The Sculpture Garden

Installation by Mike Ballou
Photo by Clint Spaulding
Send your photos of Angus and any ideas you have for future exhibits to anna@marlowandsons.com

---

---

---

Tonight In Manhattan

Caroline Fidanza, Jess Arndt and Me (Anna Dunn) will be reading from past and future Diner Journals. Please join us for fun and mystery at the world famous KGB Bar along side Gabrielle Hamilton reading from her forth coming book. Show starts at seven, goes on past the second star to the right and straight on till morning.

Who: Us
What: Non-Fiction Series
Where: KGB BAR 85 East 4th Street
When: Seven
Why: Fun

---

---

---

Come Rock Out and Put Out for Juliet

Our dear friend and family member was in a bad motorcycle accident. She is alive and beautiful and badass and well on her way to well. But unfortunately misfortune is expensive here in the United States. Were she in Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, Bhutan, Brunei, China, India, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, and Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Uruguay, Trinidad and Tobago and Venezuela and the United Kingdom this wouldn't be an issue. But let's not dwell on our countries collective idiocies. Instead lets do the money dance for Juliet.

---

---

---

Diner Journal Has Valentine's Day Crush

On the New Amsterdam Market!

Please support our mission to establish a permanent, indoor public market in the City of New York, where purveyors such as butchers, grocers, mongers, and other vendors will source and sell food from the region.

By incubating and supporting these local businesses, New Amsterdam Market will provide additional outlets and opportunities for farmers too busy or too distant to attend New York's thriving Greenmarkets - a need made all the more critical by the economic collapse.

Our aim in 2009 is to begin holding New Amsterdam Market once every month. We have been speaking with the City about use of a public site in Lower Manhattan and are encouraged by this prospect. More news will follow!

Your generous support will help us start the market.

Purchase Tickets for you and all your friends NOW!

---

---

---

Whose Woods These Are I Think I Know: Cecily Upton At Large

Last week, I drove across Nebraska. Nebraska is a really BIG state. Big and Flat. It's January, so there wasn't much growing as I passed through, but the remnants of our nation's great corn industry fanned out before me in field after field of broken stalks and barren irrigation contraptions. I know most people think this part of the country is boring, and perhaps I did feel a tinge of boredom after 300 miles on I-80 with nary a curve in the road to distract me. But mostly I think Nebraska and her sister states of Iowa, Kansas, and the Dakotas, are beautiful. Beautiful in the way that Jennifer Grey was before she got her nose job…a little plain, but kind of wild and alluring just the same.

So, I'm driving through Nebraska and I start to notice that out among the broken corn stalks in 4 out of 10 fields are herds of stout, black cows foraging freely. Foraging freely? In Nebraska? This is a state firmly in the grips of Our Nation's Food System. Subsidies are handed out here like handshakes at a campaign rally. Aren't all those cows supposed to be penned up, in chains, unable to move, force-fed unnatural diets of grain and animal parts and injected with all sorts of horrible anti-biotics? Isn't that what Fast Food Nation and King Corn tell us? Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that doesn't happen, because it does. In fact, most, if not all, of those cows I saw munching away in the great open plains are destined for that very fate. Soon. And I passed those very feedlots the next day, in Colorado, and those animals are inhumanely jammed in there and there are MOUNTAINS of manure and it looks to be a pretty horrible existence. But, BUT, my east-coast, bleeding-heart, liberal, Slow Food sensibilities were kind of rocked when I saw those cows apparently enjoying themselves roaming freely amongst the corn stalks.

Then I got to thinking. And this is what I thought: what I'm seeing here might not be a quaint antithetical anecdote to the Evil Feedlot/Bionic Beef nightmare we know exists, but instead might be, in actuality, THE SADDEST INDICATOR OF HOW F***** UP OUR FOOD SYSTEM REALLY IS. Now, I'm still a little emotional about this, as you can tell. I'm going to try and lay this out clearly, but bear with me if it gets a little tangled. Here goes. These fields, in the spring, were most likely planted with GMO corn destined for one of three fates: feedlot grain, high-fructose corn syrup, or biofuel. Now, I need to make one thing clear: this corn is inedible. People cannot eat it. It can and will only be used for one of the three products I just listed. The farmers who grow this corn are most likely losing money on each acre and are subsidized by Uncle Sam to ensure the United States' bread-basket (note the irony here, given that these crops are not destined for food) remains productive. So, the sun shines, the fields are irrigated, the corn grows. Now in the good old days, some of these fields would be something other than corn and that other stuff would be harvested to feed animals like cows through the winter before a short diet of grain was imposed to fatten them up before slaughter.

I say a short diet of grain because grain is toxic to cows. Their stomachs can only tolerate it for a short period before it becomes infected, they sicken, and they die. Anyway, growing that other stuff became less and less profitable once the government began writing the checks. The government will really only write checks for corn and a few other, mostly non-edible, staples, so it didn't make much sense to be growing acres of crops that you wouldn't get paid for. Besides, science and technology had, in the meantime, invented all of these glorious drugs you could give your cows that prolonged the period that they could tolerate grain. So now you could send cattle to the feedlot at an earlier age, keep them on corn for longer, and they'd fatten up faster. Sounds like a win-win, right? Well, I think everyone reading this blog knows it's not, but I want to get back to the cows I saw munching away in the barren fields.

So, I'm driving along and I won't lie, my black Brooklyn heart warmed a bit when I saw those happy cows in the fields, but it soon iced back over when I realized the sad irony. Here were cows, spending their last short weeks before the feedlot, scavenging in snow-covered fields for the remnants of GMO corn that they would soon be force-fed in too-close quarters while standing in their own waste. These poor animals will never know what it feels like to follow their natural instincts. Over the years, they've had those instincts bred out of them. They're bred to eat, and eat they will, anything they can find. And in these fields, what they were finding would soon kill them. Then that heart got even colder and more ice-covered when I thought about this: what if those fields were used to grow actual food, for actual people. Food that nourished and provided our population with the nutrients and vitamins that many of us so desperately need. And what if, once that food had been harvested, the remnants of that system were left to be slurped up by hungry animals who could turn it not only into further nourishment, but also into natural fertilizer, making those fields even more productive next season. Ahh, what if? I'm no farmer, so I'm sure it's just a crazy idea dreamt up by a silly kid from the city who doesn't know what she's talking about, but I kind of feel like I might be on to something here.


by Cecily Upton

---

---

---

A RESTAURANT WILL NEVER ASK YOU TO EAT AT HOME

Diner Journal Will Always Ask You to Do It Yourself

It's never a good idea for a magician to give away her secrets. Or is it? As more and more Americans turn to their home kitchens for nourishment the winds of change can feel as cold, stark and tragically bland as the January air. Cooking has always been a winter tradition and now, in this the winter of our discontent, those long hours in the warm room are not only necessary but they offer us a chance to relearn some magic that may have been lost.

Change is inevitable but what is often misunderstood is that it holds intrinsic value. America is a nation full with change and, as it follows, hope. The Diner Journal is a quarterly, independent publication that uses food to search for and express this very hope in our culture, community, arts and politics.

Inspired to write a cookbook but without the time away from their day to day work Andrew Tarlow, Mark Firth and Caroline Fidanza set out to create a periodical. Entrenched in seasonality and locality and alive with the spirit of Marlow and Sons and Diner the Journal was born. What began as a musing on the dining institution has become a place to create conversations and affect change. From preserving tomatoes to carving holy saints from chocolate the Journal maintains a commitment to reverence and instruction with the understanding we all still have a lot to learn. It is hope, along side the hearth, that keeps us aglow at night.

And in words of one of our truest Americans, Bruce Springsteen, 'You can't start a fire without a spark." I am writing you today to thank you... for your sparkles. This is the second in a series of email that will chronicle our evolution and the expansion of our community. Last time around Andrew offered to dress as a chicken in hopes of wooing your subscription dollars. As far as I know the offer still stands. I might also add that it turns out Marisa happens to have one. A chicken suit, you know, just laying around. In return you regalled us with subscriptions, ideas, thoughts and encouragement. Since then we have almost doubled our subscription base, been touted by the UTNE reader, pandered by the Financial Times and are well on our way to forging vital relationships with such astitute oreganizations as The Cloud Institute, civileats.com, Community Agriculture at NYU, and well... facebook.

Now I am asking you for more ideas. Just think of how many ideas appear and vaporate in one day. How many thought bubbles float away from us on the -7 degree air. I am asking you to just grab a couple more and send them my way... What's your favorite bookstore? Foodstore? Blog? Who is your favorite writer? Food or otherwise... What is the most important thing to you right now? How are we going to bring McDonald's to it's red and yellow knees?

Uncertainty is the unlikely gold that paves the road to progress. Help us lay the bricks. Or the eggs. Whatever you want to call it. So please if you haven't subscribed take a moment to. And pass this along to anyone and everyone you love and respect and would also like to see Burger King Body Spray go the way of the Argentinosaurus. Instead of us.

Best wishes and Happy Obama Day,

Diner Journal

---

---

---

Our President

"This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions - that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America." Barack Obama

---

---

---

Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day!

You may already have received this, but it is important. I am passing it on. Quincy Jones has started a petition to ask President-Elect Obama to appoint a Secretary of the Arts. While many other countries have had Ministers of Art or Culture for centuries, The United States has never created such a position. We, in the arts, need this and the country needs the arts--now more than ever. Please take a moment to sign this important petition and then pass it on to your friends and colleagues.

And I would just like to remind you all to stop by Bonita Two for in Forte Green some inaugural tacos and music. The choral ensemble will be performing at Bonita around 2pm! Happy day.

Petition Online

Quincy Jones image plucked from Gene Pendon - HVW8.

---

---

---

New York Times: January, 19 2009

---

---

---

Part Two: Dear Anna,

I told dad to answer his email I hope he did. He has a new kid he's tutoring and has had to teach himself algebra all over again. I have been thinking about your request for food stories and remembered the one my mother always told about how she outwitted me.

I would never eat cream cheese because I didn't like the name. So she tricked me into eating a cheesecake she used to make by telling me the filling was made of vanilla pudding. I remember the time when you were 3 or 4 when we had to remove you screaming and hitting from Shop and Save because we wouldn't buy you Captain Crunch.Your grandparents had no doubt been feeding it to you by the boxful.

My mother was famous for being a good cook and took a lot of pride in it, but she was equally as interested in the impression she made and how things looked, as she was in what tasted good. The thought of whether it was good for you really wasn't a concern in those days. We believed in wonder bread.

It was my father who actually taught me about good food even though I never saw him cook anything. When I was little the breadman and the milkman would come to the back door every week with a delivery. We bought something called bond bread and the delivery man was a chubby guy with curly black hair who always had a kind word for me. I loved that bread for years, probably because of the delivery man.

