Living by Hand and by Heart

In an age when fancy gadgets and smart devices are easily accessible, working with the hands brings a renewed sense of purpose.

When everything is done by hand, from garden to plate, there is intention and grace behind each dish. Klaus Nielsen/Pexels

I was thinking about the Popeil Kitchen Magician.

If you’re dicing potatoes, carrots, and parsnips for a pot roast, it’s unwise to let your mind wander while wielding sharp instruments, and I lost track of the moment. Were this the 1970s, and I a Middle American home cook, I‘d have just popped these roots and tubers into the Kitchen Magician like tennis balls in a practice gun. In goes the parsnip, out come stew cubes. Simple! Quick! Easy! All for $49.99. But wait, there’s more: Tonight only, we’ll toss in the Popeil Pocket Fisherman for just $9.99.

Strange where your mind goes while cooking.

But my hands never wander, and that’s the foundation of this epiphany. I’ve never had a Kitchen Magician, nor a Veg-o-Matic, nor a Chop-o-Matic, because I believe that there is intrinsic value in handwork—in the garden, around my farm, and especially in the kitchen. I prep everything by hand, I don’t use the timer on my oven, there’s no crockpot in the cupboard (maybe there’s a crackpot in the kitchen), and people who ask for my recipes are invariably flummoxed by discussion of the ultimate question: “How long do you cook it?”

“Until it’s done.”

“How do you tell?”

“Check it.”

“How?”

“By hand.”

“But how do you do that?”

The author harvested 75 ears of corn after turning the bed and doing the weeding, planting, watering, tending, and harvesting by hand. Eric Lucas

The universe gave us hands for a reason, so it’s obnoxious that billions of people now think that the way to do something is to prompt an artificial intelligence (AI) dingbat in your Alexa-Siri-Gemini-HAL device sitting on the kitchen counter next to the forlorn knife rack Grandma gave you for a wedding present back when people made fresh bread by saving potato water and mixing it in the dough. By hand! Imagine! No bread machine.

“Hey, Google, how do I boil water?”

Heaven help the human race.

Hands-on adventures here at Owl Feather Farm begin long before any cooking in the kitchen.

The author's four-legged assistant, Blue. Eric Lucas

My entire garden is in raised beds, and each spring I turn each bed by hand using a super-sturdy garden fork. In the extra-narrow beds from which pole beans reach for the sky on a trellis, I turn the dirt with a hand trowel.

“You know,” rubberneckers say, “they make little self-drive tillers that do that for you.” Maybe so, but:

• I get deeper and more thorough cultivation by hand.
• I can stop periodically and pitch away winter weeds—by hand.
• I crumble stray clay globs by hand.
• If you won’t get your hands in the dirt, are you sure you want to grow things?
• I’m saving $720 per year on the health club membership I don’t need.

The other day I was pulling weeds by hand, ruminating on a really nice Los Angeles Times health essay I had read online. It offered “five easy exercises for your hands, wrists, forearms, and elbows to alleviate desk job aches and pains.” Luckily, the exercises aren’t as complicated as the headline: Slowly roll your wrists inward and outward, five to 10 times each side. I try that with a footlong piece of bindweed. Nope. Still have to pull straight up.

Over in the UK, The Telegraph has a six-step program for arthritic hand pain relief. Don’t have arthritis yet? Hang on, it’s coming. The UK regime is way more complicated and, if carried out in full, requires about five hours of multi-step exercises involving items such as therapy putty, which I didn’t even know existed. At Owl Feather Farm, we have issued an executive order declaring subterranean clay to be “therapy putty” whenever it nears the ground’s growing surface. We do not subject it to deportation, just dissolution.

Using manual tools provides the satisfaction of a direct connection to the earth. Olezzo/Shutterstock

Please note that all of this handy-dandy stuff isn’t a religion. There’s no doctrine; excommunication isn’t possible. It’s best not to take this to extremes. I don’t use a mortar and pestle to grind up garlic, hard cheese, and basil for pesto—my wife’s parents gave me an amazing Cuisinart for that.

I’ve a wonderful home kitchen flour mill (a Popeil-esque $79.95 on Amazon) with which I grind dry corn for cornmeal and grits. No mortar and pestle for that, either. But in winter I shell the kernels off the corn cobs by hand, while sitting by the fire and listening to meditative music.

I don’t water my garden using a bucket. Well, not usually; on occasion I'll fill a bucket at the spring creek that runs through the orchard if I just need to soak in a newly planted cherry tree.

Writing, of course, my lifelong trade, is done by hand. I’m not a famous romance author and have written nothing in longhand while soaking in the bath. I’ve been using keyboards since typing school in 1966. I first used a computer keyboard in 1972, and I reject dictation. The sheer action of watching words spool out steadily, letter by letter, remains a key facet of the creative process.

As for AI, read any generative content lately? It’s all over the internet, and it’s putrid. Stupid. Laughable. Except for the material OpenAI stole from me.

Let’s go back to ground zero, where everything starts, and consult the patron saint of gardens and nature, Francis of Assisi. He said:

“He who works with his hands is a laborer.

“He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.

“He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.”

Cooking by hand is rewarding. It demands that the chef be present and alert. Ground Picture/Shutterstock

Supposedly, a neighbor came by one day while Francis was hoeing his garden (see, even the most famous saints do laborious handwork) and asked, “If you knew you were going to die later today, what would you do?”

“I'd finish hoeing my garden,” Francis replied.

Cheerfully, I’m sure. Then he‘d go cook dinner by hand. Consume it by hand. Clean up by hand. Maybe, then, he’d heed a call from above. That’s the hand of God, actually.