This is Just to Say: pt 3 in How I Became the Hog Farmer's Wife

A year or so ago I checked in with my good friend Diane, who wanted to know how I had spent a recent afternoon without my children. To her approval, I shared that I had spent the afternoon at a local independent bookstore and had walked away with a treasure. A fellow reader, she got that twinkle in her eye as she asked me what I had brought home. "Two cookbooks" I said, having spent an hour or so in the bowels of the small bookstore basement, perusing, getting lost really, in their cookbook section. Her response was unexpected. "Oh," she said, her expression almost sinking. You did? It's laughable to me now, though at the time I felt a little bit of shame (though none was intended from her) at having spent my precious moments looking at cookbooks instead of poetry (what she expected me to have looked at) or fiction (what she would've liked to have looked at)...I felt a bit sheepish, like the good fiction student who goes through the whole of his graduate program in fiction and even has a manuscript, or mostly, to show for it, but realizes that what he really wants to be writing is non-fiction books about fishing and the outdoors... 

Did I happen upon a love for food writing? Or maybe the love was always in me. These things are sometimes hard to distinguish. David's Aunt Helen remarked during a Zoom call celebrating David's 40th  birthday that she admired the uniqueness of what we're doing here at Sabbath Farm. Oh yeah, I thought to myself, that's right, this is not what everyone does anymore. It's hard to remember that not everyone wants to raise pastured hogs or spends inordinate amounts of time thinking about creating the most excellent sausage or [fill in the blank with our most recent addition to our offerings from the farm]. Our friends are too gracious, and our family has a shared interest and history in food and farming. And our other friends maybe want to farm also or already do--more on that in another post. 

The best food magazine that ever was is Saveur. I say "was" because it doesn't exist in the print format in the same way it once did; it has a different editor now. It's online site feels similar to the chaotic, ad-ridden location that is Bon Appetit's website, which is to say, somewhere that no one wants to casually browse ever. And when you hear Bon Appetit, don't think it was anything like that current magazine, staffed by writers who personify, in every article, the same level of smarmy, self-aware, always-casual tone that feels disingenuous and too sarcastic. Saveur was different. It was a food magazine written by writers who seemed to care deeply about food. And not just food but the people and the places behind the food traditions. Because food, though we often forget it in America, is first and foremost grounded in the people who make the food and the specific places that have brought about the food the people are making. Tamasin Day-Lewis had a "story" that haunts my memory from an old issue of Saveur, wherein the setting is the countryside of Britain in the Fall--beautiful in its fading and bareness, with the darkness of sky that is both chilling and yet makes you want to to be suddenly lost on a jagged hill on a coastline in Wales. It was here that Day-Lewis cooked an autumnal meal, a steak with a pan sauce, humble and yet huge in place. In a different article, another writer made her way through the German countryside, where different "farm-restaurants" open their doors to welcome diners once a year to eat of the very seasonal gatherings of their farms... 

Good food writers don't just give recipes or use a witty tone to tell you how much they love food. First and foremost, they can write, which, if you will recall, is a craft, like woodworking or painting or dentistry--it's something worked at and studied, and though Twitter would have us remember differently, there are norms and traditions and rules that when looked at, when used, when understood and practiced by a writer, make for pleasant reading. Actually, good writing will very often make you forget that you are reading something artificial at all, and instead of drawing attention to itself, you become so immersed in the piece you're reading that you enter into it in a way, lost in cadence, line, tone, found in the gift of the world that is a very present for you on this day in which you have found it. 

To oversimplify, food writers are like poets in that they seek to distill an experience of food into a single piece of writing. Much like the lyric poet who is trying to bring words to paint a picture of an emotional experience, good food writing creates a crystallized picture and imports you into the experience of cooking the steak, or making the granola, or touring the street market. But it's not just a recounting. Good food writing uses language to impart a largeness to the everyday. When William Carlos Williams writes in his poem This is Just to Say

I have eaten 

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which 

you were probably 

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

somehow the language and words used shed new light on something which we just recently took for granted; the beauty in our everyday mundane is discovered and affirmed! Hidden in the song of the words in the line on the page we find a tiny, glimmering microcosm of a world that has been created as a gift to the reader. 

That these tiny gems can be re-created through such base acts as cooking, gardening, farming, eating, is then inspiration for our creation--for trying a new recipe, for growing a different variety of melon, for raising a heritage breed of hog--for the maker. Here, says the food writer, is a small moment of extreme beauty, otherwise lost in the rush and the wear of your everyday.  Here our shared experience is elevated beyond ingredients, beyond the stink of the farmyard, beyond the wear of the plow. These artists reassure us makers--us doers--that our work and efforts have meaning and can help bring beauty to others and ourselves by way of simple ingredients like grass, soil, fruit, and animals. So much, yes, depends upon these things. 

Originally posted 7/24/2021