Crow au Vin?

To follow up on that lengthy introduction, this is the actual story...

As some of you know, I work in food. Some others of you know I volunteer in food. Some even know both, and maybe me, as well. Some know that the service aspect of my life is very important to me, and perhaps that I have tried to incorporate that into my paid work, as well, when the parameters of my job would allow that.

Well, one of my frustrations is that there are a great many people consumed with trying to send money to Myanmar, and now China, while our local food banks are short of both food and volunteers. Another one is that people are terribly worried about buying organic, free-range whatevers* for their own tables at the same time that they show no signs of being concerned about whether their neighbors are eating anything at all. And there are people whose lefty and self-righteous environmental obsessions are so narrow and myopic that they fail to take in the human cost, and the human aspects in the ethical equations that purportedly conscious and conscientious people make when deciding what, where, and how to buy.

And for me, labor issues matter. Fair treatment matters. Decent working conditions matter terribly. And, because I have worked in the often ridiculously poor conditions of commercial kitchens, finished out shifts in kitchens with second- and third-degree burns on the palm my sauteeing hand, worked with people who have previously worked in agriculture and meat processing, and have been an undocumented worker overseas myself, I would argue I have greater experience with the issue, and greater natural, visceral, direct empathy for the workers involved than do most people who simply have neither the experience nor the broadmindedness to consider the whole story of an ingredient, to imagine that the history of their organic, free-range, shade-grown tomato started a long time ago, in a language far, far away from their Whole Foods produce aisle.

So, when I read a disheartening story (you can just NewsGoogle 'Stemilt' and get one million hits, so take your pick) about Washington fruit workers in California having difficult times with a reputable and progressive agricultural firm, fruit producer Stemilt, which, frankly, among big companies has a great record with moving toward more organic practices and being quite decent with workers, I was impassioned, and I wrote a letter. I wrote a terse, angry letter with a (perhaps poetic but) mean closing line.

And a person, a live, human person like me and like the laborers, wrote me back. Okay, fine, Stemilt isn't General Electric, but I'm not Bill Gates, either. And it is a very big company, and I am not. And the letter wasn't condescending, although it had a valuable lesson. And the message 'Don't believe all that you read/hear' is one that we all, most especially myself, need to keep with us as much as we can. I work hard at being both humble and critical, and I think that, relative to many strains in our culture, I'm doing okay at both. That being said, however, we do all have our prejudices, even as we struggle against them, and it is precisely those that are most ingrained -- and thus most powerful in swaying our thoughts, emotions, and actions -- that we are least likely to perceive as they influence us.

Thus, after that terribly dramatic build-up, here are the letters. Mine first, then his, and then my response. While it is true that we live in a world that can be so alienating, and we can go for days or weeks on end without, if we so wish it, any in-person human interaction, and we can have so many 'contacts' in our Blackberries or even our social lives that are fated always to be just that and nothing more, it was shocking and gratifying and satisfying in my soul that someone at Stemilt read my angry words in the very human and compassionate way he did, and responded in such a human way.

To Whom It May Concern:

I applaud Stemilt's contributions to greener agricultural practices, but your treatment of Washington workers in California is disgusting and indefensible. I am a private chef, and my business focuses on local, organic, and seasonal ingredients as much as possible, but both my clients and I can get by just fine without your products from any state. As well, in any case where I am unable to ascertain the origin of product from the vendor, I will simply forgo that fruit, and that dish. My clients will already know why by that point, as I will be giving them information sheets next week about Stemilt's labor practices. We may be more concerned about the environment up here than people in other regions, but we are also concerned with the dignity of our fellow human beings who labor to provide us with the food that sustains our lives. May you reap the fruit of your inhumanity.

(My Name),

All the workers are harvesting the crops today in California as scheduled. No workers were removed. Be careful what you read. Stemilt is who it says it is, both environmentally and socially. Other peoples motives are what are at issue. This orchard attracts lots of great harvest workers because of the income it provides them due to its production and cleanliness. You would need to interview the workers to believe what I am telling you. The owner of this orchard is a humanitarian. It will continue to attract workers in future years because of this orchards environment.

