FREE RANGE: FOOD, NATURE, PLACE, AND MORE

Season’s greetings!

Posted on December 25, 2009 by Martin

As we approach the end of the year (and decade), we thought a look back at what we’ve accomplished and a look at what lies ahead for Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing and the Environment might be of interest.

This year was a significant one for us. In 2009 we both turned fifty (or, as Heather put it, celebrated our joint centennial); in addition, we experienced both great personal loss and also tremendous excitement and optimism about Madroño Ranch.

We spent much of the year networking—sort of a new thing for a couple of reclusive nerds like us. In February, we attended the Alliance for Artists Communities’ conference for emerging programs in Charlotte NC. Meeting and talking to Caitlin Strokosch and Russ Smith of the Alliance, and the other attendees, was a galvanizing experience—so many bright, creative people! So many great ideas! So many things to think about!

The Alliance’s annual conference in New Orleans in November was perhaps even more inspiring. Not only did we reconnect with some of the friends we’d made at the Charlotte gathering, we met many more fascinating and brilliant people, some of whose ideas we plan to rip off shamelessly.

But so many questions remain to be answered…. For example, while we highly esteem the visual arts and those who work in them, we’ve been assuming we’d only accept writers as residents at Madroño, on the theory that they require less in the way of infrastructure (i.e., kilns, darkrooms, printing presses, etc.). Now, however, we wonder if we shouldn’t rethink that decision. What if we were to invite, say, sculptors and environmental artists to come out and create place-specific, perhaps ephemeral, works?

And what about size? We’ve agreed that, at least initially, we should restrict ourselves to two or three residents at a time. But should we aspire to more? If so, how many more? Six? Eight? Ten? And how long should they stay? Two weeks? Four weeks? Longer?

The answers to these questions will obviously drive many other basic decisions, such as the center’s physical layout. Our working idea is to provide a central facility with sleeping, cooking/dining, and library facilities, etc., and smaller “satellite” structures (sheds, cabins, pods, whatever) which would serve as secluded places for the residents to work in solitude and quiet.

At first, we assumed we’d build this central facility from scratch, tricking it out with all kinds of cutting-edge off-the-grid technology. Now, however, we’re wondering if, at least initially, we can repurpose the ranch’s existing main house, which is, alas, very much on the grid; doing so would require some structural modifications but would still be significantly cheaper than building from scratch. (Presumably we’d still need to build the satellite workplaces.)

Another fundamental issue to be resolved is what the center’s governance structure should be. A nonprofit? LLC? Foundation? We’ve been talking to various leaders in the nonprofit and small business sectors, in hopes of figuring this out, but at this point it’s still an open question.

And then there’s the whole food thing. (Those of you who know us know that food is never far from our thoughts.) Madroño Ranch is teeming with sources of protein—our herd of twenty-seven bison, our trusty chickens, uncounted feral hogs and deer—and we hope to begin distributing some of it in some fashion. Our first bison harvest will take place in the spring, though we haven’t yet figured out what to do with the meat: give it away? Sell it to restaurants in Kerrville, Fredericksburg, and Bandera? And the meat is only one part of a larger scheme. What if we go into small-scale farming—say, pears, peaches, and apples—and set up a CSA to distribute the produce, with the proceeds (if any) helping support the residency program?

And—here’s an idea we heard in New Orleans and really liked—what if we set up a culinary residency as well, whereby a chef who wants some non-restaurant experience comes out to the ranch and helps develop a truly local cuisine, using only foods grown on the ranch or nearby, while cooking for the other residents?

And how about engaging the local community in some meaningful fashion? Could we offer classes or workshops on the ranch? Invite the ag students at the local high school out to gain experience in organic farming?

Last month we met with a couple of graphic designers to talk about getting a logo to use on business cards, a website, brochures, and letterhead—and (why not?) also on T-shirts, coffee mugs, water bottles, etc. But even that turns out to be more complicated than we’d thought. For one thing, do we need a logo, or two (one for the residency and one for the farming operation)? Or more? Until we figure out how all these ideas and moving parts fit together, coming up with a visual “brand” will have to wait.

