For all those who may have linked to my Etsy store lately and found it, well, inactive... I have begun posting new work there and will continue to add new pieces as they are completed. I'll soon have a new series of small originals at very affordable prices. Stay tuned!
Our local farmer's market recently expanded their operation to Saturday and now Wednesday mornings, so we have a better chance to make it down there to pick up some fresh local veggies and support our local growers.
The farmer's market is what it is. You won't find the selection that you would at a Mega Mart - no bananas or mangoes... which is kind of the point. You will find a nice selection f the stuff that grows seasonally in your part of the world. For us, right now, that means lots of onions, garlic, potatoes, tomatoes, turnips, herbs of all kinds, green beans, berries, squash, honey, sorghum, etc...
We got the fresh blackberries, above, and they were delicious. We also got some tomatoes that were not around long enough to be photographed before they were gobbled up.
Like I was saying, the only drawback is the narrower selection, but the benefits are many; very good produce, very little packaging (about as little as you like), very little transportation cost to move the product to market, local profit rather than corporate profit. If I can't grow my own (which I can't right now) I'd much prefer to give my business to these neighbors of mine.
Reader Adam writes;
I don't know that I can really blame McDonald's for making people fat. Anyone ought to have enough sense to know that you can't eat cheeseburgers, fries and shakes every day... and McD's is offering more healthy alternatives, now.
My dad was very unhealthy toward the end of his life. He smoked, was overweight, didn't exercise and sat in his La-Z-Boy a lot. People applauded the regulation of big tobacco. McDonald's and other restaurant chains are being sued now... should we go after La-Z-Boy next, for making unhealthy and addictive furniture?
I can't stand the thought of restaurants being regulated by the government or penalized for offering rich food that people like. We had some pretty rich food at my Mom's house, yesterday, I can tell you. Burgers and brats. We are planning a trip to Memphis, this summer, that includes a stop at Dyers restaurant on Beale Street (this is exactly the kind of local culture that I have learned to love so much) where the hamburgers are deep fried, in (reputedly) the same grease they have used since 1912. There used to be a sign on the wall, apparently, that said "We dip 'em, and McDonald's don't".
As a continuation of our discussion of art, bread, cheese, mass production, etc... I will present part of a further comment from The Masked Chicken and respond to it. Why? Because my response will begin to get too lengthy for the combox, and also because this stuff is what this blog is all about and, feeling as strongly as I do, I don't think it's possible to have too many posts on the subject.
The Masked Chicken comments, in part;
Art is, supposedly, a unique expression, not only of the indivdual, but of things that are common to man. The process of making things is unique to man and som personalized bread-baking falls into that, but the bread expresses a preference of the individual moreso than music, which has to go beyond itself, ideally.
Thus, bread, by its very nature, can survive being mass-produced in a way that art cannot.
I'm still probably not clear enough. Feel free to criticize so I can clarify, further. We do not substantially disagree. I just think that the art of bread-baking, while an art, is not an art-form and has less stringent conditions for cultural adaptation than the visual or performing arts.
I doubt that we really do disagree at the bottom of things, but putting these foggy concepts into words is a dicey and imprecise business, especially the way I go about it. I use language the way Jackson Pollock used paint.
I think it is clear that bread will always be a commodity in a way that art is not, because when it comes to it, people eat bread not generally in order to have a culinary experience, but because they are hungry. The expressive and cultural aspects of bread are incidental (except in France, maybe). People buy and eat bread mainly because it is a practical, versatile and reliable staple food, and other considerations are secondary, unlike art or music, which carries no quantifiable, practical benefit... no survival value.
So in that sense, I think you're correct.
Brewing one's own beer at one time did carry practical benefits. It was more nutritious than modern mass-market brews ("liquid bread") and because of the alcohol content it was safe to drink when water often was not. Even children drank beer.
In our time, however, there is no real practical or economic benefit in making one's own beer (or bread). These things can always be bought somewhere more cheaply than they can be made at home, and if you consider the time and trouble, the motivations for making these things by hand must come from other considerations... poetic, expressive or even spiritual. That is why, in modern Western culture, I look at baking bread and brewing beer as being similar to making art. Both endeavors are, in a material sense, wholly unnecessary.
However, I don't think it is merely a subjective matter to observe that home-baked bread is "better" than the spongy white sandwich fluff we buy at the store, any more than it is only a matter of opinion that a Mozart symphony is "better" than a commercial jingle. Quantifying that judgment may be impossible, but it is more than simply a matter of taste.
In theory, of course, a bread recipe could be mass produced with more or less exactly the same result as the first time it was baked in your mom's kitchen. In practice, though, things almost never happen this way. Once a product makes it to the assembly line, there begins a process of adaptation - driven by profit concerns, competition and marketing - that invariably pulls quality in a downward direction. It takes active and positive resistance even to maintain a steady position against that constant downward pressure.