(My Name), we are glad you care about people. There isn't enough of that concern in this world.

I felt compelled to respond to you. You seem like a person that cares,

Stemilt

Wow,

(His Name), thank you very much for responding to me personally. I work alone now, but when I worked in kitchens I really cared about my employees, many of whom were from basically the same demographic as agricultural workers, so I do know that it is possible, even in difficult, dirty, physical jobs, to create an atmosphere where workers feel valued. I also know that even big organizations can create overall cultures that are largely positive or mostly negative, and I applaud any efforts Stemilt makes to engender the former.

As for caring, I do. I think the food industry is unique, different than any other. There are famous artists in it, and there are tons of unskilled and semiskilled, invisible but equally vital contributors, too. And on the one hand, food is something we need every day and don't have to reflect on when we want to grab a hamburger to stop being hungry. On the other, it is an integral part of family celebrations, religious holidays, and rites of passage. And even though the poor can survive without shelter or new clothes, everyone has to eat to live. In fact, I volunteer at meal programs to help poor people get some food, to balance out the feeding-wealthy-people side of my life.

I really thank you for taking the time to respond. It is individuals, whether in a for-profit business or a charity, that make decisions, make personal connections - and make a difference. I'm not famous or influential or anything, but I'll follow the story and eat whatever crow I have to, along with Stemilt cherries, on my blog, http://oisive-vitesse.blogspot.com as it progresses. Again, I know work in the fields is hard, but I applaud you for offering workers housing, and for paying wages that attract new workers.

I can't yet find updated news stories, but I will keep looking. I do know that there isn't much money in broadcasting cheery news, unless it is put at the end of the newscast and involves a child or a pet. Immigrant farmworkers have known for a long time that they're not as cute as they could be.

*This actually happened -- and not at a Whole Foods: I was innocently idling around the bulk-licorice zone (which unfortunately abuts the bulk-coffee zone), doing no harm to anyone, when some Birkenstock-shod, bicycle-helmetted Zen master accosted the poor stock-clerk and assaulted my ears with this unnecessary query: 'While I see on the label that this blend (why must it be 'this blend?' why can he not utter the word 'coffee?' why can none of them? it's so easy to say, only two felicitous syllables that so gently roll off the tongue? cof-fee! coffee! coffffffeeeee! why does it always have to be 'this blend,' or 'this roast' with these people???) is fair-trade and organic, I was wondering if it were also perchance shade-grown, as well?'

Alright, I don't know that he said 'perchance.' Probably he didn't. But he wanted to. And the poor seventeen-year-old grocery-store worker, who probably drinks Mountain Dew and Denny's coffee by the litre and was writing speed-metal lyrics in his head and finally starting to enjoy pouring bulk penne from bags into canisters picturing the bass he's going to put a downpayment on with his next check had to break his fleeting rapturous chain of thought to go grab some higher-up who has somehow managed to memorize all the individual PC attributes of each and every 'blend' the store has, just to let the Coffee Sensei know whether or not he's hit some arbitrary 2008 liberal-coffee-buying trifecta.

Which is just a way of saying that while I think we should be moved to take action when our conscience demands it, and we should strive to do as much good and as little harm in the world as we can, there are also other things that are, simply, overkill and fatuous, and serve primarily to artificially assuage the ego -- and result in very little effect at all. I wonder when the last time for most of the Yoga Coffee Dudes of the world was that they calculated all that they spend on their blends and contributed it to something better, let alone went and 'fair traded' their own labor for free at a very needy, local nonprofit...

'Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.'

So said the epicure Brillat-Savarin, and while an ontological argument based on that aphorism would be hard to sustain in many quarters (or so I pray, at any rate: the idea of my body decomposing into lardons of cured pork and boxes of Good-n-Plenty while the walls of my veins leaked Barolo and Amarone into the velvet walls of my coffin strikes far more terror in me than the normal image which -disturbingly, perhaps - doesn't disturb me in the least), and the more transcendent aspects of his musings on gastronomy and gourmandise are equally unsuited to the realities of our present world, the above quote, read entirely wrongly, of course, and viewed through an ethical rather than aesthetic lens, is what I want to get to here today.