Sigh. Sometimes the tasks still facing us seem overwhelming. But we hope to keep forging ahead, slowly if not always surely. Perhaps our first and most tangible accomplishment to date was starting this blog, which we conceived as a way to spread the word about Madroño Ranch and keep our friends and other interested parties abreast of our progress. The fact that you’re reading it now suggests that—what do you know!—it’s working.

Obviously, we still have to do a lot more thinking about all of this. But on the theory that many heads are more likely to produce wisdom than one or two, we’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on these and other issues.

What we’re reading
Heather: Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge
Martin: Dylan Thomas, A Child’s Christmas in Wales

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Thanks, Miz Hatfield

Posted on December 18, 2009 by Martin

Bandera County, and the field of Texas history, lost a good one when Dorothy “Dot” Ferguson Hatfield passed away in late September at her home in Medina.

Probably not many of you know who she was, but over the last two decades she produced a shelf-full of indispensable books—eighteen in all—on the history and people of Bandera County. I had never heard of her or her books until our ranch manager Robert Selement generously loaned me his personal copies, signed by the author, when he learned I was researching the history of Madroño Ranch and the surrounding area.

Hatfield’s books, which bear titles such as Medina Memories; Medina: Mecca of the Hills; Magical Medina; and Medina, Glory Land, are compilations of interviews with old-timers, recountings of local legends, and other such ephemera, jumbled together in somewhat random order. They are far from scholarly, lacking an index and, often, any attribution by which to gauge their veracity, but full of lively and otherwise unavailable information—such as the tale of Medina’s last cattle drive, in 1941; or of the impromptu local celebration on November 11, 1918, when the Armistice ending World War I was signed in France; or Ida Hatfield’s account of the 1870 raid in which Indians killed her parents, kidnapped her two brothers, and left eight-year-old Ida for dead after piercing her seven times with lances.

I am sorry to say there was a time, while I was a graduate student at UT Austin, when I looked down my nose at such works. I was working toward a master’s degree in American studies, and while that field seemed somewhat less strictly “academic” than, say, English lit or history, I still believed that no work without footnotes and an index was really worth much. Then, in 1986, the Texas State Historical Association, then headquartered on the UT campus, hired me as a part-time writer and researcher on the New Handbook of Texas project.

The NHOT, as we called it, is a six-volume, 6,000-page reference work published in 1996. (It is now available online as well.) It is a sort of combination historical encyclopedia and biographical dictionary, comprising some 25,000 entries on every county, city, town, river, creek, mountain, battle, personality, and profession in or associated with Texas. The NHOT was the culmination of a 14-year project to revise, expand, and update the original two-volume Handbook of Texas, co-edited by the legendary Walter Prescott Webb and published in 1952. (A single supplementary volume appeared in 1976.)

Over the years I wrote several hundred entries for the NHOT on a dizzying variety of topics, including rock and roller Buddy Holly, football star Bobby Layne, Fredericksburg’s Nimitz Hotel, Western swing pioneer Adolph Hofner, the Dallas Stars hockey team, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, Big Bend Ranch State Park, silent movie star Tom Mix, singing cowgirl Dale Evans, and many others. And while I eventually spent about fifteen years on the TSHA staff in a variety of full-time positions, initially I was just one foot soldier in a veritable army of grad students, independent researchers, and freelance writers working on the NHOT.

Most of us relied primarily on the collection of what was then known as the Eugene C. Barker Texas History Center, now part of UT’s Dolph Briscoe Center for American History. Among the most valuable resources in that collection were works, many of them much like Hatfield’s, by amateur local historians. I quickly developed a profound appreciation of such folk; they were “on the ground,” so to speak, and knew their communities in a way that no professional academic historian could. While some of the stories were almost certainly exaggerated, if not made up out of whole cloth, and while we often wished the books had a more logical organizational structure, much of what they contained was invaluable information that would otherwise have been lost forever.

Once I meandered through Dot Hatfield’s charming and informative books of Medina history, I had been hoping to meet her; Robert, who knew she had been in poor health, kept urging me not to delay. As usual, Robert was right; she died before I had the opportunity to meet her and tell her how much I enjoyed and appreciated her work. There’s no doubt that it will inform and enrich any future blog posts in which we talk about the history of the area.

