Make it Happen
Tuesday, July 27th, 2010 | daily | No Comments
Almost as entertaining as the genuine comments on this blog are the spam ones that I read before deleting. My favorite is one that I re-visit when I’m feeling a little too sure of myself:
You are not right. I am assured. I suggest it to discuss. I congratulate, your opinion is useful. What words, super, maginificent idea. I believe that you are not right. I consider that you are mistaken.
It’s pure poetry and I wish I could babble something as brilliant as that when confronted with someone I think is full of shit. Occasionally I get a comment from an actual reader expressing a similar hostility to my message and I think I understand it now. I came back from my trip to Louisiana having learned two things that will change the way I approach my job and this blog. One is that we in Seattle are blessed with an abundance of locally-sourced food. The other is that large parts of the country are not. In Louisiana, where even the vegetable dishes are rich in pork, there is not a single pig farmer. “A what?” one butcher replied when I asked, as if I was looking for some local unicorn. There were a few small farmers’ markets, but you got the feeling these were a sort of wacky thing, like oxygen bars. But it should not be out of the mainstream to want a Creole tomato for your Shrimp Creole. “They’ll get there,” Bill the Butcher told me cheerfully when I visited his store a few blocks from UW. “Seattle wasn’t always like this. We made it happen.”
Regional Goodness
Monday, July 19th, 2010 | daily | 3 Comments
Back home in Louisiana where I am for a couple of weeks, I dragged my mother to the farmers’ market where we found, amongst other beauties, an abundance of eggplant of various colors. “I went to Carrabba’s and they told me eggplant parmesan was off the menu because they couldn’t get it,” my mother told me. (And yes, she did feel the need to explain to her locavore daughter why she was even in a Carrabba’s when she lives in one of the most unique food-centric parts of the country.) This is why no one should eat at a chain restaurant. Ever. Because the fact that gorgeous fat eggplants are gushing out of the ground a few feet away is completely irrelevant to a corporation wedded to a cheap national distribution model. I get deeply discouraged at times, until I read articles like this one from the New Orleans Times Picayune about one great effort to revolutionize one small school’s food: http://www.nola.com/education/index.ssf/2010/07/local_school_will_get_fresh_lo.html Or when one of my guys shows me some part of my passionate advocacy had an impact. The last time I heard from Badley it was through a text he sent me: “I’m at a fish market on the Potomac River buying a bushel of Maryland blue crab and a couple of pounds of shrimp from the Gulf. It’s so wild here. Happy 4th.” Happy indeed.