As some of you know, Heather and I have spent the last two weeks in a rented cottage in Point Reyes Station, about an hour north of San Francisco. This is, I think, the longest vacation the two of us have taken together since our honeymoon, and it’s been a little unsettling to be away from home for such a stretch. But the beauty of western Marin County—the wild coastline of Point Reyes National Seashore, the placid expanse of Tomales Bay, the rolling hills, the towering eucalyptus and Monterey cypress trees—is utterly overwhelming, and we have found ourselves entranced.

It is impossible, however, to be in this part of the world and not have a sense, no matter how deeply buried in the unconscious, of impermanence. Tomales Bay, after all, is a visible marker of the San Andreas Fault, and the Next Big One could hit at any time. It’s always there, that nagging knowledge that this landscape, this place, is every bit as temporary as we are; eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may be at the bottom of the ocean, or buried under rubble. I think that sublimated dread adds a poignant savor to all aspects of life, including the food, for what is more temporary than a meal? Growing and harvesting and preparing the animals and plants we eat can take years; and yet, once they appear on our plates, they are gone in a matter of minutes.

And make no mistake: for foodies, the Bay Area, and Marin County in particular, is truly the Promised Land. This is a region ferociously dedicated to the idea of local, sustainable, organic food; in fact, we have concluded that any area restaurant that does not display a “Marin Organic” sign is probably doomed to failure. The dairy farms in West Marin are legendary; the fruits and vegetables are astonishingly various and beautiful (we saw gorgeous tomatoes and carrots, squash and beets, all on offer at the same time at the Point Reyes Farmers Market); and the bread—well, this is the homeland of San Francisco sourdough, after all. ’Nuff said.

Seafood, too, is available in mind-boggling abundance. I have probably eaten more raw oysters in the last two weeks than I had in my entire previous life: at Ferry Plaza Seafood in the San Francisco Ferry Building; at the Farm House Restaurant in Olema, a couple of miles down Highway 1; at the Station House Café, in Point Reyes Station; at Saltwater, on the west shore of Tomales Bay in Inverness. And we haven’t even been to what is probably my favorite restaurant in the whole world, Swan Oyster Depot in San Francisco.

But the apotheosis of oysters is the legendary Hog Island Oyster Co. in Marshall, about ten miles up Highway 1 on the eastern shore of Tomales Bay. Last week, coincidentally, our pal Jesse Griffiths of Austin’s Dai Due Butcher Shop and Supper Club was in the Bay Area, staying with friends in Oakland. Jesse has just published his first book, a beautiful volume called Afield: A Chef’s Guide to Preparing and Cooking Wild Game and Fish, chock-full of charming stories, delicious recipes, step-by-step instructions, and stunning photographs (including some of Madroño Ranch!) by Jody Horton, and last Tuesday made an in-store appearance (which we attended, of course) at the Tyler Florence Shop in Mill Valley to promote the book.

Jesse had last Friday free, and agreed to drive up for lunch with us. We agreed to meet at Cowgirl Creamery in Point Reyes Station to load up on picnic supplies and then head up to Hog Island.

At Cowgirl, of course, Jesse immediately recognized the young woman behind the counter as a former co-worker at Austin’s Vespaio (“she was always into cheese,” he recalled, which must be an understatement). We picked up a dark, crusty Brickmaiden baguette, a round of Cowgirl’s new seasonal Chimney Rock cheese, a salame al tartufo from Creminelli, a bottle of white wine, and an Earl Grey panna cotta for Heather and hit the road for Marshall.

At Hog Island you can order your fresh shellfish, claim a picnic table overlooking Tomales Bay, and smugly ponder those unfortunate souls who have to live anywhere else in the world. Because Heather wasn’t really into the whole raw oyster thing, we ordered only a couple of dozen—one each of Kumamotos and extra-small sweetwaters—and claimed one end of a picnic table out back. (The friendly couple at the other end of the table looked enviously at our wine and bread and cheese and complimented us on our foresight.) It was a typical West Marin day; the morning had been foggy, but now the sun was out, the temperature was in the upper 70s, and a gentle breeze was blowing in off the sparkling light blue bay.

The oysters appeared atop a bed of rock salt on a plastic tray, with an oyster knife attached by a chain and a rubber glove for shucking purposes. Jesse took charge of the shucking, I poured the wine (we appropriated three styrofoam cups from the bar) and sliced the salame and cheese (using Jesse’s own oyster knife; he never leaves home without one), and we sat in the sun for an hour or so, elbows propped on the rough wood of the picnic table, eating and drinking and dropping empty oyster shells into the wire basket at our feet—not, perhaps, the most elegant meal we’ve ever consumed, but surely one of the most enjoyable. All around us people busily slurped their own shellfish, drank beer, grilled eggplant and chicken, and patted their dogs.

Raw oysters are, I grant you, an acquired taste. Some people never get the hang of it—the trick is to open the throat and let the little bugger just slide on down—but these were delicious. We ate them unadorned, with no mignonette or barbecue sauce or horseradish or Tabasco, and they were perfect: briny, sweet, smooth, plump. The wine was cool and crisp, the bread perfect (dark crust, with a firm hand), the cheese (from Jersey cow milk, washed in wine, and covered with dried organic mushrooms, savory, and black pepper) was soft and delicious, the conversation far ranging and lively, and the setting, of course, almost impossibly beautiful.