What we’re reading
Heather: Ian Falconer, Olivia Helps with Christmas
Martin:Ian McDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties

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Carnivorocity, take two

Posted on December 11, 2009 by Heather

Meat-eating has been the topic of much discussion recently, at least in what I’ve been reading. Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book, Eating Animals, has generated a significant buzz; if you Google “foer eating animals,” you get 961,000 results. Foer spent three years investigating meat production in the United States, factory farming in particular. Although he himself is a vegan, he says that he has no interest in converting anyone to veganocity; he just wants people to think about where their food—specifically, their meat—comes from.

Although I haven’t come to his vegan, or even vegetarian, conclusions, I think Foer is right. (Ahem. I haven’t read the book.) In my previous post on carnivorocity (a word my spell-check still doesn’t like), I wrote very convincingly about the ethical precondition necessary for meat eating, to wit: awareness of and gratitude for the sacrifice required to satisfy the appetite of the meat-eater, awareness that demands, for those who are to be sacrificed, a life of comfort in the world to which they are adapted. In fact, I think this awareness needs to be extended to vegetables as well; after all, even vegans require sacrifice—it’s just not as messy. By the very act of eating, all creatures—including, most emphatically, humans—participate in the circle of sacrifice, and a circle it most assuredly is; in nature, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

What sacrifice, then, is demanded of us? This year’s edition of The Best American Essays, edited by Mary Oliver, includes an essay by Wendell Berry entitled “Faustian Economics,” originally published in Harper’s Magazine. In it, Berry rails against the American propensity to confuse personal freedom with unlimited consumption, a fantasy that perhaps arose due to the intersection of the Industrial Revolution with the discovery of vast natural resources in the American West. As a nation, we’re confronting the end of this fantasy and “entering a time of inescapable limits”—an opportunity, according to Berry, to become reacquainted with traditional definitions of humanness. By their very nature, humans are, well, natural, and therefore limited. What distinguishes us from other animals (although I think this topic is being hotly debated) is our capacity for self-limitation, self-restraint, particularly as it is “implied in neighborliness, stewardship, thrift, temperance, generosity, care, kindness, friendship, loyalty, and love.”

As long as we base our identity on limitlessness, we deny an essential—and liberating—element of our humanity. As long as we base that fundamentally human activity, commerce, on fantasies of limitlessness, it will be inhuman and inhumane, what Berry calls an “economy of community destruction.” Instead, he would have us cultivate a mindfulness of human limits—agricultural, economic, medical, technological, scientific—in order to reclaim “the knowledge that some things, though limited, are inexhaustible.” He cites intact ecosystems like working forests and farms that give inexhaustibly, given the practice of human self-restraint. He compares this practice to the willing submission of artists to the constraints of their art forms—the poet to the sonnet, the painter to the canvas. The work that arises from this sort of discipline has the capacity to feed us inexhaustibly, a capacity we’ve all experienced when revisiting favorite novels or symphonies or buildings.

The title of Berry’s essay comes from Christopher Marlowe’s Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, first published in 1604, in which Faustus (that’s him in the picture above) sells his soul to Lucifer in exchange for knowledge and power. What Faustus learns—or, more accurately, refuses to learn—is that the human mind and soul are and ought to be subject to limits. When creatures refuse to acknowledge limits, hell is born.

So how do we practice the self-restraint necessary to maintain our humanity? Some, like Foer, argue that abstaining from eating meat is a logical and reasonable sacrifice. I don’t disagree with him, but I don’t think there’s a single way to humane self-restraint. Many indigenous cultures have focused on—even worshipped—the animals that fed them, Native Americans and bisons being a case in point.

I’m not sure any of this will mean much to those people and businesses that value scale and efficiency over humanness. Nor will it mean much to most Americans accustomed to the availability of cheap meat at every meal. But, with Berry, I believe that our humanity is at stake in the choices we make when we eat. When we choose to abet the suffering of animals and ecosystems to feed ourselves, we whittle away at our own humanness. When we choose to limit our choices, we paradoxically open ourselves to the possibility of inexhaustible plenty.

Sounds like a deal to me.

What we’re reading
Heather: Sylvia A. Earle, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean’s Are One
Martin: Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

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Listapalooza: top ten books about the environment

Posted on December 4, 2009 by Martin

And now for the next installment in our internationally celebrated series of lists… and what could be more appropriate from the proprietors of a place called Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing and the Environment than a list (in alphabetical order by author) of our ten favorite books about the environment?

