Lola Milholland, welcome to Writer's Voice.

Thank you so much for having me.

I just loved reading this book.

I mean, your parents are basically in my age cohort, and I lived in a lot of group houses when I was in college, and after that, and in fact, I'm thinking of looking into co-housing for my old age.

So I just really enjoyed this memoir, Group Living and Other Recipes, with recipes and a contemplation of what group living is all about in ways that I think many of us often don't think about.

So you begin the book with an anecdote about your mother's 70th birthday party.

She did a stand-up comic routine during which she said that in the 1960s, she became a disinheritor, and then she asked the audience, somewhat rhetorically, whether she threw away too much from her parents' generation.

What did she mean by being a disinheritor, and what was her answer to her own question?

Just hearing you recount that puts such a smile on my face.

What she meant by being a disinheritor is that there were a lot of societal structures that it was just assumed that she would take with her.

She was raised in a very Catholic family.

Her father's Filipino, her mother was Polish.

She calls herself a Polapino.

And so Catholicism was a very strong influence on her worldview.

She also was raised in a very patriotic family and a very patriarchal family.

In her family, she was one of eight.

There were three girls, five boys.

The boys didn't clean the house at all.

Her mother did all the cooking.

There was just a lot of domestic labor, and it was truly divided by gender.

And so when she was talking about disinheriting things, those were just some of the things that she disinherited.

You know, my mom, we would call her absolutely a hippie.

She was in San Francisco during the summer of love.

She discovered drugs, and drugs opened up a different connection to nature for her.

So those were the things that she felt she was letting go of.

And when she posed that question to the whole audience, you know, did I disinherit enough?

I think I forgot it was a comic routine for a second.

And I really pondered that question, like, isn't that harsh?

But her response with so much power was, no, you know, I didn't disinherit enough.

And I just, I remember how powerfully that came through, you know, like, how do we become more radical as we age?

And what are we holding on to?

And what should we hold on to?

And what shouldn't we hold on to?

More radical as we age, I mean, my worldview was irrevocably changed by the 1960s.

And I'm not sure that I've gotten more radical, but my understanding of what radicalism means, I think, has become a little deeper.

But on the other hand, so many people become more conservative as they age.

So say a little bit more about what you saw happen with your parents and even what's happened with yourself.

I mean, you're probably somewhere approaching your middle years.

Is that right?

Yeah.

I'm almost 40.

I'm 39 heading on 40.

Yeah.

I mean, it's a really good question.

And it's something I guess I personally aspire to.

And I love the way you frame that, which is like, there can be a deepening of what being radical means.

But I think when we think about, when my generation and younger generations think about the hippies, they often conflate them with the boomers.

And there's this sense that a generation that really changed our culture drastically then turned towards a more conservative view around money and personal isolation and wealth accumulation.

And I think that there's a strong sense among my generation, or at least around my cohort, like how can we follow a different path?

And in the case of my parents and other people I know who are of your generation, that hasn't been the case.

They haven't necessarily followed the path of becoming more conservative.

And of course, we are all creatures of our time that we're raised in and the cultures that we're raised in.

We can't disinherit it all, and we shouldn't disinherit it all.

I think a lot of my book is about trying to understand the things I really want to hold on to from my childhood and my parents' generation and everything that people of your generation created.

But I think trying to carve a path forward where we really challenge ideas about private property and wealth accumulation and what it means to really see ourselves as part of a larger community.

Those are things I'm interested in and I'm trying to explore with the book and looking at both my life, but also people in my life, my parents and my aunt and uncle who live in co-housing, which you were talking about and I just am fascinated by their ideas about how to build community.

Before we go any further, describe what it was like to grow up in the group house that you did with your parents.

Talk about the house.

You say it's a character, the house itself, and also talk about what it was like to live there.

Absolutely.

We moved into this house I call the Holman house when I was five years old and it was a very large old craftsman.

My parents immediately began working on it and getting friends to work on it and doing all these kinds of little projects.

One of the big ones they did was remodel the kitchen with a friend's help and it just became the beating heart of our house.

My parents really had an open door policy.

We had so many exchange students, at least one, sometimes two or three in a year.

Then my mother's brother came and lived with us.

