a different cut (recipe: cream of roots with smoked pork jowls)

A few weeks ago, a friend and I were comparing our favorite local farms when I mentioned my frustration with that king of meats: bacon. Local, pastured bacon is very, very expensive, so prohibitively expensive that I can rarely justify buying it. My friend asked if I'd ever heard of pork jowls, and explained that a local grower, Inland Ranch, sells them for half the price of bacon with a similar flavor. She had so many good things to say about this unusual smoked cut, I couldn't help but remember to ask for them while we were at the farmers market.

So I came home with this package of smoked pork jowls, at $6 a pound. I was hopeful as I opened the package and fried them up, but I was frankly blown away by the flavor, which seemed to me more complex and interesting than bacon. Pork jowls are also a bit more salty than bacon so I wouldn't consider them a straight substitute; they're probably too salty to eat alone, but as an addition to complete meals they're unbelievably delicious. Like most hog cuts, pork jowls give off lots and lots of rich, nutritious fat, which I saved in a Mason jar for the next morning's eggs... which were easily the best fried eggs I've ever had in my life.

I'm converted. 

I had no plans for the jowls when I brought them home, but I knew I wanted to make something with a ton of vegetables. I genuinely love vegetables and could happily live on them alone if my body would tolerate it. At this time of year, I'm drooling more than usual over my seed catalogs, fantasizing about what I'll do when I get my hands on this luscious, curvy tomato, this ripe, delicious pepper...

When I was first learning to cook, it was my regular practice to dump a bunch of random vegetables in a pot, cover them with canned vegetable broth, and cook them to death. That was my “vegetable soup,” and bless Jeremy's heart that he always ate this sloppy mess without complaint. I still love vegetable soup, but I like to think I'm a bit more sophisticated as a cook now. When I have a lot of vegetables I like to combine them with flavorful herbs, a rich broth, white wine, and yogurt, and let me tell you, topping such a soup with an intense smoked meat brings it all together.

And I believe that this ingredient provides satiety as well. It's true that when I first went vegan I ate very little because everything was so fibrous and filled me up very fast. But in the long run, it seemed I could never eat enough. Common were the nights when dinner would leave a hole in my stomach, so I'd cook up a big pot of brown rice and eat the whole thing with Jeremy, perhaps amended with hot sauce and vegan "mayo," and still I'd feel hungry.

A pot of soup of this approximation, made with soy yogurt and a bit of olive oil, would leave me so unsatisfied I'd inevitably run for a chocolate bar or worse later in the evening. Now I finish a soup of hefty vegetables with a conscientious scoop of rich, fatty meat – enough to provide flavor and leave my belly quiet and content. 

This soup makes use of the storage foods of winter. I never peel my vegetables if I can help it, so the chopping doesn't take too long. My kids had three bowls of this soup so I'd consider it kid-friendly, a good way to squeeze in lots of vegetables. If you don't have access to smoke pork jowls, you can substitute pastured bacon, perhaps cutting the amount in half to keep it affordable. 

Also, please find real sour cream for this recipe. The container should list only two ingredients: cultures, and CREAM. Not "skim milk powder" or a long list of thickeners and stabilizers. If you can't find real sour cream you can make your own, or substitute whole milk yogurt.

Cream of Roots with Smoked Pork Jowls

1 onion, diced

3 garlic cloves, minced

2 celery stalks, chopped

2 carrots, chopped

2 parsnips, chopped

1 celery root, peeled and chopped

1 turnip, diced

1 rutabaga, diced

1 russet potatoes, diced 

1 c. white wine

4-5 c. chicken broth (just enough to cover)

1 c. sour cream

8 oz. smoked pork jowls or pastured bacon 

handful of snipped chives, to garnish

Heat 2 T. butter and 2 T. olive oil over medium in the bottom of a large soup pot. Add the onion and garlic and cook until translucent, about 5 minutes, stirring regularly to prevent sticking.

