dollars and senselessness...

My granddaddy was a dentist; he worked in the Astin building in downtown Bryan, Texas, my home town. We used to watch the Christmas and July 4th parades from the windows of his upstairs office—I remember back in the 70s, when I was just a little kid, downtown Bryan was still ‘where you went’ when you needed something. You parked and walked, and within a few blocks you had the Woolworths, the Parker-Astin hardware store, a pizza parlour, shoe shops, men’s clothing shops, women’s clothing shops, hat shops, a barber shop, a library, restaurants...There was a community there, and tagging along with Dr. Enloe was a good way to meet and see every member of it. By the mid 80’s, it was a ghost town. Two out of three shops were empty, folks had moved out to bigger stores on bigger streets with bigger parking lots. Dr. Enloe had retired, the parades moved uptown and the barber looked bored. You see, that was right around the time that Wal-Mart came to town. I’m thinking about it because Wal-Mart has just announced that it is planning to begin construction, starting this spring, on its long rumoured Kemptville location.



Back in the 80s, Wal-Mart was still saturating the various media with prevarications about it’s ‘commitment’ to ‘Buy American’ a commitment which I notice it has not committed to anytime recently, especially as by about 2005, somewhere around 60% of the stuff they sold was imported, mostly from China...according to one study, in 2004 alone, Wal-Mart spent over 18 billion dollars on Chinese products. That means that if it were an individual economy; they would be China's eighth largest trading partner, bigger than Russia, Australia, and, you guessed it, Canada. According to the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations), "Wal-Mart is the single largest importer of foreign-produced goods in the United States", their biggest trading partner is China, and their trade with China alone constitutes approximately 10% of the total US trade deficit with China as of 2004.



Apparently, Wal-Mart has sent as many as 1.5 million jobs to China; you know, decent jobs, factory jobs, middle class jobs. Not the kind of ‘greeter’ or ‘cashier’ jobs they offer in their stores, jobs that pay minimum wage and lock a person into the lowest possible economic bracket for life (or at least for as long as the often brief term of employment...), especially given this company’s famous and well documented anti-union stance and what seems to be a complete and utter disdain for anything resembling a job benefit...Wal-Mart sells its stores to communities by promising jobs. Hmmm. Here are some interesting statistics: a 1994 study done by the Congressional Research Service concluded that "for every two jobs created by a Wal-Mart store, the community loses three. Jobs that are retained by a community are often merely shifted from local businesses to the giant retailer." In another study, a fella named Kenneth Stone, who is a Professor of Economics at Iowa State University, found that some small towns can lose as much as half of their retail trade within ten years of a Wal-Mart store opening. They don’t bring jobs, they just shift them around.



I used to live with a Wal-Mart employee, and her stories used to make me cringe...she said that every morning they would do cheers, even sing ‘Wal-Mart’ songs, like a cult, you know, morale building stuff...What a great place to work, right? At least until she was sent home mid shift every time she approached 28 hours in a week, the magic hour at which she would have become a full time employee, and thus been eligible (after a year!) for the modest health insurance package that such employment status required. She knew of no-one, outside of management, who was receiving any such benefit, and it’s probably just as well, with a $1000 deductible, the presence of the insurance would have been all but invisible to a person of her age, health and financial means. Wal-Mart is not a good steward of its people.



These days, I live in Kemptville, and we are not immune to the fallout of the carbon economy, the desire for bigger parking lots for our bigger trucks have already moved much of the major business from downtown to the highway, as seems to be the way of the world these days. But one of the things that attracted me to this town, one of the reasons I wanted to be a part of this community was that we still had (have...) a vibrant, beautiful, and even functional downtown area. It’s not at 100% occupancy, by any stretch, but it is still a vital, functioning core to our town. I can still shop, eat, go to the post office, the bank, I can buy books, clothes, gifts and hardware all within an easy walk from my home. The parades still loop down Clothier Street to Prescott, and we watch them from upstairs window of our Heritage building that hearkens back to a time when horses would have pulled the floats.