I remember my father, when I was a teenager, taking a slice of it and rolling it in his palms until it turned back into a ball of dough, (rather quickly actually). He had to do it over and over on several occasions until I saw the light. That's when I started to eat Pepperidge Farm or Arnold, or good bread from bakeries. He did the same to break me of the habit of watching soap operas after school as my friends did in Jr. High. He would sit and watch it with me and make such wicked fun of it that I couldn't continue doing it.

He taught me about good cheese too and frequently brought good ones home from his travels. He was a traveling salesman. Gouda or gruyere or emmanthatler. And he taught me how much better loose tea brewed was than teabags. I think he learned a lot of this on his travels to Canada. So it's funny while my mother was the famous cook, he was really the gourmet.

Anyway, all this rumination, forgive the pun, made me realize how much food and lies are intertwined. Our parents may be lying to us about what is good or bad for us, though they may mean well. The Tv and ads are always lying to us about what we should eat and why, and worse we are always lying to ourselves about why we should or shouldn't be eating or drinking something. Where does this all start?

I remember when you and Hugh were little and I was just starting being a doctor, reading a study done with toddlers, kids who were too young to have developed too many food prejudices yet. The researchers put out all types of food and let the little ones play and graze all day. They found that the toddlers actually ate a balanced diet when allowed to choose for themselves what and when they wanted to eat with out any prompting.

So how do we fall from grace to greed and compulsion and obsession, to equating everything we put in our mouths with some sort of salvation or damnation? It's too easy to blame our capitalist society for seducing our tastes. You figure it out. You write a book called "Food, Lies and Desire". You'll make a million and support me in my dotage.

Love,
Mom

(for part one please consult the winter Diner Journal)

---

---

---

Transmission from our friends The Greenhorns

Sharp hooves, and a fierce nibbling habit make sheep herds 'high impact' users of grazing territory. For this reason, land managers of the U.S. Grazing Service in 1939 sought to limit soil degradation by charting the capacity of the region to sustain the sheep. The dotted sheep corridors are mountain-passes that are accessible to watering holes and train tracks.

Data-intensive management of our agricultural soils, precious aquifers and urban foodsheds remains critically relevant today. Now, more than ever we have the digital tools to carefully inventory our natural resources. Google Earth, satellite technology, and multi-layered mapping software can serve our need for 'best use' of this American land. It is the job of our government, the USDA, to steward our land and carefully assess its productive capacity and conservation value for the benefit of present and future Americans. Land-use planning, food-security planning, water-shed planning--such foresight could provide greenspace corridors, organic farming zones, gmo-free areas, and targeted areas of intensive food production nearby large cities.

The government already tinkers quite significantly with American agriculture- incentivizing overproduction of corn and subsidized commodities, casting a blind eye to pollution, run-off and erosive technologies. Our hope for change revolves around the needs of farmers and the people they feed. The sustainable foodsystem our nation requires will speedily arise from a thoughtful federal land-use policy based on sane expectations of the land. The data-based, land-based, future-based expectations will yield a landscape of lasting fertility and flourishing rural economies peopled by farmers, entrepreneurs, families and organic delight.

Yes! We can serve our country healthy food!

The original of this map resides in the collections at the Prelinger LIbrary in San Francisco, California. The Library is appropriation-friendly and open to the public, a treasure trove archive. Severine and The Greenhorns are grateful to the Prelingers for their fierce commitment to rare agricultural texts, images and ephemera.


Young farmers: join the mapping project online. WWW.SERVEYOURCOUNTRYFOOD.NET

---

---

---

Idiom of the Week: Until the Cows Come Home

I am becoming very concerned for our bovine friends. This cow council may be considering the current recession, how it effects them and the shear lunacy of the subject of an article in the New York Times this past week:

"The government purchases come after what the department calls a "euphoric period of record prices and booming exports" for the American dairy industry. Since 2003, dairy exports have increased from $1 billion a year to about $4 billion this year, with exports of powdered milk increasing sixfold during that period. Milk powder is an attractive product to export because it does not require refrigeration, has a long shelf life and can be used to make numerous beverages and foods.

Much of the increase was caused by increased demand in developing countries, where a growing middle class replaced starch in their diets with protein sources like meat and dairy products. Some Asian countries had little history of eating dairy products but were introduced to milk and mild cheeses by government nutrition programs or by restaurant chains like McDonald's and Pizza Hut."

The mere brute pleasure of reading - the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing. ~Lord Chesterfield

---

---

---

If the person you are talking to doesn't appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear.

In all fairness I find this image of Tom Valsick endearing and I think we all might be better off if we walked in the shoes of Pooh once in while (excuse any crude puns that might come to mind) longing only for honey and muttering such knowings as the title of this post or "Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known."

HOWEVER, we don't live in the forest, our best friend is not a jolly tiger and piglet most likely is living in an industrial slum somewhere in the center of this American land. According to the Organic Consumers Association Valsick's business as usual positions have included the following:



-Vilsack has been a strong supporter of genetically engineered crops,
including bio-pharmaceutical corn.

-The biggest biotechnology industry group, the Biotechnology Industry
Organization, named Vilsack Governor of the Year. He was also the founder
and former chair of the Governor's Biotechnology Partnership.

-When Vilsack created the Iowa Values Fund, his first poster child of
economic development potential was Trans Ova and their pursuit of cloning
dairy cows.

-The undemocratic and highly unpopular 2005 seed pre-emption bill was
Vilsack's brainchild. The law strips local government¹s right to regulate
Genetically Engineered seed.

-Vilsack is an ardent supporter of corn and soy-based biofuels, which use as
much or more fossil energy to produce them as they generate, while driving
up world food prices and literally starving the poor.

No food on the menu there... and certainly no honey. Despite a massive public outcry, including over 20,000 emails from the Organic Consumers Association, President-Elect Obama has chosen former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack to be the next Secretary of Agriculture.

While Vilsack has promoted respectable policies with respect to restraining livestock monopolies, his overall record is one of aiding and abetting Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) or factory farms and promoting genetically engineered crops and animal cloning. Equally troubling is Vilsack's support for unsustainable industrial ethanol production, which has already caused global corn and grain prices to skyrocket, literally taking food off the table for a billion people in the developing world.

The Organic Consumers Association is calling on organic consumers and all concerned citizens to join our call to action and block Vilsack's confirmation as the next Secretary of Agriculture. Please help them reach their goal of 100,000 petition signatures against Vilsack' nomination. Sign today!

Your email will be sent to your Senators and the President-Elect's office.

---

---

---

Caroline Fidanza in the Study with the Knife

Have you seen this woman? Rumor has it you may be able to catch her Tuesday, January 14th in Manhattan. At 6:30 in the study of the mysterious Astor Center Caroline Fidanza will be joined by Greenmarket farmers Dan Gibson, of Grazin' Angus Acres in Ghent, NY, and Mike Yezzi, of Flying Pigs Farm in Shushan, NY, to learn about the animals they raise, their production practices, and the health and environmental reasons to eat sustainably and humanely raised pork and beef. Caroline will explain the culinary advantages of pastured meats and provide some tasty samples to make the point. Good for you, good for the planet? Sounds suspicious no? Investigate with us and Slow U for forty-five dollars. Tickets available at the Astor Center or online. See you Tuesday. Terms and conditions will not vary. Please leave all candlesticks and ropes at home.

---

---

---

---

---

---

Be the Cool Kid at School

Give the gift that keeps on giving... for a year. We are offering two gift sets:

The Diner Collector's Set:
includes 4 back issues + a one year subscription for $65

And the ULTIMATE (not immaculate) Collection:
includes all 9 issues + a one year subscription for $100

Keep your loved ones in moonshine, constant bliss, ribollita and poetry for the year to come. Don't know what those things are? Start reading! To place an order please email anna@marlowandsons.com, call Hilary at 718-384-1441 or come by the shop.

---

---

---

There is No Snow in a Snow Cone

The snow this morning looked edible. At first the flakes were oyster sized and sparse, then curtain-like falling diagonal across the sky, and now soft and but present in the air. It reminded me there is no snow in snow cones. But wouldn't it be rad if there was? I've been thinking about magical thinking and the media and food. From the snake oil of the early 1900s (which was in truth mineral oil and turpentine) to rumors of genetically modified headless chickens raised for KFC the food industry has proven to be a furtile bed for disinformation.

I saw Milk the movie last night which was great and I highly recommend. And at the end when summarizing Dan White's trial for the execution of Harvey Milk and George Mescone the film stated that White was innocent by way of insanity, insanity that was CAUSED by eating too much junk food. This is quite different then what actually happened. White's junk food (twinkies were never mentioned in the court room) addiction was actually used in his defense, as mentioned in an earlier post, but as a symptom of his depression. The term "The Twinkie Defense" now refers to a defense that some unusual biological component factored into the causes or motives of an alleged crime. I ate twinkies, they made me crazy, I killed. I blame Hostess.

Another misnomer I keep bumping into is the Einstein bee quote, "If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live." Believe me I wanted this to be accurate. But it's not. It's poetic, reverent, dire and maybe true but was never uttered by our dear white haired genius. He did however speak a few wisdoms:

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."

One wonders if this was before or after the Manhattan Project. And:

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."

Sounds like snow to me. Save the bees in NYC. Go outside and make your own snow cone... Maybe a bitters snow cone? Also fortune cookies come from California and not China.

Portrait by Bella Foster

---

---

---

Often This Time of Year

I feel like these goats! I also have a fear of umbrellas. Thank you Scarlett. This one goes out to Sasha Davies.

---

---

---

It May Not Be Made of Bay Leaves but...

it sure is pretty. On Saturday December 13th, Blooming Hill Farm will be selling their wild, local, organic, seasonal, beautiful, handmade, holiday wreaths and decor in the parking lot across from Diner on Berry Street.

As Guy says "it's a lot of work to drag all that stuff out of the woods." Not to mention making it into something beautiful.

When:
Saturday, 13th of December
11 am until dark

Where:
The corner of Broadway and Berry.

Who:
Blooming Hill Farm

Why:
Beauty and Cheer

---

---

---

Milk and ... Twinkies?

Yesterday was World Aids Day. I wish I had posted this in a more timely fashion. I'm also not quite sure this is going to come together the way I want it to so please excuse the fractal nature of this post.

On Thanksgiving, a day of mythology itself, I awoke and began the tradition of making not-so-great mushrooms stuffed with Polly o mozzarella and Ritz crackers while listening to Michael Pollan speak rather calmly about the country petitioning him to the Office of Secratary of Agriculture. Alive with my contradictions I chopped, I mixed, I stuffed. I can hardly focus in silence needing some other thing to nudge my brain into the desired direction. The Pollan rerun on NPR ended and Brian Lehrer turned his voice to something far less engaging so I turned the radio off. I thought a bit about cheap food as I crushed and sprinkled the Ritz over my cheese capped friends before the quiet in the empty apartment froze my knife mid celery like a sword in the stone.