For me, at least, the combination of being back in the part of the world in which I grew up, with my beloved Heather and our good friend Jesse, felt like a stitching together of my life. It was integrative, if I may lapse into Marinspeak, in the best way, even though I knew it couldn’t last. Our two weeks out here have been utterly amazing, but on Sunday we fly back to Austin, back to our real lives, and it will be good to be home again. These last few months have brought more than their share of challenges, and more challenges doubtless lie ahead. But on this day, sitting in the sun sharing a delicious meal with dear companions, in this most beautiful of settings, was enough. More than enough.

What we’re reading
Heather: Mary Roach (ed.), The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011
Martin: Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue

“It is true, I came as near as is possible to come to being a hunter and miss it, myself….” (Henry David Thoreau)

I spent last weekend in the company of six heavily armed women at Madroño Ranch.

Don’t worry; we’re not training up a secret army of Sarah Palin clones. No, these Hill Country Dianas were attending “Hunting School for Women,” our first ethical hunting workshop of the new season. Jesse Griffiths of Austin’s Dai Due Butcher Shop and Supper Club decided to limit the enrollment to six rather than the usual eight, since five of the six were first-timers and he wanted to make sure they received as close to a one-on-one experience with a guide as possible.

The weekend was a huge success, at least from our perspective, and while I know I shouldn’t make sweeping generalizations based on such a small sample size, I couldn’t help concluding that most women are more likely to “get” the whole ethical hunting thing, and more willing to listen and learn, than most men. (Of course, if I simply substituted “inexperienced hunters” for “women” and “experienced hunters” for “men,” that statement would be equally true; perhaps the most important factor in making this school so successful was the fact that five out of the six attendees were novices, not that all six were women.) For whatever reason, though, the weekend was as far removed as possible from the boys’-night-out mentality that prevails in some hunting circles, for which we’re grateful.

The ringer in the group was our dear friend Valerie, an experienced hunter and a regular customer of Jesse’s at the Sustainable Food Center’s Saturday morning farmers’ market in downtown Austin. In addition to her hunting expertise, Valerie brought a wicked sense of humor to the proceedings; she was the one who affixed the full-page PETA ad of Sir Paul McCartney proudly proclaiming his vegetarianism to the Madroño Ranch refrigerator, just below the inspirational magnet pictured above.

Helping Jesse and the multitalented Tink Pinkard make sure everything ran smoothly were Morgan Angelone, the phenomenal Dai Due “camp chef”; our daughter Elizabeth, the assistant chef; Jeremy Nobles and Josh Randolph, the trusty guides; and our son Tito, the assistant guide.

As if that weren’t enough of a hunting vibe, we also had two residents at the ranch: Jackson Landers, a hunter/author from Virginia, and Helena Svedberg, a student of environmental filmmaking at American University who is filming him for her master’s project.

It was, in other words, a fairly bloodthirsty group. But as Robert, our redoubtable ranch manager, told the guests, we provide an opportunity for them to hunt; we do not, and cannot, promise them that they will kill, or even see, an animal. In the event, five of the six guests did register kills from our blinds, and all six went home with coolers full of venison and/or hog meat.

All in all, then, we’re happily counting Hunting School for Women as a win. But coming on the heels of our second bison “harvest,” it has us (again) thinking long and hard about our somewhat vexed attitude toward meat eating.

Now, I take a back seat to no one in my appreciation of meat. Morgan’s bison burgers (a Friday night hunting school tradition), Jesse’s charcuterie, Ben Willcott’s pork Milanese at Texas French Bread—these are among my very favorite things to eat. And we happily accepted Valerie’s invitation to come over for dinner once she’s turned the 130-pound feral hog she shot into pork curry or some other delectable dish. But neither Heather nor I is a hunter; the only animal I’ve ever shot was an obviously deranged raccoon, presumably rabid, that we encountered staggering along the road at the ranch at midday on a scorching summer day several years ago.

In other words, while we certainly hope to make enough money from the sale of our bison meat to help support our residency program, and while we understand the need to control the deer and hog populations not just for the sake of a balanced ecosystem at the ranch, but for the good of the animals themselves (no one likes to see the starving individuals that result from overpopulation), we are a little, um, squeamish about doing the deed ourselves. Instead we are, in effect, allowing Jesse and Tink and Robert and the hunting school guests to do our dirty work. Does this make us hypocrites? Wouldn’t it be more honest for us to take rifle in hand and take care of this business ourselves?

Well, yes. Honestly, I don’t think I have a huge problem with the general concept of killing a feral hog, or even a deer, though I’ve been warned about the dreaded Bambi effect. (The bison, I confess, are a different story; they are so big, so magnificent, so valuable, that I’d be intimidated if I were the one required to shoot them.) What bothers me is the possibility that I might not be a sufficiently good shot, despite the numbers of beer cans and paper targets I’ve blasted over the years; I would agonize over the possibility that, due to my incompetence, the animal might not die instantly.

Of course I also understand that for us hunting would be a luxury, as it is for many enthusiastic hunters, and not a necessity; we are lucky to have other people who kill and process our food before we buy and cook and eat it. Moreover, not everyone can, or should, be a hunter; a healthy human ecology requires diversity and balance—vegetarians and vegans as well as carnivores; urban hipsters and rural rednecks; multinational corporations (well regulated, please!) and corner stores; butchers, bakers, candlestick makers. There should be room at the table for all.