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
John Graves, Goodbye to a River: A Narrative
Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability
Mary Oliver, What Do We Know: Poems and Prose Poems
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions
Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Or, Life in the Woods

Of course, we’re struck by the many wonderful and influential books we had to leave out to get down to ten, and we’d love to know your favorites. Let the arguments begin!

What we’re reading
Heather: Kate Braestrup, Here If You Need Me: A True Story
Martin: Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, Soccernomics: Why England Loses, Why Germany and Brazil Win, and Why the U.S., Japan, Australia, Turkey&#8212and Even Iraq&#8212Are Destined to Become the Kings of the World’s Most Popular Sport

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Farmers markets: food for thought

Posted on November 27, 2009 by Martin

Happy Thanksgiving! On any list of the things for which we give thanks, the Austin Farmers Market (downtown on Saturday mornings and at the Triangle on Wednesday afternoons), the Sunset Valley Farmers Market (on Saturday mornings), and Boggy Creek Farm (on Wednesday mornings) rank at or near the top. They’ve become a huge part of our lives, and our consumption of weird seasonal vegetables has skyrocketed, which I personally think is pretty cool, though our last remaining teenager might beg to differ.

Moreover, Heather says, with only mild exaggeration, that she’d have no social life at all if not for the farmers markets, and our Saturdays feel incomplete if we haven’t seen Sunny Fitzsimons of Thunder Heart Bison, Jesse Griffiths of Dai Due (that’s him in the photo above), J. P. Hayes of Sgt. Pepper’s, Loncito Cartwright of Loncito’s Lamb, and the rest of the gang at their stalls. Heck, they’re nice to us even when we don’t buy anything from them!

All kidding aside, the social aspect of farmers markets is actually one of the most important things about them. But don’t take my word for it; listen to Richard McCarthy and Daphne Derven, the executive directors of two organizations that have played crucial roles in the (re)birth of farmers markets in New Orleans, thereby helping the Crescent City bounce back in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

According to McCarthy, executive director of MarketUmbrella.org, reinventing older traditions like the farmers market has helped New Orleans bridge long-standing divisions of race, class, and region as it seeks to recover in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The storm, as terrible as it was, has afforded the city a rare opportunity to rethink, not simply recreate, its civic and social institutions: “As we rebuild, all the old issues have been laid bare. Now we have the chance to address them.”

McCarthy said that many farmers and fishermen from outside New Orleans were initially terrified by the prospect of coming into the city to sell their crops and catch, but in the Big Easy, where cuisine is the nearest thing to a civic religion, talking about and looking at food brought people out of their homes and into previously scary public spaces. The city’s markets served a vital function for people who were grieving the devastating loss of family, friends, and property; as McCarthy put it, “They wanted the public place where they could hug each other, cry, see the citrus and the flowers.”

He noted that some have marginalized the local/sustainable food movement, in part because “we defined what we were against, rather than what we were for.” Instead, he advocates portraying markets as the legitimate community assets they are; as an example, he cited the Crescent City Farmers Market, which contributed $8.9 million to the local economy last year.

Despite such impressive numbers, access to food remains a major issue in the city, according to Derven, executive director of New Orleans Food and Farm Network. In New Orleans East, for example, there is only one supermarket for a population of 28,000 people (the national average is one supermarket for every 9,000 people). She added that there are around 60,000 empty properties in New Orleans, more than three times the pre-Katrina total. Her organization aims to educate and empower individuals, neighborhoods, and communities, “from the person growing herbs in a pot to urban farmers cultivating up to fifty acres,” to use the available land to grow food. She believes that “‘Farmer’ is the green job of the next decade.”

We heard McCarthy and Derven at the nineteenth annual conference of the Alliance of Artists Communities, held in New Orleans on November 11–14. They were panelists at a fascinating session convened by New Orleans columnist, filmmaker, and food maven Lolis Eric Elie, which also featured Donna Cavato, director of the wonderful Edible Schoolyard New Orleans program at the S. J. Green School, and Rashida Ferdinand, director of the Sankofa Marketplace in the Lower Ninth Ward. The theme of this year’s conference was “Sustaining Today’s Artists,” and what better place to think about how to support the creative imagination than the Crescent City, which is once again a vibrant cultural center despite the devastating (and ongoing) effects of Katrina?

