FRUITCAKE CONFIDENTIAL

In 1970 I was invited to spend the Christmas holiday with the family of my best friend, Jimmy. They had rented some cabins somewhere near the North fork of the Feather River and were planning a backwoods Christmas with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Jimmy's mom, in an obvious attempt to avoid squabbling or outright mutiny, allowed each of the 12 kids to invite one friend. I was one of the chosen. It was to be my first Christmas away from my home and family.

Jimmy's dad was an accomplished chef way before it was cool to be one. He was also a chess grandmaster who had once beaten Bobby Fischer in an exhibition match. He delighted in playing against us without even seeing the board, calling out moves from the kitchen while preparing abnormally large cuts of meat and drinking goblets of Carignane he made in the family basement. He predictably thrashed us, adding to our shame by occasionally electing to use only his king and pawns. He looked a little like Patrick McNee of The Avengers TV series and drove James Bond's Aston-Martin DB-5 (sans ejector seat). Alas, for this trip the DB-5 remained in the garage and we piled in the Country Squire, caravaning up the I-80, alternating between KFRC-AM and KYA "Boss Radio" all the way. The new Jackson 5 Christmas album was getting the kind of super heavy, payola-scented rotation that would make even a Clear Channel executive blush. After Michael saw Mommy kiss Santa Claus for the thousandth time, we finally rolled into camp, briefly fought over sleeping arrangements, and then went fishing.

Our bait was a vicious, finger-pinching bug called a hellgrammite that we scraped from under rocks at the river's edge. At the time I thought it was some kind of beetle. I've since learned that it is, in fact, the large, aquatic, carnivorous larva of the North American Dobson fly. If its larva is that menacing, I never want to meet a fully grown Dobson-probably capable of swooping down to carry away and devour pets and children. I am what you might call an unlucky fisherman (if unlucky can be defined as flailing about in the water, hooking myself in the head or occasionally being beaten up by other fisherman) but that day I could do no wrong except for once (OK, twice) when I set my hook too excitedly and yanked a fish out of the water hard enough to get it stuck in the upper branches of a Douglas fir. With Christmas right around the corner, it was screaming for decoration anyway.

Fish must find fresh hellgrammites as succulent as we find fresh fish. We caught our limit and Jimmy's dad prepared pan-fried brown trout encrusted with toasted almonds and flambéed with a flask of kirshwasser confiscated from one of Jimmy's older sisters. With our campfire ebbing, the kids wanted to make s'mores after dinner. The smaller children employed that time-tested toasting technique whereby the entire mallow is first intentionally set aflame and then the youthful operator swings the sugary inferno nearest whatever objects appear most flammable. The blackened shell is eased off like a crispy slipper to reveal a warm nugget of marshmallow ambrosia. Graham crackers, chocolate squares, and first aid cream all at the ready.

Sitting by the fire, I declined the s'mores and used the surrounding confectionary pyrotechnics as a diversion while I stealthily slipped a foil package from the pocket of my down jacket. (In Berkeley in the '70s, by law everyone had to own a down jacket, usually one size too small and always filth-glazed around collar and cuffs). In hindsight I know what happened next was due to my decision to not at least pretend to toast a marshmallow. Everything seemed to happen at once: Someone asked what I was eating-and before I could begin to formulate a cover story, my wedge of Grandma Bea's fruitcake was snatched up and passed among my companions like evidence of perversion. "Fruitcake! You actually brought fruitcake!" Even the adults tittered at my indignity. This was my first (but by no means last) exposure to the irrational hostility held by so many against this old-fashioned, fruit studded symbol of merriment and gaiety.

I only cite this anecdote as evidence that fruitcake had already begun to lose respect in the 1970s. And as fruitcake lovers everywhere have been made so painfully aware, with each succeeding year the arrival of the holidays now ushers in an inevitable round of increasingly merciless fruitcake hilarity.

Columnist Russell Baker's essay entitled "Fruitcake Is Forever" diagrams the lineage of a family heirloom fruitcake with roots back to 1794, which had once been a given to George Washington. Baker explained that "Washington, with his high-flown view of ethical standards for government workers, sent it back with thanks, explaining that he thought it unseemly for presidents to accept gifts weighing more than 80 pounds." In 1991, Harpers Index rated the density of the average fruitcake as that of mahogany, aptly demonstrated by Johnny Carson who arranged to have a fruitcake delivered live to his show… with a forklift.

