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Not just a meal, but a new way of living
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Published: June 17, 2009
Updated: 06/16/2009 08:50 pm
BELEWS CREEK -- Like a lot of other people these days, Laura Frazier is committed to eating locally grown food as the right thing to do for the environment. But she's going one step further by growing much of the food that her family eats.
"Before I was just eating this kind of food. Now it's a way of life," she said.
Her farm life also has become a central theme in her artwork seen in the exhibit HOPE-FULL, on display in the SEED gallery at Urban Artware on Sixth Street.
For the past few years, Frazier and her husband, Ken Vanhoy, have been growing more and more food on what Frazier likes to call their "homestead" -- two acres of land in Belews Creek. And Frazier offers a personal perspective on farm life in her art, which uses chicken feathers, seeds and other materials from the land.
An ever-expanding garden
About four years ago, Frazier and Vanhoy decided that they wanted to be more ecologically responsible to reduce their carbon footprint from the food that they eat.
So they planted a garden and bought a few chickens.
Now their one garden plot has expanded to four. And they have more than 30 chickens -- some for laying eggs and some for meat. She even keeps a few sheep that she uses for wool.
The couple has an apple tree and a few blueberry bushes. They grow cantaloupes and watermelons.
Their vegetables include pinto beans, green beans, squash, broccoli, cabbage, spinach, lettuce, cauliflower, asparagus, cucumbers and tomatoes.
"We just keep adding more," Vanhoy said. In fact, he just planted some cherry trees, and he's adding another vegetable garden on his father's property nearby.
Putting up their own food
They make pickles and do other canning. And they have two freezers full of meat and vegetables.
"This is subsistence farming. We're trying to grow almost everything we eat," Frazier said.
Ken Vanhoy does some fishing. They get lamb from Vanhoy's father, Bill Vanhoy. And they get beef from a cousin.
Frazier still has to go to the grocery store, but she figures that she, her husband and 14-year-old son, Noah, get about 65 percent of their food from their own or family members' land.
"People look at me funny in the grocery store," she said. "I buy no meat and no vegetables. I just buy cereal, cheese, sugar -- those kinds of things."
Frazier said that subsistence farming has become a kind of moral imperative.
"When I started eating meat again (after eight years of vegetarianism), I went to visit the cows. I went to the slaughterhouse. As an ethicist, it's really important to be involved in the process of what's feeding me."
Frazier also slaughters her chickens. Though she doesn't believe that animals were put on earth just to feed humans, she does feel that it's a natural process. Still, she finds the butchering emotionally difficult.
"When I go to butcher chickens, I pray and I talk to them. It's hard to take their life. I think if more people had to do it, I think there would be less chickens eaten."
But, she said, "I won't eat a chicken I don't know for safety reasons. Where has it been? What kind of karma am I putting into the world by eating a factory chicken?"
Frazier shares her farm life in several ways. She donates fertilized eggs to the N.C. Cooperative Extension Service for use in schools, so kids can see chicks hatch. She also takes sheep to elementary schools.
And then there's her art. Frazier's intimate relationship to her food comes out in such pieces as Once Upon a Time, Black Sheep Dreams. This has a clay casting of her face surrounded by black wool with a painted background of a sky. Around the frame are such words as locavore, composting and energy efficiency.
A piece called Sacred Alliance has her son's face needle-felted with wool. A clump of chicken feathers sticks out of his hair. "My son shows sheep, so this reflects that," Frazier said. "This piece actually has a clump of the (chicken) feather from part of the tail that you couldn't just pick up; you'd have to butcher the chicken. What it expresses is my relationship to the sheep and the chickens."
A piece call Hand-Full has a cast of her hand in wool and clay. In the palm of her hand are some Pawnee beans, which are similar to pintos. On the side is some incense that has burned into the wood frame.
"This expresses the intimacy with the earth, food, seasons, with the life force represented in the incense," Frazier said.
In Pledge of Allegiance, clay, wool, incense and a sheep bone all come together to resemble an American flag. "That's a summary of my commitment to homesteading and sustainable eating and the moral and spiritual integrity behind that."
■ Michael Hastings, the Journal's Food editor, can be contacted by phone at 727-7394, e-mail at mhastings@wsjournal.com, or mail at c/o Winston-Salem Journal, P.O. 3159, Winston-Salem, NC 27102. His most recent columns can be read on our Web site at www.journalnow.com.
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