I realize that so far this article makes me sound like a xenophobe, like someone who doesn’t believe in the market or in competition. This is simply not the case. The fact is, I have always accepted that this concept, this thing, that we have collectively agreed to call ‘the market’, whatever it actually is, is one of, if not the most compelling forces on human behaviour that exists. I even believe that it might be something even deeper, something more intrinsic, like some kind of manifestation of our base needs in the world. People need to eat, to have shelter and clothing, and since prehistory we have hunted, we have gathered, and farmed, we have done what it has taken to survive, we have protected our own by providing for them, and even when we had enough, and when those we care for had enough, we hoarded, because eventually (we instinctively knew) that someday, we might no longer have enough. These base activities when practiced in the modern world become dollars traded for goods and services, the collection of dollars has replaced the collection of foods and firewood, the need to protect became the act of collecting and exchanging dollars through corporate and market based prophylactics that have absolved us of the direct responsibility for what we have done to collect more and to hoard. We are compelled by these base instincts and desires, and we act.



The question then becomes, is the market all that we are? Are we nothing more than slaves to our most basic motivations? I contend that we are not. There are, and have always been other factors that affect our behaviours, factors like love, compassion, empathy, free will and choice. A corporation is an excuse to behave badly, by its very definition it protects its participants from risk, and it absolves them of direct accountability, of blame. If these other instincts, these other factors exist and therefore do affect our behaviour, it stands to reason that other institutions must also exist (as the market exists to express our base desires) to embody them and that through them, we can act on those better angels in our hearts and minds. My feeling is that those institutions are exactly what we would expect them to be, things like the government and its mandate to regulate and pick up where the market leaves off, trade unions, churches, charities, service groups, even extended groups of family and friends. I don’t doubt the power of the market; I simply refuse to accept that it is the whole of who and what we are.



We don’t always do what is best for ourselves—given food we will sometimes indulge too much, given wine, we sometimes drink beyond our fill; we are humans and to be human is to accept that there is both base desire and a higher calling—when my pants get too tight, I know it is time to slow down. I hope that I will decide in time, but who knows? Wal-Mart is the grand expression of our most base desire, our need to collect, to conquer and to hoard, no matter the cost... it is the love handles of our culture, it is the desire to indulge taken to such bloated extremes that it no longer has a view of its own belt. I believe in the market, but I also believe in knowing when it is time to say no to a second serving, when it is time to temper our greed, and when to think about more than what is easiest and fastest and cheapest, and to start to think about what is best; best for me, best for my community and best for those who I love.



Kemptville has three grocery stores, a health food store, four hardware stores, and several other small retail stores and shops that will be dramatically, instantly and permanently affected by this new beast, this Godzilla that will not stop until Tokyo is burning. Many of these stores have been locally owned for generations; when you spend your dollar with these folks it stays here, in Kemptville, it doesn’t shoot off to Bentonville, Arkansas to make sure the Walton family will have even more billions of dollars to not give to charity (less than 1% in 2005!). Wal-Mart will come in with predatory pricing (a new Wal-Mart will charge as much as 17% less in a new area than in one where its act of economic devastation is complete,) it will bring unsecure and low paying jobs to replace the secure and better paying jobs that it will destroy and within a few years, our sweet little downtown will, sadly, probably look a lot like the one in my hometown did in the years after its arrival there, and it will probably look a lot like the downtowns in thousands of sweet little towns all across North America still do. That is, unless we decide not to let it.



The last time I visited Bryan, my old downtown was a sight to behold, new shops, new stores, new clubs and restaurants had sprung up to fill the empty storefronts from those years after the Wal-Mart came to town...folks in the government, folks in the neighborhood, the old businesses that didn’t want to move, lots of smart, forward thinking people had gotten together and decided to fix the place up. Incentives were used, not to bring in an instrument of destruction this time, but to rebuild and re-imagine what that downtown could be. Now it’s a beautiful, vibrant place, in many ways it reminds me of downtown I remember from tagging along with Dr. Enloe. It was a long road to recovery, but it worked, and I don’t think one person in Bryan would say it wasn’t worth it. The way it worked was through community—people getting together and deciding that it was something they wanted and then going out and doing it.