Shuffling through Netflix discs I found the only one I hadn't watched yet was called "The Times of Harvey Milk." A gay documentary. It seems I had a moment when first learning to "flix" where I didn't quite know how to navigate their tricky suggestion boxes and ordered up two weeks worth of gay docu-dramas including such classics as Lesbians of Beunos Aires and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

So on goes Harvey Milk. I had seen his name in the New York Times entertainment section and also new about the school in Manhattan named after him but aside from that I didn't know much. The opening scene is the press conference in which they announce his death and someone says "Jesus Christ" they way people do only when they experience great pain and I trade cooking for concentration. An hour later I'm sitting on the couch still clutching the spatula and, well, tearing up.

The documentary is great because Harvey Milk was great. Enigmatic and whip smart the man who came out at forty to become the first openly gay elected official encouraged every gay person to come out so as to ease the suffering of living a life in fear.

Harvey Milk and Mayor George Mescone were shot in the City Town Hall of San Francisco by Dan White on November 27, 1978. In his 11 months as City Supervisor Milk passed the first gay rights ordinance in San Francisco and among many other things made sure teachers couldn't get fired for being gay.

Dan White was Milk's conservative contemporary on the board of city supervisors. He was caught and charged with murder but got off with voluntary manslaughter and was released in five years. His defense? Depression. His proof? He ate lots of Twinkies.

There is nothing trivial in this story but there is tragic comedy. Milk was a great man and leader. Cheap food played a role in his killers defense. It seems like a stretch but it is history. But then it seems like a stretch that anyone would eat A foamy, fuzzy, sickly sweet Hostess. David White killed himself a few years after being released from prison.

In one of the most heartbreaking moments in the film is a blurry eyed friend speaking of Harvey Milk asking all gay people to come out. He ends by looking into the camera and saying in a way that makes you feel as though he is standing in front of you, "Imagine how many more people would have lived through AIDS if Harvey Milk was still alive."

---

---

---

---

---

---

Dear Environmental Protection Agency

It does seem odd that this is just coming up now. Also I thought a picture of smokestacks might be too depressing on this our holiday week so I picked snowflakes again. Just a little reminder of what we will be missing if we cook our planet. Tell EPA to protect our health and climate:

After more than a year of delay, the Environmental Protection Agency is now requesting public comments on whether carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping pollutants -- the primary causes of the climate crisis -- are endangering our health and our climate. Friday is the last day to voice your opinion.

Send a message about how crucial it is to reduce harmful carbon dioxide pollution and stop global warming.

Join the 72,393 people who have sent a message!

---

---

---

Quota

In searching for the soul and romance of Thanksgiving today I found that mostly our thoughts on the day are unremarkable. Perhaps this is rooted in it being a celebration of murder and plague. Or because we're too busy eating to be thoughtful. But I dug up a few:

The delusional:

There is one day that is ours. Thanksgiving Day is the one day that is purely American.
O. Henry

The rhetorical (or the one that sounds like the Journal wrote it):

Thanksgiving, after all, is a word of action.
W.J. Cameron

The one about the bee:

For flowers that bloom about our feet;
For tender grass, so fresh, so sweet;
For song of bird, and hum of bee;
For all things fair we hear or see,
Father in heaven, we thank Thee!
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The idiotic:

He who thanks but with the lips
Thanks but in part;
The full, the true Thanksgiving
Comes from the heart.
J.A. Shedd

The inspiring:

As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy

And The Original:

Thanksgiving food is soulless.
Caroline Fidanza

---

---

---

Signed the Petition Yet?

Please petition online Pollan's appointment to the Office of Secretary of Agriculture.

---

---

---

Inspired By the Rejected European Edibles

Ugly Vegetables by Bella Foster

---

---

---

Action of the Week: Sun Food

"Our agenda puts the interests of America's farmers, families and communities ahead of the fast-food industry's. For that industry and its apologists to imply that it is somehow more "populist" or egalitarian to hand our food dollars to Burger King or General Mills than to support a struggling local farmer is absurd. Yes, sun food costs more, but the reasons why it does only undercut the charge of elitism: cheap food is only cheap because of government handouts and regulatory indulgence (both of which we will end), not to mention the exploitation of workers, animals and the environment on which its putative "economies" depend. Cheap food is food dishonestly priced — it is in fact unconscionably expensive.

Your sun-food agenda promises to win support across the aisle. It builds on America's agrarian past, but turns it toward a more sustainable, sophisticated future. It honors the work of American farmers and enlists them in three of the 21st century's most urgent errands: to move into the post-oil era, to improve the health of the American people and to mitigate climate change. Indeed, it enlists all of us in this great cause by turning food consumers into part-time producers, reconnecting the American people with the American land and demonstrating that we need not choose between the welfare of our families and the health of the environment — that eating less oil and more sunlight will redound to the benefit of both." -Michael Pollan

Please petition online Pollan's appointment to the Office of Secretary of Agriculture.

---

---

---

Words of the Week

"This marks a new dawn for the curvy cucumber and the knobbly carrot!" said Mariann Fischer Boel, European commissioner for agriculture. This in response to the European Union lifting it's ban on twenty-six types of edibles born on the farm ugly or sadly misshapen the New York Times reports. However if you are an apple, peach, pair or strawberry watch out. If you don't look your best you will be "allowed onto the market provided they are marked as being substandard or intended for cooking or processing." Not for acting in movies, modeling or running for office.

---

---

---

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Or rather a jalapeno plant. Last week a customer espoused on the ethical paradox we provide each purchaser of an iced beverage. The smoke screen that is the corn cup. It's not plastic! You can COMPOST it! All very well and good. But it does support commodity corn farming.. Never mind how few people probably actually carry around their iced coffee cup until they get home and start a compost pile in the 10 foot by 10 foot apartment. This is one of those environmental issues that I have been contemplating for a while and never come up on top of. Apparently I'm not the only one. Afore mentioned customer voiced these concerns and then upon feeling as though he or she may have over stepped a boundary (or something of that sort, I wasn't there so I can only speculate) returned with a gift. A jalapeno plant in a corn cup. And now the coffee counter has a new peppery friend. It reminded me of the open of the book by Betty Smith this post is titled after:

Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York. Especially in the summer of 1912. Somber, as a word, was better. But it did not apply to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Prairie was lovely and Shenandoah had a beautiful sound, but you couldn't fit those words into Brooklyn. Serene was the only word for it; especially on a Saturday afternoon in summer.

Granted it is Fall in Brooklyn and we are a borough full of hope but I couldn't help taking this moment to remember our roots.

---

---

---

Change

is the first word I read every morning when I wake up and look out the window at Nassau Avenue. And today is the day it is all going to happen. VOTE!

---

---

---

Needle and Loom

This clipping is from 1870. I love this language: Nothing appears to be neglected by the management that would be at all likely to add to the success of the of the undertaking. Francis, our favorite coffee in the morning regular, brought this to our attention. She pointed out we have a wealth of producers and products in our fair county and we should have a Fair. I totally agree. Let's do it again! Hi Charlotte! (That's Fancis' dog.)

---

---

---

Diner Goes to the Farm

---

---

---

And Drinks Beer and Makes Pizza and Plants Kale

Happy Birthday Cheffie!
Photos by Jake O'Francis.

---

---

---

Banished

Food Words that Cheffy Hates:
Veggie
Mache
Sous vide
Molecular gastronomy
Foodie
Toothsome

Ones that I hate:
Supple
Shmear
Kombucha

Tom:
Crunchy
Piquant: which means tasteful but really as Tom points out has no meaning or purpose.

Kirsten:
Mouth Feel

My New Favorite Word:
Arrabbiata: literally "angry" in Italian; in this case referring to a spicy tomato sauce.

---

---

---

"The whole point of the armed forces is to hurt the environment."

The two sides agreed that sonar can harm marine mammals, but they disagreed about how much. Mr. Kendall said sonar produces noise as loud as 2,000 jet engines and that some whales die or become stranded in their frantic efforts to avoid it.

Gregory G. Garre, the United States solicitor general, said the impact on the animals was minor and passing. "They hear the sound, and they go in the opposite direction," Mr. Garre said. "It can also mean that they could have some temporary effect on their feeding or breeding patterns." -New York Times

---

---

---

Words of the Week

"Life itself is the proper binge."
-Julia Child

---

---

---

Funds for Farmers AND Fun for Us

This event, thrown by Badass Brooklyn Based, I as like to call them, is a fund raiser for The New Farmer Development Project. It is really exciting that this program exists and has since 2000. Here is some info from their website:

The New Farmer Development Project (NFDP) identifies, educates, and supports immigrants with agricultural experience by helping them become local farmers and establish small farms in the region.

By training the next generation of regional farmers, the NFDP helps preserve local farmland and rural farm communities, strengthen farmers markets and regional food security, and expand public access to high-quality, locally-grown farm products.

The NFDP was created in 2000 as a partnership between Greenmarket and Cornell Cooperative Extension's NYC Program. The project is based in New York City and supports new farmers witin the city, New York's Hudson Valley & Catskill Regions, New Jersey and northeastern Pennsylvania.

Project Facts and Milestones:

-More than 130 project members have graduated from the NFDP's comprehensive agricultural training course, La Nueva Siembra.
-16 individuals and their families have started their own farming businesses with the support of the NFDP. These farmers come from countries such as Columbia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador and Mexico.
-These new farmers sell produce at more than 40 farmers markets throughout the year. Many of these markets are located in immigrant neighborhoods where NFDP farmers sell vegetables, flowers, traditional ethnic produce, eggs from pastured chickens, and honey to members of their community.
-The NFDP has further developed its model through partnership with the National Immigrant Farming Initiative and the Northeast Network of Immigrant Farming Projects. See our Project Partners for more information.

---

---

---

---

---

---

Disallusion and Illusion in Louisiana

I'll be on that hill with everything I got,
Lives on the line where dreams are found and lost,
I'll be there on time and I'll pay the cost,
For wanting things that can only be found
In the darkness on the edge of town.
-Bruce Springsteen

Hurricanes don't cause any damage. They don't leave a trail of rubble. Once the storm clears, the inconvenience clears.

What I've learned from growing up in the North East is: If stuck in a torrential downpour, just pull over and wait a few minutes. If snowed in, a plow will be there in a few hours. If you are expecting high winds, bring your potted plants indoors and tie down your lawn furniture. In case of a flood, put everything in your basement up on boards just a few inches off of the ground.

Leaving a day late on our road trip from Kips Bay Naval Base in southern Georgia to Coronado Base in San Diego to avoid the touch down of hurricane Gustav was a bright idea. Our brightness avoided us the hazard of driving through one hundred and some mile per hour winds and blinding rain. Since we were set on driving through the country on Route 10, the quickest way from point A to B, leaving the day after the storm would put us only slightly out of form from initial itinerary.

