Welcome! I'm Sara Ramsey, a novelist and former tech worker. I recently moved back to my 430-person town in rural Iowa after two decades in San Francisco. I write about the wild and weird magic of my rural life, as well as anything else that strikes my fancy. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please join me!
Iowa is the largest producer of corn, soybeans, and pork in the US, but I live smack in the middle of a food desert. Grocery shopping here requires advanced planning in the best circumstances, but finding ingredients for upcoming holiday meals adds extra oomph to the madness.
I have easy-ish access to the basics. I live six miles from the county’s only chain grocery store. It sells dairy, meat (nothing organic), basic produce (again, nothing organic, and no fresh herbs), various canned/frozen/dry goods, and plenty of ranch dressing (which is a condiment, not just a lettuce-topper). People living along the southern edge of our county, where Iowa and Missouri meet, are easily 20 miles or more from a grocery store, so in that respect I’m lucky.
Frankly, I’m also lucky because I have time and gas money to make a 180-mile round trip to Des Moines when I need to stock up. I can also afford more than a week’s worth of groceries at a time, and I have space to store my hoard of food.
I don’t use the word “hoard” lightly. I’m sure there are people who grew up in food-insecure places and emerged totally healed of trauma, but I ain’t one of ’em. There are other, more entertaining things that I hoard — books, fountain pens, Starbucks mugs, dying succulents — but food is the most primal.
Most people around here — myself now reincluded — cook and eat based on structural limitations to our food supply. Meals are mostly made with frozen/thawed meat, canned goods, and shelf-stable ingredients. It’s probably why jello salads have survived here long after going out of fashion on the coasts. It’s not that we all want diabetes… but you can store jello ingredients far longer than you can store arugula.
My basic childhood understanding of food was that it was a stockpile to be carefully managed and monitored. This was so natural here that it never occurred to me that anyone lived any other way. As a kid, I literally could not have conceived of Whole Foods, with its organic ingredients and endless premade deli selections. I couldn’t have pictured a large chain supermarket of the Safeway/Albertsons variety, or buying any fresh vegetable, fruit, meat, etc., whenever I wanted.
I could, though, easily imagine the food running out.
My body’s hungers and desires were always going to be shaped, early and indelibly, by limited fresh produce, long distances to stores, and risks of running out of food during blizzards that trapped us at home for days (which were still a thing in the colder, less-climate-apocalyptic 1980s). My Depression-era grandparents’ stories probably didn’t help, but those feelings of scarcity were all cut from the same cloth.
But even if I could have escaped from a food desert childhood mostly unscathed, my hungers were twisted and reshaped by three key moments:
1) The 1980s Farm Crisis, when seemingly everyone in rural Iowa, including my parents, went broke. I don’t think we ever truly ran out of food, but everything felt precarious. I do remember helping to can or freeze enough corn, tomatoes, green beans, etc. to get through a few winters. And there was one memorable year when we ate dozens of turkeys that we’d butchered ourselves, which is a story for a different day.
2) 1993-1994, when my dad took a nonprofit agricultural job in Ukraine. I was twelve, and we lived in Ukraine for a year. The Soviet Union was dead(ish), hyperinflation made everything scarce, and it was impossible to predict what we might find to eat next. I wasn’t starving — but my dad lost forty pounds, and it wasn’t because he was lifting weights with the KGB.
My parents had shipped crates of food to Ukraine in advance — things like peanut butter, pizza sauce, and cake mixes. We rationed carefully to get through the year, supplementing whatever food my dad bought on the black market every week. It didn’t occur to me at the time that other parents — ones without my parents’ previous experiences of scarcity — might not have thought so carefully about planning for a year’s worth of food, but it seemed perfectly natural for us.
And also: in retrospect, rationing cheap cake mixes will do something to your subconscious brain even if you never excavate the memory again.
3) 2020 and the start of the pandemic. Those first weeks didn’t feel super lonely to me, even though I was living alone. But I remember being in a state of near-constant panic over whether I had enough food in my fridge, pantry, basement — and feeling utterly willing to risk my life by going out, masked and slathered in hand sanitizer, to get yet another bag of lentils (I don’t even eat lentils!!) just in case.
I had lived through twenty+ years of total food security, verging on hedonism, in my coastal adulthood. But two weeks of pandemic prepping reopened all the wounds. I sincerely don’t know if I’ll ever again feel safe without at least eight cans of black beans in my possession at all times.
In many ways, living in my hometown after over two decades in San Francisco has felt like returning to the scene of the crime.
The murky origins of my adult self are like a bunch of notes in a cold case. It’s a file I pick up occasionally and sift through, sometimes in journals, sometimes with therapists, sometimes while writing novels. When I didn’t live here, I only caught occasional glimpses of what had shaped me. It was easy to ignore the evidence and keep moving forward.
I’ve now lived in Iowa again for over a year. And every few days, I stumble across another clue that could solve the mysteries of my psyche.
Here’s one: my dad recently watched me make dinner and said that he’d never seen fresh garlic like I was using it. He’s an excellent cook and phenomenal with barbecue. He knows how to season meat. But even in 2023, it’s hard to find fresh garlic locally — only jarred garlic, or garlic powder, or garlic salt.
I was startled when he said it, but only a little. And then, later, I realized that I had taught myself, at some point in my twenties, what fresh garlic was and how to use it. Learning about garlic was one of an endless series of microadjustments I made to mimic a “normal” adult life, guessing at all the information that my childhood hadn’t provided me.
In moments like these, I feel complicated little flashes of resentment — resentment that I never saw fresh garlic as a kid, but also resentment that I felt like I had to change so many things to fit into a “standard” middle/upper-class world.
But even though returning to the scene of the crime makes these moments happen more frequently, this year has also been a gift. I can only describe it as a strange form of compassion meditation (made stranger by the fact that compassion meditation is even more rare than garlic here).
Living in rural Iowa full-time feels like an immersion — like sinking into a space, and a culture, and my childhood-obscured memories, so deeply that I can observe it all in the same way that a meditator might observe her breath.
There’s space, as I breathe my town’s air, for compassion, and for understanding.
There’s space to acknowledge: a childhood that prepared me to survive here could not also prepare me to thrive in San Francisco.
There’s space to acknowledge: we may never have fresh produce, but everyone here is trying their best with what they have.
And there’s space to acknowledge: actually, Iowans are right and ranch dressing goes with everything.
Cheers,
Sara
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, I would love to hear from you. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do - it’s a free and easy way to support my work.
And if you missed last week’s post, you should catch up before a villainous railroad sues me for libel. Or, delve into the archives to learn more about my wild childhood year in Ukraine.
Bringing back the memories of the jello salad and the Amish market
Also, the turkey story needs to be told!!!
There is a lot of Costco items on your shelves. Is that the Des Moines stocking up you're talking about? :D
Also--asks she with a black thumb--do people not grow any vegetables for themselves, like in a victory garden sort of situation--asks she who has no idea what a victory garden actually is? Or is there just too much to deal with to bother with a vegetable garden in addition?