Finally, adding icing to the (fruit) cake, The New York Times reported on a poll asking 1,000 adults what they did with fruitcake: A mere 28% reported actually consuming it, 38% said they gave it away, 13% used it as a doorstop, 9% scattered it for the birds, 4% threw it out, and 8% couldn't remember what the heck happened to it.

If one component of America's hysterical fruitcake anxiety is due to its preternatural capacity to be liquor-soaked, frozen, defrosted, and then served from one year to the next, shouldn't we then find it ironic that each year as the holidays loom, so many journalists and comedians-most of whom we know to be liquor-soaked themselves-insist on defrosting last year's fruitcake jokes to serve up to their audiences? Is it feasible that the merciless mocking of the innocent fruitcake reflects the zeitgeist of a cynical nation where a joke is now more precious than a tradition? To be honest I have no idea and just made that up because it sounded good. But after exhaustive interviews with numerous antifruitcakeians, I have learned that nearly all of them have only experienced the mass-produced, store-bought, psychedelic red and green festive depth charges so appreciated by FedEx and the postal service due to their virtual indestructibility during shipping and handling during the Christmas crush. Although fruitcake's earliest appearance was in ancient Egypt-appropriately included among entombed artifacts intended to last an eternity- no one is certain how it became synonymous with the holiday season. One English friend tells me that the tradition of tossing fruitcake slices to Christmas carolers dates back to Dickens. She added that today some of the more cautious nocturnal choirs have taken to wearing bike helmets in the event an entire fruitcake is lobbed from a balcony.

I believe that the American fruitcake tradition, having lost both flavor and significance, is floundering for a reason: It seems that there is some confusion between a thoughtful soul taking the time to bake and distribute a half dozen homemade fruitcakes and some factory in Texas that manufactures 2 million in 90 days. Comparing the two is like comparing canned tamales with the real deal. One is purely commerce, the other an act of love.

This year I challenge you to flout popular opinion and your best judgment… and make fruitcakes. Use my recipe or use your own. Forget artificially colored, neon-bright candied fruit and use the real thing, fresh or dried. Toast the nuts. Don't use any spices purchased before the invention of the cell phone. And when making fruitcake (or anything else, for that matter), just use ingredients that taste good. Regardless of what any recipe calls for, using an ingredient that looks creepy and tastes repellent just isn't the key to good eating. Proudly eat your fruitcakes warm, right out of the oven, with whipped cream. Or if you prefer fruitcakes able to withstand the ravages of time better than yourself, wrap individually in cheesecloth and douse every few days with liquor. Keep in mind that in choosing the latter, one is ultimately left with an important decision: Which lucky family member is worthy of inheriting one of these durably delectable monoliths in a Christmas yet to come?

KLINE FARM: A VISIT TO ANOTHER WORLD

Back in mid-June I had the privilege of visiting the Kline dairy farm in Fredericksburg, in north-central Ohio. The Klines, consisting of David and Elsie, their daughter and her husband and their babe-in-arms, farm 120 acres, growing feed for their livestock as well as their own vegetables, potatoes, and grass-fed beef.

Of their 120 acres, 75 is plowable and the balance is in woodland, orchards, and barns. Of the 75 plowable acres, currently 12 acres is in oats, 18 acres in corn, and the rest in hay and meadows. They use a crop rotation derived from one dating back to the early 1800s from the Rhineland and the Palatinate; the original rotation was wheat-hay-corn-oats but they have dropped the wheat. They plow with horses, avoiding tractors to avoid compacting the soil.
They milk 35 head of Jerseys ("the cow for the dairyman who likes to read," David says), selling the milk they don't keep for their own uses to Organic Valley, a cooperative of organic dairy producers. They graze their dairy and beef cattle in the meadows, confining them with a moveable electric fence in order to contain the manure in a limited area and let it get hooved into the soil to maintain soil fertility, and moving them every 12 hours to new pasture.

The entire operation is managed by the four adults. (David's answer to the question "How many work on the farm?" is "Quite often, none.") In fact, they start milking around 4:30 in the morning and are done by 6:30; they have breakfast and an hour or so to read and relax; then to the field, on days when they need to go to the field, around 8, take an hour and a half for lunch, start the afternoon milking at 4:30, are done by 6:30, and don't work in the evenings. Sounds pretty good to me.

The Klines are Amish, and live in an Amish community. Horse-drawn buggies roll along roads unmarred by utility wires or poles, through gorgeous rolling hills dotted with farmsteads and a produce auction house at which buggies and pickup trucks share the parking lot.

