Hello all!
Before I begin today’s essay, I wanted to make note of a small-but-mighty change. I will be adding a “Tip Jar” button to the bottom of my posts, now! This Tip Jar goes directly to my PayPal.me account. I understand that not everyone is interested in subscriptions—I know I can’t pay to subscribe to everything!—but if a post resonates with you and you’d like to throw me a dollar or two for coffee money, that’s the way to do it!
It looks like this:
Mind you: this is a zero-pressure thing. I have gotten feedback that some people want to contribute monetarily every so often, they just can’t justify a monthly/yearly subscription. So here’s to diversifying the options!
Enough with the money talk. On with the essay!
In life, we are given fruit to eat, to create beautiful things out of. We are given the power and imagination to make pies, sauces, and jars of sweetness. We are given providence, along with the ability to turn it into plenty.
But it is equally true that, in life, there are always scraps.
What do we do with the scraps? The peels? The cores? The bruised bits?
What do we do with the things we cannot eat?
Much of my personal philosophy of life comes from a deep desire not to waste anything. And I’m not entirely sure where that came from, but I think I can guess.
My mom is certainly the most direct inspiration. I’ve always jokingly described her as “crunchy-adjacent”, never a full-on hippie but definitely ahead of her time when it came to raising a child in the 90s. We were the whole-grain, stir-your-peanut-butter, echinacea-and-neti-pot-at-the-first-sign-of-a-cold family. We avoided processed treats as much as possible. I learned to look for dietary fiber on the Nutrition Facts of every package before I was ten. We washed out and reused our plastic sandwich bags.
And while I didn’t entirely understand it then (and eating Doritos and drinking soda at friends’ houses became an illicit childhood delight for a while) I have nothing but admiration for it, now. I’m just grateful I married a man who doesn’t object to living in a similar fashion, with the occasional processed treat thrown in occasionally.
I think for both me and my mom the desire to use every ounce of a resource might go a little deeper, a thread running backward through time. My Nana was like that, and my great-grandmother certainly was, as a woman who lived through the Great Depression and never really broke the habit of keeping everything, just in case. And my great-great-grandmother, a woman who raised thirteen children essentially alone because her husband was a riverboat captain on the Mississippi, certainly knew the value of every scrap, every cent.
On and on, back and back. Women who knew not to waste anything. Women who understood the power of transformation.
I think of them, these women in my family tree—most nameless, faceless—whenever I make vinegar. They crowd around the kitchen, a gathering of gentle ghosts, and watch me as I lean into what they always knew.
Making vinegar is not difficult. All it takes is the scraps from making applesauce, the peels and cores and bruised bits. The things we do not eat.
(I have heard—though I have not attempted this—that you can make vinegar from pretty much any fruit in this way. But apples are what I have, so apples are what I use.)
You steep the scraps—cores, peels, seeds, what-have-you—in lukewarm water, sweetened with a bit of sugar, for about a week. They foam and ferment, but if you’re wary and watchful then they won’t mold. When the week is up you strain away the apple scraps and let the liquid ferment for a few weeks more, sniffing every few days, waiting for that signature fragrance of apple cider vinegar to lift from the jar.
What do we do with the things we cannot eat?
Alchemy. That is what we do. God-given alchemy, a process you can only fully watch unfold under a microscope. The partnership of large beings with tiny ones, a strange collaboration. Ghosts crowd the kitchen. Ghosts fill the jar.
You give over to transformation. You trust that what you’ll make is magic, not mold. You make mistakes, you learn, and you try again. Fruit turns into scraps, and scraps transform back into fruit. Into form. Into flavor.
In life, we are given fruit. In life, we are given scraps. And sometimes, if you lean into the holy mystery of it all, you can transform one into the other.
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I love the generational content
This is so great! I love everything about this. I'm also one of those people who doesn't like to waste anything. Cut paper scraps from the kids crafts... don't throw those away, we can use them for something else! I'm learning to have a new relationship with food right now.. and also very much into how generations of people before us affect who we are today. I love this! Thanks for sharing!