That said, however, I believe firmly that every carnivore should, at some level, confront the meaning of meat: the death, blood, evisceration, and butchering that are inextricable parts of the process by which this chop or that sausage ends up on our dinner table. We’ve seen that process up close and personal during bison harvests and hunting schools at the ranch, and at the processing facility in Utopia that turns our bison carcasses into stew meat and steaks. But we haven’t actually pulled the trigger or wielded the knife ourselves—not yet, anyway. Perhaps we never will. But I hope we will always be uneasy about that fact, and thankful for the animals whose flesh we eat, and for those who allow us to do so.

What we’re reading
Heather: The Sun
Martin: Anthony Trollope, The Warden

… doubt not, therefore, sir, that angling is an art, and an art worth your learning. The question is rather, whether you be capable of learning it?

Inspired by the recent Freshwater Fly-Fishing School at Madroño Ranch, I’ve been rereading Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler: or, the Contemplative Man’s Recreation, Being a Discourse of Fish and Fishing, Not Unworthy the Perusal of Most Anglers, first published in 1653. Despite that rather daunting subtitle, and a certain tendency toward the pedantic (it is basically a conversion story, in which Piscator convinces his new friend Venator of the superiority of fishing to hunting), it is a charming and gentle book, of interest to anglers and non-anglers alike. (I’ve interspersed some of my favorite quotations from it above and below.)

Thomas McGuane, in his introduction to the 1995 Ecco Press edition of The Compleat Angler, compares Walton to Henry David Thoreau, one of my heroes, and to Gilbert White, author of The Natural History of Selborne, but finds Walton a more serene and comforting companion than either. “Even in the seventeenth century, there was the need of a handbook for those who would overcome their alienation from nature,” notes McGuane, adding that “learned, equitable Izaak Walton, by demonstrating how watchfulness and awe can be taken within from the natural world, has much to tell us—that is, less about how to catch fish than about how to be thankful that we may catch fish.”

Freshwater Fly-Fishing School, held on May 13–15, was the third in a series of ethical hunting and fishing events at Madroño Ranch, all put on by our friend Jesse Griffiths of Austin’s Dai Due supper club. (We had Deer School in December and Hog School in March.) It was, like its predecessors, a thoroughgoing success, and we hope to offer many more such schools in the future.

Give me your hand; from this time forward I will be your master, and teach you as much of this art as I am able; and will, as you desire me, tell you somewhat of the nature of most of the fish that we are to angle for; and I am sure I both can and will tell you more than any common Angler yet knows.

The idea behind these schools is to bring eight paying guests out to the ranch for a three-day weekend, during which they receive instruction from Jesse and his buddy Tink Pinkard, a former fly-fishing and hunting guide in Montana, in basic hunting or fishing techniques and processing, butchering, and cooking the animals they kill or catch.

Not incidentally, they (and we) also enjoy a series of incredible meals prepared by Jesse’s “camp chef,” the amazing Morgan Angelone. (Her Friday night bison burgers have become a tradition, and Saturday’s dinner is always a multicourse feast featuring various preparations of whatever animal is the weekend’s designated victim, followed by her soon-to-be-world-famous Basque cake.)

… this trout looks lovely; it was twenty-two inches when it was taken! and the belly of it looked, some part of it, as yellow as a marigold, and part of it was white as a lily; and yet, methinks, it looks better in this good sauce.

The Saturday night feast at Fly-Fishing School featured fish prepared in a multitude of ways: in soup with aioli croutons, en papilote, grilled whole, fried, grilled “on the halfshell” (unscaled), in breaded cakes… truly, it was an amazing experience; by the time the last piece of Basque cake had been shoveled down, we were sitting on the porch of the Main House at Madroño in stunned silence. Shock and awe, baby.

… he that views the ancient ecclesiastical canons, shall find hunting to be forbidden to churchmen, as being a turbulent, toilsome, perplexing recreation; and shall find angling allowed to clergymen, as being a harmless recreation, a recreation that invites them to contemplation and quietness.

Fly-Fishing School presented a different set of challenges than did Deer School and Hog School. For one thing, the guests weren’t wielding firearms, so while they still ran the risk of wounds from stray hooks and filleting knives, the chances of serious injury or death were minimized, though one guest cut his thumb cleaning a fish, and another scraped his hand on a fall in a creek. (Walton called fishing a “most honest, ingenious, quiet, and harmless art,” which I guess is mostly true if you’re not a fish.) For another, while most people have at least a vague grasp of how to shoot a rifle, even if they need coaching in safety and accuracy, fly-fishing requires a set of not necessarily intuitive skills in manipulating rod, reel, and line—not to mention tying flies (Tink devised the “Madroño Ranch caddis,” made entirely from materials sourced at the ranch), hatch-matching, etc. Thus, Jesse and Tink were simultaneously more relaxed than at Deer or Hog School, and more exhausted by the intensive instruction required at Fly-Fishing School.

… you are to know, that as the ill pronunciation or ill accenting of words in a sermon spoils it, so the ill carriage of your line, or not fishing even to a foot in a right place, makes you lose your labour….

And is there really enough water, and fish, at Madroño Ranch to make such an undertaking feasible? Absolutely. But don’t take my word for it; here’s Tink’s assessment: “Madroño Ranch offers one of the most pristine backdrops for fresh water fly-fishing in Texas that I’ve ever had the privilege of visiting…. [I]t offers spring-fed creeks and streams that empty into a beautiful lake loaded with red-breasted sunfish, crappie, red ear sunfish, bluegill, and largemouth bass.”

