From Word To Word

I have had something of a rough week.  I am not complaining, only commenting.  I pride myself on not complaining about these things, and I was under the impression that I was coping fairly well, that is, until my wife took the spoon away from me in the middle of feeding my youngest child and told me to go pick strawberries.

Now, to clarify her reasoning, I should explain that picking strawberries is something like therapy for me.  It is not that I like to eat strawberries so much, though I do like a few now and again.  It is more what strawberries represent to me. They are the first fresh produce of the year, the first food that I can pick and eat from my garden after a whole winter of barrenness and a whole spring of growth.  They are also the first preserves of the year, the first jams and sauces, the first canning.  They mean the beginning of a whole summer and a whole autumn of harvesting, eating, cooking, preparing, and preserving.

So, I spent an hour picking strawberries, in the wetness left by this afternoon’s rain, and I realized exactly how stressed I had been at exactly the same moment as I realized how much less stressed I was rapidly becoming, and I ate a few, and I picked several baskets full, and my fingers were stained red, and I smelled summer.

I enjoyed Dave Humphrey’s most recent post on reading Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows to his daughters. Perhaps it is only one of our strange synchronicities, but I identify very strongly with him when he puts himself in the place of Mole, gliding ever further down a stream that he has never seen before, putting himself completely in the hands of his new friend Rat. I have imagined myself in Mole’s place also, as I have imagined myself in the place of Rat and Badger, though never in the place of Toad, whose encounters with the human world always seem to disrupt the unity of the novel for me. There is a quality to these characters that causes me to identify with them and with their world.

I especially appreciated the notice that Dave takes of the hospitality shown by Badger to Rat and Mole when they become lost and beset by weasels in the woods. I have already made mention, in a previous post on open homes, of an earlier episode in which Rat provides hospitality to Mole, but Dave’s reflection reminds me of the other places where Grahame’s story is deeply about hospitality and friendship, the home and the hearth, the table and the meal. There is something beautiful about this world that Grahame creates, something that reaches its fullness in the scene where the nature god appears during the search for the lost otter pup. I love this story, and I envy Dave the few years headstart he has in sharing it with his children.

I need to preface this post by saying that cheese is something of a religion in my family. My paternal grandfather was a dairy farmer. My father is a professor of food science specializing in dairy and in cheese making. I was weaned on yoghurt and buttermilk and cheese, most of it made by students, much of it made with questionable quality, some of it made to be intentionally odd, either coloured green or pink or flavoured with strange spices. When I was young, we made our own yoghurt. We hung around the university labs, stealing cheese curds and watching milk be pasteurized. We wandered through the rooms where the cheese was aged, all filled with the singular smell of mould and ripening cheese. Even today, we treat cheese like some people treat wine or scotch. Cheese is a passion.

So, this past weekend, when my family attended my step-brother’s wedding in Toronto, it should come as no surprise that we gathered early and long around the cheese platters, tasting what there was to taste. Most of it was good, if unspectacular, but there was one cheese that was in my opinion both good and spectacular. It was a gouda, but unlike most of the Dutch goudas I have eaten, which are firm with a nutty kind of taste, this gouda was textured much more like a crumbly old chedder, and its nuttiness had the intensity of an old chedder’s flavour as well. When I saw it on the plate, I assumed it was a gouda, After I had eaten it, I actually had to ask my father to confirm what it was, so different was it in both texture and flavour from what I was expecting.

Later, I located the label from one of the trays. It was indeed a gouda, and the only gouda that is made in Ontario, at Thunder Oak Cheese Farm near Thunder Bay. Apparently it is possible to go there, have a coffee, and watch them make the cheese on certain days of the week. I will certainly do so if I am ever that far North, but for the time being, I will have to content myself by ordering their gouda from afar.

As of today, I have almost finished ripping out the jungle that the previous owners of our house had allowed to grow where you might expect a garden to be. Last fall, I cut down something like forty treesl, not counting the hundreds of little suckers that I pulled out by hand. I removed a dumpster full of broken cement slabs, bits of metal grating, dilapidated fencing, and other random garbage, like several pounds of engine grease, cat litter, oil filters, and bags of horrifyingly unidentifiable substances. I also planted garlic, to give me hope that I would be able to plant something again someday.

This spring, I dug out the roots of all those trees I had cut down. I also sent more than twenty brown yard waste bags and two wagons of brush to the recycling facility. Only a few hours ago, a woman who had responded to our internet ad came and removed the five trees that were small enough and healthy enough to be transplanted but had no place in our yard. I have only two stumps remaining. Then I will be able to plant things rather than tear them out.