I worked in product design for a long time, and what happens is that, in the beginning, the manufacturing process seems to be constructed around the product. Over time, however, the product becomes more and more built to accommodate the process. When big numbers are involved, cutting this or that corner can result in hefty increases in profits. Whereas factory methods are supposed to make it easier to manufacture things, it becomes more a matter of making the things easier to manufacture.
It's a rare business owner who will say, "Yes, I know we could make more money if we tweaked this recipe, used cheaper ingredients and quickened the process, but I'd prefer to continue making a decent, modest profit and keep the quality just as it is.". If one generation manages to hold the line, the next will likely move it gladly enough.
Then there are marketing factors. Making and selling a lot of one thing is always more profitable than making smaller amounts of different things, so there is always the pressure to make one product as broadly appealing as possible and sell the hell out of it. In many cases, this means making a product as inoffensive as possible. Because people have such widely varying tastes, though, the easiest way to make sure they aren't offended at the flavor of your product is to make it with as little flavor as you can get away with... case(s) in point: white bread and light beer. These may not make anyone swoon in ecstasy, but if you bring them to a picnic, at least no one could very well be offended or make a face.
Serve a robust, multi-grain sourdough bread, or a creamy stout beer and you run the risk of a certain number of people just hating it. It will happen. Little Billy will gag on the sandwich you give him (burying his face in her skirts "Mommy, I want chicken nuggets"), and Uncle Ted will grimace and maybe swear at the brew and say acidly, "I don't know what the @!%&+# this is... can I have a beer now?".
I don't know if it is the actual flavors and textures themselves that offend, or if it is simply the rude and un-looked-for shock of particularity to which modern man is unaccustomed. The tang of articulated character becomes like a kind of assault.
So, whereas bread and beer will always - in theory - be more amenable to mass production, in fact the result is nearly always that the process removes from these things even the incidental expressive and cultural characteristics they once carried. The aim may be to mass produce a certain loaf of bread - say, Mom's Homemade Bread - but in the end, the loaf of mass produced bread is not the one we had in mind in the beginning. We have not succeeded in mass producing the loaf of Mom's Bread, as we supposed. We have in fact invented a new thing... the Production Loaf, if you will, which is like Mom's bread almost only by analogy.
Incidentally, Chicken, it does not surprise me at all that you have distributist leanings. I remarked at first that it was with great trepidation that I disagreed with you in print, because I have, through my interaction with you over at Jimmy Akin's blog, come to have the highest regard for your opinions. At bottom, as I say, I doubt we would really disagree about much.
Reader Marysienka responds to my last post;
"Right on! Not a whole lot I can do right now, with a tiny studio apt in the city
and no soil, nor any kids to share it with, but I heartily agree, Tim."
Well, Marysienka, don't feel bad... I'm preaching to myself more than to anyone else. Anyone who had a chance to actaully follow me around for a while would without a doubt write me off as a hypocritical crank and a poser within a few hours... ("Note to self; delete Old World Swine from Google Reader...").
We, unfortunately, have terrible soil here at our present place and we'll likely be moving soon, anyway, so as of right now, starting a garden is out.
It can take me a while to ramp up some of the projects I get into, as my wife will readily attest (with a roll of the eyes). I bought some bread makings a few weeks ago, but have been so occupied with getting the house ready to sell that I haven't used them yet. I'm also not brewing like I'd hoped, but I feel another batch coming on.
The thing is, I think, to always have an eye out for how we can do more of these kinds of things, even if progress seems achingly slow. Not out of some sense of obligation (oh, not another duty, please), or because some Secret Bible Prophecy nutjob just knows the worldwide economy is about to totally collapse... but because these are the kinds of things we really seem to be made to do. I'm not much qualified to pontificate on any subject, but I can venture to say, based on my own experience, that I don't think man was much designed to scrabble out a living sitting in a fluorescently-lit cubicle eight or ten hours a day, with an hour or two commute, to boot.
It's not so much that people weren't designed with the cubicle in mind (though that is certainly true), but even more so that the cubicle wasn't designed with people in mind... and everything designed and made by human beings ought to be designed to enhance human life. Have you ever noticed how much cubical office clusters resemble those mouse mazes that scientists use in behavioral experiments?
The point, if there is one, is that there is really no single reason (and no logical reason at all) for anyone to brew their own beer, or to bake their own bread, or to raise their own vegetables or livestock. It can all be done more efficently in the factory, or the factory farm.
There is also no logical reason to paint pictures or write poetry or make music.
We in the West have allowed efficency to dictate nearly everything in the last hundred years, have let it pierce into places where it has no business, like the people I know who complain if the Mass runs over an hour.
