One of the best things that ever happened to me was losing everything when I was 17. My family home was engulfed in flames in the middle of the night, a couple of weeks before Christmas. Firefighters never could figure out exactly what happened, except that it started in the furnace. Speculation pointed to a fan malfunction. It didn’t seem like one of the best things that ever happened to me at the time, of course; instead, it seemed incredible, beyond imagining, surreal. I didn’t lose everything either, not really, just some stuff. I was woken by my mother; I recall that it took more than one attempt to wake me and my brother as well...the deep sleep of innocence and youth being what it is. It took us a while to clue in that it was an actual emergency wake-up, as opposed to the usual “emergency” wake-ups that usually ended with us trudging off to school or church. Even after I got out of bed, the strangeness of the situation seemed to blend seamlessly with the dreams I was shaking off. My memories of that night are fragmented, spiked with moments of clarity and mixed with long vague patches of smoke.
I remember being instructed to wake the neighbours to call the fire department and then trying to do so by ringing the doorbell once and waiting, only to be pushed aside, a minute later by my mother who rushed over to ring their bell repeatedly and furiously while pounding on their door, officially signaling that the rules had changed: politeness, the law, was suspended temporarily with the martial law of justifiable rudeness in its place. I remember having to choose what I would take (a trench-coat and a briefcase full of my adolescent poetry). I remember being able to see my sister’s closet on the back of the second floor burning from the street out front. I remember my father salvaging our Apple IIe computer, a prize possession in those days. I remember the dog sleeping through much of the fire in her doghouse out back. I remember being sent to our neighbor’s house to sleep and instead staying up singing the Talking Head’s song ‘Burning Down the House’ and laughing at our precocious sense of ironic detachment, giddy and stupid from the adrenaline overdose. I remember my mother, without makeup, in her nightclothes, sad, scared and as strong as I’ve ever seen her. My father, all action and no talk, after seeing to our safety, defying the smoke for at least three trips back inside the house for things he suddenly realized we couldn’t leave to chance. I remember brave firemen throwing a family heirloom antique desk out of a second story window in a bizarre, unguided and prescient act of preservation. It’s one of my sister’s only possessions that wasn’t burned to cinders.
Silly what you get attached to—I think I was most upset about losing a candle bottle which had been the result of hours of wasted time moulding the wax into interesting patterns by choosing colors, turning candles, and directing the flow of wax as I fell asleep watching it for the several months prior. No, it didn't start the fire. It was worthless, but also uniquely irreplaceable. My family lost some pictures; my mother and father lost some of their childhood talismans, and a family bible. As I mentioned, my sister lost almost the entire contents of her room. My brother lost some things but was and is a stoic and refused to complain. We all lost our home. It was rebuilt, different, but similar, but the old building is and will always be gone. We lost furniture, of course, and clothing. Even some things that seemed to survive were damaged by the smoke and disintegrated in the ensuing months. We mourned, at first, and felt a gap, and moved on as people do. But we didn’t lose everything. We were insured. We had a supportive community. We replaced all the things, even the emotional attachments which broke free of their moorings, in time, docked on the fertile shores of new possessions.
Later, on the morning of the fire, I remember the church, our community, arriving, the pastor and his wife at first, then the church, as a group, arriving with hands to help and ratty clothes on, scrambling through the muck and salvaging what they could, our neighbors and friends, ankle deep in ashy mud. I remember the soggy crumpled Christmas tree and crushed presents and how strange it all looked with the sunlight streaming through where the ceiling used to be. I remember that the fish survived, and how important that was. Everyone survived. I remember a miracle; my mother’s wooden box of love letters from my father was less than ten feet from the origin of the blaze and opened to reveal not a single singed page. I remember coming home to my grandmother’s house within two days of the fire to find a room stacked from floor to ceiling with donated clothes, canned foods and household goods. I remember my school collecting hundreds of dollars for us.
I was confused and gracious. I had never been on the receiving end of charity, and did not (and still do not) fully comprehend the degree to which a community is capable of and even desires being good to one other. I have had my share of personal struggles with the dogma and philosophy of the Baptist church; but one thing is for certain, I was a Baptist that day. Specifically I was a full fledged member of the First Baptist Church of Bryan, Texas. Unless you are a member of a community that joins together in times of need (and I hope that you are) you’d have a hard time understanding. That day was not about dogma or philosophy, it was not even about ‘whether or not to help’ it was about ‘how to help.’
Speaking of the church: I always recall, when thinking of this time in my life, a bible verse that instructs the reader not to ‘lay up treasures on earth, where moths and rust doth corrupt’ (colorful language, that...). Whether or not you lend any credence to the source, it, for me, summarizes a very valid philosophical point. One shared, knowingly or not, by every society that has ever engaged in any actions that result in the banding together of people to help equalize the quality of life for others in their community. It is a philosophy of setting aside, at times, that very human compulsion to collect, store, accumulate and pack away material goods for oneself alone, and instead to share with, to give to and to help carry the burden of those in need.
The fire was, in its own way, one of the best things that ever happened to me. I can feel my mom cringe when I say that, but it’s true. I wouldn’t be who I am today if it had not happened. Standing on the lawn that night I saw everything we owned going away and I learned in an instant that things could be lost. Then, over time, I learned that things could be replaced. I learned that communities can and do come together.
It is not a lesson I wish on anyone, but one I am grateful to have learned: unfortunately, nothing else can teach you the importance of charity more than being the person who needs it.
We are very happy to have found, in Kemptville, a generous and charitable community. Our efforts on behalf of the Salvation Army Food Bank in particular have been met with an outpouring of generosity that astounds me. I have no doubts, seeing the caliber and depth of character of the people here, that I am again a member of the kind of group that does not hesitate to come together to help those in need.
And for that, I'd like to say thank you.
authentic texas specialties, amazing live music, incredible selection of local, microbrewed draft beers and locally sourced and organic foods...
Friday, November 16, 2007
Smoke, part 3, Why Organic?
Travelling and being a strict vegan are a great combination. If you want to starve to death. In case you don't know, a vegan is sort of an executive vegetarian, eschewing not only animal meat, but all animal products as well, including: eggs, cheese, milk and in some cases (like my own, at the time), fringe animal products like honey and even wearing leather.
In 1994, I was a couple of years into the vegan thing, and dead serious about it, but after about a week on the roads of America with a rucksack, a very light money belt, and little more than a sense of adventure, saying no to free food became, well, silly. I tried sticking to the salad bar in Vegas, eating lots of trail mix, finding Chinese restaurants in obscure places where the soy protein was supplemented by a healthy dollop of vitamin MSG. I even lived for days at a time on bread dipped in olive oil. After a while, though, the vegan thing definitely started to wear thin. Traveling alone is not easy when you are young and poor. Traveling alone when you love social contact as much as I do AND you happen to have weird food restrictions can be scary as hell. Which is, of course, why I was doing it.
‘The Journey’ is a time honored tradition, at least according to Joseph Campbell, in which a person can test oneself, and find out if the structure of his or her belief system can actually stand up to the rigors of reality, kind of like Luke Skywalker following Ben Kenobi, or Superman slipping off to the South pole... As a literary device, or even as a teaching tool, ‘The Journey’ is the story of a person who takes a risk, goes off on their own, and comes to terms with some piece of knowledge, which transforms them. For some, it is the move to college, joining the military, fishing in Alaska, or the ubiquitous backpacking trip to Europe. For me, it was a giant move to San Francisco, to work (somewhat ironically) in a vegan restaurant. It was a little strange, realizing that I was losing my religion while I was on the path to Mecca, but it was definitely what was happening.