That is, I have two stumps remaining and more gout weed than anyone should have to see in a lifetime. Those of you who are unfamiliar with gout weed should pray that you remain so blessed. Though it is not an entirely unattractive plant, just a leafy green groundcover, it is incredibly fast growing, incredibly aggressive, and incredibly difficult to remove. Organic gardening sites do offer some methods for eliminating it, but they are all virtually impossible on a scale as large as my yard, and none of them offer any sort of guarantee of success. A neighbour of mine, who happens to do professional landscaping, looked at the problem and told me, “Luke, I hardly ever recommend herbicide, but I am recommending herbicide, several applications.”

This puts me in an ethical predicament, because it puts into conflict two ethical principles about which I feel very strongly: one, that gardening should be organic, for reasons having to do with the environment, with sustainability, with health, and with the maintenance of traditional skills; and two, that a garden should be edible as well as ornamental, for many of the same reasons. However, it appears that unless I use chemical means, I will not be able to eliminate the gout weed, and if I cannot eliminate the gout weed, it will choke out any of the edible plants that I introduce. I do not like either of my choices.

Now, because this is a singular and unique case, and because I can see no other way to have a productive garden, and also because this neighbour of mine had offered to apply the chemicles in exchange for a case of beer, I have decided to spray the gout weed, but I am unhappy with this neccessity, as I always am when following one ethical principle necessitates that I break another. Yet, this seems to happen far more often than not. I am almost prepared to say that every ethical choice requires this kind of decision, that it requires a choice, not only between what is ethical and what is unethical, but between two or more ethical principles. The choice I make is therefore always wrong, will always be wrong, and yet I am required to make it nevertheless. In this sense, living ethically may simply have to do with making these choices even as we recognize the impossibility of making them rightly, or, put differently, it may have to do, not with the rightness of the choice we make, which will always escape us in any case, but with our concern for the rightness of the choice and the will to make this choice despite its impossibility.

This past Saturday was Dinner and a Doc night again. We ate homemade carrot soup and watched Errol Morris’ Fog of War, which made a good combination in my estimation, since each reminded me of truths that I have a tendency to forget.

The soup’s story began longer ago than you might expect. Last year at about this time, my mother-in-law continued a tradition of her late husband’s by planting a substantial vegetable garden. She planted tomatoes for me to sauce, potatoes for me to store, strawberries for me to jam, and some other things, including a few carrots. Now, to be clear, when I say that she planted a few carrots, I mean merely that she planted more carrots than any single woman with a mostly absent son could have reasonably hoped to eat in a decade. She had bushels of carrots. She had far more carrots than she could dig or I could process. Fortunately, a friend mentioned that she could cover the undug carrots with some leaves and the carrots would stay fresh until the spring. So, we had a reprieve of several months, but for the past week or so I have once again been drowning in orange vegetables that neither of my sons will even eat.

I added the tops to stock until I had emptied my freezer of soup bones. I froze more bags of sliced carrots than I want to contemplate. I put carrots in one form or another on the menu three times last week. I made six different carrot soups to put in the freezer, and I brought a massive pot of my favourite soup to this month’s Dinner and a Doc. The recipe comes originally from one of the Moosewood cookbooks, its primary flavours being mint and yoghurt. Speaking only for myself, it was one of the best tasting soups that I have ever had, though its consistency could perhaps have been better.

It was also a reminder, albeit an ironic one, considering that the carrots were not exactly in season, of a truth that I always seem to be forgetting and relearning: seasonal ingredients, because of how suddenly they are harvested and how quickly they need to be used, force me to cook creatively and to discover new and interesting ways to prepare food. I had never realized what could be made with a carrot until this past week, and I have had similar realizations with everything from strawberries to garlic scapes to kale over the years. Seasonal ingredients force a kind of seasonal preparation that almost disappears with supermarket shopping, where almost everything is available all the time, and this seasonal preparation fosters culinary creativity and a connection to the seasons in a way grocery store produce does not. This is the truth that the carrot soup recalled to me.

