Texas Style ‘Slow-Enloe’ Beef Short Ribs:

In Texas, my home country, we do not rush the cooking of beef; our signature barbecued food is whole smoked beef brisket which spends as much as 18 hours in a smoker at about 200 to 250 degrees (Fahrenheit), a.k.a.; slow and low... This recipe (which feeds about 6 people) is for a similar cut, the ‘braising’ or ‘short’ beef rib; a cut which the butcher at a local abattoir described to me as ‘old-fashioned.’ I guess that means that it ain’t diet food. It is similar in that both the brisket and the braising rib have a lot of connective tissue and fat, the elements that make a braise or a slow smoke work so well. Over time, at low temperature, the connective tissue (or tendons) actually melt and turn into gelatin, which is that magic, mysterious ingredient that gives slow cooked meat the amazing ‘sticky’ mouth feel that we associate with everything from pork ribs at the local Chinese restaurant to the demi-glace at the finest French bistro. The fat, which is critical, works as a slow baste, melting and helping to keep the meat moist throughout the long process. Sped up, the tendons seize and become gristle, the fat melts too quickly and becomes a frying oil, either flaring up and becoming dangerous or (depending on the cooking method) actually frying the meat and creating a different product altogether. When you do take your time, however, this ‘old-fashioned’ cut really shines!

You’ll need:

A good smoker or barbecue pit and wood, charcoal, or even (in a pinch) propane and smoking chips; this chef does not recommend propane, (I don’t care for the flavour) but should you have no choice, make sure you have lots of well soaked wood chips in an aluminum pan or in a pouch of foil with holes punched in it. Much has been written on the process of smoking, so we’ll assume you have the ability to figure this part out, but the key points are indirect heat, and mostly closed heat dampers to keep in as much smoke as possible, and choosing good wood for flavour.

5 lb. Aubin Farm’s beef braising ribs
½ cup ‘Steve’s Spicy Coffee’ barbecue rub (recipe follows...)
1-2 tablespoons salt (a good sprinkle...)
Texanadian Barbecue Sauce (recipe follows...)
Root Cellar Slaw (recipe follows...)
Buns

The evening before a lunch or early in the morning before a dinner to serve these, light your barbecue pit or smoker, then, coat the meat with the rub and the salt and let sit for about an hour, while the coals burn down. If you have a thermometer, when the internal temperature of the BBQ is about 250 degrees and you have good smoke, the coals are ready; rake them all to one side of the pit. Place your ribs on the far side of the grill, away from the fire, close the lid and allow the smoke to do its magic. Make sure there is constant smoke by feeding more soaked chips or chunks for at least the first couple of hours and also watch the temperature closely, being careful to never allow it above 250 degrees. You can even switch the meat (covered) to an oven after the first few hours and get some sleep. Most Texas BBQ pit masters will remind you that a good lager in an ample, steady supply is essential to this process and I will not diverge from that philosophy in this recipe. As Lone Star is not available here, I would recommend Beau’s Lug Tread as a more than suitable substitute. The ribs will need at least 8 and as many as 12 hours of steady, slow cooking; you’ll know they are ready when the bone lifts out of the meat without effort. Serve the pulled meat on buns with barbecue sauce and Root Cellar Slaw.

A quick note on choosing wood and two stage smoking:

I learned how to smoke meat with mesquite, a resinous wood that when used judiciously is one the world’s finest seasonings, but can also result in an acrid creosote flavour after too long with too much smoke. As such, I learned a two stage smoking process, a few hours of smoke followed by either wrapping the meat in foil to finish cooking or even removing it to an oven for the last few hours. These days, in an attempt to achieve a genuine local product, I use a wood blend that includes maple, apple, white cedar and sometimes black walnut. Including some resinous woods like the walnut and cedar reminds of mesquite, in that you can get a stronger, better smoke flavour, but it can also lead to the same problems; if you are using just maple or oak, don’t worry so much about over-smoking or wrapping, but if you, like me, want that deep flavour that only a resinous wood will provide, just plan to be judicious and ease up on the smoke after the first few hours.