I kept thinking, on that trip, about how some of my core values; things like friendship, family, community and sharing, were starting to conflict with some of my other values; things like not doing harm, or honoring life (by not killing it to eat, for instance...). I even started to feel a little selfish for the times I had turned up my nose at food that had been offered to me with good intentions and love. I knew, in my mind, that my snubs were not meant as insults, but I was also beginning to understand how easy it would have been to interpret them as such. It’s easy to think about these things when you’re hungry.
I did move to San Francisco, and I did go to work for the vegan restaurant. I even managed to maintain a vegetarian and mostly vegan diet for another few years. You see, and this is hard for me to admit, the last two years of my vegan life had become a sort of exercise in ‘more vegan than you’ posturing for me. My incessant thirst for knowledge had forced me to face the nasty truths about the presence of animal byproducts in so many places in my life, and each new bit of knowledge became on one hand another restriction for me, and on the other hand, a weapon in my arsenal of how much better I was than those around me. It was a manifestation of my own insecurity. Part of my transformation, on my (capital ‘J’) ‘Journey’ was that bit of realization. I have never lost my belief in eating healthy foods, or in my desire to feed healthy foods to others; what I lost was the religious fervor and the deep rock solid belief that I was right.
Many vegetarians and vegans are also motivated by the environmental impact eating meat has on the world we share. Therefore, most have at least a passing familiarity with the concept of organic agriculture; now much of the world seems to be waking up to it as well. During this time, I became more and more familiar with its nuance and meaning. The restaurant where I was training purchased much of its food directly from organic farmers. Over the years of working there, I got to know and like them and I began asking simple questions about how these small farmers managed without the chemical pesticides and fertilizers used by the factory farmers. The answers were surprising. Instead of pesticides, they relied on biodiversity, or the keeping of many different crops and different types of even the same crops (‘the bugs won’t get all of them’), which, you may note, is the same system used by Mother Nature. And instead of chemical fertilizers? They used compost, sure, but also manure, bone meal, blood meal, even fish meal. In two words, animal husbandry. Many of these small farmers kept animals for their own food, and knew volumes about both meat and livestock handling and especially, how much well-cared-for animals made for better health for the farm. As a practicing vegetarian, and a vegetarian chef, charged with the work of bringing strict vegan meals to a passionate clientele, I was horrified. I mean, how could a responsible vegan eat organic food? And where did it go from there? What was next, eating only wild harvested foods? Air-itarianism (read it again, you'll get it...)? I was thinking myself into a corner and I knew I had to reassess my ideals. It may sound silly, but I honestly felt like I had to choose between organic and vegan. I guess I was transforming.
There was one other important part of the transformation that lead me back to barbecue. Forgiveness. Much of my overwrought thinking and philosophizing were the products of my single minded ambition. Like many ambitious young men with good intentions, I was determined to be pure and perfect. To fix myself. Like some sort of religious zealot, I felt like I was driven to achieve some sort of higher state through constant and unflagging self discipline, but the fact was, all of my experiences were leading me to an inevitable conclusion: I was never going to get there. And neither is anyone else. It is the same mistake being made everyday by factory farmers and war hawks with their ideals of a perfect, pure, neat and ordered world. The same mistake. We are never going to conquer nature, least of all our own, and we will always fail if we try. Oh, we won’t stop trying, and we can easily be better people, and being good to other people around you has a tendency to draw people who like to be good and be surrounded by good people to you (get all that?) But we will never be perfect. And the only way to be happy is to realize that and forgive it. To say, ‘I tried, I’ll keep trying, and that’s worth something, but this time, I didn’t make it.’
I guess it all really started on my trip to San Francisco. You see, I ate a pancake in Vegas. I knew it had eggs and milk in it. It tasted pretty good, it was free, and I forgave myself (later) and began to accept that I will keep trying to do the right thing, will keep trying to do the best things, and that in the end I’ll fail sometimes, and things will still turn out pretty good either way. And after years of arguing with myself over the political, environmental, and spiritual implications of a meat based diet, I came to some honest conclusions. You see, I like meat, I like the way it tastes, I like the people who raise it responsibly, and I like the idea that when I purchase it, I can choose to purchase responsibly. I like that when I do, my impact is probably a more successful form of activism than my holier-than-thou vegan rhetoric. I like that when I purchase it, handle it and cook it I both have and take the oppurtunity to treat the whole animal with respect and with gratitude.
A couple of years after my move to San Francisco, I found out about an organic barbecue joint in the suburbs of Oakland. Nicole and I went there for my birthday and enjoyed some of the best brisket I have ever eaten; I asked the guy, ‘Why do you use organic beef?’ He said, ‘I work here and eat here every day, and so does my family.’ Sounds like a good enough reason to me.
In 1994, I was a couple of years into the vegan thing, and dead serious about it, but after about a week on the roads of America with a rucksack, a very light money belt, and little more than a sense of adventure, saying no to free food became, well, silly. I tried sticking to the salad bar in Vegas, eating lots of trail mix, finding Chinese restaurants in obscure places where the soy protein was supplemented by a healthy dollop of vitamin MSG. I even lived for days at a time on bread dipped in olive oil. After a while, though, the vegan thing definitely started to wear thin. Traveling alone is not easy when you are young and poor. Traveling alone when you love social contact as much as I do AND you happen to have weird food restrictions can be scary as hell. Which is, of course, why I was doing it.
‘The Journey’ is a time honored tradition, at least according to Joseph Campbell, in which a person can test oneself, and find out if the structure of his or her belief system can actually stand up to the rigors of reality, kind of like Luke Skywalker following Ben Kenobi, or Superman slipping off to the South pole... As a literary device, or even as a teaching tool, ‘The Journey’ is the story of a person who takes a risk, goes off on their own, and comes to terms with some piece of knowledge, which transforms them. For some, it is the move to college, joining the military, fishing in Alaska, or the ubiquitous backpacking trip to Europe. For me, it was a giant move to San Francisco, to work (somewhat ironically) in a vegan restaurant. It was a little strange, realizing that I was losing my religion while I was on the path to Mecca, but it was definitely what was happening.
I kept thinking, on that trip, about how some of my core values; things like friendship, family, community and sharing, were starting to conflict with some of my other values; things like not doing harm, or honoring life (by not killing it to eat, for instance...). I even started to feel a little selfish for the times I had turned up my nose at food that had been offered to me with good intentions and love. I knew, in my mind, that my snubs were not meant as insults, but I was also beginning to understand how easy it would have been to interpret them as such. It’s easy to think about these things when you’re hungry.
I did move to San Francisco, and I did go to work for the vegan restaurant. I even managed to maintain a vegetarian and mostly vegan diet for another few years. You see, and this is hard for me to admit, the last two years of my vegan life had become a sort of exercise in ‘more vegan than you’ posturing for me. My incessant thirst for knowledge had forced me to face the nasty truths about the presence of animal byproducts in so many places in my life, and each new bit of knowledge became on one hand another restriction for me, and on the other hand, a weapon in my arsenal of how much better I was than those around me. It was a manifestation of my own insecurity. Part of my transformation, on my (capital ‘J’) ‘Journey’ was that bit of realization. I have never lost my belief in eating healthy foods, or in my desire to feed healthy foods to others; what I lost was the religious fervor and the deep rock solid belief that I was right.