My grandfather would live with us seasonally.

Their friends would stay when they needed a place to stay.

I think an important thing is that if that's your reality as a child, then that seems normal.

I think sometimes people think that my parents weren't paying a close eye to me and I don't think that that's true.

I think they really did care about creating a safe space for me, but they were incredibly welcoming.

It was totally common for us to have many people over for dinner and for that to feel really good.

Yeah, you said that your parents had an unspoken philosophy about the house, that we only deserve it if we share it.

And this is, I think, a real core theme to this book, Group Living and Other Recipes.

Lola Mulholland, say more about that philosophy, that we only deserve it if we share it, and also connect it with the ideas about the gift economy that you discovered in a book by Lewis Hyde, a book called The Gift.

So go delve into that notion.

Sure.

Yeah, I'll start with Lewis Hyde and I'll circle it back, which is just to say, I came upon this book, amazingly, I came upon it at a swap shop, so a place that was in a dump where you could just bring things and take things for free, which couldn't be more appropriate for this book.

It's a book that looks at ideas of gift-giving cultures and applies it to the artistic and creative practices.

And he really talks about when you receive something, it's not for you to hoard.

It's something for you to pass along.

And you don't have to literally pass along the thing you received.

You pass along the spirit of what you received, the act of receiving, and you give that on to the next person and eventually in cycles that have elements of mystery to them.

We make offerings to nature, we make offerings to community, we make offerings to the soil.

And it is only through these acts of giving and receiving, which I think of like inhaling and exhaling, that we give life to our communities.

And it is okay to receive, it is okay to be honored by somebody else's offerings, but it is important that when you do so, you then pass that along.

And I think that, I love your connection of that, this philosophy that my parents had.

I had never actually made that connection before, but I think my parents felt that the house itself was an immense gift.

They had, my mom had purchased it in 1990, which is a time when homes in Portland were quite affordable, but it was still really difficult for her to buy.

She was working at a natural foods grocery, she didn't have a lot of money and it was a really large house and she'd grown up in a large, with a large family.

And so I think she felt, if I have this place that I love and cherish, it really only is living its full purpose.

I only really am receiving this gift and acknowledging what it is if I make it available to other people and that's how it fully comes to life.

And I do think that she was engaging with ideas of gift circles.

Yeah.

And so now, talking about gift circles, talk about food, which is such a central part of this book.

I mean, the title is Group Living and Other Recipes, and you have these wonderful recipes that I can't wait to try out in the book.

So yes, tell us about food.

Sure.

You know, I love food.

It's very much at the center of my life, both because I have a food business and also because I really love and feel calm when I'm cooking and I live in a group house.

But I think you can't write a book about communal living and not put food very much in the center of it, in its DNA, whether or not this is a book that is solely about food.

As soon as you are talking about community, I believe that food ends up playing an important role and sort of explains, I think, why there are so many commune cookbooks.

And an early version of this book was inspired by all those commune cookbooks, both kind of wanting to poke fun at them and also embrace the spirit of them.

But this idea of giving and receiving, there's a ritualistic quality to it, right?

You give, you receive.

You give, you receive.

There's both a frequency to it and also something very spiritual to it.

And I find in my own life that the place that happens most often is with food.

We cook for someone, and that is a gift, and they eat and they receive it.

They cook for us, and that is a gift, and we eat and we receive it.

The farmers are often us a gift.

The land and the soil is offering a gift to the farmers.

There is this just innate cycle that is taking place with food.

And of course, then we are coming together and being with each other and just hanging out and getting to know each other.

And that repetition of time spent is how I think you build a community that's both really strong and really soft.

And so for all those reasons, I knew food had to be central to this book.

And I wanted to include recipes, and not just recipes that like feed a crowd or anything like that, but ones that show the people who are in my life and the things they've offered to me.

So I think of these recipes themselves as gifts that were given to me.

And by including them in the book, I'm offering them out to you.

And your brother, Zach, he is the originator of the first recipe in the book.

He's 10 years older than you, and he was a big influence on you.

In fact, in some ways, he really raised you.

100%.

Always, there is a lot of ways that we express love through action.

And with my brother and me, it's often over sharing food and cooking for each other.