Add the vegetables and pour in the wine. Increase the heat to medium-high and cook for about 5 minutes, until some of the wine has cooked off. Add the broth, just enough to barely cover the vegetables. Bring to a boil, then cover the pot, reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes, until the vegetables are fork-tender.

Meanwhile, fry the jowls over medium heat until crispy and brown. Pour off the fat (save it!) and drain the jowls on a paper towel. Chop into bite-size pieces.

Turn off the heat under the soup. Use an immersion blender or regular blender to process until mostly pureed. Return the pot to the stove and stir in the sour cream. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Serve in warm bowls, topped with chives and strips of pork jowl. Enjoy!

a body at rest

Before the new year began, I was thinking about trying a low-carb diet. I have never, in my whole life, gone on a "diet." Instead I have made complete lifestyle changes with the intention of sticking with that plan forever. But I was thinking about trying this diet anyway. I checked out a bunch of books from the library, hit up some low-carb friends for their experiences, studied the scientific literature, and genuinely thought I might do this thing. This diet thing.

Here's why.

I've changed the way I eat in many ways over the past ten years. I've done junk-food vegetarian. I've done whole food vegan. I've done raw. I've done WAPF. I've done Paleo.

I've changed my activity level, too. I've been a gym rat. I've been a yoga freak. I've been a jogger. I've been a cyclist. I've lifted weights. I've worked out by countless silly videos. 

I've done so many things to try to heal my body from the way I did things when I didn't know any better.

I like where I am now. I feel comfortable where I am now. I even have some confidence. I love how I eat. I love how I move my body. There are a few things that need work, but mostly, I think I'm in a good place.

Much of this is because of Health At Every Size. I credit this philosophy with giving me permission to live as healthfully as I know how without using the scale as my primary rubric.

But here's a little secret. Some part of me -- I'm still not sure how big it is -- believed that if I let go and followed the philosophy, if I adopted a healthier diet for all the right reasons and found activities that I truly loved, I would lose weight.

Although HAES is not a weight-loss program, many people do lose weight when they embrace it, because they stop following fad diets and punishing workout routines and instead eat consciously and exercise normally. Weight loss is just a side effect, not a goal. Some people do not lose weight, of course, and that's considered acceptable, too. What's important in HAES is not pounds or sizes or BMIs, but personalized healthy habits.

I've been one of those women who has not lost weight. No matter what I've done over the past ten years, my weight has stayed roughly where it is now, give or take ten pounds. Through two pregnancies. Through veganism and high-fat animal foods. Through green smoothies and cod liver oil. It. Just. Doesn't. Budge.

And maybe I started to feel self-conscious again. Maybe I started to lose confidence. Maybe I started to wonder what I was doing wrong. Maybe I read Gary Taubes and started to worry that the teaspoon of honey in my tea was undoing my otherwise healthy efforts. Maybe I was watching closely as a low-carb friend shed pounds effortlessly. Maybe I thought how nice it would be if someone said to me, "Wow, you look amazing!"

Maybe those old neuroses starting flooding back in again. Maybe I started slipping in my good habits. Maybe I doubted that I was really so healthy, if I'd truly experienced such a turn-around. Maybe I wondered if I was deluding myself.

Maybe I tried to fool myself that I wanted to try a low-carb diet to get my blood sugar under control. Truthfully, it's mostly under control. But that seemed a good excuse. It's not weight-related, after all, which is good since I don't worry so much about my weight anymore. That's not what's important. I'm more evolved than all that. Right?

It's interesting how our minds work in these tiny hypocritical ways and we don't even have to be aware of it. Like how I thought, semi-consciously, that I might lose weight by ignoring my weight, or by focusing on a specific health marker like blood glucose, even though I didn't really care about losing weight or even think it was particularly healthy to focus on losing weight, at least consciously. That's pretty funny. Is funny the right word?

In the end I decided not to go on a diet. I stopped at a certain point and thought, Huh. What am I doing here? It might have been when I was actually pondering a bag of Splenda at the grocery store.