The conference was an epic win. We learned a lot, we met many smart and fascinating people, and of course we ate like royalty (high points: the “best roast beef po’ boy on earth,” as proclaimed by Gourmet Magazine, at Parasol’s; the fried okra, crawfish etouffée, and bread pudding at The Praline Connection; and the Louisiana shrimp and grits at Herbsaint). But the best and most inspiring food of all was the food for thought prepared and served by McCarthy and Derven and their fellow panelists.

What we’re reading
Heather: Denise Levertov, Selected Poems
Martin: Douglas Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (still!)

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Extra! Americans losing sense of place!

Posted on November 19, 2009 by Martin

One of the things that we hope will characterize Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing and the Environment is a strong sense of place. It’s right there, implicitly and explicitly, in our mission and vision statements, just off to your right.

But how does one develop a sense of place? One answer, at least in part, and for those of us of a certain age, has been by reading the local newspaper. But the newspaper as we know it seems to be going the way of the 8-track and the VHS tape. Increasingly, people opt to get their news in a way that doesn’t leave ink smudges on their hands, or require drying in the oven on rainy mornings. In other words, they’re reading the “paper” online.

In “Final Edition: Twilight of the American Newspaper,” in the November issue of Harper’s, Richard Rodriguez examines the decline of his (and my) hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the historical importance of the newspaper in American life.

The press, Rodriguez argues, was the indicator and bestower of civic stature: “It was the pride and the function of the American newspaper in the nineteenth century to declare the forming congregation of buildings and services a city—a place busy enough or populated enough to have news.” In addition, the rise of the newspaper was a sign of the small-d democratic nature of American culture, “a vestige of the low-church impulse toward universal literacy whereby the new country imagined it could read and write itself into existence.”

But, for many, the newspaper seems to have outlived its usefulness. The Atlantic Monthly’s Megan McArdle, in an online (of course) column titled “The Media Death Spiral,” writes, “The circulation figures for the top 25 dailies in the U.S. are out, and they’re horrifying. The median decline is well into the teens; only the Wall Street Journal gained (very slightly).”

She adds, “I think we’re witnessing the end of the newspaper business, full stop, not the end of the newspaper business as we know it. The economics just aren’t there.”

Those of us who read the Austin American-Statesman have noted the signs already: a shrinking paper, meaning fewer ads and less revenue; the anorexic classifieds (a victim of craigslist) tacked onto the back of the Life and Arts section; the business and metro sections combined.

Why should we care whether or not the Statesman survives? According to Rodriguez, “When a newspaper dies in America, it is not simply that a commercial enterprise has failed; a sense of place has failed. If the San Francisco Chronicle is near death… it is because San Francisco’s sense of itself as a city is perishing.”

Does he exaggerate? Maybe. But once the newspapers are gone, he asks, “who will tell us what it means to live as citizens of Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor? The truth is we no longer want to live in Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor. Our inclination has led us to invent a digital cosmopolitanism that begins and ends with ‘I.’”

Rodriguez quotes a friend of his, a journalist from India: “If I think of what many of my friends and I read these days, it is still a newspaper, but it is clipped and forwarded in bits and pieces on email—a story from the New York Times, a piece from Salon, a blog from the Huffington Post, something from the Times of India, from YouTube. It is like a giant newspaper being assembled at all hours, from every corner of the world, still with news but no roots in a place. Perhaps we do not need a sense of place anymore.”

That statement really bothers me, for a couple of reasons. I can understand the appeal of what Philip Meyer, a student of the industry, calls “the demassification of the media”; in the bottom-up model of journalism, each consumer is free to pick and choose the information he or she deems most valuable, rather than being forced to rely on the judgment of a corporate editor. What could be more democratic?

But such a model does come with a cost. As Meyer writes in his book The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age, “If we’re all attending to different messages, our capacity to understand one another is diminished.”

And what about that speculation from Rodriguez’s friend, “Perhaps we do not need a sense of place anymore”? Perhaps not. But I don’t want to live in a world where people no longer feel connected to the land and the people around them. In a society that has traditionally viewed “light[ing] out for the territory,” in the words of that old newspaperman Mark Twain, as the solution to every problem, how do we convince folks that they have a stake in, and a responsibility to, their surroundings? As strip malls and chain stores and fast-food outlets and cookie-cutter housing developments and, yes, the internet make every place more like every other place, how are we supposed to know or care where we are?