We had lunch in Pensacola, Florida with one of Tom's old Navy buddies before we headed off to Louisiana. They chatted about their time in service, about mandatory tear gas sessions, guns, wars. When they refer to people outside of their club, they're referred to as civilians. This civilian was trying as hard as he could to read the captions on the muted tv hanging on the TGIFridays' wall—Ellen Degeneres interviewing John McCain.

Route 10 from the east end of Florida to the east end of Louisiana is all the same. Each gas station we stopped at had a McDonald's, a convenience store and a Waffle House. Once you get South of DC on I-95 the Waffle houses start popping up like acne on a twelve year old. From DC to Florida and Florida to California—it's all about Waffle House. If McDonald's is George W. then Waffle House is Dick Cheney. A silent partner that affects, or infects, you all the same.

At the fork between Route 10 and12 there is a police barricade patrolling who is allowed to enter New Orleans on Route 10 and who is turned away or around on 12. Even though Tom showed his military ID and had his uniform hanging in the back seat, we were turned away. We were both civilians here.

The sea of civilian cars, trucks and big rigs behind us either hopped right on 12, turned around or pulled into the gas station Waffle House right next to the road. We needed gas. The Waffle house was so packed the windows were fogged and each pump at the station had a ten car pile up. Annoyed, we decide to get gas down the road.

Driving down the highway we see people towing their cars with their Winnebago's. Speed limit and exit sign polls were bent to ninety-degree angles. Highway billboards ripped in half, leaving pieces of ads for cigarettes or used car dealerships hanging limp fifty feet off the ground. We were driving through the ass end of some scattered thunderstorms left by the mother huricane. Many of the vehicles passing us had gas cans tied to their roofs, tied to their bumpers, in their back seats.

Whenever you go on a cross-country road trip and you mention to people that you are going to drive through the desert, you will hear a few times that you should bring extra gas, that there is nothing in the desert. You could get stuck, you could boil and dehydrate and die. The people that tell you this watch too many movies. This is my second trip though the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico I will testify that this is false. There are just as many truck stop restroom hells in the desert as anywhere else on these highways. A perk about these desert gas stations though is that they all carry cheap vulgar looking knives, blackjacks and brass knuckles. The ironic thing though is that we were not in the desert, we were on Route 12 in Louisiana and just passed the city of New Orleans and approaching upon the State Capital, Baton Rouge

Rain clears as it's known to do and we pull off the highway toward a lit station. All the pumps have cars waiting at them but no one is pumping gas. People are inserting there credit cards, people are walking through the convenience store door cash in hand, but no one is filling up. The neighborhood had lost power and the emergency generator from the gas station was working but the pumps were down. We get turn back to the highway.

The gas gage of Tom's car was approaching E. We stop at two, three more stations along the highway. Some had the same problem with the pumps, some had no power at all, some where just completely out of gas. All if them had Waffle Houses with working power, all of them full of people, all of the windows fogged. Refugee housing. Along the highway everything looks like a marsh. Green trees, green grass and endless puddles. We need about two hundred miles to get to Texas. We need a tank of gas.

It's about 6 p.m. and we are about a fifteen minute ride from Baton Rouge. We pull into a small shopping center with a lit gas station. The cop in the station is forcing everyone away. We tell him our situation, tell him we are not from around here, that Tom's in the Navy and we need to get out of here. He tells us the station opens back up at 6 a.m. and to leave.

The lights in parking lots, the ones way up high on poles that look too thin to hold them up, when they are smashed on the ground in front of you, they don't look like lights anymore. More like some giant prop from a seventies film about outer space. And the signs that are way up there, that pollute every suburb, that let you know from ten miles away you are approaching a drug store—their about the size of a disco floor that doesn't light up anymore.

The closer things are to you, the more foreign they become.

We decide we are going to sleep in this parking lot. But then we pull back out about ten minutes later and hope the car can take us a little further. We end up is on the other side of Baton Rouge on some industrial highway. All the street lights where black and there was a hazy rust colored glow in the distance from a refinery or power plant. Another gas station that was twisted to a knot. A block away there was another that looked in tact besides the giant Chevron sign laid out in pieces. The third station we get to, only another block away, was black and boarded up but looked in working condition.

Eight o'clock curfew was beginning being enforced and we decided to wait here until morning, hoping this station like the other would open at six a.m. We park next to the automated car wash. We sit silent. Annoyed and worried. The rain had stopped completely but the air still held water to your body. I had never felt humidity like this. The car was quickly turning into a sauna and we couldn't roll the windows down due to the fist-sized mosquitoes sitting on the windshield waiting to drain us.

Stirred crazy we finally can't take it and walk over to the station and stand at a cautioned distance. It felt like the slightest gust of wind would bury us in sheet metal and primary colored logos. We walk back to the second station we passed and look around a bit and find what you'd expect—emptyness. We get back to the car and Tom calls his wife and I call my girlfriend. It felt too unreal to not tell someone about this who was outside the situation. It helped to know the world wasn't ending back in New York—just here. Sleep, if you could call it that, come delicutely and painfully.

About an hour later two cops swarm in on us boxing us in, flashing their lights right into our truck. We squint and squirm and rub our eyes. Tom gets out of the car and explains why we are here. He sees Toms camouflage hanging in the back seat and they become really friendly. The one cop tells him that the station right next to us was just looted; someone drove their car right through it and stole whatever the little service shop had to offer. The cops said to keep a look out, that they would check in on us and seemed a little relieved that they had a Navy kid and his buddy camping out in the station.

Wide-awake again we just want to be on the road going 100 miles per hour out of here. We pace a bit. Behind the station and the industrial highway is what looks like a little community of mobile homes and behind some shrubs something making the sound of a putting lawn mower is running consistently. We peek through the brush and see that one home has power, it's the only one with lights on and the putting is coming from a generator. We assume it must be running off of gas. With one can of gas we could get a little further, maybe get to a working station.

I now completely realize why people commit petty crime in these situations. We want this houses gas and we are desperate for it. What also hits the both of us is how easily people can get shot in these situations. Our temptation subsides a bit.

We walk back through the lot and inspect an abandoned car and get the idea to try cipher its gas. At the car wash we are tugging at any tubing we see, trying to rip it of the wall or out of some soap filled cylinder. Nothing will budge. I take out my pocketknife and start sawing through one and realize that all the tubes are lined with wire mesh and I can't get through them. We go back to the abandoned car and open the doors only to discover someone else beat us to the job. The whole car has been picked apart maybe hours before, maybe weeks before.

After another hour of sleep an old pickup truck rips though our lot and parks sharply in one of the pitch black driveways of one of the mobile homes near us. We run over as quickly as we can shouting and waving a small flashlight and see a man disappear curtly into blackness. Maybe this guy had some gas we could buy.

Standing in the loose stones to the houses driveway there was no response. We kept shouting, Tom walks a little closer and waves the flashlight into the windows. Silent slate darkness. Tom swears he can smell a nasty trail of alcohol and we walk back to out car—scared.

Inside I can hear myself swallow. We are both paranoid and breath shallow but heavy. We don't say much and I open my knife and lay back in the dark and my eyes won't close. Tom grabs a claw hammer from the back seat and puts it on his lap.

We last a half an hour and decide to try and get back to the shopping center we were at before. The one where the cop said would defiantly be open at 6 am. Magically we make it. We fall asleep. We are only woken up by one cop and one creepy old mad filling his tires up at 3 am with the air hose next to us. We wake up at about 5:15 eager and get out of the car, open the hatch to the back of the truck, change our sweaty clothes and brush our teeth using a bottle of water. Then the first car pulls in.

A middle age man pulls in. "Cops said six," we tell him and he pulls into a pump. About five minutes later a lady and her family pull up in one of those giant SUVs. She gets out and asks the middle aged man if this station is going to open, "Those guys over there said six," as he points to us.

We are fire starters. The rumor makers. Trendsetters.

Six fifteen a.m. roles around and the gas station is still closed but now there are about twenty cars lined up. People from the highway could see people were waiting at the pumps below and could only assume they were getting gas or were about to.

At about 7:30 the station is still closed. Tom and the giant SUV women decide to both call the emergency 1-800 number that is on the pumps. They both get through to someone who doesn't even know where Louisiana is. I take a walk around the shopping center. There are easily about thirty cars waiting now. Their forming lines down the road to the station and down the shopping center parking lot. On my walk I came across a closed super market that said it would open at 9 a.m and a vending machine. I buy two Cokes and go back to the car.

By the time I get back the SUV women, who is a big as her oversized truck, has made two new female friends. They formed some sort of union and became the dictators of the station. If cars would pull in they were quick to inform where the back of each line was and that we all had to wait our turns. One woman would call the 1-800 hundred number every ten minutes or so and freak on whatever operator picked up telling them that "this station was going to open at six and there are a million people here and no one has come yet!" Oddly no police were in sight, and these three never made me wish for a cop so badly. At least cops keep their mouths shut when they abuse their power, when they tell you where to line up.

At nine I walk back to the grocery store and it's an apocalyptic zoo. Nothing is in order and nobody there is orderly. It's everyone for his or her self. I grab two boxes of granola bars, some cans of V8, and a bottle of Jack Daniels, wait in an angry line with nice people and get the fuck out of there.

By eleven the women calling the 800 number was told someone would be there within the hour. By twelve p.m. it was hot as hell. By one there were about one-hundered cars waiting. By two that person showed up with her kids, went into the service shop, came back out and said it would take at least an hour to get the pumps reset. We didn't care at this point about waiting another hour. We had waited so long and now we were just relieved there would be relief.

Everyone in the station was hot. Looked beaten up and helpless. People all just sitting on their hoods or on the curbs of the lot, staring in thought. These people had done this before, and they'd probably have to do it again tomorrow. We were just waiting for some gas, the people we were surrounded by, they were waiting for their lives to return to them. I felt like a fraud. Like a living being in the midst of purgatory.

At four p.m. the women came out and said the pumps would not reset. No one was angry or sad instead our shoulders and necks fell loose and we just stared at our feet. Defeated, ordinary, civilians. Her children came out of the shop and put plastic bags over the hoses. The police showed up and made us all leave the station. We tell the cops our situation. We tell them Tom's in the Navy. They tell us to drive up "this road here and make a left on Airport Road in four blocks." Tom's car puttering, we drive down the street. There was no left in four blocks, just rights and there was no Airport Road. Ordinary civillians defeated.

And so we wandered. We are rooming creatures. Left and right and left and right and right. The cars heaving engine struggled and it's heavy metal began to feel as taut and weak as bone. Left and left and left and right. No more corners just turns. Right and right. But then the buzz of The Light and the tick, tick, tick of machines at work. Heaven. People filling their tanks.

