A Literary Feast

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Posts from the “Uncategorized” Category

I Think I Can’t

Posted on June 24th, 2013

Home canning is a great way to preserve local seasonal produce and it seems to me that everyone is doing it. I can’t scroll down my facebook page without seeing an instagram photo of the various stages of home canning, from the copious amount of item x about to be cleaned, cooked, and canned to the American made glass jars filled with the culinary rainbow. I think it’s great, and even greater when they share their bounty with the likes of me. I myself am no stranger to the commitment of cleaning, storing, and finding creative ways to enjoy the seasonal vegetative bounty available in New England, so it would seem that I should be canning up a storm. I am not. I am…

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Potluck

Posted on June 24th, 2013

I am very good at eating, and I don’t mean this in the joking sense of, “I eat a lot.” I neither want nor need to excuse my constant snacking, second helpings, or late night desserts. When I say that I am very good at eating I mean it in the traditional sense. Food – cooking and eating – is a part of my life that I devote time, skill, and artistry to; and I don’t go it alone. I have a pack of epicurious friends, a scullery support group, a guild of craft eaters: Tuesday Night Potluck. It began, as so many things do, with discontent. We were all busy, feeling isolated, and were looking for a way to be together more. “Let’s…

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Daily and Supersubstantial

Posted on June 24th, 2013

“Cult” and “Culture”–the words share a root, the Latin cultus which, loosely, means “to aid, cultivate, and care for”. The modern usage of “culture” is essentially an agricultural metaphor, in which men and women are likened to plants that must be raised with care and patience so that they might produce healthy and nutritious fruit. It is a method of raising people in the way that agriculture is a method of raising crops. “Cult”, in antiquity, before it came to mean matching jumpsuits and cyanide punch, was the basic form of religious devotion, built on the idea that proper cultivation requires a patience and dedication that borders on worship. The argument implicit in both words is that people and gods, respectively, should be shown…

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Apprentice, Eating.

Posted on June 24th, 2013

I apprenticed in the furniture making shop of a surly old Swiss man with strong opinions and no desire to keep them from anybody. He would shape high finish masterpieces from rough slabs of lumber while telling dirty jokes and comparing the breasts of the women he had dated in his youth. He would pause in his work to belt opera and then, in the same breath, call the radio host the c-word for pronouncing the composer’s name incorrectly. He was quite a contradiction, but one thing that held steady in every aspect of his life was a fine attention to detail and a high level of pride in his work. I expected, of course, to learn more than my brain could retain about…

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Secret Handshake

Posted on May 17th, 2013

I’ve spent no small amount of time feeling that I needed to be more rooted to the here and now.  That my life was something that I was constantly sliding off of. Life as greased pig. I’d fling myself on top of it, only to have it run squealing for the fences again. Half of the time I’d feel the sharp loss, and the other half of the time I’d want to sit back on my haunches in the mud, light up a cigarette, and say ‘fuck you too, mister.’   Farming, in my mind, had always seemed a sure-bet way to anchor oneself to the present. There’s nothing more immediate, after all, than dirt, than weather, bare and uncaring. The last time I…

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Protect the Freshness is Over

Posted on May 17th, 2013

If you’re living in China and just barely working out an income from freelance projects, you might take a job doing voiceovers for propaganda films. A string of hours in a Beijing recording booth can earn you fifty, maybe sixty dollars. You can take breaks and they’ll give you lunch. There will be bottled tea. Afterward, you will walk out into the spring air with a new sense of wealth and possibility, financially settled for another week and able to forget what you had just done. I spent a year doing the odd English voiceover for Chinese Communist Party films. In 2006 I worked on a crushing celebration of Tibetan agricultural practices. “The women do all the cooking and cleaning, which is their pleasure,”…

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Burning Ring of (CSA) Fire

Posted on May 17th, 2013

When most people think of retirement, images of relaxation come to mind. For Nancy and Bruce Livensparger of Fire Ring Farm in Portland, CT, retirement means running a labor-intensive non-profit Community Supported Agricultural operation (CSA). Nancy was a career landscaper whose passion for organic food grew as her interest in controlling invasive species in manicured lawns waned. As GMOs became ubiquitous in the American food supply, Nancy wanted to grow as much of her own food for her family as possible. Subsistence farming on any scale is a big endeavor and she wondered if running a CSA might be the ticket to subsidizing her efforts. As an added bonus, it gets a community involved in the natural food movement. Fire Ring Farm was born.…

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Asparagus officinalis

Posted on May 17th, 2013

Asparagus is a pretty funny thing, when you really think about it. I’ve heard it’s some sort of grass, which makes sense when you see the way it grows. Individual stalks poke up from beneath the dirt, sometimes clumped together with others but mainly striking out on their own, a single minaret growing to seemingly impossible heights. There’s no foliage between the stalks, as one might expect with other plants, just dirt and these towering green fingers. With each day, each hour, practically each minute you can see the stalks reach further toward the sky, making it look appear more like some sort of subterranean being poking up probes to test a new and alien aboveground environment. In a home garden, asparagus is really…

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Potatoes, Comrade

Posted on May 17th, 2013

Like a dog who thinks he’s people, I was a child who thought he was an adult. This presented a conflict, growing up in a working class Moscow neighborhood where most of the children spent their free time beating each other up in schoolyards and in a large field, seeded with broken glass and dog excrement, an enormous heating plant looming over the proceedings. This hell continued until we left Russia when I was nine years old. (Growing up the rest of the way in a lower middle class neighborhood in Brooklyn presented a whole other kind of hell, at least until I hit high school age.) School was my least favorite place to be; I preferred spending time alone with my encyclopedias and…

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Taproot

Posted on May 17th, 2013

I’ve roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts; And all around me a voice was sounding: This land was made for you and me. – Woody Guthrie   I grew up in a small New England town, in the same house all my life, so I always thought I had a good sense of what makes a place a home. Apart from the relative seasonal changes of spring to winter, the scenery didn’t change much and there was a comfort in that. Until one day, in the farmhouse bathroom of a woman I hardly knew, I went to wash my hands and I spotted her soap. It was large and yellow and covered in dirt.…

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