I don’t presume that I can stop Wal-Mart. No more than I can presume that I can stop myself from sometimes eating a second slice of pie. But I can, and we can, sometimes say that enough is enough. I don’t presume that I can stop Wal-Mart. Not alone. I can hope and help to curb its effects on my new home, I can warn and I can share what I have seen. We can take our energy, our ideals, our dollars and our votes and we can go downtown, pick up some trash, encourage a friend to open a shop, patronize it, send other folks there, patronize the other shops downtown even if it costs a buck or two more, we can join a community group, participate in the BIA, in a theatre group, in a church group, shop at the farmers’ market, we can build a strong community and together we can keep it alive. We can elect a mayor and a council who want to keep the heart of the community alive, who will fulfill the mandate that their institution has as a sacred duty, to think not just about the base and greedy desire to increase the tax and revenues, but rather to take the best care possible of the community that has elected them and which has given them the dollars which they already have. That means accepting that things like Wal-Mart will come, but not incentivizing it, not paying out of pocket to extend services, not giving any tax breaks or easy zoning changes...It means growing, but growing smart, not just growing for its own sake. And if you really want to be a part of real change, you can do what Nicole and I have done for the last several years, you can make the easy, quick and simple decision to shop somewhere else.

beer, a love story...

I don’t drink as much as I should...well, at least not as much as I should if I still want to be considered an ‘expert’ which, I guess, at one time I sort of was. But when I do, like most folks around here, it’s usually a beer. My first beer was a Heineken, of all things, shared between at least three of us boys, stolen out from one of our parents’ stash, and furtively gulped down in the woods out behind the house. Like most folks, I didn’t quite get it at first—but, there it was—a new experience. It wasn’t terrible, but I didn’t quite get the appeal either. When I got older, drinking beer with the guys was sort of ‘something that you did’ and I latched on to Budweiser—I appreciated the red label, (red was my favorite colour!) and, of course, the cool chef at my restaurant drank it. It was my ‘favourite’ beer, because, well, everyone needs a favourite, right? Then one night, at a party, a friend produced a Guinness.

I’ll never forget that first sip—bitter...rich, intense. At first taste, I was not a fan—I thought, fleetingly, that it might have been a joke drink—you know, like you’d find a fart scented perfume at a novelty shop or something. It was too much—it reminded me of when the soda machine at work broke and you got a cup of undiluted syrup...It reminded me of a coffee from a gas station that had been stewing since yesterday morning...It reminded me of hot tar. Then I had a second sip, and I began to recognize that all those big flavours were there on purpose, and that they even fit together in a sort of weird architectural balance—a structure—by the end of the bottle, I was hooked. I still love that beer—although, I have to admit, it’s no longer quite as devastating to me as it was that first time...it’s a context thing. That bout with Guinness lead me on a long quest—It opened up a world to me, flavours that I’d never before encountered—the world of the art of the glass...

We had a pizza joint in my home town, Double Dave’s, which offered an ‘alternative degree program’ (...it was a college town...) where one could earn diplomas and degrees in the beers of the world. My brother was an employee for just long enough for the two of us to earn our doctorates , that is to say, we tried them all—an invaluable experience for a couple of youngsters and one that has shaped my tastes in the years since. Most of the beers they had were, I know now, fairly mainstream, the ‘Budweiser’ of their respective countries; but luckily, a few were good introductions to the world that was just starting to open up to the average consumer back at that time, the world of ‘craft beer’.

A few years later, I was lucky enough to work in a brewpub in my hometown. I was on the opening crew and got to work with a selection of beers made for us alone—we were encouraged to be creative and to try to use the beers in our cuisine—it was awesome, I took every opportunity to quiz the brewmaster and spent my breaks spying on the brewery and hoping for a chance to play. It was invaluable for me to see, first hand, that beer was something that could be made—it sounds silly, I know, but it’s true—when you see something done, it makes it possible, not theoretical. It makes it real, it’s the same with cooking—you can read all you want, but until you see it done, it’s just a theory. We were busy at the start, but it didn’t work out, they had a bad chef and an owner with no experience and they failed within 2 years, I was gone in just a few months. The beer (and the experience), however, was wonderful and it’s really too bad it didn’t live on...