Many vegetarians and vegans are also motivated by the environmental impact eating meat has on the world we share. Therefore, most have at least a passing familiarity with the concept of organic agriculture; now much of the world seems to be waking up to it as well. During this time, I became more and more familiar with its nuance and meaning. The restaurant where I was training purchased much of its food directly from organic farmers. Over the years of working there, I got to know and like them and I began asking simple questions about how these small farmers managed without the chemical pesticides and fertilizers used by the factory farmers. The answers were surprising. Instead of pesticides, they relied on biodiversity, or the keeping of many different crops and different types of even the same crops (‘the bugs won’t get all of them’), which, you may note, is the same system used by Mother Nature. And instead of chemical fertilizers? They used compost, sure, but also manure, bone meal, blood meal, even fish meal. In two words, animal husbandry. Many of these small farmers kept animals for their own food, and knew volumes about both meat and livestock handling and especially, how much well-cared-for animals made for better health for the farm. As a practicing vegetarian, and a vegetarian chef, charged with the work of bringing strict vegan meals to a passionate clientele, I was horrified. I mean, how could a responsible vegan eat organic food? And where did it go from there? What was next, eating only wild harvested foods? Air-itarianism (read it again, you'll get it...)? I was thinking myself into a corner and I knew I had to reassess my ideals. It may sound silly, but I honestly felt like I had to choose between organic and vegan. I guess I was transforming.
There was one other important part of the transformation that lead me back to barbecue. Forgiveness. Much of my overwrought thinking and philosophizing were the products of my single minded ambition. Like many ambitious young men with good intentions, I was determined to be pure and perfect. To fix myself. Like some sort of religious zealot, I felt like I was driven to achieve some sort of higher state through constant and unflagging self discipline, but the fact was, all of my experiences were leading me to an inevitable conclusion: I was never going to get there. And neither is anyone else. It is the same mistake being made everyday by factory farmers and war hawks with their ideals of a perfect, pure, neat and ordered world. The same mistake. We are never going to conquer nature, least of all our own, and we will always fail if we try. Oh, we won’t stop trying, and we can easily be better people, and being good to other people around you has a tendency to draw people who like to be good and be surrounded by good people to you (get all that?) But we will never be perfect. And the only way to be happy is to realize that and forgive it. To say, ‘I tried, I’ll keep trying, and that’s worth something, but this time, I didn’t make it.’
I guess it all really started on my trip to San Francisco. You see, I ate a pancake in Vegas. I knew it had eggs and milk in it. It tasted pretty good, it was free, and I forgave myself (later) and began to accept that I will keep trying to do the right thing, will keep trying to do the best things, and that in the end I’ll fail sometimes, and things will still turn out pretty good either way. And after years of arguing with myself over the political, environmental, and spiritual implications of a meat based diet, I came to some honest conclusions. You see, I like meat, I like the way it tastes, I like the people who raise it responsibly, and I like the idea that when I purchase it, I can choose to purchase responsibly. I like that when I do, my impact is probably a more successful form of activism than my holier-than-thou vegan rhetoric. I like that when I purchase it, handle it and cook it I both have and take the oppurtunity to treat the whole animal with respect and with gratitude.
A couple of years after my move to San Francisco, I found out about an organic barbecue joint in the suburbs of Oakland. Nicole and I went there for my birthday and enjoyed some of the best brisket I have ever eaten; I asked the guy, ‘Why do you use organic beef?’ He said, ‘I work here and eat here every day, and so does my family.’ Sounds like a good enough reason to me.
Smoke; part two, the lean years…
SCENE: A household in Texas in the early 90’s, a son confronts his parents with a startling revelation:
SON: “Mom, Dad I’ve got something to tell you.”
FATHER: “You’re gay?”
SON: “No, worse…”
MOTHER: “Oh my god, Sam, he’s a vegetarian!”
There are a lot of things that can go through the mind of a cook or a butcher whose profession involves the handling of meats daily and often. I’m sure I don’t speak only for myself when I consider the speculation involved in the quartering of a chicken or a rabbit, when the mind wanders to a pet cat or dog, or the way a knife passes through a meaty joint of pork or lamb and considering one’s own cut-ability. Perhaps even more disturbing are the thoughts that creep in when handling the less blatantly obviously animal of the meats, for instance opening a case of four layers of six ounce boneless, skinless chicken breasts, twenty-four to a layer, each identical piece separated into its own little plastic tray. What kind of world produces such cases upon cases of these disturbing ‘protein delivery systems’, and what is to be said about the consumers who demand it? These can be weird and terrible thoughts, and they inevitably lead to a black sense of humour among cooks. I used to love the way the fat trimmed from the chicken breasts looked like giant loogies; the waitresses, however, were not nearly as impressed. No doubt, some Sigmund would describe this as some sort of coping mechanism, which is fine, and I would hope we could all laugh in the face of our own darkness, but not too much, and not to excuse it. All things considered, we are meat and our rationalizations for consuming it will always be tempered by that honest truth. In the early nineties, my response to this philosophical hypocrisy was simple: I quit eating it.
My first wife’s father was a rancher; it was his first and third career. In between, he was a civil engineer. His first career, because he was raised with it, and his third, because even after years of schooling and years of well-paid high level work in engineering firms in Dallas, he couldn’t get it out of his blood and returned. In the city, he heard (herded?) the cows in his sleep, mooing for him to come home. Or something like that. He was a good intentioned man, which is not to say he was a good man. Cattle were something he thought he understood, unlike the employees at the big firm or even his own family. He worked with the cattle like he would have approached an engineering question: with a desire to produce the most beef per acre at the lowest cost. Dogs and cats on the farm were treated with the same callous disregard for health or hardship and were only allowed their share of the food when their usefulness (as mousers or herders) warranted it; they certainly weren’t allowed inside and affection (or a trip to the vet) was out of the question.
Maybe my ex-wife’s inheritance of this attitude of disrespect for animals was what lead to our demise-- our last big fight was about the fact that I shelled out a pile of cash to save our dog’s life without consulting her (how many marriages have cell phones saved?), but probably not, as we were headed apart anyway. But it is no coincidence that my exit from that animal-hating family put me off the meat industry for a while. When people ask me about why I became a vegetarian, I usually crack wise about getting thin to pick up chicks after my first divorce or crack sincere about how I was always a lover of the environment and animals and life in general and couldn’t reconcile that with my experience of the meat production industry from within. Well there’s actually a partial explanation within both of those reasons and in the story of the rancher above, and in the meat cutting story in the previous paragraph. None of us do anything for just one reason, we do things for one just reason. To me it all goes back to one little lie. One day in the field with my father-in-law I pushed the punch into the calf’s ear for a tag and felt the large animal shudder with pain, and my father-in-law said the following:
“Don’t worry, it doesn’t hurt them.”
They say that one of those stages of addiction (or is it grief?) is denial. And we are addicted to the consumption of meat, without question. There are millions of us who satisfy our itches with booze or drugs, but there are billions and billions of us who satisfy our itches with a Big Mac. The only way we can collectively justify that industry created by our addiction to cheap meat is to hide it on the fringes of our vision. We don’t see the killing floors on our televisions or in our grocery stores; our feedlots do not offer guided tours. Our meat comes to us on sale, pre-cut and pre-cleaned on a Styrofoam tray wrapped in cellophane, and we buy it with out ever looking at the guts, brains or the eyeballs of the animal from which it came. We collectively deny the animal’s pain. When I lost my ability to deny it, I had to confront it, and I had to quit.
