I spend a lot of time feeling hungry. Fast metabolism aside, my thoughts during a typical day surround what I’m going to eat next, how I’m going to cook it, and where I’m going to buy it. It’s a family trait. People ask us where we put everything after we fork down several plates in minutes, and in my house the appropriate response is “in my hollow leg!”

My major has taught me how people have disrespected the planet to feed themselves, but not given a firm solution for how to feed people differently. Professors suggest buying local and organic, or even growing our own food. Easier said than done for someone confined to 300 square feet of carpet, seven stories up, living on less than $50 per week.

Recently I’ve been reading Braiding Sweetgrassby Robin Wall Kimmerer. Within the book, Robin talks about the various ways indigenous peoples care for the plants that feed them, in ways that respect both the plant, and the earth that grows them. These stories make me dream of growing my own food and feeling connected to every part of the process that gives me life.

But I’m not indigenous, despite my small amount of Cherokee blood provided by my birth mother. I don’t have the space and sun I need to be a farmer. It felt wrong when I thought about trying to connect to the three sisters – corn, beans, and squash – in a dish, when doing so could be considered cultural appropriation. But, the yearning for a better understanding of what it takes to feed myself stuck.

So, I settled for a food that has long been a part of my German heritage: sauerkraut.

Sauerkraut is a simple lactic-acid fermented food. All you need is cabbage, salt, and a jar. Easy enough, I thought when I filled my shopping basket with a volleyball sized green cabbage. Cut up the cabbage, massage it with a tablespoon of sea salt for every pound of veg, stick it into a jar, and wait for the almost magical brine to form.

The salt pulls the water out of the cabbage and creates a salty anaerobic environment perfect for the pre-existing lactic-acid bacteria on the cabbage to thrive. Leave it for a couple weeks, pushing down the veg every few days to make sure there are no air bubbles, and you wind up with delicate, wonderfully acidic kraut.

I messed up the first time. I came back to my jar a few days later, and mold was growing on the top. My cabbage hadn’t stayed fully submerged. I felt terrible knowing that this batch would go to waste. I thought about scooping out the moldy leaves and risking sickness to save what might be fine, but I talked myself out of it. Better safe than sorry. I poured the contents into the toilet.

But while I poured, I smelled the brine. It was sweet, tangy, and familiar, and brought forth a slew of memories that I hadn’t thought of in a long time.

I grew up in a country which values cost over quality. McDonalds over a homecooked meal when there’s no time and hungry children to feed. But my childhood, however suburban, was flecked with a different way of thinking about food.

My birth mother always had a garden. It was the one thing she could start and finish. We’d grow green beans, heirloom tomatoes, jalapeños, corn, even okra – an uncommon vegetable for Pennsylvania, but one she brought from her childhood in Oklahoma. Some of my warmest memories are from tending our unruly strawberry patch – always eager to expand past the bounds we set for it – and being startled by a vole running across my bare foot.

My birth mom was a lazy gardener. I don’t remember ever weeding by her instruction, but despite this, everything I grew with her and my three sisters seemed bountiful. We couldn’t afford to eat out, but it didn’t matter when our favorite foods were from the backyard. The smell of sun-ripened tomatoes still hugs me to this day.

Her weeding style paralleled her yard maintenance regime: absent. As I neared being a teenager, I was often embarrassed by the state of our landscape: constantly overgrown with thistle, mulberry, and a plant with seed pods similar in shape and size to a half dollar coin. My sister Kas and I called it “the money plant” when no one could give us a name.

Instead of cherishing the goldfinches and catbirds that I had so long enjoyed watching nest in my yard, I envied the manicured lawns of my friends and neighbors. Back then, I didn’t notice that their yards only had robins.

I remember being overcome with pride when my dad said that I was finally old enough to use our push lawnmower. I was 11, and a feather-weight, so mowing was hard. The sweat beading down my back felt cleansing though, like months of chagrin washing away. I remember finishing, turning off the mower, and standing back to admire my handiwork.

Sometime soon after that, my birth mom caught on and started mowing occasionally. One day though, her mower’s path matched with a cottontail kit. We moved the quivering, severed body back to its nest with a rusty shovel. I lost my taste for mowing after that.

Several years later, my dad remarried. We moved to Delaware to a house without a yard, I gained a new mom, and was encouraged not to speak to my birth mother, which was easy then because I felt abandoned by her newfound love of bars and karaoke. It’s been eight years and I still haven’t spoken to her.

With my step-mother came step-siblings, two brothers and a sister. We all got along well which made the change easier. But I didn’t feel at home with my big family until my step-mom made sauerkraut. Her sauerkraut is almost beyond words, tangy and sour, but warm in a way I hadn’t experienced before – the result of caraway seeds. She’s mostly Austrian and after one bite of her kraut I felt the connection she has to food and her heritage.

After several years of living with my step-mom, it’s clear she also thinks a lot about food. She cooks as much at home for us as she can, which amazingly is most of the time. Almost every day I can find her stooped over the kitchen island, twirling a loop of long blonde hair in her fingers as she reads over a new recipe. She knows that to feed us healthy fresh foods, is to grow healthy fresh minds. Every meal is prepared with love.

This homecooked love is a gift that I took from both of my mothers.

Now my studies have led me back to the place from where my life has grown. I now know that the “money plant” from my childhood is an Old World invasive most commonly called annual honesty, but some people also call it the money plant. I now know that most of my friends have never stuck their hands in the dirt of their gardens or reveled at the taste of an unwashed cherry tomato, plucked right off the vine and plopped into their mouths. I now know that after years of thinking I had two mothers, I’ve really had three all along.

Thinking of the planet as “Mother Earth” is a practice my father and primary education taught me was unrealistic and romantic. But as I’ve grown, I can’t see how anyone thinks this way. Every time humans have a need, they turn to the environment whether they realize it or not. Plants come from sun and soil, animals from plants, electricity from coal or the sun or dammed rivers, clothes from plants and petroleum. We are as connected to our environment as ever by our wants and needs, the same way we are connected to our mothers, who provide for all our wants and needs. Calling the environment Mother Earth is a way of actively respecting the bounty she provides us.

This is a way of thinking that I knew as a child but had to relearn as an adult. Our society doesn’t value the origin of our comforts, despite every hand of luxury being connected to an arm of an organism, a community, an ecosystem, and the body of our earth, the resources that fuel all life. I find it ironic that my father, who taught me to leave any place I lived in a better condition than how I found it, would question why his daughter sees our planet as mother and home.

But I know that he and many others feel this way because they weren’t taught otherwise. Their classrooms taught them that science was a way to make a living, but not a way to live. That plants were food, medicine, and beauty, but not gifts of life. Success meant going to war, getting a high-paying job, buying a house, having children, raising those children to success.

I may never help my father or other people understand that everyone needs the earth and all her ecosystems. I only have two hands. It takes many hands to lead our friends and families back to a different way of thinking, gardening, cooking, and living with Mother Earth.

These two hands can write, though, and make homemade sauerkraut to share.