The sandwich shop is the only job I ever went back to. I first got the job in college, and it was the perfect college job; the owners were a couple of childless hippies who adopted the entire crew as a surrogate family and as a social circle; they took it upon themselves to teach us all how to work hard, and, well, how to party just as hard...OK, maybe it was the perfect college job if you had slightly less than lofty ambitions, but it seemed perfect to me at the time. The owners were, perhaps, a bit messed up personally, but as managers, they were outstanding. It was a small shop, but even after over twenty years in this industry, when I look back, it was the cleanest and most efficient place I have ever worked; it had the best morale, the highest rate of loyalty, and to be honest, it offered some of the most fun of any job I’ve had. I left it when I left college. I left college because of ‘personal reasons’ which is to say, I had learned how to party a little too well and it had fouled up both my first marriage and my college ambitions, much to my parent’s disappointment (if you can call a pissing away of a few thousand bucks ‘disappointment’ with a straight face). I, like many young folks in my privileged position, screwed up.
After college came a couple of years in Austin, where I tried to finish sowing my unsowed oats, and where I embarked upon an honest attempt at a music career. In retrospect, that, much like my college career, was more honestly described as skipping the hard parts (practice, touring, promotion, ‘homework’) and going straight to the parts I felt most suited for (parties, shows, and, well, did I mention parties?) I continued to cook through those years, graduating from sandwiches to fine-dining Italian and eventually vegetarian cuisine. I seemed able to get a little farther down that road even in spite of myself. But, finally, in an act of ironic, intentional rebellion, I ended up in another boozy, ill-advised marriage that was also destined for much of the same success as my life had rewarded me prior to that point. She was from West Texas, and when an opportunity came to live on a farm out there for next to nothing, we jumped at the chance to ‘play redneck.’
When we arrived at our dirt farm (I can’t imagine what else we would have harvested; stones? Mesquite? Cactus?), I did give the local restaurant a once over, if not a fair shake. It was owned by a former Dairy Queen franchisee who had expanded his ambitions into a family dining establishment that was both informed by his experience in fast food and a perhaps a little, but not too much, more. I applied, half-heartedly, but didn’t want it, and decided, for fun, to try something new for a change. Most of the men out there were oilmen, mainly because the land and climate yielded little else of value to be exploited as a trade. It was a small town, and if you didn’t work on the rigs, in the fields or on the derricks, chances are you made your money off of folks who did. And so it was that, I, in an act of hilarious ironic intent, a long-haired cook, an environmentalist, a musician type, a vegetarian even, ended up working (for a couple of weeks, I thought) as a welder’s helper.
I quickly found out that ‘welder’s helper’ is a bit of a euphemism like saying ‘washroom’ instead of ‘shit-hole.’ My status as a newbie and a city boy did not make my life any easier, and these flaws were only compounded by the fact that most of our days were spent crammed together in truck cabs driving from job to job listening to America’s latest (at the time) invention of dubious value, right wing talk radio. I still have scars from the holes I bit through my tongue. This is not to say that my life was completely miserable. Working among men has its moments, when the tensions start to ease and the humour comes out, and when the fear of the unknown or ‘the other’ is supplanted by the familiarity of shared experience. There were, working as we were in areas rarely visited by civilized folks, moments of startling beauty; we once saw a herd of wild deer numbering in the hundreds, and stopped to watch this rare sight in silence with a profound sense of privilege. In time, I (almost...) seemed to become accepted as one of the crew. Personal stories among these fellows were rare, but over time the welder’s story began to emerge.
His family had lived and worked on this dry, difficult land for generations. When the oil came along, his father had learned to weld (a trade he passed on to his son), but only to help cover expenses for the family ranch. Hard work was rooted deep in the bodies of these men like knots in a twisted log. In his family (unlike mine), education was not considered work, but a frivolity for the weak willed and the lazy, and ambition was all well and good as long as it didn’t interfere with the chores. The man I worked for had eased away from the family ranch and pursued a career of welding, even becoming a foreman and leader of his own crew, but in keeping with the family tradition, he had done this with little more than a seventh grade education. I recall that a portion of every day we worked together was spent with him agonizing over a calculator assembling the numbers required by his contract, his brow deeply furrowed as he used fierce determination to bridge the divide between what he needed to do and what he had been taught.
In all honesty, I didn’t really like him; my true (but mostly hidden) self was too far removed from his experience. He did not drink, he did not discuss politics, books, or even films, he did not seem interested in music, and his work was his life. His tough exterior was betrayed by his sensitive fascination with the natural world, and had he discussed this, I might have liked him more, but no verbal admission of this passion ever seemed to pass his lips. Outside of work, his wife and children were his only priority, a fact that, also unspoken, was understood. I was not in a place to appreciate these priorities, nor did I see myself heading in that direction and I didn’t get it. He was a gruff, knee-jerk xenophobe, and I was a rock and roll freak. I didn’t like him.
But even so, the ‘couple of weeks’ of work stretched into a couple of months, and as my comfort level among the roughnecks slowly grew, I left the occasional messages from the local restaurateur unreturned. I was not feeling creatively challenged by this new line of work, nor was there any glimpse of a future I could take pride in (oil work for a former environmental activist?) but the money was outrageous, much more than I’d ever made cooking, and though the work was hard on my body, it was easy on my brain. Maybe even a little too easy; which is probably why I was shocked the day we drove past the rocks.
Texas A&M was the university in my hometown where I had wasted my parents hard earned money. It is an internationally recognized math, engineering, science and agricultural school. So, naturally, I had majored in Theatre Arts; a department that existed here with the sole purpose of filling fine arts credits for students pursuing degrees in more practical areas of study. And, in case you didn’t get it, Theatre Arts was not a practical course of study.
I was required to complete a science credit for my degree, and in keeping with my flawed logic, I chose a course that seems to have sounded both easy and equally as impractical as the rest of my schooling; Geology. To this day, I have not got the slightest idea why I chose such an odd course; I did not collect rocks as a kid, I did not have an interest in mountains or volcanoes beyond that of casual appreciation, I love the natural world and rocks are, I suppose, just as nice as anything else in that genre, but why someone interested in food would choose the one science with probably the least to offer in that area is beyond the scope of my memory. It must have been my hope for an easy ‘A’, I can’t imagine what else, except perhaps ...fate... that would have motivated me.
You see, back in the oil field on the day in question, we drove past some rocks; well, actually, it was a row of bubble shaped hills. Hills, which I recalled from my Geology course, as being formed when lava shoots formed long tunnels that almost, but didn’t quite, push through the surface of the earth. It was an odd fact to remember, and one which I casually mentioned out loud. The welder, to my astonishment, immediately stopped the truck and began to quiz me intensively, and then, after a few minutes, astonished me yet again when he impulsively decided to end the work day, turned the truck around, and drive an hour out of our way to another interesting rock formation where we stopped again and the quizzing resumed. I was humbled. I had spent months alongside this fellow, watched him struggle with numbers, show casual disdain for things I considered to be of high importance (like music, film, books, politics or philosophy), I had seen him express little or no interest in any culture beyond the oilfield and ranchland that surrounded us. And I had, frankly, written him off in my head as a simple man. And then he had done what I, in my self-centered universe, had never expected a simple man to do. He had surprised me.
You see, I had lived these past few months, years even, in a sort of ironic fog. I had accepted, even rationalized my journey through the world of the ‘blue collar man’ with a laugh and a self-righteous sense of superiority; knowing that I was ‘among’ them, but not ‘of’ them. It had started when I dropped out of college, and been expanded when I moved to Austin. I drank cheap beer and wrote comedic country songs, I drove an old truck because it looked the part; I’d even rented a trailer home, because it was cheap, sure, but mainly because it was a campy cliché. But the western shirts I wore were from an upscale thrift store and my leather belts had somebody else’s name on them. I was a pretender, an interloper, and even the oil job and the farm were part of the play that the Theatre Arts major was performing in his head. But then, in a truck on highway in West Texas, the entire character was shattered. The whole play fell apart. I realized, in a moment, and with a startling clarity that I was a punk, a lousy little punk, who had hoped to walk in this world unnoticed only to be betrayed by his own lack of true worth.
The welder was no simple man. Had he been born in my family, where education was valued, he may very well have studied Geology, not for an easy ‘A’ but for interest and fascination. But my parents had given me an opportunity to have an education, and I had pissed it away. In my shoes, he would have graduated, he would have made my (I guess ‘his’ in this iteration) parents proud, in the same way he made his (actual) parents proud with the life he had actually lead. A life that wasn’t what he wanted to do, but what he needed to do. But me? I had failed at college and, these days, had even turned my back on the only career that had stood any chance of redeeming me...cooking. Cooking was the career that had paid for my lifestyle when my parents help had run out, the career that was my creative outlet; that meant something to me, the career that could actually not just pay my bills but that could probably save my soul. The only thing I’ve ever done of consequence besides fail at college (and vacuum cleaner sales, but that’s another story...) was cooking. And instead of keeping at it, focusing and getting better, I was slogging through crude oil and pretending to listen to Rush Limbaugh with a man who was still, for all his shortcomings, a better man than I. Me, I was just a lousy pretender; I had never done what I needed to do, just what I had wanted, and in a moment I realized that if I ever really wanted to be someone worthy of respect, the fact was, I had a lot of work to do.