The truth that the film recalled to me also begins some time ago. When I was first designing Documenting Justice, the documentary course that I teach, I had been told of a particularly relevant film, Seeing is Believing by Peter Wintonick. The film explores the use of the camera, particularly the handicam, as a tool or as a weapon in situations of social injustice. While it does draw attention to the problems inherent in the assumption that we can believe the filmed images that we see, its central thesis is essentially that the visual images produced by the video camera do inspire belief in a way that make handicams a powerful weapon. To phrase this thesis in a way that the film would not, the handicam is effective as a tool or a weapon precisely because most people are niave enough to believe in what they see.

I few months later I saw Fog of War for the first time. I enjoyed it very much, and it remains one of my favourite films, even through what was my fourth or fifth viewing on Saturday night. The film is really an extended interview with Robert S. McNamara, and it is structured around a series of lessons that he draws from his tenure as the United States Secretary of Defence during the cold war and the first years of the Vietnam War. What struck me on my first viewing and again on my fifth was one of those lessons: it reads, “Sometimes both seeing and believing are wrong.” This seems a simple and obvious statement, but I seem always to be forgetting it.

I keep forgetting McNamara’s lesson for at least two reasons: first, because the niave view, that I can actually believe what I see, is the dominant assumption of my culture and its media; and second, because the more critical and cynical view, that I see only what I want to believe, is the dominant assumption of most critical discourses in my culture and its media. Yet, what McNamara recognizes, and what I seem to be continually relearning, is that, while seeing and believing may function together to reinforce a particular perception of the world, both may be wrong. I would even argue that both are always wrong, in every case, to one degree or another. No amount of seeing, whether through the gaze of the camera or the data of a scientific instrument, and no amount of believing, whether in the goodness of humanity or the omnipotence of God, will suffice to guarantee the rightness or truth of anything.

This does not mean, at least to me, that we cannot know rightly and truthfully. It merely means that we can have no guarantee of this, and that both our seeing and our believing need to be characterized by a fundamental humility. I need to be humble in this sense, not provisionally, not because I have yet to find what will guarantee my seeing and believing, but absolutely, because I recognize that I will never be able to find this kind of guarantee. Though I am sure that McNamara did not mean to say quite this, it is nevertheless the truth of which Fog of War reminds me each time I see it.

Between the reading that I am doing in preparation for my courses and for my various conversations, I have been finding spaces to read a fantastic little book by Bill Buford called Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany (Anchor Canada, 2007). The book is much what the subtitle advertizes it to be, and it is written with the same sense of humour that the subtitle advertizes also. What appeals to me most about the book, however, is Buford’s obvious passion for food, bordering on obsession, as he recognizes himself at one point in the narrative. It is among my most firmly held beliefs that food, whether in the garden or in the kitchen or on the table, should be approached with a kind of fierce frivolity. Food should be both serious and celebratory, simultaneously. Buford’s book has this sense about it.

At one point, relatively late in the book, after Buford has already narrated his experiences in one of New York’s most renowned Italian kitchens, in one of Italy’s most obscure pasta restaurants, and in one of the world’s most famous butcher shops, he pauses to reflect on how his understanding of food has changed. He notes that what he keeps finding in good food is a disregard for commercial success, an insistent respect for tradition, a determination to do things with the hands: a collection of qualities that he describes as “smallness”. He contrasts the idea of smallness explicitly to that of slowness, the approach to food advocated by the slow movement, not because he necessarily disagrees with the principles of the slow movement, but because he finds the metaphor of slowness inadequate in some ways. He notes, with ample justification, that some very good foods are prepared very quickly, and suggests that smallness perhaps describes better the ideal approach to food.

I too have always been dissatisfied with the metaphor of slowness to describe a proper approach to food, but Buford’s idea of smallness is not much better to me, since, as his own narrative describes on several occasions, good food is sometimes made on a grand scale. Buford’s book does provide, however, a criterion for good food that is perhaps more satisfactory than either smallness or slowness. Relatively early in the book, he relates how many of those working with him in the Italian restaurant would talk about food that is “made with love.” This, to me, is the place where we should begin to talk about good food. Food made with love, a love both for the food itself and for the people who will eat it, does indeed describe well what distinguishes what is produced in a fast food restaurant or a factory farm from what is prepared in the home table and in the artisan shop. It is this love that appreciates food at the proper speed, whether slow or fast, food in the proper proportion, whether small or large, and food in the proper style, whether traditional or innovative. It is this love that insists on only the best.

We need to teach people, not to eat small for the sake of smallness or to eat slowly for the sake of slowness, though smallness and slowness might be a result of this teaching. We need to teach people to love their food enough to have it grown and raised well, to have it cooked and prepared well, to have it eaten and appreciated fully. I am an advocate of this kind of love.