(Update 06.12.08: That was really all one sentence. Someone, save me from myself.)

People like to think of globalism as a brand-new phenomenon. And I will admit that with the population of the world so much greater than ever before, every nation or region has a greater impact on others: I have more people producing more waste over here in country X, so there is a greater chance of some of it reaching you in country Y, for example. But the Chinese have been a global power for millennia, over land and by sea. The silver in Chinese coffers plundered by the British opium trade and subsequent wars and concessions was largely from South American mines, while the tea that the British came to love was, as we all know, an ancient part of Chinese gastronomic culture. Marco Polo brought pasta to Italy, and the cotton plantations of the southern United States arose to fill the growing gap between India's long history of production and current need, while the US is now poised in coming years to become the leader in 'hauling coals to Newcastle' quite literally -- not to mention the huge markets of China, India, Russia, as well as many smaller countries in the developing world.

So.

It may have been the case before, but now that the stakes are manifestly higher we admit it more readily: we are all in this together. Even George W. Bush has come to acknowledge that, at least as far as the ozone layer is concerned, human beings can have some kind of corporate and individual impact on the world as a whole. And I believe that food, our use of it, our approach to it, our taking it for granted or choosing to be deliberate in our choices, can be a significant aspect of living up to our values.

Every left-leaning, bunny-hugging simpleton will recite the evils of McDonalds anytime there is a perceptible lapse in conversation. And, in the Northwest at least, anyone desirous of impressing upon his audience the virtuousness of his life and lower intestine will not fail to (re-) state (the obvious:) his unswerving allegiance to the aisles of Whole Foods for all his home cooking and (natural) grooming products needs.

But in the same way that my sending a check every once in a while to Mercy Corps or the Red Cross does not confer something akin to proactive moral immunity, a lifetime's absolution, or mean I thus have carte blanche to perform human sacrifices or set the neighbor's house on fire because I did good elsewhere, trusting a preacher, or a friend, or - for heaven's sake! - a retailer, as gatekeeper for all our individual, specific ethical choices sells our own conscience and powers of rational contemplation short. There simply is no one guidebook containing every possible moral conundrum an individual can face in the moment. And I think that before we can get to 'we are what we eat' in its moral sense, we have first to accept that we are what we do, overall. We are the choices we make, the mistakes we regret, the issues we feel compelled to stand for, and the hand we do or do not offer a suffering soul.

How this all ties in to food, not to mention my enduring and recurrently proven faith in the human voice coming through miles of wires and anonymity and preconceptions, and not forgetting, as well, my own well-deserved humility and willingness to put crow in cream sauce on my own dinner menu when appropriate, will have to wait until next time, as this preamble to what I intended to say is already too long without even having a body yet!

Get Your Own Bloody Flag!

To those of you who hope to dictate the topics or timbre of this blog I have a couple things to say.

One is that it is not your blog. I should think this would be apparent, as it is my picture and my words which figure most prominently herein. But since it clearly is not as obvious as all that, here is my flag. I am planting a flag, so this space is now mine. You are welcome to stay, and have a mint julep or a Bloody Caesar according to your country's custom and some of those canapés over there, and listen to a story or a rant, but you cannot move in and take over the territory. That I have put my flag down here proves that.


Secondly, you should understand you are not my demographic. You are one person. One person is not a demographic, unless that one person is me. That I myself could be construed as my onlylonely target demographic is evidenced by the fact that I use the words 'patently' and 'frankly' with the same frequency as I use the word 'the,' as well as the fact that I employ my own idiosyncratic punctuation scheme in which I italicize words in quotation marks all the time in some kind of super-double quotativity -- and yet don't care. I don't care because this is my blog not my dissertation, and I don't care because if you are not sufficiently entertained as to keep reading, then you should by all means not continue reading.

Unless your intent in continuing is to ascertain before offering me a book deal whether my egregious lapses in syntax, my meretricious embrace of both high and low diction, and my slipping between overdone Latinate multi-clause monstrosities and staccato Anglo-Saxon gunfire can be ameliorated with the assistance of a patient and judicious editor.

