RAGBRAI Day 1: Food Is Life
- Laurence Clarkberg
- Jul 22
- 2 min read
Updated: Jul 27
Judy and I are reading “Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World” written in 1953 by Helen and Scott Nearing. Judy describes this book, with some reverence, as the original manifesto of the back-to-the-land hippie movement. Chapter 5 opens by posing the question “What is health?” The authors then launch into an excoriating diatribe blasting the food industry for basically poisoning people. And I agree with the Nearings that poisoning is not too strong a word for what was happening then (think DDT) and what continues to happen now (think glyphosate).
I believe this, and yet I am helpless to reform my eating habits. Today is a case in point. We woke up at 5:22am to the sounds of a perky robin. I had two hard boiled eggs for breakfast. Nice and gluten free. Then we packed our tent and were on the road by 6:10. We biked about 75 miles to the next camping spot in Milford Iowa. Along the way the locals had planted funny signs luring us into gastronomic excess. The standard fare they offer to RAGBRAI cyclists is slabs of meat, pickles, pie and beer. In spite of Iowa being an agricultural state, there don’t appear to be any vegetables here. We spend the days passing by miles and miles of crop lands, but the only crops we see are corn and soybeans, which are not intended for direct human consumption.
At Granville I succumbed to a pork chop with a side of fried green beans. At May City I fell upon a delectable known as “bacon wrapped pork loin on a stick”. It was there as well that, as shown in the photo, I got pickled.
We continued down the road in this way barely burning as many calories as we consumed. Lastly we entered a Dairy Queen where I consumed an ice cream-like substance even though I know that one of its ingredients is called propylene glycol, added for texture. To be fair, propylene glycol is not exactly the same as anti-freeze, which also contains ethylene glycol.
The Nearings’ solution to the problem of processed food rampant in America is to encourage everyone to grow their own food and to process it as little as possible. They give detailed plans in Chapter 5. Judy and I like this solution and so next month we plan to begin a new project, gardening in earnest and in quantity, and raising chickens and bees, and going off the grid, and phasing out fossil fuels, and bringing back to life the two-acre property we own in Ithaca. Because food is life.
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