The kitchen and the table are the condition for a certain philosophy, not the condition for all philosophy, of course, for there is much philosophy conducted elsewhere; and not the condition even for a particular aspect of philosophy, for the philosophy of the kitchen is not restricted in this way; but the condition for a philosophy that proceeds at a certain pace and with a certain rhythm. The philosophy that occurs in this way, between those who are cooking and eating together, takes on the rhythms of the meal. It gives to each subject it encounters the time and the pace that it requires, whether it be the periodic rising and kneading of a bread, or the continual simmering of a reduction, or the focused heat of a grill, and it allows all of these things to happen simultaneously, one layered upon the other, informing each other like the mingling scents of different dishes. Philosophy conducted in this way is held by the teeth, savoured on the tongue, inhaled by the nostrils.

This philosophy of the table does not, however, occur of its own accord. Like a good meal, a space and time has to be made for it, not only in the banal sense of holding a place open in my schedule or making sure there is a space available, but in the much more profound sense that I need to create, to fashion, to shape the space and the time to do a meal justice, to do a conversation justice. It is not a matter of saying, “I can squeeze you in for an hour between this previous thing and this later thing,” because this way of making time always assumes that the meal and the conversation will be made to fit the time that I allot for it. Rather, it is a matter of saying, “I will make myself available for however long that this meal and this conversation requires, and I will do what is required to do it justice,” because this way of making time is willing to take its time, to pass its time, to be of its time.

For example, I spent this past Saturday evening at Dave Humphrey’s house. His wife and daughters were vacationing. My wife and sons had released me for the night. True to our practice, we had little in the way of recipes. We had decided on some ingredients in advance: We had steaks from locally raised, hormone free, field grazed beef, t-bones, with beautiful large sirloins. I prepared a wet, garlic rub for them. Dave began a reduction to accompany them on the plate. We had thick, slab-like bacon, also locally raised and hormone free. We fried and cut it for the vegetables and potatoes. We added some simple spices to the drippings and poured them over hasselbacked potatoes. We had shrimp. We sauted them in the remaining bacon drippings and mixed them with the vegetables. We had a beautiful olive bread. We ate until we could not even stomach the thought of the grilled mango cheesecake that Dave had prepared for dessert, to my lasting regret.

I dwell on this because we also dwelt on it. We began cooking at 3:30 in the afternoon, and we finished eating sometime late in the evening. We opened our first bottle of wine shortly after I arrived, and we finished the last one when it was late enough that we had long since stopped looking at the clock. Among those in between was a particularly nice Bordeaux that we could not make linger nearly long enough. It flowed through the meal like the theme of a poem or a song. We followed where it meandered.

In this time and space that we had prepared, our conversation, the philosophy of the kitchen, also meandered according to its own theme and its own gait. It began by circling around ideas of media and spectrality, because this is what I have been reading lately and because this relates to Dave’s occupation. It brushed often against questions of pedagogy. It wove its way through the practice of reading and writing in various media. It was punctuated repeatedly by the matters of the home, and the table, and the garden, and the meal. In short, it took its time. It allowed its thinking and its speaking the time necessary to do themselves justice. This is the philosophy of the kitchen, not merely a philosophy about how and what the kitchen is, but a philosophy that finds it proper habitation in the rhythms of the home and the meal and the conversation.

The events of this past weekend have reinforced a kind of personal principle that is becoming increasingly important to me, the principle of the open home. Bill and Sharon, friends of ours who have moved to Collingwood, came on Friday evening and stayed the night. The next morning they joined our whole extended family, my wife, my two kids, my mother-in-law, and myself, for our ritual Saturday walk to the Guelph Farmers Market. When we returned home, we had breakfast together and chatted over coffee for several hours. For the latter part of this time we were joined by Steve and Christine, other friends of ours who have moved to Rockwood. We had met them by chance at the market earlier in the morning and invited them over to introduce their sixth child and to meet our second. They knew Bill and Sharon a little and stayed to chat with them for a while also. Then, just as everyone was leaving, Laura, a friend who has moved to Toronto, came by unexpectedly for a few minutes to have some tea and to catch us up with her life. There were a few hours of lull after Laura left, but that evening we hosted several couples and their children for a monthly meal that we have together, each couple taking turns to bring some element of the meal or to host the gathering. The food was good, and the conversation was good also. All of these things together, these comings and goings, sometimes planned and sometimes spontaneous, sometimes overnight and sometimes only for a few minutes, sometimes for a meal and sometimes just for tea but always for food, these passings to and from our house, fulfill the ideal of what I call the open home.