But wait, isn’t this supposed to be about barbecue? Now you’ve got us addicted to eating food? That’s like saying we are addicted to air! We have to breathe don’t we? Well, to that point I must ask, how quickly would our lives change if we had to pay for air? Bet the cheap stuff would go quick and somebody would figure out a way to market second hand smoke to children (“Keeps you alive for a few years for under 99 cents and it comes with a free toy!”) In other words, there are right ways and wrong ways to do everything. There is always more to the story than meets (meats? Sorry, that was completely uncalled for…) the eye…
Stay tuned for part three…
SON: “Mom, Dad I’ve got something to tell you.”
FATHER: “You’re gay?”
SON: “No, worse…”
MOTHER: “Oh my god, Sam, he’s a vegetarian!”
There are a lot of things that can go through the mind of a cook or a butcher whose profession involves the handling of meats daily and often. I’m sure I don’t speak only for myself when I consider the speculation involved in the quartering of a chicken or a rabbit, when the mind wanders to a pet cat or dog, or the way a knife passes through a meaty joint of pork or lamb and considering one’s own cut-ability. Perhaps even more disturbing are the thoughts that creep in when handling the less blatantly obviously animal of the meats, for instance opening a case of four layers of six ounce boneless, skinless chicken breasts, twenty-four to a layer, each identical piece separated into its own little plastic tray. What kind of world produces such cases upon cases of these disturbing ‘protein delivery systems’, and what is to be said about the consumers who demand it? These can be weird and terrible thoughts, and they inevitably lead to a black sense of humour among cooks. I used to love the way the fat trimmed from the chicken breasts looked like giant loogies; the waitresses, however, were not nearly as impressed. No doubt, some Sigmund would describe this as some sort of coping mechanism, which is fine, and I would hope we could all laugh in the face of our own darkness, but not too much, and not to excuse it. All things considered, we are meat and our rationalizations for consuming it will always be tempered by that honest truth. In the early nineties, my response to this philosophical hypocrisy was simple: I quit eating it.
My first wife’s father was a rancher; it was his first and third career. In between, he was a civil engineer. His first career, because he was raised with it, and his third, because even after years of schooling and years of well-paid high level work in engineering firms in Dallas, he couldn’t get it out of his blood and returned. In the city, he heard (herded?) the cows in his sleep, mooing for him to come home. Or something like that. He was a good intentioned man, which is not to say he was a good man. Cattle were something he thought he understood, unlike the employees at the big firm or even his own family. He worked with the cattle like he would have approached an engineering question: with a desire to produce the most beef per acre at the lowest cost. Dogs and cats on the farm were treated with the same callous disregard for health or hardship and were only allowed their share of the food when their usefulness (as mousers or herders) warranted it; they certainly weren’t allowed inside and affection (or a trip to the vet) was out of the question.
Maybe my ex-wife’s inheritance of this attitude of disrespect for animals was what lead to our demise-- our last big fight was about the fact that I shelled out a pile of cash to save our dog’s life without consulting her (how many marriages have cell phones saved?), but probably not, as we were headed apart anyway. But it is no coincidence that my exit from that animal-hating family put me off the meat industry for a while. When people ask me about why I became a vegetarian, I usually crack wise about getting thin to pick up chicks after my first divorce or crack sincere about how I was always a lover of the environment and animals and life in general and couldn’t reconcile that with my experience of the meat production industry from within. Well there’s actually a partial explanation within both of those reasons and in the story of the rancher above, and in the meat cutting story in the previous paragraph. None of us do anything for just one reason, we do things for one just reason. To me it all goes back to one little lie. One day in the field with my father-in-law I pushed the punch into the calf’s ear for a tag and felt the large animal shudder with pain, and my father-in-law said the following:
“Don’t worry, it doesn’t hurt them.”
They say that one of those stages of addiction (or is it grief?) is denial. And we are addicted to the consumption of meat, without question. There are millions of us who satisfy our itches with booze or drugs, but there are billions and billions of us who satisfy our itches with a Big Mac. The only way we can collectively justify that industry created by our addiction to cheap meat is to hide it on the fringes of our vision. We don’t see the killing floors on our televisions or in our grocery stores; our feedlots do not offer guided tours. Our meat comes to us on sale, pre-cut and pre-cleaned on a Styrofoam tray wrapped in cellophane, and we buy it with out ever looking at the guts, brains or the eyeballs of the animal from which it came. We collectively deny the animal’s pain. When I lost my ability to deny it, I had to confront it, and I had to quit.
But wait, isn’t this supposed to be about barbecue? Now you’ve got us addicted to eating food? That’s like saying we are addicted to air! We have to breathe don’t we? Well, to that point I must ask, how quickly would our lives change if we had to pay for air? Bet the cheap stuff would go quick and somebody would figure out a way to market second hand smoke to children (“Keeps you alive for a few years for under 99 cents and it comes with a free toy!”) In other words, there are right ways and wrong ways to do everything. There is always more to the story than meets (meats? Sorry, that was completely uncalled for…) the eye…
Stay tuned for part three…
Smoke, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the brisket. Part One:
Granddaddy made his own barbecue sauce. Or so I believed. More likely, Grandmother Ruby made it and he added a stick of butter and a couple more shots of Tabasco. A family event at our grandparents’ house usually meant one thing, barbecued brisket. By the time we got there, granddad would have already been tending the brisket for a number of hours, so I can’t relay his exact method, but after a number of conversations with my father, my cousins and some of Granddaddy’s friends, as well as years of my own experience, I can now make some assumptions. First, either early in the morning or late the night before, he would build a wood fire in the pit with post oak or mesquite, then let the coals die down, and then set his brisket on the far side of the pit. The pit was made from a 50 gallon oil drum, it had welded-on legs, handles, hinges and a stovepipe and it was split sideways, so it could open up like a giant clam, it may have been painted at some point, but it was black from years of smoke by the time I saw it. It was fitted with a rack across the bottom half, like any other barbecue and it included little sliding doors on the bottom and across the top of the stovepipe to control the airflow through the main chamber when the lid was closed. No Texan needed that description as these contraptions were (and in some places still are) as plentiful as heat and sun in our yards in the summertime, which is to say, well, plentiful. Robb Walsh (a Texas food writer) called them Texas Hibachis, a description I like now but wouldn’t have remotely understood if you’d used it at the time. A Hibachi is a tiny grill for charcoal grilling used in Japanese cooking. When I was a kid, I probably just assumed Japanese people ate Chinese food, as I didn’t encounter Japanese food more exotic than ‘teriyaki chicken’ (with the ubiquitous canned pineapple ring) until my early twenties. Since everything is bigger in Texas (just ask any Texan) a fifty gallon drum is a Hibachi the same way a guitar is a Texas mandolin. When my granddad cooked a brisket, it took total attention. He was the pit boss, and it was his show. By profession, he was a dentist, but in the summers I remember him two ways, in his coveralls in the garden or perched on an aluminum lawn chair next to that barbecue pit, chewing on a fat cigar and tending the brisket. His method was unique; it involved a regular basting with his barbecue sauce until the sugar formed a kind of crust on the meat. In retrospect, it wasn’t perfect, but it was perfect for us.