Just so. The guests also enjoyed phenomenal weather, as a cool front blew in on Saturday morning. The wind didn’t actually do much for the fishing, though the anglers had better luck when they abandoned the lake, which is fairly open and exposed, for the sheltered banks of Wallace Creek. Still, even though I would characterize the fishing as good rather than great, the guests seemed happy just to be out in a beautiful place, in beautiful weather, practicing what was for most of them a new form of fishing.

I envy not him that eats better meat than I do, nor him that is richer, or that wears better clothes than I do; I envy nobody but him, and him only that catches more fish than I do.

Actually, that’s the thing I’ve always loved about fly-fishing: even when you don’t catch any fish, you’ve still spent the day standing in or near a body of water, which is its own reward. And in my admittedly limited experience, the physical movements of fly-fishing are not only beautiful to watch (at least when someone more competent than I is making them), they are almost magically calm-inducing. Indeed, I imagine that casting a fly rod can induce something pretty close to a Zen state, and a day of fly-fishing on which one catches no fish is only slightly less enjoyable than a day of fly-fishing on which one catches many fish.

… this day’s fortune and pleasure, and this night’s company and song, do all make me more and more in love with angling.

I suspect that the beauty of Madroño Ranch, along with Jesse and Tink’s light pedagogical touch and Morgan’s jaw-dropping cooking, would be enough to convert anyone to fly-fishing; my friend and hiking buddy Bruce Bennett didn’t stand a chance. Bruce is a devoted, even fanatical, fisherman, spending virtually every free weekend fishing off the coast of Louisiana, and while he had never been fly-fishing before, he took to it so quickly that Tink threatened to hire him as an instructor for the next Fly-Fishing School. Indeed, Bruce spent most of the weekend in or on the water and “in the zone,” largely oblivious to everything except the arc of his cast and the location of the fish. When he finally, reluctantly, came back to reality, he said, “This has been the greatest weekend of my life.”

Somewhere, I feel sure, old Izaak Walton was nodding and smiling.

What we’re reading
Heather: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Martin: Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler: or, the Contemplative Man’s Recreation, Being a Discourse of Fish and Fishing, Not Unworthy the Perusal of Most Anglers

Fittingly, this Ash Wednesday began with a vigorous north wind, the kind that knocks dead branches out of trees and can make you a little leery about walking outdoors. It blew me back to the moment that I first got a glimpse into the meaning of Lent.

I had vaguely thought of “giving something up for Lent” as an opportunity to practice self-discipline and to display a sense of commitment to a “good” life, a sort of spiritual calisthenics that made you feel better, especially when you stopped. The events I recalled weren’t, on the surface, particularly interesting or dramatic, but they allowed me to see myself from a previously undiscovered vantage point; for the first time, I could see I was like a tree filled with dead branches that needed some serious pruning in order to keep growing. Observing Lent wasn’t a way to prove how strong I was; it was a space offered in which I might look at all my dead branches and wonder how I, with the north wind’s help, might clear some of them out, while trusting that I wouldn’t get knocked out by falling timber.

A time for submission—no wonder Lent gets a bad rap. Who wants to submit, especially after a look at the roots of the word: “sub-” is from the Latin for “under,” and “-mit” is from “mittere,” to send or throw or hurl. To submit to something is to hurl yourself under it—“it” presumably being a force much greater than your itty-bitty self, a force like, say, a speeding F350 pick-up. In fact, it might even take some courage to submit to the scouring blast of Lent.

In last week’s post, Martin considered some of the complexities of being from a particular place, ending with a beautifully expressed desire to be here, rooted in this rocky Hill Country soil. Imagine his exasperation when I said last night that I felt like I needed a vacation. My desire to run away (presumably temporary) probably has several sources, but one of them may be an awareness that the idea of Madroño Ranch is taking on heft and weight, leaving behind the dreamy elasticity of fantasy.

I’m reminded of my reaction to our daughter Elizabeth’s first vision test. It had been suggested by her third grade teacher, who had never had a student make so many arithmetic mistakes, especially in copying problems from the chalkboard onto paper. The test results were normal; Elizabeth wasn’t nearsighted, just math-impaired. First I mourned that she would never be an astronaut or an engineer or a mathematician, but then I realized that we now knew more about who she really was; she was beginning to take on her own form, independent of my fantasies for her.

In a lovely essay entitled “Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms,” Wendell Berry (of course) unearths the kinship between marriage and formal poetry: both begin in “the giving of words,” and live out their time standing by those words:

In marriage as in poetry, the given word implies the acceptance of a form that is never entirely of one’s own making. When understood seriously enough, a form is a way of accepting and living within the limits of creaturely life. We live only one life and die only one death. A marriage cannot include everybody, because the reach of responsibility is short. A poem cannot be about everything, for the reach of attention and insight is short.

Choosing a form implies the setting of limits, limits that appear arbitrary from the outside or at the outset, but that can open into generosity and possibility as they are practiced. Even as they limit, these old forms point their practitioners to a way through self-delusion toward truth, through loneliness toward community. Individual failures are certainly possible, but they aren’t necessarily arguments against the forms themselves. In fact,

“[i]t may be… that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

This past weekend we hosted “Hog School” at the ranch, the second in an ongoing series of sustainable hunting/butchering/cooking/eating extravaganzas put on by Jesse Griffith of Austin’s Dai Due supper club. I spent much of the weekend baffled (and not in a good way) by rifle-toting guests scattered across the property hunting feral hogs, by the seemingly effortless magic with which chef Morgan Angelone produced gorgeous and delicious treats from the kitchen (my kitchen, mind you, my philandering kitchen purring in someone else’s hands), by my own mental contortions.