Steve’s Spicy Coffee:

I took a batch of this rub to the cottage a few years back for a barbecue, but early in the morning on the day of the barbecue my groggy (...hung-over...) brother-in-law mistook it for the coffee and brewed us all a big pot; ever since, we can only refer to it as Steve’s Spicy Coffee in honour of his finest hour. (Thanks for being such a good sport, Steve...)

1 cup ground, dried medium spice peppers such as ancho, guajillo, or chilhuacle.
¼ cup freshly ground coffee beans (decaf, if you must...)
¼ cup brown Sucanat or brown sugar
¼ cup ground cumin
2 tablespoons dried oregano

--Mix together, use as needed, store excess in an airtight container and use as you would a chili powder or a Montreal Steak Spice, etc.

Texanadian BBQ Sauce:

‘It’s the Maple Syrple!’

½ yellow onion, sliced thin
2 teaspoons canola or sunflower oil
¼ cup ‘Steve’s Spicy Coffee’ or your favourite chili powder blend
2 cups canned Utopia tomatoes and juice
4 tablespoons Utopia tomato paste
1 cup maple syrup
2/3 cup Barkley’s apple cider vinegar
2/3 cup tamari soy sauce

--Caramelize the onion in the oil. Add spice, then add remaining ingredients, simmer ½ hour. Blend.

Root Cellar Slaw:

Weather-wise, we locavores in Canada are in the dip right now waiting for the first green shoots to get long enough to pluck and eat, while concurrently staring at the bottom of last year’s barrel. The weather is drawing us outdoors to barbecue, but what veggies do we eat today? Boiled turnips again? How about taking those turnips, those beets, even the cabbage, carrots and onions from the back shelf of the root cellar and making this delicious, quick slaw?

3 cups shredded mixed roots such as carrots, beets, sunchokes and turnips
3 cups shredded cabbage
1 small onion, sliced thin
1 tablespoon salt
¼ cup Barkley’s apple cider vinegar
¼ cup honey or sugar
¼ cup sunflower or canola oil
2 teaspoons dried dill
2 teaspoons dried parsley
1 teaspoon chili flakes
1 teaspoon toasted caraway seeds

--In a large bowl, mix the veggies and salt. In a small saucepan, bring the remaining ingredients to a boil, pour the hot dressing over the veggies, stir and cover for five minutes. Then uncover, stir again and enjoy!

Our Daily Bread...

In three years, I’ve made every batch of brown bread at the restaurant except for one. That day, I had help from my good friend Rob Mathewson, who those of us locally know as the gentle giant genius of loaf behind Grateful Bread, the bread consortium that has anchored our local farmers’ market these past three years. He and his equally storied and infinitely interesting wife Shelley just moved on last month to the West Coast, for work, but also for family, which is also how I found myself here, so who am I to judge? Just a bit sad, that’s all...But anyway, this story is about bread, so we’ll talk about all that stuff some other time. This story is about bread, about baking, and about my favourite baker.



I guess my first experiences making bread were my grandmother’s Parker House Rolls, a recipe in which each yeasty, white ball of dough was dipped in melted butter before it was packed together in Corning ware, then risen and baked. The effect, though guilty in hindsight, was mind expanding in practice. My mom complained that her mother in law had never mentioned the second package of yeast on the recipe she wrote out, and that had she not spied that sneaky addition over her shoulder one day, no-one would have ever known. That might be why no-one else’s rolls ever came out quite as good, but I think we all suspect it was more than just that. The most critical ingredient in bread, I have come to discover, is the baker. When she baked those rolls, it was her way of showing her love.