Barbecue can be source of great pleasure and great debate with Texans, some would claim that there are as many different barbecue styles as there are Texans, but there are some universal truths. Barbecue, in Texas, refers specifically to the slow and low cooking of a cut of meat. Cooking meat, or anything else for that matter, on a grill over direct heat is called grilling. You may grill foods in a barbecue pit, but that’s kind of a coincidence, like figuring out you can use a hammer to not only hammer a nail but also, say, to crack an egg or perhaps to open a window. Texas barbecue almost always refers to beef. And it almost always refers specifically to a cut from the front quarter of the animal found near the leg called the brisket. The brisket is whole and untrimmed and when cooked, is sliced against the grain. Brisket is also the cut of meat used to make Pastrami and Montreal style smoked meat. Barbecued brisket is served sliced warm in Texas with a sweet, spicy and vinegary tomato based sauce, known far and wide as barbecue sauce. This distinction is important because apparently some folks make a non tomato based sauce, and still try to call it barbecue sauce although most Texans aren't sure why. My granddad's barbecue sauce had a list of over twenty ingredients of which I'll share two, tomato paste and orange peel. Tomato paste to make the point about a tomato based sauce, and orange peel, because I thought it was weird and kind of cool. After I got the recipe, I liked to imagine him peeling an orange and throwing it in the big bubbling pot like a mad alchemist, but later, after he died, I found a McCormick’s spice jar in his cabinet, dry and ancient, that read 'orange peel' which dashed that fantasy to bits. If it had ever actually smelled like orange peel, I'm afraid it was many years before I opened it.
Along with barbecue the food, there is also barbecue, the culture. When you leave the Texas Hibachi in the yard and go out to get barbecue, you venture into the very pinnacle of Texas culture, the barbecue joint. A barbecue joint has a about a 90 per chance of being a guy's name. Luther's barbecue house had the best sauce, Tom’s had the best meat. Some other place had the best sides, it was probably called Jim's or Rufus's or something. And these were all joints. They were kept clean, sort of, but no money was wasted on decor. Cast off street signs, old beer cans, hunting trophies, all mixed up with red-checked plastic tablecloths and Sears picnic furniture. The smell of smoke and meat. No money was wasted on cutlery or dishes, either. Barbecue is best served on butcher paper on a tray with onions, sliced cheese, thick slices of fluffy white bread and pickles. Tables were carefully set with a stainless steel napkin dispenser and a plastic bottle of barbecue sauce. You pay by weight. Barbecue joints offer choices like sausage or chicken or a combination. Family meals, that kind of thing, maybe a grilled cheese sandwich for a kid. Sides were usually simple things like slaw or potato salad, but if you were lucky, maybe something hot like fried okra or a big buttery ear of corn. But the most important thing was the brisket.
Maybe that's why my biggest act of rebellion was becoming a vegetarian.
Stay tuned for part two....
Barbecue can be source of great pleasure and great debate with Texans, some would claim that there are as many different barbecue styles as there are Texans, but there are some universal truths. Barbecue, in Texas, refers specifically to the slow and low cooking of a cut of meat. Cooking meat, or anything else for that matter, on a grill over direct heat is called grilling. You may grill foods in a barbecue pit, but that’s kind of a coincidence, like figuring out you can use a hammer to not only hammer a nail but also, say, to crack an egg or perhaps to open a window. Texas barbecue almost always refers to beef. And it almost always refers specifically to a cut from the front quarter of the animal found near the leg called the brisket. The brisket is whole and untrimmed and when cooked, is sliced against the grain. Brisket is also the cut of meat used to make Pastrami and Montreal style smoked meat. Barbecued brisket is served sliced warm in Texas with a sweet, spicy and vinegary tomato based sauce, known far and wide as barbecue sauce. This distinction is important because apparently some folks make a non tomato based sauce, and still try to call it barbecue sauce although most Texans aren't sure why. My granddad's barbecue sauce had a list of over twenty ingredients of which I'll share two, tomato paste and orange peel. Tomato paste to make the point about a tomato based sauce, and orange peel, because I thought it was weird and kind of cool. After I got the recipe, I liked to imagine him peeling an orange and throwing it in the big bubbling pot like a mad alchemist, but later, after he died, I found a McCormick’s spice jar in his cabinet, dry and ancient, that read 'orange peel' which dashed that fantasy to bits. If it had ever actually smelled like orange peel, I'm afraid it was many years before I opened it.
Along with barbecue the food, there is also barbecue, the culture. When you leave the Texas Hibachi in the yard and go out to get barbecue, you venture into the very pinnacle of Texas culture, the barbecue joint. A barbecue joint has a about a 90 per chance of being a guy's name. Luther's barbecue house had the best sauce, Tom’s had the best meat. Some other place had the best sides, it was probably called Jim's or Rufus's or something. And these were all joints. They were kept clean, sort of, but no money was wasted on decor. Cast off street signs, old beer cans, hunting trophies, all mixed up with red-checked plastic tablecloths and Sears picnic furniture. The smell of smoke and meat. No money was wasted on cutlery or dishes, either. Barbecue is best served on butcher paper on a tray with onions, sliced cheese, thick slices of fluffy white bread and pickles. Tables were carefully set with a stainless steel napkin dispenser and a plastic bottle of barbecue sauce. You pay by weight. Barbecue joints offer choices like sausage or chicken or a combination. Family meals, that kind of thing, maybe a grilled cheese sandwich for a kid. Sides were usually simple things like slaw or potato salad, but if you were lucky, maybe something hot like fried okra or a big buttery ear of corn. But the most important thing was the brisket.
Maybe that's why my biggest act of rebellion was becoming a vegetarian.
Stay tuned for part two....
You can never go home again...or can you?
My birthday is coming up this week and for me at least, that sort of thing tends to set the old nostalgia engine to rumbling. It also means lots of people are doing nice things for me. It started a week ago last Monday with a trip to Prince Edward County; my sister-in-law Denise surprised her husband Steve, my wife Nicole, and me with an elaborate plan involving fine hotel rooms at Huff Estates winery, reservations at restaurants in Picton and Kingston and pages of printed internet pages recommending culinary and booze related stops at an organic farm, a cider maker, several wineries, a brewpub, a cheesemaker, an ice cream shop, a beach and even Reader’s Digest’s pick for the ‘Best Hot Dog in Canada.’ Our whirlwind tour brought back numerous fond memories of trips Nicole and I took in California and Austin to each of their neighboring wine regions (I’ll let you guess which one was better). Visiting a winery’s tasting room is the best way to discover a wine’s secrets. You will always find the wine displayed in its very best condition, temperature, aeration and proper glass; the staff do nothing but answer questions about the wine and are therefore always capable of offering at least some basic information to help a buyer make informed choices. They also tend to know the culinary and cultural landscape of the area, as locals, and can help to guide the experience outside the winery as well.
