Kate Lebo, THE BOOK OF DIFFICULT FRUIT: Arguments for the Tart, Tender, and Unruly (with recipes)

[1:24]Zibby Owens: This is Zippy Owens, and you're listening to the award winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology, which you should run out and buy, called Moms Don't Have Time to A Quarantine Anthology. All proceeds of that book go to COVID nineteen Vaccine Research. And I'm the editor in chief of Moms Don't Have Time to Write, a new publication on Medium, and we're accepting submissions, so please send your personal essays there. And if all that isn't enough, you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, and my website is zibbyowenscom. Okay, now back to this amazing podcast. Special announcement. I am teaming up with Katie Couric Media's Wake Up Call and Random House to give away 100 copies of the book Stranger Care by Sarah Santillis. I'm really excited about this. Here's a little about Sarah's book, and we collectively are giving away 100 copies. After their decision not to have a biological child, Sarah Santilles and her husband Eric decide to adopt via the foster care system. Despite knowing that the system's goal is the child's reunification with the birth family, Sarah opens their home to a flurry of social workers who question them, evaluate them, and ultimately prepare them to welcome a child into their lives, even if it means most likely having to give the child back. Stranger care is an illuminating read, and Sarah will be on this podcast soon. So if you would like to enter for a chance to win, please go to the link in the episode description from right where you clicked on it and enter your email address, first and last name. By doing so, you're agreeing to the sweepstakes official rules and agree to receive communications and special offers from Katie Couric's wake up call and moms don't have time to read books. Thank you for doing it and enter to win today. Just go back to the episode description. Thanks again. Kate Lebo is the author of The Book of Difficult Fruit. She's also the author of cookbook Pie School and the poetry chapbook Seven Prayers to Kathy McMorris Rogers and co editor with Samuel Leguin of Pie and Whiskey, writers under the influence of butter and booze. Her essay about listening through hearing loss, The Loud Proof Room, originally published in New England Review, was anthologized in Best American Essays 2015. She lives in Spokane, Washington where she's an apprenticed cheesemaker to Laura Lee Mr Lee or Maestre Lee of Quillessass Cut Farm. Welcome, Kate. Thanks so much for coming on moms don't have time to read books. Can't even say the name of the podcast today.

[3:50]Kate Lebo: Thanks

[3:51]Zibby Owens: so much for having me. Oh my gosh. Okay. Can you please tell listeners about Difficult Fruit and the book about Difficult Fruit and your whole story and how it became a book and

[4:01]Kate Lebo: all the good stuff? Well, I guess like the quick version of what this book is, is that it's a collection of essays that go from A to Z. So, Roni, a blackberry cherry, and then yuzu and zucchini to finish this out. And what I try to do in this book is use stories about fruit to try to understand these personal stories where nurturing and harm get all tangled up. So I got really interested in the relationship between food and medicine, the ways that we kind of use metaphors and magical thinking to figure out what will heal us and what to eat. But that got woven into this book. In addition to the essays, each essay concludes with two recipes. So generally, it's one you can eat and one that's for a cosmetic or garden or medicinal application, though. I don't stick to that rule because I couldn't find something for every single fruit that fit that rule. I bent my mind. Nobody noticed. Nobody noticed. It was fine. Don't

[5:02]Zibby Owens: tell them that. I will tell them. So I really love the section on vanilla, but I feel like how is that really even like a fruit, you know? It is fruit.

[5:12]Kate Lebo: Right? So part of the journey of writing this book for me was first discovering how many things are fruits that I don't think about as fruits. Like a wheat berry is a fruit. A vanilla pod, a vanilla bean, we call it a bean. But it is a fruit, it's one of the only fruits of edible fruits in the orchid family. It's also the most expensive fruit to produce in the entire world. That must be why I like it. Right? Which makes sense for something that's so like delicious and precious and all that. By the way, totally with you on like the Bath and Body Works.