I moved back to my home town from West Texas in ’93 or so and was lucky enough to find a job at a little scratch bakery, Brazos Blue Ribbon, that was operated by a couple of ex-hippie types who probably just wanted a place to buy whole grain fresh bread and muffins themselves and couldn’t find anyone else doing it. They had a wide selection of loaves, pastries, kolaches, and cookies and they served sandwiches and soups for lunch. I was hired as an assistant baker, which meant I never got to see lunch; lunch time, for me, was now in the middle of my night. I arrived at work every day at 2 am and left work at about ten, at least for the six short months that I managed to survive that schedule. Maybe it was as a result of these long, late hours, but the head baker there was insane, good insane, I mean; he was a hilarious, huge, jolly, loud, heavy metal singing madman, and at 2 o’clock in the morning, I was his only audience and his biggest fan. He taught me like Obi Wan taught Luke, with a pile of clichés, aphorisms, cleverly mixed metaphors and the occasional near backhand (which I probably deserved...) I was told to use my hands to mix the dough; ‘spatulas are liars!’ I was trained to taste the dough, to ‘think with my hands’, to ‘bake with my nose...’ I was no baker when I came in, I had mistakenly believed that 5 years of line cooking would qualify me for some kind of high speed ascension to that goal; but, by the time I left, I was, although not quite a baker, at least not quite as foolish as when I arrived. He was a great teacher, he loved what he did, and it showed. So why did I leave? Honestly? I wasn’t ready to give up sunlight; I don’t think I ever will be. Baking, as a profession, asks a high price from those who it calls.



Rob is not a baker by profession (...yet?). He worked here in Kemptville in some capacity for the government; he told me about it once, it was something to do with measuring water levels, analyzing drainage from wetlands, that kind of thing...I’m not really sure, the fact is, when I talk to Rob, it’s usually about bread. He loves bread, he loves baking...when he’s not at work (or practicing his clarinet), it’s likely that he’s baking. He always reminds me of that jolly baker from Brazos Blue Ribbon, he has that same big presence, the same quick smile and twinkling eye—and I don’t care what he gets paid for, the man is, and will always be, a baker. He understands, naturally, instinctually, what it took me so long to learn about bread, about why bread is not pure science or pure art, about how good bread is craft, plain and simple, about how your hands know more about baking than your head, and that your heart and nose are just as critical to the process as your mixer, your oven or your timer. Baking bread is about patience and care. It is about good humour and generosity. It is about love and, if you do it right (and he does...), it is about changing the way people think about every other bite of food they take.



Rob has given more to this community than just some tasty loaves; he is one of those good, generous people who come along and just can’t seem to help but share. He started, a couple of years ago, giving classes on baking to anyone who was interested, he dreamed up the whole idea as a charitable act...the classes, or workshops, were, I believe, actually a ruse to get a dozen or so extra hands out to roll dough for bread for a Salvation Army Food Bank fundraiser (I may have my facts wrong, but I believe it was for one of our Mother’s Day brunches here at the Municipal Center). The idea caught on, and soon, these workshops (again, not to be confused with free labour...) were given several times a year, baking bread for Christmas food baskets, again for our Mother’s Day brunch, for a free community Thanksgiving dinner, or, really for any event or even person that needed an extra bit of sustenance to be broken and shared. I noticed once that at the workshops, and with the free loaves of bread, he gave out a recipe on a little piece of onion skin paper along with an idea, a prayer really, a request that the holder of the recipe would bake it with others, and that in exchange for this loaf, in lieu of payment, that they would do this same giving again, for other food banks, for other friends, for anyone who might need a warm loaf of love. Luckily, at the very first workshop, the friendly friar of the leavened loaf won a convert, my sister-in-law, and really, one of the world’s all time greatest people, Denise Busby.



Now with all due respect to Rob, who was the reason I set out to write this story, within the first two or three lines I, and really, anyone who has bought bread at our exciting little market over the last few years, probably knew very quickly where this was going to end up. Denise is the kind of person who just seems to do well at most anything she tries; over the years that I have been lucky enough to know her, not only has she been a record breaking manager for a noted office supply company in the heart of Ottawa, she has evolved into a master hobby gardener, a photographer of immense talent, the most patient wife her incredibly lucky husband could hope for, and, on an incredibly personal note, the greatest aunt I could ever imagine for my, for all of our, little girl. She also, thanks to Rob’s workshops, and a great deal of that natural instinct like both my Grandmother’s and his, has become a phenomenal baker. The first year of the market, Rob alone was the baker, but starting in the second and continuing with the third, Rob was joined by Denise as a fellow ‘Grateful Bread’ baker. As often as Rob has been at the market of a Sunday, Denise has been there as well, at first with breads she learned to bake with Rob, but later and lately with scones, cookies, and even breads made with her own recipes. I am, I admit, a very picky person when it comes to the quality of food (hey, it’s my job!) and I can honestly say that during the market season, her Chipotle-Cheddar Bread is one of the greatest pleasures of my daily life.