I snapped out the fog that had followed me. I left the oilfields that week, went to the little restaurant in town, accepted the position he had offered, gave it my all, and helped bring a few special meals to some folks in a small town; and yes, in spite of myself, I managed to learn a few things as well. As the fog lifted, the marriage, with its ironic core, dissolved into mist. When we split up, I left, but I didn’t go back to Austin, not yet, that was where the irony had begun to take root—I went back to my home town, my college town and tried to start again. I went back to the sandwich shop and tried to do it right this time, and learn how those owners had become such good managers, paying attention to the work this time, not the parties, because this time, it counted. It was the only job I ever went back to, because this time, I needed to go back and do it right.
authentic texas specialties, amazing live music, incredible selection of local, microbrewed draft beers and locally sourced and organic foods...
Friday, October 9, 2009
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
You are what you read...
Abigail turned one this weekend and my folks are in town for that and to help celebrate Nicole’s folks’ fiftieth (!) wedding anniversary... Among Abigail’s many gifts were several books; she’s generally too young to appreciate them yet for any qualities beyond, say, flavour or texture, but she will, soon enough, and for now, the colours and pictures do seem to draw her eyes, and the pages are already fun to turn. The birthday morning I noticed another gift, this one to me, while sitting on the couch with my mom and a cup of coffee, both of us chatting and...reading. You see, in my family, we don’t just ‘like to read’ we READ like crazy; there are books, newspapers and magazines everywhere you look. Our lives are storied and lettered to the point that it is a perfectly natural act for a conversation to go on hold while I ‘just finish this page...’ or to walk around one of our houses and see an open or bookmarked book in more than three rooms, thus outnumbering the actual number of people in the given home (unless you count Meg, my parents’ Chihuahua.) The gift my folks gave me is that love of the word, that life alongside, that ability to think on the page and to escape, to imagine, and to learn.
Music was my big dream in my late teens and early twenties, and at that point in my life you would have found my bookshelves stacked with biographies of my favorite musicians; trade and music entertainment magazines littering my coffee table; and other books just mentioned by the musicians I favored (thanks, Jim Morrison, did you actually finish Thus Spake Zarathustra? Really?) I also found a love of theatre and its trappings in college and my shelves filled with plays by the increasingly more literary but probably less likely to be staged fringe of modern, absurdist, and surreal playwrights (I’m not exactly sure what career that degree would have brought me, but based on the few staged plays of Beckett, Pinter, or Ionesco that I did manage to attend, I’m fairly sure it would have involved some incredibly tiny and just more than slightly uncomfortable audiences...)
It is telling that when I realized I wanted to be, not just a cook, but a chef and artisan in a food tradition, one of my first acts was a yearlong (circa 1996) decision to put aside all other reading. I did not read novels, I read food and cooking memoirs; I did not read music magazines, I read food trade magazines; I did not read plays, I read cookbooks. I immersed myself in the literary, philosophical and practical world of cooking words. I am not claiming that this choice alone would have made me into a great cook or a chef—that path is only blazed through a forest of cuts, burns and many long, hot days at the stove—but it did give me an edge. It gave me a language to describe what I did, a sense of camaraderie and kinship, and a means to communicate.
Reading does not replace learning, it colourizes it. It fills in the gaps; it makes learning more fun. In my first year of college I, unsure of my eventual vocation, took introductory courses in a number of different disciplines—through that experience I determined a pattern. Each of these courses offered a vocabulary; each spent a class period covering a word, a term, a group of phrases; they were teaching us how to speak the sacred tongue of Anthropologese, or, say, a dialect of Psychology-ican. In some cases, the learning of another language was literal, as in Latin for the sciences or Spanish, for, well, Spanish...But in others it was more subtle, English using English to describe English, or words we knew that meant a new thing in the context of our new (potential) discipline.
Kitchens are no different. Once through the swinging door, you are in the ‘back of house’ you are grabbing ‘half-pans,’ ‘firing tickets,’ ‘counting covers,’ ‘plating four-tops,’ ‘eighty-sixing’ items, or even ‘digging yourself out of the weeds.’ Words and phrases appear unannounced; for instance, in our kitchen at the branch we use a loft space for the storage of dry goods, and within a couple of months of being open it became ‘the sky’ and the ladder to reach it became the ‘flight’ (as in ‘flight of stairs’) When open, the ladder blocks one of our hand sinks, a condition that led to the perfectly logical mnemonic couplet ‘when you sky at night, don’t forget to remove your flight’ a bit of nonsense that is completely sensible in context. Our small silicon spatulas became ‘jerries’ for no reason other than that ‘jerry’ is easier to say than ‘small silicon spatula’ 300 times in an evening service. A girl from New Jersey introduced me to the term ‘wazzing’ for blending, and a friend in San Francisco gave me the Yiddish word ‘schmutz’ (which I’m fairly sure has an unpleasant definition...) to refer to any pasty concoction with a smear-able texture like that of hummus or peanut butter. These terms travel from kitchen to kitchen like viruses and eventually, as a whole, become the lexicon of our daily life. Our language.
I feel very lucky that I love to read. It has helped with all of my choices, helped me find context for my interests and it has made me a more complete person. Usually, within a few minutes of meeting someone, I can tell if they are readers as well and have a foundation on which to build a common bond. I sometimes feel like the readers out there are like Harry Potter’s wizarding friends with the non-readers making up the Muggle population—I would be slightly worried about that comparison offending the humourless, but I doubt that a non-reader would even get it. Or be reading this. See what I mean?
My year of cookbooks didn’t just help me learn how to be a better cook; it helped me begin the process of thinking about cooking, eating, and food as a whole philosophy. Cookbooks by Alice Waters and Deborah Madison helped me find food philosophy books by Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, which lead me older books by Rudolf Steiner and even Esscoffier. I spent time with Harold McGee and Julia Child and Peter Mayle; and I travelled the world on a plate, with books about food from every corner of the globe. Through these discoveries and adventures I became informed, not just about how to be a chef, but why. I came to understand that eating is more than just sustenance, but also a way to relate to the world. Cooking, as a trade, came through my work, practice and effort, but my reading filled in the gaps, my reading is what gave me the confidence to be a chef.
Abigail may only taste her books right now, but I do hope she develops that taste--it has certainly made my life sweeter.
Music was my big dream in my late teens and early twenties, and at that point in my life you would have found my bookshelves stacked with biographies of my favorite musicians; trade and music entertainment magazines littering my coffee table; and other books just mentioned by the musicians I favored (thanks, Jim Morrison, did you actually finish Thus Spake Zarathustra? Really?) I also found a love of theatre and its trappings in college and my shelves filled with plays by the increasingly more literary but probably less likely to be staged fringe of modern, absurdist, and surreal playwrights (I’m not exactly sure what career that degree would have brought me, but based on the few staged plays of Beckett, Pinter, or Ionesco that I did manage to attend, I’m fairly sure it would have involved some incredibly tiny and just more than slightly uncomfortable audiences...)
It is telling that when I realized I wanted to be, not just a cook, but a chef and artisan in a food tradition, one of my first acts was a yearlong (circa 1996) decision to put aside all other reading. I did not read novels, I read food and cooking memoirs; I did not read music magazines, I read food trade magazines; I did not read plays, I read cookbooks. I immersed myself in the literary, philosophical and practical world of cooking words. I am not claiming that this choice alone would have made me into a great cook or a chef—that path is only blazed through a forest of cuts, burns and many long, hot days at the stove—but it did give me an edge. It gave me a language to describe what I did, a sense of camaraderie and kinship, and a means to communicate.
Reading does not replace learning, it colourizes it. It fills in the gaps; it makes learning more fun. In my first year of college I, unsure of my eventual vocation, took introductory courses in a number of different disciplines—through that experience I determined a pattern. Each of these courses offered a vocabulary; each spent a class period covering a word, a term, a group of phrases; they were teaching us how to speak the sacred tongue of Anthropologese, or, say, a dialect of Psychology-ican. In some cases, the learning of another language was literal, as in Latin for the sciences or Spanish, for, well, Spanish...But in others it was more subtle, English using English to describe English, or words we knew that meant a new thing in the context of our new (potential) discipline.
Kitchens are no different. Once through the swinging door, you are in the ‘back of house’ you are grabbing ‘half-pans,’ ‘firing tickets,’ ‘counting covers,’ ‘plating four-tops,’ ‘eighty-sixing’ items, or even ‘digging yourself out of the weeds.’ Words and phrases appear unannounced; for instance, in our kitchen at the branch we use a loft space for the storage of dry goods, and within a couple of months of being open it became ‘the sky’ and the ladder to reach it became the ‘flight’ (as in ‘flight of stairs’) When open, the ladder blocks one of our hand sinks, a condition that led to the perfectly logical mnemonic couplet ‘when you sky at night, don’t forget to remove your flight’ a bit of nonsense that is completely sensible in context. Our small silicon spatulas became ‘jerries’ for no reason other than that ‘jerry’ is easier to say than ‘small silicon spatula’ 300 times in an evening service. A girl from New Jersey introduced me to the term ‘wazzing’ for blending, and a friend in San Francisco gave me the Yiddish word ‘schmutz’ (which I’m fairly sure has an unpleasant definition...) to refer to any pasty concoction with a smear-able texture like that of hummus or peanut butter. These terms travel from kitchen to kitchen like viruses and eventually, as a whole, become the lexicon of our daily life. Our language.