So Zach was a big influence in terms of teaching you how to cook, is that right?

My brother was such a picky eater when he was young.

I was too small to know that, but he was even a picky eater when I was just a young girl and he was a teenager.

And he transformed that into this kind of concern and interest with how ingredients really taste, like what they are and how to use them in their best use.

And the level of care that he brings to each ingredient is just to this day, inspiring to me.

There's like a presence there that just transforms the way that he interacts with food in the kitchen.

And I aspire to that.

I find it constantly revelatory when he shares something with me and sort of cracks it open for me.

And that's been true for other people in my life too, but Zach has been incredible that way.

So for you, as you said, and it sounds like for him as well, food was a really spiritual, intimate part of your relationship and it's kind of like Zen and the art of cooking.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now being involved with food, this is something that your mother in a way blazed a pathway for you in this.

She got in on the ground floor of working for Organic Valley, which is the biggest dairy cooperative in the country.

So talk about your mom's experience with organic food, the Organic Valley model that turned the dairy industry on its head in a way.

Absolutely.

I think my mom thought she would be a preschool teacher.

She studied that.

She came to Portland and ended up working in an early, if not the first co-op in Portland, which is called Food Front, and discovered that she had such a passion for food and specifically organic food and food that was raised with a consciousness about the environment.

I mean, while she...

During the time that you were all young and heading in towards adulthood, it's really the beginning of the green revolution and these ideas about pesticides and heavy chemical use in agriculture.

And I think from an early age, she read many books that influenced her and made her feel like that isn't the path that creates the most life for our planet.

So she had this activist passion, but she started working at a co-op and she realized, I also have a business person's voracious appetite for growth.

I am driven and savvy and could I apply this intensity that I have to my activism?

And so that really became the center of her business life.

She worked then at a grocery store in Portland called Nature's.

And then from there, she freelanced for a little while and ended up at Organic Valley.

And at the time, Organic Valley was a co-op of dairy farmers in the Midwest.

And it was a combination of people who were early back-to-the-land hippies, also just traditional farmers who had small herds and didn't want to start using growth hormones, and also Amish and Mennonite farmers.

And all of these farmers came together in 1980.

We have a huge farming crisis and they were potentially going to go out of business and lose their livelihoods.

And they saw an opportunity with Organic to change the way that they were paid.

The commodity market pays based on supply and demand.

And they wanted to be paid based on what it actually cost them to care for their animals and make dairy products.

And so Organic was a path to be able to do that, to get paid for their own costs.

I think it was a really big risk and they took it.

And by the time my mom joins, they're still struggling, but they're growing and they are ready to go into a new region and welcome more farmers in.

And co-ops are built, this one is a farmer's co-op, on many, many members contributing.

And so to grow, they needed more farmers.

And my mom was situated in the Pacific Northwest and she took on this enormous job of finding farmers to convert to organic, finding processors who would run organic milk as the first run of their day, finding distributors, finding grocery stores, building a customer base.

And it just so absolutely fit with her passion for business, with her passion for a cause, making sure that farmers could continue farming organically on a small scale in perpetuity.

And so she was joined by many other people with passions like hers and they were able to grow this co-op so much.

I mean, in my lifetime, I watched it grow, but every time it grew, it didn't mean more money in a few people's pockets.

It meant more farmers joining in different regions.

And I just have always found the co-op model really moving.

I mean, it is a form of democracy and my mom rose and became head of marketing and sales, but that didn't look like being head of marketing and sales in other places.

And she also lived, I wasn't totally sure about how connected this was to Organic Valley, but she lived in a group house on a land trust that was associated with Organic Valley.

Is that right?

Yes.

It isn't literally one-to-one, but some of the people that founded that land trust were involved in the early days of Organic Valley.

And when I was young, she started working and having to travel to Wisconsin at first one week a month, then more.

And where she would stay was this land trust because it was near the headquarters and their first CFO was one of the members of this lodge that was a communal lodge.

And so at first she stayed in an outbuilding and then slowly she moved into the main lodge and she still lives there today.

That's awesome.

So you mentioned Japan before and I wanted to ask you, well, one thing is you went to Japan right after college, I believe, or as a foreign exchange student.