I grew up in Southern California; I came late to farming, inheriting no farming tradition whatsoever and coming into farming in a purely commercial environment where all agriculture is irrigated with water supplied by enormous pipelines and pumps from vast dams. Almost everyone grows for the packinghouse, for wholesale nationwide or for export. Listening to David talk about his operation was like hearing a (purely benign) representative from a different planet. Scratch that: It wasn't like hearing from another world, it was hearing from another world.

The Amish are descendants of the Swiss radical Reformation, invited to Pennsylvania by William Penn to maintain a distinct way of life unmolested by civil or religious authorities. To this day they speak "Pennsylvania German." They have a dual-kingdom theological tradition, maintaining the church separate from the world. Their religion values quiet righteousness, obedience to the community, and plain living. In the early 1900s they said no to tractors (bad for the soil), no to the automobile (I didn't get a reason why), no to the telephone (in favor of face-to-face communication). As far as I can tell, they have wrestled with issues related to "living apart" and cultural change from their beginning.

Being and remaining Amish in contemporary United States cannot be for the intellectually lazy. The relationship to technology is far more nuanced than you might think from the fact that they get around in buggies. Here are a few more things David Kline said:

They like to farm with horses because it limits the amount of land they can farm, which they feel serves their community. (He didn't say it but I suspect they like giving the horses real work to do as well.) They have church services every other Sunday. Twice a year, in the Easter season and at the end of Fall harvest, they have preparatory services before communion at which they do two things: They ask forgiveness of those they may have harmed, and they consider questions of technology-cell phones, cars, recorded music, electricity, that kind of thing. A new technology will be accepted when everyone reaches agreement that it will not harm the community; the onus is on the technology to prove not only its utility but its benignity.

A side note on horse plowing: Steve Sprinkel, Ojai-based organic farmer, merchant, and cultural critic, spent a number of years working as an organic certification inspector for Indiana Certified Organic. He says that one year his inspections included an Amish farmer. The Amish farmer, Steve says, got 42 bushels to the acre in a very wet year "when everyone else got 20s and maybe low 30s. His row spacings were 10 inches wider than others; he was able to make frequent entries to cultivate when it dried down when the tractors could not get in, and because of low compaction the bean plants had many side branches and the beans were loaded all the way to the ground. The plants were twice as prolific and the others were pretty spotty, low yields. And the weed pressure due to rain and no cultivation was humiliating to the tractor farms."

Regarding technology at the Kline farm, I saw a Bobcat (a small diesel-fueled frontloader with a very tight turning radius) in a shed. They have milking machines; they run them by operating a small Honda engine for about 20 minutes, which charges a 500-gallon compressed-air tank; then they turn off the engine and operate the milking machine by compressed air. They skipped getting their homes wired-they went straight from Coleman lanterns for household illumination to photovoltaic cells. They use 12-volt electric fence technology as a way of keeping their herd confined while moving it around to different parts of the pasture. Their pasture and orchard grasses are improved varieties, which they bring in from the Netherlands. They think American plow technology is lame: David says the United States stopped innovating in plows in about 1930 because we dealt with deficiencies in plow design by putting more power into the tractor; but in Europe, where fuel costs more, they've continued to innovate. For horse-drawn plowing, obviously the efficiency of the plow is extremely important, so they get plows from Norway and adapt them locally for horse-drawn use. And oh yes, because he writes for Farming Magazine, David has e-mail.

My visit to the Kline farm stunned me. Can you imagine a Southern California community that says "We like our enterprises small because we think it best serves us all"? It's like a deliberately naïve business model: We'll just use this ancient technology because it works, thank you, and keeps all of us gainfully employed at interesting work.

The Amish, who understand themselves in terms of ancestry and community, I suspect suffer from issues of excess of community in ways that I can't even imagine. But that's because they have an honest-to-god actual community. (They even have a word for it-gemeinschaft-and the fact that they have word to refer to it means they're aware of it and talk about it.) Out here, our communities are cobbled together based on recreational preferences or workplace identities or whatever we can put together. Not having real community, we suffer from issues of its absence.

One thing is sure: they have a much saner conception of the role of food and of food production. David says, "There's no such thing as a post-agricultural society." He also says, "The quality of life begins with the food." And, "Our only health insurance is a sensible diet of food grown on healthy soil."

THINKING GLOBALLY, ACTING LOCALLY

By Jane Handel

Last Autumn I acquired a Pixie tangerine tree. Not long afterwards, I learned that Wangari Maathai had received the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize. As soon as the danger of another frost seemed unlikely, I planted my tree in her honor.