By the time I moved to San Francisco, I had begun to flirt, even start to get serious with ‘the other beverage’. Wine, to the average male Texan in those days was generally considered a necessary evil at an event, you know, so the girls would have something sweet to drink; but in the years between that first Guinness and through my gradual ascension into finer dining, I had come to understand that it was actually quite a bit more. So much so, in fact, that it is generally accepted that culturally, wine is the only important beverage in a fine restaurant setting. Imagine that bottle of Bud on a white tablecloth; you’ll see what I mean...And accept it I did, especially once I found the ‘college with a thousand classrooms’ that is the California wine country. I learned in earnest, especially at my work, where my professors brought the class to me, and for at least an hour or two a week I was treated to tastings of some of the world’s best organic wines, the wines that made up Millennium’s incredible (and the world’s largest) exclusively organic wine list. But through it all, I never lost interest in my first bottled love—beer—in fact, I learned even more, thanks to a fella named Captain Jack Fecchal, B.L.F.

Captain Jack was an oddball when he came to work with us at Millennium; it was by way of Italy, where he had attended a cooking school, and Colorado, where he apparently attended an Ultimate Frisbee school. Colorado was, and still is, ground zero for the US homebrewing movement. In fact, just weeks after President Carter signed the bill that legalized it, a couple of guys named Charlie Papazian and Charlie Matzen launched the American Homebrewers Association (AHA) in Boulder, Colorado on December 7, 1978 (happy birthday, AHA!) with the publication of the first issue of Zymurgy magazine. Captain Jack had apparently minored in this fairly recent but grand tradition at his Frisbee school, and by the time he got to California, he brought his knowledge and the tools of homebrewing with him. I was lucky enough to brew my first few batches with him on his elaborate 10 gallon system made up of converted kegs, propane burners, plumbing supplies and recycled angle iron, all welded together into a giant contraption that brought tears to the eyes of his roommates, especially when they realized that it wasn’t going to just ‘go away’, as they had earnestly hoped. We brewed several ‘all grain’ batches, the most difficult style, which means that we actually did the serious lab work of converting starch into sugar over low heat for long periods before applying yeast to ferment. I was glad to have learned this method, but was also a little happy to later discover that there were easier methods involving extracts and partial extracts that brewed some reliably tasty batches with quite a bit less time and work; I (and my wife) was also a bit pleased to discover that giant contraptions were not, necessarily, critical to the success of the batch. Beer was fun.

Wine, however, was where my brain continued to lead me, and my ‘expertise’ in that field continued to grow; I was even invited to be a judge at a prestigious wine event in Los Angeles—I was one of many judges, granted, but I was honoured, nonetheless. Beer was still a hobby, not a serious pursuit, and though it did occasionally appear in our restaurant as a feature, or in a serious trade magazine in some article or another, it was not ever something I allowed myself to believe was ever quite as important as wine. Beer was for fun, wine was for work.

I never really understood why wine culture was so much different than beer culture, but I did (and do) think about it a lot. Wine has a reputation, among ‘regular’ folks as being a snob’s drink—something that has bothered me since day one. It is, after all, just a beverage, just a way to lubricate social interaction, to relax, to consume the same drug that beer delivers, but by way of grapes instead of grains...so why all the fuss? Why does wine get ritual where beer gets games? Why does beer get neon lights when wine is lit by candles? Why does wine require a jacket when beer gets a t-shirt and blue jeans? It really does just come down culture.

When Nicole and I travelled to Europe, I went as a wine enthusiast. I was excited to experience wine close to the source, to see the old Chateaus and vineyards, to taste and to explore. I was also fairly poor—we were not going on a wine tour, per se, we were going to experience what we could, but also what we could afford. So we bought cheap, Budweiser cheap. We bought what was on the shelf at the corner stores, and I was pleased to discover, we bought quite well. At first I thought I was just lucky—after all, I had tasted literally hundreds of wines at this point, and how cool was it that with wines that were averaging in price around 3 to 5 dollars a bottle, how lucky was it that we kept scoring with completely drinkable bottles of regular wine? Everything else around us, hotels, restaurants, coffee, was more expensive than home, but bottle after bottle presented cheap but drinkable wine! I, at first, like I said, felt lucky, but as time went on, I had to admit, I started to get a little annoyed.

You probably know what kind of wine 3 or 5 bucks would get you here. You probably also know how much it would cost you to buy an equivalent amount of cheap, yes, but also entirely drinkable beer. It didn’t take long for me to figure out why wine is a North American snob drink and why our mainstream culture prefers beer.