[5:45]Zibby Owens: Okay. In fact, I was in LA recently and we went into this mall and I was like, Oh, you know, someone gave me a gift of this like amazing vanilla lotion from Bath and Body Works, but I'm not exactly sure what the bottle is. Like, let's go in. And so I went in the store and I was like overwhelmed by this flood of scents and the And I was like, okay, I turned right out. Want to ask It

[6:07]Kate Lebo: makes you dumb. You walk in there and you're completely overwhelmed by the sound, the sight, and then the scents, of course, that go right into you and kind of knock you out. But it was such a funny experience researching that piece. So I'm writing about vanilla, and I'm writing about this particular type of vanilla bean fragrance that was probably fake and was introduced to me by Bath and Body Works when I was a teenager, it was to you probably. And trying to recapture that scent, which doesn't really exist anymore. And it a couple of months before we went into lockdown for the pandemic. It was my very, very last time in a mall for the last year and a half. But it was so weird going in there because once you kind of get past the overwhelming sense explosion, you're just watching complete strangers pick things up, uncap them, put them in their faces and smell them, and then hand them to their friends who are doing the same thing. And everybody's smelling everything in the store, it's all up in their faces. And I was like, what other store would this be allowed and appropriate in? I mean, much less not question in any way. Yeah.

[7:14]Zibby Owens: I mean, let alone like digging your fingers in and like scooping it, the trials and like, oh my gosh, the testers and the makeup store with the lipsticks and I don't know, all that. I'm like, they must not be doing that anymore. Right.

[7:27]Kate Lebo: Mean, nope. Wonder. I haven't been out yet to find out. Yeah. Okay.

[7:32]Zibby Owens: So tell me about writing each chapter. So some of the ones how did you find all the different like how did you decide from each letter on which one you were going to do? Sure. You know, it often depended on kind of if I had a personal connection to it already, which sometimes actually made it even harder to write about.

[7:52]Kate Lebo: If I knew something about the fruit that I found really compelling, for example, with wheat, I learned that wheat dust, the dust that's made by milling flour, which I use to make pie, that dust, which I don't use to make pie, we don't eat the dust, is more explosive than gunpowder. And that fact was, phenomenal, but also suggested all sorts of ways I could use it metaphorically. So that's why wheat made it into the chapter. Then I had to figure out how it was fruit, right? Lucky for me. But then didn't your partner have like a gluten intolerance or something? Am I making this up, right? No, that's in that chapter. So I, yeah, the fact about wheat dust being explosive led me to think about the incompatibility ultimately between me and an ex partner where I was I was learning how to express myself through flour. It was a really important practice for me as we were figuring out that a bunch of his health problems were probably related to wheat, among other things. So it just became this intractable conflict that, you know, neither of us wanted to have, of course. And within the book, the way I talk about, that becomes another way to talk about kind of over nurturing, kind of codependent or just like reactive nurturing that I was engaging in at the time, maybe because of my girl training, maybe because of thinking that, you know, this was the way to love someone was to, you know, nurture them until the relationship ends, you know? The relationship overbalances and can't withstand the nurturing. Yes, that's an example. Other examples like cherry, for example, people probably wouldn't think that that's a difficult fruit. They're so, they're present everywhere, they're sweet, they're easy to eat, but as I did more research I came to understand that within the cherry kernel, which is within the pit, is amygdalin, which has been used as a quack cure for cancer. It doesn't work, But it also is cyanide, so it creates an almond flavoring that's delicious, but it also creates cyanide. Now it's an amount that if you have, you know, one and you're an adult, your body can process that, where the gut's made to break down small amounts of toxins like that. But over time, and if you have a lot of this, it will hurt you. And that just seemed like a really stunning combination of qualities to have in what I thought was a really sweet

[10:24]Zibby Owens: and approachable fruit. So again, the opportunities to get to talk about, I guess, other situations. And the maraschino cherries, which you wrote about, right? How they're like so prevalent and they're like so fake. You know, now you give your own version of making your own maraschino cherries. I was like, Oh, that sounds like fun.