I finally decided to go for a walk where I was unlikely to be mistaken for a hog. Marching through the field by the lake and muttering imprecations against the wind (no birds to watch), the lack of rain (no grass coming up), and the hunters (no long walks available), I decided to climb to the base of the cliffs above me and head back to the house by a new route.

Though they can be steep, the Hill Country hills aren’t exactly the Alps; climbing to the base of the cliffs only takes a few minutes and a lot of grabs at branches to keep from sliding back down in the loose mulch and rocks that just barely hold the hills up. Once I got into the still-leafless trees, I began lurching across the perpetually shifting terrain and found that it was impossible to walk and look at the same time; if I wanted to walk, I had to watch my feet carefully, and if I wanted to look, I had to stop and make sure I was balanced before I shifted my gaze. It made for slow going because, unexpectedly, there was a lot to see that I hadn’t noticed from below.

I found a fine moss-covered boulder that allowed me a new vantage point from which to look down and into the trees and brush I normally looked up at, a posture that causes the painful condition among birders known as “warbler neck.” I quickly misidentified several sparrows, and with an un-aching neck, was able to track down some raucous spotted towhees making rude observations from a clump of yaupons and to lecture them briefly. Staring at my feet as I staggered across the hillside, I found that grasses, indeed, were beginning to sprout, despite the drought. Skidding onto my derriere—it always happens off-roading on these hills—I was able to observe the first blush of blooming redbud tree, closely guarded by the great daggered yucca beside it. And then, as the wind picked up again, the rich thick smell of honey clogged the air. The source? Tiny yellow blossoms nestled under agarita spines—tiny and extravagantly generous and impossible to pick without getting pricked. The wind blew my hat off, and, setting off multiple rockslides, I chased it gracelessly down the hill.

Limits: from dust you were made and to dust you shall return. Bafflement: unexpected forms arising, unforeseen paths opening. Submission: throwing the deadwood of the ego into the flames of the Unnamable One. That’s a lot to wrestle with for the mere forty days of Lent.

What we’re reading
Heather: Adam Gopnick, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life
Martin: Donovan Hohn, Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them

Happy new year! The beginning of the year is always a good time to take stock, so we thought it might be appropriate to look back at what we accomplished—and, erm, failed to accomplish—during the last twelve months. Much remains to be done before our hopes for Madroño Ranch are completely realized, though we took what felt like some significant strides in 2010. With apologies for any perceived self-indulgence, here are some of them.

First, thanks to the wonderful and talented Shawn and Susanne Harrington of Austin’s Asterisk Group, Madroño Ranch now has a vibrant, striking, beautiful visual identity—logo (above), wordmark, etc.—which we hope eventually to splash all over actual and virtual reality. (Madroño Ranch T-shirts! Madroño Ranch gimme caps! Madroño Ranch bumper stickers and koozies and belt buckles and….)

Second, we’ve begun to rethink our initial determination to offer residencies only for environmental writers, however broadly defined (poets, philosophers, essayists, whatever). We had initially thought we would restrict our offerings to writers because, well, as a couple of recovering English majors, we felt like we knew writing better than we knew art, and (perhaps more important) we didn’t want to spend a lot of money on infrastructure (kilns, darkroom facilities, printing presses, whatever). Most writers, after all, are highly mobile these days, requiring little in the way of equipment beyond a laptop computer. But it has become increasingly obvious, even to us, that virtually the same is true of many visual artists as well—digital photographers and collagists, to name just a couple. Painters can travel with paints, portable easels, and suchlike. And then there are environmental artists, like Andy Goldsworthy, who use materials found on-site—rocks, leaves, branches, etc. Why should we exclude such creative thinkers from our pool of potential residents?

Third, while we are still a long way from officially opening our residential program for environmental writers (and artists)—we have yet to construct the small casitas we envision as individual workspaces, and we have yet to hire the necessary personnel to cook and care for our residents—we have managed to find a couple of brave souls willing to serve as “guinea pigs.” Melissa Gaskill and E. Dan Klepper will each spend several days at Madroño Ranch in the next couple of months, working, resting, and experiencing some if not all of what our actual residents will experience once we’re fully up and running. We look forward to hearing their feedback, suggestions, etc.

Fourth, our friend Jesse Griffiths of Dai Due came up with a new and exciting way to open the ranch to a wider public through a variety of sustainable hunting, fishing, and cooking “schools” throughout the year. The first, Deer School, brought six guests to the ranch in November, and was a thoroughgoing success; now we’re looking forward to Hog School in early March and Freshwater Flyfishing School in mid-May, both of which have already sold out. If they go well, we’re hoping to make these (and perhaps other such schools) an annual tradition at Madroño Ranch.

Fifth, we finally gained state approval of the label that will appear on the packages of bison meat we sell, which means we can finally go ahead with our first “harvest” (as it’s euphemistically called) this month. (We had hoped, naively, to harvest our first bison in October, but the approval process turned out to be considerably longer and more complicated than we had imagined.)

Sixth, Heather made significant progress in her quest to become a true chickenista, following the example of local legend Carol Ann Sayle of Austin’s Boggy Creek Farm. Our original flock of fifty or so laying hens took up residence in their bombproof (and, we trust, owl- and hawkproof) new coop, which we call the Chicken Palace (pictured below). A few months later Robert’s brilliant creation the Chicken Tractor (actually a mobile coop on wheels) became the home of a new flock of about twenty younger hens. (As of last week, the two groups were just beginning to commingle.)