I don't want to get a bunch of nasty emails from people who had their lives saved by Atkins, so let me just say, it's not about the Splenda. It's not even about the diet. It's about my value system. In theory, I value all people, all bodies. In theory, I believe that corporations, including the monolithic diet, cosmetic, and pharmaceutical industries, induce women (and increasingly men) to loathe, mutilate, and subjugate their bodies for profit. In theory, I am a feminist who believes that people of all shapes and sizes, including the very skinny and the very soft, are beautiful and worthy of love and acceptance.

In practice, I am a hypocrite, if only with myself. 

Wanting to be an ambassador of Good Will Toward Bodies, I'm trying to find the courage to speak up when I hear my friends talk about their frustrations with workout routines or diets "not working." Whenever possible I try to say, "You look wonderful as you are. If you're doing everything right and this is what you weigh, maybe this is what you should weigh." And I mean it. I really do think that almost everyone I meet is a beautiful person. I really don't believe that unhealthy attitudes or practices are going to result in health even if they result in weight loss. It hurts my heart to hear women with luscious, curvy bodies, or sturdy, narrow bodies, complain about those bodies. It makes me angry to realize that they would probably feel perfectly normal and at peace with those bodies -- neither too admiring nor too condemning -- if they did not have a culture constantly screaming at them about how ugly they are.

Have you ever stopped to consider how much our self-worth, as women, is tied to body modification? The project of a woman's body is her primary occupation. At any one time we should, as women, be on a diet. Or be trying one workout routine or another. Or "cleansing." Or trying to stay away from caffeine or sugar or saturated fat. Or targeting our "problem areas." Or using some product made from the emulsified aborted fetuses of the red-bellied lemur to stop the "subtle signs of aging."

If left to our own devices, with no audience, with no public body ready to dismiss our bodies as repulsive and threatening to all insurance carriers, almost all women would follow the dictates of Health At Every Size without even thinking about it. Unfortunately, a woman's body is a public project, not a private one.

I can't tell you how badly I want to move from theoretically accepting to truly embracing. I'd love to appreciate my own body as much as I do my friends', but I'd settle for just not loathing it so absolutely. In a culture where it's not only typical but practically mandatory that women hate their bodies, it's a radical act to be comfortable in one's skin, to jump off the modification train and say, "Nahhh.... this is far enough."

If ever a woman dares to do this she is accused of giving up. Letting herself go. Committing to imperfection, and not the mild imperfection of bony elbows or ugly toes but the critical and fundamental offense of a body out of bounds. A body at rest.

Here's the truth: Eating normally and moving naturally, I may never weigh less than I do today. I may never wear a smaller size. I may never know what it's like to be given a gold star for beauty. And I'm tried of putting my life on hold until my body is more acceptable to strangers. 

My weight hasn't budged over the past ten years, but my health is very different. Ten years ago I caught every cold and cough that came my way. Now I almost never get sick. Three years ago, my digestion was so bad I preferred not to eat, ever. Now I almost never have digestive problems. Five years ago, I needed days or even weeks to recover from exercise. Now I do a little something every single day, and sometimes I do big things, and I feel strong and sure in my movement. I sleep better (when Tuna isn't shoving his cold, wet nose down the back of my shirt). I feel full after meals. And I laugh a lot. I used to be embarrassed about this, but to hell with that.

I am healthy for the first time in my whole life. And yet I'm supposed to concern myself with what other people think of the shape of my body?

Fuck that. 

If I can't do it for myself, I owe it to this girl to be better than that.

And now, a challenge for you. 

I rarely ask anything of my readers except patience with my long, convoluted essays. But now I'd like to deliver a challenge. If you have resonated with anything I've said here, spread the word. Post on your blog about your own "body project." If you don't have a blog (or if you are very shy), talk about it with a friend, or with your partner, or with your child (young girls often feel this pressure before they hit preschool). And if you feel inspired to think differently, to even try to think differently, post about that, too.

And one more thing. One day this week, find a female friend and tell her that she is good enough just as she is, regardless of whether she loses one single pound. Remember that most women are engaged, on one level or another, in a body modification project, with no end in sight.