There was an old joke (I don't even remember where I heard it) about watching lovers in Paris, and how you could always tell the Americans because the man would keep looking at his watch. I'm not saying it's true, only that there is something very true about it.
Eric Scheske says National Homebrew Day is coming soon, and I have no reason to doubt it. I mean... it was on the internet! And I'm just too lazy to take the trouble to confirm it. I suppose you could declare any day you like National Homebrew Day, though, and nobody could really do anything about it.
So, last night I broke open a couple of homebrews to celebrate... umm... getting all the wallpaper peeled off the walls in the downstairs hallway! Yeah, that's it.
This beer was the first batch of homebrew I had done in years, and getting it bottled turned out to be a kind of comedy of errors. I was a little rusty, you might say. It turned out (a few weeks later) flat, green and undrinkable, and so - taking some advice I found on the internet - I let it sit in the bottles and age for several months. It has improved considerably and is now drinkable (at least). I would be mortified to let anyone else taste it, but it does now qualify as beer. It would likely continue to improve for a while, but I'm drinking it, anyway.
There is some moderate carbonation, the beginnings of a good head of foam, and even a little lacing down the side. There is also a bit of an off flavor that I chalk up to contamination (which is why I would never share it with any friend I wanted to keep), but - as I say - it is drinkable, and if I were alone on a desert island I would be mighty glad to have it.
Alcohol content must be pretty good, because I got a decent buzz from just two beers. I woke up with a little headache this morning, though, which is likely also due to some contamination. Quality varies a good bit from bottle to bottle, which comes from A) trying to bottle directly from the fermentation tank (which resulted in widely varying amounts of yeast sediment getting in the bottles) and, B) from adding the priming sugar to each bottle individually, rather than in one homogeneous batch.
I made note of numerous small ways to improve the process, and have already purchased a secondary tank for priming and bottling, which should make the job go much more smoothly and ensure better and more consistent quality next time around.
Even given all the negatives, it is nice to be drinking my own brew, again. Brewing beer is one of those things that people should never have stopped doing for themselves, like baking their own bread, growing at least some of their own food or raising and educating their own kids. The only way to reclaim some of these things is for individuals to begin doing them again on their own initiative. There is no use waiting for some new social movement to take shape, and big government - along with big business - actively (but quietly and steadily) discourages such independence.
Do it anyway. Just go ahead and start. Plant something. Brew something, even if it tastes crappy at first and is cheaper from the store. Find a way to sit down with your kids and make sure they know the things you want them to know about life, even if it feels awkward and you think you'll do a poor job of it. They are your kids, and the primary responsibility (and privilege) of their education is yours, not anyone else's.
I've been doing a lot of home improvement stuff, lately, in preparation for (God willing) selling our house and buying another, and I've discovered that I really enjoy this kind of work, though it has required me to awaken muscle groups that had been happily asleep, and boy are they grumpy. It is extremely fulfilling work, though... I can compare it to those days long ago when I lived with my folks on a small lake in Lawrence County, Arkansas, where we had a good sized garden.
That is, my folks had a good sized garden. If it had been up to us kids, the ground would have remained blissfully undisturbed, the red clay baking into something like a concrete slab during the summer months and, in the rainy season, turning into a slurry of sticky, red gumbo.
But my folks (especially my Dad) took pains not only to break the ground, but to fold into it all manner of loamy, organic refuse... sawdust from a local sawmill, moldy hay, horse manure... all of which I and my brother had the privilege of hauling and shoveling.
Then came hours of walking behind a roto-tiller, and finally planting, watering, weeding, hoeing... how I loathed it all. I grumbled and fumed and thought about all the productive hanging-out time I was missing. I had just bought Steely Dan's new album, Aja, and I had plans to spend precious hours laying in bed with my headphones on. How did they not get that?
And yet, at the end of a day of gardening, even for me (too cool to enjoy gardening) there was a deep and undeniable satisfaction in looking back at the tilled earth, the planted rows, the green and growing things. Then there were the meals we made off that little patch of ground... new potatoes, fresh green beans, sweet peas, asparagus, corn on the cob, tomatoes, peppers... Even for a classy sophisticate like me (you must read that last line in Jethro Bodine's voice) it was pretty heavenly stuff. It was't just the fact that it tasted great, either... it was this idea of living off our own land and the work of our hands.
Hunger is the best spice, as they say, and coming in from a day of garden work to a plate of something picked an hour ago and cooked five minutes ago is one of the best things there is.
I find fixing up our house deeply gratifying in the same way. It's one of those things that humans were made to do, and from which we seem made to draw satisfaction. Allow me to wildly speculate that if we all spent more time gardening and fixing up our homes instead of watching TV or surfing the web, we would be immeasurably happier and better off.
Home improvement is fast becoming a new hobby for me, rather than merely another chore. I can hardly wait to get started on our new place (wherever that will be).
