Daily Bread

An Introduction

Good Morning, hi, hello… eh, hem…

Did you know that I’m writing two books simultaneously, in addition to all these lovely little ditties I pester you with? Before you consider me quite the genius or accuse me of never spending time with my family or helping around the house or roll your eyes at my complete lack of humility, it should be noted that I churn out words like California churns out water—it ain’t lookin’ good, folks. I won’t bore you with hypotheses regarding my excruciatingly slow word output. Perhaps to you it may not be noticeable, but you don’t know how many hours I sit at this desk.

Nevertheless, I feared sharing drafts of the novel-in-progress because I knew they’d be difficult to follow. Perhaps, even, uninteresting without context, chronology, nor any real sort of story line. But I will continue to share them because they’re interesting to me, and, also, maybe to you. How am I supposed to know what’s interesting to you? Rhetorical, rhetorical. But, actually, it’s three books, though at over 50,000 words I’ve left the first of the three, for the third time, to marinate for a while. I’ve been at that one for years. Anyway, the book I introduce today is a work of narrative nonfiction and quite in theme with the words of mine you’ve become familiar with. In fact, for some of you there will be redundancies. It is called Daily Bread and concerns the spiritual bankruptcy in America as seen through the lens of the food system. Using my firsthand, years long experience sourcing and cooking organic, local, foraged, heritage, and heirloom ingredients for my latest restaurant that ultimately went out of business because of it, I guide you through the spiritual bankruptcy that I have seen, while discussing the topics of curiosity, self-reliance, and spirituality. Some of these chapters are quite long, so I will break them up into manageable segments. I assure you, however, that these drafts are far less ethereal than those of my fiction, will be in chronological order, and come to you fairly polished. If you happen to know anyone in publishing… it’d be nice to get this thing off the ground. Thank you in advance for any assistance therewithin.

     Now, the fun part. I’ve turned the comment section on. I do hope you will consider leaving something thought provoking, as opposed to some nasty thing or other. But you do as you wish. Also, if you’d rather engage me directly, simply reply to the emails. And now I shall leave you with the beginning of Daily Bread…

Daily Bread: An Introduction

Who am I to tell you how to live? I am no one. But because I am no one, only few have cared enough to want to cultivate me individually, at least outside the walls of the “education” institution I suffered through some time ago. I walk among you, past the statues of confederate soldiers in town squares being torn down by an indignant youth, next to the dirty water hot dog cart inflicting more danger upon humanity in a single day than Robert E. Lee did in a lifetime. No, I will not attempt to prove this, and certainly not with “facts”. How Democratic. I prefer the America that was driven to action by great ideas, before we drifted into the current of populism.

     Now, before I become too incendiary, perhaps I’ll let it be known “I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townspeople concerning my mode of life, which some would call impertinent, though they do not appear to me be at all impertinent, but, considering the circumstances, very natural and pertinent.” I find the next sentence of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden even more apropos: “Some have asked what I got to eat…”

     So, this is an introduction into food as an approach to addressing the Spiritual Bankruptcy spreading across our American land. “Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food.” Food transcends. But in the America I’ve known, food has become poisoned, weaponized, and stripped of its power to unite these very un-United States. It has been reduced beyond the pale and built back up from a scientific, technological, and nutritional mishmash to something altogether unrecognizable by our body and spirit.

     If food is, indeed, medicine, I then struggle to understand why it does not, also, follow the central idea of which our modern medical system was founded on, that of wholeness: the Hippocratic Corpus. Perhaps because the system of health our Western world was founded on has fallen out of favor. This has forced me to act deliberately, often at odds with the wants of my brethren, and nearly always with difficulty, at least compared to today’s standards of convenience. Indeed, the greatest American fear is inconvenience.

When I began my journey, now many years ago, I hadn’t realized cooking all local ingredients could be so unnerving to others. And that is precisely the story I mean to tell: how I spent uncompromising years procuring and preparing food solely from the land I know to the vexation and indignation of a community that chose not to support my business. I’m not blaming that community, nor am I angered that I’ve lost my restaurant. It was merely a symptom of an American Spiritual Bankruptcy that I, now many months later, sitting peacefully in the comfort of my homestead surrounded by gardens and chickens and cherry trees, have chosen to reckon with, using my experience to guide me. Some may consider it a retreat to greener pastures, to which I would reply: the show must go on, and I’ve chosen to continue my crusade surrounded by the lushness of the land, the hound dog at my feet, the cat’s paw next to the notebook, and enough steamers and oysters and rockfish and crabs and catfish and corn grits and heritage beans and ancient grains of rice and wheat and pastured beef and chicken and eggs and forest pork and a rainbow of vegetables from the garden and honey and maple syrup and sorghum molasses and cheeses to feed my family and myself for the rest of our days.

     This book isn’t about food as subject, but what the philosophy of food has accomplished, and could continue to accomplish. You will find no recipes for ramen or sourdough bread. Be sure, if one such recipe called for a cup of beef broth, you’d procure it boxed from the store. Frankly, all of this began one day—though it’s fair to assume subconsciously it began gradually over many days—when I walked outside my first restaurant onto the Baltimore streets and suddenly felt like everything was attacking me with its impurity: the street signs are made of metal and where does that metal come from and the paint to paint them? And the asphalt roads—where did they come from? What of the machines laying it down and rolling it flat? And the signs above the storefronts made of plastic? And the cars whizzing by? And the telephone poles and their wires stringing the entire city together block by block? And the air conditioners, and planter boxes, and glass windows, and doors, and skateboards, and cigarettes, and Styrofoam cups littering the cement gutters? What about our clothes: shoes, shirts, pants, undergarments, etcetera? I couldn’t find a single thing around me that was made from my land. Everything was taken from someone else’s land, mostly at the expense of its people and environment, and shipped across the globe and in and out of dozens of ports and warehouses. I asked myself, on what day in what year was the last thing from my land replaced with something from someplace else? It was not my intention then nor is it now to take back the city, as it were—to make America great again! I made the choice, instead, to feed myself deliberately, because that was still within my control, although, in hindsight, not without difficulty nor mistake.