[10:42]Kate Lebo: Delicious and sweet and also drowned in a kind of toxin AKA liquor. So there's a lot of this, I engage in a lot of kind of relativity and how I'm thinking about what nurtures and what harms and what heals and is

[10:57]Zibby Owens: nutritious in this book. So did writing the book, how would you put that for yourself on the healing to harmful meter?

[11:04]Kate Lebo: Oh, well, I mean, it's funny. I don't think that I wouldn't think of it as harmful, but it is definitely an amount of exposure that I had to live in denial about as I was writing the book. And that does feel very weird to have the book out in the world now and have to really, you know, face the fact that other people are reading it and have opinions about it and know all sorts of things about me that I, you know, kind of just pretended like I had to pretend as I was writing that this was a private conversation I was having with myself or with an unknown person or with the reader.

[11:42]Zibby Owens: I feel that way I've moved like you though, like instead of like there, I really love this like form of sort of memoir with recipes as format. I like love getting the little bonus gift at the end of a chapter. And like, I don't know. So I've read like multiple books of this sort of type. Not that this is like anyway. No, this is a type. This is a type and I am playing with that type. That is totally fine. Just, you know, not to diminish the form because I happen to like love the form. But I do feel like your own experience was almost hard to find. Like you had to paw through the recipes. Like, it wasn't like you started every chapter with like, this was what was going on in my life or whatever. And then you had a recipe at the end. Like some fruits you barely talked about yourself at all. And then others you had like a whole thing, and it felt like a jewel. You know, like, oh, look at this. Now I get a whole paragraph about like this relationship or something. So I feel like, I don't know, maybe at times you were like withholding or there wasn't as much personal anecdote to share about certain topics or whatever. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince. Summer always makes me rethink what I'm reaching for every day. Lighter fabrics, better materials, pieces that just feel good the moment you put them on and look effortless. That's why I keep coming back to Quince. They focus on high quality essentials. Think breathable linen, soft organic cotton, washable silk, but without the luxury markup. It's that rare balance where everything feels elevated, but still easy. Quince has beautiful everyday pieces like 100% European linen pants, dresses, and tops with styles starting at $32. Their denim is soft and easy to wear. I wear my jean jacket all the time. And their organic cotton sweaters are perfect for layering on cool summer nights. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. Quince works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middlemen, so you're paying for quality, not brand markup. And it's not just clothing. Quince has really become destination for elevated essentials across home, kitchen, bedding, and beyond, making it easy to bring a more premium feel into everyday life. In addition to my jean jacket, I recently got a white tank top dress with a beautiful cotton skirt that is absolutely gorgeous, and I can't wait for it to be warm enough so I can wear it every day, but it has been a cool spring. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quince.com/zippy for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty five day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's quince.com/zippy for free shipping and three hundred and sixty five day returns. Quince.com/zippy.

[15:20]Kate Lebo: Sometimes, but sometimes really what I'm thinking about within a whole book is a balance and a weave between the personal and the research that I was able to do. Because I guess what I hoped was that information about fruit, the research that I was doing about fruit, would make my own story bigger than just my own story. And would help me kind of set it within this larger context about food and medicine and other ways that we identify food out in our neighborhood or in the wild. But then also that just so much about food is so personal, it would have felt false to me to present this information without also presenting myself and my idiosyncrasies and biases and blind spots and obsessions and all that. So that's, yeah, kind of that was my hope anyway, for the weave of those two characteristics. Nice. Accomplished.

[16:16]Zibby Owens: So how much do you cook now? Like, tell me about your cooking. How much of these fruits now do you include when maybe you wouldn't have before? Or have you, like, scrapped the whole difficult fruit, now you're on to, like, really challenging vegetables or something?