We could all use a little relief.

weekend link love

My first Link Love feature! I won't do this more than once or twice a month, but the weekend seems like a good time to point out some interesting reads.

First, I just want to make the briefest of comments on the Paula Deen hullabaloo. If you haven't heard, celebrity chef Paula Deen has gone public about her diagnosis of Type II diabetes. And people are pissed. I'm more disgusted by Deen's opportunistic corporate partnership, but that's just me. I think it's all very silly, but if you take a step back this situation is illustrative of where we are in terms of politically-correct nutrition.

I checked out The Southern Cooking Bible from the library just last month, after hearing her interview on NPR. I’ve never seen her show (does she have a show?), but I love cookbooks of all stripes. Butter and meat could be found in her book, but what dominated were the desserts. Holy shit, the desserts! They comprised half of the book in several different chapters -- candies, cakes, cookies, pies, and so forth. Her cakes were almost invariably triple-layered and the frosting would contain many CUPS of sugar.

I counted up the sugar for one cake, and between the cakes themselves, the frosting, and the filling, there were seven cups of sugar. In one recipe.

Even though I eat lots of meat, lots of eggs, and lots of fat overall, I couldn't find many recipes in her book that would fit within my diet. That says something, I think. Despite her reputation as "the Butter Queen" (one article said she might as well have announced her diagnosis with a "fried stick of butter in her mouth"), most of Paula Deen's recipes are grain-based. Even meats are often coated in flour and fried in refined unsaturated oils. One of her fudge recipes includes "processed cheese product" and two pounds of sugar.

So to say that she has diabetes now because of the occasional tablespoon of butter that she uses for her collard greens is to blatantly ignore what truly comprises the vast majority of her recipes, and indeed the diet of most U.S. Americans. It ain't butter, friends.

(That wasn't such a brief comment, I guess.)

In related news, maybe you should be eating more cholesterol, not less. And forget dieting while you're at it. If you want to do something good for your health, why not take your exercise routine outside courtesy of the biophilia hypothesis?

I love all things NorCal-themed, especially if they contain tequila. And I was happy to find this tutorial for pressure-canning homemade broth, since I have no room in my freezer and plan to acquire a pressure-canner soon.

For inspiration, check out these teachers who decided to work for free post-budget cut, this campaign against rape, and this town that aims to be entirely food-sufficient in seven years. (This might help!)

And remember that yoga shouldn't hurt.

Music and books are not things I get to share very much 'round these parts, but this seems like as good a place as any. Right now I'm reading The Fat Studies Reader, The Abstinence Teacher, and Wisdom of the Bees: Principles for Biodynamic Beekeeping, and listening to Ray LaMontagne, Metric, The Crux, and Junip. Any suggestions?

Have a wonderful weekend!

choosing life

I'll never forget the first cabbage I grew.

Jeremy and I were living in an ugly purple house in Provo, Utah, the first house we rented after getting married. The kitchen was a cramped whitewashed cubbyhole and I never once used the oven. We were too poor to fill the compartmentalized living room with more than a single couch. The backyard housed several apricot trees and untended grapevines. I spent several days ripping old vines out of the fence to restore the grapes, and we pruned the apricots, knowing nothing of what we were doing but still allowing new growth for the first time in years.

(Several months later our landlady stopped by and stripped every last apricot from those trees. I've never quite forgiven her for it.)

The backyard also contained three raised beds that were filled with that infamously rocky Utah soil. If you ever find yourself pulling rocks out of a garden bed in Utah your neighbors will probably ask you to let them know when you reach China. It's considered a great joke. If the rocks are not enough to make you scream, there's always the scourge of morning glory. I spent most of my time in the garden pulling out those vines. I envisioned a hulking alien knot of bindweed lurking in the city's sewage pipes, dispensing its daughter vines into the soil above, malevolently intent upon consuming the city.