I don’t know the answer to that question, but I think we better find one. People who feel strongly connected to their surroundings, urban or rural or in between, feel that the place is theirs; they know it, feel it, eat it, sleep it, and live it. They’re also more likely to take care of it. I certainly hope that the things that make Madroño Ranch special to us—the hills, the water, the rocks, the trees—will outlive us, and our children, and our children’s children, and we intend to do all we can to make sure they do.

What we’re reading
Heather: Mary Oliver (ed.), The Best American Essays 2009
Martin: Douglas Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America

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Carnivorocity

Posted on November 13, 2009 by Heather

Since we’re in the early planning stages for our first Madroño Ranch bison harvest, I’ve been reflecting on issues of carnivorocity, which my spell-checker tells me isn’t a word. It suggests “carnivorousness” instead. But I prefer my neologism because it retains echoes of the ferocity that undergirds all meat-eating.

I have been a happy meat-eater all my life, with the exception of my senior year in college, when I chose to be a vegetarian for financial and life-style rather than ethical reasons. Although I still eat meat, I’ve grown increasingly troubled by the system that produces most of it in the United States, and no longer eat meat at most restaurants or from supermarkets.

In some ways, I think that vegetarians may be more evolved than meat-eaters. According to Genesis, all creatures—not just humans—were vegetarians in the beginning. God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of the earth, and every tree with seed in it for fruit. And to every beast of the earth, and every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food’” (Genesis 1:29–30). Thus modern vegetarians are hearkening back to their Edenic roots, to a human dominion over nature that reflected the aboriginal harmony and mutual respect among species—unless, of course, you happened to be a green plant.

But the story became more complicated, as good stories always do. As punishment for various transgressions, God sent a flood that only Noah and the passengers on his ark survived. In thanksgiving, Noah built an altar to the Lord and made of every clean animal and bird (although this was before the laws differentiating clean from unclean) a burnt offering. When God “smelled the pleasing odor, he said in his heart, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of humankind…’” (Genesis 8:21). From that time on, humans were given animals for food, with the stipulation that they should not eat flesh that still had blood in it.

Complicated? My goodness, yes. Eating meat is God’s concession to the fact that something in the original balance of the world has been thrown out of whack—and that the smell of cooking meat is profoundly satisfying. Those who can resist the lure of barbecue are made of sterner stuff than God! The line between vegetarians and meat-eaters is the line between self-identified utopianists and realists—or between utopianists and people who don’t think about the issue. I tend toward the utopian end of the spectrum. So why do I eat meat?

In his fascinating book The River Cottage Meat Book, British chef and farmer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall points out that scripture has been used to justify the most heinous acts, including the abuse of animals for human consumption. He finds the “commitment to eliminate the pain and suffering of animals at the hands of humans… to be morally superior to the commitment to ignore it.” But he also finds the pro-vegetarian argument based on the desire to eliminate the pain and suffering of animals unconvincing. Animals inevitably suffer, even without human intervention. He points out that “dying of old age” rarely occurs in nature, and that wild animals are quite likely to end their lives as food for something.

Eating meat is a reminder that we belong to the system over which we exercise dominion. We are not above the law that ordered the universe; we do not lie outside the natural order. Not long ago I took a cooking class from Jesse Griffiths of Dai Due, one that took a chicken “from gallina to pollo,” as our daughter Elizabeth put it. We started with two live roosters, which we were to kill, pluck, and clean. After Jesse showed us how to hold a rooster upside down—which disorients and calms it—he put it headfirst into a lopped-off traffic cone and slit its jugular. The whole business took ten seconds or less per bird and was strangely intimate, giving me an insight into some of the labyrinthine dietary and purity laws in Leviticus. Surely we are meant to eat meat with a profound awareness of the sacrifice that doing so entails. As usual, no one has said it better than Wendell Berry:

I have taken in the light
that quickened eye and leaf.
May my brain be bright with praise
of what I eat, in the brief blaze
of motion and of thought.
May I be worthy of my meat.