Seventh, while we still don’t have an actual Madroño Ranch website (though we’re working on it!), we do have an official Madroño Ranch Facebook page. We invite those of you on that ubiquitous social network to check it out, and click the “Like” button if you’re so inclined; until our website is up and running, that will be the easiest way to keep track of what’s happening at the ranch in what we hope will be an exciting twelve months to come.

Perhaps none of these accomplishments sounds terribly important in and of itself, but each brought us just a little closer to our goal. Our hope for 2011 is that we—and you too, Gentle Reader—keep striding throughout the new year, whether the steps be large ones or small.

What we’re reading
Heather: Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (still—it’s hard!)
Martin: Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

At lunch the other day, a friend opined that too much of what we all think and see and hear—and, yes, eat—passes through various filters (the media, agribusiness) before it reaches us; even our air is conditioned, he added, though I have to say I’m okay with that, at least in the summer. But his larger point is one that’s been in the back of my mind (and take it from me, there’s lots of room in there) for some time.

Unmediated experiences seem increasingly hard to find. We have lost an awareness of the connection between our actions and their consequences, especially when it comes to food, especially when it comes to meat; it’s easy to avoid the stark truth that some creature was slaughtered, blood was shed, so that we might buy shrink-wrapped chunks of meat in the supermarket. The thoughtful (and splendidly named) English chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall writes in his River Cottage Meat Book that “the human act of killing animals for food, once familiar to most of society, has now become so shameful that those who condone it—by eating meat every day—are entirely protected from thinking about it. Food animals are killed and their meat is cut up and packaged far from human eyes. By the time meat reaches the consumer, the animal origins have been all but obliterated.”

Conveniently, this last weekend presented us with an opportunity to escape the shrink-wrap bubble in the form of “Deer School,” a hunting/butchering/cooking extravaganza at Madroño Ranch. Watching the skinned, eviscerated, and decapitated carcass of a 120-pound buck being carved up on your kitchen counter definitely qualifies as an unmediated experience.

The man doing the carving was Austin’s incomparable Maestro of Meat, Jesse Griffiths of Dai Due, and his audience, in addition to Heather and me, included six hunters—four experienced, two newbies, united in their love of food and dedication to the principles of ethical hunting—who had paid to spend a long weekend at the ranch. Four of them live in or around Austin, but we also had a couple who drove all the way from Michigan (!), sleeping in their Little Guy trailer all the way.

In return for their money, the guests were taken on three guided hunts (the guides were Jesse, his omnicompetent buddy Tink Pinkard, and, after poor Robert, our ranch manager, was felled by a kidney stone on Saturday morning, our son Tito) and then instructed in how to make efficient use of whatever animals they shot. They also ate a series of truly spectacular meals prepared by the indefatigable chef Morgan Dishman-Angelone, who works with Jesse.

Their collective haul included five deer and several hogs, though Robert shot the buck Jesse used for his demonstration the day before the guests arrived. As we all gathered in the kitchen to watch Jesse at work on the carcass, I was reminded of Rembrandt’s famous painting “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp.” A grisly spectacle, but also fascinating, and Jesse’s obvious care and skill were mesmerizing.

True confession: I am not a hunter, though I am an enthusiastic carnivore and have done a good bit of fishing in my time; the only mammal I have ever knowingly killed was an obviously diseased raccoon who was staggering around in the middle of a hot summer day at the ranch several years ago. But we live in a meat-centric state (the Republic of Barbecue, anyone?), and I have come to realize the distance between my life and the realities of blood and bone that hunters and farmers and ranchers confront on a daily basis.

Here’s Fearnley-Whittingstall again: “As I pull the trigger and… the beast tumbles, I feel the gap between me and the quarry, which a moment ago seemed unreachable, closed in an instant.” I think this is really the point of ethical hunting, responsible carnivorism, and eating meat in general: the realization that we, consumer and consumed alike, are part of the same system, much as we might try to deny it. Thus, in a funny way, a hunter—a responsible one, at least—rather than treating the animal he or she kills as an objectified and separate Other, is more likely to understand the profound interconnectedness that binds us all together.

Jesse and Morgan took virtually every piece of meat off that buck and used it for an extraordinary multicourse dinner that night. “We’re going to punish you,” Jesse warned us facetiously, and he wasn’t kidding: six courses, including venison tartare (pictured above, just prior to final assembly), venison paté with Jesse’s own coarse-grained mustard, braised venison flanks stuffed with chorizo, liver with mashed potatoes and apples, venison cutlets with grilled marinated radicchio, and, for dessert, Morgan’s signature Basque cake—salty-sweet crusted cake around a pastry crème center with candied persimmons and apples. It was an unforgettable meal, and left everyone—even Tito!—sated, at least temporarily: the next morning we had breakfast tacos with barbacoa made from the deer’s shanks and neck meat, which had been simmering in a crockpot overnight. Under the circumstances, “holy cow” hardly seems like the right expression, but you get the picture: we ate incredibly well, and that one buck provided enough meat to feed thirteen people twice, with quite a bit left over; thanks to Jesse, we’re looking forward to enjoying even more of it when we go out again over New Year’s, by which time I should be almost ready to think about eating meat again.