Which it is not. Your intent, I mean.

So, if you are disenchanted, if you don't care how much sandalwood or oud I used in the last perfume, if you don't want to hear that I think none of the candidates is qualified to steer this Narrenschiff out of the shoals, or that in an effort to save time I electrocuted myself by toasting bread while bathing, or that I ate nothing but licorice over the weekend, or that I am contemplating making a flip-book of clothing items in order to make outfit selection a more organized and enjoyable procedure, then the best I can do is to relay a rumor recently passed to me that these Interwebs have some kind of 'page' on which you can write your dream of an electronic reading or viewing selection, and the Interwebs will then write for you suggestions of where you can go to find that. If I have been shorter of shrift on the travails of the house of Gucci than you might like, or if you wish I had talked more about the origin of the proscription against the split infinitive in English, then maybe you will find your dream elsewhere. In the meantime, click 'NEXT BLOG' at the top of this page. And may it be in Uzbek!

The lover's discourse stifles the other

who finds no place for his own language beneath this massive utterance. -Barthes, A Lover's Discourse

An acquaintance, having read the profile I managed to endure having up on Match for two weeks, made interesting comment. Well, interesting to me, at any rate, as pretty much anything regarding me is a source of endless (self-) entertainment. Which is good, inasmuch as that at least makes one of us.

What he said was that, while on the surface my profile appears to be very intimidating in terms of what I would be seeking in a partner, it is in fact, or so he reckoned (correctly, as it turned out, but then he is smart and that is invaluable when it comes to reckoning, dead or otherwise) not at all. This is because, unlike in the overwhelming majority of cases, I offer no list of what he has to be. Or like, or be like. And there isn't one, isn't any such list, anywhere in my head.

Consequently, many of the things that came closest to being stipulations were mediated by friendly and sort-of relativist terms: he doesn't have to believe in God, for example, but would ideally 'believe in Good'; he should 'more or less accept some sort of ontological basis' with regard to my referencing the mundane, the sordid, and the divine as categories. So not hardcore at all; in fact, pretty nimbly leaving the door open for discussion on whatever, even the huge things -- provided he knows what the bloody heck I'm even talking about.

That, of course, remains a bit of a sticking point, and one which I've argued with myself over for years. Intellectually, of course, I would think it fatuous to hope someone, friend or lover or sister-in-law, has the same reading resume, for example, that I do. Certainly my reading has been as much a part of my life, or my development, as my varied experiences -- but I wouldn't expect or consciously hope that someone would have had the same Life History that I have, so why do so with books, or thinky pursuits?

But I do imagine there is a bottom level either of fluency or of competence with the ideas and values I might be expressing, or the way in which I intend a certain word, or come to a position, or approach an idea or situation. And I'm not sure, though, whether that relates to actual intellectual experience or innate intelligence (the 'fluency' versus the 'competence'). Moreover, there is certainly the part of me that wishes on the one hand never, ever to fall in love with someone I'm going to have to have arguments with over Homi Bhabha or Agamben! Really really really. That part of me that distrusts and at some level despises all language and particularly despises any language that talks about language. The part of me that can love, rather than 'love.'

So, wow, it would be fantastic to find someone who did believe that some things transcended language, defied articulation -- and who was passionate enough to be able to seek those sort of experiences openly, genuinely. Unpostmodernly!

But, anyway, yes I do not say, must like Telemark skiing and growing Siberian ginseng; must be at least this high and weigh no more this; must eat, or not eat, meat; must like Western Swing and Shostakovich. So mine, for all its bloated words and grandiloquent turbidity, makes, in a sense, far fewer demands on the potential suitor than all those who ask that you agree on income, occupation, children, pets, occupation, hobbies, politics, and 'turn-on' and 'turn-offs' before you make a move one way or the other. Of course, not that I worked this out or laboured over the diction, but I'm sure somewhere in my pointy head there was the notion and the desire that the content and the writing and the vocabulary would nauseate and repel the least suitable.