The open home is different from the open house for me in that it is not a specified range of time during which others can come to our place, but a way of living that is always open to having others come, and eat, and talk, and stay, and go. It is an invitation to share our home with us, not necessarily a house that is cleaned and prepared for company, but a home that at any moment may be filled with children’s toys or renovations or jam making. It is an invitation to eat with us, not necessarily a meal that has been specially planned and prepared, but whatever we happen to be eating at the time, whether it be the tea my wife is constantly making or the stew that has been simmering all day or the misshapen cookies that my three year old son has just made. It is an invitation to join with us, not necessarily to sit and be entertained, but to be a part of whatever we happen to be doing, whether going to the market or digging in the garden or cooking a meal.

The open home is one that understands others to be welcome always, not as visitors to be entertained and impressed, though sometimes this is fun also, but to be included in the activities and the rhythms of the home, as the Athelnys include Philip Carey in theirs (Somerset Maugham Of Human Bondage London: Pan Books, 1975) or as rat includes mole in his (Kenneth Grahame The Wind in the Willows Sydney: Rigby Publishers, 1983). It says, “Come and join us. You are always welcome here, just as you are and just as we are. Have a glass of what there is to drink and a bite of what there is to eat. Talk with me as I do what needs to be done today. Oh, and there is a bed for you if you want to stay the night. You are more than welcome to it.”

The open home is not, of course, always able to welcome everyone at every time. It is not possible to be always at home, and there are some matters of the home in which others can not or should not be included, but the open home is a way of living that welcomes the coming of others and asks that others come again, even if they cannot enter now, at this moment, for one reason or another. It is a way of living that always welcomes the arrival of others, even if this arrival cannot be received in this instant. It says, “I am so glad that you came. I am disappointed that we cannot receive you now. Please, come again, whenever you can.”

To live like this is to resist the understanding that a house is primarily a possession, a castle, a sanctuary, something to be held and defended as primarily my own. It is to resist the assumption that others need to be welcome only on my own terms, when I am at my best, when I have had the time to cook and clean and make myself presentable. It is to resist the idea that welcoming others is primarily a matter of entertaining them. It is to affirm that my house is primarily a place where people can be at home.

This does not always look the same from person to person and from moment to moment. Some people have stayed with us for several months, some just for a night. Some have shared a meal with us, some just a cup of tea. Some have joined us in kneading the bread dough, others have just watched from a safe distance. In every case, however, it has been good, not merely with the goodness of pleasure but with the goodness of what is good. Beyond any attempt at a theological or philosophical defence, I feel and know a rightness about a home that is open in this way. When I encounter it, I know it to be true in a way that very little else can be.

In the past few days I have had two almost identical conversations. The first was on Sunday was with a friend of mine named Amy Hersey, who was very excited to learn that I can and dry produce each year. She wanted to know if she could come help me make strawberry jam this spring, because, as she confessed, her mother had never taught her how to do those kinds of things. Then, yesterday, as I was standing in line at the grocery store, I struck up a conversation with a woman ahead of me, who confessed that she bought boxed maccaroni and cheese because she had not the least idea of how to make a cheese sauce from scratch.

These things alarm me, not because everyone needs to make their own jam and their own cheese sauce, though I think everyone should, but because it is indicitive of how much practical knowledge is no longer being passed from one generation to the next. As our society has increasingly emphasised the importance of formal schooling, and as that schooling has become increasingly directed toward producing members of the professional workforce, the other sorts of learning that used to occur in the home and the neighbourood have become neglected. We have become accustomed to purchasing almost all of our products and services, even when these products and services are entirely inferior to what we could make ourselves. We no longer grow or preserve produce; we no longer cook or bake; we no longer work wood; we no longer sew.

The excuse we give, of course, is that we do not have the time to do these things ourselves, and to some extent this is true. Now that I have two children, I no longer bake bread or make pies as often, and I have never been much of a tailor, even if I can do my own mending. But there are some things that I would not give up, the things that are most meaningful to me, like canning and cooking, and it should concern us, it certainly concerns me, that we are so busy that we can do nothing of this sort any longer, that we do these kinds of things so infrequently that our children never learn from us how to do them.