We pull into the station and up to one of the tenants, "where is the end of the line?" He laughs at us. "Well, I can't see the end of it, but it's somewhere down that way." We drive down along it, 60-70 cars maybe. The break we got though, the only break the whole time, was that the end of the line was slightly up hill, so we were able to idle in a blissful humid decent, for two more hours, on down to a gas pump.

By Adam Ward

---

---

---

What Does It All Mean: Homogeny on the Homefront

Last week at Diner a poll was handed out. It asked you to list in order of importance when making food choices organic, cost, local, employee sustainability, and taste. Pictured are the results. Problems with this social experiment lie in the phrasing of the question or rather that there was none just a piece of paper with words and boxes. Also the way we were meant to score them was unclear. Is five the most important or is one? Are we rating as a consumer or an employee of this restaurant? Mixed emotions aside what does it mean when taste comes before humanity and organic has completely lost all its meaning? Or imagine the great power of taste... Or wonder how differently the data might be if you asked people who work the kitchens at New York City Public Schools. Or even Giando's On the Water... What becomes obvious is that these five seemingly simple concepts have an avalanche of offerings and implications.

Here We Are:
1. Taste
2. Locally Produced
3. Employee Sustainability
4. Organic
5. Cost

---

---

---

Harvest Time: Words for the Week

As can be seen, all this chopping and pounding has much to do with health. -Patience Gray

---

---

---

As It Were

I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship, but [...] I am very closely joined and, as it were, intermingled with it. - Descartes

Some writers write only about love. Some only about boredom, others failure or food. It seemed to me that David Foster Wallace wrote mostly of suffering. This suffering took many shapes, the critique of irony, of media, of gastronomy. I remember the first time I ever read anything Wallace penned I was wandering around the creaky old house in Maine trying to abate my insomnia with Budweiser and crackers. My father, an unquenchable reader and closet insomniac, plopped down the New York Times magazine.

"This guy makes tennis interesting," he uttered with rueful enthusiasm. "Read it."

"Carl? Carl!" My mother's scratchy roll call. "Are you coming to bed. Carl!"

And with a sigh my father vanished leaving me alone with tennis and shrill buzz of Maine's pastoral silence.

Much of Wallace's writing is like his life. You get the sense you're waiting for the next foot to fall. Like with every experience we try to have in life, reading one of his articles is in the beginning simple or rather straight shooting. I believe this was a technique he employed to trick a reader into trusting him enough to lead her from goofy male machoism into a maybe bleak treatise on the human condition. An article is never just about tennis, lobsters. And an article is never just about human suffering. Here is an excerpt from an article published in 2006 on Roger Federer:

"Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

The human beauty we're talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings' reconciliation with the fact of having a body.(1)

(1)There's a great deal that's bad about having a body. If this is not so obviously true that no one needs examples, we can just quickly mention pain, sores, odors, nausea, aging, gravity, sepsis, clumsiness, illness, limits — every last schism between our physical wills and our actual capacities. Can anyone doubt we need help being reconciled? Crave it? It's your body that dies, after all."

Here Wallace volleys the ball, not out of the park but out into the deep dark cosmos, kissing us all goodbye with a perfect spin into that black starless abyss.

Exhibited also in this passage is another favorite technique, the footnote. Wallace often used the footnote to break code with the editor, writer, reader trifecta. Here, in his notes, he tells the story he wants to tell, which may or may not break form with what is best for the article itself. Here he offers a compromise. Here Ruth Reichl is an article on the Maine Lobster Fest, and here in the footnotes is the more dynamic story I would tell were I not writing for you. And inevitably the footnotes are always published because they are the tiny signifiers that we can all relate to; they are not obscure reference points. I find them the most pensive and alive parts of his writing. The notes also create a call and response. They are never clever but simply the fractal sputterings of a brilliant mind. In reading them you start to get a glimpse of how David Foster Wallace's brain works. Or worked, as it were.

There is always anger around suicide. But I for one have never understood it. Wallace, it seems, struggled with depression for over twenty years and I am thankful that he survived that long. My mother explained to me once that she thought some people aren't (at least this time around) made to handle the weight the world wants us to. Some people were hunters, some gather. Some survive and some do not. Some people have stars in their pockets and some carry mountains.

When reading his articles earlier in my life I felt the profound sense that Wallace was speaking to or into the vacuum that is American madness.(1) It seems however he was faced with something much more harrowing, his own.

While Considering the Lobster for Gourmet Wallace forces you to ask does the lobster not suffer only because it cannot say it suffers. It struggles and claws and hangs on to its life as we would. We would not boil alive a cow, or a moose or a dear. The brilliance of this article is he forces you the reader to consider the hand you play in creating suffering, and your own suffering. In a chilling moment close to the end of the article Wallace contemplates the possibility that lobsters experience pain the way patients who experienced frontal lobotomies do.

"These patients evidently do feel physical pain, neurologically speaking, but don't dislike it; it's more that they feel it but don't feel anything about it- the point being that the pain is not distressing or something they want to get away from."

Wallace was seeking electo-convulsive therapy in the year before he died. There is something wild and American in that. And like the lobster how often is it that we can truly speak or even simply express our suffering. Is it American madness or rather sadness or is it my very own? Are we all somehow implicated when someone so fragile and titanically talented succumbs? And so I can't help but feel that here we are again mourning in the kitchen, trying to reconcile an ever-lonely chicken and the yearning of an egg.


(1) The kind of madness that brings me, via fiber optic cables and the grand delusions of contemporary democracy, a gun toting, bikini wearing Sarah Palin into my everyday consciousness. The kind of madness in which a woman in Alaska is forced to pay for a rape kit when she goes to the hospital after surviving the most violent and ugly of acts. The madness of hurricanes and bankruptcy.

Illustration by Harry Aung

---

---

---

Ode Tomato

For me, the last days of summer arrive with an onslaught of Striped Germans. These beautiful giants put in a late-season appearance at the end of August and the start of September. Like a strange and wonderful dream, they're not here for long, and when they're gone, it's hard to convince yourself or anyone else that they did once, in fact, exist.

Legend has it that the Striped German originated in, well, Germany. In a vague and misty history, they're said to have ventured across the Atlantic with early Mennonite immigrants to Virginia. Seed catalogues love to report that Striped Germans were "found" in West Virginia in the 19th century.

Despite its peripatetic history, and no doubt due in part to its excessive size, the Striped German exhibits the classic flaw of the heirloom tomato: an inherent dislike of traveling. This flaw, however, is also what makes heirloom varietals key players in our anti-industrial food movement. These colossal fruits are often 1 ½ magnificent pounds. Sometimes bigger. Caution requires that they be held with two hands. If you bring home a Striped German and inadvertently destroy him in the process, the good news is that he can be cooked. With garlic and olive oil he will make a heavenly sauce or a lip-smacking soup.

In the best of all possible worlds, you will carry your Striped German home gently and reverently and no one will bump into you. You will slice him open quickly and smile at the colors within. After you have dusted him with salt and pepper and taken your first juicy bite, you will marvel at the mysterious taste and the great mass of thick, dense tomato flesh.

You may wonder, as I have been, exactly how the tomato, which originated as a small, wild berry in South America, became the beautiful heirlooms grown today. How many people (and how many tomatoes?) did it take to give a tiny berry the hue, girth and meaty demeanor of the mammoth Striped German? How many competing versions of an elusive tomato ideal are at work in creating the Striped German's fragile and elusive perfection?

Striped Germans are perfectly ripe when the tops are a little green, the bottoms are a little red, and the part in between is a lustrous yellow or vibrant orange. Only sometimes are they striped. They have a mellow, seductive taste: fruity, earthy, almost—but not quite—mushroomy. They are not tangy. A Striped German often gives the impression that it has been soaking in a rich and buttery olive oil. The pink and yellow flesh is lusciously marbled. Kind of like a rare steak or a August sunset.

By Maya Joseph

---

---

---

Get Roasted

The Greenhorns is a documentary film that explores the lives of America's young farming community—its spirit, practices, and needs. As the nation experiences a groundswell of interest in sustainable lifestyles, The Greenhorns, both the vision of the film and the group of dedicated young people making it, see the promising beginnings of an agricultural revival. Young farmers' efforts feed us safe food, conserve valuable land, and reconstitute communities split apart by strip malls. It is the filmmakers' hope that by broadcasting the stories and voices of these young farmers, we can inspire another generation of optimistic agrarians.

The Glynwood Center is a working organic farm and conference center set in the middle of 2,000 acres of preserved forest glory. Their work revolves around helping communities preserve land and a strong agricultural economy. The site is stupendously beautiful with goats, chickens, orchards, rare cows and sheep, and an ancient orchard.

Join forces this weekend to raise awareness and money. I am particularly curious about workshops called: DIY Undergarments for obvious reasons and Anarchy Apiaries for more serious reasons! Alas I can not attend but Tom will be up there teaching meat curing! For more information check out the Greenhorn's blog the irresistible fleet of bicycles.

---

---

---

Ordinary Equality

There will never be a new world order until women are a part of it. -Alice Paul

What's the difference between a soccer mom and a pit bull? Lipstick. –Sarah Palin

Oh, the irony and the confusion. Oh, the humanity. Traveling high up above our cavernous country on my way to San Francisco for Slow Food Nation I could help but find myself in the midst of a dense American moment. Storm Gustav was drumming its way toward New Orleans, a city betrayed once three years ago by our howling mother earth and then again by our nations great leaders. People were traveling distances for Slow Food to listen to panels on climate change and human rights. Senator Obama was speaking of promises, promises we make by simply waking up everyday in America. And every tiny screen in that plane shone as he spoke and we stayed silent, listening while the sun slowly fell soft through the clouds and we chased it.

"This country of ours has more wealth than any nation, but that's not what makes us rich. We have the most powerful military on Earth, but that's not what makes us strong. Our universities and our culture are the envy of the world, but that's not what keeps the world coming to our shores.

Instead, it is that American spirit - that American promise - that pushes us forward even when the path is uncertain; that binds us together in spite of our differences; that makes us fix our eye not on what is seen, but what is unseen, that better place around the bend.

That promise is our greatest inheritance. It's a promise I make to my daughters when I tuck them in at night, and a promise that you make to yours - a promise that has led immigrants to cross oceans and pioneers to travel west; a promise that led workers to picket lines, and women to reach for the ballot.

And it is that promise that forty five years ago today, brought Americans from every corner of this land to stand together on a Mall in Washington, before Lincoln's Memorial, and hear a young preacher from Georgia speak of his dream."- Senator Obama

But that's not what keeps the world coming to our shores. I just love that. What keeps me here I had to wonder. I'm still not sure but I think it has to do with idealism and hope. The next morning McCain, who has the momentum of a duck sitting in water, names Sarah Palin his running mate. Sarah Palin the creationist. Sarah Palin the pro- life woman. Sarah Palin the female republican. Sarah Palin the bible thumping, family values preaching mother of a pregnant teen. Sarah Palin the oxy-moron.