I feel very lucky that I love to read. It has helped with all of my choices, helped me find context for my interests and it has made me a more complete person. Usually, within a few minutes of meeting someone, I can tell if they are readers as well and have a foundation on which to build a common bond. I sometimes feel like the readers out there are like Harry Potter’s wizarding friends with the non-readers making up the Muggle population—I would be slightly worried about that comparison offending the humourless, but I doubt that a non-reader would even get it. Or be reading this. See what I mean?
My year of cookbooks didn’t just help me learn how to be a better cook; it helped me begin the process of thinking about cooking, eating, and food as a whole philosophy. Cookbooks by Alice Waters and Deborah Madison helped me find food philosophy books by Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, which lead me older books by Rudolf Steiner and even Esscoffier. I spent time with Harold McGee and Julia Child and Peter Mayle; and I travelled the world on a plate, with books about food from every corner of the globe. Through these discoveries and adventures I became informed, not just about how to be a chef, but why. I came to understand that eating is more than just sustenance, but also a way to relate to the world. Cooking, as a trade, came through my work, practice and effort, but my reading filled in the gaps, my reading is what gave me the confidence to be a chef.
Abigail may only taste her books right now, but I do hope she develops that taste--it has certainly made my life sweeter.
Monday, July 6, 2009
a funny thing happened on the way to Syracuse,
Last week I visited Texas for a family get-together we call the Ogg-in (Ogg is my mother’s maiden name); it is a big family, close and fun. This tradition of getting together in June started about four or five years ago, and my uncle said it was my fault, it was a year when I was back in Texas and my mom wanted to try to get everyone together one more time before I moved...I’ll take the blame—this party is well worth being held responsible for. Like everyone, I’m sure, I come from a diverse, interesting and colorful family that includes CFOs and mechanics, soldiers, bankers, teachers, actors, carpenters, nurses, and more than a few food professionals and food lovers—Uncle Jim and Aunt Suzie, who host the party, have a catering business run out of a kitchen my uncle built himself on the back half of their hill country home in Marble Falls, Texas.
Uncle Jim moved to Marble Falls in High School with his parents in an intermission from their life in my home town of Bryan. The way I’ve heard the story, my Granddaddy Leo and my Grandmother Chris (Christine, as in ‘Abigail Christine’) loved the Hill Country and vacationed there frequently and finally decided to stay for a bit. They had a picture framing business called ‘The Mitre Box’ (which my uncle bought back and ran as well, years later), and my uncle (the youngest of five siblings) was the only one who actually still lived with his folks while they were there. Good thing, too, because that’s where he met the love of his life, and Suzie is assuredly one the sweetest people ever born. They are very comfortable in Marble Falls; it is a beautiful area, with probably the most rewarding scenery in Texas—beautiful slopes melting into glassy rivers and lakes, bright and quiet and just green enough to provide a spare but adequate shade from the powerful Texas summer sun. Their generosity and efficiency as hosts is only equaled by their warmth, humour, and pleasant company as people and this family event is well worth traveling from Canada to enjoy.
The drive my grandparents made from Bryan to vacation in Marble Falls is about 3 hours. From Canada, it’s more like three days, if you’re hopped up on bennies and willing to wear a catheter. Vacationing, but perhaps even more strange, living far away from home, in the age of the airplane, has come to mean a very different thing than it did in times past. Being spread out, as we are, can now mean living thousands of miles from family and loved ones, without, thanks to the internet and relatively cheap plane tickets, necessarily even feeling removed. But this separation, at least for the not so rich and famous such as ourselves, has also come to affect the ways and whys of how we vacation.
At the outset of this adventure, I coined the word ‘oblication’ to describe my attitude about the number of stops expected of us during our short visit, a visit cut even shorter by the (gasp) loss of a half days travel when our plane missed its connection in Newark on the way down. It is a weird world in which a 1000 mile trip is considered inconvenient by taking more than half a day. But that is, nevertheless, how it feels. With numerous friends, family and a month’s worth of ‘important’ stops to make in a week’s trip, the pressure to ‘oblige’ makes the desire to ‘vacate’ seem very appealing. But oblige we did, and when we could, vacate we did as well; which was actually fairly easy to do under the guidance of our excellent west Texas hosts.
We spent a day or two in Austin, where I visited my recently rebuilt old haunt of Mother’s Café, which seems to have survived the fire without having suffered much pain in the way of rebirth...we met a new young friend, a second daughter to one of my oldest friends, just hours after her birth. We visited Boggy Creek Farm and chatted with other friends of ours (as well as Uncle Jim and Aunt Suzie’s), Carol Ann Sayle and Larry Butler, the urban farmers who inspire me as much or more than any other two folks alive. And we took a day in Dripping Springs to play some music, grill some veggies, help build a lego city and enjoy the incredible Hill Country sunset with some other old friends and their children. We didn’t manage to do about seventeen other things that we had promised ourselves that we definitely would...but in the end, I think we did just about enough.
The weekend was spent enjoying family at the Ogg-in, introducing Abigail to her cousins for the first time and playing washers while drinking longnecks, crowding around jigsaw puzzles, eating well and smiling, laughing, maybe even crying, just a little, for a couple of folks who should have been there, and had been there in years before, and were still there, in a way...
Then a stop at home, my parents’ house, where I can’t seem to sleep anywhere except for my old room, even though my sister’s old room has a bigger bed and its own bathroom. Some habits are hard to break. I could have spent the whole week in that room—it is like visiting a younger version of my self; it is amazing how much of our inner lives are scripted in those teenage bedrooms, and how much of that inner dialogue follows us in the years that pass as we grow. I still go through all the drawers, expecting to find some document or talisman that proves that room is still mine. This time, I saw an old green blanket on the shelf of the closet—I remembered its smell on the cool evenings of my youth when it kept me warm in my insomnia, my brain racing to capture all those important things before they faded, never realizing that those thoughts would still be with me to mull over for the rest of my years...
Thoughts like how we live and love and what it means to be alive and live well. What it means to be good and to be happy. What it means to be successful. Thoughts about God and atheism, about sneaking out the window (the screen is still broken, another reminder...), and thoughts about things like drugs and sex, even death, and about what it means to feel good and how.
Abigail was a champ, she flew well, and (with maybe one exception) was in good spirits for the duration of the often blisteringly hot, sometimes chaotic and always completely new to her experience of the whole adventure. Even when we hit the worst of it.
We can’t seem to fly through Newark without some glitch...even on previous trips, that airport has tripped us up with delays, weather issues and the like. Our trip home looked OK, we had a mechanical issue with our scheduled plane, but the airline kicked us over to another small jet at another gate in record time—even the flight attendant seemed impressed. We took off on schedule and seemed to be moving well...we were about halfway to Syracuse when the weather hit. Nicole, Abigail and I were in the last row, which is, I understand, the worst spot for a bumpy ride, but this seemed even more violent than usual, it didn’t help that a pilot on the next row looked visibly alarmed by ‘the ride’, the seatbelt lights were on and the flight attendant was buckled in and using phrases like ‘a little rough’ and ‘looking for a better route’. Nicole had her head between her knees and was breathing like she did the day we met Abigail and I realized I couldn’t keep reading and should probably put my book away. The tension was palpable. The pilots were quiet, focused, and the plane was loud with sound of whitening knuckles and gritting teeth. I was feeling something I knew I was supposed to feel, anxiety, tightening in my neck and tensing my arms around my girls. Fearing for my daughter, coaching Nicole in her breaths; but then, suddenly, calm.
Suddenly I was back in my old room, smelling that blanket, staring out the broken screen. I was thinking, what if this is it?
The plane hit a hail storm; it was a quick, loud metallic ripping noise. Not a noise you want to hear 20,000 feet in the air. The pilot in the adjacent row lifted up in her seat. The wingtip pointed down and our (excellent) captain swung us around and out of there. A minute later, the flight attendant told us that we were going back to Newark and blah, blah, blah. I was still lost in my calm.
What if this is it? I have the best job in the world. I have the most beautiful daughter in the world. I have found the love of my life. I have few regrets and I have just spent a week in the company of many of the people I love most in the world. What if this is it? Well, OK. I’ve done quite well—better than that teenage kid could have ever imagined. More than lucky, I am blessed. I don’t crave death, this is not some sick wish, I just realized, all over, with a sense of shock that no matter what happened, I couldn’t control it, and if this was it, well, OK.
Suddenly ‘oblication’ felt like far too harsh a critique. I felt lucky, so damn lucky for every moment I had spent in the last few days with the folks I loved so much. I felt so lucky for the last several years, in fact, for the whole life I’ve had. Much of me knew that we weren’t going down, but I did know that we could, just as we could all meet our moment at any time, whether we liked the idea or not. The important thing was that something about that moment reminded me to think about those big thoughts, the ones I used to chase wrapped in that old green blanket on those sleepless nights in my room at home. I knew that we probably weren’t going down but I also knew that if we did, that if this was it, there wasn’t one thing that I could do about it.
The plane leveled out and left the clouds. We found our way back to Newark and were ‘inconvenienced’ by another six or seven hour wait. Eventually, we made it home; back to Kemptville, to the branch, to our other family, here.