Excuse me, I have wallpaper to peel.
"So be careful to do what the LORD your God has commanded you; do not turn aside to the right or to the left." Deuteronomy 5:32
Paul at The Aesthetic Elevator brings to light the phenomenon of The Artist as Closet Republican.
Coming out as a conservative - of any kind - in many art circles takes some major chutzpah.
I remember knowing I was out of place back in art school. I thought liberalism was nuts, but I never would have called myself a Republican and am even less tempted to become one now.
I sensed that a lot of the leftist agitprop I heard from professors and other students was hogwash, but it took me longer to begin to see the problems with the knee-jerk conservatism from the right that was often a response to it.
Still, I was glad when I heard Rush Limbaugh on the radio for the first time back in 1991. It was very liberating and encouraging to hear someone - anyone - of national prominence having so much fun lampooning the old liberal cliches, and giving the hand-wringers on the far left a poke in the eye.
Not that I have ever been a regular Dittohead. I've always had areas of disagreement with Rush, and never more so than over the issue of torture. I also see problems with the kind of chemically pure capitalism that gives free rein to guys like Bernie Madoff. If it weren't for original sin, Capitalism might be a perfect system, but I could see some making the same argument for Communism.
I have come around to what Chesterton and Belloc called Distributism and what the Church calls Subsidiarity... the idea that everything ought to be accomplished at the lowest and most local level possible. Big Business and Big Government are equally enemies of the Distribustist idea, and so far from being in competition with one another are in fact partners in the ongoing project of taking from the common family any right or incentive to look after their own property, produce their own goods or make their own decisions. Why spend two or three evenings by the fireplace carving your mother a new hardwood stirring spoon, when you could work that same amount of time at The Plant and make enough money to bury her in a pile of machine made wooden spoons?
(Stop reading and think for a minute about what we have lost in making that trade)
Property and estate taxes make it practically impossible to ever really own a piece of land or a house. They are never finally yours, free and clear. Living "off the grid" - or even substantially independent of the grid - is actively discouraged in both modern law and commerce.
You must have legal tender, and for that you need A Job, and once you have A Job, you will have little time or energy to worry about much else.
But don't fret! The government will raise your children in the public schools and prepare them for their own Jobs and to be compliant citizens, while the corporations will, through the media, prepare them to be good consumers and to take passionate stands on approved and allowable political positions (Red, or Blue?). They will never miss the Old Farm. Besides, they can watch stories about farm life on the high resolution flat-screen. They can also Google "farm life" and find enough information to choke a horse.
There is an opportunity, with this current economic downturn, to perhaps re-learn a few of the things we have forgotten. There is maybe a chance for Small is Beautiful to be discussed without being laughed to scorn. There is a little more time, maybe, for carving a spoon by the fire.
"Our society is so abnormal that the normal man never dreams of having the normal occupation of looking after his own property. When he chooses a trade, he chooses one of the ten thousand trades that involve looking after other people's property."
- G.K. Chesterton
Good Bloggage
Paul S., at his blog Spike is Best has a thoughtful meditation on Jesus' parable of the generous landowner who pays equally for unequal work. A fellow Chestertonian, he writes well and features some fine original poetry, as well, from time to time.
Professio is a new-ish blog of Catholicism, art and culture from another Chestertonian (there can never be too many). In a recent post, he poses the question "Can It Be Done Smaller?" in a brief defense or explication of the Distributist spirit. He also asks another question that I'll deal with in another post.
Finally, Paul N. - The Aesthetic Elevator - has been musing on the concept of Beauty and includes human relationships as being among the truly beautiful (or I guess, ugly) things we can create. He also features some good quotes on the subject from people like Cardinal Henri de Lubac and C.S. Lewis. I was gratified to read his thought about the beauty of human relationships being similar to creating beauty in more temporal ways... art, music, poetry, that kind of thing.
Every Christan artist ought to try and read Tolkien's short story Leaf by Niggle, which touches on and develops this idea. He seems to confirm that in our daily decisions and relationships we create something far more durable and significant than any conceivable work of earthly art could hope to be. Our life in Christ - that aspect of our personhood that is united with and animated by his will through the Holy Spirit - exists in eternity as something solid and distinct, like an everlasting sculpture we work on every day without realizing it. We shape it by our thoughts and actions.
Paul is also depressed about scarves right now... or probably more accurately, about mass produced and mass marketed "hominess". This reminds me of all the trouble I used to go to as a teenager in order to get my jeans to wear and fade just right... then the industry giants started mass producing pre-faded and worn jeans, even including the holes and frayed cuffs.
Yesterday, I saw an ad flashed on a gas pump LED screen that read "Grandma's Cookies, 2 for $1.00". I don't know what they're selling in every gas station coast-to-coast in those little mylar pouches, but it ain't my grandma's cookies.