What we’re reading
Heather: George Johnson, Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order
Martin: Richard Price, Lush Life

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When authors are rock stars: the Texas Book Festival

Posted on November 6, 2009 by Martin

Last weekend was the fourteenth annual Texas Book Festival, one of my favorite events of the year. The TBF, held in and around the State Capitol, is sort of the literary equivalent of the ACL Music Festival in Zilker Park, without the dirt, pot smoke, and bleeding from the ears.

The TBF offers the public a chance to see favorite authors in the flesh (and discover new favorites) via readings, signings, panel discussions, award programs, etc. This year, my favorite session featured Dayton Duncan, Ken Burns’ collaborator on the PBS documentary series The National Parks: America’s Best Idea and the author of the beautiful companion volume of the same name.

Duncan spoke eloquently and emotionally (he actually wept a couple of times) about the importance and beauty of these treasures. I had sworn that I wasn’t going to buy any books at this year’s festival—the stack of unread books on my bedside table had long since reached life-threatening heights—but I couldn’t resist buying Duncan’s book… along with Brenda Wineapple’s White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, for Heather. Still, I think I showed admirable restraint; two books, by my standards, is nothing—nothing!

Among the other notables appearing at this year’s festival were Woody Tasch (An Inquiry into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered), Douglas Brinkley (Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America), and Barbara Ehrenreich (Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America), as well as Richard Russo, Corby Kummer, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jane Smiley, Margaret Atwood, Taylor Branch, Jeannette Walls, Jonathan Lethem, David Liss, and (an old family favorite) Rosemary Wells.

In previous years, the smorgasbord of scribblers has included heavyweights like Robert Caro, William Least Heat-Moon, Richard Price, ZZ Packer, Rick Bragg, Bud Shrake, Sherman Alexie, Roy Blount Jr., and Christopher Buckley. Local literary luminaries like Sarah Bird, Bill Wittliff, H. W. Brands, Kinky Friedman, Amanda Eyre Ward, Jim Magnuson, John Burnett, and Dick Holland usually put in an appearance as well. In fact, as used to be the case when I was young and foolish and still insisted on attending the ACL Festival, my main problem is always that so many people I want to see are scheduled to go on at the same time.

Basically, it’s just a big ol’ literary theme park, with great food (this year’s vendors included Ruby’s BBQ and Torchy’s Tacos), live music, cooking demonstrations, entertainment for the kiddies, and just about everything else a bibliophile could ask for. Plus it’s at the State Capitol, which is a totally cool building, and when the weather’s gorgeous, as it was last weekend, there’s just no better way to spend a weekend. Best of all, and unlike the ACL Festival, admission is free!

What we’re reading
Heather: Jeffrey Greene, Water from Stone: The Story of Selah, Bamberger Ranch Preserve
Martin: Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life

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“Everywhere there’s lots of piggies…”

Posted on October 30, 2009 by Heather

I sometimes find myself feeling a little defensive about the Texas Hill Country. Martin, a San Francisco native, and I drove across the country via Texas after we graduated from college in Massachusetts. Somewhere around Bastrop, I said, “Well, we’re at the eastern edge of the Hill Country.”

“Really?” he said. “So where are the hills?”

Okay, so our hills are a little stumpy and our landscape a little scruffy, and most of the fauna (and much of the flora) will scratch, sting, or bite you. But at least we can proudly boast that nobody’s got more feral hogs than we do.

Hogs are always lurking in the background of life at Madroño—and frequently in the foreground as well (and yes, those are some of our very own hogs making their way across a creek in the photo above). They’re smart, secretive, social, fierce, and remarkably fecund; a sow can have two, and sometimes three, litters of eight a year. Robert, the ranch manager, figures that his wife Sherry shot the Madroño heavyweight title holder, which tipped the scales at about 400 pounds, and they can get significantly bigger than that. They have no predators other than humans, whom they generally leave alone. Dogs, however, they consider fair game. These hogs are expert at slashing their tusks in an upward arc, where they can easily intersect a dog’s jugular or stomach with deadly results.

