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Hunger and Thirst

AIR DATE: Wednesday, January 21st 2009
POSTED BY: EMILY HARRIS
Download the mp3 for this show.

What do you hunger for?

How appetizing does a feast of fly larvae sound? In "Hunger and Thirst," a new anthology, Northwest writers share stories of food that nourish much more than your stomach. Chicken soup that both divides and heals a relationship between mother and daughter. An aching heart soothed by a new spoon and rice pudding. A family that expresses their togetherness through shortbread and whiskey.

What are your stories of food - and love, misery, adventure or peril?

GUESTS:

 

Food Memories
I grew up listening to stories of life on the farm by my mother who was the eldest of 13 children. They toiled in the fields seven days a week and their only meal was something she called "mush". At Christmas one solitary gift was an orange. Gunny sacks were sewn into dresses. Her education summed a total of eight years at the same one room school house. Duties and obligations forced her to stay home to help raise her siblings and work long hours in the fields.
As a grown woman I have come to value the taste of real food. Joining a co-op of like minded folks, we drive over an hour to purchase raw milk from a small farm in Yamhill, then bring it back to the city for distribution. My daughter referred to it as our "raw milk bootleg run".
Recently I worked in a four star cafe where polenta was served as a side dish on all entrees. I was constantly reminded of the irony of how the mush my mother ate as a staple in her childhood has now become a food choice on pricey menus in stylish cafes. And always at Christmas I give each of my children an orange in memory of my mother and her simple stories of food.

cinmartino —
delete me
trurl9 —
I remember camping with my father in November. We shared "quality time" freezing our buns off in the back of the station wagon as the snow flakes fell gently on Wy'east's shoulders. I'll never forget the sound of the giant flakes sizzling as they dropped into the frying pan along with the bacon. Wy'east is the Multnomah indians name for Mt. Hood according to Wikipedia.
trurl9 —
Hunger and thirst, what a complete waste of time, i am very sorry to say the Think Out Loud is typically a complete waste of time and is my least favorite program on OPB.

Most of the topics are TERRIBLE and not relevant to Oregon or current affairs.

Please, please apply some effort to your thought process when selecting new shows, at this time they are neither thought provoking or noteworthy!


civicarena —

It’s no wonder your blog does so well. Your site is well thought out, graphically impressive and full of great advice. Kudos.

Sodium Thiosulfate

helpgodme —
When I came to Oregon in 1958 as a child, suddenly robbed of the daily sunlight of SoCal and thrust into the foggy, cold, miserable and colorless world of rural Oregon, I got to learn about starvation. This was before food stamps or food banks, and my father was earning a dollar an hour in a sawmill, so my school lunch often consisted of ketchup sandwiches. The smells in the cafeteria were the rations of Tantalus -- this was also before the days of free school lunches, back when its cost of one quarter was paid in silver coin -- so when I got off the school bus, drooling over the macaroni and Kool-Aid supper to come in a few more hours, my nose located a blackberry patch somewhere in the woods. On the way there, I spotted a slug, but I wasn't that hungry yet. Presently I came upon the ruins of an old cabin, which blackberries had converted into a giant support cage. They were at the pinnacle of ripeness, and there were billions of them.

Some will say that a small child cannot eat two quarts of unwashed blackberries after school without suffering digestive upset. They are wrong. For one glorious week of my life, I ate blackberries as my staple diet, not counting the morning gruel or the evening crust of bread. To wash them down, I drank open water from a nearby spring, another thing you can utterly forget about doing in 2009. Feasting on those simple berries probably gave me the vitamin C overdose necessary to survive a childhood in a world full of smokers -- in those days, there were ashtrays on airplanes, hospital waiting rooms, and on theater seats, and my parents smoked even in the bathtub, not to mention inside the car during drive-in movies, so I was a pack-a-day secondhand smoker by age 10 -- and a full tummy. Even today, I don't like to cut blackberry vines.
jefftaylor —
I loved the Reyes poem ! Paiute . . . . was that the correct title?

I'd love a copy
sp88888 —
The title is Piute. It was originally published in his collection of poetry "A Suitcase Full of Crows."
Emily Harris —
I was very surprised to learn that during the Irish potato famine when so many Irish people starved, that Ireland was exporting food.

Exporting food.

Selling food and sending food away from Ireland.

When their own people were starving.

Ah, Conservative family values. So "Compassionate".
Tom D Ford —

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