In 2004 and 2005, I was lucky enough to attend the Book and the Cook Festival in Philadelphia, as an author (co-author of ‘The Artful Vegan’, 2001 Ten Speed Press) and as a cook alongside my old friend and mentor (and fellow beer enthusiast) Chef Eric Tucker. We reunited those two times to prepare a five course dinner paired with the beers of Philadelphia’s treasure, The Nodding Head brewpub. The Nodding Head is co-owned by a group that also includes Monk’s Cafe, easily one of the most important bars for the true beer enthusiast in North America—and it was there that we found the beer bible, a menu including over 200 beers—some available nowhere else in the world, and it was also there, under the excellent tutelage of the owner, Tom Peters, that we attempted to taste every one of them. Or something like that; it gets a little fuzzy. The important part of the story is this—we were in a hallowed hall of beer—surrounded by the best of the best—and the most expensive bottles were still well under 50 bucks. Try finding that with wine...Try finding that with anything; the best of the best just doesn’t have a good habit of staying that far under the dollar amount of the average person’s single days paycheck.

It’s a cultural thing; I guess, when I thought about it, I started to understand. In Europe, where drinkable wine is cheap, and I do mean cheap, the ‘average, regular’ person can afford to enjoy a glass or two, without making it a special occasion. But here, for those prices, the fact is that we often get undrinkable swill (sorry, North American wine industry, but you know it’s true.) Here, the ‘average, regular,’ person is going to choose a cheap, perfectly drinkable beverage that doesn’t break the bank. I appreciate wine, good wine, and I really appreciate great wine, but the fact is, that until all those ‘average, regular’ folks come on board, the culture of North America is going to continue to prefer their beer. And , well, maybe if I drank a little more, I’d have the time to find those rare and often rumoured ‘great, cheap wines’, but since I don’t (...and since we’ve got Beau’s right here!), for now, anyway, I’ll probably just have a beer.

McJob...

So yes, I had a McJob. Not proud, but it makes me one of (depending on who you ask) as many as 15% of the North American workforce. I guess it comforts me to know that one out of eight of you probably served at the altar of Ronald at some point in your working life as well. Life, however, is about choices. And though many of us have worked at a McDonalds at some point in our careers, few of us have chosen to stay.



My first restaurant ‘job’ was at Samuel’s Fine Foods—my dad being the Samuel in question, and with our family making up a majority of the staff. The restaurant was dad’s dream—he had wanted it for years. It was a tough road, fraught with challenges, but he loved the very idea of it. He wanted a fine restaurant, beautiful, a celebration of quality and excellence, and with Samuel’s, he had it. The restaurant embodied many of his ideals; as a good Baptist, he chose not to serve alcohol, he didn’t open on Sundays, he also chose the best before the cheapest, and the food was real, made from scratch. Ask him about it today and he still smiles at the memory. I, too, remember that restaurant with the fondness and idealism that only the frosted filter of childhood memory can reproduce. We served orange scented ice tea in heavy goblets and things like juicy steaks, chicken crepes with sherry cream sauce, and huge slices of my mom’s amazing cheesecake. It was, by far, the best food in the world. The building was an old, majestic home, converted for business use. It had chandeliers and wooden floors and we filled it with antique tables and chairs, floral print china, multifold linen napkins and cut glass crystal stemware. There was another person in this story: a guy who became my hero, our restaurant’s chef. I followed him around like a loyal pup—to me, he was an outlaw and a priest; his motorcycle, the leaping flames, and the razor sharp knives were all the forbidden and the beautiful accessories to the palate pleasing sculptures on heavy china that he sent out to be shown and enjoyed in the gallery beyond the swinging kitchen doors. His world—the kitchen—was mystical and inviting. My parents had me bussing tables and refilling glasses; but I was enchanted, I begged the chef to let me learn. He offered me the pit—the dish pit—and I faced a choice: work out front and refill glasses or scrub and scrub and maybe someday learn his magic art. I chose, and I scrubbed until the pots shined. And finally, eventually, he did teach me a little. I was enchanted, and in some ways, I still am. But his cooking was only one thing—he was a talented chef—in the end what I learned most from my parent’s restaurant was from my father. It was how one earns, and deserves, respect.