Still, it is not as though I don't have desires or limits. We all do. In my case though, I have this possibly wrong-headed but nonetheless inextinguishable belief, or at least sense, that what matters is ultimately evinced. This, I have discovered (and so have others, and I'm sorry, genuinely) is one more thing that makes me a ghastly date. I don't ask questions. I'm also pretty sure I give weird answers when people ask me normal ones. The latter relates to so much being contingent or context-driven for me. As a very trivial example, I really do hate pickles, at some level. Nonetheless, I have a jar of Zesty Dills, I believe they are, in the front of my refrigerator, and I have on occasion cut up two of them and eaten them for dinner. But if someone were, for his own idiosyncratic reasons, to wish to know on a first date where I stood on the matter of pickles, I would not know how to answer. I would probably say I hate them, because that is an answer, and because it came to my head, but it's not true in the way I can say I like taking long drives alone listening to weird reportings about Central Asia. Certainly if he asked something of greater substance I could well be far more nonplussed and nearly preverbal in my stumbling attempts to come up with something resembling an expectable answer...

Partly it is because, when it comes to the big things, especially anything having to do with a big-R Relationship, nothing is really true at that point, and you as my interlocutor have no context for understanding anything I might say about me, if it were the case that I could come up with something. As there is no relationship, it serves little for me to do what amounts to conjecture about what I might or might not be like in a relationship. Admittedly, too, as I look at it, I think some of that reticence derives from an inground and inescapable sense of the seemly, even when I can remember 'what I am like' or 'what I like.'

But it's also truly that what I like depends on who you are. If I don't need a 6'2"-6'4" linedancing Presbyterian wildlife-biologist father of no more than two, then what I will enjoy with you depends on who you come to this as, and what sort of connection we develop together. If you really want me to come crew with you at the stockcar races, and I love you, then manifestly I am going to come to love the stockcar races, and your car, and your hot new exhaust system, and your pit crew. I may well come to love the pickles the Snak-Shak passes out with their hot dogs!

Frankly, it's also just fair. I am no longer twenty, and have tastes and opinions and my own little life, and I would hope that no one would demand that I stop engaging in all the silly little things that give me pleasure. If I hold out the hope that you will accept that I have a weakness for bad Arab dance music at times, and that every other month my house has a completely different color scheme, then who am I to ask you to renounce fly fishing or your veneration of a comic I consider insipid and exhausting?

And so instead of asking I wait. So, too, I think that what it occurs to you to tell me is arguably more revelatory than those things you share merely because you were prodded, those things that were not in your head, even if they really are a part of your life. I am given more things - more information, more insight - in the former case than the latter, by a lot. There is an interesting why there that doesn't exist in the second case, in which the only 'why' is because I asked you to tell me. Which is very boring compared to reflecting on what it might mean that you described your employees but not your firm, or your favorite poets but not novelists, or how you felt in Denali but not in Dalian.

In other words, I can make you tell me about mean, mean Sr. Catherine making you stand in the hall yet again for passing notes in class, or whether you preferred to be the bank robber or the policeman -- but what do you want to say? I'm not going to get a full picture anyway, I am not going to get to your core at this point, so what is the self you wish to give me, here where we are now? Yes, it could all be lies, but it could also be untrue that you went to Catholic school!

Upon reflection, I have decided that this approach, the receptive rather than active or inquisitive one, makes normal people think I am cold, uninterested, and in all likelihood a supercilious she-devil. Commingled with my insurmountable inability to give the vaguest idea of how I am when I'm in love (which is, in all frankness, the opposite of how I am when I am with someone I don't know -- but who would know that??), it makes for a very unappealing proposition for my unsuspecting date. And in sense, a very, very strong sense, if you like (not that I think it's possible, but let's hypothesize, shall you?) how I am on the date (the distance, the ostensible apathy, the cool, the lack of anything resembling the guts of me in evidence anywhere), then you will not like the me that would emerge in a Relationship. If you, by contrast, find the Date me ineffably off-putting, then my bad luck indeed, as you might be just the sort the Relationship me would get on with brilliantly.





Too bad you and she will never meet.