I often wander around my garden in the morning, trying to clear my head before plunging into the day's work; I examine the progress of what is there and think about how to make the garden better and improve my life in general. While pulling the occasional weed or deadheading a wilting rose, my thoughts tend to meander aimlessly. But increasingly, those thoughts have been crowded by feelings of anxiety for this fragile planet of ours that just seems to stagger from one environmental and humanitarian crisis to the next.

Because I have long believed that there is a connection between our personal lives and actions and the problems we witness in our communities and the world, at moments like this I try to imagine specific ways in which I can take action to make things better.

Planting a tangerine tree is obviously just a symbolic gesture, but because of its special dedication, it often reminds me of Professor Maathai and the extraordinary work she has done and continues to do. Because of her, when I look at this particular tree some of my feelings of anxiety are allayed, and although I've planted many trees in recent years, each with its own promise of a future that the planting of any tree signifies, my Pixie grows as a special talisman of hope.

In his presentation speech for last year's prestigious prize, Professor Ole Danbolt Mjos, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said of Wangari Maathai, "She has taken a holistic approach to sustainable development that embraces democracy, human rights, and women's rights in particular. She thinks globally and acts locally." For an individual like Maathai, those latter words resonate in far-reaching ways-they are not merely bumper-sticker rhetoric.

This remarkable woman, the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate, the first woman professor at the University of Nairobi, the first African woman to win the Nobel Prize, with courage and perseverance has accomplished her goals against all odds. In her country, Kenya, during the second half of the 20th century, 90% of the country's forests were destroyed. Witnessing the effects of this deforestation firsthand, as a biologist, Wangari Maathai understood the ramifications of soil erosion. In 1977, on World Environment Day, she planted nine trees in her backyard and founded the Green Belt Movement. Since then she has succeeded in mobilizing mostly poor women to plant 30 million trees. Maathai has devoted her life to grassroots activism for women's rights and the environment-two issues that are inextricably bound for African women in particular. Her efforts caused her to be repeatedly imprisoned, beaten, and tear-gassed during Kenya's former authoritarian regime, but despite many years of adversity Maathai has prevailed. In 2002, she was elected to Kenya's Parliament, and since 2003 she has served as her country's deputy minister of environment, natural resources, and wildlife.

In Africa, women are primarily responsible for tilling the soil, planting, harvesting, and preparing food from the crops they grow for their families. When deforestation helps turn cropland into desert, they must travel longer distances seeking water and arable land. The introduction of commercial farming has further degraded the environment and made small individual farms and the age-old practice of biodiversity increasingly difficult to maintain. The Green Belt Movement has provided thousands of women with the educational resources to understand the connection between protecting the environment and quality of life. By planting trees these women empower themselves by taking charge; they see that their goals are attainable. The trees grow. They improve the watershed, provide shelter, food, and income. In Kenya, trees were also planted in many places specifically as symbols of peace and used to mobilize Kenyans toward a democratic government and a culture of peace.

Wangari Maathai believes that by protecting our sustainable resources, conflicts over them will be reduced and a more secure peace will be possible in the world. By healing the earth's wounds we heal our own. The Nobel Committee clearly agrees with her philosophy. It has always had a broad approach regarding how the world can advance along a path to peace, but by awarding Maathai the Nobel Peace Prize the committee affirmed that peace can also be achieved through environmentalism.

Ventura County has laws in place to protect certain kinds of trees, but not everyone honors those laws and many find ways to circumvent them. Orchards, of course, are not protected by anything other than the landowner's intentionality, so whenever I pass one that has been reduced to piles of tree corpses and dust, my heart sinks and I anxiously check back repeatedly to see what has become of the acreage. Inevitably, I breathe a deep sigh of relief whenever I see a new orchard planted to replace the old and feel grateful to live in a community that doesn't encourage extensive development. But it is up to each of us as members of that community to make sure a system of governance is in place to protect the environment-and that is an ongoing challenge.

I know that I am not nearly as vigilant about keeping informed and mobilized regarding all the "issues" that threaten our collective quality of life. I probably spend too much time wandering around my garden, agonizing about it all instead of doing more to "make a difference." Sometimes I just feel like Scarlett O'Hara and want to "think about it tomorrow." But then I see my flourishing Pixie tangerine tree, which has more than doubled in size in just a few months; I breathe in the sweet fragrance of its first delicate white blossoms, and feel a rush of excitement when I see the miniscule tangerines revealed as the petals drop. And, again, I feel hope. Maybe my children's children will someday know the pleasure of eating its sweet fruit, and as we peel tangerines together, I will tell them the story of Wangari Maathai and how she planted trees and thereby saved the world.