Bread was one of the first things that we humans learned to make. Almost every culture has a bread of some kind, flour and water, maybe some other stuff, a leavening agent, some time of work, some time of rest. Bread is what we share, when we share. It is the most basic of sustenance, and, as a symbol, it speaks to the core of who and what we all are. It is the first thing we serve at most restaurants, because throughout our cultural memory, it has become an act of welcome so common that to not offer it would be out of place. Early on we learned that all of the bounteous harvest our farmers’ market’s amazing vegetables would bring people out once, but that it was the bread for which they returned.



I’ve learned a lot about baking over the years; I learned about tortillas, the bread of Mexico, from fellow cooks and older Mexican ladies at a taqueria in my home town, my first job outside of the stifling world of fast food. I learned about thin crust pizza dough from a skilled chef at Romeo’s in Austin where I baked in a wood fired oven, and I trained intensively through those dark nights at the Brazos Blue Ribbon, teaching my hands how to feel for when the dough was just right. I have learned that sometimes it’s about a second package of yeast that someone forgot to mention, and that sometimes it is about no yeast at all, just patience and courage. And I have learned, after all that, that all the knowledge in the world will only produce a pretty good loaf of bread.



Thanks Rob, it was always a pleasure to bake and to break bread with you, and I hope to do it again soon. You’ve given a lot to this community, more than we ever could have asked, Vancouver Island is lucky to have your big, generous heart in its midst. I understand why you moved to be close to family; that is, after all, also what brought us here.



I hope that my bread, the one I’ve made every batch of save one, is half as good as Rob’s, half as good as my grandmother’s Parker House Rolls. I’ve tried to shape it, learn it, understand it, infuse it with all the meaning, heart and soul that I can, and every time I make it I think maybe, maybe this time, maybe I’m getting close. Bread is more than just flour and water and yeast and salt. It is family, it is being together, it is sharing and it is love. And for me that means that on the last weekend in May, when the time is finally here at that first market of the season, I’ll be right there in line again, waiting anxiously for that first loaf, for that first taste of Chipotle-Cheddar from Denise, Abigail’s Aunt Denise, my favourite baker.

‘God Bless America’

I couldn’t help thinking, the other day, when I saw this sign in a window in Ogdensburg, how strongly Irving Berlin must have been feeling the day he wrote it. I mean: to wish the blessings of the highest being one can imagine on an entity, on a group of people, on a landmass with non-specific boundaries, on a vision, a shared dream, a collective effort—I guess my generation is too far removed from any great revolutionary moments to fully appreciate the intensity of that kind of emotion, at least as it relates to a piece of land. But it moved me. Yes, even embarrassed me a little. I’m not one to speak of it, especially as an American living abroad, but, if I’m honest, yes, my programming is still in place.



When I was a kid, I read with interest and horror of the shortcuts my ancestors had taken to acquire the ‘right’ to the land they ‘discovered.’ I was so incensed that in my youthful agitation, I chose a quiet, but, I felt, meaningful protest; I refused to, as it was the custom, stand and recite the ‘Pledge of Allegiance’ in my school classroom. My teachers were naturally upset, rebellion of any form being seen as a disruption in a routine based system, but I was more surprised to find that my classmates were upset as well—‘Don’t you know about the Indians?’ I asked, ‘The smallpox blankets? Wounded Knee? The trail of tears?’ Some of our ancestors were definitely not the good guys. Slavery was also and still is a huge stain of on the face of my nation, and my generation, as the first desegregated one in my small southern town, was still itchy and uncomfortable in its new multicoloured clothes. Perhaps that’s why they didn’t care, ‘This is America,’ they said, ‘love it or leave it.’ Patriotism has always been a hard road for me.