And who knows—maybe the next time we host Deer School at Madroño (and we do hope there will be a next time) I’ll sign up myself. After all, it wasn’t all that long ago that I was about as unconscious a carnivore as there was on the planet, and I’m in as much need of unmediated experience as the next guy. I’m not going to start refusing to eat anything I haven’t actually killed myself; that would be impractical, to say the least. But I do believe that hunting and butchering a deer or other animal for one’s own consumption is probably a useful exercise, and that the world might be better off if every unconscious carnivore were forced to undertake it at least once. A fuller awareness of the cost of satisfying our appetites cannot, I think, be a bad thing.

What we’re reading
Heather: Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety (still!)
Martin: Charles M. Robinson III, Bad Hand: A Biography of General Ranald S. Mackenzie

The season of hospitality is upon us, with all its pleasures and burdens. Known in the Christian tradition as Advent, it focuses on the need for preparation, both for the very intimate event of a baby’s birth and for the cosmic birth of a new order. One of my favorite images for the season, if I’m remembering rightly, comes from a series of woodcuts made by a northern Renaissance nun. In it, she imagines herself as a housewife, preparing for the coming company of the Child and the Judge by cleaning the house of her heart: dusting, sweeping, washing, polishing. The images refuse any pretensions to profound theology or high art; they are reassuringly earth-bound and homey. If you pay attention, you can almost smell the baking bread.

“Hospitality” is one of those words whose meaning has changed over the years. In our current culture, it often refers to an industry directed toward travelers or those in need who are expected to pay for its services. If hospitality isn’t a primarily economic exchange, it usually refers to the opening of home and hearth to friends, family, and associates.

In ancient times (or in places that still hew to ancient ways), hospitality wasn’t a service or an option; it was a necessity and a moral imperative. Before the development of institutional hospitality (hospitals, hospices, hostels), vulnerable individuals outside of the normal network of social relations—travelers, refugees, the sick, pilgrims, orphans, widows—were able to rely, at least for a while, on a code of hospitality that brought shame to those who were able and refused to engage it. Christine Pohl, professor of Christian social ethics at Asbury Theological Seminary, writes: “In a number of ancient civilizations, hospitality was viewed as a pillar on which all other morality rested: it encompassed ‘the good.’”

Curiously, the words “host” and “guest” are closely related etymologically, if they don’t actually come from the same source. Even more interestingly, “guest” shares an etymological bed with “enemy,” rooted in the notion of “stranger.” The idea that any of us might move from providing hospitality to needing it—to and from strangers—gives the word a kind of trinitarian energy that caroms from the poles of host to guest to stranger/enemy until the parts are indistinguishable from the whole. I don’t usually feel that charge when I check into a motel, but I think the hospitable artist nun knew that she was a part of that energy, as hostess opening her heart to the Child; as guest and sojourner on the earth; as stranger before the greatest mystery.

One of the reasons I’m thinking about hospitality, aside from the advent of Advent, is that today we’ll welcome seven guests, whom we have never met, to Madroño for the weekend. They’ll be attending “Deer School,” the brainchild of Jesse Griffiths, chef, butcher, and proprietor (with his wife Tamara Mayfield) of the Dai Due supper club and butcher shop. Deer School will include several guided hunts followed by instructions on how to field-dress and use the animal from nose to tail, followed by some really fine eating.

While I’ve been thinking recently about what it means to be a good host (new sheets and shower curtains), I’m also thinking about my role as guest, sojourner, stranger, enemy; after all, they are intimately connected. In last week’s Thanksgiving post, Martin wrote about the hospitable nature of the feast: “On Thanksgiving the acts of preparing, serving, and eating become consciously sacramental; the cook(s) giving, the guest(s) receiving, in a spirit of gratitude that can, sadly, be all too rare at other times of the year….” As one of the cooks this year, I was less attuned to what I was giving than to what had been given to me: the gorgeous vegetables from local farms, the fresh turkey from our over-subscribed friends Jim and Kay Richardson, and the freshly shot and skinned half-hog that unceremoniously appeared on the kitchen counter (and then spent eight hours roasting in a pit) after my brother, his son, our son, and Robert, the redoubtable ranch manager, went hunting early Thursday morning. The astonishing abundance and hospitality of the land was quite literally overwhelming: half a 150-plus-pound sow is a lot of meat.

I’m blundering onto mushy and possibly treacherous literary territory here, I know: Mother Earth nourishing her offspring, big hugs all around. But I’m increasingly grateful for the bounty of the place and hope the same for those who come here seeking community, solitude, rest, refreshment, and, yes, fresh deer meat. We call Madroño Ranch ours by some weird cosmic accident; the more we know it, the more we know that it belongs to itself or to something even broader, wider, more generous. What we hope now is to avoid being the nightmare guest/enemy, the one who comes and overstays his or her welcome within twenty minutes, who demands foods you don’t have, strews clothes all over the house, leaves trash and dirty dishes in the guest room, noisily stays up late, assumes you’ll do all the laundry, and never says please or thank you. Who seems to think he or she owns the place.

We all know places where that’s exactly what has happened; for me, one such place is the stretch of Interstate 35 between San Antonio and Austin, which Martin and I drove last Sunday morning, and which is almost completely lined with outlet malls, chain stores, fast-food franchises, and other such marks of our collective thoughtlessness. Somehow, we’ve managed to promote the idea, especially in the American West and particularly in Texas, that among the rights accruing to property owners is the right to destroy or devalue their property in the name of short-term economic gain. In fact, destroying property may be seen as the ultimate proof of ownership.