My parents’ restaurant didn’t make it—neither do most restaurants, I have come to learn. This is sad. Most restaurants are an act of passion and faith, and it sad that such noble intent usually ends so poorly. It leaves us all poorer. Our challenges overwhelmed us—a lack of visible parking, the oil bust, banking issues, and other things...few people who are not small business owners realize what a razor’s edge those of us who are walk in order to open our doors every day. Profit can be an elusive prey, the public’s taste a fickle friend, the bills must be met, the employees paid, and the last one paid, if there’s anything left, is the boss. This is fair—providing jobs and building networks of suppliers are acts that benefit the community; they are noble intentions, and, as they say, no good deed goes unpunished; but it is fair—for in the end, if it works, we also stand to gain the most. A successful business is not just a source of profit—the community it supports also rewards its founders with a more valuable commodity than the money in the bank, it earns them respect. And succeeding in such a difficult business? Perhaps even more so. I’d venture that most small business owners, whether they realize it or not, choose this life because they are seeking this respect, more than even the money.



Respect is a valuable asset. It is hard to come by and easy to lose. But, I should be clear; it is not the respect of others, rather, it is the sense of self respect that is most dear. We are all faced with choices, and the choices we make in business are no different from those in life: how we treat others, whether or not to be good neighbours, whether or not to give of ourselves when we can...Those choices, ultimately, are how we earn the right of self respect.



Here’s where the subject gets tricky...as a lifelong left wing advocate for fair trade, for employee rights, for the environment, for health care, for charity, and with the sincere belief that a community must stand together to be strong—my choices, though slightly different from my father, are nonetheless imbued with my own sense of idealism. Which is why it pains me to admit that some of my feelings in the three years we’ve had this business have made me (like many before me, I’m sure) feel conflicted. I’ll be honest, and perhaps even more honest than I should be, when I say that I sometimes struggle with fair pay and benefits when we can afford neither for ourselves. I’ve even occasionally balked at the money we’ve collected for charity when we could not, sometimes, pay our own bills on time. In those moments, sometimes, I’ve even caught myself empathizing with what I always considered to be ‘the opposition’ or ‘the other’. As I walk that razor, I feel a temptation (but not an attraction) to, well, not try quite so hard. To make a choice and run the restaurant that lots of folks seem to want. A restaurant with cheap food; consistent food, you know, with coca cola, with fries and ketchup. The things McDonalds serves—turn and burn food. Junk food. Drive through food.



A few years after Samuel’s closed, my second restaurant job was at McDonalds. I was informed that I had this job by my juvenile probation officer. He wanted me somewhere where he could keep tabs on me during the day while my folks were at work and I, for reasons that I hesitate to go into (it involved some bad choices...), was not in school. I was 16 years old. There was no mysterious outlaw priest in this kitchen. In fact, by the end of my first shift I was, in effect, a head chef, working the burger station by myself—preparing food that was served to our small percentage of our company’s well documented billions and billions of customers. I steamed buns; I dropped frozen hockey pucks into a machine that was essentially a flat grill sandwich, pushed a button and retrieved the cooked results when the timer blared. I used modified caulk guns to dispense ketchup, mustard, and special sauce. I placed pre-portioned quantities of frozen fries into baskets and pushed more buttons. Over time, I learned how to not sweat the unannounced appearance of busloads of schoolkids, and eventually I learned other things, like that both 5 minutes late and 5 minutes early were transgressions punishable by public humiliation and possible loss of privilege. McDonalds was like a prison camp. Most of us were miserable, but had to be there—the rules were strict and the pay was low, the managers were only months older than us, and the work was as mind-numbingly anti-creative as could be imagined. Trust was nonexistent, to the point that we were forbidden from handling the burgers that were thrown out for being 20 minutes too old; in fact, the managers were invested with the duty of counting those burgers, in the trash can, to make sure that they were not redirected to the tight, polyester pant pocket of an employee’s uniform. They were then taken, at the end of the shift, supervised, to a dumpster which was kept locked. That was just the trash. The rest of our employed minutes were watched just as closely. Employee breaks were letter of the law—fifteen minutes, OFF THE CLOCK, every four hours, 16 minutes was a criminal act, and punishable. Don’t even consider forgetting to clock out. The food was...what food? I never peeled an onion, sliced a tomato, shredded a head of lettuce...All these things arrived, prepared, numbered...Once I was asked to cut a hamburger in half; I had to use a plastic knife from one of the individually wrapped cutlery packages out front.