Watching Sarah Palin's speech at the RNC this week made me mourn the hard work and pure spirit of the women's suffrage movement. And this bit in particular sent chills down my spine: Al Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America ... he's worried that someone won't read them their rights?

Alice Paul, pictured above on the right, was one of the leaders of the National Women's Party. After an arrest during the first political protest to picket on the white house Paul and many other women were arrested and brutally beaten. Alice Paul enacted a hunger strike, which lead to her torture, guards held her down and tube fed her raw eggs as the story goes. Woodrow Wilson and his cronies tried to persuade a psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane so that she could be permanently institutionalized. The doctor refused. Alice Paul was strong, he said, and brave. That didn't make her crazy.

The doctor admonished the men:'Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity.'

What is truly frightening for me and for all the women who suffered for our equal right to vote and in turn Palin's right to run is Palin might just be the opposite of this paradigm. In the brazen naiveté of Palin's platforms I find a tare in the human contract. If a woman is raped she should have the right to choose. If a woman is pregnant she should have the right to choose. Listening to the simple stupidity of Palin's speech at the Republican National Convention I was reminded by the simple brilliance of Alice Paul's words:

I never doubted that equal rights was the right direction. Most reforms, most problems are complicated. But to me there is nothing complicated about ordinary equality.

---

---

---

A Bit of Obit and a Lot of Lady

I've been reading obituaries and have found their structure unduly formulaic. Life and language is mostly formless so why is it that we force our posthumous celebration of it into tiny plotted out packages stacked together in the columns of the New York Times. Is the most important thing about a life it's obvious plot lines, she had three children, she received a Ph.D. and published a book? In reading about Karen Hess, a food historian who died on May 15th of this year I am compelled by her spirit and peculiar projects.

First and foremost, I have to acknowledge that Hess herself might see this blog post as a disservice considering I never met her myself. Hess was an adamant believer in primary sources. She believed or rather knew that history was made in the moments in between books, in between victories and defeats, in between meals. She also spent a good part of her career updating or interpreting old cookbooks such as "Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery." I admire the intention to not lose antiquated texts but instead to adapt them to us as we adapt to the world around us. So here I wish to celebrate Hess with some of her words in some less stagnant structure. I may have never met Karen Hess but her words provide me a little insight into the beacon that she was. How immediate her message still is. Can most Americans be wrong? Need we say more?

---

---

---

For Girls and, as it turns out, Everyone Else

Stand too close to the counter and you'll miss it. But stand back a bit and brush away the few lingering coffee grinds and there it is, six odd shelves of sugar, colorings and nostalgia. On the top shelf you'll find an assortment of quaint old-fashioned gum. Teaberry, Blackjack, Beachies packaging seems deliberately unchanged since our parent's parents bought them at the Five and Ten cent stores for just as much. Then there are the gummi snacks (burgers, fries, pizza), licorice wheels, Lemon Heads and Red Hots. Below that are Chimes Ginger Chews, in an attractive tin canister, Art Bars chocolate and El Bubble gum cigars in light pink or baby blue. And lest we forget, the selection of British candy bars: the Lion, Crunchie, Yorkie and Curly Whirly.

One may wonder why such a section even exists at Marlow's, a bastion of good eats and healthy ingredients. I wondered the same myself when asked to write a little something about our eclectic assortment of confections. The candy section is the equivalent of a grocery line impulse-buys, it serves as a last minute moneymaker and pacifier for unruly youngsters.

But why do we need a candy section? We certainly could do without the sugar and artificial colorings. And store sales wouldn't be too badly hurt without these last minute purchases. I've given this question a lot of thought and I've realized that aside from a sugar boost and a sweet taste in our mouths, the candy section, whether we realize it or not gives us comfort.

And I don't mean by featuring comfort food, though who can't resist a smile when biting into a Yorkie Bar or chewing on a gummi sea creature. No, the kind of comfort offered by the candy section is in the colors on the box or the name of the candy itself. They remind us of our childhood, a hometown candy shop or an aunt who always had an ample supply of a certain gum or hard candy. It's certainly not the taste of those licorice wheels that keep me coming back for more. It is the fact that they taste like the black jelly beans that I used to find in my Easter Basket as a kid. And I couldn't care less for Swedish Fish, except that their smell reminds me of riding back from Harper's, newsstand and local candy outlet, on my bike, a paper bag full of an allowance-worth of little reds in hand.

For everyone, a candy store or section reminds us where we're from. In America we have Snickers, in England, Cadbury, and so on. You know you're home when you see your country's sugary products on the shelves. Our Italian customers are delighted, even proud to find that we sell Brooklyn Chewing Gum (Italy's version of Trident), and our British patrons can never seem to get over the fact that we sell their favorite chocolate bars from the motherland, sexist as the Yorkie bar may be.

I realize that these products may be sugary, full of preservatives and likely to give you cavities, but it's a satisfying feeling to know that when a customer slaps a pack of Teaberry gum or a Lion Bar on the counter, they're going to go away with more than just a satiated sweet tooth. They're going away with a taste of their past, their identity and their home.

By Lindsay Debach

---

---

---

Words for the Week

Whoever looks at a beehive should actually say with an exalted frame of mind, "Making this detour by way of the beehive, the entire cosmos can find its way into human beings and help to make them sound in mind and body."
-Rudolph Steiner

---

---

---

The Scanner broke and I had to think a lot about commas today...

This is what I learned:

"The en dash is slightly longer than the hyphen but not as long as the em dash. (It is, in fact, the width of a typesetter's letter "N," whereas the em dash is the width of the letter "M"—thus their names.) The en dash means, quite simply, "through." We use it most commonly to indicate inclusive dates and numbers: July 9–August 17; pp. 37–59."

And then I learned that there is no en OR em dash on the contemporary keyboard... only a hyphen. Unless, of course, you use the subtraction key.

---

---

---

Butch

So, uh, since I've spent three posts and an entire summer doomsdaying my way through the history of meat eating – and, since, the whole point of that tirade was to tell you something else, something wonderful, and not just make you depressed about your love of pork belly, I figured, well, I should probably tell you about that something else:

Tom Mylan is the in-house butcher for these restaurants.

You may already know this. Or you may not know this. But undoubtedly, if you've tasted this meat, you will want to know more.

I go back into the walk-in. Tom is slicing through a dark, shiny orb that turns out to be beef liver. It's Wednesday, so he's working through the two pigs and steer that arrived from Fleischer's yesterday. They arrived hanging weight meat, huge hulks of muscle and tissue and bone and skin. By now he's gotten the pigs into primal thirds: shoulder, loin, belly, sirloin and ham. He gestures to an invisible stack of pigs on the block, saying, "All this is done."

The radio is on and it's hot. Mark's coming to take meat to Bonita and we have to get those bags of it into a cooler for him. I jump in and once we've loaded the meat in half way, Tom warns, "Watch out, they're a little bloody on the outside."

Then we're back to talking beef. Tom tells me about smoking, brining, braising. I ask about the burgers. He grinds the beef twice so it sticks together, but it's still coarser than most ground beef because the holes on the grind plate are larger. That's what gives the burgers their meaty quality – there's more whole muscle in them.

Tom talks with such ease about cutting up meat that it's hard to believe he hasn't been doing it forever. Just a few years ago, Tom was in charge of the grocery at Marlow and editing the journal with Anna when he walked passed Cheffie and Andrew outside of Diner one day. They told him they were considering getting an in-house butcher so they could get hanging weight meat from Fleischer's. And he said something like, "That sounds really really cool." And they said, "Wanna do it?"

He moved in with Josh and Jessica of Fleischer's, lived on their futon with their mastiff Booboo and a giant tortoise. Every morning it was "beef leg, beef leg, beef leg." He began to collect books on the subject like a Navy meat manual from 1945 and watched educational clips on You Tube.

And it has paid off. According to Tom, getting hanging weight (100-180 pound sections) meat is the only way for a restaurant to be able to afford getting grass-fed, local, properly raised meat. There's a lot of flexibility. Tom gets together with Juventino, Sean and Dave, and they can cut any way they want, make stylistic choices that wouldn't be possible if their meat came out of Cryovac. And it's a lot more exciting to cook here. Curing lardo, rendering it, whipping it. Dealing with odds and ends. Says Tom, "Limitations, not infinite possibilities, are what make great, classic cuisine." Agreed.

Leah Campbell

---

---

---

Proposition for a Party

Slow Food Nation Asks This:

This Labor Day, join us in building a food system that is just, sustainable and delicious by holding picnics in your town or city. A day of generosity and action, we invite you to organize Labor Day picnics locally with loved ones and new friends who together will break bread, share a meal and help transform the American food system.

These picnics are meant to build on the momentum created by communities all across the country eager to support and foster a good, clean and fair food system.

Join us for a day of action dedicated to sharing food and celebrating the realization of Slow Food Nation in dozens of different ways, in communities across America.

Start posting your Slow Food Nation Labor Day picnic plans.

---

---

---

Summer Swartzy

Who hears fish when they cry? It will not be forgotten by some memory that we were contemporaries.
-Henry David Thoreau

---

---

---

More Heros!

Kirsten:



Mark:



And Harry:

---

---

---

---

---

---

Different Types of Genius

Andrew's Hero:


If this video doesn't load click here to see!

Anna's Hero:

---

---

---

Bird by Jason

---

---

---

Our Red Headed Sparrow

Molly Quinn will be playing Drusilla in the new and exciting Omina Opera's presentation of Claudio Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea. Check out their write up in the New York Times today. And get your tickets soon!

---

---

---

Spam Spam Spam Poetry and Spam

I couldn't help trying to find logical patterns in the raging sea that is my morning deluge of internet spam comments. There amongst the 1000 gambling and car insurance blips I banished today I found this little haiku:

For motorola cell phones

bela tarr harmonies artificial eye review
frog eye salad recipe
jack johnson if i had eyes
how long does alcohol stay in your system


ps. One of my first weeks working in the store at Marlow's we got Spammed. Drunk customers left cans of Spam hidden on the shelves. I also should say I am a bit taken with gambling and car insurance as somewhat romantically linked ideas... There seems to be some method in this madness... How long does it...

---

---

---

Wait is this an ad for American Spirits? Who is that ruffian?

---

---

---

The Rabid Dog and the GOP or What Color IS Vermont

Last week I received an email from Cerise Mayo, of Greenhorns, Serve Your Country Food, Slow Food and New Amsterdam Market, about composting in Vermont. The email was a letter to the editor of the Times Argus paper in Montpelier, Vermont. It reads like this:

Dear Editor:

We are a group of concerned citizens, including avid home gardeners, long-time commercial farmers and voracious consumers of fresh local food, who believe that the Vermont Compost Company of Montpelier is a most valuable and responsible business in our region that must be kept open and thriving.

