In a Time of Unrest, Consider World Peas

My grandparents were subsistence farmers in the Kootenays. The family lore is that they worked all the time. But when I think about it today, and at this time of year, I see their lives through a different lens.

The season of harvest — a period of picking, preparing and preserving — was a blur of work. Apples and vegetables were stored in the root cellar, and everything that could possibly be canned lined the walls of the basement in an army of glass jars. Peaches, cherries, tomatoes and a bounty of other items were all carefully labelled in my grandmother’s spidery handwriting.

My grandparents worked a great deal. But looking back on it now, I realize that they also spent a lot of time enjoying the stuff of life. The moments that I remember the most vividly always happened in the kitchen, usually in the course of preparing yet another enormous feast. While I chopped stuff or pulled the pin feathers out of a chicken carcass, my grandmother told one story after another about her childhood. “Hellion” doesn’t quite do her justice: her salad years were something like The Little Rascals meets A Clockwork Orange, except that there were always horses involved. Afterwards, she’d sit back and enjoy post-dinner discussions with the family (known to us as “the time of tall tales”) that seemed to last for days.

Once the dinner dishes were done and we’d scraped the leftovers into a bucket fed to the chickens, my grandparents retired to the living room to watch television. While my grandfather slumbered in his chair, my grandmother drank homemade wine, getting rowdier as the evening progressed. She’d interrupt our dedicated viewings of Little House on the Prairie with snarky comments about the action onscreen. We’d yell at her to stop to making fun of Dean Butler, the actor who played the protagonist’s romantic interest, Almanzo Wilder, whom our grandma insisted on calling Zalldamo.

This time of year is particularly laden with memory. With the summer drawn to a close and the colder weather socked in for the long haul, I well remember when the season of slowing down began in earnest. I still think of the fall as a hunkering-down period, with days dedicated to reading books and kicking up leaves on long walks in the crisp air. It has always seemed like a time for reflection, time for staring out the window at either the cornucopia of changing colours — shades of russet, loden and burnt umber — or conversely dark sheeting rain, when a cup of tea and a woolly sweater are the keenest pleasures known to humankind. A time of peace, if you will.

But peace isn’t exactly in wild abundance at the moment. Over these past few weeks of 2023, war, climate collapse and incipient disasters of every conceivable stripe leapt out of the undergrowth and savaged people’s state of mind. And peace seemed like the most distant and unattainable thing. A faraway bird, so high overhead that you could barely make it out anymore, much less hold it in your hand.

So, how to get it back?

Make soup.

Ok, give me a moment.

When you cook soup from scratch, a degree of preparation is required. First off, a trip to the store to buy ingredients. Things like carrots, potatoes, garlic, onions, stock and a good glug of red wine for heartier fare. A glug for the chef is entirely appropriate. Soup is the only way to make kale palatable, so go wild with that stuff.

After procuring everything that you need, the chopping stage begins. Put something pleasant on in the background, such as a true-crime podcast or maybe an old-timey musical. Now, it’s time for the slicing and dicing, a period of slow and steady work. Measured activity that will take you away from the screech and howl of the daily news cycle.

Slide everything into a giant pot, set to a slow simmer, then sit and stir and stare into space. Time spent doing something physical with your hands seems to free up the mind to wander, gathering mental daisies, roaming about like an antelope or maybe a mountain goat. Let it doodle about, drifting from Grade 4 memories to speculation on romantic entanglements. When every free moment is crowded with options to take up your attention, daydreaming has become something of a lost art. But in this free-floating, soap-bubble meander, new, potentially radical things can occur.

Daydreaming has some useful things to teach us, namely about the capacity of the human brain for imagination. There is something extremely useful, even potentially revolutionary, about imagining other possible realities. As the inimitable Ursula K. Le Guin put it, one of the reasons that artists tend to be scooched to the fringes of society by the powers that be is that they embody the ability to envision other options — other worlds than this.

Humans are so inundated with reactionary stuff, be it the news or the latest Netflix show, that it’s rare to have time to unwind one’s self from the blitz of exterior narratives. When you have the time and expanse to think about things without other forces directing the show, curious stuff, like shy forest creatures, begins to peek out from the tangled undergrowth. Consider soup making as a path or prompt to step away from screens. Then these creatures of imagination fully emerge, maybe even take over.

But soup-making needn’t be solitary. The unbridled pleasure of cooking and conversing in the kitchen is one of life’s greatest joys. Meanwhile your soup is burbling away, coalescing into something affirming for both body and soul.

Any recipe worth its while can be endlessly adapted, ingredients added or subtracted, depending on what’s kicking around in the back of your cupboard. The joy comes from making it your own, throwing in a last dash of something to kick it over the top from good and pleasing to utterly sublime. One of my favourites: white bean kale soup.

Soup is more than a delicious meal. It’s also a handy metaphor for community and generosity. And making enormous batches of soup means that they can be shared. Neighbours, friends, family, even strangers on the street can be provided with jars of nourishing goodness. So, fill spare containers with extra portions and take some to the neighbours. Maybe they will be inspired to do the same.

Peace through soup might not solve the most dire problems of humanity. But making and sharing it is a gesture towards common ground and a warm full belly. What we all need in this darkening time.