I shudder now at the memories. It was like being in a war. It was five months of my life when...I learned a lot. McDonalds was very, very good at the one thing that eludes me the most now, consistency. It eludes me for all of the reasons I was so miserable then and struggle so much now. Every day I face the fact that what some customers seem to want most, seem to crave and require of me, is that I provide exactly what McDonalds was so damn good at preparing: a consistent, uniform and tightly controlled product. That today, tomorrow, and six weeks from now, they can walk in, say ‘the usual, Joe’ and get exactly that product that they have gotten so many times before. I have been quoted as saying that consistency is the enemy of the good, and it’s true. This animal urge for a consistent product may have served some important function at a pre-modern point in our evolution, presumably to insure our safety in a diverse world—after all, two mushrooms with just slightly different gill structures can mean delicious...or death...but what function this instinct serves in modern man is difficult for me to fathom. I try to avoid this whole issue by explaining that we are ‘consistently good’ or some such thing, but again and again I find myself being drawn into keeping ‘signature items’ or offering a ‘bar menu’ of easy favorites to satisfy the masses. And every time I do, every time I train an employee to press this timer or use that ¼ teaspoon measure, I find myself slouching towards McDonaldland.



You see, no two onions are exactly alike. No two onions should be exactly alike. Onions, like people, are living things, as are all of the plants, delicious animals, and even the yeasts that ferment our wines and cheese. It is this life, this heart, this soul that feeds us and sustains us. To not acknowledge its presence, well, is to ignore the very core of the idea of sustenance. To treat the ingredients without respect for their individual characteristics is to deny our connection to this vast network of life that is what we are. Consistency and conformity in food is acceptance, even the advocacy of conformity in life and spirit. We do not celebrate consistency in humans (that’s called fascism), so why do we require it of our foods? I am mystified and baffled by this urge. But, sadly, not even immune to it. To me, McDonalds, and all it represents, is such a dark and wicked, soul-less place. But in all honesty, here I am, as human as the rest, with the memory of a McDLT on my lips and knowing that the McRib was a preformed press meat, and still craving its blend of sweet tangy barbecue sauce, onions and pickles. Why is this urge still here?



We yearn for our past. We long to stop time in our happiest moments and savour the lingering sweet taste of youth. The frosted filter of memory works on us all and dilutes our anxieties, polishes the rough edges, and reminds us only of our glory. It helps us to ignore or gloss over the unpleasant truths about things like how and why our food is so cheap, so uniform, and so consistent...and things like why our best attempts sometimes fail. I remember my parent’s restaurant as a paradise—but an honest retelling will admit that some of my dad’s idealistic choices helped to speed his restaurant’s decline and that ultimately, the paradise collapsed when the chef, my ‘hero’, ran off with the night’s receipts and the banks came knocking on our door. We lived lean for years after that, bankrupt and almost beaten. And like it or not, it was during those years that McDonalds always paid my check with the same timeliness and efficiency that they required of me. My heart pulls me to Samuel’s but my head, well, Ronald, sometimes it pulls me to you.



So if my head is right, if the ‘customer is always right,’ why struggle? Why not succumb to the machine? Sysco or Tannis will, no doubt, sweep in today, if I call, and they will be happy to fill my orders post haste with a ten percent discount across the board if I am willing to give up the fight, quit trying to serve local and small farm organic food, if I am willing to order exclusively from big agri-business factories that have done their diligence, commodified, and sucked all the heart out of everything they do in order to provide a cheap, consistent product.



Well that’s where we come back to the question of respect. You see, if I make that call, if I ‘give up’, then tomorrow, I’ll have to admit that the respect I sought to earn wasn’t for something I believed in, but for something, well, less than noble. I’ll have to face the fact that my success was gained not by investing in my community, but by giving up on it. I guess it all comes down to a simple fact. Life is about choices. Some folks choose the consistent. I consistently choose the variety, the individual, and the good; things with a live heart & soul behind them. And, if I’m lucky, well then maybe I’ll even be consistently good.



My father faced similar choices and his restaurant failed. But in the end, he chose right, he did the right thing, and he left with his well earned self respect intact.



So yes, I had a McJob. And I had a hero, and no, it wasn’t the chef, and it wasn’t Ronald McDonald...it was the guy I still, and will always, respect: my dad.

a working class hero is something to be...

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.

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.

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.

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