I’ve never told anyone this other than Barry Estabrook: I grew up eating tomatoes planted in soil nourished by my own poop. My family’s zeal for organic gardening was unmatched. No, we did not have a composting toilet. Instead we used a 5 gallon white plastic bucket, filled up regularly, and carefully composted the old-fashioned way—in a steaming heap.

My family was a clan of Boston and Brooklyn-bred urban hipster homesteaders in the 60s, far before the trend. In the 70s, they went whole hog and bought 100 acres of land in the deep South where they could count on the sunshine and knowledge of neighboring farmers to help them carve an existence from the land.

Eco-freaks with art and design pedigrees, my family hated waste and respected art born from the crucible of a closed loop ecosystem. So they recycled cow bones, from the Chicago meat packing plants that supplied McDonald’s, into gorgeous jewelry that graced the pages of Vogue and the halls of the Smithsonian Galleries.

On the land, our access to food was limited by our skills and dictated by our natural environment: we grew most of what we ate, hand-pumped water from a well, bathed in the creek, heated with wood, kept bees, and aimed for the lightest possible footprint. We would consume meat only if we hunted it ourselves or if a neighbor did; luckily or not, we were in NRA and NASCAR country where hunting was de rigueur.

Occasionally when the wind howled and pickings were slim in our winter garden, we made soup from those Chicago bones. The soup was my favorite part of the whole operation. I’d spend hours prepping, stirring, and analyzing the flavors. Poop, reclaimed bones, then honorable soup seemed like a natural order. I partly resented our lifestyle, but mostly I was reverential, as I knew it had deep meaning. It was clear for me that the culmination of our ethics came together in the soup pot.

Fast forward from that white plastic bucket and the poop-nourished tomatoes. I didn’t stay on the family land. Still, my upbringing was simply too cool to rebel against. Goats in the living room would have been fine, so the best I could muster for backlash was to spend a decade in corporate environments, mastering the black art of communications, while my self-sufficiency skills marinated on the shelf.

In my adult life, I blamed my peripatetic career path for my mostly-tepid backyard vegetable gardening commitment. Instead of getting my hands in the dirt, I went after the best tasting authentically sourced food I could find–that was ethics enough for me. I remained serious about the kitchen: For years I was a foodshed nomad, living, working and sniffing out peak eating and cooking experiences in North Carolina, Japan, and Israel. I even tried Guatemala, with not much luck. Didn’t I earn that separation from the land after years of pooping in a bucket in service of that soil?

Returning to the U.S., I applied my communications chops in the Fair Trade movement, fighting for fair pay for farmers in developing countries. I loved my work, but I ran smack into monster-sized contradictions. I felt compelled to hide my love of food. It was not cool to rhapsodize over my homemade shallot sherry vinaigrette when coffee farmers were starving in Nicaragua. Visiting my friends, do-gooders like me employed at environmental and social justice organizations, I would cringe when I saw their kitchen trash cans stuffed to the brim with packaging from frozen processed fare—often vegan or organic—but inevitably from Trader Joe’s. Then again, who was I to tell them to shell fresh favas while Guatemala City sunk into chaos and poverty? I wished the social justice and environmental movements would ally with the good food advocates but the gulf was too wide. Where did this basic and critical connection of loving food fall flat for these otherwise enlightened people?