In that knotted salty soil I sunk my first roots – carrots and potatoes, squash and cucumbers, cherry tomatoes and strawberries. Then I got pregnant and spent most of my time sleeping in the impossibly hot, impossibly white bedroom upstairs. Some of the plants thrived despite my lack of attention. The strawberries died, the carrot seeds blew away, but we were overwhelmed by baby potatoes and the tomatoes bore more fruit than I could ever possibly use. A month before our landlady broke our lease so her son could have the house, the cabbages looked well enough to eat.

I don't think I'd ever eaten cabbage before. I wasn't sure what to do with it. Buying those starts was a case of my eyes being bigger than my stomach, because I didn't know anything about gardening. My only experience with plants was that bean-sprout-in-a-paper-cup experiment in second grade. I just wanted to grow something, make a new life out of anything. The garden and my pregnancy sprouted from the same soil – a tentative, immature, but hopeful love of life, the first and most honest love I ever knew. Pulling that cabbage out of the ground – which required quite a bit of muscle – felt like the fruition of something greater than a seed.

I can close my eyes and be taken back to that moment in an instant. It was evening, the bugs were in full force, and when the plant came out of the ground its green scent filled the air. I was absurdly proud of myself, but I must have looked bizarre, with my small baby bump and this huge plant with its huge roots hanging down and my hands covered in dirt and a big sloppy grin on my face. I carried the cabbage over to the picnic table and Jeremy began navigating the soil and leaves the size of plates with a big knife, trying to cut away the head of cabbage so we could do something with it. Eat it, I guess.

Finally he released the cabbage head and then he sliced it in half and how can I describe the awe I felt in that moment? I had very little to do with that cabbage's existence – someone else planted and fed the seed, I just stuck it in the ground and watered it when I remembered, which wasn't that often. It probably wasn't the finest specimen of cabbage, but it seemed that way to me.

I don't remember exactly how we ate that cabbage. It's possible that we didn't even finish it. But I do remember the flavor, and the feeling that a heart of significance was being revealed to me.

As a child I kept common garden snails as pets, housing them in 2-liter Coke bottles with the labels peeled off, feeding them lovingly with greens and soil and wiping away the condensation so I could watch their strange, laborious movements. On the flipside, I stored dead birds in an empty shoebox. Okay, so maybe I was a weird kid. I can't imagine what my parents thought when they found them. I used to gently cradle their frail, weightless bodies, poring over the hollow wing bones, peering inside the skull. I think that on some subconscious level I was trying to understand the line between the living and the dead.

In the trajectory of my life I've often been confused by that line, and uncertain of which side I wanted to be on. I grew up in a lifeless place, surrounded by the blasted, burned-out, paved-over remains of living systems and people who struggled to survive without a thought for where they resided in relation to that line. My childhood was characterized by violence, boredom, and helplessness, and the few positive memories I have always include some green living thing, or green living space, or the rare green living person who showed me there was another way to be in the world.

I want to be that person, living in that place, growing those things. Every time I plant a seed I am reaffirming that hope... and that choice. Life. 

almondventures (recipe: banana walnut bread)

Back in November I saw a recipe for Paleo Pumpkin Bread from Elana's Pantry. I've been reading Elana's blog for years, but I've taken a special interest in it since she's not using much agave nectar and leans toward an ancestral diet now. She uses almond flour in most, if not all of her baking, but almond flour runs about $10 a pound. Gluten-free baking is so temperamental and throwing away several dollars' worth of almonds would really hurt.

For the most part, I've just learned to live without bread. I've written before, many times, about how much I hate culinary mimicry. I've just been wrecked by too many years of tofu “scramble” and rice “cheese” and gluten “sausage” and other “foods” bracketed by “quotations marks.” But I have to say, every now and then, I do get the craving. And since this bread required only one cup of almond flour, it seemed a simple thing to try.

I was skeptical, and kept my expectations low, so I was pleasantly surprised. I couldn't believe how perfect the bread looked when it came out of the oven. I took a bunch of pictures and then joked that it would probably taste like sawdust. But the flavor was excellent, too. It was a bit soft because it lacked the bite of gluten, but that was no loss.

