More Or Less Cooking

It showed up in our refrigerator one day—round and pink and wrapped in plastic stamped "Bologna." It stayed there for almost a week, and no one was quite sure how it got there. Unlike the lettuce and tomatoes around it, it never started to wilt or discolor; we decided it must have a half-life equal to that of plutonium.

Every time I opened the refrigerator that week, the sight of it brought back fond memories of Wonder Bread and "lunch meat." And I silently acknowledged the secret I had kept these three years: Before Sojourners I was a Cheez Whiz junkie.

Some old patterns die hard. For some of us the temptation to revert to a mainstream existence comes at the point of less privacy, secondhand clothes, or $15 a month spending money. For others the struggle has been food.

I arrived at Sojourners determined that my adjustment would be easy. My first kitchen task in my new household was to "make milk." Those of us who grew up in central Pennsylvania got ours from cows; I had never heard of "making milk." But I went to the large bins by the refrigerator as directed, took out a cup of white powder, and mixed it with water. The children later used the results for glue, and I have since been given directions in how to tell the difference between flour and milk powder.

The most important considerations in how we eat at Sojourners are nutrition and economics. Meat, usually chicken, is a part of our diet only once or twice a week. Paying attention to complementary protein and balance, we rely heavily on eggs, cheese, rice, pasta, salads, and beans of all shapes and colors—not to mention the omnipresent peanut butter.

Many years ago, about the time I discovered that pimentos don't grow in olives, I came to the realization that I really don't like vegetables. I always thought that vegetarians were somewhat unbalanced people who just happened to like vegetables a lot. I grew up feeling that God had saved up all his creativity for animals, plaguing us with a barrage of vegetables—broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, asparagus—all resembling miniature trees and similar to one another in their blahness.

But spices are the variety in our life. With the right seasoning, any vegetable can be well-disguised and tasty. This is not true, however, of zucchini. I can spy a zucchini in any casserole, bread recipe, or spaghetti sauce. Like rabbits, zucchinis seem to multiply just by looking at them, and we are overrun with them all summer long.

We have been known to live by the motto, "With enough ketchup, anything can taste like hamburger." This is true with lentilburgers, but was not the case with "texturized vegetable protein," a leatherlike substance that finally disappeared from our shelves for good last year.

"Stir-fried" is as common a term around here as "anti-nuclear." One dish that gets to our tables with some regularity we affectionately call "Rice and a Thousand Weeds," made by lightly frying all the vegetables left in the refrigerator at the end of a week. For those meals that have been overwhelmingly liked and appear often on our menu, we are most grateful to Doris Longacre who gave us the More With Less Cookbook.

Since our community numbers 40, we have the benefit of many traditions and specialities—Millie Bender's Mennonite pies, Janice Johnston's Texas-style chicken enchiladas, David Calder's down-home Mississippi biscuits and sweet potato pie. Dan Goering mixes up fine homemade ginger and root beer, and David Fitch can make wine out of anything from boysenberries to beets. We try as much as possible to make our own yogurt, bread, granola, and salad dressings, and grow bean and alfalfa sprouts year-round.

We buy most of our staples and produce from the Euclid Food Club, a cooperative which we and our neighbors run out of the basement of one of our households. We try to avoid foods laden with preservatives and eat less-processed foods, such as brown rice instead of white, whole wheat flour instead of bleached, honey in place of sugar. At the supermarket we shop with political considerations in mind, avoiding those products we know to be tied to exploitation in this country or the Third World—for example, Nestle products and those which are part of the United Farm Workers boycotts. We recognize that we can't be ideologically pure on this issue, and we find that the formulation of our views on food is a continual learning process.

One of our more creative sources of food is David Fitch, a member of Sojourners and a research psychologist for HEW. On summer weekends David tends a garden at Dayspring, the retreat center of the Church of the Savior. And in the cooler months, David can often be seen on his way home from work in coat and tie, leaning over huge garbage bins behind suburban grocery stores. There he finds outdated but still edible food, which has included such luxuries as sausage, 35 half-gallons of ice cream, and three dozen pints of whipping cream.

Responsibility for cooking the evening meal is rotated among all adults in each living situation. Occasionally one of us produces a "Black Hole Souffle," or a miscalculation renders enough chili to feed us, the eight neighborhood kids playing on the front porch, and all the visitors at Sunday worship that week. We have learned that food, like most other aspects of our shared life, must be taken with humor and flexibility, but rarely with a grain of salt.

Joyce Hollyday was an associate editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.