We feel strongly that the recent action taken by the Vermont Natural Resources Board to shut down Vermont Compost is unjust and in clear violation of the state's own regulatory procedures and laws. The moratorium on compost operations that the Legislature passed and the Governor signed into law this past legislative session was written specifically to exempt from shutdown both Vermont Compost and the Intervale, two of the state's larger composting facilities, until an adequate regulatory definition could be officially determined as to whether "composting" qualifies as an agricultural activity. The administrative action taken to immediately suspend Vermont Compost's operations and fine the company $18,000 is a draconian and blatantly capricious action that we call on Governor Douglas to reverse immediately.

As the price of fuel skyrockets and the global food emergency intensifies, the state of Vermont desperately needs more agricultural facilities and local food and farm operations like Vermont Compost. To close down Vermont Compost, as well as the Intervale which is also teetering on the brink of collapse in the wake of inconsistent regulatory oversight, is a most dangerous and reckless failure in public policy that will undermine Vermont¹s ability to maintain and develop a vibrant farm economy for generations.

Keep Vermont Compost open!

-Martin Kemple, Middlesex
-Kelly Sullivan, Middlesex
-Lydia Russell, Montpelier

An entity called the Natural Resources Board is closing two-thirds of the composting facilities in Vermont? The irony is crystal. With a little more research this drama plays out like an episode of Desperate Housewives. I suppose that might be harsh but the neighbor down the road who recently complained about Mr. Hammer, owner of Vermont Compost, is a GOP fundraiser who has raised many moneys for Jim Douglas, THE GOVERNER. The other open compost facility, Vermont Natural Ag Products, is by run the governor's brother-in-law. At the same time across counties Vermont Yankee (again feel that cool irony), the nuclear power plant, has a crack in it. And Mr. Hammer is shut down because his facility is not considered a farm? Because the majority of waste he processes comes from other farms?

The only other voice I found in opposition to Mr. Hammer was one Ellen Beck who argues that he is a bad business man because he was reluctant to give his dogs rabies shots and "felt no need to get a permit from the town of East Montpelier when he erected a business sign." The business sign which I imagine is as offensive as the logo seen above...

---

---

---

Put A Egg On It

Today at the Rose tasting I thought the day couldn't get better. I was having temporary amnesia. I had forgotten the new air-conditioner in my apartment didn't work and almost fell out the window. That poor bird dog has a vet appointment. That the sun is as hot as fire, and the asphalt torching. But it was noon and I was drinking Rose. Life was great. And it was Pink. Domaine de Montrieux, Mas Jullien, Ciliegiolo.

Then someone handed me something. A manila folder with this egg journal and pin. As I have harped on before I have a hard time reading about food and the biggest culprit is preciousness. Immediately I was attracted to the little green zine. It represented the punk zines of lore, referencing the ripped borders, the content on the front page, the humor and ironic graphics and the paper. Still I worried. I had a sip of the bubbles in front of me. And started to read.

Words I dislike jumped out at me. Munch. Meal. Ravenous. Delicate. But still I read on and... I was compelled. The magazine features a lovely and sincere tale of eating in the rain and a night that ends in a slow dance.

This little number is a gem. It is reverent of its roots, paying subtle homage to the punk and the rock. The photo spread in the center is as sincere as the text and alive with the mess, awkwardness and community that is eating.

I would like to thank Sarah Keough, who is the author and editor, and recommend this tiny book to all. Also R&S Media are the perpetrators of Print Fetish, one of my favorite blogs. Ever.

---

---

---

Every Thursday 8-4 till November

---

---

---

Of the Land: Books Andrew has been dabbling in

First Sentences:

My first garden was a place no grown-up ever knew about, even though it was in the backyard of a quarter-acre suburban plot.

One of the peculiarities of the white race's presence in America is how little intention has been applied to it.

---

---

---

Meating the Demand

Carnality and pollution, historically meat's foremost negative connotations, have been represented in all forms – perhaps the most interesting of which is fine art (S. Twigg 1983). Take, for example, the carnal leitmotif of the butcher shop in Flemish and Italian paintings of the 16th century. Scholar Barry Wind writes that the burlesque characters of "these paintings exploit the meat stall as a metaphor for wantonness." In Bartolomeo Passarotti's "Butcher Shop," the licentious expressions of the butchers played on "vulgar colloquial connotations of the word butcher shop, 'beccheria,' which seems to have been used synonymously with sexual encounter." The implied pollution in these paintings is the moral and spiritual decrepitude of the leering, wayward butcher.

But pollution of another kind was on the horizon. The late 18th and early 19th centuries marked a period of rapid change for the West as the Industrial Revolution transformed the way people lived and ate. Innovations in industry were charged with notions of progress and prosperity – meat, formerly a rare luxury, would be available and affordable to all. This kind of ubiquity could only be made possible by a systematic overhaul of the process by which animals became meals. Engineering advances proferred machines that sped the preservation and dissemination of meat. These machines required the labors of hundreds of thousands of workers, and the entire apparatus ran on the vast capital investment of business organizations.

As Upton Sinclair's The Jungle showed, the sullied reality of packing houses was gruesome: "Under the system of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the cleaning out of the waste barrels. Every spring they did it; and in the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water—and cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the public's breakfast."

The shock of Upton's novel did less to inspire aid for the oppressed working class (as he had hoped), than it horrified meat eaters around the country. The public uproar spurred the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, which were both signed on June 30, 1906. This cemented the Food and Drug Administration as a law enforcement institution in the name of consumer (read: citizen) health.

This is the system we've inherited. Industrial production has become industrial overproduction. Government subsidies keep the cycle going, driving prices continually up. South Korea gives proof that not everyone agrees with what the FDA pardons, that we are a world still concerned with the safety of its products. But many people are also concerned with contamination by the meat industry on an environmental level. Take one example of the industry's impact: vast quantities of water are used to irrigate cattle feedlots, then factory farm run-off returns to natural bodies of water or seeps into water supplies causing irreparable damage. The 2006 United Nations report called the meat industry "one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global."

Even as global demand for meat increases, consumers are more and more removed from the pollution that the meat industry generates. So many of us just don't know. That's why Mark W. Rosegrant, director of environment and production technology at the nonprofit International Food Policy Research Institute champions "a stronger public relations campaign in the reduction of meat consumption — one like that around cigarettes — emphasizing personal health, compassion for animals, and doing good for the poor and the planet." Because it's the remove, the lack of awareness, the total obscurity by which meat arrives on the dinner table, that carries us from Passarotti's colloquial and smutty (but personal) butcher shop to Roy Lichtenstein's 1962 piece, "Meat." Meat, an abstracted mass. A product. A profit.

Leah Campbell

---

---

---

UnFancy and Crafty

Sasha is busy making the UnFancy Food Show medals while I am busy staring adoringly at her. How can I not love someone who reminds me that every once in a while, or more often than not, it is SHOT O'CLOCK! Thanks again to the UnFancy Food Show and New Amsterdam Market.

---

---

---

The "Buzz" About the Office

Today our top articles included Royal drinking and driving. A very wealthy dog named Trouble and some cosmic lotto numbers from Kirsten: 41, 51, 61, 48 and 17.

---

---

---

Week Two: A History Doomed to Repeat Itself

I had one week to grasp the hominid's carnivorous history. Tom suggested I start with a tome on the shelves behind the bar at Marlow & Sons called Larousse Gastronomique, written by Frenchman Prosper Montagné and prefaced by Escoffier, "king of cooks and cook of kings." Inside its decaying covers I found an encyclopedic pastiche of butchery's past, which began with the kind of scene depicted in ancient Greek bas-reliefs – a man with outstanding posture slitting the throat of some hulking animal. Within half of a page, however, this history had so noticeably morphed into nationalistic prose nostalgic for the heights of French butchery under Napoleon's reign as to make me doubt its veracity.

After all, this is the kind of armchair anthropology that makes me physically uncomfortable – the kind that touts France as the last in the line of civilization's evolution, the natural height of human cultivation. And meat, a symbol for the physical domination and incorporation of other animals, is the perfect language to write such a history in. In Eating Meat: Evolution, Patterns and Consequences, Vaclav Smil writes, "There is little that is neutral about meat." And Larousse's truth is anything but neutral.

But truth – ultimate, un-biased and objective – is not the aim of this post. Which is to say, these things happened, and may have happened. As I read, I realized I couldn't put together a complete and neutral chronology of meat-eating any better than Larousse. But I did begin to see parallels between ancient practices and modern values. As Tom said in the walk-in, "You can tell a lot about a culture by the way it cuts up its animal." And we can think about the state of meat processing today in light of these histories.

In Egypt, sacrifice brought royalty closer to the divine. Take, for example, this zealous charge by Thutmose III in his Coronation Inscription: "... that I might supply with food his altars upon earth; that I might make to flourish for him the sacred slaughtering-block with great slaughters in his temple, consisting of oxen and calves without limit" (J.H. Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt; Part Two, § 149). Without limit! Ancient political sovereignty gorged on meat. For centuries, meat was the essential foodstuff to invigorate marching armies. And just as an Egyptian ruler had to prove his power in meat, so do our politicians, as we saw in last week's post. This is the context in which right-wing radio show host Michael Savage called Obama the "Tofu Messiah."

It was the Romans who outsourced slaughter. The higher classes disdained the "gross practice" of butchery, and a class of butchers took up the lowly job. Even though these butchers provided the essential service of preparing the sacrificial carcasses, their work was considered uncivilized and degrading. In return for tainting themselves with the flesh of animals, the butcher halls were made as monumental as the Aqueducts and Baths. This was a life in paradox.

And something of the Roman paradox remains. We depend on meat, but we want its journey to our plate to be out of sight, out of mind. We extend the process by which it gets to us to the point of near total ignorance. I recently read that chopsticks were first used in the eleventh century B.C. because a Chinese rule of etiquette banned knives from the table since they reminded diners of the slaughter of the animal. Today we continue to pass the death of domesticated animals down the line. Most butchers no longer kill the animals they prepare – that's done at slaughterhouses. PETA would have us go so far as to no longer kill, and therefore raise, animals at all. They recently announced that they would give one million dollars to anyone who could grow meat in a petri dish that could be sold at competitive prices by the year 2012. Any takers?


Leah Campbell

---

---

---

Words of the week:

The question that must be addressed, therefore, is not how to care for the planet, but how to care for each of the planet's millions of human and natural neighborhoods, each of its millions of small pieces and parcels of land, each one of which is in some precious way different from all the others. Our understandable wish to preserve the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence.

—Wendell Berry, "Word and Flesh" in What Are People For? (1990), p. 200.