[16:28]Kate Lebo: Well, know, I had a baby seven months ago. Oh, congratulations. Everything. And you're right, I don't have time to read. My god. Do an hour a day. Precious, precious time with my book. And what I found actually is it's not so much the difficult fruits that I can't interact with as much anymore because of the attention that they take. I mean, my attention is on my kid and what I have attention for are these kind of like fifteen minute little segments of food preparation. So it turns out that doesn't work very well for like jam making. Because things, you know, it boils, it's molten, it's going to spit and scald everything. And then if you turn away for a second, it's ruined, right? So I've stopped making jam, but ferments are easy. Ferments you, you know, chop them up, them, put some salt on them, and then just forget about them for a while. So it's more that, yeah, since publishing the book and having the baby, my ability to pay attention has changed so much that what I can cook is different. And I try to incorporate these difficult fruits, but yeah, some of them are not going to happen. Trying to make persipan,

[17:38]Zibby Owens: for example, that's that case to made out of the kernels of stone fruits. There's no way that's going to happen for the next couple of years. I would say for most people that was never going to happen. So you're one up on pretty much everyone in the world. Yeah. Yeah, like the goals are pretty lofty. You have to have a certain, I mean, you have to have a certain enjoyment or you have to enjoy

[17:59]Kate Lebo: repetitive tasks, I think to do some of to deal with some of these fruits. And that's why we don't see a lot of these fruits or some of these recipes in our usual marketplaces or our usual cookbooks. When we go to the grocery store, we are just encountering fruit that is able to get there over long distances, and that we are able consume easily. There's a market for it. There's not so much a market for fruit whose nickname is chokeberry because that's the thing it does to you when you eat it. Yeah.

[18:31]Zibby Owens: We need some rebranding there on the chokeberry.

[18:34]Kate Lebo: Right. Or more consumers with a taste for challenging things. There will always be those people. They just probably

[18:41]Zibby Owens: won't be most of us. Maybe there needs to be some sort of more like extreme eating. On all these cooking shows, maybe it has to be shifted into the X Games of food. You know what I mean? Like super duper make it edgy and

[19:00]Kate Lebo: I don't know. And I wonder about the things that you do have to do to prepare some of these difficult fruits are not particularly photogenic. They take a long time. There's not a climax. There's not even a plot. You're just sitting there, smashing things or separating one part of the fruit from the other part of the fruit quietly. And maybe you're doing it with a friend or maybe you're staring off into space. But I love those moments personally. That's the appeal of these recipes. And the other appeal to me, I guess, is to I'm used to encountering recipes that try to take care of my need to make dinner on a Tuesday, which I'm very grateful for and I need to do every Tuesday, right? And Wednesday and Thursday and all that. But there's so many other ways to cook and so many other food forms that we don't often encounter because they don't offer themselves easily to us, or because we can't source what's in them easily, or because they just happen over a period of five years, right? I think about making umoboshi, for example, the pickled plum that is so delicious and part of Japanese cuisine. I mean to really make great umoboshi, it takes five years. Imagine that. It's so different than a recipe for corn chowder. Yeah.

[20:14]Zibby Owens: That's true. My husband's cousin, Robbie, two restaurants in New Jersey, but he let us go downstairs. One of them is called Biagio. He took us down where they cure these meats for years, right? Like they hang them up and I'm not I don't know exactly what's going on, but all I know is we were downstairs and flanks were they weren't going to be ready for years and dry age this. I'm like, What? And then someone's going to eat them in like three seconds. All of that time. All of

[20:45]Kate Lebo: that is part of that flavor. And we sense the specialness of that flavor, but we don't necessarily know what it's coming from. That is part of the magic of it actually is having all of that stripped away and we just get the delicious meat and we don't have to know exactly where it came from. Next But for those of us that want to know and want to think about, yeah, all those years and all those years hanging lonely in the

[21:09]Zibby Owens: you're in New Jersey, I'll hook it up. You can go down and visit the

[21:13]Kate Lebo: That'd be awesome. So

[21:16]Zibby Owens: what so you're not going to I was going to say what are you doing next, but I don't want to put any pressure on you. If you have a baby and you're struggling to make corn chowder.