One fall day a couple of years ago, my brother-in-law Daniel and I, along with his doughty dog Mojo, were walking along the top of the property. Mojo is an unspecified breed, maybe part wolverine, low to the ground with a long heavy coat, and utterly fearless. The minute he heard porcine snorting in a nearby cedar brake, he charged, even as Daniel and I screamed for him to stop. For the next few heartbeats of eternity we yelled and listened to the invisible fight as it receded down a draw. Sure that Mojo was a goner, we trudged sadly downhill to break the horrible news to my sister Isa—Daniel’s wife—and their young children.

So when Mojo popped out of the brush halfway down, he received an ecstatic and extended hero’s welcome. His ruff was stiff with pig spit; his thick fur had saved him from what were doubtless multiple tusk slashes. Many dogs aren’t so lucky.

Here’s one good thing about hogs: they make delicious sausage. Here’s another good thing about them: they’re omnivorous, eating even snakes. Here’s a(nother) bad thing: they love grubs, especially if those grubs are under wet grass. Carefully tended yards can look like a demonic rototiller has let loose its evil fury after a rain or a watering, the grass torn up and plowed under in great sheets (see below). Robert once got so furious at the persistent destruction of the lawn he’d tended so carefully at the lake house that he vowed to sleep there until he’d hunted the culprits down. After four nights and increasingly plaintive appeals from the family he’d abandoned, Robert admitted defeat. “Those pigs outsmarted me and whupped my ass in the lake house yard,” he said ruefully. “It was a humbling experience.”

Clearly, hog tales running the gamut from slapstick to philosophical will be a recurrent theme of this blog. Share your hog tales with us—and check back for more.

What we’re reading
Heather: Graham Swift, Last Orders
Martin: Brad Meltzer, Rags Morales, and Michael Blair, Identity Crisis

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Growing hope

Posted on October 23, 2009 by Heather

This summer we attended a screening of Fresh, a documentary that highlights the efficiency and productivity of organic farming and the casual cruelty and hidden costs of industrial agriculture. Along with about a hundred others, we watched the film under the pecan trees at Boggy Creek Farm while eating locally sourced vegetarian picnic dinners provided by the Alamo Drafthouse, one of the screening’s cosponsors. (The others were Edible Austin and our friend Steve Kinney’s Front Porch Project.)

This kind of setting induces feelings of satisfaction that can all too easily morph into self-righteousness, and there’s no question that this event was a classic case of preaching to the choir. One of Boggy Creek’s neighbors’ front yards frequently sports a sign demanding housing for the homeless, not food for the rich. There’s no question that the momentum behind the local/sustainable food movement has been slowed by the argument that it’s a movement for the dainty tastes of the economic elite.

Fresh delivers a powerful counterpunch—maybe even a KO—in the person and work of Will Allen, whose nonprofit Growing Power Inc. operates two acres of greenhouses in working-class Milwaukee, producing mountains of affordable, healthy food, and trains countless inner-city residents to convert empty lots into thriving organic food centers.

The son of a sharecropper, Allen believes with every fiber of his 6’7″ body that healthy food is primarily a social justice issue: income should have no bearing on access to quality food. He himself is a happy consumer of doughnuts and doesn’t condemn those who have no alternative to KFC, but his passion for fresh food is altering the urban landscape and the food choices of thousands of people who might otherwise face a future of obesity and diabetes.

We’re no experts on food pricing, but we would guess that Growing Power enjoys a pricing “advantage” over other organic farmers because of grant money and a sizable volunteer labor pool. Agribusiness is able to control costs through government subsidies. What if the playing field on which organic and industrial agriculture compete were level? If organics were subsidized? If the costs of the ecological devastation caused by agribusiness monocultures, manure cesspools, and the health issues resulting from fast foods were factored into the cost of “cheap” food?

Before the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, many considered conservation a hobby for the wealthy. Carson made clear the connection between environmental issues and civil rights. We hope that people like Will Allen and movies like Fresh will do the same for the local/sustainable food movement.

After the screening at Boggy Creek, Edible Austin sold copies of the movie on DVD, along with licensing agreements allowing purchasers to show it to groups of up to twenty people—neighborhood gatherings, church groups, book clubs, etc. Through this bottom-up, grass-roots, guerilla marketing campaign, the producers hope to spread the word far beyond those hundred or so predominantly white, relatively wealthy faces under the trees. We bought two copies, one for Robert and one for us.

What we’re reading
Heather: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, The River Cottage Meat Book
Martin: Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead

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