Abigail slept through the whole thing, safe in her daddy’s arm, my other arm around Nicole, reminding her to breathe, calm, and smiling.
Uncle Jim moved to Marble Falls in High School with his parents in an intermission from their life in my home town of Bryan. The way I’ve heard the story, my Granddaddy Leo and my Grandmother Chris (Christine, as in ‘Abigail Christine’) loved the Hill Country and vacationed there frequently and finally decided to stay for a bit. They had a picture framing business called ‘The Mitre Box’ (which my uncle bought back and ran as well, years later), and my uncle (the youngest of five siblings) was the only one who actually still lived with his folks while they were there. Good thing, too, because that’s where he met the love of his life, and Suzie is assuredly one the sweetest people ever born. They are very comfortable in Marble Falls; it is a beautiful area, with probably the most rewarding scenery in Texas—beautiful slopes melting into glassy rivers and lakes, bright and quiet and just green enough to provide a spare but adequate shade from the powerful Texas summer sun. Their generosity and efficiency as hosts is only equaled by their warmth, humour, and pleasant company as people and this family event is well worth traveling from Canada to enjoy.
The drive my grandparents made from Bryan to vacation in Marble Falls is about 3 hours. From Canada, it’s more like three days, if you’re hopped up on bennies and willing to wear a catheter. Vacationing, but perhaps even more strange, living far away from home, in the age of the airplane, has come to mean a very different thing than it did in times past. Being spread out, as we are, can now mean living thousands of miles from family and loved ones, without, thanks to the internet and relatively cheap plane tickets, necessarily even feeling removed. But this separation, at least for the not so rich and famous such as ourselves, has also come to affect the ways and whys of how we vacation.
At the outset of this adventure, I coined the word ‘oblication’ to describe my attitude about the number of stops expected of us during our short visit, a visit cut even shorter by the (gasp) loss of a half days travel when our plane missed its connection in Newark on the way down. It is a weird world in which a 1000 mile trip is considered inconvenient by taking more than half a day. But that is, nevertheless, how it feels. With numerous friends, family and a month’s worth of ‘important’ stops to make in a week’s trip, the pressure to ‘oblige’ makes the desire to ‘vacate’ seem very appealing. But oblige we did, and when we could, vacate we did as well; which was actually fairly easy to do under the guidance of our excellent west Texas hosts.
We spent a day or two in Austin, where I visited my recently rebuilt old haunt of Mother’s Café, which seems to have survived the fire without having suffered much pain in the way of rebirth...we met a new young friend, a second daughter to one of my oldest friends, just hours after her birth. We visited Boggy Creek Farm and chatted with other friends of ours (as well as Uncle Jim and Aunt Suzie’s), Carol Ann Sayle and Larry Butler, the urban farmers who inspire me as much or more than any other two folks alive. And we took a day in Dripping Springs to play some music, grill some veggies, help build a lego city and enjoy the incredible Hill Country sunset with some other old friends and their children. We didn’t manage to do about seventeen other things that we had promised ourselves that we definitely would...but in the end, I think we did just about enough.
The weekend was spent enjoying family at the Ogg-in, introducing Abigail to her cousins for the first time and playing washers while drinking longnecks, crowding around jigsaw puzzles, eating well and smiling, laughing, maybe even crying, just a little, for a couple of folks who should have been there, and had been there in years before, and were still there, in a way...
Then a stop at home, my parents’ house, where I can’t seem to sleep anywhere except for my old room, even though my sister’s old room has a bigger bed and its own bathroom. Some habits are hard to break. I could have spent the whole week in that room—it is like visiting a younger version of my self; it is amazing how much of our inner lives are scripted in those teenage bedrooms, and how much of that inner dialogue follows us in the years that pass as we grow. I still go through all the drawers, expecting to find some document or talisman that proves that room is still mine. This time, I saw an old green blanket on the shelf of the closet—I remembered its smell on the cool evenings of my youth when it kept me warm in my insomnia, my brain racing to capture all those important things before they faded, never realizing that those thoughts would still be with me to mull over for the rest of my years...
Thoughts like how we live and love and what it means to be alive and live well. What it means to be good and to be happy. What it means to be successful. Thoughts about God and atheism, about sneaking out the window (the screen is still broken, another reminder...), and thoughts about things like drugs and sex, even death, and about what it means to feel good and how.
Abigail was a champ, she flew well, and (with maybe one exception) was in good spirits for the duration of the often blisteringly hot, sometimes chaotic and always completely new to her experience of the whole adventure. Even when we hit the worst of it.
We can’t seem to fly through Newark without some glitch...even on previous trips, that airport has tripped us up with delays, weather issues and the like. Our trip home looked OK, we had a mechanical issue with our scheduled plane, but the airline kicked us over to another small jet at another gate in record time—even the flight attendant seemed impressed. We took off on schedule and seemed to be moving well...we were about halfway to Syracuse when the weather hit. Nicole, Abigail and I were in the last row, which is, I understand, the worst spot for a bumpy ride, but this seemed even more violent than usual, it didn’t help that a pilot on the next row looked visibly alarmed by ‘the ride’, the seatbelt lights were on and the flight attendant was buckled in and using phrases like ‘a little rough’ and ‘looking for a better route’. Nicole had her head between her knees and was breathing like she did the day we met Abigail and I realized I couldn’t keep reading and should probably put my book away. The tension was palpable. The pilots were quiet, focused, and the plane was loud with sound of whitening knuckles and gritting teeth. I was feeling something I knew I was supposed to feel, anxiety, tightening in my neck and tensing my arms around my girls. Fearing for my daughter, coaching Nicole in her breaths; but then, suddenly, calm.
Suddenly I was back in my old room, smelling that blanket, staring out the broken screen. I was thinking, what if this is it?
The plane hit a hail storm; it was a quick, loud metallic ripping noise. Not a noise you want to hear 20,000 feet in the air. The pilot in the adjacent row lifted up in her seat. The wingtip pointed down and our (excellent) captain swung us around and out of there. A minute later, the flight attendant told us that we were going back to Newark and blah, blah, blah. I was still lost in my calm.
What if this is it? I have the best job in the world. I have the most beautiful daughter in the world. I have found the love of my life. I have few regrets and I have just spent a week in the company of many of the people I love most in the world. What if this is it? Well, OK. I’ve done quite well—better than that teenage kid could have ever imagined. More than lucky, I am blessed. I don’t crave death, this is not some sick wish, I just realized, all over, with a sense of shock that no matter what happened, I couldn’t control it, and if this was it, well, OK.
Suddenly ‘oblication’ felt like far too harsh a critique. I felt lucky, so damn lucky for every moment I had spent in the last few days with the folks I loved so much. I felt so lucky for the last several years, in fact, for the whole life I’ve had. Much of me knew that we weren’t going down, but I did know that we could, just as we could all meet our moment at any time, whether we liked the idea or not. The important thing was that something about that moment reminded me to think about those big thoughts, the ones I used to chase wrapped in that old green blanket on those sleepless nights in my room at home. I knew that we probably weren’t going down but I also knew that if we did, that if this was it, there wasn’t one thing that I could do about it.
The plane leveled out and left the clouds. We found our way back to Newark and were ‘inconvenienced’ by another six or seven hour wait. Eventually, we made it home; back to Kemptville, to the branch, to our other family, here.
Abigail slept through the whole thing, safe in her daddy’s arm, my other arm around Nicole, reminding her to breathe, calm, and smiling.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
entering the foie gras fray:
I submitted this letter to a call-in about foie gras on Tuesday's 'Ontario Today' show on the CBC. They read an edited version of the letter, here is the full submission:
In regards to Wednesday’s foie gras conversation, I’d like to submit the following: as a chef and a former vegan, (I was the co-author of a vegan cookbook!) I visited a foie gras farm in Gascony while travelling and working on organic farms. I came to the farm as a chef, not as a vegan or an activist, and my tour was conducted with mutual respect and genuine curiosity. I was walked through every aspect of the operation and was not disgusted or horrified by what I saw. I saw a small farmer using traditional methods, I saw ducks that were happy and quacking within seconds of the feeds, which were conducted individually, by hand--and yes, at the end of the line, I saw a slaughterhouse where ducks were killed and processed for meat, which is, I know as a former vegan, what this conversation is really about, anyway. There are probably terrible farms out there where the ducks are handled with less care than the farm I visited, but I know in my heart that every factory farmed chicken (and that means most every chicken that costs less than 4 bucks a pound) is handled more inhumanely than the ducks I saw. I guess what I’m trying to say is that it is not a real victory to target small restaurants who are the front line of the battle for ethical purchasing by already choosing small, artisan farmers. As someone who has been on both sides of this issue I’d like to say to the vegans, choose your battles, it is the CAFOs and the giant centralized meat processors that supply the big chain restaurants and fast food joints that are robbing us of our humanity--not small traditional farmers. As a chef and a small restaurant owner, I don't serve foie gras, but I have, and I would again under the right circumstances—but, for now, I don't have a fine dining restaurant--I can't afford the stuff, and as a small restaurateur, honestly, I can't afford to alienate my vegan clientele over a subject on which we happen to disagree. But I sure wish that all the energy my former co-vegans spent on these hot button issues was directed at the real culprits at the big cheap corporate feed troughs that populate the mall food courts of our collective popcorn reality instead of at these little guys. Choose your battles. Everyone is watching and the more people you alienate with hollow victories the less will stand up for you when the real battles begin.