When we first moved to this area, Nicole and I took a day trip from Toronto to the Niagara region and were just a little disappointed. The wines were not terrible, we just found them unadventurous and safe. I’m sure a few more trips might yield a different opinion, but after California and Europe, Canadian wines just seemed, well, like they needed more time to come into their own. Prince Edward County, on the other hand, was a pleasure from the first stop to the last. Perhaps the insanity necessary to build a wine region in an area that requires burying the entire crop to save it from the harsh winter also attracts winemakers with a bit more of a maverick attitude. Oh, the safe names like Cabernet and Chardonnay were still evident, of course, but they were often dismissed by the wineries themselves, as well they should be, as most of them were produced from grapes sourced from Niagara. They instead seemed more interested in showing off the newer grape varietals and blends, or the older varietals that were more appropriate for our cooler climate. The wines were not perfect, which is why I liked them. I once heard the French biodynamic wine guru Nicolas Joly speak in San Francisco; he said that he loved to taste bad wine; then, after a beat, he said, it’s the only way you can tell it was made by a human and not a machine. In my experience, some of the best and worst wines I have tasted have been made by the same person. I like Prince Edward County wines and am thrilled to find such a gem so close to my new home.
My parents arrived on Friday of last week with a trunk full of my old vinyl records. It was the missing puzzle piece for me in many ways. I started collecting records when I was about 15 and have amassed a modest but personally important collection over the years. When I moved away from Texas in the 90s, I left the bulky collection in my parents’ care (it wouldn’t fit in my rucksack), but on arrival in California, realized that I had not lost the bug. Collecting records is a very satisfying hobby; it is an excuse to visit second hand shops, garage sales and flea markets, it involves the skills probably evolved in our DNA for hunting, it has the reward of music upon the find, the lost art of the record sleeve, and unless one is a different kind of collector than I, it is a cheap hobby. I never even go to the collector’s shops where discerning snobs have placed inflated values on some album I will definitely find next year after Grandma cleans out Junior’s old room and will sell me the whole box for, I don’t know, 50 cents? Over time I built what I called, The California Collection. And my parents held The Texas Collection. In my mind, I dreamed of a day where the two collections were joined together, and as of last Friday, that wish has come true. I have often said that when these two collections were together I would know that I was home.
I was raised in Bryan, Texas; my family on both sides were Bryanites for at least three generations; I know that wouldn’t seem like much to a European or an Asian whose family has held their patch of ground for hundreds or thousands of years, but to me, it was home, it’s what home felt like, it was the streetmap of my nostalgia, the precise location of my ennui, my longing; for me homesickness was bryansickness, and it still seems like a mystical place, shrouded in the very mists of blah, blah, blah. Ughhh. The fact is, Bryan was a smaller town, it had some neat stuff, but it wasn’t a place I felt very strong about at the time. In fact, as a pre-teenager, I remember fighting tooth and nail to convince my family to move to East Texas when an opportunity came to buy my great Aunt’s house and property. High School was a bitter pill for me and felt more like a survival game than a learning institution. When my chance came, I was gone. I love my parents dearly, but the life of a Bryanite was not for me. I have and will visit the old home for many a year to come, but it is not for me. Not to mention that businesses have closed and opened, old friends have left, new people have arrived, and it’s not the same place it once was.
Many people have written on the theme that we can never go home again, most famously Thomas Wolfe in the book by that (approximate) title, in which he proceeded to piss off so many people with his frank tell-all approach that he actually made the title true by writing it. I don’t claim to understand the mechanics of nostalgia, but I am not immune to it. I feel longing and sometimes its name is Bryan, sometimes Austin, sometimes San Francisco, sometimes it is for my great Aunt’s homestead and farm, a place I never even lived but sometimes wonder about. It was in a small town, a village smaller than Kemptville, and I would have had a very different life. I wanted to move there so badly because it was near my father’s family farm, a (now) collectively owned 150 year old house we call ‘The Old Place’. When I close my eyes I can feel the smooth wood of the porch rail and the magical wind we called the Enloe breeze. I can smell the pine forest and I can imagine milking cows and hauling hay in that blistering hot Texas sun. I can imagine the sound of the old fiddle from the closet, strung and shiny and new giving us a mournful tune in the hands of some great-great aunt or cousin of mine before cars drove down the old red dirt road. I am nostalgic for something I’ve never even lived through. And isn’t that what nostalgia is? A ghost?
I am writing this in a 130 year old building in a country and village which neither I, nor my ancestors had any part in building. I am looking at my complete record collection. And I am home.
When we first moved to this area, Nicole and I took a day trip from Toronto to the Niagara region and were just a little disappointed. The wines were not terrible, we just found them unadventurous and safe. I’m sure a few more trips might yield a different opinion, but after California and Europe, Canadian wines just seemed, well, like they needed more time to come into their own. Prince Edward County, on the other hand, was a pleasure from the first stop to the last. Perhaps the insanity necessary to build a wine region in an area that requires burying the entire crop to save it from the harsh winter also attracts winemakers with a bit more of a maverick attitude. Oh, the safe names like Cabernet and Chardonnay were still evident, of course, but they were often dismissed by the wineries themselves, as well they should be, as most of them were produced from grapes sourced from Niagara. They instead seemed more interested in showing off the newer grape varietals and blends, or the older varietals that were more appropriate for our cooler climate. The wines were not perfect, which is why I liked them. I once heard the French biodynamic wine guru Nicolas Joly speak in San Francisco; he said that he loved to taste bad wine; then, after a beat, he said, it’s the only way you can tell it was made by a human and not a machine. In my experience, some of the best and worst wines I have tasted have been made by the same person. I like Prince Edward County wines and am thrilled to find such a gem so close to my new home.
My parents arrived on Friday of last week with a trunk full of my old vinyl records. It was the missing puzzle piece for me in many ways. I started collecting records when I was about 15 and have amassed a modest but personally important collection over the years. When I moved away from Texas in the 90s, I left the bulky collection in my parents’ care (it wouldn’t fit in my rucksack), but on arrival in California, realized that I had not lost the bug. Collecting records is a very satisfying hobby; it is an excuse to visit second hand shops, garage sales and flea markets, it involves the skills probably evolved in our DNA for hunting, it has the reward of music upon the find, the lost art of the record sleeve, and unless one is a different kind of collector than I, it is a cheap hobby. I never even go to the collector’s shops where discerning snobs have placed inflated values on some album I will definitely find next year after Grandma cleans out Junior’s old room and will sell me the whole box for, I don’t know, 50 cents? Over time I built what I called, The California Collection. And my parents held The Texas Collection. In my mind, I dreamed of a day where the two collections were joined together, and as of last Friday, that wish has come true. I have often said that when these two collections were together I would know that I was home.
I was raised in Bryan, Texas; my family on both sides were Bryanites for at least three generations; I know that wouldn’t seem like much to a European or an Asian whose family has held their patch of ground for hundreds or thousands of years, but to me, it was home, it’s what home felt like, it was the streetmap of my nostalgia, the precise location of my ennui, my longing; for me homesickness was bryansickness, and it still seems like a mystical place, shrouded in the very mists of blah, blah, blah. Ughhh. The fact is, Bryan was a smaller town, it had some neat stuff, but it wasn’t a place I felt very strong about at the time. In fact, as a pre-teenager, I remember fighting tooth and nail to convince my family to move to East Texas when an opportunity came to buy my great Aunt’s house and property. High School was a bitter pill for me and felt more like a survival game than a learning institution. When my chance came, I was gone. I love my parents dearly, but the life of a Bryanite was not for me. I have and will visit the old home for many a year to come, but it is not for me. Not to mention that businesses have closed and opened, old friends have left, new people have arrived, and it’s not the same place it once was.