---

---

---

This week in the news: Mark at the Market!

Sunday was a wild success on the island and in the borough. While most of my peers were selling out of ham and pickle sandwiches and helping the lovely Robert LaValva promote the New Amsterdam Market, Grant and I kept it really real with many plastic cups of Sweet Action at the UnFancy Food Show. I would like to thank Sasha Davies, Tom Mylan and Robert for again creating a thoughtful and fun way to raise awareness about food, how we consume it and who makes it. Here is an endlessly cute interview with the causal duo on gothamist and a impressive photo essay of the seaport market on eater.

---

---

---

This Sunday at the Seaport

---

---

---

(Nothing But) Flowers...

This was a Pizza Hut
Now it's all covered with daises
-David Byrne:
(Nothing But) Flowers

An incredibly innocent young person asked a friend of mine recently if there were bands in Williamsburg when she moved here five years ago. Williamsburg famous for brunch and gay people, Dominicans, Hasidic Jews and Domino Sugar has something new to be proud of. Condos!

Bird dog and I walk to work everyday from Greenpoint to the corner of Broadway and Berry. It is about a mile and a half walk in a straight line down Berry, past the park and the Automotive Highschool, the Levee and the vet. The early morning hours offer a barrage of sounds. Dogs barking, cars whirring, beeping, Polish. But then behind the staccato is something else. Something more ominous. It is sometimes soft but harsh, erratic and omnipresent. The dull sound of metal pounding at the ground, the thud thud of the earth's growing wounds. People (developers) standing on corners trying to figure out just how much money they can eek out of the sky. Next to Marlow right now are two giant craters of broken dirt. Even these tiny swaths stolen through blue plywood walls prove startling apocalyptic. Here in Brooklyn, unless you are in a well manicured park or at the beach, this might be your only glimpse of real land.

What came as an equally jarring surprise is that we, unwittingly, are helping sell them. I mean it is obvious that Marlow and Diner play a role. We are in an SUV add, let's be real here. But it was a shock to see this in a recent issue of New York Magazine:



In the little box are Bonita matches and postcards! We never approved of these photos? No permission was asked. No money changed hands as they say in gangster movies. I went a little undercover to the tower's sales office, a tiny hut just feet from the East River. It reminded me of the tacked together little lean-tos that used to pockmark the waterfront's "unofficial" parks. Inside was a even more offensively appropriated picture of the interior of Bonita. Almost as creepy as the fake lady next to it...



In the mile and a half from my home to Marlow and Sons there are:
15 construction sites
4 new buildings and
one community garden.

---

---

---

Beef Knuckle: Would a Cut By Any Other Name Smell As Sour?

So, last week we cut our teeth on shoptalk. I spent three hours with the man named Tom in a walk-in stocked with recently delivered hanging-weight meat. Tom, a former vegetarian, runs the meat program for all four restaurants. As he deftly carved up the side of a cow, I asked questions, and he let loose a deluge of information informed by his experience as a butcher. It was before my time, but the 1984 Wendy's commercial with the crotchety, beef-obsessed old lady rang in my head.

"Where's the beef?" Well, here it was, all around me.

I learned that there are only four pieces of skirt steak, one of the most commonly used cuts of meat, on a single steer. I learned that there's only one two-pound hanger steak on an entire cow. And I learned that sirloin tips used to be called beef knuckle before the industry changed the name to make it more marketable. In Tom's collection of books on meat, which range from a 1919 vocational manual to Pork & Sons, the change in nomenclature occurs in the mid-80s. I found this brochure from Beef Innovations Group, which avows "A product's name can enhance its appeal." Tom and I agreed Beef Knuckle would make a good name for a frat boy, but not so much for an appetizing entree.

Mostly, I learned how very little I know about meat. I'm not alone in my ignorance. After talking with Tom, I'd say I know more than most Americans about the meat they chew. I'm thinking again of the adage, "Where's the beef?" And, as it turns out, the question is so…well, dated. The beef? It's everywhere.

Beef is a major player in our American cultural landscape. And that means it's in the political brew. On January 7, 2008, presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton went on the ABC News morning show just before the New Hampshire primary. Echoing Walter Mondale's sharp criticism of Gary Hart in the primaries of 1984, she said of Obama's campaign:

"You know, all of a sudden you start to ask yourself – wait a minute, I mean, what is the substance here? What, as famously was said years ago, 'where's the beef?' You know, where is the reality? And I think that's a fair question…Voters are going to start asking themselves the tough questions that I think all of us have to ask."

Clinton could have just as well still been talking about beef. Unpacking the sound bite reveals a startling irony. Do we really equate beef with reality and substance? Because it seems that reality and substance have long been divorced from the American consumption of meat. So much so, that a better question for 2008 might be "What is the beef?" As the ingredients in our food become unrecognizable, knowing what's for dinner is no easy feat.

Mark Bittman's Wednesday article "Putting Meat Back In Its Place" hits a worthwhile chord – eating less beef seems like a good thing to do today. But his advice falls short. The "tough questions" go beyond how much meat to eat. How were the animals treated? How did they live, and how did they die? The tough questions involve asking where our meat comes from, seeing – as Anna pointed out in a previous post – the international ramifications of our meat industry, and, simply, learning what meat is. After all, how many people know what part of the animal their favorite cut of meat is from?

These questions beg for answers. In a time when Americans eat an average of 1/2 pound of meat a day, I think you'll find, as I did, that there are many more hours to spend in the walk-in.

NEXT WEEK: Tom pointed me in the direction of a tome called Larousse Gastronomique on the shelves behind the bar at Marlow & Sons. Expect musings on the ancient, quasi-mystical history of butchery. -Leah Campell

---

---

---

I feel confused...

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008: New York Post Page 35



Wednesday, June 11th, 2008: New York Post Page 47

---

---

---

Today In The News

On my way to work today I bought the Daily News? For its front page as pictured here. Sifting its foully ink drenched pages I began to question my decision. Obviously a hilarious, effective, and important headline to anyone living in a fast food city such as New York, as well as directly pertinent to the industry and political platform (local food, know your farmer, seasonal etc.)we often perch on. I still felt a tiny wave of discomfort or unease. And I realized it had nothing to do with the proximity my brain waves were to the ultra-saturated gossip page. I started this morning, moving slowly through the hell wave that is our climate today, wondering about how I ingest information.

In my inbox when I sat down this morning was an article on South Korea's Prime Minister and Cabinet resigning in hopes to quell riots over US Beef being allowed to be imported after a 5 year stay due to fear of Mad Cow disease. The issues here run deeper, wallowing in what seems to add up to a deep rooted mistrust of the three-month old presidency of Lee Myung BakThis. The article was from the Times Online listed under the category of World News. Fair enough. Again an article aligned in some way with my concerns with the world, to make a possibly unfairly sweeping statement.

So I recognize a thread here. One from the World News section of the Times Online to the front page of the Daily News. For more investigation I moved my attention to the New York Times Online today. Here I found an even more complex system of shoots and ladders.

In the Nation Section (and I'm aware as I write this that the New York Times Online is tricky, moving an article from one section to another it might pertain to, creating a Rubik's Cube of qualified information) an article on how the aforementioned tomato crisis will most likely pull in an extra 275 million in next years budget for the failing FDA. In Well, a health blog, Tara Parker-Pope discusses the dangers of lawnmowers, without ever mentioning the environmental ramifications of a perfectly manicured and pedestrian lawn. In the BUSINESS section is an article on farmers (mostly of corn and soy etc.) expecting a harrowing harvest due to water logged land. In the Magazine/Home and Garden section a somewhat tritely in depth article on a hipster in London who "guerrilla gardens" for what seems to boil down to street cred.

Quote:Yet aside from a few tomatoes and some Swiss chard, which he says "tasted dirty," Reynolds has never grown any food. Nor is he too tied to gardening as an ecological act, a way of restoring nature's order; he gladly plants invasive species if they're aesthetically appropriate to the setting.

Also in Home and Garden a timely little piece about growing your own tomatoes and an interesting, if surface, instructional on how to live off the grid in your early retirement home without sacrificing your microwave. Thank you Sun. In Regional you will find out how Economic Development Corporation owes 45million dollars in water bills. In Business and World a mention of Mad Cow and the South Korean unrest, in Technology a treatise on plants and the possibility they recognize their relatives and are nicer to them. Similar to us? I'm not sure. Also a question mark on climate control, class and infectious disease in Dot Earth/Science.

Perhaps the most poignant article today is also found in Science. The dubious future of our friends the horseshoe crab, who like most ocean inhabitants are fighting for survival.

Quote:The loss of the horseshoe crab would be tragic, researchers said, not only because the creatures are fascinating and cute and predate the dinosaurs by 200 million years, but also because so many contemporary life forms depend on them. Their annual spawns draw hundreds of species of migratory birds, predatory fish, reptiles, amphibians and various other alimentary canals eager to brunch on the freshly deposited Limulus eggs. "Horseshoe crab eggs are like filet mignon around here," Dr. Mattei said. "They're a very popular item on the menu."

At first the scattering of environmental issues bugged me. Why do I have to scour the paper or the internet for what I find interesting and vital when someone else can check the golf scores in about .5 seconds. Maybe not a totally apt metaphor but you see what I mean? Then something else happened. Looking at the information I had gathered from each section it started to mean something more. I began to recognize that just as I find our earth tangibly present in most moments of every day, be it the 98 degree weather, lunch or the pop art littering the cover of the Daily News, so does the newspaper or rather the information stream. It might be quite impossible to limit these articles to one section or "streamline" them everyday because they are everywhere, in everything, informing the air around us. Our land, farm or asphalt, is our lens, our sphere, our metaphor as well as our sometimes scarred reality.

Much like the horseshoe crab, what we stand upon depends on us just as much, if not more, than we depend on it.

---

---

---

You Must Sit Down,

So I did sit and eat.

The scallop, like poetry, is cool. It is interesting how geometry will unconsciously effect our preferences for something. The shape of the scallop shell, for its equality of design, its balance, is what we think of as THE SEA SHELL by the seashore. This is maybe why Sasha was so fascinated and excited by it that she took this lovely picture. Also did you know that scallops can sing? It's true! And also there is a form of poetry called the Scallop that due to its syllabic restrictions appears in the shape of our beloved bivalve.

It is the very quality of form, like the contours of a poem, that makes verse so unique. Several weeks ago I came into the office to find a copy of George Herbert's poem called Love. Apparently this poem, which I stole the closing lines from to name this post, is one of Tom's favorites. Then out of no where, as if to give the air itself structure and purpose Molly started reciting this tiny but satisfying agenda by Shakespeare:

Where the bee sucks

Where the bee sucks, there suck I;
In a cowslip's bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat's back I do fly
After summer merrily.

Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

---

---

---