Empires, Cannibals, and Magic Fish Bones
Join us as we celebrate food, the dinner table, and quite likely empires, cannibals and magic fish bones!
This afternoon I’m drinking a Wasatch Devastator Double Bock (creamy, malty, yeasty and bananany) as I simmer diced onion and bacon (Revival Farms) in charred leftover bits of sirloin (Augustus Ranch). Grounded in the kitchen? Dwelling and being. I stir the pan and think through rural America, national parks, salmon on the Columbia River, returning … Continue reading Savoir-Vivre: Some Thoughts On Culture In A Bowl
In Chapter Three of The Unsettling of America, “The Ecological Crisis as a Crisis of Agriculture,” Wendell Berry pointedly defends the primacy of “wilderness” within the conservation movement in America. What has to be acknowledged at the outset is that wilderness conservation is important and that it has a place in any conservation program, just … Continue reading Wilderness, Good Oak, And Moby Dick
Born in Royal Oak, Michigan, raised in Troy, I really didn’t interact with the city of Detroit until I went to Wayne State University located in mid-town, south of Grand Boulevard and what used to be the General Motors Building, and north of Cass Corridor and dire poverty. My whole stay in the Metro-Detroit area … Continue reading From Small Goat Farms To Megafarms: The Shared Reality of Urban and Rural America.
Grant Wood’s 1930 painting of a pitchfork-wielding farm couple heralds our return to Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. How to interpret this portrait? How to interpret American Gothic, which to my mind means the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Through the lens of The Unsettling of America, an interpretation becomes … Continue reading Unsettling America
Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin writes, and there can be no question the answer philosophically challenges us. This blog seeks to engage with the aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of food. I begin with the proposition that eating is an agricultural act, writes Wendell Berry … Continue reading Know Thy Eating.
We arrive at Mission Beach and immediately dig into the earth. Some of us further than others. Clad in a Detroit Tiger’s cap and determination, Demian takes over a hole dug by other beach-workers and continues the business of excavating. Eventually he sheds cap and shirt and runs into the Pacific where he jumps waves, … Continue reading Mission Beach, Feijoada and Thoughts About Brueghel
The feijoada rests. I added linguisa and wild boar sausage; and, unfortunately, there’s been a little burn on the bottom, so I’ve been carefully stirring. When I warmed the beans and meat up this morning, I checked news on my phone, and I looked back again to find vigorous bubbling. Ha! Fire does not allow … Continue reading Feijoada Day Two And Cook It Raw
Two years ago I fell into reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and this act opened the books of Joel Saladin, Carlo Petrini, Sir Albert Howard, Aldo Leopold, Daniel Barber and many others. And, of course, I read Wendell Berry. Poet and farmer, Berry coined the key sentence for all of us who understand there … Continue reading And Now For Something Completely Different . . . And Yet There’s Always A Bone.
I love cooking with bones. Over the next few blogs we’re going to consider the artistic and sustainable aspects of all sorts of bones: buffalo, chicken, fish, lamb and pig. For the joy of it, I’m also going to include shells as bones. As we consider the shank and neck, spine and trotter we’ll also … Continue reading Bones!