This bit of inspiration kicked off a veritable glut of almond flour experimentation. In the end I'd made two kinds of banana bread, a fig-walnut bread, a cranberry-orange bread, and a cornbread for chili. All of them turned out beautifully, and thus did almond flour earn a permanent position on my grocery list.

This is one of the first breads I tried. I don't buy bananas very often because we have so many local fruits available, but we did have a few and they were turning brown and what else do you do with brown bananas but make banana bread? Which I haven't eaten in years, by the way. 

I want to make a special point about the pan I used for this bread. I bought two of these mini-loaf pans (5 3/4" x 3") to make Elana's bread, and because they worked so well I've been reluctant to try a full-size loaf pan with this kind of bread. The pans are not expensive and I've seen them at several regular grocery stores. They make a cute, small loaf that is ideal for gift-giving as well as avoiding a bread binge. You can get 6-8 small slices of bread that are the perfect size for serving with tea or for a light dessert.

If you have a hard time stopping once you start eating bread (I do!), this loaf pan will be perfect for you. Even if you have absolutely no self-control and eat the entire loaf to yourself, you'll just be having a cup of nuts with some fruit and eggs. Not a bad snack! 

Banana Walnut Bread

1 c. almond flour

1/4 t. salt

1/2 t. non-aluminum baking powder

1 T. cinnamon

3 pastured eggs, beaten

1/2 c. banana, mashed (about 2 small bananas)

1 T. honey, warm

1/2 c. walnuts, chopped

for garnish:

1/4 c. walnuts, chopped

2 T. turbinado sugar

Preheat the oven to 350F. Thoroughly grease a petite loaf pan ( 5 3/4" x 3") with butter and set aside.

Combine the flour, salt, baking powder, and cinnamon in a large bowl.

In another bowl, stir the banana into the beaten eggs. Stir in the honey and fold the flour mixture into the wet ingredients. Fold in the nuts.

Spoon the batter into the greased loaf pan. The batter will come almost all the way up to the top. Spread the garnish nuts on top and sprinkle with sugar. Bake at 350F for about 40 minutes, until a tester comes out clean.

Let the bread stand in the pan for about 5 minutes, then gently loosen the sides and place the bread on a cutting board for slicing. Enjoy!

This recipe has been shared on Fight Back Friday @ Food Renegade.

relentless

(This post is a part of the Patchwork Living Bee at Attainable Sustainable.)

"I was a perfect parent before I had children." That's my friend Jen's joke. It's truer than true, isn't it? I know other parents know what I mean.

I was definitely going to be a perfect parent. I had it all figured out. I had it all planned out.

Needless to say, it didn't work out. Most days I have to settle for good-enough. Some days I have to live with less. If you asked me now, I'd say that my parenting philosophy is not attachment or love & logic or continuum theory or tough love. I'd say that it's whatever works. I'd say that it changes every day. Maybe I'd say, "What philosophy?" Maybe I'd just laugh.

But I didn't quite learn my lesson. I was going to be a perfect farmer, too. I'd never lose an animal to disease or predators or misadventure. The coop would always be clean. The garden would always be beautiful. The grounds would always be organized.

Best-laid plans. Ideology. These are smashed to bits by chickens and children alike.

So I am quickly becoming a "whatever works" farmer. That's what you have to be when a bobcat steals your chickens right in front of you.  

Twice.

The first time, I was just inside the front door when I heard a commotion from the chickens. I walked out to the deck just in time to see a dark shape hauling off a hen along the creek. To me, it looked like a small dog. Jeremy walked Tuna down the creek and found the pile of bloody feathers. No sign of the predator.

The second time was just a few hours later. Our friends Alex and Jen were visiting with their two kids. That makes eight humans and one canine watching as that bold bobcat, apparently unsatisfied by the meager flesh of a juvenile Auracana, snatched one of the biggest Delawares and ran off with him. This time I got a good look at her. And I was truly shocked. Thousands of acres of wild game and she's got to brave humans and dogs and electric fences to steal a skinny chicken?

Of course, this was my fear. Remember?

