Quote of the Week: From Michael Perry's "Truck"

One of the best books I've read this year is Michael Perry's Truck: A Love Story, described in a cover blurb from USA Today as "a delightful, quirky account of a year in a mid-American life spent restoring a 1951 International Harvester, cultivating a garden, and falling in love." Perry lives in New Auburn, Wisconsin, and, after years of writing for magazines (some of his articles and essays -- which I'd call a mixed bunch -- have been collected in volumes such as Big Rigs, Elvis & the Grand Dragon Wayne and Off Main Street), he made a decent splash in 2002 with his book Population 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time, which I also loved. I like Perry best when he loses the verbal attitude that was probably a requirement for some of the magazine pieces, and writes compellingly -- sometimes hilariously, often with a sense of the sacred -- about small-town life.

My quote of the week comes from a passage in which Perry gathers herbs and green onions from his struggling garden, chops them with lots of garlic, mixes in olive oil, red wine, and lime or lemon juice, and after letting the mixture sit at room temperate until lunchtime adds fresh-ground black pepper and grated parmesan. He calls this bruschetta, but serves it stirred into angel-hair pasta, rather than atop the traditional grilled or toasted slices of crusty bread, so perhaps we might consider it more a mixed-herb pesto. An edited version of the rest of this passage appears in my sidebar; here's a slightly fuller version:

I eat in my favorite spot, the big green chair in the living room beside the bookcase with a view through the screen to Main Street. I can't imagine a finer moment than to be here in this old chair with this fresh alive food in my lap, all the greenness and the garlic and the sounds of the day easing through the screen on the back of a breeze. ... There is something about listening to a day through a screen that infuses the moment, as if the steel mesh slows the day down, lets us bathe in it a bit more. A screen seems to filter the harshness from the outside noises and they reach your ear softened. It will be best if the sound is coming to you over a varnished wooden floor decorated with a strip of sunlight; the flat surface, however artificially imposed, is reassuring in the face of entropy and has the added advantage of being made from trees and blessed by light. It is exquisite to sit here in this perfect moment, eating food that I -- a black-thumb gardener -- have coaxed from seed to fork. I am humbled that in the face of all chaos, I should have this plain, priceless moment.

Another Fox Sighting

More fox sightings in Northfield: My friend Mary has posted a comment to my Fox on Woodley Street post to report that she saw a fox on Hall Avenue at midday yesterday. Please share your interesting wildlife sightings with me! I'd love to know what people happen to see as they go about their daily lives.

Big Business Organic

While browsing another local-foodie blog, Dirt to Dish (written by Katherine Gray, who has posted comments here) , I came across a reference to an enlightening chart showing the huge multi-nationals that own some of our most familiar organic brands. Santa Cruz Organics? Owned by J.M. Smucker. Stonyfield Farm and Brown Cow yogurts? Owned by Dannon. Nantucket Nectars? Cadbury-Schweppes.

Organic has gone mainstream, finding its way into Wal-Mart, Target, and just about every other major grocery outlet. We read that supply is having a hard time keeping up with demand for organics (see my blog post from July, "Helping farmers make the switch to organic"). Is this good? Is it a great victory? Or is it a sell-out? Does it inevitably mean a deterioration of what organic really means if it's being supplied by big business?

Well, no... and yes. I have to think that on balance it means, at the very least, that more soil is being enriched and fewer pesticides are being used on our one and only planet than would be the case if organic hadn't gone mainstream. I think many of the supporters of organic farming always hoped it would become mainstream -- "the way food is grown," not just a tiny subculture.

And yet. There is a fear that when organic farming becomes big business, it loses something -- perhaps not the essentials (returning organic matter to the soil, avoiding chemical fertilizers and pesticides), but the sense -- perhaps an overly romantic one -- that organic gardening by its very nature should involve a commitment to place, to a particular soil, to a particular location, to a particular ecosystem and a particular community. When it's run, or at least owned, by billion-dollar corporations and its fruits are transported by carbon-and-particulate-matter-spewing trucks all over the nation, hemisphere or world... when production involves thousands of ill-paid farm laborers... when it's commodified on a global scale, that doesn't feel organic anymore. It's Big Food Conglomerate, not Hard-working Local Farmer committed to the health of his or her own patch of earth.

And yet. Big business is here to stay. Big business is vital to national economies. Big business can take, and I think should be praised for taking, steps toward improving its green credentials. Just because it's big business, it doesn't mean every action is cynical and heartless. It might in fact be, but if the results are a step in the right direction, that's still worth something.

Twin Cities Metro Dares You to Eat Local

"Eat Local. I Dare Ya." is the name of a recent article in Twin Cities Metropolitan that talks about the Eat Local Challenges taking place across the country this month and about why people become passionate about eating more locally. It's about having trust in your food producers. It's about reducing carbon emissions. It's about a relationship with the food you eat and attention to the way you eat it. And as the author, Mecca Bos-Williams, notes:

If you’re a statistical sort, there’s a wealth of facts, figures and numbers on why more people are choosing to eat locally. While these can certainly be compelling, they can’t hold a candle to just-picked heirloom tomatoes, still heavy in your hand with sun-tempered juices, heady on your tongue.

Thanks to my colleague Elin Odegaard for bringing the article to my attention!

A Local-enough Chicken in New York City

Caution: Vegetarians -- and others -- may find the following excerpt distasteful. As I have a streak that has always appreciated dark humor, it made me laugh out loud, I'm afraid.

The September 3 & 10 issue of The New Yorker (which I got a year's subscription to when I made a pledge to MPR last fall) is all about food. I haven't read all of it yet, but there's a piece by Calvin Trillin about the amazing street food to be found in Singapore, and one about Adam Gopnik's attempt to "eat local" within the five boroughs of New York City -- discovering spicy honey, tasting of sources like linden and gingko, from rooftop beehives; greens like wood sorrel (tastes just like lemonade, we discover) and purslane gathered in Central Park; fresh eggs from the City Chicken Project, run out of community gardens in the outer boroughs. Gopnik is not successful in his quest for a completely local chicken to eat -- the egg purveyor is horrified at the suggestion -- but stumbles upon a Bronx slaughterhouse where live chickens, lambs and goats await selection:

A few minutes later, a bag came out, with the chicken, still warm, cut up inside. It wasn't, of course, precisely the New York chicken that I had hoped for. It was an upstate chicken, most likely, that had come to town just for the hell of it, but its life cycle -- born elsewhere, arrived in hope, lived in cramped quarters, ended its New York existence violently and unexpectedly at the hands of someone with a fatal amount of money -- seemed to make its life local enough to qualify. I took it home to cook.