--Chef Bruce
In regards to Wednesday’s foie gras conversation, I’d like to submit the following: as a chef and a former vegan, (I was the co-author of a vegan cookbook!) I visited a foie gras farm in Gascony while travelling and working on organic farms. I came to the farm as a chef, not as a vegan or an activist, and my tour was conducted with mutual respect and genuine curiosity. I was walked through every aspect of the operation and was not disgusted or horrified by what I saw. I saw a small farmer using traditional methods, I saw ducks that were happy and quacking within seconds of the feeds, which were conducted individually, by hand--and yes, at the end of the line, I saw a slaughterhouse where ducks were killed and processed for meat, which is, I know as a former vegan, what this conversation is really about, anyway. There are probably terrible farms out there where the ducks are handled with less care than the farm I visited, but I know in my heart that every factory farmed chicken (and that means most every chicken that costs less than 4 bucks a pound) is handled more inhumanely than the ducks I saw. I guess what I’m trying to say is that it is not a real victory to target small restaurants who are the front line of the battle for ethical purchasing by already choosing small, artisan farmers. As someone who has been on both sides of this issue I’d like to say to the vegans, choose your battles, it is the CAFOs and the giant centralized meat processors that supply the big chain restaurants and fast food joints that are robbing us of our humanity--not small traditional farmers. As a chef and a small restaurant owner, I don't serve foie gras, but I have, and I would again under the right circumstances—but, for now, I don't have a fine dining restaurant--I can't afford the stuff, and as a small restaurateur, honestly, I can't afford to alienate my vegan clientele over a subject on which we happen to disagree. But I sure wish that all the energy my former co-vegans spent on these hot button issues was directed at the real culprits at the big cheap corporate feed troughs that populate the mall food courts of our collective popcorn reality instead of at these little guys. Choose your battles. Everyone is watching and the more people you alienate with hollow victories the less will stand up for you when the real battles begin.
--Chef Bruce
Thursday, May 28, 2009
sore loser...
I am not a competitive person. Which is what you say when you are, in fact, a sore loser. When I was a kid, my brother was just enough older than me that he was always physically two steps ahead—a condition that has a tendency to level out eventually, but also one that can be a source of much anxiety through the younger years. Our neighborhood friends were also his age (and size), so in the games that boys play...soccer, football, baseball, basketball (I suppose it would have been hockey had I been born somewhere a little less, well, Texas-y)...I guess you could say I had a tendency to lose. I was probably fine with this for a while, I honestly don’t remember, but eventually, it started to tick me off. Loss after loss became a source of manifest frustration. Screaming tantrums, crying jags, the whole bit. Little kid frustration at the fact that the world didn’t seem to work the way it did in the Disney sports movies. I wasn’t upset that I was losing; I was upset that the whole thing seemed so unfair.
Being the runt made me agitated, and I say that I was not competitive, but I was actually the worst of the bunch. But losing time after time made me hate the games, made me throw up my hands and eventually walk away in disgust. Finally I just quit playing, if anyone asked, I just said I wasn’t competitive, I found other outlets, comfort zones where physicality wasn’t critical; books, music, things like swimming or theatre, places where I played alongside rather than against.
Business is not a comfortable or un-competitive space. Even before I was a business owner it had become manifestly obvious that competition, even ruthless competition, was a fact of business life. Just like big kids dominate little kids, big fish swallow small fish, corporations will feast on small businesses. Only the biggest, strongest or sometimes the most creative, quickest or smartest survive in the big game—unfortunately, that doesn’t always mean the best.
Being ‘non-competitive’ in my youth gave me some perspective. It helped me distance myself and observe—it helped me to look for the merit in things that existed beyond the usual benchmarks, the trophies, the material successes.
As a restauranteur, for instance, my obvious goal in a purely competitive mode would be to become McDonald’s, arguably the most successful ‘restaurant’ concept in history. Money, power, market share...it’s all there. They are the Superbowl champs of food. And they are also a blight upon the land. I feel no love for this monstrous beast—It has leveled rainforests in its quest for cheap meat, it has created an entire industry where genetically modified corn fattens grass eaters beyond reason in concentrated toxic spaces that have made me, at times, question whether or not humanity has lost its soul. And then there’s what they’ve done to the cattle (wait for it...). But seriously, McDonald’s is all plastic and disposable in a world where every indication is that plastic and disposable will eventually choke the life from our oceans, our land, and, inevitably, ourselves. This competitive edge has brought them fortune, but we have all lost much for their gains (even as we have gained much from their fries...) All because they are very, very good at winning. It is as if they have successfully mastered the sport of feeding us our own feet, the better to keep us from walking away from this destructive path.
What would be an alternative? Is there one? Or is competing so aligned with our nature that we are trapped into this Sisyphean game forever?
When I lived in Oakland, California—I was down the street from an awesome coffee shop—they used to make an iced mocha with chocolate ice cream that would kill you dead on the spot, and then restart your heart at double speed all in the space of one quick gulp. Let’s just call it delicious. One day Starbucks decided to open a shop on the same stretch of road. Next door. It’s vicious. I mean, my little coffee shop was good, but not so good that it could afford to share a small market. It was pure predatory behaviour—That Starbucks didn’t need to succeed, it just had to outlast...I’ve got a dozen stories like that, and so do you. And the fact is that there is a twisted logic to it all, that is to say, when the object is to win at all costs, anything goes.
Are these corporations evil? No, just good competitors. A positive case could even be made for McDonald’s, Starbucks or WalMart; these guys are huge and generally irresponsible, but when they do make a choice on the side of angels, it can have massive effects...McDonald’s has implemented programs certifying and only using slaughterhouses that kill humanely, has had positive effects on millions through charitable actions such as the creation of the Ronald McDonald houses or their sponsorship of the Special Olympics; StarBucks has made choices like providing the options of Fair Trade or organic coffee, even turning these formerly fringe products into household words (without necessarily always being the best at choosing them...) Even WalMart stands poised to completely inflate the market share for organic foods, albeit at the very real risk of diluting the meaning of that word to the point of meaninglessness. The point is that when a corporation is a good citizen, its impact is on a scale that few small businesses could ever hope to achieve.
So why do I despise these places so much? If we are hardwired, if it is inevitable that we compete, and if, within the competitive world there is always going to be a winner, why can’t I just accept it and move on like everyone else seems to have? Maybe it’s because I am a sore loser. I can’t stand to see that smirking jerk in the winners circle with the babes and the trophy, knowing full well that he cheated his way to the top; it is the unfairness of the game that irks me most. And maybe, just maybe, it’s because I know there really could be a better way. I feel like the corporate big kids all acknowledge it, with these charitable acts, these nods to environmental responsibility or to social justice. They realize that some large part of our success as humans is contingent upon the interconnected nature of our actions.
When it comes to how I spend my dollars, I always prefer the quirk to the quick, the creative to the consistent, the human to the machine. Give me greasy spoons and mismatched forks over McStyrofoam™ any day. I love to see the kinds of restaurants where people sit and talk and feel like they own the place—and I don’t feel any sense of competition with them, even when they are next door. Little restaurants like the ones we’ve got (and have sadly sometimes lost) around our downtown are special, as are the bookshops, bead stores, thrift shops, yoga studios...we are blessed with a host of real and worthy businesses around here. The kind of spots that are worth supporting and the kind that deserve to win—even though you can also choose cheaper, faster and less thoughtful versions of anything they sell at franchise version of the same around the corner or up on the highway. Maybe what I like is that these little places exist in the same way that healthy people and ecosystems work, with diversity, interconnectedness, care and love.
When I was a teenager, I met Bob Atkins at his house long before I entered his homey little health food store—he had two beautiful daughters about my age and I was lucky enough to spend enough time with them to at least meet dad (if too unlucky for much else...), and though they were cute, but it was on my first trip to the health food store that I really fell in love. Rows of bulk bins, bags of flours, seaweed, tofu, sprouts...I had never found such an array of strange and wonderful delights—I felt like a young wizard in an alchemist’s laboratory. Brazos Natural Foods had the particular smell that I have since come to associate with every health food store: that blend of incense, musk, patchouli, yeast and garlic, that rich, savoury scent which I have found again and again in my life, in tiny shops and in giant groceries, scattered throughout a hundred small towns and sprawling cities, in Canada, throughout the U.S., even in Europe. It is a particular and comforting scent for me and every time I smell it, it always feels like coming home.
One of the things that attracted me to Kemptville, in fact to the area in general, was that every small town around here supports at least one if not more of these quirky little health food shops. It was a big factor in helping me have the faith that this community could also support an organic foods restaurant. Kemptville has a particularly nice one, Nature’s Way, which I have shopped at regularly since moving here, and where I am now known well enough that I am always greeted by name by most of the staff, a gaggle of sweethearts who genuinely care about the health of this community (and who definitely care less about me and more about my baby daughter...). I’m not going to say anything rude, but I couldn’t help but notice that recently a local grocery store, which although Independently (oops, sorry!) owned is still part of a much larger entity, which also happens to be practically next door to our little shop is adding a ‘store within a store’ health food area...and, well, I’ll just say that I’m a little peeved. The grocery store doesn’t need that market segment to survive, at least I don’t think it does, and, well, I guess the whole thing just feels fishy to me. It seems like that predatory, anything goes, play to win sort of nonsense that made me such a sore loser in the first place. Part of me says ‘Well, think of the positive, think of all the folks who would never go to a quirky little health food store who will now be exposed to organic foods, maybe even for the first time.’ But part of me, that sore loser side, sees a problem on the horizon for a cool little shop that deserves to win but has a big brother that’s always going to be a little stronger and a little faster.