Many people have written on the theme that we can never go home again, most famously Thomas Wolfe in the book by that (approximate) title, in which he proceeded to piss off so many people with his frank tell-all approach that he actually made the title true by writing it. I don’t claim to understand the mechanics of nostalgia, but I am not immune to it. I feel longing and sometimes its name is Bryan, sometimes Austin, sometimes San Francisco, sometimes it is for my great Aunt’s homestead and farm, a place I never even lived but sometimes wonder about. It was in a small town, a village smaller than Kemptville, and I would have had a very different life. I wanted to move there so badly because it was near my father’s family farm, a (now) collectively owned 150 year old house we call ‘The Old Place’. When I close my eyes I can feel the smooth wood of the porch rail and the magical wind we called the Enloe breeze. I can smell the pine forest and I can imagine milking cows and hauling hay in that blistering hot Texas sun. I can imagine the sound of the old fiddle from the closet, strung and shiny and new giving us a mournful tune in the hands of some great-great aunt or cousin of mine before cars drove down the old red dirt road. I am nostalgic for something I’ve never even lived through. And isn’t that what nostalgia is? A ghost?
I am writing this in a 130 year old building in a country and village which neither I, nor my ancestors had any part in building. I am looking at my complete record collection. And I am home.
Smile
Someday, we’ll look back on all this and smile. Every once in a while, however, we realize exactly how great all this is right now. And smile. Sunday was one of those days. When 2 o’clock rolled around and the first farmer’s market customers started approaching the first farmers, we knew something special was happening. Everyone seemed to feel it. Smiles were miles wide in every direction. I’ve flirted with spirituality from a distance since my Baptist upbringing, but if ever a case could be made for divine intervention, it was the way the sky cleared and the rain dried up for the exact two hours of our first market day.
Recently, I’ve been wondering what has kept Kemptville from sustaining a farmer’s market long before now (yes, I know that this is not the first attempt). And, to some degree, I’ve been thinking how much fear plays a role in our lives. Be it fear of the unknown (or the unknown food, as it relates to cooking and eating), or fear of change, or the fear of failure, it seems we are constantly being controlled on some level by our fears. For me, I came to a point where I either had to face my fears, or I wasn’t going to be able to get on with my life.
I was in my early twenties and I was beginning to realize that my chances of finishing college were about as good as my chances of making a career out of the theatre degree I was pursuing, which is to say, next to none (apologies to Sarah, my sister with the theatre degree). I wasn’t going to be a rock star after all, and I was Single Again. For years, I had talked about travel, specifically going to San Francisco to pursue my career as a cook, but fear had kept me from it. Growing up in a smaller town, we spoke of “The City” as a scary place, with Crime and His Cousins lurking in every shadowy alley (smaller towns have fewer alleys but I’ve since discovered that that particular family doesn’t seem to mind…). Travel in general was met with equal suspicion, and admittedly can be quite harrowing, especially without the cushion of financial stability or a network of friends and family in place to buffer the dangers. But the biggest roadblock, far and away was not the fear of the danger…it was the fear of loneliness.
We humans are not an incredibly large animal, nor do we possess razor sharp teeth, claws or the ability to out-run, out-jump, or out-swim, well, (speaking for myself, of course) much of anything (hey! I’ve got flat feet!) As such, and being social creatures, we love more than anything to stay close to our pack. As for the fear of being alone, I really think that it’s just the way our brain decodes the blips and bleeps of our subconscious that are telling us, “wait, slow down, let’s just watch from a safe distance, if she eats the toadstool and doesn’t die, then the rest of us can try it,” or “let’s all just wait on the shore, we’ll watch this potentially insane ape walk out on the ice, if he doesn’t fall in and drown, and this does turn out to be an excellent shortcut, then we’ll follow” etc. It can be a rather useful instinct, when you think about it. Though we do celebrate, as a culture, those who are willing to step away from the crowd, we just don’t like to commit to joining them until they’ve proven themselves to not be insane. We like the winning team (Go Sens Go!) but are anxious, cautious and doubtful until the results are tallied (Senators in 6, I’m told). For me, when faced with my choice, I realized that I had to be the one to eat the toadstool, to walk out on the ice.
At the age of 24, I packed a bag and went west. Alone. I knew I needed to find something, and I did. I found that I survived. For me, that simple discovery was a big deal. As important and useful as our instinct to cling to the warm comfort of the pack may be, the fact is that someone has to be the loner, the innovator, the one to take chances; and without that wacko gene, we wouldn’t evolve as individuals or as a species. The best part is that once a person learns that lesson, how to put aside one’s fear, life starts to become easier. In the years since I took that first big risk, I have traveled both this continent and abroad, I have written a cookbook, I have made a good and important career out of something I used to think of as nothing more than a way to make the monthly payments on my microphone and P.A. Best of all, I met and married the most important person in my life, and wasn’t afraid to tell her so.
Last year, Nicole, Brent, Jenn and I each set aside our fear of failure and opened a business, offering creative & tasty organic food in Kemptville. There are those who think we are silly or weird, but it seems like more and more people think it is a good and timely idea and are willing to take a chance and try something new. A month or so ago we set in motion a plan to open a farmer’s market. And last Sunday, with smiles as bright as our own personal patch of sunlight, we saw that without question Kemptville was ready for a taste of the local foods movement. Time and again, we have seen that fear alone should never be a reason to not do something, and that life rewards the innovator. So don’t be afraid. Go west. Or east. Or even just go down the street to meet a new farmer, make a new friend, or maybe just to try something new...
Trust me, someday you’ll look up...and smile!
Recently, I’ve been wondering what has kept Kemptville from sustaining a farmer’s market long before now (yes, I know that this is not the first attempt). And, to some degree, I’ve been thinking how much fear plays a role in our lives. Be it fear of the unknown (or the unknown food, as it relates to cooking and eating), or fear of change, or the fear of failure, it seems we are constantly being controlled on some level by our fears. For me, I came to a point where I either had to face my fears, or I wasn’t going to be able to get on with my life.
I was in my early twenties and I was beginning to realize that my chances of finishing college were about as good as my chances of making a career out of the theatre degree I was pursuing, which is to say, next to none (apologies to Sarah, my sister with the theatre degree). I wasn’t going to be a rock star after all, and I was Single Again. For years, I had talked about travel, specifically going to San Francisco to pursue my career as a cook, but fear had kept me from it. Growing up in a smaller town, we spoke of “The City” as a scary place, with Crime and His Cousins lurking in every shadowy alley (smaller towns have fewer alleys but I’ve since discovered that that particular family doesn’t seem to mind…). Travel in general was met with equal suspicion, and admittedly can be quite harrowing, especially without the cushion of financial stability or a network of friends and family in place to buffer the dangers. But the biggest roadblock, far and away was not the fear of the danger…it was the fear of loneliness.
We humans are not an incredibly large animal, nor do we possess razor sharp teeth, claws or the ability to out-run, out-jump, or out-swim, well, (speaking for myself, of course) much of anything (hey! I’ve got flat feet!) As such, and being social creatures, we love more than anything to stay close to our pack. As for the fear of being alone, I really think that it’s just the way our brain decodes the blips and bleeps of our subconscious that are telling us, “wait, slow down, let’s just watch from a safe distance, if she eats the toadstool and doesn’t die, then the rest of us can try it,” or “let’s all just wait on the shore, we’ll watch this potentially insane ape walk out on the ice, if he doesn’t fall in and drown, and this does turn out to be an excellent shortcut, then we’ll follow” etc. It can be a rather useful instinct, when you think about it. Though we do celebrate, as a culture, those who are willing to step away from the crowd, we just don’t like to commit to joining them until they’ve proven themselves to not be insane. We like the winning team (Go Sens Go!) but are anxious, cautious and doubtful until the results are tallied (Senators in 6, I’m told). For me, when faced with my choice, I realized that I had to be the one to eat the toadstool, to walk out on the ice.