I don’t understand why most folks can’t seem to see the connection between ‘patriotism’ and ‘nationalism,’ (i.e.: ‘fascism.’) All patriotism, to me, seems to be built upon the simple preconception that we are better than them, for some reason. And really, are we? Do we actually have some divine gift that puts us above our peers? By virtue of an address? A Zip Code? Seriously, American ‘exceptionalism’ as it is called these days, when examined closely, is little more than a philosophy of thinly veiled racism.



I do love much about America. My programming aside, America is my nostalgic home, I love Thomas Jefferson’s words (more than his actions, actually,) and I love that a rebellion of tax shirkers could actually produce a fairly even handed and intelligent method of self government. I like checks and balances and I like term limits, I like that even the worst of presidents can only really get away with about 8 years in office and that, if we want to, we can flip the whole card and start fresh without firing a single bullet. It seems smart; it acknowledges the pendulum of public sentiment and provides a mechanism for bloodless revolution. And when you think about it, it would take a bunch of people who’d lost so much in a bloody one to come up with and actually agree on such a radical idea. I’m sure my historians out there will want to remind me of the Magna Carta or even of ancient Greek philosophers who laid out the framework that the ‘founding fathers’ adopted long before, but, nonetheless, they could have gone a few different directions once they had the reins, and yet, at the moment, they chose democracy, for better or worse.



So, do I love it or hate it? Well, both. I’ve travelled a bit more now, and I also now live here, in Canada, a place that tells you they find patriotism distasteful, but makes exceptions for hockey, Canada day, any rendering of the anthem, or any mention or presence of any native Canadian anywhere in American popular culture. I’ve also visited Europe, in a ‘post 9-11’ world and met equal parts admiration for our exciting culture and horror at our actions on the world stage, horror that mirrored my own youthful disgust at my reading of my country’s history. I have hated the way, from a distance, America looks more and more like a selfish bully, even with ‘a new face’; it still projects willful ignorance regarding it’s own behaviour and seems to consume everything around it at an alarming rate like one of it’s famously obese children. Yet, as I say, I have travelled a bit more now and have also seen that American people are no worse at heart than the people in any of these other places either; I have met with racism and stereotypes wherever I have gone, ignorance and childish, selfish behaviour, even with boorish and criminally violent foolishness. America, it seems, has no trademark on stupidity whether you love it or leave it.



‘Democracy,’ as Winston Churchill said, ‘is the worst form of government, except for all those others that have been tried...’ A telling quote. I love much about the idea of America, and much about the idea of Canada, Norway, Denmark, even Japan and yes, even China. I love lots of ideas behind governments, I love the idealism from which they spring and I love the facets of them that seem to work for however long people put their minds to it. But in the end, it always seems to come back to our nature, our avarice, our greed, our compassion and our desire for joy, for love, for security or for safety. The same universal human emotional behaviours that make us choose between decaf and regular, between charity and big screen televisions, behind, beneath and surrounding every decision we make every day. Governments, countries, landmasses of non-specific boundaries, these collective groups of people work and don’t work because they are conceived by, made up of and belong to, of, and by people. Human, frail, weak, and beautiful people.



God Bless America. I checked the lyrics, and it didn’t say, ‘She’s gonna need it.’ But maybe it should have. And really, maybe it should say ‘God bless this planet,’ because that’s where all this patriotism, this pride in ‘our people’ is going to have to redirect itself if we want to see our grandchildren enjoying the ‘pursuit of happiness’ instead of the ‘pursuit of potable water’ like the folks in desertified swaths of Africa our carbon economies have helped to create. Woody Guthrie knew this; he hated Berlin’s heart swelling opus and responded with ‘God Blessed America for Me’ a song he eventually changed to ‘This Land is Your Land’, his most famous song and an important poem in its own right. His answer to ‘God Bless America’ did not speak of a lofty divine being whose hand could guide us through a night with a light, he spoke of America’s terrestrial beauty, of how his own two feet carried him across it, of nature’s bounty. And he spoke of a fence:

As I went walking I saw a sign there

And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."

But on the other side it didn't say nothing,

That side was made for you and me.



I’ll leave it there. This land was made for you and me.

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.