[21:23]Kate Lebo: I'm getting childcare next. Holy cow, that's going to happen next month. It's going to change everything, or at least change a little thing. Yeah, and I'm actually I'm working with the Washington Center for Cultural Traditions right now, gathering food waste stories in my area of Spokane, Washington. So that is happening right now and what's next. That's really cool. Yeah. Wow. I love the unique way that you think. It's

[21:49]Zibby Owens: like I just it's very cool. Like a little bit off the beaten path, but very awesome. It's it's really cool. Anyway. Yeah. I will think of that when I am debating what to make that doesn't take a lot of attention and think, Oh, well, you know, I mean, Kate Lebo is like fermenting stuff and like I'm microwaving oatmeal.

[22:09]Kate Lebo: I'm microwaving yams. I'm microwaving so much stuff right now. The only thing that's keeping us alive is my dad's lasagna and

[22:17]Zibby Owens: the microwave Okay. And peanut butter. I felt like you would not be in favor of the microwave. I don't know why you Microwave

[22:23]Kate Lebo: is fine. Like whatever it takes to feed yourself well. I don't care what the tool is or what the shortcut is.

[22:33]Zibby Owens: Thank you. For the lay people, I feel better.

[22:37]Kate Lebo: Otherwise, we're just sitting here feeling guilty while we eat our sad salad. You know? It's true. I wonder with this whole rise of

[22:45]Zibby Owens: know, people's complete lack of attention and the seven second attention span, what foods we'll be eating in like thirty years. Right? If we don't have, right now, like the idea of some of these obscure fruits and their preparation seems overwhelming, but maybe in a maybe by the time my kids are grandparents, the idea of even the slow cooker or whatever would be like, forget it. Why would we do that?

[23:07]Kate Lebo: Everything will come in just a plastic sleeve and you just push your food up from the bottom. Yeah. Sounds great. Like an astronaut is something. Both extremes. They'll be needing food in seven seconds and then the people who miss the connection to their food and miss all the social aspects of food that takes a while to prepare and get really deep down into it. That's true. It'll be I mean, I feel like we see that every generation, people rediscovering or thinking that they are discovering these more connected, older ways of cooking. So That's true. This is my I guess the book of difficult fruit catalogs, my own discoveries of more kind of folk way style methods of cooking. But it's not like I discovered any of them. I'm just looking for them. And some of them are in plain sight, and some of them are in books, and some of them, you know, I've got to find people to teach me and some of them I'll never know.

[24:02]Zibby Owens: Awesome. So having released this whole project into the world, and I loved your advice that you like trick yourself that nobody's

[24:12]Kate Lebo: gonna ever read it. What other tips and tricks and advice would you have for aspiring authors or Well, aspiring I I think I mean, in this age of social media, one of the most important things is to figure out a way to protect your inner life. That the constant, you know, deluge of information from people we love and people we don't love and everyone in between. All that is a conversation that I think makes it can make it really hard to write. And whatever it looks like for each individual person, for them to be able to go into a room, figure out how to shut that off, shut all that chatter off, or tell the chatter to wait anyway, like it'll be outside the room when you're done writing. I think it's really important and really challenging. Yeah. So that's the only thing that allows me to write. So yeah. Awesome. How do you stop the chatter of a seven month old baby? Well, you can't.

[25:04]Zibby Owens: What trick did I miss there?

[25:08]Kate Lebo: You know, it's been really cool to get to spend so much time with him that isn't about words. You know, I guess as a writer, so much of my worth and so much of the way I think about what I'm going be doing with this day has to do with how do I understand something and how do I write it down? And when I'm hanging out with Sai, it's we're just it's so much of it's just physical. It's like, let's go look at a flower and let's go feel the flower and let's just kind of sit here and play and cuddle. I don't really have words for it. And again, there's no plot, there's no conflict. It's just this beautiful animal physical time. So I'm enjoying that while it lasts. I know, at some point it's going to be like, Get out mom. But right now, I'm cool.

[25:56]Zibby Owens: Awesome. Well, Kate, thank you so much. Thanks for chatting with me on the podcast and entertaining me with your book and all of it. So thank you. Thank you so much, Zibby. All right. Take care. Take care. Bye bye. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram Zibby Owens and at moms don't have time to read books. Also, sign up for my newsletter at zibbyowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.