I mentioned earlier that big brothers don’t stay bigger forever. There came a point for me where I certainly could no longer use that excuse in my losing to mine. Not being competitive is a nice idea, but compete I do, every day, for the hearts and minds (and especially the stomachs) of a small town outside of the city—knowing full well that the big kids can do almost everything I do faster and cheaper—but also knowing that they can never do it better or with more heart. They can smirk and strut in the winners circle, but they also have to try to sleep knowing that they cheated to get there. And they also know that someday, sore loser or not, I’m not going to be quite so little anymore. And neither are you.
Nature’s Way is located at 2676 County Rd. 43 in Kemptville; they are open Monday through Saturday from 9 to 6, stop by if you’re in the area.
--Chef Bruce
Being the runt made me agitated, and I say that I was not competitive, but I was actually the worst of the bunch. But losing time after time made me hate the games, made me throw up my hands and eventually walk away in disgust. Finally I just quit playing, if anyone asked, I just said I wasn’t competitive, I found other outlets, comfort zones where physicality wasn’t critical; books, music, things like swimming or theatre, places where I played alongside rather than against.
Business is not a comfortable or un-competitive space. Even before I was a business owner it had become manifestly obvious that competition, even ruthless competition, was a fact of business life. Just like big kids dominate little kids, big fish swallow small fish, corporations will feast on small businesses. Only the biggest, strongest or sometimes the most creative, quickest or smartest survive in the big game—unfortunately, that doesn’t always mean the best.
Being ‘non-competitive’ in my youth gave me some perspective. It helped me distance myself and observe—it helped me to look for the merit in things that existed beyond the usual benchmarks, the trophies, the material successes.
As a restauranteur, for instance, my obvious goal in a purely competitive mode would be to become McDonald’s, arguably the most successful ‘restaurant’ concept in history. Money, power, market share...it’s all there. They are the Superbowl champs of food. And they are also a blight upon the land. I feel no love for this monstrous beast—It has leveled rainforests in its quest for cheap meat, it has created an entire industry where genetically modified corn fattens grass eaters beyond reason in concentrated toxic spaces that have made me, at times, question whether or not humanity has lost its soul. And then there’s what they’ve done to the cattle (wait for it...). But seriously, McDonald’s is all plastic and disposable in a world where every indication is that plastic and disposable will eventually choke the life from our oceans, our land, and, inevitably, ourselves. This competitive edge has brought them fortune, but we have all lost much for their gains (even as we have gained much from their fries...) All because they are very, very good at winning. It is as if they have successfully mastered the sport of feeding us our own feet, the better to keep us from walking away from this destructive path.
What would be an alternative? Is there one? Or is competing so aligned with our nature that we are trapped into this Sisyphean game forever?
When I lived in Oakland, California—I was down the street from an awesome coffee shop—they used to make an iced mocha with chocolate ice cream that would kill you dead on the spot, and then restart your heart at double speed all in the space of one quick gulp. Let’s just call it delicious. One day Starbucks decided to open a shop on the same stretch of road. Next door. It’s vicious. I mean, my little coffee shop was good, but not so good that it could afford to share a small market. It was pure predatory behaviour—That Starbucks didn’t need to succeed, it just had to outlast...I’ve got a dozen stories like that, and so do you. And the fact is that there is a twisted logic to it all, that is to say, when the object is to win at all costs, anything goes.
Are these corporations evil? No, just good competitors. A positive case could even be made for McDonald’s, Starbucks or WalMart; these guys are huge and generally irresponsible, but when they do make a choice on the side of angels, it can have massive effects...McDonald’s has implemented programs certifying and only using slaughterhouses that kill humanely, has had positive effects on millions through charitable actions such as the creation of the Ronald McDonald houses or their sponsorship of the Special Olympics; StarBucks has made choices like providing the options of Fair Trade or organic coffee, even turning these formerly fringe products into household words (without necessarily always being the best at choosing them...) Even WalMart stands poised to completely inflate the market share for organic foods, albeit at the very real risk of diluting the meaning of that word to the point of meaninglessness. The point is that when a corporation is a good citizen, its impact is on a scale that few small businesses could ever hope to achieve.
So why do I despise these places so much? If we are hardwired, if it is inevitable that we compete, and if, within the competitive world there is always going to be a winner, why can’t I just accept it and move on like everyone else seems to have? Maybe it’s because I am a sore loser. I can’t stand to see that smirking jerk in the winners circle with the babes and the trophy, knowing full well that he cheated his way to the top; it is the unfairness of the game that irks me most. And maybe, just maybe, it’s because I know there really could be a better way. I feel like the corporate big kids all acknowledge it, with these charitable acts, these nods to environmental responsibility or to social justice. They realize that some large part of our success as humans is contingent upon the interconnected nature of our actions.
When it comes to how I spend my dollars, I always prefer the quirk to the quick, the creative to the consistent, the human to the machine. Give me greasy spoons and mismatched forks over McStyrofoam™ any day. I love to see the kinds of restaurants where people sit and talk and feel like they own the place—and I don’t feel any sense of competition with them, even when they are next door. Little restaurants like the ones we’ve got (and have sadly sometimes lost) around our downtown are special, as are the bookshops, bead stores, thrift shops, yoga studios...we are blessed with a host of real and worthy businesses around here. The kind of spots that are worth supporting and the kind that deserve to win—even though you can also choose cheaper, faster and less thoughtful versions of anything they sell at franchise version of the same around the corner or up on the highway. Maybe what I like is that these little places exist in the same way that healthy people and ecosystems work, with diversity, interconnectedness, care and love.
When I was a teenager, I met Bob Atkins at his house long before I entered his homey little health food store—he had two beautiful daughters about my age and I was lucky enough to spend enough time with them to at least meet dad (if too unlucky for much else...), and though they were cute, but it was on my first trip to the health food store that I really fell in love. Rows of bulk bins, bags of flours, seaweed, tofu, sprouts...I had never found such an array of strange and wonderful delights—I felt like a young wizard in an alchemist’s laboratory. Brazos Natural Foods had the particular smell that I have since come to associate with every health food store: that blend of incense, musk, patchouli, yeast and garlic, that rich, savoury scent which I have found again and again in my life, in tiny shops and in giant groceries, scattered throughout a hundred small towns and sprawling cities, in Canada, throughout the U.S., even in Europe. It is a particular and comforting scent for me and every time I smell it, it always feels like coming home.
One of the things that attracted me to Kemptville, in fact to the area in general, was that every small town around here supports at least one if not more of these quirky little health food shops. It was a big factor in helping me have the faith that this community could also support an organic foods restaurant. Kemptville has a particularly nice one, Nature’s Way, which I have shopped at regularly since moving here, and where I am now known well enough that I am always greeted by name by most of the staff, a gaggle of sweethearts who genuinely care about the health of this community (and who definitely care less about me and more about my baby daughter...). I’m not going to say anything rude, but I couldn’t help but notice that recently a local grocery store, which although Independently (oops, sorry!) owned is still part of a much larger entity, which also happens to be practically next door to our little shop is adding a ‘store within a store’ health food area...and, well, I’ll just say that I’m a little peeved. The grocery store doesn’t need that market segment to survive, at least I don’t think it does, and, well, I guess the whole thing just feels fishy to me. It seems like that predatory, anything goes, play to win sort of nonsense that made me such a sore loser in the first place. Part of me says ‘Well, think of the positive, think of all the folks who would never go to a quirky little health food store who will now be exposed to organic foods, maybe even for the first time.’ But part of me, that sore loser side, sees a problem on the horizon for a cool little shop that deserves to win but has a big brother that’s always going to be a little stronger and a little faster.
I mentioned earlier that big brothers don’t stay bigger forever. There came a point for me where I certainly could no longer use that excuse in my losing to mine. Not being competitive is a nice idea, but compete I do, every day, for the hearts and minds (and especially the stomachs) of a small town outside of the city—knowing full well that the big kids can do almost everything I do faster and cheaper—but also knowing that they can never do it better or with more heart. They can smirk and strut in the winners circle, but they also have to try to sleep knowing that they cheated to get there. And they also know that someday, sore loser or not, I’m not going to be quite so little anymore. And neither are you.
Nature’s Way is located at 2676 County Rd. 43 in Kemptville; they are open Monday through Saturday from 9 to 6, stop by if you’re in the area.
--Chef Bruce
Thursday, April 30, 2009
dandy poem
Why would we celebrate the dandelion?
This crooked little weed—
This fruit of fertile, feral seed—
This yellow and this green that speak out Spring! Spring! Spring!
For what this little flower with its splash across the lawn—
Aggravating those who seek an order to the grass and long to poison it and us by proxy—
What moxie shows this humble little plant—
It can’t be beaten back, just slowed—
It springs back each and every time it’s mowed, its seeds sown again and again, by wind!
How can one defend against such a hearty foe?
