A Culinary Outrage.

In this time of conflict between organic and natural food stuffs, the old stand byes and processed foods of our youth, the clamor for free trade coffee and cocoa and grass fed beef and free range chickens and a tofu alternative to every single meat option there is (and I say what the fuck is the point?  tofu is never going to taste, feel, or look like turkey or bacon or beef, why do people choose to be vegan/vegetarian then clamour for a tofu replacement?  So typical of the human spirit to abstain from a perceived health threat only to recreate it in a perverse and deranged image).  We are affronted with a growing assault on our culinary sensibilities: turkey bacon.

I had thought that chicken sausage was perverse enough.  That beyond turkey burger we could stoop no lower.  But tofurkey signaled the death knell for the purity of food and now we have to cope with turkey bacon.  There is a watery argument (much like the flavor of said abomination) that it is similar to the bacon I know and love, that it has the same flavor and texture with fewer health risks.  Turkey bacon is championed as something from the hills, something pure and good and wrapped with old-timey graphics.  It is everything bacon with the notable exception of being bacon.

In our exuberance to denounce everything grown, raised, butchered, or otherwise produced using chemicals, hormones, corn, or cages--in effort to take marbled beef off the shelves, make sausage healthy, and wage an ideological campaign against the traditional American farmer--we have wrapped ourselves into a very real but vague moral outrage against whatever we think maybe different from what we want.  Within the campaign to make produce natural (I've always been drawn to the inorganic plastic fruit from the popular children's kitchen toys) factions have emerged and our strength has become divided.  Is this organic grass fed or organic corn fed? Did it ever have a shot to keep it from getting sick?  If so, why didn't you take the loss and destroy your income, I mean livestock?  Did someone ever pee on your garden and chemically taint the soil?  Were the worms in these apples ever in fertilized apples?  And on and on and, as a wise consumer populace, we have become as week and divided as the political parties under pressure from the tea party.

Our guard is down and we are vulnerable and the result is turkey bacon.

I, for one, am outraged.  Who will join me in attempt to quash this attack on our culinary consciousness?  Is there anyone else not afraid of the powerful poultry lobby?  Is anyone else willing to help me put turkey back where it belongs, shunted to its day of glory towards the end of November?  If we don't draw the line here, what is next?  Turkey Bratwurst?  Turkey chicken breasts?  Turkey prime-rib?

We must act now, before it is too late.

I Have To Read.

Its been hard for me write this past week.  Yesterday I spent some time with my coffee staring at the flashing cursor on the computer screen, unsure of how to proceed or what to do.  After some time had passed I started to write, three beginnings sit unused and barely legible.  Is my life so boring that I can't muster one post this week?  That is entirely possible.  I have removed myself from the inevitable election, weary of the adds, the smear, the lies, the promises, and the bickering that obscure the issues at hand.  I have removed myself from religious controversy and I haven't read anything in a couple of weeks.  (I will book binge for two or months straight and then fall into a barren spell in which I will read nothing at all.)

The truth is that I have been exhausted.  Tired, worn-out, and unable to get up and motivated in the mornings.  This, right here, is a supreme challenge for me and each passing line is a mental mountain to climb.  Bereft of creativity it is apparent to me that to write, lucidly and with  little effort I have to be reading as well, I have to be immersed in language.  It is worth the inconvenience of the library to maintain a stack of books to read.  It is worth a re-visit to the home library to re-read an old stand bye.  It is important for writers to read.

I am afraid that is the extent of my powers this morning.

A Long Way From Home

This fall has been very nostalgic for me.  My oldest son has started kindergarten which has turned out to be a sublime trigger to a flood of emotions and memories as we race into fall.  The Pendleton Rodeo centennial was this year (second full week in September) and contrary to what I expected I have had this feeling that we should have been there to be a part of something of a milestone for something that defined, by and large, the town I grew up in.  And this fall, more than ever before, there is the sneaking suspicion that I should be getting ready for deer season, something I haven't done in 10 years, but it is there and very real and with each passing day, each tree that drops its leaves, the feeling is a little more real.

It isn't clear to me if I would have felt this way with the advent of kindergarten or not but that seemed to trigger the fall memories.  One year I jumped out of the top bunk, on the first morning of school, having slept in the cloths I intended to wear.  The halls of my elementary school are vivid in their soft colors, lined with bricks and tall windows.  The gym, the green basement where the cafeteria and kindergarten classes were.  The black top were we played four-square and basketball and the grassy fields for field sports.

Generally my memories of elementary school are a blur.  The faces of my teachers stand out but their names have mostly faded with textbooks and schoolmates and lessons and the individual memories of school.

I was not prepared for these emotions this year.  Fall is usually a nostalgic season for me, however, it defines so much of how we grow up as the starting point for new school years for the formative time in our lives.  I don't think the firsts ever get easier, for the parents or the children.  When my son goes to first grade, the public school down the street, I will be fraught with emotion, once again.  I remember walking onto the campus of Western Washington University for the first day of classes--small, lonely, frightened and a long way from home.

I have a new home now.  A family of my own.  New joys and trials and adventures and challenges in which to participate.  But this fall I feel a long ways away from myself, as though I have drifted to far away from home.

Who I Am?

Its been hard, lately, to get into a daily rhythm.  Commitments and obligations are constantly being shaped and added and it seems that the most subtle shift can have a disproportionate effect on the daily regime.  I am not a person who does well with either a loose schedule or a tight schedule that is constantly evolving.  I am a creature of habit and I crave normalcy and a constant schedule, all the while I long for variation and change. 

It isn't because I love eggs and toast that I eat them every morning, and I could easily find a substitute for coffee, if I was so inclined.  These are things that ground my day, just as riding my bike to shop that the company I work for is based out of is a way that I take control of how I am defined.  I remember a pastor once said to look at the lords table (communion) and recognize the elements--bread and wine--as the most basic food the disciples would have had available on a daily basis and find something like that in our life.  It has struck me as I struggle with my identity and work and general attitude towards life lately that I take on my routine to maintain control of who I am.

I don't sit down to my breakfast of eggs, toast, and coffee and make a conscious choice to enter into a time of communion.  Rather, I sit and recognize who I am.  This breakfast is something I made because i enjoy it and wrapped up in what I enjoy is who I am and what I believe.  I am on a quest to severe, in so much as I can, the connection of my identity to what I do for work.  Who I am is more what I believe than how I make a living, what I enjoy more than what I have to do.

We do what we have to do to survive--pay the rent, but bread on the table, gas in the car, and shoes on our feet.  As a husband and father I sacrifice elements of dreams for the pragmatic reality of daily life.  But who I am does not need to be defined by what I do.  It needs to be defined by who I am.