And at one point you moved into a home of a family of a mother and two daughters and you talked very movingly about what you learned from them about Kyoto home style cooking.

Yes.

I mean, I can't express how fond I am of these people to this day.

Yeah.

So I didn't know very much about Kyoto food.

Kyoto was the historic capital of Japan and I think it's just good to know that Japan is very, very food obsessed and each region, each sometimes micro town has its own particularities.

Kyoto food was influenced both by the court being there and also like a deep Buddhist temple tradition.

And home style cooking, the way that I experienced it is that every dish is presented on its own plate and each dish is very whole in and of itself.

It's not a lot of different flavors at once, sort of almost like what Zach taught me, which is taking one ingredient and expressing it in its fullest potential based on that moment in the season.

And so you have these plates and bowls laid in front of you, maybe a bowl of rice in front of you, a miso soup off to one side, and then three or four other small plates with vegetables and fish.

And you create your meal by each bite you take.

You take a bite of rice and then you might have something a little bit rich, like some grilled mackerel, and then you might want to cut it with a pickle.

And so you're sort of orchestrating your own experience of the meal itself.

And it's so, if you want it to be, it can be so full of intention and that kind of presence that we were talking about before that Zach has modeled for me.

Hmm.

Wonderful.

Now, I'd like to ask you, Lola Mulholland, about some of your non-book endeavors.

You run Umi Organic.

This is a noodle company, and I read online that it has a commitment to providing nutritious public school lunches in Portland, Oregon.

Tell us about this company, what it's about, and how it expresses your politics of food.

Yeah.

I mean, it was really beautiful for me to discover the opportunity to work with school lunch.

I started the business in 2016 making fresh organic ramen noodles, sourcing some of the flours directly from Oregon farmers and millers who were growing grains and doing it with such intention and connection to the community, and I really wanted to make a noodle for this region that expressed something about this region, something, a noodle that felt like it had some of the spirit of the food I had eaten in Japan.

And so that's how we started.

But then around 2019, I got the chance to meet the head of Portland Public Schools Nutrition and her assistant, Whitney and Ben, and they had become interested in serving a Japanese noodle in the district because they had allowed some parents to take over the very elementary school I had attended, which is a Japanese immersion program, and they had been serving yakisoba, which is stir-fried noodles with vegetables, and it was a huge hit with the kids.

And so they thought, you know what, if it was a hit at this one school, maybe it would work district-wide, and they were searching for a local noodle, and I really took up that opportunity to make something that was whole-grain-rich, that was sourced from local farmers, but also, I hoped, that would delight kids.

And I've always seen this part of our business, the school noodles, as one of the most meaningful ways that we are part of our community.

I think foods that are for everyone, foods that are for all kids, there's like an equitableness to that that feels really right for the kind of culture that I want to be part of building and that I want to live in.

And you write that you have a fascination with the way that shifts in food culture reflect and influence larger cultural moments.

So I wonder if you could put that in the context of this just delightful memoir, Group Living and Other Recipes, you know, kind of take us out on bringing this whole picture together.

Oh, love that.

What a big question.

I do believe that what we eat and how we interact with food and its place in the environment and our lives, it changes the cultures that we inhabit.

So the ways that we come together around food, the relationships that we build around food, the ways that we interact with it, it ripples out.

And the more care and intention we put in, the more it influences all of us in small ways that are very, very profound.

And I feel like at the heart of my book, what I'm curious about is kind of the way we can build culture through all of the small and meaningful interactions that we have with each other, back to just giving and receiving with intention and being open to giving into mystery.

And I feel that we have the opportunity to shift our culture drastically through these daily intentional activities and actions that we do together.

Well, that is a beautiful place to end, and this has just been a great conversation.

Thank you so much, Lola Milholland.

Your book is Group Living and Other Recipes.

Thanks so much.

Thank you so much for having me.

This is a joy.

Lola Milholland.

Go to writersvoice.net for links to recipes and more from Group Living and Other Recipes.

Next up, we re-air our September 2023 conversation with Chuck Collins.

His novel, Alter to an Erupting Sun, is set in an intentional community in Western Massachusetts, one based on a real-life collective that was dedicated to social activism.

Stay tuned after a short break.