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ROADSIDE DIARIES
Roadside Diaries Breaking Bread Above the Clouds
The monks of Big Sur find new inspiration in their food
By Rob Fisher
Sitting with me at a wooden picnic table thousands of feet above the ocean, eating freshly baked bread and salad sourced from the organic garden surrounding our table, Dan Cronin, the operations manager at the New Camaldoli Hermitage, tells me that the monastery “used to be very poor. Now we are just poor.”
When the monastery was founded in 1958, the spirituality was focused inward. It is hard to believe given the Hermitage’s stunning surroundings, but the original rooms were built with no windows facing the ocean. The idea then was: Why would you want to look outside? Look in!
Because they had no money, they also had nothing to put in the rooms. It turned out that the guests loved that. This rugged simplicity is what they were seeking. It was cleansing. People came to the Hermitage to savor the solitude, the silence and the beauty of this special place. However, the missing piece to the experience, until very recently, had always been the food.
This is not to say that they did not send noteworthy food out from the monastery. Local foodies may be most familiar with the monastery’s celebrated fruitcakes. They are so surprisingly luscious that one taste will make a believer out of even the most hard-bitten fruitcake skeptic. Their granola, too, is some of the best granola to be found locally. It’s made on-site by monks and other devoted staff members at the monastery, in small batches, using a WWII-era military surplus pizza oven. Compared to these offerings, though, the food served to retreat guests and to the monks had been lacking.
Brother Bede Healey, the vice prior, tells of meeting a man at a food vendor show once. The man said, “I visited your place 20 years ago, and I just have one question for you: What did you do to irritate your cook? One day, all we were served were three rotten oranges!”
In the early days, because they had so little money, they had no choice but to supply their kitchen with food that grocery stores could not sell—food that was imperfect but edible. The brothers did the best they could with these poor ingredients.
Today, the monks are older and fewer, but perhaps they are also wiser in their appreciation of the important role that good food plays in the spiritual life. This has led to a reawakening.
A food revival
The new organic garden where we enjoyed our lunch is a place bursting with color. It is easy to see why it has become a source of pride for the monastery. Ray Davi took me to see it, and he was giddy with excitement. Ray does not live at the Hermitage, but he has been attending retreats there for decades and has a deep affection for the place. He explained to me that when he heard there was a garden on the grounds, he searched it out but was sorely disappointed to find it had been neglected. When a local gardener started
Chef Vig Swaminathan with organic gardener Michael Devadattan Fayran in the organic garden
growing food in the garden, and the monks started to realize that they were eating food grown right on the monastery grounds, they started to take interest. Soon people started working on the garden, and now it is thriving. It is the highest point on the campus, not counting the 900 acres of wilderness that rise above the monastery. A cross-shaped fountain sits at the top, from which water descends to several pools through pipes, watering trees and plants as it works its way downward. In front of the stone cross is a circle of rocks surrounding a pattern of brightly colored plants. When a very large butterfly came out of nowhere and started going from bloom to bloom, Ray was beside himself with joy. He said, “Everything in Big Sur is big: the sky, the heat, the ocean—even the butterflies.”
The quiet is big, too, if quiet can be described that way. People who come for a retreat soak it up. It is such a rare commodity for most of us who live our busy lives in a constant rush that it has become one of the most treasured gifts offered by the Hermitage.
East Meets West
Perfectly suited to this environment, and to the task of moving this food revival forward at the Hermitage, is Chef Vig Swaminathan, hired in January of 2012. He is an energetic, soft-spoken man, with intricate tattoos that appear above his collar and below his sleeves. Chef Vig was born to a mostly secular Hindu family in India that moved to Chicago when he was six. In Chicago, his mother, an excellent cook, traded South Indian cooking for Italian-American fare at home in an effort to assimilate. Her cooking gave him an appreciation of good flavors starting at an early age.
As a young man, Chef Vig headed to the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in Carmel Valley, where he trained in Edward Espe Brown’s bread baking tradition, and also studied with Deborah Madison. At Tassajara he learned the practice of meditating while cooking. Later, while cooking at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California, he stumbled upon the writings of Catholic monastic writers Thomas Merton and Thomas Keating. He found that prayer was what had been missing from the Buddhist tradition for him. He explains, “Meditation is sitting in cosmic stillness, but prayer is a real expression of gratitude and vulnerability. This is what attracted me to the Catholic, contemplative tradition.”
Chef Vig sees cooking as an act of both spirituality and service. He always meditates and prays as he cooks, and it makes him feel overjoyed. He aims to create a contemplative space in the kitchen that is consistent with the space in the chapel. He says, “I hope that I can give back to the community as much as I have received.”
Chef Vig’s philosophy on food and the spiritual life has evolved over the years. “I used to think that we should just be eating simple foods, like rice and beans, when I first came to Tassajara. But I have learned it is really important to have comforting, richer food for people who are doing spiritual work.
“There is already this great gesture of renunciation that people have taken with their spiritual lives, but when the food is like that too it becomes a bit unbalanced. The spiritual work takes energy, and the food should replace that energy.” Chef Vig notes that the people on retreat are there for cleansing, and they should have primarily clean, simple food. But for the monks, he provides more sturdy, “comfort” food. Their constant spiritual work needs strong sustenance.
The Benedictine way, explains Brother Bede, is to say “Come and see!” The monks do not go out into the world, but they invite the world to come and experience what they do. The fruitcake and the granola are a way for them to send out their presence to the wider community as an invitation to hopefully lure people to come and experience what they offer at their perch above the ocean.
After my day with Bede, Daniel, Ray and Chef Vig, when I came down from the mountain, I immediately noticed a difference in the pace of life I was returning to. I already missed the slow rhythm, the calming quiet and the intentionality put into all things at the monastery. The monks’ way of life seems to be increasingly rare, but I hope it never vanishes. Whether it was from the slight sunburn on my face or the nourishing food in my belly, I felt refreshed and radiant—filled with gratitude and already looking forward to my next visit.
Rob Fisher is an editor at Edible Monterey Bay, and also has a day job, which is rector of St. Dunstan's Episcopal Church in Carmel Valley.
