The SFA is advertising the Cochon Ball on its blog:
If we understand correctly, Chef Donald Link will be cooking a pig or three, with his grill set up behind one of the goals of a mock foosball game, laid out a green at the center of the Brickyard. While Link cooks, 26 foosball players will, taking their inspiration from the tabletop game, slide and summersault while kicking a green, inflatable ball – representing the apple commonly stuck in the mouth of a roasted suckling pig – around the field, trying to score points. After a couple hours of kicking, everyone will eat pig. Along the way, Meehan hopes to catalyze conversations about how food events engender community and about how local foods matter to local people. Wacky? Yes. Fun? Definitely. You should go.
Details: January 17, 2009 Location: The Brickyard, Bywater, 3000 block of Chartres Street. Foosball starts at noon or so Feed starts at 3:00 or so Admission is $5 or so Questions: alisounm@gmail.com
Musing on pigs, I found a great how-to guide for cooking cochon de lait on this site from Texas A&M. Warning: It includes pictures likely to make sensitive vegetarians nauseous. But, as you can see, the flash-creations of pigs hanging on rotisseries in homemade cooking sheds are a delight. And the author's description of this joyous Louisiana ritual is spot on:
Cochon de Lait is basically a cajun pig roast of a whole young pig. The pig is slow roasted for 6 to 12 hours. That is what makes a Cochon de Lait an event rather than just cooking a meal. It's an extended "male bonding", "story telling", "bull shooting", "beverage of your choice drinking", "fire tending" event!
Like any good time in the South, it's probably not a success unless somebody gets hurt.
Frustrated political activism eventually becomes civil disobedience--That's not always how it goes: I don't think Thoreau was active about too much outside of his writing and his bean plants. But he couldn't truck what he deemed an unjust war or slavery, so he stopped paying the taxes that financed it.*
Environmentalists and guerilla-types have been exuberant about DeChristopher's stunt; everybody else not so much. The Federal government is threatening to prosecute him for interfering with and perverting its business (whoops, I almost wrote the public good). And DeChristopher, who now owes $1.8 million to the BLM, has to figure out what to do with his new real estate. Recently, a group of supporters raised $45,000 for the down payment, which might help keep him out of jail, but the consequences of DeChristopher's political act are still up in the air.
You can read more about DeChristopher, as well as watch video of him at the auction, by clicking on the donation button, which leads to the Bidder70 site. Lord knows if I had any extra money, I'd throw it his way.
Or weeks in review...extended to account for the holiday attention lag:
Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson composed a sapient if not stirring op-ed in the New York Times about the need for a long-term, truly ecological Farm Bill:
For 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have money we will have food. That is a mistake. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. The government will bring forth no food by providing hundreds of billions of dollars to the agribusiness corporations.
President Bush granted monument status to 195,000 square miles of marine habitat in the South Pacific, which means he "has now protected more ocean habitat (333,000 square miles) than any of his predecessors." (I tried to make a joke about off-shore oil here, but then I decided there was no reason to be ironic about something praiseworthy.)
The Wall Street Journal snickered at Guvnah Pardo's Go Fish Georgia Initiative, which if you've ever played "Go Fish" is pretty funny in its own right (HT: Kim). The state is spending $18-19 million to make Georgia a premier boating and fishing tourism destination. That's a fine allocation when you're not facing "the worst economic slump since the Depression," not to mention a record drought:
The governor -- who fondly recalls a childhood in which his grandfather took him fishing with a cane pole along the banks of Big Indian Creek in Middle Georgia -- said critics must not be fishermen. "They haven't seen a kid's eyes light up when he catches his first fish."
Others aren't so nostalgic. Last month, the Georgia Department of Veterans Services was forced by budget problems to close a housing unit for 81 sick or disabled veterans in the town of Milledgeville. "It's a shame that our veterans are being displaced so we can catch some fish," said Fae Casper, a retired Army sergeant who heads the Georgia chapter of the American Legion. "Revenue is important, but taking care of the people that allow us to be free is, to me, more important."
In spite of the uproar from the Farm Bureau and the commercial farm industry, an EPA levied "cow tax" for gastrointestinal emissions is probably not going to happen. It probably was never going to happen and originated, as some have suggested, as an anti-regulatory scare tactic.
The Onion pointed out cogently that, at the end of the day, there is one thing we can all agree on.
And, when you really think about it, there's a lot to like about food. It tastes good and it's good to eat. That's all I can think of for now, but those two things alone make me like food. Furthermore, I just thought of something else: Food is probably the healthiest and best thing to put in your mouth. You can ask a doctor about that.
There's been a cavalcade of book recommendations here lately. It shows my native weakness for hardbacks and literary fare, but I've also got a higher motive. Everyone looking for a revolutionized food culture—Janisse Ray, Gene Baur, Sara Miller—have called for consumers to make their dollars political, proving the importance of local, organic, etc. by spending on them. I'm not going to dispute the point, although I think it may overreach by assuming a large, informed consumer base, not to mention the common availability of “new” food stuffs. Before anyone exercises political power by buying organic mutton off the shelf, work has to be done to inculcate that person of the inherent merits of the choice. That's where I come in humbly, attempting to solidify a vibrant food conscious by broadcasting the values of community, stewardship, singularity, and, of course, healthy eating.
Dabney, Rawlings, even Baker help achieve that goal. So might Sylvia Tomlinson, author of Plucked and Burned, a fictional expose of chicken farming in the United States. In the author's own words:
Chicken farmers are often maligned as "factory farmers" when in fact, they run small family farms. Families, who while desperately looking for a commodity that might earn a decent return and keep them on the farm, believed the false promises made by poultry integrators. When I began my research, I was shocked to learn that the situation about which I intended to write was not an isolated, maverick incident. It was widespread across the country and most especially in the South and parts of the East Coast where few rural employment opportunities exist and environmental monitoring is less strenuous, at best.