Embrace, and buss, enjoy, we must!
This lion’s tooth, so humble, and so strong—
Why celebrate this weed, this flower, this first sign of spring, this bitter green?
Why celebrate when we have lost the battle it has fought?
Why would we not?
This crooked little weed—
This fruit of fertile, feral seed—
This yellow and this green that speak out Spring! Spring! Spring!
For what this little flower with its splash across the lawn—
Aggravating those who seek an order to the grass and long to poison it and us by proxy—
What moxie shows this humble little plant—
It can’t be beaten back, just slowed—
It springs back each and every time it’s mowed, its seeds sown again and again, by wind!
How can one defend against such a hearty foe?
Embrace, and buss, enjoy, we must!
This lion’s tooth, so humble, and so strong—
Why celebrate this weed, this flower, this first sign of spring, this bitter green?
Why celebrate when we have lost the battle it has fought?
Why would we not?
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Locavore
A couple of months back, Nicole and I were present at the second annual Savour Ottawa summit meeting, held (this year) in the opulent surroundings of the National Art Centre. Savour Ottawa is the hub of the wheel that is moving our National Capital Region towards having a functioning local foods network. It is a joint program of Ottawa Tourism and a non-profit group called Just Foods, and is supported and loosely connected to many other local, provincial and Canadian efforts that all aim to put a little sanity back into the way we purchase, source, and ultimately consume food. In our area, it is our biggest and best means of participating in the local foods movement. This organization attempts to do this by putting chefs in the room with farmers (...and the media...and many other concerned folks, such as grocery store owners, distributors, micro-processors and farmers’ markets...) and it seems to be working; attendance at each event has increased as has interest and membership, with a surprising number of restaurants and farmers seeming anxious to climb aboard and help move this stuck wheel out of the mud. Much of the event was a series of progress reports and information bits, delivered in an organized and thoughtful fashion. Savour Ottawa has been quite active and engaged since its inception, just three short years ago, and I’ve enjoyed attending, participating, and even sitting on the advisory committee of this effective, smart and forward thinking group. We have gained a great deal by way of this group, but by far, the best thing has been the opportunity to meet, hear, talk to, and get to know a wonderful community of like minded folks. Folks like Terry McEvoy.
‘Locavore’ is a new word; the folks at the Oxford American Dictionary added it to their lexicon and named it the word of the year for 2007. It was coined in San Francisco by someone named Jessica Prentice for the 2005 World Environment Day to describe folks who choose locally produced foods over the high mileage options we find in most stores, and in a short time, it has come to describe a movement some folks are calling the new ‘organic’. That would have been funny to our grandparents who would have called it ‘normal’. I spend a lot of my time thinking about this kind of stuff, so much so that it actually surprises me when I discover that other folks don’t necessarily do the same. That’s why it is always a pleasure to find other people who are as passionate about it as I am.
I never set out to be a local foods guy; for me, it started with a love of food combined with a sincere interest in and love of nature and the environment. It began in my teens and, I’m usually sorry to say, the earliest manifestations were a precocious political bent, usually expressed with a passionate lecture or a blind criticism of anyone whose knee didn’t jerk to the left. Needless to say, this approach didn’t win me many fans and I eventually learned to tone down the preachy-ness in favour of a more personalized expression in the form of a series of experiments with vegetarian, vegan, and finally organic eating. My career path being what it was (with few exceptions, I’ve only ever cooked for a living), and because of my other hunger for things to read and learn, it was natural for me to follow each of these personal experiments into both extreme research in the form of articles and books as well as into a variety of professional settings. This path has led me to where I am now, cooking philosophical local and organic food in a small town—reaching out and teaching folks (I hope) about some of the things I’ve learned along the way. When we opened the branch, I made a promise to myself that I would start shopping at my door, and really, honestly try to forge a local network that would supply our restaurant, of course, and support my family, but also to contribute to the community as a whole; that we would be a part of something bigger than just a business, and that we would make an honest effort to be a part of a positive world change.
Doing that meant meeting local farmers and producers, a task that is the least work-ish part of my work. It meant going to farmers’ markets, cold-calling numbers from the internet or the phone book, and occasionally, it meant pulling a dangerous u-turn to stop and buy a tub of honey at a self serve shack like Terry McEvoy’s, which was right on the side of one of the main roads out of town.
I am a local food geek, for sure, but I am not a local food armageddonist, which is to say, I no longer think that the world will end if I eat a slice of processed cheese (it might...but I doubt it); nor am I completely convinced that there is absolutely no place for giant mechanized and centralized farming operations in the matrix of the future of how we feed this planet (hey, I love Star Trek, I’d love to think that there is a scientific solution to every problem!) But, as far as the benefits of local eating go, what I have come to believe is that big economies (such as giant centralized and mechanized farms) and big corporations (such as agro-chemical, food processing plants, or giant feedlot and slaughter operations) are too easily made victim to the violent side effects of one of nature’s fundamental laws, the law of inertia, or momentum. And until humans can subvert this basic law of nature, (God help us when we do...) I can’t help but feel that we are needlessly endangering ourselves, our fellow humans, our children and our planet, and usually for all of the wrong reasons, like money, power or ‘security’; but most often, as I stated before, simply because of momentum. Big systems like our agricultural and industrial food processing ones can turn a bad idea into a devastating one in a short time (think DDT or gene modification); ideas which seem like good science in the lab can suddenly become toxic and widespread when applied to our enormous food system as a whole. Also, when things go wrong, (think Mad Cow Disease, or E. coli) they tend to go very wrong, very quickly because the system is so big that by its nature, by its momentum, it is difficult, or even impossible to slow or stop. In other words, with each new iteration of a poorly tested or poorly understood catch-all agricultural ‘solution’, or with each new manifestation (...watch the papers, what is it that is being recalled this week: Peanut Butter? Spinach? Deli Meats?) of a systemic problem, we open Pandora’s Box; and by the time we realize what we’ve done, it is too big, too bad and too late.
You see, I do believe in the science of agriculture, it’s just that my favorite farm laboratories are not climate or temperature controlled (at least not by the hand of man) or located in a Monsanto complex, they are scattered around the countryside of every rural route in the world—and they are operated by scientists who understand things about plants that can’t be taught in a clean white lab-coat or with a test tube. The scientists that I trust have dirty hands and well-worn rubber boots; they can fix a tractor with a bent stick and a length of twine—they can tell you which hill gets the best sun for basil and which shallow spot is too wet for garlic. And the science they understand isn’t from a book with pages; it is from an almanac filled with dirt, sun, time and water. These scientists Will Feed Their Family, and then, if there is something left, they will feed some other folks, too. They know that crop diversity will be the best tool to ensure a year of meals because the bugs can’t get everything, and they know that saving seeds is cheaper than buying them and the best way to be sure of what they’re going to get. They know that spraying poison on food is counterintuitive at its best and downright criminal at its worst. And they know that if something doesn’t work, for heaven’s sake, you stop doing it, you don’t keep trying it over and over again, hoping for a different result. They are small enough, smart enough and quick enough that they do not get crushed by the momentum of a bad idea.
These folks are the scientists that I trust. They acknowledge the math and philosophy of the agricultural schools but they also don’t let it interfere with the process of putting food in the pantry or the root cellar. It is a science not simply based on knowledge, but on knowledge tempered with wisdom; science of the mind, but also of the heart. These are the same scientists who carried the world on their backs from the caves right up to the industrial revolution, and when the oil runs out (and it will...), these are the scientists we will all be seeking out, hat in hand, begging them to teach us how to feed ourselves again.
I’m not going to wait.
I didn’t want to write today, I (and lots of other folks) got some bad news yesterday morning, Terry McEvoy, our honey guy, died suddenly, much too suddenly and much, much too young. Our, and many other heavy hearts, are with his family today. Terry was a honey collector and processor, a family man, a birdhouse builder and a pioneer and an activist in many community based, positive world changing groups and projects. And, without question, he was one of those scientists, those men of knowledge, of wisdom, and of heart to whom I referred.
I was remembering that Savour Ottawa summit at the NAC today, because of him. As a fellow member of the advisory committee he was asked, I believe, just to introduce or to give a quick summary of some item at the microphone at some point during the latter half of the event. There was no keynote speaker that day and accurately sensing the spirit of the moment he took it upon himself to say a few things...he noted that this was not what he had been asked to do, but that he felt that when an opportunity presented itself, such as this one had, there must be a reason, and that it was important for someone to say what needed to be said. Then he pulled out a set of notes. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said with a bit of mischief, ‘It won’t take too long.’ It didn’t. He spoke clearly and eloquently for the next several minutes about several topics, but central to his theme was the idea that our collective need to put the idea of ‘culture’ back into ‘agriculture.’ He talked fondly of his forebears and about how crazy they would have found the idea that in our backwards food non-culture of today a farmer could have hundreds of acres and still not be able to feed his or her family. And he spoke about how great it was that we were all there in that room talking about doing something about it, but that all the talk in the world wasn’t going to fix what needed fixing and that we were all going to have roll up our sleeves and get to work if we wanted to see real change.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that his talk that day affected me deeply. On the one hand, my respect for him increased tenfold for his act of courage and will in even taking (and I do mean taking) the chance to speak. In some ways, he helped to wake up that passionate youngster in me who I had suppressed all those years ago for fear of offending; I felt like I was being given permission, even responsibility to take the chance to say what needed to be said when the chance arose, and I’ll admit, I have enjoyed and taken a few opportunities to do exactly that in the months since...much like what you’ve read in the paragraphs here today. And on the other hand, the importance of the specifics of his message have resonated with me; both as a reminder of the importance of what we who are active in the local food culture are doing and also for his call to arms, his recipe for a clear direction forward. His phrase about putting the ‘culture’ back into ‘agriculture’ is now a permanent part of my idiom, as it now is, I’m sure, for every person who heard him speak on that (or any other) day. Terry was a true and good leader. I did not know him well, certainly not nearly as well as I wanted to, and though I had looked forward to getting to know him over years to come, I find that even in 2 short days, I am already getting to know him better as I learn more and more about his incredible legacy.