At the age of 24, I packed a bag and went west. Alone. I knew I needed to find something, and I did. I found that I survived. For me, that simple discovery was a big deal. As important and useful as our instinct to cling to the warm comfort of the pack may be, the fact is that someone has to be the loner, the innovator, the one to take chances; and without that wacko gene, we wouldn’t evolve as individuals or as a species. The best part is that once a person learns that lesson, how to put aside one’s fear, life starts to become easier. In the years since I took that first big risk, I have traveled both this continent and abroad, I have written a cookbook, I have made a good and important career out of something I used to think of as nothing more than a way to make the monthly payments on my microphone and P.A. Best of all, I met and married the most important person in my life, and wasn’t afraid to tell her so.
Last year, Nicole, Brent, Jenn and I each set aside our fear of failure and opened a business, offering creative & tasty organic food in Kemptville. There are those who think we are silly or weird, but it seems like more and more people think it is a good and timely idea and are willing to take a chance and try something new. A month or so ago we set in motion a plan to open a farmer’s market. And last Sunday, with smiles as bright as our own personal patch of sunlight, we saw that without question Kemptville was ready for a taste of the local foods movement. Time and again, we have seen that fear alone should never be a reason to not do something, and that life rewards the innovator. So don’t be afraid. Go west. Or east. Or even just go down the street to meet a new farmer, make a new friend, or maybe just to try something new...
Trust me, someday you’ll look up...and smile!
Spring Farmers Market Story
Spring has finally sprung! April showers are bringing May mushrooms (or flowers, if you prefer that sort of thing...). The monolithic parking-lot-snow-mountains have shrunk and finally slunk off in a watery retreat to the rain gutters of our fair village. The tips of sprouts are courageously poking out through the brown, frostbitten soil, buds are breaking the ice hardened skin of the bushes and trees, and all around us the bright green chlorophyll is tentatively singing the first few bars of her sweet song of promise. If you listen, you can almost hear it...it sounds like a collective sigh of relief as we all plunge together into the brief season apparently known in these parts as 'Not Winter'.
With Spring upon us, it seems that all we can talk about is gardening, farming, planting and growing food. There is no doubt that this instinct is as human as thousands of years of agriculturally based civilization can possibly make it. Let me clarify, at our core, we creatures of the earth have the simplest mechanism to keep us alive, that of survival. The desire to follow successful survivors is a manifestation of that base engine, and as humans, the successful survivors have been agriculturalists. So naturally, when spring reminds us of its bounty, we are culturally compelled to prepare the soil, to plant, and to plan for the harvest. Frankly, if we weren't so compelled our genetic traits would meander off aimlessly and probably fade from the gene pool altogether.
My grandfather was a dentist, but was raised on a farm in East Texas. At his home in Bryan throughout his life he kept a small vegetable patch, a few fruit trees and a few chickens. I think he was just cheap; when you are raised on a farm it is likely difficult to spend money on things that can be produced so easily at so little expense. (I'm joking, of course, I mean he was definitely cheap, but farming is not easy...) The beauty of his example, though, is another fact of farm life that we are all quietly aware of. Fresh food tastes better. He knew it and couldn't be satisfied by the grocery store's poor excuse for quality, and we know it, but suppress the knowledge because our busy lives have made the idea of farming and even gardening seem like hobbies or vanity projects. The industrial age has been a noble human pursuit, but it has come at the expense of the flavour, healthfulness and quality of our food (and our lives), and ultimately our connection to the earth itself. This is illustrated clearly by both health crises we are facing as humans and by the looming threat of global warming, a health crisis for our planet.
But Spring has sprung. Everywhere we look or listen today people are talking about these issues. Commercials for organic baby food have entered primetime, hybrid cars are not just for tree huggers and hippies, recycling and energy conservation are now the winning buzzwords for successful politicians, not just the claptrap of the fringe. Is the battle over? No, of course not, it's just beginning, but it is beginning in earnest and with vigor. I know in my heart that humans will turn this mess around, and I'll tell you why. Survival. We always end up rooting for the winning team. We are so hardwired to win this game that we will do whatever it takes to make it happen. And mark my words, those who don't will wander off aimlessly and their genetic information will fade from the gene pool altogether.
What can you do? Eat local, shop local, buy those funny looking light bulbs, quit driving so much and quit buying from people who drive so much. If you do buy from abroad, and we all do, choose organic. The branch will be starting a Sunday afternoon farmer's market on May 27th; let’s all pitch in and support our local farmers. It's our best good chance to win this race. This human race.
With Spring upon us, it seems that all we can talk about is gardening, farming, planting and growing food. There is no doubt that this instinct is as human as thousands of years of agriculturally based civilization can possibly make it. Let me clarify, at our core, we creatures of the earth have the simplest mechanism to keep us alive, that of survival. The desire to follow successful survivors is a manifestation of that base engine, and as humans, the successful survivors have been agriculturalists. So naturally, when spring reminds us of its bounty, we are culturally compelled to prepare the soil, to plant, and to plan for the harvest. Frankly, if we weren't so compelled our genetic traits would meander off aimlessly and probably fade from the gene pool altogether.
My grandfather was a dentist, but was raised on a farm in East Texas. At his home in Bryan throughout his life he kept a small vegetable patch, a few fruit trees and a few chickens. I think he was just cheap; when you are raised on a farm it is likely difficult to spend money on things that can be produced so easily at so little expense. (I'm joking, of course, I mean he was definitely cheap, but farming is not easy...) The beauty of his example, though, is another fact of farm life that we are all quietly aware of. Fresh food tastes better. He knew it and couldn't be satisfied by the grocery store's poor excuse for quality, and we know it, but suppress the knowledge because our busy lives have made the idea of farming and even gardening seem like hobbies or vanity projects. The industrial age has been a noble human pursuit, but it has come at the expense of the flavour, healthfulness and quality of our food (and our lives), and ultimately our connection to the earth itself. This is illustrated clearly by both health crises we are facing as humans and by the looming threat of global warming, a health crisis for our planet.
But Spring has sprung. Everywhere we look or listen today people are talking about these issues. Commercials for organic baby food have entered primetime, hybrid cars are not just for tree huggers and hippies, recycling and energy conservation are now the winning buzzwords for successful politicians, not just the claptrap of the fringe. Is the battle over? No, of course not, it's just beginning, but it is beginning in earnest and with vigor. I know in my heart that humans will turn this mess around, and I'll tell you why. Survival. We always end up rooting for the winning team. We are so hardwired to win this game that we will do whatever it takes to make it happen. And mark my words, those who don't will wander off aimlessly and their genetic information will fade from the gene pool altogether.
What can you do? Eat local, shop local, buy those funny looking light bulbs, quit driving so much and quit buying from people who drive so much. If you do buy from abroad, and we all do, choose organic. The branch will be starting a Sunday afternoon farmer's market on May 27th; let’s all pitch in and support our local farmers. It's our best good chance to win this race. This human race.
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