Color me intrigued and a little envious of Tomlinson for writing the book before I could. My dad's a contract chicken farmer, and I've seen the farmer-company relationship first hand. Tomlinson likens it to indentured servitude; I'd call it modern-day sharecropping—just a difference of origins and vantage points no doubt. My dad has escaped most of the standard company harassment in the last decade because he's been with Fieldale, which has acted more sympathetically to its growers than any company in his memory. But pop's got stories. The company can drop you at its whim, and keep you on the line and in debt with constant capital demands. It seemed that for a good part of my childhood, every year my dad was threatened with being cut off unless he installed $20,000 worth of feeder trough or cool cell upgrades before the next flock. He was fortunate because my grandfather had farmed chickens, too, and the houses had been up and paid for a long time. Today it's inconceivable that a family could build new houses and ever be comfortably profitable. The technology cost alone is now exorbitant. While the company would offer easy financing, it wouldn't necessarily be friendly, and as I mentioned, they'd be prone to making demands that could keep a grower forever behind the eight ball. This is a particularly heinous activity considering the economics of chicken farming:
In reality, Tomlinson states (and this is courtesy of a professor of economics at Auburn) that the growers put up more than 50 percent of the cost of poultry farming, only to collect 1-2 percent of the end profit. The company, however, receives between 25-30 percent. One of the farmers at this summer's meeting wondered how he could let the public know that while consumers are paying between $5 and $8 for one package of chicken breasts, he is "lucky to get 30 cents on a whole chicken."
I don't have space or patience to get into the psychology of intimidation. Although there is a market of companies and growing contracts, farmers are afraid to shop around with their livelihoods at stake. The contracts are so vital yet tenuous that the growers are almost forced to develop a kind of obedience. The servicemen and their bosses exploit and encourage it, composing niggling lists each week, “writing you up” after measuring the height of the grass outside the door.
My dad is now 61-years-old and out of the chicken business. It's not by choice. The economy has forced Fieldale to cut back, and my dad's farm is inconvenient to reach in the developing southern end of Hall County, Georgia. I'm glad he no longer has to fight the daily stress of a broken feeder or a serviceman in a bad temper. However, he's lost his primarily cash-flow. As with most farmers, there's not a lot to fall back on.
UPDATE--Merritt Melancon at the Athens Banner-Herald has a story up on the effect of the recession, as well as recent residential development, on North Georgia chicken farmers (HT: Ben):
"We're good right now," Crowe said. "But you worry what will happen in a few months if this thing doesn't turn around. ... If they cut an entire flock of birds, even though I'm this close (five years) from paying off my houses, I'd have to restructure my loans. Then if they miss one flock, what's to keep them from cutting down to two, three a year."
UPDATE UPDATE--The article has an exceptionally lively comment section, and I couldn't resist quoting one of the comments in its entirety. I suspect that KPOST's statements are ironic, but apparently that's wishful thinking:
OH MY GOD! Why are you people defending a business that employs illegal aliens? All these farms need to be plowed under! I moved to Barrow county so I could get away from the Mexicans in Gwinnett. I didn't move to the countryside to have my residential activities disturbed by farming activities. I shouldn't have to look at horses or smell chicken ***** when I drive down the road! I can't build my $150,000 house because of that barn next to me. Where I want to put my house, I'd have to look at that freak'n barn. It's bad enough that I have to smell the chicken house everytime I drive by, and I WILL DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO SHUT HIM DOWN. I managed to stop the horse farm from doing business!
And who are you people to judge me? You don't know me!
Another commenter, WTF, provides this well-measured response to KPOST: "Move to New York City and get run over by a bus. Thank you."
Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, and Scuppernong Wine is my favorite kind of a writing: Perhaps it's just an attention span that only slightly exceeds a chicken's, but I've always been partial to encyclopedias, chrestomathies, and motley books. The prime example in English might be Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, in a peripatetic group that includes everything from William Blake's epic poems to Ambrose Bierce's subversive dictionary to James Agee's queer account of Alabama sharecroppers. Like the Wisdom Books of the Old Testament, each seems to offer a continuously unique, surprising, and delightful encounter, and the reading as a whole is as various and inexhaustible as experience himself.
So it was with great satisfaction I opened, at random, Joseph Dabney's “cookbook” to find instructions for bear stew combined with an anecdote about a North Carolina woman breastfeeding a cub. Smokehouse Ham is hardly a manual for cooking but a living compilation of history, biography, opinion, and folklore, which animate each chapter's recipes. Personally, I can hear my own grandfather talking about hunting squirrels and rabbits in the North Georgia foothills to supply the family's table during the Depression, and in this way the volume invites a kind of mutual action, begging for me to pull out a pencil and write in the margins as the page inscribes me.
I should add a recommendation that will touch all similar bibliophiles. Characteristically, the book has a reassuring heft. My favorite books have all been physically substantial. They're like intimate companions. Often when I've fallen asleep reading late, I've woken the next morning to find the rectangular impression in the sheets beside me wholly comforting.
This is exactly what I had in mind as a mountain complement to Marjorie Kinnan Rawling's Cross Creek Cookery. I hope Rawlings doesn't disappoint. After reading the following quote from her Cross Creek, I doubt she will:
[T]he consciousness of land and water must lie deeper in the core of us than any knowledge of our fellow beings. We were bred of earth before we were born of our mothers. Once born, we can live without mother or father, or any other kin, or any friend or any human love. We cannot live without the earth or apart from it, and something is shrivelled [sic] in man's heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men.