Inside the electric fence, the birds can range happily on grass and insects and grubs. Outside the electric fence, they're fair game. I lost two chickens to one predator in one day. So I had to change direction.

I bought some poultry netting and strung it up along the inside of the fence. Now my purely pastured chickens are ranging less than freely. Undoubtedly they would prefer to have unlimited space, but I must assume they would also prefer to keep their heads attached to their bodies and their guts safely contained on the inside.

The added fencing did not deter that bobcat. She is relentless. She still comes by several times a day. She appears, the chickens cluck and babble with fear, she can't breach the fence, she leaves in frustration. She comes by first thing in the morning and in the middle of the night. She won't stop. Maybe she's confused about why her easy meal became so complicated.

The electric fence, with its attached netting, is only about four feet high. When she thinks to jump it, it's all over.

I don't know what else to do. We can't afford to put up a solid 12-foot fence, as is recommended by our local animal control agency. Maybe we'll just have to extend the electric wire that high and hope for the best.



More basic to a chicken than feathers or a beak is its ecological position as a prey animal. Out here, in the wild, keeping a chicken alive is to fight against its most basic nature.

When a bobcat steals a sweet Auracana and rips her head off, she's not thinking, "Is this moral? Is this ethical? Is this cruel?" She's not thinking, "Am I making her suffer? Am I moving fast enough? Is her species going to survive?" Humans, with our self-consciousness, think this way. We want an animal to be healthy and happy and to die quickly without fear or much pain. At least on the intimate scale, we try to offer our prey mercy.

"If you’ve been present at many deaths, you know 'painless' is not a word that can often be truthfully applied. 'Merciful' is generally the best we can do.

"Painlessness is — in death as in life — a fantasy.

"Mercy, on the other hand, is within our reach. Perhaps our desire to grant mercy gives us the truest logic behind the word 'humaneness.' It’s the word that describes humanity’s attempts to be merciful, to take into account the feelings of other living creatures and to spare them suffering, whenever possible."

My frustration with this bobcat makes me wonder what, exactly, I am in this scenario. Am I a competing predator, annoyed because another keeps stealing my food? Am I a loving protector of my chickens, wanting to spare them a terrified death? 

At one time, I denied that I could be a predator. The word carried an ethical weight I was not willing to accept. I genuinely considered myself a voluntary herbivore, never mind my evolutionary heritage, or what my bones and blood really needed, and eventually screamed to have. 

Now I think, how silly I was to consider predation a moral issue. This was brought home to me by those ardent vegan, cited by Lierre Keith in The Vegetarian Myth, who wanted to draw a line down the Serengeti, dividing predator from prey.

"Killing is wrong and no animals should ever have to die, so the big cats and wild canines would go on one side, while the wildebeests and zebras would live on the other. He knew the carnivores would be okay because they didn’t need to be carnivores. That was a lie the meat industry told. He’d seen his dog eat grass: therefore, dogs could live on grass.

"No one objected. In fact, others chimed in. My cat eats grass, too, one woman added, all enthusiasm. So does mine! someone else posted. Everyone agreed that fencing was the solution to animal death....

"....[But] on the carnivore side of the fence, starvation will take every animal. Some will last longer than others, and those some will end their days as cannibals. The scavengers will have a Fat Tuesday party, but when the bones are picked clean, they’ll starve as well. The graveyard won’t end there. Without grazers to eat the grass, the land will eventually turn to desert. 

"Why? Because without grazers to literally level the playing field, the perennial plants mature, and shade out the basal growth point at the plant’s base. In a brittle environment like the Serengeti, decay is mostly physical (weathering) and chemical (oxidative), not bacterial and biological as in a moist environment. In fact, the ruminants take over most of the biological functions of soil by digesting the cellulose and returning the nutrients, once again available, in the form of urine and feces.

"But without ruminants, the plant matter will pile up, reducing growth, and begin killing the plants. The bare earth is now exposed to wind, sun, and rain, the minerals leech away, and the soil structure is destroyed. In our attempt to save animals, we’ve killed everything.