This community has suffered a blow. Terry McEvoy, a good, good man, was ripped from us too swiftly and much too soon. But if he were here, something tells me that he’d be taking the microphone and telling us that we’ve got to roll up our sleeves, look ahead and get to work.
I didn’t want to write today, but I knew I had to.
--Chef Bruce
‘Locavore’ is a new word; the folks at the Oxford American Dictionary added it to their lexicon and named it the word of the year for 2007. It was coined in San Francisco by someone named Jessica Prentice for the 2005 World Environment Day to describe folks who choose locally produced foods over the high mileage options we find in most stores, and in a short time, it has come to describe a movement some folks are calling the new ‘organic’. That would have been funny to our grandparents who would have called it ‘normal’. I spend a lot of my time thinking about this kind of stuff, so much so that it actually surprises me when I discover that other folks don’t necessarily do the same. That’s why it is always a pleasure to find other people who are as passionate about it as I am.
I never set out to be a local foods guy; for me, it started with a love of food combined with a sincere interest in and love of nature and the environment. It began in my teens and, I’m usually sorry to say, the earliest manifestations were a precocious political bent, usually expressed with a passionate lecture or a blind criticism of anyone whose knee didn’t jerk to the left. Needless to say, this approach didn’t win me many fans and I eventually learned to tone down the preachy-ness in favour of a more personalized expression in the form of a series of experiments with vegetarian, vegan, and finally organic eating. My career path being what it was (with few exceptions, I’ve only ever cooked for a living), and because of my other hunger for things to read and learn, it was natural for me to follow each of these personal experiments into both extreme research in the form of articles and books as well as into a variety of professional settings. This path has led me to where I am now, cooking philosophical local and organic food in a small town—reaching out and teaching folks (I hope) about some of the things I’ve learned along the way. When we opened the branch, I made a promise to myself that I would start shopping at my door, and really, honestly try to forge a local network that would supply our restaurant, of course, and support my family, but also to contribute to the community as a whole; that we would be a part of something bigger than just a business, and that we would make an honest effort to be a part of a positive world change.
Doing that meant meeting local farmers and producers, a task that is the least work-ish part of my work. It meant going to farmers’ markets, cold-calling numbers from the internet or the phone book, and occasionally, it meant pulling a dangerous u-turn to stop and buy a tub of honey at a self serve shack like Terry McEvoy’s, which was right on the side of one of the main roads out of town.
I am a local food geek, for sure, but I am not a local food armageddonist, which is to say, I no longer think that the world will end if I eat a slice of processed cheese (it might...but I doubt it); nor am I completely convinced that there is absolutely no place for giant mechanized and centralized farming operations in the matrix of the future of how we feed this planet (hey, I love Star Trek, I’d love to think that there is a scientific solution to every problem!) But, as far as the benefits of local eating go, what I have come to believe is that big economies (such as giant centralized and mechanized farms) and big corporations (such as agro-chemical, food processing plants, or giant feedlot and slaughter operations) are too easily made victim to the violent side effects of one of nature’s fundamental laws, the law of inertia, or momentum. And until humans can subvert this basic law of nature, (God help us when we do...) I can’t help but feel that we are needlessly endangering ourselves, our fellow humans, our children and our planet, and usually for all of the wrong reasons, like money, power or ‘security’; but most often, as I stated before, simply because of momentum. Big systems like our agricultural and industrial food processing ones can turn a bad idea into a devastating one in a short time (think DDT or gene modification); ideas which seem like good science in the lab can suddenly become toxic and widespread when applied to our enormous food system as a whole. Also, when things go wrong, (think Mad Cow Disease, or E. coli) they tend to go very wrong, very quickly because the system is so big that by its nature, by its momentum, it is difficult, or even impossible to slow or stop. In other words, with each new iteration of a poorly tested or poorly understood catch-all agricultural ‘solution’, or with each new manifestation (...watch the papers, what is it that is being recalled this week: Peanut Butter? Spinach? Deli Meats?) of a systemic problem, we open Pandora’s Box; and by the time we realize what we’ve done, it is too big, too bad and too late.
You see, I do believe in the science of agriculture, it’s just that my favorite farm laboratories are not climate or temperature controlled (at least not by the hand of man) or located in a Monsanto complex, they are scattered around the countryside of every rural route in the world—and they are operated by scientists who understand things about plants that can’t be taught in a clean white lab-coat or with a test tube. The scientists that I trust have dirty hands and well-worn rubber boots; they can fix a tractor with a bent stick and a length of twine—they can tell you which hill gets the best sun for basil and which shallow spot is too wet for garlic. And the science they understand isn’t from a book with pages; it is from an almanac filled with dirt, sun, time and water. These scientists Will Feed Their Family, and then, if there is something left, they will feed some other folks, too. They know that crop diversity will be the best tool to ensure a year of meals because the bugs can’t get everything, and they know that saving seeds is cheaper than buying them and the best way to be sure of what they’re going to get. They know that spraying poison on food is counterintuitive at its best and downright criminal at its worst. And they know that if something doesn’t work, for heaven’s sake, you stop doing it, you don’t keep trying it over and over again, hoping for a different result. They are small enough, smart enough and quick enough that they do not get crushed by the momentum of a bad idea.
These folks are the scientists that I trust. They acknowledge the math and philosophy of the agricultural schools but they also don’t let it interfere with the process of putting food in the pantry or the root cellar. It is a science not simply based on knowledge, but on knowledge tempered with wisdom; science of the mind, but also of the heart. These are the same scientists who carried the world on their backs from the caves right up to the industrial revolution, and when the oil runs out (and it will...), these are the scientists we will all be seeking out, hat in hand, begging them to teach us how to feed ourselves again.
I’m not going to wait.
I didn’t want to write today, I (and lots of other folks) got some bad news yesterday morning, Terry McEvoy, our honey guy, died suddenly, much too suddenly and much, much too young. Our, and many other heavy hearts, are with his family today. Terry was a honey collector and processor, a family man, a birdhouse builder and a pioneer and an activist in many community based, positive world changing groups and projects. And, without question, he was one of those scientists, those men of knowledge, of wisdom, and of heart to whom I referred.
I was remembering that Savour Ottawa summit at the NAC today, because of him. As a fellow member of the advisory committee he was asked, I believe, just to introduce or to give a quick summary of some item at the microphone at some point during the latter half of the event. There was no keynote speaker that day and accurately sensing the spirit of the moment he took it upon himself to say a few things...he noted that this was not what he had been asked to do, but that he felt that when an opportunity presented itself, such as this one had, there must be a reason, and that it was important for someone to say what needed to be said. Then he pulled out a set of notes. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said with a bit of mischief, ‘It won’t take too long.’ It didn’t. He spoke clearly and eloquently for the next several minutes about several topics, but central to his theme was the idea that our collective need to put the idea of ‘culture’ back into ‘agriculture.’ He talked fondly of his forebears and about how crazy they would have found the idea that in our backwards food non-culture of today a farmer could have hundreds of acres and still not be able to feed his or her family. And he spoke about how great it was that we were all there in that room talking about doing something about it, but that all the talk in the world wasn’t going to fix what needed fixing and that we were all going to have roll up our sleeves and get to work if we wanted to see real change.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that his talk that day affected me deeply. On the one hand, my respect for him increased tenfold for his act of courage and will in even taking (and I do mean taking) the chance to speak. In some ways, he helped to wake up that passionate youngster in me who I had suppressed all those years ago for fear of offending; I felt like I was being given permission, even responsibility to take the chance to say what needed to be said when the chance arose, and I’ll admit, I have enjoyed and taken a few opportunities to do exactly that in the months since...much like what you’ve read in the paragraphs here today. And on the other hand, the importance of the specifics of his message have resonated with me; both as a reminder of the importance of what we who are active in the local food culture are doing and also for his call to arms, his recipe for a clear direction forward. His phrase about putting the ‘culture’ back into ‘agriculture’ is now a permanent part of my idiom, as it now is, I’m sure, for every person who heard him speak on that (or any other) day. Terry was a true and good leader. I did not know him well, certainly not nearly as well as I wanted to, and though I had looked forward to getting to know him over years to come, I find that even in 2 short days, I am already getting to know him better as I learn more and more about his incredible legacy.
This community has suffered a blow. Terry McEvoy, a good, good man, was ripped from us too swiftly and much too soon. But if he were here, something tells me that he’d be taking the microphone and telling us that we’ve got to roll up our sleeves, look ahead and get to work.
I didn’t want to write today, but I knew I had to.
--Chef Bruce
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