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Bursting from its skin,
a gifted pomegranate
is received gently.
Party Trick
I've come up with a new party trick. Well, it's not new, actually quite old and probably thought of as a chore in it's day but I like it. We pull butter from a bottle of cream.
What could be easier? I pour a bottle of cream into a bowl, grab the whisk, hand it all to the person nearest the kitchen and ask them to whisk. The bowl gets passed around.
One friend told a story of making mayonnaise in Africa while she whisked. Which led to someone else's stories of collecting mushrooms in Germany and someone else's memories of mushrooms in Vermont. And then there's the person, this could easily be me, but this time it was the Takeout Queen, who had never seen butter being made.
"Don't you have to add something?" she asked.
That person has the most fun. Because the transition of cream to butter is a small miracle. It's the fuzzy caterpillar to a butterfly metamorphosis. Mothy white cream turns in the blink of an eye, once the turning actually happens, to the color of a yellow daisy, the color of breakfast, the color of all that is good in the world; it turns butter yellow at the same time it leaves behind it's milky beginnings. Butter. Meltingly sweet fresh butter from cream.
I've yet to see someone not smile at the turning, at the lump of gold found in a returnable bottle. And then I serve the bread. Even the most delicate among us takes up the butter knife and with a singular purpose, not one at a time, everyone reaches knives and elbows into the butter balancing huge nuggets back to their bread.
It's there in the breaking of bread, of bread and new butter, the reaching and full mouths that no one feels like a guest any more; it simply feels like everyone is at home. That's my favorite part.
Righteous Porkchop
The first time I heard anyone talk about industrial pig factories it was Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. What he described was so unfathomable I reasoned it must not be true or he was exaggerating. Or something. The speech was likely made at the same time the author of Righteous Porkchop, Nicolette Hahn Niman, worked for Kennedy at Waterkeeper Alliance as a staff attorney and head of a national campaign to combat pig factories.
Maybe I haven't been paying attention between the time of that speech half a dozen years ago and two weeks ago when I picked up Righteous Porkchop. I thought the pork industry had cleaned up its, please excuse me, cleaned up its shit for all I heard about it.
They haven't.
Righteous Pork may change that. NHN spends the first half of the book describing her work with the pig factories and the people and communities who worked alongside her. Which is why I didn't want to put the book down. It's not all pretty reading but the people and communities affected by the factories are.
In some ways the story is an unfolding drama. I found myself more than once, okay, a lot, routing for the local communities but NHN also shows the corner the factory owners have gotten themselves into and I couldn't help but route for them too; that they can find a way out. No one is having a good time.
There's a little bit of spying; quite a few bad politicians. There's a guy hired by the pork industry to tail NHN to community meetings. Eventually someone does have a good time and there's romance too.
The later part of the book visits industrial chicken and fish, factory dairies and beef. Did you know that it's a widespread practice to feed factory hens red dye to make the yolks of their eggs yellow? I had no idea. I also learned the correct terminology for the animals on a dairy. They are not all cows.
There's a lot to learn from Righteous Porkchop. It's a smart book with history.
My only criticism is Niman Ranch beef comes across too precious in Niman's telling. In one example she praises a retailer for carrying Niman beef, overlooking the foreign imports in their produce department. That would have been fine but she goes on to knock the produce department of another retailer that doesn't carry Niman beef.
And I loved this book. It's an important read revealing the truth that corporate meat producers don't want us to know. It's to their benefit to keep us ignorant. Righteous Porkchop changes that though, one knowledgeable page at a time.
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Gravenstein Apples
I love the city. I really do. But when I take a few days off I want to hit the country. Which is how the cute guy and I spent a long weekend. We headed north. To apple country.
We drove through Sebastopol to Graton, up to Cloverdale and over to Booneville. And each time we passed apple farms, there were two near our camp, I remembered picking apples with Mom. .jpg)
I remembered her pulling on to the side of the road, two wheels in the field. It was before there were fences, orchards as far as Christmas. "Come on," she'd say. "Let's get apples." And I'd pick as many from the ground as I could carry. "They're Gravensteins," she'd sing, which meant nothing to me except Gravensteins made her happy.
Yesterday Gravenstein apples were the main headline in the Sunday paper. I recognized the farmer in the front page picture. We've laughed together. I've taken more than one slice of apple from his hand. .jpg)
The article explained that the apple growers aren't picking the fallen apples traditionally used for juice. There's no where to take them. The US apple juice market is sustained by China. It's cheaper.
I didn't read further but I did come home with cotton bags of apples. Picked from a growers wooden boxes at the farm. A farm with a black dog carrying a yellow ball. A farm with a big rabbit and three red hens. 
I read the names of the apples; Northern Spy, Sierra Beauty. There were more varieties than there are holidays. I could see them in the field, on the trees and the ground. I could happily smell them but couldn't help wondering, will the apple fields be there the next time? Or will we need to go to China to buy them off the farm?
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