"On the ruminant side of the fence, the wildebeests and friends will reproduce as effectively as ever. But without the check of predators, there will quickly be more grazers than grass. The animals will outstrip their food source, eat the plants down to the ground, and then starve to death, leaving behind a seriously degraded landscape.

"The lesson here is obvious, though it is profound enough to inspire a religion: we need to be eaten as much as we need to eat. The grazers need their daily cellulose, but the grass also needs the animals. It needs the manure, with its nitrogen, minerals, and bacteria; it needs the mechanical check of grazing activity; and it needs the resources stored in animal bodies and freed up by degraders when animals die.

"The grass and the grazers need each other as much as predators and prey. These are not one-way relationships, not arrangements of dominance and subordination. We aren’t exploiting each other by eating. We are only taking turns."

Every natural thing, including death, serves life. This is my religion. This is why I'm confused by the concept of physical resurrection, or even spiritual reincarnation. My body and indeed my soul belong here. They don't even belong to me. They belong to the Earth. I'm just borrowing this configuration of molecules. In a very short while, they'll collapse and something else will sprout from that decay. Is that beautiful or what?

Okay, enough philosophizing. I don't have a point, just meandering thoughts.

For now, we're watching and waiting with the bobcat. I'm hopeful that after being shocked a few times she'll be dissuaded from coming around again. There's got to be easier prey out there.

In other chicken news... See this boy?

 

That's right, he's a boy. We weren't supposed to get any males, except for the Delawares that we're raising for meat, but we did. At least one, maybe two. And several of our Delawares are looking like females, which will help to replace the layers lost to predation.

I'm thinking of calling him Jemaine, so when I catch him gettin' down with one of the ladies I can sing "Business Time".

That's right, baby. With me you only need two minutes, 'cause I'm so INTENSE.

with the flip of a switch

Sometimes I feel impossibly overwhelmed by all that must be done to develop our small farm, and also to make our cabin more hospitable. I won't put that ever-changing, ever-growing list here, because I'm trying to focus on what we've done already, which is substantial. 

When we moved in, six months ago, this place had no electricity, no insulation, no refrigeration, and no hot water. It was impossibly dusty and dirty. The propane line was sketchy, so even after Jeremy got the on-demand water heater working, we didn't often have hot water, and we'd go stretches of hours or days without being able to cook anything indoors. 

Sometimes I've wondered if we can survive here. My parents talk about this place like it's a temporary sacrifice so we can save money and move into a "normal" house. I've been trying to drop hints that we hope to live here for many years, and that's why we're working so hard to make it manageable.

We have a refrigerator now (remember when I just couldn't take the cooler anymore?). We have insulation, made from recycled blue jeans, which will soon be plastered so we'll have "real" walls. And as of Sunday, we have solar power.

When I've mentioned getting solar panels, people who don't live here are generally skeptical. Because I live in Northern California, they believe that most of our days must be foggy or overcast, if not outright rainy. But this is inland Mendocino, not Humboldt. Most of our days are sunny, and solar power is going to work just fine.

With the solar we can run lights, charge our laptop, and use low-power appliances without having to use the generator. On overcast days when the battery runs dry, we can charge the system using the generator.

Our friend Alex installed the solar on Sunday. Before he left, he flipped on our lamps to show us that the batteries were already charged. It was the first time I've seen light in our cabin without having a screaming monster sucking up petroleum on the back deck. It was amazing. I almost cried.

Maybe we should all be so easily impressed. 

We couldn't have done any of this by ourselves. Most of what we've done to clean up this place and make it sustainable has come about through the support of our friends, and sometimes outright gifts. It makes me wonder, what am I giving? How am I being generous to others, and helping others to fulfill their dreams, and letting them know that I deeply respect and value them?

Am I letting our friends know how completely HOME they have made this place for me?

My thoughts circle around this mantra: What can I give...?

This is a better thing to be thinking than, “Why isn't the effing hot water working again?”

Chicken Tender is officially solar-powered. Good morning.