I struggled in an earlier post with the idea of land ownership, and I struggle with it still. All land came as a gift at some point. Not literally to its current owner, perhaps, but the land still bears the trace of its giftedness somewhere on that deed. In this season when we prepare for the arrival of guests, giving the gift of hospitality, or head somewhere hoping to be good guests, bringing gifts of thanks, it can be easy to forget that we are also always empty-handed strangers, constantly looking for a wider hospitality than we are ever able to offer or sometimes even to know that we need. We’re only a week past Thanksgiving; this is as good a time as any to thank the land that sustains us. Without it, we can never fill a house with the smells of baking bread and roasting meat—or any of the other things that sustain us.

What we’re reading
Heather: Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety (still)
Martin: Ben Macintyre, Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory

The other night, inspired by a typically wonderful dinner at Texas French Bread, my Best Gal and I got to talking about our favorite meals ever, and what made them so. Eventually, we decided that it might be interesting to write about some of our most memorable meals. Since it happened to be my turn to grind out our weekly post, I got to go first, but we hope to turn this into an occasional series. Stay tuned!

For the purposes of our discussion, I arbitrarily ruled out meals that Heather, an amazing cook in her own right, had made at home, which knocked out a bunch of contenders: her pork posole, her made-from-scratch pizza baked in the wood-burning oven in the backyard, her weapons-grade ratatouille, her charcoal-grilled bison-lamb burgers with all the fixin’s, and so on.

With those delectable meals off the table, so to speak, my thoughts turned immediately to the tagine we enjoyed on the pillow-strewn rooftop of an inn in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, and the tortelli at that trattoria (I can’t even remember its name) we blundered into by pure chance near the Duomo di San Martino in Lucca. Less exotically, I remembered wonderful meals at Higgins, in downtown Portland, Oregon; at Delfina and Swan Oyster Depot, in San Francisco; and at Savoy, in New York’s Soho.

Closer to home, I fondly recalled the burgers and Shypoke Eggs (actually a form of trompe l’oeil nachos) at the late lamented Little Hipp’s in San Antonio. And then there was that “Whole Hog” dinner prepared by Jesse Griffiths of Dai Due last year: seven incredibly delicious courses, each featuring some form of pork—even dessert, which was beignets fried in pork lard. (Oops! Please excuse me while I wipe the drool off my keyboard.)

Somewhat disconcertingly for a couple of self-styled foodies, though, we found that we could rarely remember the dishes that made up these meals in much detail. Rather, what we tended to recall was the setting, and the company, and other such trivia. Not that the food wasn’t important, of course; but we concluded that it takes more than merely wonderful food to make a truly memorable meal. When it all comes together, there is something magical about the combination of the flavor and texture and smell of the food, and the comfort of the setting in which it is served, and true ease and delight in the presence of one’s companions (and what a wonderfully evocative word companion is, deriving from the Latin “with bread”—literally, one with whom you would break bread).

Or, alternately, a truly memorable meal might just involve intense pain and suffering, like the one I’m about to describe. Almost thirty years ago, during the summer after we graduated from college, we set off on a 4,500-mile road trip from Massachusetts to San Francisco and then back to San Antonio—all in Heather’s un-air conditioned Toyota Tercel hatchback, nicknamed Pollo for reasons now lost in the mists of time.

It was an eventful journey—in New Orleans someone busted in one of Pollo’s windows and made off with everything we owned, including the all-important cooler full of cold beverages, and in San Francisco each of my parents had an, um, entertaining reaction to my newly pierced ear—but in some ways the high point occurred as we were making our way back to Texas in July.

We’d been following Interstate 40 eastward, but we had an early edition of Jane and Michael Stern’s book Roadfood in which we read about this Mexican joint in the dusty little town of Socorro, New Mexico, and even though Socorro was some seventy-five miles out of our way we decided (ah, youth!) that it would be worth the detour.

We reached Socorro at the height of the scorching mid-afternoon heat and found the restaurant, next to the railroad tracks and surrounded by chickens, without too much trouble. It was almost completely deserted, in that dead time between the lunch and dinner crowds, and as we walked to our table we caught a brief glimpse of an enormous black cast-iron stove in the kitchen, surrounded by a swarm of diminutive elderly women in black.

Heather ordered… I don’t know; enchiladas or something. I ordered the tamales with salsa verde, I can’t remember why; perhaps the book recommended them? We sipped our iced tea while the women in the kitchen got busy; when the food arrived, it looked and smelled fabulous. We both dug in enthusiastically, and almost immediately I realized I was in waaaaay over my head.

The tamales were wonderful, but that verde sauce… oh, my God. It’s still probably the spiciest thing I’ve ever eaten. My body’s alarm bells started clanging, the warning lights began flashing; my forehead, and then my scalp and neck and upper body, started pouring sweat like Albert Brooks in Broadcast News.

Soon my T-shirt was soaked; still the heat kept building. I drained several glasses of iced tea, to little effect. I noticed that all the women who worked in the kitchen had come out to watch me; they stood in the doorway, pointing and giggling, like a gaggle of highly amused crows.

Somehow I made it all the way through the tamales, then, trying to marshal my last shreds of dignity, stood up, marched out to the car, and changed my sopping wet T-shirt. Did the women applaud when I returned? I can’t remember, though they certainly should have. I’ve had many fiery meals since then, but none could compare to that one. Fortunately, my youthful constitution absorbed the dreadful punishment with no long-term ill effects, and we went on our way to Texas.

Yeah, that was a memorable meal, all right. Won’t you tell us about some of yours?

What we’re reading
Heather: Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Martin: Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America

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!)

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:

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