fresh fish, which I then shared.
I worry now that I am digressing into a laundry list of fond reminiscences—but that, in a way, illustrates exactly what I’m trying to convey. None of these memories would exist without the neighborliness that sprouts from sharing in procuring and eating food.
Starting a garden, harvesting fish, taking care of the place where you live—all of these things would qualify as “simple” acts, or measures taken to move one’s life toward “simplicity.”
This word, “simplicity,” can be mistakenly conflated with “ease.” It is simple, yes, to go catch a fish to eat. But it requires that you go catch a fish, that you are capable of catching that fish, capable of preparing it, and know how to do all of this responsibly. It is simple, too, in theory, to start a garden. But it requires you take the time to garden and do that work well. These things are not easy, but they are worthwhile and productive. They enrich our lives and make them more sustainable.
Perhaps I am overthinking things. The impetus behind all of this, after all, was a single garden bed, merely four feet by eight.
But perhaps that is also the point: all it takes is a small rectangle of dirt to make me pause and consider the ways in which I can better live my life—to bring me closer to the people in it, and to the food which sustains it. If my modest garden bed, four feet by eight, roused all of this, I can only imagine the ways in which the meaning of food—and my life overall—will be enlarged when I eventually do graduate to more beds.
I guess we’ll see.
My sister in-law lives in Rochester, Massachusetts and years ago I had gone fishing a few times on charters with her husband for Stripers. The byproduct, if you will, was Bluefish which apparently none of his friends thought very highly of. I came back to Minnesota with two coolers full of Stripers and Bluefish much to my delight.