     But what do I mean by impurity… When I cook, I cook with as few ingredients as possible to allow the ingredients I do use to tell their story. I do not feel a mix of old, tasteless spices collected over a decade or more years of random recipe following that have taken up entire shelves, drawers, cabinets, and pantries adds quality to my food. What was once a base of ripe tomatoes has become indecipherable—baseless. It has been rendered poorer by adding an inferior substance. It is no longer a wonderfully ripened tomato picked off the vine from a plant that began as a seed many months prior, grew because of an amazing—in the truest sense of the word—photosynthesis of soil, water, and sunlight, and will shortly come face to face with its mortality. Perhaps I may do better to define purity: positive—the quality of being itself. Impurity is noise and chaos.

     Of course, there will now be those who think I’m down on spices. False. I’m down on your spices, because you have old, tasteless, poisonous, immoral spices. Your spices are bad and were bad to begin with, because you have no respect for spices. You should purchase your spices from someone who does respect spices, which means respect for their purity, which means ­respect for their origin, which means respect for the practices used to grow them and the person who grew them, respect for how they were processed, etcetera, etcetera. He’s a food snob, you say. False. You’re a snob because you have no respect. It’s difficult to view your spice cabinet and not draw parallels to how you’ve chosen to live: you’ve filled your life with cheap, insipid commodities you know nothing of at the expense of a great number of people you’ve never considered, that you will ultimately gravely underutilize for lack of knowledge and no desire to attain it, and, eventually, when the cabinet is overflowing and so is the house you’re leaving for a larger one, chuck into the wastebasket destined for a landfill to add to the further production of toxins, chemical leachate, and greenhouse gases.

     Your life and your spice cabinet are the same. Go home. Open your spice cabinet. Ask yourself if you really know what that spice is, what it tastes like, what it’s used for, where it comes from, how it’s grown and processed. Realize this is also a metaphor. You now know you know nothing. Declare bankruptcy. Begin again. Use your land to fulfill your needs. Be pure, then proud, that you have fulfilled your needs without drowning—or drowning others—in their wake. Then move on to other such satisfactions. 

     I have also unwittingly collected spices in my cabinet to the detriment of myself and others, and, like Belshazzar in the Book of Daniel, have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. While I welcome you to take from my experience anything you may find useful, I do not pretend to offer a solution to the quandaries of mankind, but rather “to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates (Thoreau).” I will, however, offer my opinion fervently and never feign an objectivity impossible to achieve, though I may quietly and privately believe my opinion truer than fact, for I’ve taken great pains to collect the necessary context to make it so.

     But before I begin the tale of my crusade through the Spiritual Bankruptcy of America with the simple act of daily bread—quite a task!—I must share my suffocating doubt in hope of gaining your trust. You see, I could not begin a work such as this without being convinced of its merit, and by merit I do not mean filled with pretty little populist lines and addictive wit, though I do hope you are at least moderately entertained. By merit I mean inherently meaningful. Therein lies an ideological conundrum: what is meaning? I do not wish to manufacture meaning in order to have something to hang my hat, though as I string together a few thoughts regarding the meaning of this work… is that not also pretense? I desire that this book is meaningful; I do not desire to make this book meaningful. This would therefore imply that the subject of this book—the years long bread breaking crusade—was meaningful. I certainly did not endeavor to waste my time! But is this not all some kind of philosophical game, some kind of playing around with words: what is meaning, what defines this, what is the identity of that, you are a radical-leftist, you are a white supremacist, a Communist, a Socialist, a Structuralist, a Deconstructionist, a Lacanian, a Hegelian, a Zizekian, a Freudian, a Kantian, a Transcendentalist, a Pragmatist… perhaps, as it pertains to food, it’s best to simply grow vegetable. Eat vegetable. Feed chickens vegetable waste. Collect egg. Eat egg. One day eat chicken. I journeyed to discover the simple mode of living well, and now, after consideration, the meaning is clear and has been here all along, independent of my searching for it: food is medicine.

     And, lastly, but only because a meal is nay complete without something bitter to remind us of our ability to endure hardship and our mortality, is a subject whose very roots originate in agriculture: social justice, including the gross pretense therein related. It’s the elephant in the room, at least for me, and the oft ignored injustices themselves have caused indignation to rise within me for quite some time. But it hardly seems practical or worthwhile to tell you what is just or unjust because, again, who am I to say so? You’ll want me to put my laundry through the wringer. But we all know how futile an effort like that would be, as it would hardly expound on something you already know, and hardly more convince you to change your opinion because someone like me provided a citation. Someone like me. And who is the me I speak of, you’ll want to know, so you can weigh my worthiness in discussing such a matter based on the color of my skin or my gender or some other such perceived social standing. Such matters may be important to the populist, but they hardly bear any practical application. Nevertheless, I’ll provide autobiographical facts that I deem important: I am a restaurant owner; I am a sentient being. And, here, it is important to repeat the above quote from Thoreau: “to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates.” I have learned from how I’ve lived and have changed how I’ve lived because of what I’ve learned.